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Lunacharsky - On the role of the proletarian state in the development of socialist culture

Transcript of the speech at the session of the Institute of Philosophy of the Komakademia on the report of Comrade Yudin. In view of the illness and death of A. V. Lunacharsky, the transcript was not corrected by him personally and was subjected only to editorial revision. - Ed.

Comrades! In his interesting report Comrade Yudin gives a clear definition of the Marxist-Leninist understanding of the very term "culture". This definition seems to me to be absolutely correct and the only acceptable one. I just want to look a little inside this phenomenon - culture, to consider some of its individual aspects and their mutual connection.

Tov. Mishin, speaking here on Comrade Mitin's report, dwelt on a very interesting question—the dependence of politics on economics. He pointed out that genuine Marxism never denied the reverse influence of politics, which, of course, grows on a certain material basis and its movement, on this material basis, on the economy. At the same time, he spoke mainly about the relationship between economics and politics already at the socialist level. The attempts of capitalist policy to introduce order into the economy, to curb elemental force, to force it to go where the ruling class would like, to protect itself from the logic of things, which unfolds to the disadvantage and even perniciously for this class, cannot, of course, lead to the results desired by the capitalists. Only the dictatorship of the proletariat is such a political form that powerfully, consciously and systematically affects the economy. Economic planning is one of the most essential aspects of the dictatorship of the proletariat. And indeed, the policy of the proletariat, after it has won power, after it becomes a dictator, turns into a genuine process of the influence of organized human consciousness, organized human will on spontaneous processes. This already represents the beginning of that process of transition from necessity to freedom that Engels spoke of (these words sometimes seemed like a paradox, something even non-Marxist to those people who did not understand the inner essence of Marxism). turns into a genuine process of the influence of organized human consciousness, organized human will on natural processes. This already represents the beginning of that process of transition from necessity to freedom that Engels spoke of (these words sometimes seemed like a paradox, something even non-Marxist to those people who did not understand the inner essence of Marxism). turns into a genuine process of the impact of organized human consciousness, organized human will on spontaneous processes. This already represents the beginning of that process of transition from necessity to freedom that Engels spoke of (these words sometimes seemed like a paradox, something even non-Marxist to those people who did not understand the inner essence of Marxism).

The organized proletariat, which promotes a party from its midst, seizes power in the revolutionary process, creates its own government, its own state apparatus, which is deeply embedded in real life, can and must regulate economic processes. Of course, he is to a certain extent dependent on the object, on objective conditions, on certain objective forces, which he cannot immediately transform into soft clay easily yielding to his pressure. Nevertheless, it is already really invading the economy as a truly extremely important, determining factor.

Individual supporters of capitalism also talk about a plan, they also dream of creating something similar in their own country by overcoming chaos and competition, through an ever greater "organization" of individual branches of the capitalist economy, through attracting their own state, which is a hidden or open dictatorship of the imperialist bourgeoisie. But of course they can't do that.

Economics and politics belong to the field of culture. It is impossible to oppose, used these terms in the scientific, Marxist-Leninist sense, culture to politics, because it embraces politics. It is also impossible to oppose culture to the economy, because it includes it as well. Of course, we first of all pay attention to material culture. It is in very close contact with what we call the economy and which is a spontaneous process, independent of the will of man, right up to the victory of the proletarian revolution. Spiritual culture - an ideological superstructure - seems to have more human features. But we know that the development of any kind of ideologies, up to the most subtle and lofty, is also natural, also does not depend on the will of an individual person or any movement whatsoever, and is under the pressure of social laws - in the first place, it is precisely the development of this material base, material culture.

