What official Communists said in public and what they actually did are different things. You can say in public that all art should serve the Proletariat and then in reality produce a delightful cartoon about Winnie the Pooh. Rhetoric is not reality. Actually the Soviets generally drove a sharp dividing line between official propaganda and entertainment. The idea that all official culture in the USSR served an ideological function is a Western fantasy. It's true that the Soviets post-Malevich did not like abstract art, but art is not divided between abstract art on the one hand and socialist realism on the other.
----- Original Message ---- From: Bhaskar Sunkara <bhaskar.sunkara at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Tue, February 23, 2010 2:02:24 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] On Althusser and socialist "realism"
Althusser's writings were circa late 1950s. I don't know a ton about state art in the 1930s-60s but I do know of Nikita Khrushchev's famous disdain for the abstract and the dominate thinking in the CPs in the 50s. Althusser's thinking on abstract art *were* way out of step with others in the milieu of official Communism during this time.