Since its launching in February 1998, the World Socialist Web Site has devoted a great deal of attention to artistic and cultural matters. We have reviewed thousands of works—films, concerts, plays, television series, novels, albums—and commented on artistic currents and problems out of a concern, above all, for the development of the social awareness and consciousness of the working class.
Marxists consider that art and culture play “an immense role in shaping and broadening the outlook of the working class, sharpening its awareness of the injustices of capitalism, strengthening and refining the workers’ outrage and willingness to sacrifice and making more ardent their belief and confidence in the possibility of realizing socialism and building a society based on genuine social equality and solidarity.” (Introduction to The Sky Between the Leaves, David Walsh)
Our attitude toward present-day cultural life is highly critical. Indeed, as a leading German socialist once explained, “contemporary culture is the enemy of culture.” Triviality, self-centeredness and social indifference largely prevail. Art, if it is to make a deep impact and endure, needs to turn its attention, by whatever means it chooses, to the great questions and convulsions of our day.
First published in 1924, these essays by Trotsky illuminate the problem of literary creation in the first workers state. Trotsky subjects the leading trends in literature and art in the early years of the revolution to criticism that is sharp but never tendentious. He illuminates and develops the Marxist method of historical materialism, rejecting “art for art’s sake” conceptions as well as their apparent opposite, the theories of “proletarian culture” and “proletarian art,” then becoming fashionable in certain left circles.
Voronsky was an outstanding figure of post-revolutionary Soviet intellectual life, editor of the most important literary journal of the 1920s in the USSR and a supporter of Trotsky and the Left Opposition in the struggle against Stalinism. He was executed by Stalin in 1937. A defender of the “fellow traveler” writers and an opponent of the Proletarian Culture movement, Voronsky was one of the authentic representatives of classical Marxism in the field of literary criticism in the twentieth century. Read more on Voronsky and this vital work here.
This volume by World Socialist Web Site arts editor David Walsh contains a collection of film reviews, essays on film and interviews with directors and film critics spanning the 20 years from 1992 to 2012. The critique provided by David Walsh is absolutely unique in the field of contemporary film criticism. Walsh’s writing is widely respected for its unrelenting hostility both to the pervasive academic fog of postmodernism in the arts, as well as the pseudo-left glorification of identity politics in contemporary film. Walsh’s writings are essential for the development of a conscious, revolutionary critical attitude toward capitalist society.
This lecture was delivered on January 9, 1998 to the International Summer School on Marxism and the Fundamental Problems of the 20th Century, organised by the Socialist Equality Party (Australia) in Sydney. Walsh argues that art 'expresses things about life, about people and about oneself that are not revealed in political or scientific thought; its great power consists in its ability to connect human beings, as though by invisible wires, at the most profound and intimate levels. To become whole, human beings require the truth about the world, and about themselves, that art offers.'
