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PARTISAN REVIEW
about the relation of culture to society contain specific esthetic prin-
ciples, they have vulgarized the theories and invented the principles.
The Heirs
Up to about 1935, the communist literary movement, claiming
to be the legitimate heir of every last nuance of Marx, sponsored two
doctrines, under the slogans, "art is a weapon" and "build a prole-
tarian literature." In fact it is these two notions, carried to their
farthest implications, which most people thought to be Marxist critic-
ism. And quite naturally so, for the Stalinist position in literature had
all the militancy and subversiveness commonly identified with revolu-
tionary thinking. Moreover it had the plausibility of baby-talk-was
it not, therefore, a doctrine for the millions? The logic was simple.
If society is divided into two principal classes, the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat, argued the Stalinists, it follows that each class has its own
art, and conversely, that art is so much advertising copy for the in-
terests and the ideas of the class it serves. All art is propaganda! And
since society has been ruled for centuries by the bourgeoisie, most art
is bourgeois propaganda. The proletariat, however, in its struggle for
power, requires an art which would coax the still-unenlightened work-
ers and farmers into socialism. Hence a proletarian art must be im-
mediately created, insisted the Stalinists, by those writers and artists
who heard the call of the future. There were of course many ramifica-
tions, as critics, in their zeal to outdo each other in militancy, added
their own prejudices to this general mythology of art, but in outline
this was the position of the Communist Party in literature. And as was
to be expected from such a theoretical
reductio ad absurdum,
the
practice was even more absurd than the theory, but it would be almost
sadistic to recall now some of the comic statements which were taken
so seriously at that time in the pages of the
New Masses.
It would be a mistake to regard the Stalinist version of Marx's
attitude to literature as the
natural
error of an infant movement, for
it was obviously inspired by the political line and the factional needs
of the Communist Party. (A bit of research would have shown that
they were mouthing many of the populist platitudes of Upton Sin-
clair.) What further proof is needed than the fact that when the
Communist Party, in 1935, abandoned its revolutionary politics, it
relegated its work-shirt theories of art to the archives of history? And
when the new esthetic position, though it was a complete reversal of
the old one, was likewise advanced as Marxist criticism, it became
clear that the strategy of the Communist Party was to conduct its
theoretical adventures under the auspices of Marxism. On the cul-
tural front, Marxist criticism was the pseudonym of orthodoxy. And
