Proletarian Art of Storytelling (1920)

To begin with: In this brief overview, the aim is to show that Proletkult has nothing to do with proletarian art, that Proletkult can at best be one of many tools for developing proletarian art, and that art, contrary to the generally market-driven view, is and must exclusively be a product of class, class ideology, and class struggle. As long as the opposition between unproductive and productive classes must be reduced to the formula of exploiters versus the exploited, the notion of universally applicable laws of the living organism remains a crude bourgeois fraud.

The exploited, forcibly and systematically assimilated to the exploiter under the guise of legal living conditions in a state serving particular interests, live and perceive under this external equality of conditions in a fundamentally different way than the exploiter. They experience and interpret life as a class, collectively, whereas the bourgeois individual is ashamed of class affiliation and pretends to feel as an isolated individual, supposedly independent of the very laws they themselves help enforce. Bourgeois perspectives on art indulge in the luxury and dual deceit of claiming to be both individual and universally human. It is no longer creative in the communal sense of shaping joy, sorrow, and the vibrant spectrum of life as a component of existence, of the “living in life.” Instead, bourgeois art is creative only for the fragment of life that requires the existence of others’ labor and wealth to sustain itself. It thrives on restraining, capturing, "educating," and representing these realities.

In Germany, the representation of the proletariat is mistaken for proletarian art, a clear indication that German Proletkult remains a purely bourgeois affair.

Germany has no proletarian art. At most, it exists in its very first nascent stages. Consequently, the preliminary condition and essential task of Proletkult—to prepare the ground for its emergence—collapses. What Germany does have is an array of bourgeois writers and feuilletonists, who suddenly discover proletarian poets and art from the past and present, hurriedly muddling concepts in favor of their own egos. The feuilletons of the Rote Fahne and Freiheit, along with the literary critiques of the Junge Garde, are evidence enough of this.

It must be said outright: The parties of the proletariat must reach a unified understanding of what the proletariat is as a class, its inherent nature, and the ideological tasks it must fulfill to renew and humanize society. Only then will the seemingly minor question of proletarian art—often dismissed as insignificant—no longer be hijacked by literati with no connection to the proletariat. Currently, literary enthusiasts are zealously searching for proletarian novels and storytellers. What has been written thus far is an arbitrary evaluation from the perspective of bourgeois individualism. The communal idea of an oppressed class, one that not only thirsts for the struggle against its oppressors but also creatively builds the new—defining collective right and wrong, good and evil, joy and sorrow—is still in its infancy in world literature. It is entirely absent in German literature. Strangely enough, it is more prevalent in Western Europe, particularly in Anglo-American literature, than in the East—a fact that becomes understandable when one considers that proletarian art is tied to the degree of self-consciousness achieved by the proletariat.

This further demonstrates that the focus of revolutionary tactics must increasingly shift to the West, adapting to the level of self-consciousness already realized by Western European proletarians. This shift becomes crucial when securing and expanding proletarian thought becomes a precondition for maintaining political power.

Jack London can be regarded today as a pioneering proletarian storyteller on a grand scale. His novel The People of the Abyss, not yet translated into German, serves as an exemplary model. It conveys the rhythm of shared, collective experiences—common feelings of joy and sorrow, collective hopes and disappointments. Individual fate disappears as the central focus; it becomes a nuance in the colorful explanation of the whole (emphasis by me -K.V.). It integrates where, in works by Victor Hugo (Les Misérables), Emile Zola (Germinal, among others), Lemonnier, the Goncourt brothers, Kjelland, Nex, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, the communal served merely as a backdrop against which the individual developed or broke. Many German imitators of these authors can be cited. They sympathized with the proletariat but were not carriers of proletarian art. Jack London’s works consistently contain the rhythm of collective events. Their importance for the future is incalculable, even if some of them lack “artistic quality” in the old sense.

It remains to be seen whether authors of anti-war novels will evolve into proletarian poets. For Leonhard Frank (Man Is Good), this seems unlikely; his approach is thoroughly bourgeois. Perhaps Henri Barbusse (Under Fire, among others) has more potential, although the community of those subject to the laws of war is not yet the community of the proletariat. Barbusse, however, understands the rhythm at least. More likely candidates are H.G. Wells and Patrick MacGill. It is telling of German incomprehension that Wells, despite many translations, remains relatively unknown in German literature, with the core of his works largely unrecognized. Wells is not just a fantasist or disciple of Jules Verne; his fantasies are merely the shell through which Wells offers proletarian art. The rhythm of community in conflict with dominant ideology and the broader social environment is the direct subject of his portrayal. His novels In the Days of the Comet and The Time Machine are the most significant precursors of the proletarian novel. The depiction of the proletariat as a community of misshapen laborers dwelling underground and preying on the bourgeois classes above—who live in idyllic, unbroken prosperity—is the sharpest and most accurate portrayal of class antagonisms in literature, precisely because it is unsentimental.

Upton Sinclair (Jimmie Higgins) embodies proletarian hope, although the danger of pure social critique as an individual experience is always present, as seen in his latest press novel. Similarly, Anatole France’s The Gods Are Athirst and Johan Falkberget’s In the Outermost Darkness align with this trend.

Modern Russia has yet to produce proletarian art. Instead, it focuses on massive propaganda for art for the proletariat, overlooking the fact that viable beginnings had already emerged from the proletariat decades earlier. Russian literature, as Peter Kropotkin convincingly demonstrated, includes so-called “folk writers,” or Verists (the name derives from “truth”), who write only the truth—the conditions as they are, the people as they live and think. From the mid-19th century, Russia has had writers who are genuinely proletarian poets. Their work, still largely unknown in the rest of Europe, embodies proletarian art. The most important of these are Reshetnikov and Uspensky. The former depicts the lives of Volga boatmen and railway workers in Ural villages. His descriptions, however brutal or "artless" in individual instances, convey the collective rhythm of the oppressed, the poor, the disenfranchised, and the defiant within the framework of a bourgeois state order.