Leon Trotsky, from Literature and Revolution, 1924 trans. Strunsky reprinted in Art in Theory: 1900-2000. ed. Harrison and Wood pp. 443-447
“To reject art as a means of picturing and imaging knowledge because of one’s opposition to the contemplative and impressionistic bourgeois art of the last few decades , is to strike from the hands of the class which is building a new society its most important weapon. Art, it is said, is not a mirror, but a hammer: it does not reflect, it shapes. But at present even the handling of a hammer is taught with the help of a mirror, a sensitive film which records all movements. Photography and motion-picture photography, owing to their passive accuracy of depiction, are becoming important educational instruments in the feild of labour. If one cannot get along with mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one’s life, without seeing oneself in the ‘mirror’ of literature? Of course no one speaks about an exact mirror. No one even thinks of asking the new literature to have a mirror-like impassivity. The deeper literature is, and the more it is imbued with the desire to shape life, the more significantly and dynamically it will be able to ‘picture’ life.” p. 443
“When one breaks a hand or a leg, the bones, the tendons, the muscles, the arteries, the nerves and the skin do not break and tear in one line, nor afterwards do they grow together and heal at the same time. So, in a revolutionary break in the life of society, there is no simultaneity and no symmetry of processes either in the ideology of society, or in its economic structure. The ideological premises which are needed for the revolution are formed before the revolution, and the most important ideological deductions from the revolution only appear much later” p. 444
“It is not true that we regard only that art as new and revolutionary which speaks of the worker, and it is nonsense to say that we demand that the poets should describe inevitably a factory chimney, or the uprising against capital! Of course the new art cannot but place the struggle of the proletariat in the centre of its attention. But the plough of the new art is not limited to numbered strips. On the contrary, it must plough the entire feild in all directions. Personal lyrics of the very smallest scope have an absolute right to exist within the new art” p. 445
“The proletariat has to have in art the expression of the new spiritual point of view which is just beginning to be formulated within him, and to which art must help him give form. This is not a state order, but a historical demand. Its strength lies in the objectivity of historical necessity. you cannot pass this by, nor escape its force” p. 445
I wanted to include Trotsky’s theories on art for its relative sympathy towards traditional art comparted with other Marxists, particularly in his treatment of art’s interpersonal function, representing ourselves in the ‘mirror’ that shapes how we use the ‘hammer’ of more explicit political action and produces new images of society that both reflect and change it.
So, for Trotsky effective art must create a new ‘spirit’ of proletarian life capable of initiating the revolution against capital. The quotes above show that Trotsky treats this central goal with some subtlety- his bone/tendon analogy suggests that revolutionary art may not have to perfectly or totally acomplish its goals to be worthwhile or effective – new art offers a starting point for revolutionary action that comes in fits and bursts, and contributes towards an eventual rev. Art contributes to the ideological remaking of society that eventually culminates in revolution. The ‘plough the feilds in all directions’ quote speaks also to this more general revolution in thought that begins in art.
Trotsky’s version of ‘new art’ essentially is a form of sympathetic realism, a “preoccupation with our life of three dimensions” p. 446, but his description of it here is not very compelling.