Culture and Socialism

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1. Technique and Culture

Let us recall first of all that culture meant originally a plowed, cultivated field, as distinct from virgin forest and virgin soil. Culture was contrasted with nature, that is, what was acquired by man’s efforts was contrasted with what was given by nature. This antithesis fundamentally retains its value today.

Culture is everything that has been created, built, learned, conquered by man in the course of his entire history, in distinction from what nature has given, including the natural history of man himself as a species of animal. The science which studies man as a product of animal evolution is called anthropology. But from the moment that man separated himself from the animal kingdom — and this happened approximately when he first grasped primitive tools of stone and wood and armed the organs of his body with them — from that time there began the creation and accumulation of culture, that is, all kinds of knowledge and skill in the struggle with nature and subjugation of nature.

When we speak of the culture accumulated by past generations we think first and foremost of its material achievements in the form of tools, machinery, buildings, monuments, and so on. Is this culture? Undoubtedly it is culture; the material forms in which culture is deposited — material culture. It creates, on the basis provided by nature, the fundamental setting of our lives, our everyday way of living, our creative work. But the most precious part of culture is its deposit in the consciousness of man himself — those methods, habits, skills, acquired abilities of ours which have developed out of the whole of preexisting material culture and which, while drawing on this preexisting material culture, also improve upon it We will, then, consider it as firmly established that culture has grown out of man's struggle with nature for existence, for the improvement of his conditions of life, for the enlargement of his power. But out of this same basis classes also have grown. In the process of adapting itself to nature, in conflict with the hostile forces of nature, human society has taken shape as a complex organization of classes. The class structure of society has determined to a decisive degree the content and form of human history, that is, its material relations and their ideological reflections. This means that historical culture has possessed a class character.

Slave-owning society, feudal serf-owning society, bourgeois society, each engendered a corresponding culture, different at different stages and with a multitude of transitional forms. Historical society has been an organization for the exploitation of man by man. Culture has served the class organization of society. Exploiters' society has given rise to an exploiters' culture. But does this mean that we are against all the culture of the past?

There exists, in fact, a profound contradiction here. Everything that has been conquered, created, built by man’s efforts and which serves to enhance man's power is culture. But since it is not a matter of individual man but of social man, since culture is a social-historical phenomenon in its very essence, and since historical society has been and continues to be class society, culture is found to be the basic instrument of class oppression. Marx said: "The ruling ideas of an epoch are essentially the ideas of the ruling class of that epoch." This also applies to culture as a whole. And yet we say to the working class: master all the culture of the past, otherwise you will not build socialism. How is this to be understood?

Over this contradiction many people have stumbled, and they stumble so frequently because they approach the understanding of class society superficially, semi-idealistically, forgetting that fundamentally this is the organization of production. Every class society has been formed on the basis of definite modes of struggle with nature, and these modes have changed in accordance with the development of technique. What is the basis of bases — the class organization of society or its productive forces? Without doubt the productive forces. It is precisely upon them, at a certain level of their development, that classes are formed and re-formed. In the productive forces is expressed the materialized economic skill of mankind, his historical ability to ensure his existence. On this dynamic foundation there arise classes, which by their interrelations determine the character of culture.

And here, first and foremost, we have to ask ourselves regarding technique: is it only an instrument of class oppression? It is enough to put such a question for it to be answered at once: no, technique is the fundamental conquest of mankind; although it has also served, up to the present, as an instrument of exploitation, yet it is at the same time the fundamental condition for the emancipation of the exploited. The machine strangles the wage slave in its grip. But he can free himself only through the machine. Therein is the root of the entire question.

If we do not let ourselves forget that the driving force of the historical process is the growth of the productive forces, liberating man from the domination of nature, then we shall find that the proletariat needs to master the sum total of the knowledge and skill worked out by humanity in the course of its history, in order to raise itself up and rebuild life on principles of solidarity. …

2. The Heritage of Spiritual Culture

Spiritual culture is as contradictory as material culture. And just as from the arsenals and storehouses of material culture we take and put into circulation not bows and arrows, not stone tools or the tools of the Bronze Age, but the most improved tools available, of the most up-to-date technique, in this way also must we approach spiritual culture as well. …

