Contents. Introduction, by George Novack 7. Part 1: Problems of everyday life. Part 2: Education and culture

Transcription

1 Contents Introduction, by George Novack 7 Part 1: Problems of everyday life Not by politics alone 17 Habit and custom 29 Vodka, the church, and the cinema 36 From the old family to the new 42 The family and ceremony 52 Civility and politeness as a necessary lubricant in daily relations 57 The struggle for cultured speech 62 Against bureaucracy, progressive and unprogressive 68 How to begin 79 Attention to trifles! 88 Thou and you in the Red Army 93 Introduction to the Tatar-language edition 95 Thermidor in the family 97 Part 2: Education and culture Alas, we are not accurate enough! 113 Youth and the phase of petty jobs 118 The Red Army, seedbed of enlightenment 128 Don t spread yourself too thin 130 Tasks of communist education 132 The newspaper and its readers 149 Big and small 160 On bibliography 167 A few words on how to raise a human being 169

2 Leninism and library work 179 The cultural role of the worker correspondent 202 On stenography 229 Next tasks for worker correspondents 232 For freedom in education 242 Part 3: Science and technology Science in the task of socialist construction 247 Dialectical materialism and science 256 Culture and socialism 281 Radio, science, technology, and society 309 Part 4: The materialist outlook Youth fills the breach 329 Work: the basis of life 331 Attention to theory! 333 The curve of capitalist development 337 Young people, study politics! 347 Leninism and workers clubs 356 The party in the fields of art and philosophy 395 The ABC of dialectical materialism 398 Notes 411 Index 427

3 Introduction by george novack Nothing human is alien to me. This maxim, minted by the Roman playwright Terence, was a favorite of the Frenchman Montaigne and the German Karl Marx. It is likewise highly appropriate to the exceptional range and diversity of the interests of the Russian revolutionist, Leon Trotsky. He wrote in 1935 that politics and literature constitute in essence the contents of my personal life. This selfcharacterization hardly does justice to the many other areas of human experience that his probing mind, equipped with the method of Marxism, investigated. The dramatic twists and turns of his career, its sudden ascent from obscurity to the summits of power followed by its equally precipitous drop into exile, penury, and persecution, have few parallels in the twentieth century. Consider only his biography from the Russian Revolution in 1917 through the mid-1920s, the period during which most of the pieces in this collection were written. As the president of the Petrograd Soviet and the director of its Military Revolutionary Committee, Trotsky led the October uprising that brought the Bolsheviks to power and inaugurated the postcapitalist epoch in world his- George Novack, a noted Marxist scholar, is the author of many books, including Origins of Materialism, Understanding History, and Humanism and Socialism. 7

4 8 / problems of everyday life tory. He was the first commissar of foreign affairs; then he undertook the organization and command of the Red Army. He was commissar of war from 1918 to But the tremendous burden of guiding the destiny of the workers state with Lenin seems only to have heightened the attention Trotsky gave to every detail of its development, to matters that others might have thought were so far afield from the responsibilities of state as to warrant little attention from a leader of Trotsky s stature. But Trotsky s concern for the revolution touched every aspect of Russian life. The connection between culture and the socialist revolution is the axis of these writings. Trotsky construed culture in a very broad sense. He contrasted culture, as the totality of the works of humankind, with whatever belonged to nature in the raw. Culture encompassed all facets of social life in its historical development, from the processes of producing wealth to customs, morals, law, religion, literature, art, science, and philosophy. The subsoil of culture was the economy, the ways in which people produced and exchanged the necessities and comforts of existence. The multifarious aspects and achievements of cultural activity grew out of this material foundation. There is much misunderstanding about the Marxist position on the relations between the mode of production and the other elements in the social structure. The opinion that economics presumably determines directly and immediately the creativeness of a composer or even the verdict of a judge, represents a hoary caricature of Marxism which the bourgeois professordom of all countries has circulated time out of end to mask their intellectual impotence, Trotsky declared (In Defense of Marxism, Pathfinder Press, pp ). The economic foundation of a given social formation is organically related to and continuously interacting with its political-cultural superstructure and determines the character and course of its development in the last analysis. According to historical materialism, economics is the principal factor shaping the conditions of life, the habits and consciousness of a people.

