Page 63 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

MARXISM

Second and Third International Marxism

To proceed from Marx’s own Marxism to the scientific Marxism of
the Socialist and Communist Internationals, is to proceed to a normally
strongly determinist version of the base/superstructure model. The
key instances here are those provided by, respectively, Georgei Plekhanov
(1856–1918) and A.A.Zhdanov (1896–1948). Plekhanov’s Art and
Social Life, first published in 1912, is perhaps the single best known
example of the type of cultural theory which emanated from the pre–
1914 international socialist movement. Its authorship in Russian,
rather than in German, the more influential language within the
movement as a whole, also secured the relatively easy incorporation
of many of its themes into later communist Marxism. It is, then, a
peculiarly significant text. For Plekhanov, culture is the outcome of
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an interaction between biology and material history. But insofar as
art in particular is concerned, as distinct from culture in general,
Plekhanov conceives this material history as operating in a very peculiar
way. In effect, Plekhanov comes to think of artistic form as a kind of
superstructure, and artistic content as its material base: “the value of
a work of art is determined, in the last analysis by its content”. 16
Content can be imagined thus only because it becomes equated with
the realistic representation of material history, where the term realism
denotes not simply a set of literary conventions designed so as to
create the illusion of an accurate depiction of some extra-textual reality,
but rather a genuinely accurate depiction of a genuinely extra-textual
reality. Such accuracy provides the measure of literary value: “when
a work distorts reality, it is a failure”. 17
This valorization of “realism” echoes Engels (though not, I think,
Marx). But what in Engels is mere personal preference here emerges
as a realist aesthetic, in which bourgeois “modernism” (cubism, for
example) is judged decadent. This analogy between base/super-
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structure and content/form is, of course, bizarrely contrived, since by
any reasonable definition both form and content are quite obviously
equally superstructural. Moreover, whether we accept the analogy or
not, any deterministic formulation of the base/superstructure thesis
must necessarily preclude the need for a prescriptive aesthetic. If the
base does indeed determine the superstructure, then the insistence
that it should do so remains clearly redundant. And, in any case, the
very notion of art as a mode of cognition, significantly analogous to

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