>I agree. That's why I condemn such slovenly rhetoric as "some x is y" as
>vigorously in a fellow leftist as I would in a freshman theme. It is
>extremely important for the left not to encourage such disregard for
>minimal intellectual standards.
One wonders what grad Prof Cox would have given this essay...
<http://www.wsws.org/arts/1995/nov1995/conroy.shtml>
Worker-Writer in America
Jack Conroy and the Tradition of Midwestern Literary Radicalism, 1898-1990
Douglas Wixson
University of Illinois Press, 1994, 678 pages
9 November 1995
By David Walsh
This confused and often wrongheaded book touches upon a number of subjects which are of considerable interest to anyone engaged in the struggle to change the current, stagnant cultural atmosphere.
Douglas Wixson, a former professor of American and English literature in the US and France, has written a biography of Jack Conroy, worker-writer and author of The Disinherited, a novel about working class life in the first third of this century.
[...]
Conroy was held up by the Stalinist cultural apparatus as the model of a proletarian writer. With the encouragement of Mencken and Gold, he remolded anecdotes and autobiographical material into his first novel, The Disinherited, published in November 1933.
[...]
Douglas Wixson's aim in writing Worker-Writer in America is clearly to call attention to Conroy's life and work and resurrect his reputation. Furthermore, in championing Conroy and other working class radical writers Joseph Kalar, H.H. Lewis, John Rogers, Ed Falkowski, etc. Wixson is advancing a definite perspective of his own. He is by implication making the case for the worker-writer and proletarian literature in the present day.
Taking into account the prevailing cultural vacuum, it is entirely possible that such catch phrases will attract adherents. It is, therefore, critical to demonstrate that a struggle waged under the slogan of working class culture would not represent any way out of the present impasse.
The central conflict, according to Wixson, is one between genteel literature i.e., formally innovative and cosmopolitan art produced primarily by Eastern intellectuals and an indigenous American art that [admits] the grime and idiom of the working world.
Wixson restates this essential premise, either in his own words or Conroy's, over and over again: Art is viewed [by Conroy and his colleagues] as a tool of the leisured class; its subject is beauty, the purity of art. Rebel poetry, on the other hand, deals with actual conditions with little regard for niceties such as the aesthetic qualities of verse; sincerity is more important (p. 249). Wixson cites the slogan of the Anvil, a magazine edited by Conroy in the 1930s: We prefer crude vigor to polished banality (p. 305).
Then there is Conroy's remark made at the 1935 Stalinist-run American Writers' Congress: To me a strike bulletin or an impassioned leaflet is of more moment than three hundred prettily and faultlessly written pages about the private woes of a gigolo or the biological ferment of a society dame (p. 389).
In A Note on Literary Criticism (1936), novelist James T. Farrell, who at that time was moving in the direction of Trotskyism, aptly replied: Though I need hardly say that I favor proper strike bulletins and effective and impassioned leaflets, I see no necessity for counterposing these to works of literature.
[...]
Even the most effective strike bulletin is not art, although its production may require artistry. True artistic production involves reflecting and working on reality, and imaginatively reconstituting it, on the basis of an accumulated body of work and in accordance with definite aesthetic laws.
By erasing the distinction between art and propaganda, Conroy and the Stalinists attempted to reduce art to something easily consumable by the masses at their present level of consciousness. But the task of an artist concerned with the progress of art and society is surely bound up with the struggle politically to educate and organize the working class, and raise its general spiritual and moral outlook. Assisting workers in assimilating the finest products of past and present culture is a responsibility of anyone serious about preparing the intellectual groundwork for a social revolution.
Populist conception
The notions advanced by Conroy and the Midwestern radicals had much more in common with various strands of nineteenth century petty-bourgeois radical thought and protest populism, utilitarianism, etc. than they did with Marxism. It is not accidental that Wixson, echoing his subjects, continually contrasts the honest, sweat-soaked Midwesterner with the sophisticated East of the Hudson intellectual. Nor is it accidental, and Wixson passes over it much too quickly, that one of Conroy's cohorts, H.H. Lewis, descended to overt anti-Semitism in his attack on New York radical opponents.
