The Ideas of Victor Serge

PROLETARIAN CULTURE
IAIN BIRCHALL

To discuss proletarian culture in the 1990s may seem very old fashioned.
After the collapse of the Soviet bloc and German unification, the epoch
born of the Russian Revolution seems to be finally ended. Many so-called
'theoreticians' deny the very existence, not merely of proletarian culture,
but of the proletariat itself.

Indeed, the concept of proletarian culture has never had many advocates. If
it was Stalin who liquidated the proletarian culture organisations, it was
Trotsky who developed the most lucid and intelligent critique of the theory.

Yet the questions posed by the debate on proletarian culture are still very
much alive. For example, in 1990 radical students in the USA wanted to
remove 'DWEMS' (Dead White European Males) from university
syllabuses.'

In more general terms, the idea of proletarian culture has always been
linked to the belief that the emancipation for the working classes must be
the work of the working classes themselves. For those of use who are
trying to rediscover in the traditions of the Bolshevik Revolution the basis
for recreating a socialist tradition free from the distortions of Stalinism and
Social Democracy, the work of Victor Serge is of particular importance,
and it is very rewarding to study what he wrote about proletarian culture.

Victor Serge holds a uniquely privileged position in the debate about

proletarian culture, especially proletarian literature. A witness of the
Russian Revolution from 1919 onwards, he found time to study not only the
dramatic events in the political and social fields, but also the remarkable
cultural blossoming of the period immediately after the Revolution.

Proletarian culture was not a phenomenon confined to revolutionary

Russia. Henry Poulaille, who can be considered one of the leading
theoreticians of proletarian literature in France, insisted on the

1 See J Wood, 'Farewell! a long farewell, to all my greatness!', Guardian, 13 December 1990.

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Proletarian Culture

international nature of this current in his book Nouvel age littéraire. Here
Poulaille presents studies of authors who, in his view, have contributed to
the development of a proletarian culture:

This literature does not come from Russia. There is certainly

a temptation to believe that it is of Soviet origin. But this is
not the case....Anyone who doubts that its existence is prior
to the Russian Pleiad emerging from the Revolution, the likes
of Gladkov, Demidov, Victor Serge, Yesenin, Babel,
Ehrenburg etc. need only refer to the dates of publication of
the work of Lucien Jean, Nazzi, Streuvels, Neel Doff, to
mention only the period from 1900 to 1910.2

In Littérature et revolution (1932) Serge endorses the definition of a 'new

age' given by Poulaille.3

Serge, with his knowledge of the French and Russian languages and
literatures, was a more or less unique mediator between the debates which
took place in the two countries about proletarian culture.

For the young Serge who went to Paris in 1909, literature was as important
as politics. It was his reading of contemporary authors as much as his
acquaintance with political militants of the time which formed the Serge
we know. For left-wing activists at this time, literature had an enormous
influence: Ibsen and Zola, Péguy and Sorel helped to shape the values of a
whole generation of anarchists and socialists. Young writers tried to
develop further the tendencies they found among their elders. Among the
writers who excited Serge at this time, he names at least two who can be
considered in some sense as precursors of proletarian literature. Both are
discussed in Henry Poulaille's book Nouvel age littéraire.

In Memoirs of a Revolutionary Serge tells us that:

Paris called to us, the Paris of Salvat, of the Commune, of the

CGT, of little journals printed with burning zeal, the Paris of
our favourite authors, Anatole France and Jehan Rictus.

2
Henry Poulaille, Nouvel âge littéraire, Paris, Librairie Valois, 1930, pp 186-87.
3
V Serge, Littérature et révolution, Paris, Maspero, 1976, p 83.

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 The Ideas of Victor Serge

Rictus was of particular importance to him:

Jehan Rictus lamented the suffering of the penniless

intellectual dragging out his nights on the benches of foreign
boulevards, and no rhymes were richer than his.4

Rictus was much loved in anarchist circles; Serge's friend, Rene Valet,
used to recite Rictus' poems.5

Rictus may not have been a proletarian in the strict sense of the term, but
he had certainly experienced poverty; having been a packer, a stevedore, a
sandwich-board man and even a tramp, he expressed in his poetry the
suffering he had undergone, and he transformed the popular speech of the
Paris poor into a poetic language to speak of their sufferings.

Rictus made fun of Zola (an author Serge and Poulaille always admired)
because he described poverty from the outside, while living the life of a
well-off bourgeois.

"Ben pis Mirbeau et pis Zola

Y z 'out "plaint les Pauves " dans des livres,
Aussi, c'que ca les aide a Vaute Saint Nicolas!"

(And then Mirbeau and then Zola pitied the poor in books, which helped
them to live from one Christmas to the next!)6

Like many of his contemporaries, he wanted to go beyond naturalism to

create a literature based on the actual experience of the proletariat.

There was virtually no political content in Rictus' work. In his early years
he had supported the anarchists, but for him the poor were primarily
victim, not an active element in the transformation of society. He

4
V, Serge Memoirs of a Revolutionary, (edited and translated by P Sedgwick) London, OUP,
1967, p 16.
5 R Parry, The Bonnot Gang, London, Rebel Press, 1987, p 43.
6
J Rictus, Les Soliloques du pauvre, Paris, Eugene Rey, 1934, p 14.

