Lenin once compared art to the human appendix; "in time", he said,
"we shall cut it out". Radicals and socialists have always shared
his ambivalent attitude to high culture: sometimes embracing it,
often rejecting or subverting it, but always creating to some
extent their own alternative cultures of expression and
association.
Major individuals featured in Socialist History 18 include Karl
Marx, Franz Kafka and John Ruskin, whose centenary falls this year.
Lenin himself figures negatively in the discussion by Judith
Harrison and Liam O'Sullivan of the Russian avant-garde and the
state. They show that in the period 1905-1924 a brilliant
generation of revolutionary artists, blasphemers and subversives
under Tsarism, found little improvement under Bolshevism. Matthew
Worley tackles the political culture of the British Communist Party
in the "Third Period", where political marginality was not
incompatible with a rich and vigorously adversarial political
culture. Andrew Whitehead also explores the problems of creating an
independent working-class culture, but in the very different
circumstances of late 19th century Clerkenwell, an inner London
district with deeply rooted traditions of artisan radicalism, where
he captures the moment of transition from radicalism to
socialism.
In tracing the differing paths which socialists take to forge
their cultural and political identity, the range of articles
reflects the complex relationship of the left to culture.
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