Page 64 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

SECOND AND THIRD INTERNATIONAL MARXISM

scientific knowledge, remains radically untenable: the most realistic
of novels are nonetheless fiction, not history, their realism a matter of
literary convention, not cognitive adequacy.
Whatever its transparent theoretical demerits, Plekhanov’s embryo
aesthetic at least possessed neither legislative intent nor power. Once
elevated to the level of official Soviet government policy, the theory
of socialist realism, or Zhdanovism as it became known, was possessed
of each. At the 1934 Soviet Writers’ Congress, Zhdanov, then Secretary
to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,
had announced that, of all the world’s literatures only the Soviet
could have become “so rich in ideas, so advanced and revolutionary”.
It had become so, he insisted, because its authors “correctly and
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truthfully depict the life of our Soviet country”. Elsewhere, by contrast,
“bourgeois literature…is no longer able to create great works of art…
Characteristic of the decadence and decay of bourgeois culture are
the orgies of mysticism and superstition, the passion for pornography”. 20
For Zhdanov, as for Plekhanov, literary modernism is thus essentially
a form of cultural decadence. For Zhdanov, as not for Plekhanov, the
legislative means were available for the suppression of all such
decadence, both from the Soviet Union itself and from the ranks of
the foreign Communist Parties.
There is an important sense in which these theories of realism
represent the reassertion within Marxism of a type of utilitarianism
that had only ever lain dormant in Marx’s own work. The connection
between culture and interest, from which Marx had forged the concept
of ideology, is, in fact, partly reminiscent of Bentham. For Marx, this
connection is a hidden secret, to be exposed and demystified. It was
that, too, for socialists and communists, in their struggles against
bourgeois ideology. But in their advocacy of socialist realism, a much
more properly Benthamite conception of a desirable and desired
connection between value and utility is observable. It is this connection
which explains not only the genuine appeal to socialist and communist
militants of literary and artistic realism, but also the much more ulterior
motivation of Zhdanovism proper.
That Western radicalisms, whether socialist, communist or, more
recently, feminist, should have on occasion come enthusiastically to
endorse the techniques of literary realism is in itself neither surprising
nor suspicious. To require of their own writers that their art be of
some directly political use, by virtue of its potential to expose the

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