ART AND POLITICS
9
of wars and revolutions which is drawing near, everyone will have to give
an answer: philosophers, poets, painters as well as simple mortals.
In the June issue of your magazine I found a curious letter from an
editor of a Chicago magazine, unknown to me. Expressing (by mistake,
I hope) his sympathy for your publication, he writes: "I can see no hope
however [?] from the Trotskyites or other anemic splinters which have no
mass base." These arrogant words tell more about the author than he per–
haps wanted to say. They show above all that the laws of development of
society have remained a seven times sealed book for him. Not a single
progressive idea has begun with a "mass base," otherwise it would not have
been a progressive idea. It is only in its last stage that the idea finds its
masses-if, of course, it answers the needs of progress. All great move–
ments have begun as "splinters" of older movements. In the beginning,
Christianity was only a "splinter" of Judaism; protestantism a "splinter"
of Catholicism, that is to say decayed Christianity. The group of Marx and
Engels came into existence as a "splinter" of the Hegelian Left. The Com–
munist International germinated during the war from the "splinters" of
the Social Democratic International. If these pioneers found themselves
able to create a mass base, it was precisely because they did not fear isolation.
They knew beforehand that the quality of their ideas would be transformed
into quantity. These "splinters" did not suffer from anemia; on the con–
trary, they carried within themselves the germs of the great historical
movements of tomorrow.
In very much the same way, to repeat, a progressive movement occurs
in art. When an artistic tendency has exhausted its creative resources,
creative "splinters" separate from it, which are able to look at the world
with new eyes. The more daring the pioneers show in their ideas and actions,
the more bitterly they oppose themselves to established authority which
rests on a conservative "mass base," the more conventional souls, skeptics,
and snobs are inclined to see in the pioneers, impotent eccentrics or "anemic
splinters." But in the last analysis it is the conventional souls, skeptics and
snobs who are wrong-and life passes them by.
The Thermidorian bureaucracy, to whom one cannot deny either a
certain animal sense of danger or a strong instinct of self-preservation, is
not at all inclined to estimate its revolutionary adversaries with such whole–
hearted disdain, a disdain which is often coupled with lightness and incon–
sistency. In the Moscow trials, Stalin, who is not a venturesome player by
nature, staked on the struggle against "Trotskyism," the fate of the Kremlin
oligarchy as well as his own personal destiny. How can one explain this
h ct? The furious international campaign against "Trotskyism," for which
a parallel in history will be difficult to find, would be absolutely inexpli–
cable if the "splinters" were not endowed with an enormous vitality. He
who does not see this today will see it better tomorrow.