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Proletarian Culture

distrusted socialist politicians, and the poem Conseils (Advice) he urged

the worker to say:

Moins d'cours du soir, moins d'conferences

gardez pour vous votre instruction;
j'veux pas aller dans les U.P.,
Mieux vaut me lover les arpoins
que d'aller ecouter des pions...

(Less evening classes, less lectures; you can keep your education. I don't
want to go to the People's University; it's better to go and wash my feet
than listen to low-grade school-teachers.)7

It was not so much Rictus' specific opinions, but rather the desire of
founding a literature on the experience of the oppressed which must have
impressed Serge.

For Henry Poulaille Louis Nazzi8 is one of those who 'showed the way' for
the new-born proletarian literature.9 Nazzi, who died at the age of twenty-
eight, left only a small body of writing. He contributed to several journals -
including J-R Bloch's L'Effort libre, in which Marcel Martinet was later to
elaborate the idea of a proletarian art. He wrote several short stories, a
study of Daumier and some drama criticism. His own journal Sincerite,
launched in 1909, had only two issues.

Our age is so confused, murky and sinister that it makes you

weep. You can see nothing but minor authors skilled at self-
promotion, but never a young one. In all the artistic cliques
from the far right to the far left there is the same somnolence,
the same cowardliness, the same wretchedness of heart and
mind. The kingdom of France seems to have adopted the
slogan 'Mediocrity at any price!'10

7
J Rictus, ...le Coeurpopulaire, Paris, Eugéne Rey, 1920, p 211
8 A writer whom Serge and his friends frequently discussed at this time; Memoirs of a
Revolutionary, p 20.
9
Nouvel âge littéraire, p 217.
10
'A Mon Lecteur', Sincérité, No 2, November 1909, p 1.

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 The Ideas of Victor Serge

Likewise, Serge must have welcomed his enthusiasm for Daumier, the
painter of the victims of the suppression of riots and revolutions:

He aims to be, quite simply, the silent and truthful witness of

horror and crime. There is no need to invent, nor to mock,
nor to accuse!11

Perhaps Serge remembered these words when he was himself describing

revolution and defeat.

Nazzi did not write much, but the most striking part of his work was the
aphorisms in which he tried to define the functions of literature. For
example:

With all respect to our dear democratic authors, so Parisian,

so coddled, so well-paunched: there is a harsher, more tragic
and more wonderful problem than the problem of love: that
of daily bread.12

Perhaps Serge remembered those words twenty-three years later, when he

wrote:

A statistic that would make your head spin, without giving

you a very elevated idea of the spirit of the age, would be the
number of French novels published in the last twenty years
dealing with love in fashionable society....This could be
compared to quite different figures. France today has
fourteen million proletarians, thirty million with their
families. Fourteen million men earning their bread,
according to the Biblical law....with the sweat of their
brows.13

But certainly the most important contribution to the definition of the idea of
a proletarian culture was Marcel Martinet's article in L'Effort libre, L'Art

11 L Nazzi, 'Honore Daumier', Portraits d'hier, Year 3 No 54 (1911), p 174

12
Sincérité, No.2, p 61.
13
Littéraire et révolution, p 11.

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Proletarian Culture

proletarien' (proletarian art).14 Martinet was replying to the former

anarchist Charles Albert, who had already invented the term 'proletarian
art' 15 , and his article attempted a synthesis of the various experiences of
emergent proletarian literature. The article appeared in 1913, when Serge
was already in prison, and it is not very likely that he read it.

Martinet's article deserves consideration, because it presents the most

developed argument in defence of the idea of a proletarian literature, and it
is the product of a collective intellectual process in which Serge and his
friends had participated.

Martinet rejects the term 'socialist art' out of a syndicalist scorn for
Socialist Party politicians and concludes that the only remaining valid term
is 'proletarian art'. Like Rictus, Martinet considers that it is necessary to
go beyond Zola to create a literature which does not stop at studying the
proletariat from outside, but which looks at the world from the proletariat's
own viewpoint:

(Zola) studies, as he thought, impersonally, as a writer in face

of these men just as he would study insects if he were a
zoologist. But since we all necessarily belong to one world or
another, not being of their world he belongs to a different
one; just as an explorer would study Laplanders as a
Frenchman from France, so Zola, a gifted and goodhearted
bourgeois, studied the proletariat as a bourgeois.16

Above all, for Martinet the starting point is Marx's famous phrase: 'The
emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working
classes themselves'.17 For if the proletariat is incapable of creating its own
culture, then it seems dubious that it will be able to achieve its own
emancipation.

In 1919 Victor Serge arrived in Russia just after the proletarian revolution.
Even though he accepted a crushing burden of political tasks in the service

14
M Martinet, 'L' Art proletarien', L'Effort libre, June 1913, pp 528-54.
15 C Albert, 'Un art du peuple', L'Effort libre, January 1913, p 106.
!6
'L' Art proletarien', p 545.
I7
'L' Art proletarien', p 541.

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 The Ideas of Victor Serge

of the revolution, he still managed to stay in touch with the various cultural
developments in Russia, especially in the field of literature.

