Proletkult

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Proletkult ( Russian Пролеткульт ) is a short word from пролетарская культура ( Proletarskaya kultura - proletarian culture). It denotes a cultural revolutionary movement of the Russian October Revolution . Starting from what was then Petrograd , between 1917 and 1925 she tried to create a culture of the new ruling proletarian class without any bourgeois influence. Here she took a radical epistemological point of view theory . The main theorist was Alexander A. Bogdanow (1873-1928), other important representatives wereAnatoli W. Lunacharsky (1875–1933), Alexei Gastew , Fyodor Kalinin and Michail Gerasimow . In the field of the fine arts, constructivism was initially decisive , in music and literature, futurism .

Proletarian Universities

The proletarian universities should be a prerequisite for proletarian culture . Bogdanow thematized in Science and the Working Class precisely this relationship to one another. In Capri he and Maxim Gorky tried to teach Russian factory workers accordingly in a school. The first all-Russian conference of the Proletkult Organization on the subject of "Science and the Working Class" brought out the following resolution on December 17, 1918:

“The first All-Russian Conference of Proletarian Culture and Enlightenment Organizations, which regards science as a tool of the organization of social work, which in the hands of the ruling class up to this point served as a tool of the ruling class, but in the hands of the working class as a tool of theirs to serve social struggle, victory and development, recognizes the socialization of science as a basic task in the scientific field, d. H.:

  1. systematic review of the scientific material from the collective working point of view;
  2. its systematic rendering of the conditions and needs of proletarian labor, both everyday and revolutionary;
  3. the mass dissemination of scientific knowledge in this transformed form.

The conference believes that the fundamental organizational tools for such a socialization of science must be:

  1. the creation of a workers' university in the form of a whole system of cultural enlightenment institutions, which is based on the comradely cooperation of teachers and learners and consequently leads the proletariat to take full possession of the scientific methods and the highest achievements of the sciences;
  2. on the basis of the activities of the Workers 'University the elaboration of a workers' encyclopedia, a harmonious presentation of the methods and achievements of science from the proletarian point of view, brought to the greatest simplicity and clarity. "

Confrontations with the proletarian cult

Soviet Union

Before the October Revolution, Bogdanov had played an important role in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party and published an alternative epistemological draft to dialectical materialism with a “General Organization Science ”. The conception of the prolet cult by Bogdanov, who was the most important theoretician during the first phases of the prolet cult, led to a tense relationship between the prolet cult and the party.

Bogdanov's scientific worldview and his rationalism were supported by Lenin et al. a. in his work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Critical remarks on a reactionary philosophy (1908) accused and condemned as empirical criticism . In 1920 he turned against the autonomy of proletarian organizations with his own draft resolution, since Marxism "by no means rejected the most valuable achievements of the bourgeois age". In Lenin's draft it goes on to say: The "Congress of the Proletkult" "on the contrary makes it an unconditional duty for all organizations of the Proletkult to regard themselves as auxiliary organs of the institutions of the People's Commisariat for Education [...]"

Leon Trotsky and AK Voronsky fought the Proletkult movement. They argued that the proletariat must adopt the highest technical, artistic and scientific achievements of the bourgeoisie, since these are universal to all of humanity. Trotsky also argued that it was impossible for the proletariat to develop its own artistic forms until the proletariat had completed its historic mission of outstripping the international bourgeoisie.

The futuristic writers Sergej Tretyakov and Vladimir Mayakovsky worked in the early 1920s around Vsevolod Meyerhold's “First Workers Theater of the Proletkult”. A few years later, however, they criticized representatives of the proletarian cult for the tendency to want to create proletarian art that was independent of the party. For their part, they called for a “revolution in art and an art in revolution”, as opposed to the later socialist realism of Stalin, but they accused the late Russian proletarian cult of “cosmic mysticism”.

Italy

The Turin section of the Russian proletarian cult , which was co-founded by Antonio Gramsci in 1921 , came into being during the Turin council movement . She tried to find allies in the futurists and also invited the futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti , who was temporarily in conflict with the fascists .

Germany

In Germany, the discussion about the proletarian cult was mainly carried out by the magazine Die Aktion , which very quickly opened up to the syndicalist currents after the November Revolution. An influence of the proletarian cult can be found less in German proletarian organizations, which were to be formed internationally at the suggestion of the 2nd Congress of the Communist International in 1920, than in the left bourgeois intelligentsia and in the political theater of the Weimar Republic (for example Erwin Piscator's "Proletarisches Theater") 1920/21), which turned to agitation.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ WI Lenin: Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Critical remarks on a reactionary philosophy . In: WI Lenin Werke , Volume 14. Berlin 1964
  2. ^ VI Lenin: On Proletarian Culture . In: WI Lenin Werke , Volume 31, April-December 1920. Berlin 1964, p. 307 f.