5 introduction / 9 At the same time, inherited traditions and institutions, bound up with the uneven development of the historic process, can generate deep disparities among the constituent parts of a specific society or nation. These contradictions are especially striking and acute in a revolutionary period, when the old regime is being overthrown and broken up and relations corresponding to the demands of the new order are being formed slowly and under difficult circumstances. That was the situation confronting the Bolsheviks in the years immediately following the consolidation of the young Soviet republic after the intervention ended in All the problems of culture were raised in theory and in practical life by the first proletarian victory in a backward country. The Communist leaders not only had to cope with immense political, military, diplomatic, and economic problems, but were also called upon to provide answers to questions of education, literacy, scientific development, architecture, family relations, and a host of other pressing matters. Throughout this period Trotsky took on a variety of jobs. He was cofounder with Lenin of the Third International and wrote the most important manifestos and resolutions of its first four congresses. At the end of the civil war, he reorganized the shattered railroad system. He became the chief intellectual inspirer and literary critic of postrevolutionary Russia. Despite his many government assignments, he managed to produce a remarkable literary output. In the summers of 1922 and 1923 he completed a book, Literature and Revolution, which presented views on cultural policy he held in common with Lenin. After participating in discussions with Communist propagandists meeting in Moscow, he wrote a series of articles for Pravda on various aspects of manners and morals. These were published under the title of Problems of Everyday Life and make up the first nine chapters of this collection. After being relieved of his duties as commissar of war as a result of the intensifying factional conflict, he headed the Board

6 10 / problems of everyday life for Electrotechnical Development and the Committee for Industry and Technology, where he oversaw the progress of Soviet scientific work. I assiduously visited many laboratories, watched experiments with great interest, listened to explanations given by the foremost scientists, in my spare time studied text-books on chemistry and hydro-dynamics, and felt that I was half-administrator and half-student, he wrote in My Life (Pathfinder Press, p. 518). His reflections on these questions found expression in a set of addresses he delivered in 1925 and 1926 on the relations between science and society and on the Marxist approach to science. Many of the articles and speeches belonging to this fruitful period of his intellectual activity are included in this collection. They were gathered, together with some other articles, in the twenty-first volume of Trotsky s Sochinenia (Collected Works), under the title Culture in the Transitional Epoch (the period of the transition from capitalism to socialism). This book, published in the Soviet Union in 1927, was among the last of Trotsky s writings to be issued in the USSR under the official imprimatur. Trotsky, together with Lenin and other Communist theoreticians, suggested the proper course to be pursued in several domains of cultural policy without, however, taking the attitude of imperious command that the Stalinist authorities subsequently took. The early Communist leaders wanted to leave ample room for experimentation, innovation, and competition in the wholly new undertaking of fashioning a culture of, for, and by the working masses under revolutionary auspices. History gives nothing free of cost. Having made a reduction on one point in politics it makes us pay the more on another in culture, Trotsky observed in 1923 in Problems of Everyday Life. However, he was then unable to foresee what became increasingly evident not long afterwards: how cruelly heavy a price Russia s backwardness was to exact, not only in culture but in politics as well. Because of the setbacks to the international revolution, the

