Our Party's Press and Literature: Lenin 1905

Lenin Reading Pravda, oil on canvas Vsevolod Medvedev (1912-1985), USSR 1965

From The Workers Monthly Magazine in April, 1926 this is a translation of an article by V. I. Lenin from 1905. The translation is interesting as it is somewhat different from other translations of the same article and it has a different title as it is elsewhere often called something along the lines of Party Organisation and Party Literature:

THE socialist proletariat must consider the basic principles of the literature of the workers party in order to develop these principles and express them in their most complete form. These principles are in contrast with bourgeois customs, with the commercialized bourgeois press, with the individualism of the ambitious adventurers of bourgeois literature and their "splendid freedom," and with the scramble for profits.

What do these principles consist in? Not only in the fact that the literature of the proletariat must no longer be a means of enriching groups or individuals but still more that it ought not to bear an individual character nor be independent of proletarian control. No more "non-party" writers; no more literary supermen!

Literary activity should be a part of the whole work of the proletariat. It should be a cog in the great machine which will be put into motion by the whole vanguard of the working class. Literature should become one part of the work of the party, organized, thought out, unified, and revolutionary.

"All comparisons limp," says a German proverb. It is so of my comparison of literature with a cog in the machine of the movement. There will be no lack of hysterical intellectuals to yelp in distress at this conception, which, according to them, will debase, will destroy, will "bureaucratize," and mechanicalize the free "struggle of minds," free criticism, free "literary endeavor," etc. Their laments are nothing but an expression of bourgeois intellectual individualism.

Obviously, literature is the last thing to be treated mechanically; it cannot easily be graded by, or submit to, the decisions of the majority. In this matter, one ought undoubtedly to allow a great deal of scope for individual initiative, for personal inclination, for inspiration and imagination, in form and content.

All this is indisputable but it proves only one thing; that the literary side of the party's work cannot be mechanically identified with the other sides of proletarian activity.

This by no means destroys the truth — incomprehensible and strange as it may seem to intellectuals and bourgeois democrats — that literary work ought to be most strictly bound to the rest of the socialist work of the party. Writers ought to enter the party without making any stipulations. Publishing establishments, bookshops, reading rooms, libraries, everything to do with literature ought to be placed under the control of the party.

The organized socialist proletariat ought to supervise and control all this work; it should infuse into it the vital spirit of the workers, and in this sphere, should throw off the outlook of the mercenary bourgeoisie, who see in the writer only the man who sells his writings to earn his living, and in the reader simply a customer who brings in money.

Naturally we do not imagine that this change in literature can be brought about at one swoop, especially in this Russian literature, which has so long been crippled censorship, and corrupted by a Europeanized bourgeoisie. We are far from expecting any panacea whatever in the shape of decisions and resolutions settling the whole thing in an arbitrary manner. That is not the point. What concerns us is that our class-conscious proletariat should understand that here is a new problem that has to be faced frankly, and everything possible done to solve it.

After having delivered ourselves from the chains of censorship, we do not want to be the captives of bourgeois commerce and its relationships. We want to create a press that is freed not only from police control, but also from the influence of capital and from private ambitions, and above all freed from anarchist-bourgeois individualism.

These last words will be an object of derision to many of the reading public. "Good heavens!" some burning apostle of "intellectual freedom" will doubtless exclaim. "Good heavens! You want to submit to the masses so subtle and so personal a thing as literary workmanship. You want workmen to decide, by the majority of votes, high questions of philosophy, science, and taste. That is the way you suppress the spirit's freedom to work, which is essentially individual."

Don't be alarmed, my friends!

First of all, this concerns the literature of the party, its place in the party, and the control of the party. Every one is free to say and to, write what he wants to without the least restriction. But every voluntary association — and the Party is one. of them — is free to expel from its ranks members who use its organization to preach opinions against the Party. The Party is a voluntary organization that will inevitably fall in ruins, first spiritually, and then materially, if it does not take care to decide the position of those people who propagate opinions against it. And to fix what is for and what is against the Party we have the program of the Party as a criterion, its tactical resolutions, its statutes, and finally the experiences of International Socialism, the whole experience of the voluntary associations of the proletariat.

Our Party is becoming a party of the masses; we are in an epoch of rapid transition towards an open legal organization, and at this period many useless people (from a Marxist point of view) and perhaps a few who are Christians or mystics as well, join us. But, we have a strong digestion; we are Marxists hard as adamant. We shall assimilate all the confusionists. Partisans of freedom of association, we still fight unmercifully to purge the Party of confusionist elements.

Furthermore, may we inform our friends, the bourgeois individualists that their talk about "absolute liberty" is nothing less than pure hypocrisy.

In a society which maintains itself by the power of capital, and where the mass of the workers lack the necessities of life, there is no real liberty. Are you free in relation to your bourgeois individualists, that their talk about are you free in relation to your bourgeois public, which demands from you pornography and prostitution as a supplement to "sacred dramatic art"?

Absolute freedom is a bourgeois or anarchist fiction (for anarchism is a bourgeois theory the wrong way round). The freedom of the bourgeois writer, or artist, or actress, is a mask of independence concealing a real dependence on the money of parasites and souteneurs.

We Marxists tear aside this hypocrisy and unmask their false standards, not to arrive at a literature "above class" (that will only be possible in a socialist society, in a society without classes), but to oppose to this so-called free literature which is really allied with the bourgeoisie, a literature bound openly to the proletariat.

This will be a literature truly free, because corruption and ambition will have no place there, and socialist ideals and sympathy with the oppressed will continually bring into it new forces and new groupings.

This will be a free literature, for it will not depend on the blasé heroine nor the ten thousand bored and fattened high-brows, but on the millions and millions of workers who are the pick of the country, its power and its future.

This will be a free literature, which will enrich itself with the latest creations of revolutionary thought, with the experience and living work of the socialist proletariat.

Get down to the job, then, comrades! We have before us a great and difficult problem; we must create a rich literature, narrowly and indissolubly bound to the socialist workers' movement. It is only after this work that socialist literature will deserve the name; it is only then that it will be capable of carrying out its tasks; it is only then that even within the framework of bourgeois society, it will be able to free itself from bourgeois bondage and bind itself to the movement of the truly revolutionary class.