But is it possible in culture to sever the objective, elemental side and the conscious side? Again, if we use strictly scientific terms, then, perhaps, it is impossible. For example, can the dictatorship of the proletariat influence culture, the pace, direction, and character of its development? I may be told from the point of view of the Marxist-Leninist definition of culture: no, the dictatorship of the proletariat is itself already a form of culture, it itself enters into the realm of culture. This is true, but there is no need to be pedantic and conclude from this that we should not even put the question in this way. It can be said that we use these terms in a certain special sense. One can pose the question in the same approximate way that Comrade Mishin raised the question of whether the opposite effect of politics on the economy is possible. In essence, he thus raised the question of how much the organized consciousness of a cohesive proletariat can inversely determine the development of the economy itself. To this question, he answered: yes, maybe, and to a much greater extent than any other state. So we can put the question before ourselves: can culture, which develops depending on the pressure of the material process and has its own regularity in its higher spiritual areas, be regulated by one of its parts, namely organized human knowledge in the form of a state, again in its the most acute manifestations—in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat? This is not an idle question at all, for all bourgeois and semi-bourgeois thinkers have said: firstly, the state as a form of human consciousness, and therefore state influence, legislation, cannot change anything in culture, and especially in the highest forms of culture; secondly, if the state tries to influence this spontaneously developing culture, it always influences it in a harmful way. Strictly speaking, the essential feature of bourgeois liberalism lies precisely in the teaching that the state has nothing to do in the field of culture, that it should not interfere here, because, on the one hand, it would deceive itself, imagining that it has the power to create cultural values or determine the cultural direction , but on the other hand, it would harm the cause. It is known that the bourgeois liberals said the same thing about the economy: no matter how the state imagines that it is capable of regulating the economy. In essence, it is extremely weak in this area and, apart from evil, cannot create anything here. Leave the duties of a watchman behind you, go about your political affairs, but do not dare to interfere in the subtlest relationships of individuals, in how they build their economy. The less the state interferes in this matter, the more the economy will prosper.

It goes without saying that this was a pure, fragile form of bourgeois liberalism. Very soon the bourgeoisie moved away from it to more complex ideas about the relationship between the state and the economy. But even now we still see, for example, how, in response to the proposal of state planners dreaming of state capitalism, such a burp of the 18th and early 19th centuries is heard: well, they say, as soon as you embark on this path, you will completely ruin capitalism, because the most the essence, the noble essence of capitalism is that it is spontaneously created on the basis of the free interaction of economic forces and economic individuals. In a similar way, bourgeois liberalism tried to treat questions of culture taken as an object, art, literature, science, philosophy, characterizing a given society and a given age in their relation to the state. The classic example is Buckle. Buckle establishes as an unshakable truth that in the field of high ideologies (in this case we will talk about the highest forms of culture), the weight of the state, in his opinion, is extremely negligible and its influence is extremely disastrous. He gave many examples of the fact that where the government did not interfere in the life of society, science, philosophy, and art flourished. In the opposite case, either the withering of these forms of culture, stagnation, or officialism, insincerity, and the deepest internal perversion of cultural values were obtained.

A similar teaching still exists today. And in our country you can meet its representatives who say: this is a delicate matter, and if you involve censorship, regulation of the state apparatus, surveillance, suppression, or, even worse, state encouragement and, God forbid, state planning, something will certainly come out. according to Shchedrin: there will be a lot of order, but abundance will disappear. This is terrible, it may be cleverly disguised, but in the end, Arakcheevism, this is the state strangulation of the free spirit. Culture is where the spirit is free. Freedom generally disappears when the state approaches. There are perfumed states, white-gloved states, liberal states, but a state that dares to call itself a dictatorship is such a monster, at the approach of which all free cultural spirit immediately disappears like a frightened bird.

An interesting little illustration that I came across recently. One of the issues of Evening Moscow published an article by Comrade Katanyan devoted to a book by a certain Gidoni. If I'm not mistaken, Gidoni was at one time the adjutant of Plekhanov, who was already approaching the grave and had finally become smaller. Gidoni has published some kind of wild book about art, and among other things he quotes a letter from Courbet, an artist close to us in many ways. This is the proud letter with which Courbet responded to the desire of Napoleon III to award him the Order of the Legion of Honor. Courbet writes that he does not recognize the right of states to interfere in art and does not want to be in any relationship with the state: he, a free creator, a free artist, will not take trinkets from the hands of the state. After that, Gidoni writes: "Comments are superfluous." But, Katanyan notes, Gidoni did not pay attention to the fact that a few years later, during the Commune, Courbet entered the Committee for Art, the art of the Commune. This means that the state is different from the state, and here he was not only not afraid to defile himself with some kind of order, but he himself was a conductor of the active influence of the state on art.

The bourgeois state is a worse or better disguised measure of the violence of the minority against the exploited majority. The bourgeois state at a certain stage of development becomes a force holding back cultural progress, because cultural progress begins to serve the interests of other, non-bourgeois classes in developing their independence and struggle against the bourgeoisie. State art of the bourgeoisie is harmful to culture. And even when the bourgeois state encourages art, it only harms it, it falsifies it. We have something completely different where the proletariat is in power—in the proletarian state, which is the organization of the majority of the working people against the exploiters. The proletarian state seeks to accustom the backward working masses to socialist culture, to raise them spiritually to the level of citizens with equal rights, to the level of builders of culture, it seeks to open up prospects for them, to create for the first time the possibility of a truly human culture. The influence of the proletarian state on art is beneficial.