7 introduction / 11 prolonged isolation of the beleaguered workers state in a hostile imperialist environment, and its material and cultural poverty, the Soviet Union took a different path from that envisaged by its chief architects. The program, the high ideals and aspirations that had animated and guided the early years of the revolution were perverted, trampled upon, and discarded by the bureaucratic reaction that took over the Communist Party, usurped power in the country, and blighted all aspects of Soviet life. The bulk of the articles and speeches in this book were composed in the mid-twenties, during the factional struggle inside the Russian Communist Party that Lenin initiated just before his death. Trotsky carried on this struggle when he formed the Left Opposition, which tried to maintain the revolutionary character of the party against the growth of a conservative privileged bureaucracy led by Stalin. During most of this four-year struggle, Trotsky was prohibited from voicing his political criticisms publicly. But in his discussions of cultural and scientific questions, he dealt with the dangers of bureaucratism and of narrow-mindedness, conservatism, and pettiness, warning his listeners to defend and extend the gains of their revolution. Virtually every article in this book contains a veiled discussion of the struggle against bureaucracy. The Stalin leadership was infuriated by these articles but was unable to prevent their publication until 1927, when it felt strong enough to expel Trotsky and other Oppositionists from the party. Cultural advancement was a prime casualty of this degenerative process of the 1920s and 1930s. Thanks to the conquests of the revolution, the Soviet Union was enabled to make considerable headway in bringing the elementary prerequisites of modern culture to the broad masses that had been denied them under czarism. The spread of literacy, the growth of educational facilities and opportunities, the promotion of science and technology, the formation of an extensive intelligentsia, the improvement of the skills of the working class, the increase in opportunities for women, the establishment of state social security and medical care, raised the

8 12 / problems of everyday life Soviet Union closer to the technical and cultural levels of the advanced capitalist countries. But the totalitarian practices of the new ruling caste had the most pernicious effects upon the rights and freedoms of the Soviet people. This retrogression was manifested, for example, in the sphere of the family, where instead of providing social equivalents for family housekeeping functions in order to lessen the servitude of women, Stalin revived the cult of the family, withdrew the right of abortion, and gave incentives to wives to become brood sows. Trotsky took note of the degeneration with respect to the family in The Revolution Betrayed, written in The selection is included in this anthology. The dictatorship of the bureaucracy built schools, universities, and technical institutes, issued papers and magazines by the millions, set up radio and TV networks, made films and pressed down upon all this a deadly uniformity that nonconformist minds found more and more intolerable. Permitting and encouraging the development of economic individualism (piecework, private land allotments, premiums, decorations) [the bureaucracy] at the same time ruthlessly suppresses the progressive side of individualism in the realm of spiritual culture (critical views, the development of one s own opinion, the cultivation of personal dignity), wrote Trotsky in 1936 (The Revolution Betrayed, Pathfinder Press, p. 176). But the triumph of Stalinism does not invalidate the views expounded by Trotsky in this collection. Quite the contrary. What he had to say on cultural matters stands out all the more forcefully and favorably by contrast with the anti-marxist policies of Stalin and his imitators. His ideas retain their full value in clarifying the complex problems of culture encountered in the transition from capitalism to socialism. Trotsky never claimed originality for his theoretical and political positions. From his conversion to the doctrines of Marxism as a youth in 1898 to his assassination in 1940, he was a Marxist in the classical tradition extending from Marx and Engels to Lenin. This did not prevent indeed it made it pos-

9 introduction / 13 sible his enrichment of the Marxist treasury of thought through the formulation of the theory of the permanent revolution and the law of uneven and combined development. In this collection, Trotsky focuses the searchlight of dialectical materialism upon the big and the little tasks involved in building a new society on the debris of the old. What an abundance of ideas is spread before the reader in these brilliant observations! Trotsky takes up philosophy, science, technology, bibliography, stenography, library work, religion, social and individual psychology, literature, the role of the cinema, the position and prospects of women, the purification of speech as an instrument of clear thought, mass initiative, and much more. How often do the adversaries of Marxism charge that its dogmatic outlook blinkers the sight, blunts sympathies and sensitivities, constricts the interests of its adherents. These pages should help dispose of such allegations. They show how a master of Marxist method deals with the problems of culture and science in a realistic and flexible manner, always keeping in view their connection with the struggle for socialism against capitalist domination and bureaucratic corruption. november 7, 1972