Dialectics and materialism are the basic elements in the Marxist cognition of the world. But this does not mean at all that they can be applied to any sphere of knowledge, like an ever-ready master key. Dialectics cannot be imposed upon facts, it has to be deduced from facts, from their nature and development. Only painstaking work on a vast mass of material enabled Marx to advance the dialectical system of economics to the conception of value as social labor. Marx's historical works were constructed in the same way, and even his newspaper articles likewise. Dialectical materialism can be applied to new spheres of knowledge only by mastering them from within. The purging of bourgeois science presupposes a mastery of bourgeois science. You will get nowhere with sweeping criticism or bald commands. Learning and application here go hand in hand with critical reworking. We have the method, but there is work enough for generations to do. …

Art is one of the ways in which man finds his bearings in the world; in this sense the heritage of art is not distinguished from the heritage of science and technique — and it is no less contradictory than they. Unlike science, however, art is a form of cognition of the world not as a system of laws but as a group of images, and at the same time it is a way of inspiring certain feelings and moods. The art of past centuries has made man more complex and flexible, has raised his mentality to a higher level, has enriched him in an all-round way. This enrichment is a precious achievement of culture. Mastery of the art of the past is, therefore, a necessary precondition not only for the creation of new art but also for the building of the new society, for communism needs people with highly developed minds. Can, however, the art of the past enrich us with an artistic knowledge of the world? It can, precisely because it is able to give nourishment to our feelings and to educate them. If we were groundlessly to repudiate the art of the past, we should at once become poorer spiritually.

One notices nowadays a tendency here and there to put forward the idea that art has as its purpose only the inspiration of certain moods, and not at all the cognition of reality. The conclusion drawn from this is: with what sort of sentiments can the art of the nobility or of the bourgeoisie infect us? This is radically false. The significance of art as a means of cognition — including for the mass of the people, and in particular for them — is not at all less than its "sentimental" significance. The ancient epic, the fable, the song, the traditional saying, the folk rhyme provide knowledge in graphic form, they throw light on the past, they generalize experience, they widen the horizon, and only in connection with them and thanks to this connection is it possible to "tune it." This applies to all literature generally, not only to epic poetry but to lyric poetry as well. It applies to painting and to sculpture. The only exception, to a certain degree, is music, the effect of which is powerful but one-sided! Music too, of course, relies upon a particular knowledge of nature, its sounds and rhythms. But here the knowledge is so deeply hidden, the results of the inspiration of nature are to such an extent refracted through a person's nerves, that music acts as a self-sufficing "revelation.” Attempts to approximate all forms of art to music, as to the art of "infection," have often been made and have always signified a depreciation in art of the role of the intelligence in favor of formless feeling, and in this sense they were and are reactionary. … Worst of all, of course, are those works of "art" which offer neither graphic knowledge nor artistic "infection" but instead advance exorbitant pretensions. In our country no few such works are printed, and, unfortunately, not in the students' books of art schools but in many thousands of copies. …

Culture is a social phenomenon. Just because of this, language, as the organ of intercourse between men, is its most important instrument. The culture of language itself is the most important condition for the growth of all branches of culture, especially science and art. Just as technique is not satisfied with the old measuring apparatus but is creating new ones, micrometers, voltameters, and so on, striving for and attaining ever greater accuracy, so in the matter of language, of skill in choosing the appropriate words and combining them in the appropriate ways, constant, systematic, painstaking work is necessary in order to achieve the highest degree of accuracy, clarity and vividness. The foundation for this work must be the fight against illiteracy, semi-literacy and near-illiteracy. The next stage of this work is the mastering of Russian classical literature.

Yes, culture was the main instrument of class oppression. But it also, and only it, can become the instrument of socialist emancipation.

3. The Contradictions in Our Culture

What is special about our position is that we — at the point where the capitalist West and the colonial-peasant East meet — have been the first to make a socialist revolution. The regime of proletarian dictatorship has been established first in a country with a monstrous inheritance of backwardness and barbarism, so that among our people whole centuries of history separate a Siberian nomad from a Moscow or Leningrad worker. Our social forms are transitional to socialism and consequently are beyond comparison higher than capitalist forms. In this sense we rightly consider ourselves the most advanced country in the world. But technique, which lies at the basis of material and every other kind of culture, is extremely backward in our country in comparison with the advanced capitalist countries. This constitutes the fundamental contradiction of our present reality. The historical task which follows from this is to raise our technique to the height of our social formation. If we do not succeed in doing this, our social order will inevitably decline to the level of our technical backwardness. Yes, in order to appreciate the entire significance of technical progress for us it is necessary to tell ourselves frankly: if we do not succeed in filling the Soviet forms of our social order with the appropriate productive technique we shall shut off the possibility of our transition to socialism and we shall be turned back to capitalism — and to what sort of capitalism: semi-serf, semi-colonial capitalism. The struggle for technique is for us the struggle for socialism, with which the whole future of our culture is bound up.

