An unfortunate mistake by Benjamin
Oleh Shynkarenko
In the last Ukrainian translation of Walter Benjamin’s essays (“On the Critique of Violence”, Kyiv: Grani-T, 2012), his article “The Author as a Producer”, which he read at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris on April 27, 1934, finally appeared.
This speech is very revealing and important in understanding the regrettable error that left-wing intellectuals assumed earlier and continue to stubbornly cling to today. This mistake, in my opinion, arose only because the information about human nature available at the beginning of the century was still extremely contradictory.
Therefore, a large number of thinkers believed that the psychology of a person depends on his origin. This is a direct conclusion from a very famous and questionable statement from the preface to Karl Marx “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (Zur Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie). Yes, yes — this is the famous “social existence determines consciousness”.
That is, the environment, people and lifestyle shape a person’s consciousness. Of course, the environment is a necessary factor for the formation of consciousness, but it is not sufficient for it. And with the passing of time, and especially when a truly catastrophic information explosion occurred at the end of the 20th century, the share of the environment in consciousness decreased somewhat, although it is not yet possible to say for sure how much.
It can only be said that there is no direct relationship between a person’s origin and his state of consciousness, which includes his tastes, beliefs and desires.
It seems that any left-wing intellectual tends to exaggerate the role of the proletariat (or the working class) in social relations, and Benjamin did not escape this fate. He begins his article with a quote from Ramon Fernandez: “It is a matter of drawing the intellectuals to the side of the working class, making them realize the identity of their spiritual actions with their fate as producers.”
It is interesting that in Benjamin’s article is about writers, but he begins it with a quote about intellectuals, that is, people of intellectual work who take an active part in political life. This means that he considers writers to be politically engaged from the beginning. Here are just a few quotes: “The poet… must serve his activism… The bourgeois writer… works in the service of certain class interests… The writer of the progressive type… directs his activity to what is useful to the proletariat in the class struggle”.
In those distant times, the media was too slow, primitive and corrupted by censorship and propaganda, otherwise Benjamin would have known that it was in 1934 that the Russian poet Daniil Harms had recently served his exile in Kursk precisely because, according to the secret police, “he did not direct his creativity for the benefit of the proletariat”. That was the accusation.
And the very next year, Ukrainian writer Valerian Pidmohylnyi admitted that he belonged to “a group of nationalist writers with terrorist attitudes towards party leaders.”
Not knowing all this, Benjamin naively cites the example of the Soviet “action” writer Sergei Tretyakov to illustrate his statement that “correct political tendency and progressive literary technique are always and under any circumstances functionally dependent.”
Tretyakov believes that the mission of an action writer, unlike a narrative writer, is not to inform, but to fight. “When in 1928,” writes Benjamin, “in the era of total collectivization of agriculture, the slogan ‘Writers — to the collective farms!’” was proclaimed, Tretyakov went to the commune “Communist Mayak” where, in particular, he “called mass meetings” and “convinced single peasants to join collective farms”.
Of course, Benjamin could not have known that just three years after his lecture in Paris, Tretyakov would be shot by Soviet secret police as a Japanese spy (very often accusation of many people who knew foreign languages and were abroad). It is interesting that songs to Tretyakov’s words were performed and printed after his death with the note “folklore words” (so that not to mention his name). Perhaps, it is worth mentioning here as a demonstrative example of “progressive literary technique” the final song of the movie “Song of Heroes” (the director is a well-known leftist intellectual who laid his great talent on the altar of class struggle — Joris Ivens).
Ural, Ural — Magnit mountain,
Ural, Ural — desert winds,
But the party said: Get up here! Get up here!
And the Komsomol answered: Everything is in place!
We moved, we moved
Nomads, hunters,
Drivers, collective farmers,
Strike formation…
Ural, Ural is a turbulent river,
Ural, Ural — strong and deep,
But the party said: Give current! Give current!
And the Komsomol answered: As soon as possible!
It should be added that Tretyakov did not always write such primitive “progressive” texts. At the beginning of his literary career, he was a member of the group of ego-futurists “Mezzanine of Poetry”, famous theater directors Meyerhold and Eisenstein staged his plays, he taught Russian literature at Peking University, was one of the founders of the group “Lef” and was friends with Berthold Brecht.
So what happened? Why was the actual implementation of Benjamin’s theories, which occurred almost simultaneously with their emergence in his head, so pathetic at best and tragic at worst? Why did the mountain of socialist realism, the praise of which was so diligently sung and the lofty mission of which was so carefully justified by the philosopher, give birth to a mouse?
In my opinion, Benjamin’s home-born toy theories look so weak and far from real life only because they arose and developed in the hothouse favorable conditions of Western democracy.
The thinker simply could not even imagine the consequences of the implementation of his opinion that “a political trend, no matter how revolutionary it appears, exerts a counter-revolutionary influence as long as the writer is guided only by his direction of thought, but as a producer does not concern himself with his solidarity with the proletariat.”
He did not know what was happening in the USSR, otherwise under no circumstances would he have been able to write that “the Soviet state… sets before him (the poet — O.Sh.) such tasks that do not allow him to demonstrate the long-falsified wealth of creative personalities in new masterpieces”.
As you know, the Soviet authorities of Czechoslovakia forcibly sent the writer Bohumil Hrabal to a metallurgical plant, where he sorted scrap from morning to night, so that there would be no extra time to “demonstrate the long-falsified wealth of a creative personality.” It is also worth recalling the cultural revolution in China, where the ideas endorsed and promoted by Benjamin were implemented with particular zeal.
But the lack of information only partially influenced the course of the philosopher’s thoughts. Many Western leftists, even after visiting the USSR, continued to be captive to their own illusions. The essence of their error lay in the basis of the theory of Marxism, which affirmed the dependence of human consciousness on its existence. From this, Benjamin and other left-wing thinkers quite rightly concluded that the bourgeoisie has a bourgeois consciousness and, accordingly, needs a bourgeois literature that will satisfy its bourgeois tastes, while the workers have a proletarian consciousness, so their tastes need a special proletarian literature. And the difference between bourgeois and proletarian literature is drawn by Benjamin very clearly: the first entertains, the second calls for class struggle.
The political history of the 20th century has shown that the very concept of class struggle is false. Soviet ideologues of Marxism-Leninism, 30 years after Benjamin’s lecture in question, proclaimed that “the class struggle is a process of peaceful competition between socialist and capitalist systems. During this competition, the question of which system will win is decided.”
Today, after the peaceful self-destruction of Soviet satellites countries union (so-called “Soviet Camp”), we can observe the so-called “class struggle” only on the example of the coexistence of South and North Korea. It is in North Korea that there has recently been a clear explanation of why the class theory of art that Benjamin tried to defend and justify in his lecture is, in fact, completely unfounded.
This is a quintet of North Korean accordionists performing the sweet and counter-revolutionary bourgeois tune “Take on Me” by the group “A-Ha”.
Many suspected it earlier, but today almost no one has any doubt that the workers, the proletarians…whatever they are called, have a completely bourgeois consciousness and tastes. They do not want to plunge into the maelstrom of class struggle or any other. They just wanna, justa wanna, justa wanna have fun.