I would like to explain this contradiction with some examples. A young German student once told me:

“Here,” he says, “the German students have now radically perverted. There were times when university youth were the bearers of progress in the spirit of protest, in the spirit of opposition. As for the corporants and all the sons of their fathers, they did not set the tone, or at least made up 50 percent. students. But the further we go, the more our students become statesmen, the further they go, the more they follow the tendencies of not only the present state, say, the state of the Weimar Constitution, but much worse, the absolutist state. It becomes a real supporter of the absolutist state. And this is terrible, because the students who stand for power are something really ugly. The youth must rage, the youth must doubt, the youth must be in opposition, the youth must demand something, the youth must never be an agent of what is at this time a force.

And this student, himself a bourgeois liberal, said:

“I'm afraid that it's a little different with you, but still I often hear and read that your students think communist, Soviet. Soviet students are bad. I'm not saying that he needs to be bourgeois, but if they were anarchists, it would be prettier." ( Laughter ).

This student does not understand that the bourgeois absolutist state is death, that the bourgeois absolutist state is oppression, disintegration, the end, degradation. It's completely different with us. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a serious and tough thing, as Lenin said. But this is a revolutionary state, which marks progress, the struggle for culture, for the highest forms of culture. The proletarian state is the instrument of the greatest emancipation of the working masses, while the reactionary forces that fight against it are the instrument of violence against the masses.

I once cited in the press a very interesting, revealing conversation that Lenin had with Gorky back at the time when the latter was vacillating between his deviation from us and his return to us. Gorky complained to Lenin that a search had been carried out and, it seems, even an arrest of a prominent liberal professor, and said:

“Well, Vladimir Ilyin, doesn’t something prick in your heart? After all, this person and you once hid.

Lenin replied:

“Well, yes,” he says, “he is a terrible good man. At one time we hid with him from the tsarist gendarmes, but now he hides the Socialist-Revolutionaries from us. And it’s very good that he was searched.” ( Laughter ).

It is quite clear that Lenin never ceased to be a revolutionary, and this liberal is neither cold, nor warm, nor red, nor white, but simply a generous person who does not understand what's what, and such people are sufficiently harmful.

Bourgeois militarism is a disgusting thing. But I remember how Lenin once came to the Council of People's Commissars - it was at the very beginning of the revolution - very radiant and cheerful and said: “I have a wonderful case today, almost a historical anecdote. I heard one old woman say to someone: “Now you don’t need to be afraid of a man with a gun, now a man with a gun is for the poor.” This simple phrase of the old woman really contains the deepest meaning, because the fact of the matter is that we have a man with a gun for the poor and a state for the poor, and it affects culture not against the poor, but for the poor. Therefore, its impact on culture is extremely beneficial. All the goals of the Soviet state, and only of the Soviet state, are creative goals, liberating and constructive goals to the widest degree.

From this point of view, references, for example, by writers and other artists to the fact that freedom is an atmosphere necessary for creativity, should not confuse us in any way. We cannot but bring down repressions on those writers and artists who use the great weapon of art or science, philosophy for the counter-revolutionary struggle against us. Freedom of the press in the bourgeois sense is a false and false thing, self-contradictory. If it were used in our country, then it would be tantamount to the right to bear arms and sell poisons to our enemies.

The situation is exactly the same when we are reproached: your criticism is somehow so unsympathetic. Well, criticize how I placed the commas, what color I have, otherwise they somehow climb right into my vest - what class I am ( laughter ), it smells like fists, etc. This is not criticism - this is detective work, this is not criticism - this is denunciation!

Of course, sometimes you can overdo it in this regard. Of course, one cannot defend such criticism, which begins to seek out: but his mother-in-law was not married to a general. ( Laughter ). Such criticism leads nowhere. But what kind of Marxist-Leninists would we be, what kind of scientific critics would we be, if, while stating that in any work of art or literature we must see the intertwining threads of class relations and the class struggle, at the same time we would not be able to discover.

