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WSWS : Arts Review

Radicalism, Stalinism, and "proletarian culture"

Examining the life of a worker-writer

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's career and the problems it raises are definitely worth examining. Born in 1898, he grew up in a mining community in northern Missouri. His father was one of thousands of Irish and British immigrants, many of them with trade union experience and sympathy for Chartism and socialism, who ended up in the Midwestern coal fields. Wixson describes Conroy's father as a member of the working class intelligentsia, with a fondness for Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens.

At the age of 13 Conroy was apprenticed at the Wabash railroad car shops. This close-knit work community was shattered by the drive of the railroads in the post-World War I period to destroy the relatively privileged position of their skilled workers. The Wabash work force was broken up as a result of the defeat of the railroad strike of 1922. Wixson comments: The older order of kinship, craft, and community ties, with its preindustrial workers' culture of fraternity and resistance ... was giving way to a new workers' world of proletarianism.

Over the next decade Conroy, like many others, drifted to Detroit, Toledo and other industrial centers in search of steady work. At the same time he established artistic contact with other radical workers and intellectuals throughout the Midwest. His first literary mentor and sponsor was H.L. Mencken, iconoclastic publisher of the American Mercury.

The leading role played by the Communist Party in various labor defense and strike struggles and the onset of the social misery produced by the Depression impelled Conroy into the Stalinist political orbit, although he never became a party member. In the cultural sphere at this juncture, the Stalinists internationally had adopted a left face, declaring uncompromising war on bourgeois literature. This was heralded in the US by the appearance of the July 1928 issue of New Masses, in which its editor, Mike Gold, announced that the journal was henceforth to be devoted to the world of revolutionary labor. Its pages would be written by the working men, women and children of America.... The product may be crude, but it will be truth.

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.

More accurately, he attempted to remold them into a novel. The Disinherited is an honest account of a worker's life in the momentous period of 1910-33. It has amusing and moving moments, many of which although not all ring true. The first section, in which the protagonist's father is a compelling figure, is the most cohesive and effective. After his father's death and the dissolution of the mining community, the central character (and perhaps this was the case with Conroy himself) seems somewhat lost.

The book wanders through his subsequent experiences, from the rail shop and strike to auto plants, steel mills and boxcars to his final political awakening. It never rises to the level of a work of art in which each element is subordinated to a single unifying purpose. The novel remains a string of events, of greater or lesser interest. The Disinherited is most successful when it is least concerned with convincing the reader of sociological truths.

The turn to the popular front

Conroy wrote a second and considerably inferior novel, A World to Win, published in 1935. With the Communist Party's turn in 1934-35 towards the popular front, in which friendly relations with well-known liberal authors and critics sympathetic to the USSR such as Ernest Hemingway and Malcolm Cowley became paramount, the Stalinists junked their proletarian literature orientation. To a certain extent, figures like Conroy and others were shunted aside.

Aside from short stories and children's books, Conroy published little during the remaining 55 years of his life. Disillusioned with Stalinism, but retaining his radical views, he fell into a fairly dissolute life style in Chicago in the 1940s. He survived the Cold War years writing for an encyclopedia company before retiring to Missouri in 1966, where he lived until his death in 1990.

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.

(Interestingly enough, according to Wixson, Conroy had in mind the so-called Minneapolis techniques used so effectively by Miles Dunne in the 1934 strike, i.e., techniques developed by the Trotskyist movement.)

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.

In Russia, the notion that art was purely functional and had to serve the people was associated with the populist Narodniks, whose heyday in the 1870s passed with the emergence of the industrial working class. It was revived by Aleksandr Bogdanov, a former Bolshevik and idealist philosopher, on the eve of the October Revolution in 1917. Lenin and Trotsky castigated the theory of proletarian culture in no uncertain terms.

Trotsky explained that the formless talk of Bogdanov and his followers fed on the shallow and uncritical identification of the historic destinies of the proletariat with those of the bourgeoisie. Unlike the bourgeoisie, which had several centuries of cultural development behind it when it assumed political power, the proletariat, a propertyless class, was obliged to take power for the very reason that society does not allow it access to culture.

While the rise of the bourgeoisie took place with a comparative evenness in all fields of social life, the struggle of the working class for emancipation assumes an intensely one-sided, revolutionary and political character because it is a class unfortunate economically. This was not meant to discourage those more or less isolated working class artists who did appear, but to acknowledge a social and historical fact.

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.

Behind the concept of proletarian culture, advocated in the latter part of the 1920s by Bukharin and Stalin, lay an entirely opposed perspective to the Marxist conception of the present epoch as that of world socialist revolution. The embracing of proletarian art was a reflection in the field of culture of the same deep skepticism toward the revolutionary capacities of the working class and the potential for the overthrow of capitalism internationally that found expression, in the field of politics, in the program of socialism in one country.

The nascent bureaucracy contended that the Soviet state faced an extended period of isolated development, implicitly accepting the continued existence of capitalism outside the USSR and the need to find an accommodation with it. Thus its furious opposition to Trotsky's contention, Our entire present-day economic and cultural work is nothing more than a bringing of ourselves into order between two battles and two campaigns.... Our epoch is not yet the epoch of new culture, but only the entrance to it.

Thanks to Stalinist betrayals of revolutionary struggles in China, Germany, Spain and elsewhere, the USSR did remain isolated. The result, however, was not a flourishing of proletarian culture, but a monstrous degeneration of the regime, the extinction of the most serious artistic trends and the birth of that grotesque deformity known as socialist realism.

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 rebels and Stalinism

In the course of paying tribute to the Midwestern radicals, the underlying pattern of whose thought he asserts is probably antiauthoritarianism, Wixson never once pauses and asks himself the following question. How is it that these antiauthoritarians ended up in the service of a barbarous police-state dictatorship, the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, and remained entirely silent about its bloody crimes?

It is not sufficient to assert that they were lied to or duped, or that the CP was the only mass political force on the left. There is more to the relationship than that. Otherwise it would be impossible to explain why Wixson gives such an essentially sympathetic account of the Stalinist cultural policy in the 1930s in his book written in 1994.

Stalinism was not simply an import from Moscow. The material and spiritual privileges the Soviet bureaucracy could provide no doubt went a long way toward corrupting an entire layer of intellectuals and workers. But the political outlook which made up Stalinism found nourishment from within petty-bourgeois political trends populism, anarcho- syndicalism, progressivism which already existed in the United States.

Wixson, in a revealing comment, describes the legacy of Midwestern radicalism as grass-roots democratic expression, a spirit of egalitarianism and individualism-neighborliness that seemed at times at odds with the demand for revolutionary change. Indeed.

If Conroy remained under Stalinist influence it was primarily because his own political origins made him susceptible to its nationalist and reformist outlook. This is not to suggest, fatalistically, that the course of his life was inevitably fixed. Had there been a mass revolutionary movement based on Marxist principles in existence in the US in the 1930s, Conroy might have found his way to it.

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?