The Thinking Reed

In the present work, therefore, we are concerned not to consider politics ‘and’ culture, but to study politics as part of culture or, contrariwise, culture and art as political factors. Finally, we have the question of the evolution of the political culture of our society as a whole. The cultural-political process is such that we cannot draw a precise line of demarcation between politics and philosophy, politics and religion, art and politicized philosophy, and so on. In the frontier zone at which we are looking they do not only interact: they interpenetrate, becoming transformed into a single entity; furthermore, one of them can appear in the form of another.

The significance of the cultural-political process for the life of society, for its future, is much greater than could be supposed on the basis of vulgar Marxist or positivist schemas. Marx’s general formula to the effect that social consciousness, belonging to the sphere of the ‘superstructure’, reflects and interprets the ‘base’ — that is, the relations which take shape in the process of production — is absolutely correct as a fundamental law; but it explains particular cases just as little as the universal law of gravity explains the trajectory of the flight of a shell travelling at such and such a speed, with such and such a wind blowing, and fired from such and such a gun, and so on. In every case many laws and factors come into play. Merely referring to a general historical law means no more than refusing to explain. This is all the more so because in society it is living people who are acting, and they cannot be reduced to any schemas. Thus consciousness, as one of Marx’s happiest formulations has it, does not merely reflect the world, it also creates it. This means, incidentally, that the ‘superstructure’ does not simply influence the ‘base’: it penetrates and sometimes becomes it. For man, with his illusions, his political views and even his aesthetic preferences, is himself a very important productive force. Marx and Engels understood this very well. Lenin appreciated it too, and for Gramsci it possessed central significance. H.H. Holz, in his work on present-day socialism, wrote:

The basis is in Marxist theory defined through production. The latter consists, however, not only of material things, embodied in productive forces, but also of the people who work with the aid of these productive forces, and these productive forces are organized in accordance with those people’s ideas. These ideas are defined, naturally, by the development of the productive forces, but they are also formed by traditions of theory and practice, prevailing usages, the philosophical and religious doctrines assimilated by the people concerned, the works of art that they like — in short, people’s self-awareness as objectified in culture.7

The truth of this can be judged, for example, by the many failures suffered by European (especially Soviet) specialists in the countries of the Third World when they have tried to make local workers use up-to-date equipment. This attempt failed (or did not fully succeed) because the necessary level of culture was absent or, more precisely, because the workers’ type of culture was different from what the engineers required.

As can be seen from its subtitle, the present work makes no claim to be an all-embracing and exhaustive examination of the problem of cultural-political development in the USSR. That would be quite impracticable given the huge amount of material, the many aspects of the problem and the extremely few serious (especially Marxist) studies that have been devoted to it. The task of this work is to pose and formulate the questions in a clear-cut way rather than to provide a conclusive answer to them.