Here is a fresh and very expressive example of our cultural contradictions. There recently appeared in the papers a report that our Leningrad Public Library holds first place for the number of books: it now possesses 4,250,000 books! Our first feeling is a legitimate feeling of Soviet pride: our library is the first in the world! To what are we indebted for this achievement? To the fact that we have expropriated private libraries. Through nationalizing private property we have created a richer cultural institution, accessible to everyone. The great advantages of the Soviet order are indisputably shown in this simple fact. But at the same time our cultural backwardness is expressed in the fact that in our country the percentage of illiterates is greater than in any other European country. The library is the biggest in the world, but as yet only a minority of the population reads books. And that is how things are in almost every respect. Nationalized industry, with gigantic and far from fantastic schemes for Dnieprostroi, the Volga-Don canal and so on — and the peasants do their threshing with chains and rollers. Our marriage laws are permeated with the spirit of socialism — and physical violence still plays no small part in our family life. These and similar contradictions result from the entire structure of our culture, at the meeting point of West and East. …

It is now, I think, dear to everybody that the creation of a new culture is not an independent task to be carried out separately from our economic work and our social and cultural construction as a whole. …

When Lenin spoke of the cultural revolution he saw its fundamental content as raising the cultural level of the masses. The metric system is a product of bourgeois science. But teaching this simple system of measurement to a hundred million peasants means carrying out a big revolutionary cultural task. It is almost certain that we shall not achieve it without the aid of tractors and electric power. At the foundation of culture lies technique. The decisive instrument in the cultural revolution must be a revolution in technique.

In relation to capitalism we say that the development of the productive forces is pressing against the social forms of the bourgeois state and bourgeois property. Having accomplished the proletarian revolution we say: the development of the social forms is pressing against the development of the productive forces, that is technique. The big link by seizing which we can carry through the cultural revolution is the link of industrialization, and not literature or philosophy at all. I hope that these words will not be understood in the sense of an unfriendly or disrespectful attitude to philosophy and poetry. Without generalizing thought and without art, man's life would be bare and beggarly. But that is just what the life of millions of people is to an enormous extent at the present time. The cultural revolution must consist in opening up to them the possibility of real access to culture and not only to its wretched fag ends. But this is impossible without creating very big material preconditions. That is why a machine which automatically manufactures bottles is at the present time a first-rate factor in the cultural revolution, while a heroic poem is only a tenth-rate factor.

Marx said once about philosophers that they had interpreted the world sufficiently, the task was to turn it upside down. There was no disesteem for philosophy in those words of his. Marx was himself one of the greatest philosophers of all time. These words meant only that the further development of philosophy, as of all culture in general, both material and spiritual, requires a revolution in social relations. And so Marx appealed from philosophy to the proletarian revolution, not against philosophy but on its behalf. In this same sense we can now say: it is good when poets sing of the revolution and the proletariat, but a powerful turbine sings even better. We have plenty of songs of middling quality, which have remained the property of small circles, but we have terribly few turbines. I don’t wish to imply by this that mediocre verses hinder the appearance of turbines. No, that cannot be said at all. But a correct orientation of public opinion, that is, an understanding of the real relationship between phenomena, the how and why of things, is absolutely necessary.

The cultural revolution must not be understood in a superficially idealistic way or as something which is an affair for small study groups. It is a question of changing the conditions of life, the methods of work and the everyday habits of a great nation, of a whole family of nations. Only a mighty tractor system which for the first time in history will enable the peasant to straighten his back; only a glassblowing machine which produces hundreds of bottles and liberates the lungs of the old-time glassblower; only a turbine of dozens and hundreds of thousands horsepower; only an airplane available to everyone — only all these things together will ensure the cultural revolution, not for a minority but for all. And only such a cultural revolution will deserve the name. Only on that basis will a new philosophy and a new art come to flower. …