The situation is exactly the same with respect to the encouragement of art by the state. At the very beginning, when the proletarian writers presented their demands for official support, the party said: you, please, flounder yourself, achieve your own dictatorship and hegemony in the field of literature with your works. But at the same time, our state, and especially in a lean time, when it was quite difficult for each individual to create elementary conditions of comfort for himself, helped writers, supported them. The state cannot treat all writers equally. It would be highly wrong if it said: “I am the sun that looks, smiling, at both the good and the evil; I am the rain that sheds on the bad and on the good.” Of course not. And if we have, for example, some kind of opportunity, as yet insignificant, to give support to this or that artist or writer, to send him abroad to study, then it goes without saying that we will strive first of all to direct our still meager funds in the direction where we expect good results. We want to sow, and we must sow not on a stone, not in a swamp, but on more or less fertile soil.

Liberals meet with particular fury our attempts to organize in the field of art, which we are still very weakly carrying out. In science, we have only just begun this work, but we have already begun it quite firmly. It can be stated with pleasure that some members of the Academy of Sciences, who also recently said: the spirit of God blows where it wants, science is an extremely tender sprout, you will step on your iron heel and immediately destroy it, now they perfectly understand that science has begun to recover that her musculature began to develop and her problems became alive from the fact that we put a drive belt between our construction, our vital requirements and scientific tasks, scientific work. A mass of tasks, not invented, not sucked from the finger, but the most urgent, stood before science and began to fertilize it.

Objecting to Stiriner and his assertion that the artist is such a creative individuality that is irreplaceable and absolutely united, Marx and Engels said that even brilliant individuals can be replaced and that it is not true that all creativity is creativity, because it is individual. Creativity, they said, can be collective, and all that we now have in the field of organizing artistic labor is a trifle compared to what we will have in a socialist society.

Now, when we have colossal needs not only of a scientific, but also of an artistic nature, formulating the needs of the population, even if it is called by such a dissonant name - the state order - is an extremely important task. To point out in which direction artistic forces, artistic attention, artistic talent should be directed—this is a natural conclusion from our entire planned economy.

We know perfectly well, therefore, that we have the right to interfere in the course of culture, from the development of mechanization in our country and electrification as part of it, to the guidance of the finest forms of art.

Can we achieve something in this area?

This is where the semi-bourgeois Pereverzev theory succeeded in seducing very many in our own midst. One of the methods of the bourgeoisie's struggle against us is the struggle in a Marxist mask. In essence, all deviations known to us are such an unconscious struggle of the bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie against us in a Marxist mask. In the Pereverzevshchina we have a remarkable example of such a struggle. Pereverzev said: I am the only, real, genuine, scientific Marxist, because I make the artistic forms of creativity directly dependent on the economy and sharply, firmly, without concessions, define all the work of the artist, right down to his forms, to the finest characteristics of his works, from his class entity. And many said: indeed, this is a Marxist without any boasting and without any slyness, he will screw the writer to a certain class, do not breathe for this writer. (Laughter). It means that there is something Bolshevik, something hard-stoned in this. And if you smell it, it shows that it smells like a genuine rejection of artistic politics. The essence of the matter boils down to the fact that each writer is defined once and for all in his class essence. What this means is unclear. By the age of 16 or later, a person becomes a bourgeois or a petty bourgeois, and after that he has nowhere to go. In all his works, he begins to depict himself as a stylized class self. And some of Pereverzev's students said that if, for example, a poet describes a horse, then, rummaging through it, it turns out that the horse is also a stylized class self. (Laughter). The essence of the matter was this (Pereverzev hid it very much): a writer cannot be re-educated, a writer cannot be influenced, he cannot run away from himself anywhere, and if you tell him: I don’t like you, so-and-so, we will interfere with you , you are hostile to us, we want you to write this way or that, then he will either stop writing altogether, or he will lie - and this will not be art, but falsehood.

Thus, according to Pereverzev, it turns out that art, and if you expand it to the entire field of culture or to spiritual culture, then even culture is a calculation in itself, and there can be no influence of an organized powerful class on the course of events. It follows that government measures to stop the development of the poisonous and to develop an art that is beneficial for us, contributing to the revolution, is an attempt with unsuitable means, which leads not to good, but to evil. This is a Menshevik, liberal, and in any case counter-revolutionary tendency. As I already said, all the measures that we are using to regulate artistic creativity - proletarian and fellow traveler - and to suppress artistic creativity among the direct enemies of the USSR - this is the school of influence from repression to the greatest concern for the artist, to comradely participation in it, helping him, penetrating into the depths of his laboratory - all this is expedient and necessary. And just as at the stage of development we have reached, our state has a powerful influence on the economy, so our proletarian consciousness can powerfully influence the pace and direction of the development of the spiritual culture of the country. But of course, certain conditions are needed for this. That this is a subtle thing is true. That many threads here can be broken by the touch of a rough hand is beyond doubt. In order to guide the subtle forms of culture, the ideological forms most distant from the base, a high culture is needed for the state itself.