Of course Serge understood the priorities of revolutionary struggle;

doubtless he agreed with the character in Conquered City who says:

We'll break all the porcelain in the world in order to

transform life. You love things too much and you don't love
men enough.18

Yet Serge never underestimates the importance of cultural activities, even

at the most difficult moments of the revolution. For if the emancipation of
the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves,
then the consciousness of workers is precisely of the highest importance.
For example, Serge reminds us that in Petrograd in May 1919:

In time of famine everyone's main concern was to get bread

or potatoes for the next day. Once this was done, people went
to the theatre, the cinema or the clubs Our fifteen theatres
and thirty cinemas....and the five or six concerts daily...were
not enough to satisfy a crowd anxious for relaxation and new
sensations.19

Serge explains these phenomena by a dialectical analysis in which he

shows that the end is not separate from the means, rather the final aim is
contained within the means of struggle:

One day, when people speak of these things with a concern

for justice and truth, when, in the City which one day we
shall succeed in building, all the wounds of humanity have
been healed, they will praise the revolution for never, even in
its most tragic days, having lost its concern for art, for never
having neglected rhythms, fine gestures, voices that move us
by their beauty, dreamlike scenery, poetry, the hymns of the
organ and the sobbing of the violin. Never. And I cannot

18
V Serge, Les Révolutionnaires, Paris, Seuil, 1967, p 351.
19 V Serge, Pendant la guerre civile, Paris, Les Cahiers du Travail, premiére seiie, sixiéme cahier,
15 May 1921, p 8.

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Proletarian Culture

help seeing in this obstinate quest for beauty, at every

moment of the civil war, stoicism, power and confidence. It
is doubtless because the red city is suffering and fighting so
that one day leisure and art shall be the lot of all....20

Between 1922 and 1926 Serge wrote a series of articles for the French
journal Clarte, in which he told of the developments of Russian literature
in the period since the Revolution.

Clarte was a journal which took a particular interest in questions of

revolutionary culture. These articles are more or less unique; for in the
years after the Revolution, communication between East and West was very
difficult.

We may imagine that Serge had not forgotten his reading and discussions
in pre-war Paris. Even if his political position had evolved a long way
from his youthful anarchism, he undoubtedly retained memories of the days
of Rictus and Nazzi which helped him to find his bearings in a country
transformed by revolution. Peter Sedgwick, (a researcher to whom all
British admirers of Serge have an enormous debt) said of George Orwell's
writings on the Spanish Civil War that he had seen what his previous
experience had prepared him to see: 'others were there, after all, and did
not notice it.' 21 One might say the same thing of Serge and his comments
on Russian literature.

The very idea of proletarian culture has been so distorted that before
looking at Serge's articles it is necessary to say a few words about the
history of the movement. The first conference of Proletarian Culture
Organisations took place in Petrograd form 16 to 19 October 1917, that is,
before the October Revolution. The golden age of proletarian culture was
in fact the period of the civil war; by 1920 the proletarian culture
organisations had some four hundred thousand members, and published
fifteen journals. Already by 1921 the conflicts between the proletarian
culture organisations and the Party leadership were becoming visible, and
from this date proletarian culture was in retreat, although it survived until
the early thirties.

20 Pendant la guerre civile, p 16

21
P Sedgwick, 'George Orwell, International Socialist?' International Socialism, 37, 1969, p34.

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 The Ideas of Victor Serge

The proletarian culture movement was not a purely literary movement; it

advocated a conception of cultural revolution which was to embrace all
aspects of the revolutionary process. Moreover, it was not a homogeneous
movement. It was in no way the creation of a few intellectuals who wanted
to spin a new culture out of their own heads; on the contrary, it was a mass
movement which expressed an authentic desire on the part of many
workers to participate in a fundamental transformation of the human
condition. Proletarian culture cannot be simply reduced to the ideas of
Bogdanov.

For Serge, the proletcult was only one aspect of a cultural process which
reflected the enormous revolutionary upsurge of the years after 1917. He
took little interest in the doctrinal debates between various literary schools,
and rejected the idea that any literary tendency should have a monopoly:

It is through criticism and competition that proletarian

literature must establish itself; not by restrictive measures
against its rivals.22

To Serge, it was practice, the production of works, which was important,

and not theories or sectarian definitions:

The young Communist writers of the USSR seemed to me to

be obstructed rather than assisted by doctrine. They are
permanently tormented by a concern for orthodoxy. The
pleasure of presenting in a novel creatures of flesh and blood,
of passion and intelligence, riddled with contradictions,
illogical, good and bad at the same time, like all human
beings, is more or less forbidden to them.23

Serge took little interest, then,, in the theories on which proletarian culture
was based; the name of Bogdanov scarcely appears in his articles. For
example, in a series of impressions of life during the civil war, he notes:

22
Littérature et révolution, p 112
23
P Istrati, Vers l'autre flanune - II - Soviets 1929, Paris, Rieder, 1929; according to E Raydon
(Panait Istrati, Paris, Les Editions municipales, 1968, p 118) this volume of Istrati's book was in
fact written by Serge.

