Art and the Working Class
* Book: Alexander Bogdanov. Art and the Working Class. Translated and Introduced by Taylor R. Genovese, Iskra Books, Madison, Wisconsin, 2022. 144 pp.
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Review
Stephan Hammel:
""Art and the Working Class gathers together three articles that had been published separately. The first, ‘What is Proletarian Poetry?’, is characteristically ambitious, summarizing the history of literature from the first human labour songs, through the epics of the ancient world, to the lyric poetry of bourgeois society. In every instance, Bogdanov argues, poetry serves to educate its consumers. He writes that education is to “the human collective” (33) what order and discipline is to the army. Hence the imperative that workers have genuinely proletarian poetry at their disposal. The relevant criteria have primarily to do with a poem’s content, although not all verses that expresses commitment to class struggle count as proletarian poetry. Rather, Bogdanov is keen to identify poetry that moves beyond a focus on the experience and agency of individuals and, instead, foregrounds the collective. Just as it was the historical task of bourgeois poetry to fully develop lyric individuality, so it is the task of proletarian poetry to educate readers in “good organization” through “comradely initiative, collective direction, and comradely discipline on the part of everyone” (47). Bogdanov’s interest is that art be edifying. Recalling the explicit function of some eighteenth-century novels, proletarian poetry serves to teach virtue through a form of surrogate experience, or to use Bogdanov’s language, ‘organized living images’.The second essay, ‘On Artistic Heritage’, takes up one of the central themes of Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution, namely, the proper attitude the proletarian should take toward to the art products of decadent and defunct modes of production. By way of orienting his reader, Bogdanov iterates a distinction he is fond of making between the atheist critic of religion and the free thinker. While the atheist is focused on denying the claims of the dogmatist, the free thinker is neutral with respect to the claims of religious authority, and is therefore well-disposed to creatively appropriate the contributions of religious culture on the free thinker’s own terms. In fact, much of the chapter is given over to a discussion of religion. For a reader familiar with the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party’s philosophical debates about materialism, it is intuitive to analogize the atheist to the pre-critical materialist who is primarily concerned to refute the claims of metaphysics, and the free thinker to the post-critical, Marxist materialist who sublates metaphysics in a historical materialism. Bogdanov follows this with an interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in which the feudal and aristocratic values held by the play’s characters are no obstacle to drawing useful lessons from the work. From the proletarian perspective, Shakespeare need not be thrown out, indeed, the worldview of the working class demands that its content be interpreted historically, and, at least in the cases of great works, productively. As with the heritage of religion and metaphysics, the art of the past belongs to the worker as the expression of a stage in a development that led to the present and its historical imperatives.‘Critique of Proletarian Art’ ends the volume and is aimed at distinguishing proletarian poetry from other forms, in particular those proper to peasants and soldiers. The Russian proletariat was relatively young in this period, and its composition was drawn from the peasantry. This alien class perspective, then, was particularly prevalent in the poetry that found its way into the labor press. Isolated from their fellows by their direct personal control over the farming process, the peasant’s worldview is individualist, while the proletarian is collectivist. The worldview of the soldier, by contrast, is not formed by his relations of production, but by his military training, which leads them to make a fetish of violence and cruelty. Bogdanov insists on the nobility of proletarian culture, writing that “it must become the new aristocracy of culture – the last in the history of humanity, and the first worthy of the name” (110). It is no accident that the targets of Bogdanov’s critique correspond with groups in society with which class-conscious industrial workers made alliances to effect the revolution. While these alliances had been necessary given historical and demographic circumstances of 1917, they nevertheless represented threats to the full expression of proletarian culture. Bogdanov concludes his essays was a discussion of form and content. Form, he argues, must be fit to an artwork’s content, and since that content changes with its class character, so too must its form. All the same, Bogdanov dismisses formal innovation for its own sake, and rejects stylistic individuality out of hand. As he puts it: “Let there be some uniformity in what is right” (124)."