PARTISAN REVIEW
· 183
art remains linked to that of the revolution. In
this
sense, it is indeed
an internal exigency of art which drives the artist .to the streets - to
fight for the Commune, for the Bolshevist revolution, for the German
revolution of
1918,
for the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, for
all
revolutions which have the historical chance of liberation. But in
doing
so
he leaves the universe of art and enters the larger universe
of which art remains an antagonistic part: that of radical practice.
Today's cultural revolution places anew on the agenda the prob–
lems of a Marxist aesthetics. In the preceding sections, I tried to
make a tentative contribution to this subject; an adequate discussion
would require another book. But one specific question must again
be raised
ill
this context, namely, the
~eaning,
and the very pOs–
sibility, of a "proletarian literature" (or working-class literature). In
my view, the discussion has never again reached the theoretical level
it attained in the twenties and early thirties, especially in the con–
troversy between Georg Lukacs, Johannes
R.
Becher and AndOT
Gabor on the one side, and Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjainin, Hanns
Eisler and Ernst Bloch on the other. The discussion during this
period is recorded and reexamined in Helga Gallas' excellent book
Marxistische Literaturtheorie.
10
All protagonists accept the central concept according to which
art (the discussion is practically confined to literature) is determined,
in
its "truth content" as well as in its fonns, by the class situation
of the author (of course not simply in terms of his personal position
and consciousness but of the objective correspondence of his work
to the material and ideological position of the class). The conclusion
which emerges from this discussion is ' that at the historical stage
where the position of the proletariat alone renders possible insight
into the totality of the social process,- and into the necessity and
direction of radical change (i.e., into "the truth"), only a prole–
tarian literature can fulfill the progressive function
of. ·
art and de–
velop a revolutionary consciousness: indispensable weapon in the class
struggle.
Ca~
such a literature arise in the traditional forms of art, or
10. (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1971).