83
Proletarian Culture

She often came around midnight, after telephoning ("Have

you any tea?"). She shook her ash blonde hair. Her eyes
seemed to smile gravely. She would say:

You understand, the regional decentralisation of the

engineering industry....For the Supreme Economic Council
and the Federation of Trade Unions...." or else:

"The theses of Bogdanov, from a strictly Marxist

standpoint...." or else:

"The organisational sub-committee of the Second Sector

Committee has decided...."

She lit a cigarette. Her lips had the rosy tint of a ripe fruit.24

That Serge remember the hair and lips of the young woman, but lets the
theses of Bogdanov disappear in a row of dots should not cause any
surprise.

Indeed, Serge quite frequently quotes Trotsky's cultural formulations,

generally with approval, including Trotsky's vigorous critique of the theory
and practice of proletarian culture. Where the theory produced bad
practice, Serge does not hesitate to condemn it:

Genuinely gifted writers, prisoners of preconceived ideas,

visibly obsessed with theses and schemas, produced these
abortions....It isn't good proletarian literature because it isn't
good literature at all.25

He is far from kind towards proletarian poets who merely follow ready-
made formulae:

24
V Serge, 'La Flamme su la neige', Ciarté, No. 33, 1923, p 210.
25
V Serge, 'Une Littérature prolétarienne est-elle possible?', Ciarté No. 72, 1925, in Litíérature et
révolution, p 115.

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 The Ideas of Victor Serge

But in general, their attempt to create proletarian poetry has

mainly produced banal verses, in which the factory, the
factory chimney, the machine, the hammer and sickle and the
red star are just one cliche after another. Did the proletcult
poets limit their horizons to much? I am inclined to think
so.26

Nonetheless, Serge has no hesitation in finding merit in works inspired by

the concept of proletarian culture. Above all, he was on the side of those
who, within the proletarian culture movement, wanted to present 'living
man', with all his faults. Serge never wanted a literature which covers up
problems; he praised Pilniak because he 'did not flatter either the
revolution or the revolutionaries'.27 In order to attack the second-rate
products of the last years of Russian proletarian culture, Serge quoted in
contrast French proletarian writers:

Can your hero be a bad husband? religious? an oppositionist?

an alcoholic? quarrelsome on his bad days? I challenge you
to quote me a single example of such a character from among
published works! No! he must be a 'hero of labour' from the
roots of his hair to the soles of his feet; and if he isn't a Party
member, he must be about to become one....The most minor
characters in Hamp or Poulaille (Le Pain Quotidien) are a
million times more human.28

Among the novelists who emerged from the proletcult, we can take two
examples of those discussed by Serge. The first is Gladkov, the author of
Cement.. Gladkov was the son of a peasant and had himself known
poverty; he described in this novel how the Bolsheviks in a provincial town
succeeded in getting the cement factory into production, despite the
repeated attacks of counter-revolutionaries. A mere summary of the novel
might lead one to believe that we are dealing with a precursor of socialist
realism, and it is true that Stalin himself greatly admired this novel.

26
V Serge, 'Les Ecrivains russes et la révolution', Clarté, No. 17, 1922. p 390.
27
V Serge, 'Boris Pilniak', Clarté, No. 36, 1923, p 274.
28Littératureet révolution, p 59.

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Proletarian Culture

Serge recognised real merits in it, he translated it into French. The novel
does not depict heroes and heroines without faults, but on the contrary
shows us clearly that the great problem of the Russian Revolution was that
it had to create a new world using human beings who were deformed by
class society. In particular Gladkov shows us the oppression of women and
the struggle of women to emancipate themselves.

Perhaps the novel for which Serge expressed the most enthusiasm was A
Week by Libedinsky. Libedinsky was one of the main representatives and
theoreticians of the proletcult, who had several clashes with Trotsky, but
Serge does not mention this in his account of the novel (elsewhere he says
of Libedinsky's article Themes which await their authors that it is
'disastrously schematic'.29 Serge prefers to deal with the content of the
novel, the story of a counter-revolutionary rising in a small provincial town
in 1921. For Serge this is a genuine example of proletarian literature:

Iury Libedinsky is a young writer: this is his first work. He

was involved in the Revolution in the provinces. He is not a
man of letters, nor a real scholar: he has the fragmentary and
incomplete education typical of young workers who like
reading or of proletarian students who have worked for four
years while fighting with empty stomachs. His style is flat.
We can see that in constructing his story, he has modelled
himself on those Russian story-tellers who have now become
classics, and that he didn't have the time or perhaps even the
desire to polish his form. A book like this brings us back to
the simplicity of the first works of all literature. The author
is writing neither to sell at a high price to a publisher, nor to
win honour, nor to get himself flattered by a few magazines,
nor to please a select readership. He simply feels the
primordial need, the source of all artistic creation, to express
what he has experienced, that is, what he has seen, done and
understood.

In these words we can hear echoes of Rictus and Nazzi, perhaps even of
Poulaille.

