THERE is hardly a literary critic in America who has not at one time or another taken a hand in the controversy concerning proletarian literature. Few of the contributors to this historic controversy, however, were aware of its concrete political background and perspectives. What was new about the proletarian literary movement was its emphasis on political and social relations; and in approaching this movement the critics, it is true, discussed the connection between art and politics and between art and society. But they failed to notice that it is not these general and abstract connections but primarily its specific political history which explained proletarian literature. Like other types of literary creation, this literature undoubtedly reflected class interests, needs, and attitudes; yet unlike other types, it reflected such interests, needs, and attitudes through the coordinated medium of a political party. That party is the Communist Party, which alone of all parties in the labor movement displayed any solicitude for proletarian literature-a solicitude, needless to say, in full measure returned by its recipient. It is impossible, in my opinion, to understand the development of this literature, its rise and fall, without understanding its relation to the Communist Party. There are other factors, of course, but all of them have been modified by this one fundamental relation. Thus the Marxist doctrine, for ...............missing page.............. a piteous victim and militant rebel he typified their revival. And his apotheosis was consummated when writers made a practice of detaching him from his ordinary human environment in order to place him within "the glorious collectivity of the embattled proletariat." A further causative factor was provided, of course, by the exhaustion of the literary modes current in the 'twenties. Being for the most part expressions of disillusionment with society, these modes could not cope with the demands for its reconstruction. The various regional programs, designed as they were for local uses, appeared inconsequential in the face of a national crisis involving profound spiritual and material transformations. The proletarian program, on the other hand, invoking history in all its tenses to confirm its ambitions, laid claim to a universality and radicalism of outlook poles asunder from the restricted and polite values of the past. Furthermore, a political party existed in America, the Communist Party, which made haste to identify this literary program as a part of its own larger perspective and which welcomed into its political home all writers wishing to realize in practice their conversion to the revolutionary cause. This party, at that time virtually in sole occupation of the Marxist arena, thus became the organizer of proletarian literature and its ultimate court of appeal. The left literary magazines were published under its auspices or edited by its members. It appointed political commissars to supervise the public relations of the new literary movement and to minister to its doctrinal health. It furnished it with an initial audience and with an organizational base; and, finally, it conditioned the writers that had come under its control to conceive of the Soviet Union, its own source of strength and seat of highest authority, as the living embodiment of their hopes for socialism. Nominally, despite the elaborate and often weirdly sectarian theories proclaimed by individual members, the program of this literary movement was quite simple and so broad in its appeal as to attract hundreds of writers in all countries. It can be reduced to the following formula: the writer should ally himself with the working class and recognize the class struggle as the central fact o f modern life. Beyond that he was promised the freedom to choose his own subjects, deal with any characters, and work in any style he pleased. The Communist Party was seldom mentioned directly in .......missing page....... less how learned in Marxism, could possibly presume to pit his own judgment against the party's political sway and reputed infallibility in the reading of the law and the prophets. To impugn the party's political authority meant to court excommunication. Thus it turned out that a novel or a play was certificated "revolutionary" only when its political ideasexisting or latent----corresponded to those of the party. And since the party had long ago awarded itself a monopoly of correct politics, the seemingly liberal formula that had enticed so many recruits was soon filled with a content altogether at variance with its manifest meaning. If not in origin then in function it became no more than an administrative tool, a political contrivance for imposing party views on critical and creative writing. What we were witnessing was a miniature version of the process which in Russia had resulted in the replacement of the dictatorship of the proletariat by the dictatorship of the Communist Party. Within the brief space of a few years the term "proletarian literature" was transformed into a euphemism for a Communist Party literature which tenaciously upheld a fanatical faith identifying the party with the working class, Stalinism with Marxism, and the Soviet Union with socialism. The "literary movement" droned these beliefs into its members with the result that instead of revolutionary writing-which may mean a thousand and one things depending upon time, place, and individual bias-an internationally unif orm literature was created whose main service was the carrying