50
PARTISAN REVIEW
It goes without saying that we do not identify ourselves with
the currently fashionable catchword: "Neither fascism nor com–
munism !"a shibboleth which suits the temperament of the Philistine,
conservative and frightened, clinging to the tattered remnants of the
"democratic" past. True art, which is not content to play variations
on ready-made models but rather insists on expressing the inner
needs of man and of mankind in its time--true art is unable
not
to
be revolutionary,
not
to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruc–
tion of society. This it must do, were it only to deliver intellectual
creation from the chains which bind it, and to allow all mankind
to raise itself to those heights which only isolated geniuses have
achieved in the past. We recognize that only the social revolution
can sweep clear the path for a new culture.
If,
however, we reject
all
solidarity with the bureaucracy now in control of the Soviet
Union, it is precisely because, in our eyes, it represents not commu–
nism but its most treacherous and dangerous enemy.
The totalitarian regime of the U.S.S.R., working through the
so-called "cultural" organizations it controls in other countries, has
spread over the entire world a deep twilight hostile to every sort of
spiritual value. A twilight of filth and blood in whicq, disguised as
intellectuals and artists, those men steep themselves who have made
of servility a career, of lying for pay a custom, and of the palliation
of crime a source of pleasure. The official art of Stalinism mirrors
with a blatancy unexampled in history their efforts to put a good
face on their mercenary profession.
The repugnance which this shameful negation of the principles
of art inspires in the artistic world-a negation which even slave
states have never dared carry so far--should give
rise
to an active,
uncompromising condemnation. The
opposition
of writers and artists
is one of the forces which can usefully contribute to the discrediting
and overthrow of regimes which are destroying, along with the right
of the proletariat to aspire to a better world, every sentiment of nobility
and even of human dignity.
The communist revolution is not afraid of art. It realizes that
the role of the artist in a decadent capitalist society is determined
by the conflict between the individual and various social forms which
are hostile to him. This fact alone, insofar as he is conscious of it,
makes the artist the natural ally of revolution. The process of
sublima–
tion,
which here comes into play, and which psychoanalysis has ana–
lyzed, tries to restore the broken equilibrium between the integral
"ego" and the outside elements it rejects. This restoration works to the
advantage of the "ideal of self," which marshals against the unbear–
able present reality all those powers of the interior world, of the "self,"