29
Littérature et r3volution, p 1 1 1 .

86
 The Ideas of Victor Serge

Libedinsky was able to combine a profound commitment to the principles

of Bolshevism with a realism that did not omit any detail that might be
embarrassing for the regime. Once again Serge praises him for it:

On a freezing cold night in the snow Surikov was present at

the execution of five counter-revolutionaries. The atrocious
thing was ordering the five prisoners to get undressed, seeing
these five human figures shivering in the freezing half-light,
waiting to be shot. Now, every piece of clothing was
precious; in this country reduced to extreme poverty - we
know what the price of seed was - in this Russian winter
every jersey could save a life, or add to the strength of a
fighting man. You couldn't waste clothes. The cruelty
resulted solely from the poverty. This is a general truth.
Shipwrecked sailors have been reduced to cannibalism. - This
is quite different from the cruelty of the counter-revolutionary
pogroms.30

One of the most striking passages in the novel is a description by Simkova

of a station where there was a staircase covered with poor people, dirty,
hungry and louse-ridden, while in the buffet a speculator was eating cakes
(it was the period of the New Economic Policy). And then a smart
commissar wearing a communist star on his breast came down the staircase
in a disgusted manner picking his way through the bodies of the poor
people to go and eat cakes with the speculator.31 This is precisely the sort
of scene one might find in one of Serge's own books.

But the most vivid pages that Serge devotes to the proletcult are those
where he tries to situate the movement in its context and to assess its
achievements:

During the heroic years 1918 to 1921, the proletcults had

fought fiercely for a proletarian culture, set up circles in the
smallest towns, covered the walls of cities with their posters,
produced poets, staged plays, drawn up theses, set up courses,
even set up an international committee which lived for a few

30
V Serge, 'La Semaine de I Lebedinsky' Ciarté, No. 43, 1923, pp 388-89.
31
I Libedinsky, A Week, London, Allen & Unwin, 1923, p 99.

87
Proletarian Culture

brief days. The effort was premature, the aims magnificent

but rather Utopian. We recognise the failure. What cultural
work was possible at the time when every Party member was
on a war footing and lived on 200 grammes of black bread a
day and three dried herrings a week? But all the same the
initiative taken by the proletcults had a very real value. It is
a good thing that in such periods the fighters of the social
war should dedicate some of their thoughts to ambitious
cultural projects. And the proletcults did train young poets:
Alexandrovsky, Kirilov, Vassily Kazin, Obradovitch.32

And above all, when he moves on from general considerations to show us

the activity of a proletarian circle, Serge gives us an unforgettable picture
of the true experience of the proletcult, an experience which is valid
outside of any theoretical argument:

Remember that in winter two thirds of these workers walk

through the Russian snow with holes in their boots. They
don't frequent cafes! They work, they write, with the fine
frankness of children determined to become mature. The
Vagranka group was formed in the Rogoysko-Simonovsky
suburb of Moscow of sixteen worker correspondents who
write for the press. An old Bolshevik writer, Perkati-Pole,
blind, as poor as you can get - he's a forgotten man -
assembles them in his bleak lodgings and teaches them to
write rhythmical verse and prose. There aren't enough
chairs; they squat in a circle on the floor. Of course, the
products of this little literary circle, where people come
smelling of tar, machine oil and swarf, are still very
imperfect; but don't you agree with me that the very existence
of such a group is a significant fact? And that in any case it
means more for human culture than an exquisite literary
salon in Paris? At Tsarytsin they have formed an association
of proletarian writers, all unpublished. There is a locksmith,
a turner, a cook, some labourers. Neither Pierre Hamp nor
Gorky would make fun of it.33

32
Une Litérature prolétarienne est-elle possible?', Littérature et révolution, p 108.
33
Une Littérature prolétarienne est-elle possible?', Littérature et révolution, p 117.

88
 The Ideas of Victor Serge

In this description we can see the great strength of the proletcult. It is not
a question of the quality of the literary production of these workers;
doubtless most of their works are not worth reading. But the fact that they
had the desire and the determination to learn to express themselves is proof
that the Russian Revolution was not the work of a few leaders, but a
profound movement towards their own self-emancipation on the part of
thousands and thousands of working people.

As we saw with the reference to Pierre Hamp in the last quotation, Serge
was always conscious of the comparison between Russia and France.
Certainly the problems of the two countries were different. In Russia in
1917 the vast majority of peasants could not read or write; even among
urban workers the percentage of illiteracy was quite high (around 30 per
cent). In France the working class had the advantage of compulsory
schooling, but at the same time left bourgeois culture (republicanism and
the ideals of secularity) exercised a powerful influence over workers. In
France too, at the time of the Russian Revolution and the founding of the
French Communist Party, the question of a proletarian culture was on the
agenda.

It was Marcel Martinet who posed the question in the most intelligent and
perceptive form. In 1921 he was appointed cultural editor of L'Humanite,
the daily paper of the Communist Party created at the Congress of Tours.
Every week he had the responsibility for a whole page which he used to
pursue his cultural objectives among the readers of L'Humanite.

Between September and December 1921 Martinet wrote a series of articles

in L'Humanite about the organisation of culture. His primary
preoccupation was to insist that, while intellectuals had a role to play in the
working-class movement, workers could not entrust the organisation of
culture to these intellectuals:

That the body to be set up should accept intellectuals on an

individual basis, those who can show their credentials, we
can ask nothing better, nothing is more necessary. But to
take them en bloc, to trust to them the organisation and
leadership of the task that has to be accomplished at a time

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Proletarian Culture

when, with the old world in ruins, it is necessary either to

rebuild it as it was or to create a new one, that's quite a
different matter.