Lenin said: what do we lack in order to build our socialist state? Our land is great and plentiful, the power belongs to us. We do not have enough culture, the culture of the leaders, the culture of the communists. Even more so, this can be said about the less broad and less decisive, but also more subtle task of leading science, art, etc. We ourselves need more culture. Do we already have it? Let's not mess around. We will not claim that we already have it. We ourselves feel that we are often not up to the mark, that we must hasten to arm and rearm. It is necessary to carefully study the questions of the theory and history of these high ideological forms, it is necessary, first of all, to master, as Lenin said, the entire sum of cultural values previously acquired by mankind and critically review and assimilate them. You need to determine your own approach to this matter. If we were to say: oh, since we have power, then everything else will follow, the main thing is that there is power, then this would mean just showing our lack of culture. This would prove that we are bad Leninists. On the other hand, if we lowered our hands and began to say: where are we, and how are we, these bourgeois writers are so-and-so unscrubbed, extremely subtle, and all their questions are so fragrant, and we are proletarians in felt boots, and we will say something - something like that, and we will use the wrong terms, and we will not understand their subtle soul, and embarrassment will come out - by this we would show that we are in slavery to the petty bourgeoisie, that we do not understand all the fruitful power of the class, for which we have great happiness and pride to belong. We must draw the following conclusion: for the Bolsheviks, everything is possible, but on the condition of the most intense and most rational work on oneself and others.

Our criticism must be very sharp, but at the same time extremely subtle. Our self-criticism, our mutual comradely influence, should consist not in shouting, not in mutual deafening, but in the most caring attitude towards any comrade working side by side in the field of culture, in a passionate active desire to teach him and learn from him what you can. And the more we work as a collective, the more we will achieve this truly comradely, collective method of self-arming and growth. In any case, we are already on the way to this, we have already done something significant and tangible in this regard. We know where to go, and we will more and more move from clumsy experiments to completely precise methods of influencing culture in this specific sense of the word, this highest form of culture.

In particular, the Institute of Literature and Art of the Komakademia has as its task just work in this area. It has been set as a goal, on the one hand, to be an observation station that should register the new development of various forms of art, respond, comment on them at least provisionally, contact new forces, and on the other hand, develop the theory and history of these great phenomena, as well as a method not only of artistic creation itself, but also a method of fruitful, corrective and socio-hygienic criticism, which could straighten the patient and open before him the path of possible luxurious development and health.

These tasks are extremely large. This is not the place to talk about LII's shortcomings, about how long he can't get back on his feet. In particular, I was cut off from work by other duties that the Party placed on me, and by illness. Now this institution is undergoing a radical restructuring, we are giving it a different organization, we are trying to define its tasks more precisely, and we are more convinced than ever how little it can do if it closes itself within its walls. The LII Institute needs, on the one hand, the deepest connection with the creative teams and units in all areas of art, and on the other hand, an inextricable connection with political economic organizations that determine the entire course of events in our country and to break away from which means to break away from our construction altogether. , and with many fraternal institutes within the Comacademy, which develop related theoretical problems.

In particular, constant and close contact between the Institute of the LII and the Institute of Philosophy, which are so close to each other, is absolutely necessary. None of our problems can be posed otherwise than in the context of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, and it would be simply ugly if we did not feverishly follow the progress of philosophers, did not turn to them for help in resolving our problems. Without false modesty, we can say that we can sometimes be useful to them, because it goes without saying that the philosophy of individual eras and a particular area of ​​culture is extremely closely connected with the artistic manifestations of this era. Sometimes this connection is personal, as, for example, in the person of Goethe and a number of other creators, but nevertheless they are representatives of the same cultural formation. It is necessary to give an accurate analysis of their theoretical, philosophical and artistic creativity. This task is undoubtedly very important and the only correct one. To separate one from the other is not Marxist, not Leninist.

Therefore, I am very glad that, despite my health, I managed to make this short speech, to express a few thoughts about how we understand the impact of proletarian consciousness on a spontaneously growing culture, on its specific area, on the area of ​​higher forms of spiritual culture. Here we have before us colossal, extraordinarily fruitful work, which, bypassing various difficulties, is capable of accelerating the pace of development of the new young socialist culture. I just want to emphasize once again our extraordinary desire to feel the neighborly elbow of fellow philosophers at every step in the future, to work with them in inseparable contact. ( Applause )