Page 65 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

MARXISM

injustices either of capitalism or of patriarchy, is simply to insist on
the political possibilities of political art. That working-class radicalism
should often have been accompanied by an antipathy towards high
modernist art forms is similarly unsurprising: there is a wealth of
available empirical, sociological evidence to suggest that popular
aesthetic taste is “based on the affirmation of continuity between art
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and life” and “a deep-rooted demand for participation”, neither of
which are especially compatible with highly formalist types of literary
or artistic experimentation. What is surprising is that such preferences
should have ever become codified into a prescriptive aesthetic which
sought to deny not only the political, but also the artistic, legitimacy
of alternative cultural strategies. This development occurred only as
a result of the intervention into the international communist movement
of the Soviet government, and bespoke the power of that government’s
own more sinister intentions and aspirations.
What the Soviet authorities demanded, and imperatively so, was
also an art that would be of directly political use. But it was to be of
use to the new post-revolutionary ruling class, to be supportive rather
than subversive, conservative rather than radical. The hint is there in
Zhdanov himself: “Comrade Stalin has called our writers engineers
of human souls. What does this mean?…it means knowing life so as
to be able to depict it truthfully…not…in a dead, scholastic way, not
simply as ‘objective reality’, but to depict reality in its revolutionary
development…the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic
portrayal should be combined with the ideological remoulding and
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education of the toiling people”. Where Western socialist realisms
sought to expose the inequities of Western capitalism, Soviet socialist
realism found itself commanded to disguise those of Soviet-style state
capitalism.
For so long as it existed, the international communist movement
yoked together a collection of Western working-class political parties
on the one hand, a group of modernising state capitalist dictatorships
on the other. In cultural theory, as in almost all else, this improbable
alliance was secured only at the price of a systematic linguistic ambiguity
that bordered on duplicity. Western and Eastern communisms spoke
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the same language, and meant almost entirely different things. No
doubt Trotsky was right to describe Soviet socialist realism thus: “The
official art of the Soviet Union—and there is no other over there—
resembles totalitarian justice, that is to say, it is based on lies and

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