out of party assignments. For strategic purposes, of course, the official spokesmen found it advisable to conceal their essentially factional inspiration and narrow standards under a variety of pseudonyms designed to give the appearance of flexibility, objectivity, freedom from control, etc. However (and I think I can allow myself the dogmatism of saying this), unless we understand the relation of these pseudonyms to their referents we can learn very little about left writing in America, or, for that matter, in any other country. It is essential to understand the difference between the literature of a class and the literature of a party. Whereas the literature of a class represents an enormous diversity of levels, groupings, and interests, the literature of a party is in its very nature limited by utilitarian objectives. It cannot properly be called literature, for it tends to become a vehicle for the ....missing page.... tariat, on the other hand, before it can achieve the freedom that participation in culture requires, must first institute changes in society which include its own abolition. And if that historic task is ever accomplished, it will not be the proletariat-which will then no longer exist-but a classless and stateless humanity that will shape the new culture in its own image. Virtually all the theorists of proletarian culture are fetishists of ideology, which they naively equate with and substitute for culture. And since they believe that in Marxism the proletariat possesses a distinct and separate ideology of its own, they conclude that all that is lacking for the creation of an art and literature of the working class is a plan and the will to carry it into effect. But the truth is that Marxism is not an ideology o f the working class-it is an ideology for the working class brought to it from without. "The history of all countries," Lenin wrote in What Is To Be Done?,, "bears witness that the working class is capable of developing only a trade-unionist consciousness .... that is, the conviction of the necessity of joining together in unions, of conducting a struggle against the employer, of demanding from the government this or that legislative measure in the interests of the workers, etc. The socialist doctrine (Marxism), however, has proceeded from the philosophical, historical, and economic theories which originated with educated representatives of the owning classes, the intellectuals." Now inasmuch as proletarian literature, by the innumerable definitions* of it given by its own theorists, is nothing more than the socialist doctrine transferred to the creative sphere, it follows that it is a literature produced outside the proletariat and brought to it from without. But it is impossible to conceive of a literature issuing fullblown from a doctrine--it must also have some kind of concrete political basis. That political basis is none other than the Communist Party, which conceives of itself as the guardian of the socialist doctrine and its organizational embodiment. .........missing page........ the ages. Its practitioners were persuaded by the party-critics to turn out sentimental idealizations of the worker-types they were describing in their stories and plays. These works, most of which were quite crude as literary art, presented a silly and distorted picture of America. Despite good revolutionary intentions, their political content was schematic. Instead of giving a realistic and individualized portrayal of social experience, their authors inferred its characteristics by speculative methods from the theses of the Comintern about the "world-situation"; and since the Comintern had declared at that time that the workers of all countries were ready to seize power and establish socialism, they endeavored to demonstrate that the Comintern was right by showing "reality" behaving according to its directives. The better writers, of course, such as Josephine Herbst, Grace Lumpkin, Robert Cantwell, and Kenneth Fearing, avoided these fantasies by sticking to what they knew. But proletarian literature as a whole, here and abroad, followed the party in predicting and celebrating the victory of the revolution in a period when it was actually losing every battle. At present this literature is withering away because the party no longer needs it. Since 1935 the party has acquired respectability by reconstructing itself on a reformist and patriotic basis. Having abandoned its revolutionary position and allied itself with liberal capitalism, its cultural requirements are altogether different from what they were in the past. Everything within its orbit, including the proletarian literary movement, which separates it from other reformist and left-bourgeois tendencies in being done away with in order to expedite the "building of a democratic front." That the political party which fathered proletarian literature should now be devouring it is no cause for astonishment. A certain type of internal cannibalism-witness the Moscow trials-is intrinsic to its history and necessary for the fulfillment of its peculiar tasks. The period of the proletarian mystification of American letters is now definitely over. To say this, however, is by no means equivalent to saying that in recent years the official Left has declined in size and in influence. On the contrary, there are more writers today extending active political support to the Communist Party than ever in the past. To read the long and diversified lists of names signed to some of the appeals or petitions is- .....missing page...... them