1. Truly Human Culture -Case Study
review of Al Richardson (ed), Victor Serge, Collected Writings on Literature and Revolution (Francis
Boutle, 2004), £12.99
we are told, dismisses culture, together with other superstructural activities, like law and religion, as
marginal to the interests of the oppressed and the exploited. This crudely deterministic account has
bolstered the opposing view that culture has no class determination, that it should be viewed as
something free-floating, with its own value system and subject only to its internal laws of
development.
It is, therefore, important to recover a quite different tradition within Marxism, one that neither
succumbs to a reductionist, deterministic understanding of culture nor abandons culture to the
enemy. Foremost in that tradition is, of course, Trotsky, whose Literature and Revolution of 1924
analysed not only cultural and literary developments of the post-revolutionary period but provided a
magnificent vision of an emancipated humanity developing a truly human culture. The recent
publication in English of Alexander Voronsky’s writings (Art as the Cognition of Life) has revealed how
other Russian Marxists of the period developed that tradition.
