PROPAGAND.1 OR PARTISANSHIP?
45
tor true-dialectical-objectivity.
Contrary to "propaganda" (in which
support of something means its idealist glorification, while opposition to it
involves its distortion) and to "impartiality" (whose motto-never
prac-
ticed-is:
"to understand all means to forgive all," which involves taking
an unconscious and hence almost always hypocritical stand), this sort of
partisanship achieves the standpoint that makes possible the cognition
and creative portrayal of the
entire process
as the summed-up totality of
its real motive forces, as the perpetual, ever-higher reproduction of its
underlying dialectical contradictions.
This objectivity is based upon the
correct-dialectical-detennination
of the relationship between subjectivity
and objectivity, of the subjective factor to objective development.
It is
founded upon the dialectical unity of theory and practice.
The analyses
made by Marx, Engels and Lenin furnish models of how this dialectical
unity is to be understood.
To cite but one example, from Lenin:
"It is the bourgeoisie'3 business to develop trusts, to force
women and children into factories, to exploit and ruin them there,
and to condemn them to extreme privation.
We do not 'demand'
such a course, nor do we 'support'
it; we fight against it. How
do we combat it, however? We realize that trusts and women
working in factories represent progress.
We do not pro-
pose a return to hand craftsmanship, to capitalism without mon-
opolies, or to women working at home. Forward through trusts
and their like and beyond them to Socialism!"
(Against the
Current,
1914-1917.)
Partisanship in this sense, therefore, is not a new term for an old
idea. It is not a matter of substituting the word "partisanship" for
"tendency" ["propaganda"]
and leaving everything else unchanged.
For
terminology is never fortuitous.
Our adoption of the term "tendency"
from the literary theory and practice of the oppositional bourgeoisie (and
not even from the epic period of its revolutionary history) signified, as
we have shown, that we took over a not inconsiderable ideological aggre-
gate together with the word.
Today, when we are subjecting the ideo-
logical heritage of the Second International in our own theory and prac-
tice to thorough revision, we must see to it that we do not drag along
in our literary theory and practice-impeding our progress- a bourgeois
legacy transmitted through the Second International.
We have endeavored to give a brief sketch of the theory of "ten-
dency." We should like to ask, in concluding, whether this theory has
had any effect upon our practice.
Of course it has.
We do not mean
the literary practices of Trotzkyism alone, in all its conscious or uncon-