Martinet repeated the slogan he had adopted in the article L'Effort libre:

The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered

by the working classes themselves.34

In Martinet's cultural activity we observe two complementary elements

which should not be separated one from the other. On the one hand
Martinet, the admirer of Baudelaire, in no way desires to abandon the
heritage of classical culture; on the contrary, he wants workers to strive to
take possession of it, but of course, in a critical fashion.

At the same time Martinet took on the task of encouraging proletarian

writers. It was he who published Henry Poulaille's stories in L'Humanite;
he who provided the vital encouragement for Lucien Bourgeois. And, of
course, it was Martinet, among others, who encouraged Victor Serge to
write novels. 35
j

Likewise in 1921 Martinet launched Les Cahiers du Travail , inspired by

Peguy's Cahiers de la Quinzaine. To quote Martinet's own words:

We are very obstinate, and, in a new form, it was still the

same object of proletarian culture that we were pursuing
when, in 1921, we founded Les Cahiers du Travail.36

In the first series appeared, alongside texts by Rosmer, Monatte and Rosa
Luxemburg, two pamphlets by Victor Serge, Pendant la guerre civile
(During the Civil War) and Les anarchistes et Vexperience de la revolution
russe (The Anarchists and the Experience of the Russian Revolution).

34
M Martinet, Culture prolétarienne, Paris, Maspero, 1976, p 77.
35 Memoirs of a Revolutionary, p 263.
36
Quoted by J Maitron & C Pennetier, Dictionnaire biographique du movement ouvrier français,
volume XXXV, Paris, les Editions ouvrières, 1989, p 411.

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 The Ideas of Victor Serge

Martinet was not the only one to discuss proletarian culture. During the
twenties the idea of a proletarian culture aroused great interest. We can
mention, merely as examples, the articles of Georges Michael (Andre
Varagnac), in Clarte, the writings of Pierre Hamp with his idea of the
sanctity of labour, the works of Jean Guehenno, the 'fetes du peuple'
(people's festivals) organised by Albert Doyen and Georges Chenneviere,
and, above all, the activity of Henry Poulaille.

Not surprisingly the discussion was often somewhat confused. Some

curious articles were written, for example on in which J-R Bloch began a
discussion of proletarian literature by talking about books he had lent to his
maid. 37

On August 4 1928 the magazine Monde opened a debate on the subject of

proletarian literature by posing the question : 'Do you believe in the
existence of a literature and art expressing the aspirations of the working
class?' Despite the fact that Communist loyalists did not take part, Monde
received answers from a range of viewpoints. Henry Poulaille naturally
championed 'the existence of a literature and art expressing the aspirations
of the proletarian class.'38 Unfortunately the surrealists replied in a totally
negative fashion39; in particular the contribution from Benjamin Peret
revealed a deplorable sectarianism:

Proletarian literature today? Just another form of careerism.

Barbusse failed to be a second Paul Bourget and he's taking
his revenge as best he can. As for the likes of Istrati,
Duhamel, Rictus, Durtain and such rationalised and
rationalising Poulailles, leave them, if you will, to observe the
flies which buzz around abattoirs in the summer. Their turn
will come, as will Pierre Hamp's, and we know what his
'proletarian literature' does for him. It's a means of spying
on working-class organisations, a means of spying which
pushes up the sales of his books.40

37
J-R Bloch, 'Littérature proléletarian et littérature bourgeoise', Europe, No. 85,15 January 1930,
pp 106-11.
38 Monde, 13 October 1928.
39
For the politics of the surrealists see I H Birchall, 'Des Marteaux matériels', French Studies,
XLIV/3, July 1990, pp 300-318.
40 Monde, 17 November 1928.

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Proletarian Culture

Victor Serge was uniquely qualified to contribute to the debate because of

his knowledge of proletarian literature in both Russia and in France. His
contribution is noteworthy because it tries to avoid both utopianism and
fatalism.41 Serge notes that 'learning to become a professional writer is
incompatible with factory work' and that 'proletarians...in general do not
buy books.' But at the same time he recognised the possibility and the
necessity for cultural activity within the working-class movement:

The working class in process of becoming conscious of itself

has, nonetheless, its own ways of feeling, of understanding
life, of suffering, of laughing and of fighting; it has its own
way of perceiving society, the state, the law, work and the
family; it has, in short, its own view of the world and its own
historic task. Hitherto all this has been expressed only to a
limited extent and for political ends in the class struggle.
One can very well imagine a literature which would express a
proletarian attitude to life. It would find a limited audience
among workers; it would not make its authors rich; but it
would be very much more powerful and fertile than that of
such writers as Bourget and Morand, obsessed with alcoves
and divans! A proletarian is possible. In the capitalist
countries it could well be the work of writers who have gone
over to the cause of the revolutionary proletariat so
wholeheartedly that they share its way of life.

In 1932, when Serge published Litterature et revolution, he was already

discovering the roots of Stalinism even'in the earliest phases of the Russian
Revolution. But Litterature et revolution by no means takes a negative
approach to the concept of proletarian literature, even if Serge's idea of it is
closer to Poulaille than to Bogdanov.

