PROPAGANDA OR PARTISANSHIP,?
proletarian literature seized upon the stigma of "propaganda art" applied
by its class enemies and nailed it to its mast as a term of honor-like the
Dutch
Beggars
in the sixteenth century and the
sans-culottes
in the French
Revolution.
Moreover, bourgeois "pure art" was growing progressively
poorer in content and increasingly remote from reality and therefore more
and more tendentious itself, so that its condemnation of proletarian "prop-
aganda art" became increasingly hypocritical.
Hence for a long time we
manifested a controversial pride in calling out literature "propaganda
literature."
II.
But understanding how this theoretical pOSItIOn was arrived at is
far from proof of its theoretical soundness.
Together with the bourgeois
statement of the problem and the bourgeois terminology, this standpoint
uncritically accepts all of bourgeois eclecticism in the problem's formula-
tion.
It takes over the bourgeois-eclectic contradictions, which are not
resolved but left either blurred or rigidly polarized.
By the latter we
mean the distinction between "pure art" and "tendency" [or "propa-
ganda"].
Accepting the implied assumptions, two alternative answers
can be made:
1. We are not interested in "pure art" or "perfection of form."
Literature has a social function in the class struggle, which determines
its
content;
we consciously perform this function and do not concern
ourselves with decadent-bourgeois problems of form. (That is, restricting
literature to day-by-day agitation: the standpoint of mechanical materialism
n Iiterary theory).
2. We acknowledge the existence of an "esthetics," and endeavor to
'oncile it with the "propaganda" arising from the "social" or the
litical" field, i.e. from a field "foreign to art." In other words, we
'tically pose the insoluble problem of weaving a "non-artistic" con-
';ent into the work of art.
Esthetic immanence, the "pure" artistic
~ogeneity of the work of art, i.e. the primacy of form over content, is
.,citly) acknowledged.
The demand is made, however, that expression
. given to a content ("propaganda")
which is foreign to art-as this
',ory sees it. This gives rise to an eclectic idealism .
. These unresolved contradictions-which are irresoluble under the
regoing assumptions-were the cause of Franz Mehring's uncertainty
In this point.
Mehring accepted Kant's esthetics, which dominated the
declining bourgeoisie's theory of art, as a theoretical foundation.
The
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