PROPAGANDA OR PARTISANSHIP?
43
I
t is the realization of social necessity that-contrary to both the
mechanist and idealist viewpoints-fixes the correct (and important) place
of the subjective factor in history.
And the latter is determined differ-
ently for the proletariat than for other classes. Marx's statement that
"the working class has no ideals to realize" applies
solely
to the proletariat.
It is to the other classes (including the bourgeoisie in its revolutionary
stage) that Engels'
aphorism applies: "ideology is a process consciously
performed by the so-called thinker, but with the wrong consciousness"
(Letter to Mehring, July 14, 1893).
This "wrong consciousness" results
either in the accrediting of a magnified independence and a leadmg role
to conscious human activity in the historical process, or else its relegation
to no active importance at all. This is also manifested in the appearance
of the subjective factor in the shape of "morality" and of its aims as
"ideals."
Even those bourgeois writers and philosophers who do penetrate
fairly deeply into the dialectics of history get lost in foggy mysticism or
remain entangled in contradictions which they cannot resolve.
(Hegel,
for instance, in whom Marx found an "uncritical idealism" together with
an equally "uncritical positivism.")
And when they are able to perceive
the real, objective motive forces of social development, they do so with the
"wrong consciousness," unintentio •.ally, unconsciously, and often even
against their own will.
In discussing Balzac, Engels pointed out that
Balzac deliberately intended to glorify the declining class of the French
ancien regime,
but that "he was compelled, against his own class sym-
pathies and political prej udices" to paint a correct and exhaustive picture
of the society of his day. His "propaganda" [or "tendency"],
therefore,
is opposed to his creative portrayal; his creative work is important not
because of its "tendency," but in spite of it.
(This is also true of
Tolstoy and other important bourgeois authors.)
The proletariat is not subject to this ideological limitation.
For its
social existence enables the proletariat (and hence the revolutionary prole-
tarian writers) to transcend this limitation, to perceive the class relation-
ships and the development of the class struggle behind the fetishist forms
of capitalist society. Insight into these interrelationships and the laws
of their evolution likewise signifies insight into the proletariat's historical
function and into the role of the subjective factor in this development.
This holds good both for the determination of this subjective factor b;;
objective, economic-historical evolution and for the active function o.
this subjective factor in the transformation of objective conditions.
This knowledge is not a mechanical, direct product of social existence;
