John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

Partly as a result of this attitude, Proletkult’s modern reputation is a byword for cultural vandalism by the ignorant and talentless. Yet Richard Stites’s groundbreaking and sympathetic work on utopian sub-cultures and experimental lifestyles in the revolutionary era uncovered “a genuinely novel experiment designed to arm and teach an entire class in quick time to construct wholly new culture in a still very much illiterate society, and to do so with minimum guidance from the past”. 14Just as Lenin had advocated smashing the old state machine and building a new one from the ground up, Proletkult sought to uncover and nurture an entirely new working-class aesthetic. Despite its limitations, it achieved some remarkable innovations in style and form which still influence popular art and marketing today. Its weakness was not that it focused on the emblems of industrial modernity–the city, the machine, the teletype, the car and the factory–but that it disallowed virtually anything else.

What was intended as a positive programme to provide working-class men and women with opportunity to express themselves authentically in art and culture could slide into an anti-intellectual nihilism. At the first Proletkult conference, just before October 1917, a passionate advocate declared there was nothing worthy of retention in the old bourgeois culture “except for natural science and technical skills”. Many Proletkultists consciously rejected the “greats” of Russian literature such as Pushkin, whom Lenin revered. When Nakompros instigated a prize for “Best Proletarian Poet” an angry Proletkult worker wrote, “We who were born in the thunder of plants and factories, in the mines and pits and behind the plow, we do not recognise ‘Kings’ or ‘Best Poets’”. 15

In Literature and Revolution (1923), Trotsky offered lucid comment on the revolutionary art that had emerged from October. “The call of the Futurists to break with the past”, he wrote, “to do away with Pushkin, to liquidate tradition, etc., has a meaning as far as it is addressed to the old literary caste”. But the call was meaningless once addressed to the relatively uneducated working class. “The working class does not have to, and cannot, break with literary tradition, because it is not in the grip of such a tradition. The working class does not know the old literature, it still has to master Pushkin, to absorb him, and so overcome him”. 16Lunacharsky agreed. Nakompros subsidised Proletkult, but it also protected the museums and libraries of the old world. It helped the Marxist theatre producer Meyerhold stage his innovative productions but it also allowed and valued Chekhov and Shakespeare, who were far more popular amongst the “advanced” workers.

With the exception of family and sexual policy, there was no field that unsettled the Bolshevik Revolution more than art and culture. Lunacharsky instituted a remarkably liberal regime. Whilst he gave Proletkult enough space to experiment he also channeled resources to the Futurist and Suprematist schools of art around Tatlin and Malevich. These were not allies of Proletkult, often competing for the same audience. Although Mayakovsky had been one of the most eminent pre-war Futurist poets, after October he immersed himself in Proletkult and the “Rosta Windows” (from Russian Telegraph Agency–Rosta) school of propaganda art. These were large stenciled sheets that told multi-frame sequential stories of the Civil War and revolution, a politicised version of the American tabloids’ “Funny Pages”, themselves the precursor of the comic and the graphic novel.

Sheila Fitzpatrick observed that the Bolsheviks shared with the liberal intelligentsia an instinctive dismissal of working-class popular culture, frequently condemned as “vulgar” or “backward” or, worst of all, “petty bourgeois”. The last epitaph was “equally derogatory whether it came from the lips of a well-born liberal intellectual or those a militant proletarian Bolshevik”. 17Trotsky, in a series of essays collected together as Problems of Everyday Life (1924), offered advice to those attempting to guide the working class towards a higher, more cultivated existence, including the desirability of better personal hygiene, stopping smoking and not swearing. “The Russian worker, except the very top of the class”, he opined, “usually lacks the most elementary habits and notions of culture (in regard to tidiness, instruction, punctuality, etc.)”. The Russian masses were told some harsh truths:

We are poor. We are wasteful. We are careless. We are sloppy. We are slovenly. These vices have deep roots in our slavish past and can be eradicated only gradually by persistent propaganda by deed, by example, and by illustration–and by means of careful control, vigilance and persistent exactitude. 18

Some workers were attracted by this vision. Most were not.

How to appeal to a mass working-class audience has always been a central problem–perhaps the central problem–for the left. Even in the late 19th century, in the early days of the organised labour and socialist movement, the attraction and distraction of “bread and circuses”–the pub, the music hall, etc.–to under-educated masses was socialism’s greatest obstacle. Technological development simply made it more so. By the middle of the 20th century, the intellectual left was paralysed by the seeming omnipotence of what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkhiemer, in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), called the “culture industry”.

Adorno and Horkhiemer were intimidated and mesmerised by the radio and the cinema, which they saw as all-powerful transmitters of mindless mass culture to a depoliticised working class. In their pessimism they did not notice or foresee that alternative messages and values still seeped through that culture. Indeed, they were often transmitted directly by it, such as the radical documentaries of the Mass Observation project in the 1930s , the socialist values of the Daily Mirror in the 1940s, or the self-education offered on late-night TV by the Open University in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the second decade of the 21st century the culture industry is, from one perspective, a grotesque and extreme version of that described by Adorno and Horkhiemer, a commercial machine in which amoral corporations produce slick soft-porn videos of Britney Spears telling young women that if they desire material riches–“You wanna a Bugatti? You wanna a Maserati?”–then “You better work, Bitch”, or businessmen like Simon Cowell pretend to be celebrities in order to exploit untutored musical talent under the cover of TV entertainment. But their control is slipping. Social media, portable IT and public funding have revolutionised both the product and the means of accessing it. To cite just three well-known examples, films like Pride , TV series like The Wire , and Russell Brand’s The Trews on YouTube offer a very different world view to that of the conventional culture industry.

Great works of radical art are essential, but they achieve little in isolation. Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy , Morris’s News from Nowhere , Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath , Ken Loach’s Land and Freedom and many others provide inspiration and solace, but capitalism takes the hit and moves on. The challenge is how to shape and transmit a radical and questioning culture to a mass audience and to make that a constant in their lives. The potential is there. Digital social media in all forms and on all platforms allows a continuous level of social collaboration and innovation that is inherently subversive of neoliberalism’s individualist ethic. It has created vibrant mass anti-corporate/direct-action campaigns and sites of information such as Adbusters, Corporate Watch, WikiLeaks, the Global Justice Movement, Food Not Bombs and the Hunt Saboteurs Association.