Revolution awakened millions to ‘thirst for culture’

Problems of Everyday Life by Leon Trotsky is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for September. The excerpt is from his talk “The Cultural Role of the Worker Correspondent” given in 1924. A leader of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, of the Bolshevik Party and the Communist International, Trotsky became the principal defender of V.I. Lenin’s internationalist course against the growing counterrevolutionary bureaucratic social caste headed by Joseph Stalin. Expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico by Stalin’s secret police in 1940. These articles and speeches, most written in the 1920s, discuss the connections between culture, the socialist revolution and strengthening the ability of the working class and peasantry to run the country. Copyright © 1973 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY LEON TROTSKY
[W]hy are we poor in schools, books, and newspapers? Because we are poor and culturally backward in general and we have very little of anything. But we do not have class barriers and obstacles on the part of the state; that is, we do not have a state power that has an interest in curtailing the means of cultural development for the proletariat, since in our country there is workers’ power.

In one of his last articles, to which I have alluded elsewhere, Vladimir Ilyich [Lenin] explained: With the conquest of power, the very approach to socialism is abruptly changed. As long as bourgeois supremacy lasts the struggle for socialism means uniting the proletariat for the revolutionary seizure of power. This means that the first thing you must do is force open the gates to the realm of the future! But once power has been taken, it is necessary to raise the cultural level of the working masses, for it is impossible to build socialism on the basis of underdeveloped culture. Of course, for the German proletariat, the problems of cultural work after the conquest of power will be incomparably easier than for us. But we have to work under the conditions we have been placed in by our whole past history, and our history is one of brutal oppression, backwardness, poverty, and a lack of culture. You cannot jump out of your own skin. The heritage of the past has to be overcome. The greatest advantage, the greatest conquest that the revolution has offered up to this time (and the revolution is not an end in itself, as we know, but only a means) has been the awakening of a powerful thirst for culture among the working masses. A sense of shame over our low cultural level and an aspiration to improve ourselves — that is the main thing the revolution has brought about — and on a scale never before seen, encompassing millions and tens of millions.

This thirst for culture is, of course, particularly strong among the youth. There is no doubt that the rate of illiteracy among the youth is declining. We see this among the new military recruits. But there is a stage between illiteracy and literacy when a person is semiliterate or insufficiently literate. Many stay too long in this stage. There are many such partly literate people in the army, as well as among working class youth, and particularly among peasant youth. It is necessary for our newspapers to get hold of such semiliterates, attract them, induce them to read daily, teach them to read, increase their degree of literacy and through literacy to widen their horizons. Which brings us to the question we are discussing today.

The working class has been awakened to the need for culture. And worker correspondents are one of the expressions of this class awakening. This is the fundamental distinction between the worker correspondents’ organization and all the other writers’ groups. Worker correspondents are the closest, most direct instruments of the newly awakened working class at the grass roots level. This relationship is what determines the meaning of their work, their role, and the scope of their interests, and this is the scale by which they are measured. The worker correspondent is receptive to everything by which the working class lives and breathes. The worker correspondents use their pens like levers. It is a small lever, but there are many worker correspondents, and that means there are many little levers for elevating the culture of the working masses. …

The worker correspondent is an organ of the social conscience, one that watches, exposes, demands, persists. It cannot be otherwise. The worker correspondent writes about cases of malfunctioning and expects them to be eliminated. But they are not always eliminated immediately.

This, then, opens up the only genuine sphere of activity for the worker correspondents. It is very easy after a failure to throw up your hands. But worker correspondents who are fighters act otherwise. They know that it is much easier to find malfunctioning than to eliminate it. They also know that a newspaper makes itself felt, not all at once, but by repeating, keeping pressure on, day after day. Worker correspondents take advantage of all new opportunities and find new ways, using new circumstances or details, to expose these instances of malfunctioning. Moreover, they continue to study the problem themselves, approaching it first from one angle, and then from another, in order to more clearly understand its roots and to strike more accurately at its main cause.

A worker correspondent needs self-control; a worker correspondent needs the temperament of a fighter. Even in the larger political arena we do not win everything immediately. We went through decades of underground struggle, followed by 1905, then defeat, and again the underground; then came 1917, the February revolution, the civil war…. Our party displayed the greatest tenacity in the revolutionary struggle and through this, it conquered. Worker correspondents must be totally imbued with the spirit of the Communist Party — the spirit of struggle, tenacity, and revolutionary commitment. The worker correspondent must be a communist, must live not just by the letter, but also by the spirit of Lenin’s teachings, which means constant criticism and self-criticism. Don’t believe everything you hear; don’t live by rumors; confirm figures, confirm facts; study, criticize, strive; struggle against arbitrariness and the feeling that there is no defense against injustice; persist, press your views, broaden your field of ideological understanding; go forward and push others forward — only then will you be genuine and true worker correspondents!

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