Wixson extols in a truly shameful manner the anti-intellectual and anti-ideological current which runs through the various radicalisms. Conroy's claim, reported by Wixson, that seeing Das Kapital on the shelf was enough to give him a headache reminds one of Marx's comment that ignorance never helped anyone.
[...]
Confronted by the arguments of Wixson's counterparts in the 1920s, Trotsky responded: 'Give us,' they say, ....something even pock-marked, but our own.' This is false and untrue. A pock-marked art is no art and is therefore not necessary to the working masses. Those who believe in a 'pock-marked' art are imbued to a considerable extent with contempt for the masses.... This is not Marxism, but reactionary populism, falsified a little to suit a `proletarian' ideology. Proletarian art should not be second-rate art. One has to learn regardless of the fact that learning carries within itself certain dangers because out of necessity one has to learn from one's enemies.
The most dangerous implications of the slogan of proletarian culture did not emerge until the period, in the mid-1920s, during which the Stalinist bureaucracy consolidated itself organizationally and ideologically. Marxists, including the Bolsheviks, have never viewed the taking of power by the working class as ushering in an entire historical epoch of proletarian rule, much less culture, but the transition to a socialist, that is, classless, society and culture. Proletarian culture, Trotsky stated categorically, will never exist, because the proletarian regime is temporary and transient.
[...]
Nationalism and reformism
That the slogan of proletarian culture inevitably has nationalist and reformist political implications is borne out by Wixson's own approach to the question. He devotes a good many passages in Worker-Writer in America to descriptions of life in close-knit working class communities, such as Conroy's birthplace in Missouri. For example: The strikes, the material conditions of life in the coal camp, and the immigrant miners themselves were constituents of a radical consciousness in which cooperation, craft autonomy, and collective resistance were the rule rather than the exception.
It is true that in their struggle against capital, the most advanced sections of workers develop ideological elements of the future in the present solidarity, selflessness and a certain level of political and cultural awareness. But this achievement is not simply the chance product of craft or location. It is invariably bound up with the political work of socialists who struggle to elevate the working class to the level of its historic tasks.
Moreover the sort of working class culture which Wixson describes by no means embodies genuine political class consciousness. It represents only a limited stage in the development of the working class as a conscious historical force. It is not something to be gazed upon in awe, but rather the raw material for the construction of a revolutionary working class movement based on a socialist outlook.
Wixson asks so little of both the working class and art that he repeatedly presents as culminating points developments that are, in reality, quite primitive artistic or political conquests.
It is noteworthy that in the course of describing the Missouri mining community where Conroy grew up, Wixson, because he is an honest and meticulous researcher, contradicts one of his principal themes. He stresses the crucial and positive role of the immigrants who brought with them progressive conceptions from overseas. He thereby acknowleges implicitly that the existence of a working class intelligentsia, capable of reading Scott, Dickens and Shakespeare, was bound up with the emergence and rapid growth of an international socialist culture in the last third of the nineteenth century. This, however, undercuts Wixson's thesis that Conroy's intellectual cultivation and literary inclination were the spontaneous product of an indigenous American radicalism.
The thrust of Wixson's argument, and the radical sociologists he cites, is to glorify the working class as it presently is, to idealize what it can achieve within the bounds of capitalism and to project that state indefinitely into the future.
[...]
The final point that needs to be made is an aesthetic one. As Trotsky pointed out, neither the working class nor anybody else needs second-rate art. Conroy was a talented writer, burdened by the needs of earning a living for his family. Flattered and soothed by the stupidities of Mike Gold and company, Conroy cut himself off intellectually (and physically) from the highest achievements of modern literature. This artistic self-strangulation, in combination with disheartening political events, led to the collapse of his writing career.
There are, of course, those in the world of art and literature who consciously aim at inaccessibility and impenetrability. But such people generally have little significance. Art makes its greatest contribution to the cause of social liberation when it penetrates most deeply into the conscious and unconscious mind of the reader or viewer, altering his or her perception of the world. To accomplish this the artist needs to take hold of the most advanced social conceptions and the most developed formal and technical achievements. What shall we say about an artist or critic who consciously rejects such an undertaking?