Even after his return to France Serge never abandoned the notion of
proletarian culture. We can see this by looking at the relations between
Serge and the main French theoretician of proletarian culture, Henry
Poulaille. Serge and Poulaille first met in 1912 in anarchist circles at

41 Littérature et révolution, p 99-103.

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 The Ideas of Victor Serge

Romainville.42 Always an anarchist at heart, Poulaille was attracted by

communism after the Congress of Tours. He never took a party card, but
he did write for L'Humite in the period when the literary editor was
Marcel Martinet, a man whom he always continued to greatly admire.

Rapidly disillusioned with Stalinism, Poulaille pursued his concept of

proletarian culture by launching a series of magazines, almost all of which
were very short-lived.

In 1932 Poulaille launched the Bulletin des Ecrivains proletariens, the first
issue of which (March 1932) contained a statement entitled 'Our Position':

Every class, on coming to power, reflects in its literature the

preoccupations which concern it. It is no different with the
proletariat....In every country where the proletariat has the
necessary minimum degree of culture, it strives to create its
own literature....We do not refuse to serve, but we want to
serve within the boundaries of truth.

In the third issue of the Bulletin Serge expressed his endorsement of this
position.43

In the 1930s Poulaille set up the Musee du soir, a cultural organisation

aimed at proletarians - a library, talks and discussions, etc44 Victor Serge
went there to give a talk on 'his memories of the pre-war anarchist
movement'. The Musee du soir was undoubtedly a commendable project.
But it was an essentially apolitical project - proletarian culture had lost all
its links to the struggle for political power for the proletariat. A notice was
displayed with the exhortation 'Visitors are requested to abstain from all
sectarian politics.'

However, right up until his departure from France, Serge seems to have
held positions quite close to those of Poulaille. Serge tells that in 1940:

42
K-A Arvidsson, Henry Poulaille et la littérature proléletarian française des années 1930, Paris,
Jean Touzot, 1988, p 37.
43
Arvidsson, pp 140-44.
44
See R Binnet, Le Musée du soir, Les Cahiers du peuple, No. 2, 1947, pp 61-78.

93
Proletarian Culture

Henry Poulaille and I adopted as a title for a weekly

publication - which never saw the light of day - The Last
Days.45

But before the debacle of 1939 there was one last chance to link the cultural
and political struggles. This was the FIARI (Federation Internationale de
I'art revolutionnaire independant ; International Federation of
Independent Revolutionary Art), launched by Leon Trotsky and Andre
Breton to bring together artists who wanted to fight against fascism and
Stalinism. For once the surrealists and the advocates of proletarian culture
agreed to form a united front. Martinet and Poulaille served on the
National Committee alongside Andre Breton.

Serge became a supporter of the FIARI and even wrote an article pleading
for the broadest possible unity:

To give our organisation its best chance of getting established

and growing, we must, I believe, have a broad and
unrestrictive conception, and not require of our supporters the
clarity of ideas which we ourselves possess; we should ask
them no more than a sincere commitment to revolution,
which may be conceived in some fashion other than a
Marxist one. Thinkers from an anarchistic or eclectic
tradition are in the majority, and there are some sound and
excellent ones.46

But the differences were too deep. According to Arvidsson:

Henry Poulaille and Marcel Martinet did not participate in

the activities of the FIARI because, in their view, the grip on
the organisation of the surrealists, with their sectarian
disputes, was too strong.47

45
V Serge, Mémoires d'un révolutionnaire, Paris, Seuil, 1951, p 391. (this passage does not
appear in the English translation)
46 Clé (Bulletin mensuel de la FIART), No. 1, January 1939, p 5.
47
Arvidsson, p 188.

94
 The Ideas of Victor Serge

Only two issues of the magazine Cle appeared; once again the surrealists
and the proletarians had failed to work together.48 The last chance was
lost.

It is now possible to summarise some of the lessons about proletarian

culture that we have been able to learn by looking at the various writings of
Serge and some of his contemporaries.

(1) Proletarian culture has nothing to do with Stalinism. If the Stalinists

sometimes found it useful to use the rhetoric of proletarian culture, it was
simply an example of what Trotsky calls substitutionism; for Stalin and for
Stalinism, the word 'proletarian' did not indicate the real practice of the
proletariat, but rather what the proletariat ought to think and do according
to its self-appointed leaders. It was Stalin who liquidated the last
remaining proletarian culture organisations in 1932.

Serge's articles in Clarte can precisely serve to remind us that the golden
age of proletarian culture was during the civil war, long before the birth of
Stalinism, and that, moreover, it was a heterogeneous mass movement and
not a theory imposed on the working class from above.

The origins of proletarian culture were in ultra-leftism; in France among

the revolutionary syndicalists, in Russia with Bogdanov, an ultra-leftist and
political opponent of Lenin. If proletarian culture is a deviation, it is
certainly a leftist deviation. A reading of Serge offers a clear response to
Althusser's disciple, Dominique Lecourt, who tries to see Bogdanov and
the advocates of proletarian culture as precursors of Stalin. You really need
quite a peculiar point of view to see Stalinism as a leftist deviation.49

(2) The concept of proletarian culture is often distorted by suggesting that

the supporters of the proletcult wanted to get rid of all the heritage of the
past. Nothing could be further from the truth. It will suffice to read the
resolution drafted by Bogdanov and adopted at the All-Russian Conference
of Proletarian Cultural and Educational Organisations in September 1918:

48
See 'Des Marteaux matériels', pp 311-12.
49 See D Lecourt, Proletarian Science?, London, NLB, 1977, pp 137-62

95
Proletarian Culture

The proletariat must take over the treasures of past art with
its own critical illumination, in a new interpretation,
revealing their hidden collective principles and their
organisational thought. They will then become a precious
heritage for the proletariat, a tool in its struggle against the
old world which created them, an instrument for organising a
new world. It is proletarian criticism which must transmit
this artistic heritage.50

Martinet held a similar position.