to behave. It is now no longer news, except to fanatical Stalinists and reactionaries bent on maintaining a red scare, that the Comintern has put away its revolutionary aims and embarked on national-reformist policies; and it is no friendlier to revolutionary ideas in the cultural than in the political sphere. Its literary adherents are, of course, lagging behind the "party line." A cultural lag is to be expected. All sorts of amusing inconsistencies and atavisms are to be observed in the pages of the Stalinist literary periodicals. In a purely academic way the small fry are still permitted to play with Marxist notions. The literary movement as a whole, however, is being quickly dissolved in the body of American writing. It is a long time since we have read a programmatic article on proletarian "aesthetics" in the New Masses, which has replaced its former standards of evaluation with the abstract categories of "progress" and "reaction." This year only one novel and two volumes of verse were published in America that follow in any appreciable degree the accepted patterns of the proletarian literary mode. In fiction the themes of unemployment and union organization have persisted. Being objectively present in the material of the social-minded writer, they cannot be arbitrarily cast aside; and neither does the politics of reformism make such a casting aside necessary. The question relates entirely to the political treatment such themes receive. If once, in following the official perspective, the proletarian writer transformed his positive characters-who invariably were either unemployed or on strike-into revolutionaries performing some act that symbolized the overthrow of the system of private property, today he would have to resolve their problems by attaching them to some activity of the New Deal. The new Communist orthodoxy having decreed that peace, progress, and prosperity are possible under capitalism, the writer is unable to revolutionize his characters in any concrete sense without violating the precepts of the political faith of which, presumably, he is a loyal adherent. To be really logical, the unfortunate practitioner of the "party line" in fiction would have to substitute one of the President's fireside chats or a resolution for an immediate declaration of war on Japan for those visions of proletarian upheaval and the ultrafuture of the classless society which nourished his inspiration in the past. There are certain forms of demagogy, however, which a medium as .....missing page....... fascism-and you have accepted the notion that your only real enemies are the fascists and that with everyone else it is necessary to cooperate, then to all intents and purposes your function as a Marxist critic has been abolished. What is left, of course, is the party-task of misrepresenting and assaulting the work of those left writers who have repudiated Russian "socialism" and the Comintern. Michael Gold, for instance, has recently arraigned John Dos Passos before the bar of "progress" and convicted him of writing nothing but merde.* But such critical activities are exercises in the art of abuse rather than in the art of criticism. In the last chapter of The Great Tradition, revised in 1935, Granville Hicks wrote that "if revolutionary writers should become convinced, on adequate or inadequate grounds, that capitalism could survive, that revolution is unnecessary or impossible, they would cease to be revolutionary writers." Given the political milieu in which Mr. Hicks works, it was rash of him to commit himself to so definite a formula, which has the virtue of proving the statement that revolutionary literature, at least as Mr. Hicks conceived it in 1 93 5, is no longer in existence. But it passed away without the benefit of any kind of convictions, either "on adequate or inadequate grounds," on the part of Mr. Hicks' "revolutionary writers." An episode in the history of totalitarian communism, it will be remembered as a comedy of mistaken identities and the tragedy of a frustrated social impulse in contemporary letters. 1*In his The Novel and the People, the British Communist critic, Ralph Fox, states that "Marxism gives to the creative artist the key to reality . . . . "He [the proletarian writer] will be unable to make his picture a true one unless he is truly a Marxist, a dialectician with a finished philosophical outlook." The Soviet Russian, Sergey Dinamov, speaks of the writer's "Party and class evaluation of life." The German, Otto Biha, contends' that the "proletarian writer can view the world only from a consistent Marxian standpoint . . . ." The American, Edwin Seaver , defines the proletarian novel by its 'acceptance and use of the Marxian interpretation"; another American, Edwin Berry Burgum, defines it similarly, as "a novel written under the influence of dialectic materialism from the point of view of the class-conscious proletariat." 2* In the Daily Worker, Feb. 28, 1938, Gold wrote: "On rereading his trilogy, one cannot help seeing how important the merde is in his psychology, and how, after a brief, futile effort, he has sunk back into it, as into a native element," etc. etc. Hailed as late as 1936 as the foremost representative of the revolutionary novel in America, he is now condemned as a hater of humanity and a decadent. This "critical" revaluation is based, to be sure, not on a "rereading" of the trilogy as Gold pretends, but on the fact that since 1936 Dos Passos has emphatically expressed his disagreement with Stalinist policies in Spain and elsewhere.