And indeed, in an article abut Mayakovsky, Serge reminds us that in

Russia it was the futurists and not the supporters of the proletcult who
wanted to abandon the cultural heritage:

Futurism seems to us to be steeped in the past. This

excessive leap towards the future - how old-fashioned. The
proletariat must grasp that the endless process of becoming is
made of past, present and future. This hatred of tradition is
old-fashioned. We need revolutionary traditions,51

(3) At the time when Serge still believed that the Russian Revolution could
succeed, his interest in the proletcult was always located within the
perspective of such success; the striving of the proletariat to create a culture
for itself was part of the painful attempt by the proletariat to turn itself into
a class which could take over the leadership of society.

Even in Litterature et revolution Serge insists that culture is only a by-

product of revolutionary struggle:

Proletarian literature will be the spontaneous work of writers

won over to the revolutionary proletariat.... Writers
accustomed to seeing the world in terms of proletarian
thought, and having become incapable - whatever their
personal origin may have been - of separating their interests
from those of the proletariat, being steeped in the very rich

50
Action poétique, No. 59, 1974, p 81.
51
V Serge, 'Mayakovsky' Clarti, No. 69, 1924, p 508.

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 The Ideas of Victor Serge

revolutionary traditions of our age - such writers, whatever

subjects they may deal with, and whatever their feelings or
even their varied ideological positions, will necessarily
produce proletarian works, and they will be such to the extent
that the authors themselves are revolutionary socialists.52

(4) The critique of proletarian culture set out by Leon Trotsky in Literature
and Revolution is well-known. The theoretician of permanent revolution
recognised that the proletariat which had taken power in Russia was a
backward proletariat; for Trotsky it was incapable of creating its own
culture, and had to confine itself to taking over bourgeois culture. Above
all for Trotsky culture was not so much a question of poetry as of
technology, hygiene, etc.

It is interesting to note that in 1932 Maurice Parijanine published some

texts by Trotsky where he attempted to clarify his position. In particular
Trotsky said:

Even in capitalist society we must, of course, do all we can to

raise the cultural level of the mass of the working class. To
that is linked in particular, a concern with their literary
standards. The party of the proletariat must give particular
attention to the artistic needs of working-class youth,
supporting and guiding them. The creation of groups of
apprentice worker writers can, if the thing is carried out
properly, give very valuable results. But, however important
this field of work may be, it will necessarily remain extremely
limited. A new literature and a new culture cannot be created
by isolated individuals coming from the oppressed class; they
can be created only by the whole people which has freed itself
from oppression.53

On the basis of this text it is possible to make a distinction between culture

and cultural practice. If a proletarian culture is impossible within the

52 Littérature et révolution p 33.

53
M Parijanine, 'Une interview de Leon Trotski ur la "littérature prolétarienne", pp 409-23 of L
Trotski, Littérature et révolution, Paris, 10/18, 1964, p 415 (this text does not appear in the
English edition of Literature and Revolution).

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Proletarian Culture

framework of capitalism, nonetheless a proletarian cultural practice is both

possible and desirable. This is a distinction which could have been
accepted by Marcel Martinet, and also by Victor Serge who, while
accepting the main lines of Trotsky's argument, nonetheless maintained
that 'proletarian literature' corresponds to:

....a need of the transitional period, satisfied to an appreciable

extent by new values. Several generations of workers will
probably know no other period. They will spend their time
primarily in combat. They will see enormous destruction and
suffering: the world has to be rebuilt. But, like the armies of
the ancient world, they will have their bards, their story-
tellers, their musicians, their philosophers....In this
historically limited sense, there will be, indeed there already
is, a culture of the militant proletariat.54

The value and importance of Victor Serge today is that he enables us to

rediscover a socialist tradition which is neither Stalinist nor social-
democratic. Stalinism has collapsed; Social Democracy is slowly dying. If
Serge could have seen the despicable and treacherous conduct of Kinnock
and Mitterand during the Gulf War, he would have been reminded of the
worst days of Noske and Ebert.

Serge's tradition is the tradition of Bolshevism and of Trotskyism, a

tradition which takes as its starting-point the fact that the working class
must emancipate itself through its own practice. The ability of the working
class to develop its own cultural practice is an essential part of its struggle
for power, for a class which is incapable of a cultural practice can be only
the object, not the subject, of history. Serge, with his gift for grasping
concrete, living details, recalls to us the experience of proletarian culture,
both in Russia and in France, and helps us to assess the richness and the
limits of this experience. His writings are therefore an invaluable
contribution to a debate that must be reopened.

54
'Une litérature prolétarienne est-elle possible?, Littérature et révolution, p 120.

98