The Artist Under Socialism; D. Lipton

IN 1891, the famous Anglo-Irish writer, Oscar \Vilde, wrote an es say titled "The Soul of Man under Socialism." In it, he predicted that under socialism the arts would thrive as never before, and the artist would at long last find his true home. Nor can even the most rugged individualist find fault with Wilde's reasoning that great art is always the work of an in dividual, accurately summing up what art is in these words: "Art is the most intense mode of in dividualism that the world has known." But he then went on to propound a fallacy, insisting that socialism would release man's en ergies and talents as no other sys tem ever would. Anyone who has lived through the rise of \vorld socialism must Mr. Lipton of San Francisco has been an Army historian, newspaperman, art and literary critic whose articles have appeared in numerous magazines. SOCIALISM DEAN LIPTON see himself as little Alice in a wonderland of fantasy whenever he reads any of the nineteenth century utopian socialists like Os car Wilde. How· so many brilliant n1en could have guessed so wrong will forever remain a perplexing historical mystery.

The case of Boris Pasternak is typical of what happens to an art ist under socialism, and is quite different from Wilde's day dreams. Pasternak, in the judgment of one of the world's outstanding literary critics, Edmund Wilson, deserves to be classed with such giants of Russian literature as Tolstoy, Dos toevski, and Turgenev. Several years ago he won the Nobel Prize for Literature for Doctor Zhivago, a novel critical of Soviet society. The communist leadership ordered him not to accept the award, de nounced him in its government controlled press, and with sys342 THE FREEMAN June tematic and calculated ruthless ness hounded this great man to his grave. A few years later, two young Russian writers were sentenced to a Siberian concentration camp. Un able to secure publication for their work in the Soviet Union, they had submitted it to foreign pub lishers. Under socialism this was a crime - although it would have been acceptable practice in any capitalist country.

It is worth noting that these acts were committed by the "lib eralized" Soviet state, and not by the old Stalinist tyranny. Not that Stalin's treatment of artists was more gentle. During his regime, for instance, the great Russian born Jewish painter, Marc Cha gall, was denied the right to ex hibit his work in Russian muse ums. The reason is obvious to any one familiar with Chagall's paint ings. They were usually based on religious themes or Jewish folk lore, but most certainly did not conform to socialist realism, the prevalent critical mode in the So viet Union. Chagall was more fortunate than most, for he him self was not living in Russia dur ing Stalin's time. Recently, China has shown the world just how savage the treat ment of artists and their work could be when a socialist state really put its entire will into it. China's leaders attacked artists as a class of undesirables in need of "cultural rehabilitation." Young hoodlums were permitted to hu miliate, degrade, and even torture some of the finest artists in the nation. Then they were turned loose on the ancient treasures of China, the works of art it had taken many gifted men centuries to produce. Priceless tapestries were torn from their walls and trampled in the mud, wonderful paintings were ripped to shreds, and exquisitely-wrought sculptur al pieces were smashed into rub ble. Nor does it take many guesses to figure out what the cultured and civilized Oscar Wilde would have thought of this senseless savagery.

Situation Reversed Compare the lot of the writer or artist under socialism with one who worked and lived in the United States when capitalism was at its height. Jack London was not only a brilliant novelist but a socialist who wrote fiery essays advocating revolutionary socialism. Yet, he was never forced to seek foreign publi~ation for his work. The largest capital ist publishing firms in the nation gave his writings more than an adequate hearing. His career spanned the presidential adminis trations of three of the most 1968 THE ARTIST UNDER SOCIALISM 343 ftrdQnt bQIiQvers in capitalism in American history - William Mc Kinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft - and at no time did any of them consider using the power of his office against a man whose every politi cal, economic, and social argument must have been repugnant to him. As a further comparison, we might consider Pasternak's treat ment by the socialist authorities of his country against the treat ment accorded to the four Ameri can Nobel Prize Winners for Liter ature: Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck. They were all at one time or another vigorous and vo cal critics of American society.

But none of them was forced to renounce the award won by his own talents. The free press of the nation did not engage in a cam paign of slander against any of them. Far from being degraded or humiliated, they were applauded and lionized. How Socialism Stifles Art To everyone living in a socialist country, socialism is two things. First, it is a political and legal system; secondly, an economic sys tem. Obviously, no system can do anything for the artist. This is as true of capitalism as it is of so cialism. The best thing any so ciety can do is to let him alone to create his work, to think out his ideas, to develop his imaginative concepts. And this is exactly the one thing that socialism will not do, for it is congenitally incapable of letting anybody alone. Beyond this, socialism restricts the artist in a third way. It forces him to accept critical standards which have little or nothing to do 'with art. In its extreme forms, as we have seen, it does this with all of the power of its governmental apparatus. In gradualistic types of socialism and welfarism, it is done with more subtle economic, social, and academic pressures but subtle as they are, they are very real to the artist.

The way critical standards are arrived at by the nonartistic so cialist-thinker can perhaps best be seen by examining the ideas of the late Mike Gold, long-time lit erary arbiter of the American Communist Party. The determin ing factor in worthwhile art, Gold once announced, was its social significance. By this definition, a writer of second-rate, socially-sig nificant novels like Harriet Beech er Stowe would be considered su perior to a great allegorical styl ist like Herman Melville. In fact, Gold said as much. It was, of course, his right to believe any thing he liked about art or litera ture. As long as they remained just one man's opinion, his views 344 THE FREEMAN June injured no one. Unfortunately, in extreme socialist societies, men like Gold dictate artistic policy, and the arts are inevitably down graded to the position of propa ganda handmaidens for the gov ernment.

Swamped with Trash The decline of the arts in the United States has paralleled the rise of welfarism, and this doubt less is one of the reasons why the beliefs of a brilliant novelist like John Dos Passos have swung from the radical left to the conservative right. He lived to see what any de gree of socialism could do to the cultural level of the nation; Oscar Wilde did not. There are, for instance, more books being published in the na tion than at any other time in our history, and yet their general literary quality has never been so low. To understand how this could happen, it is necessary to realize that the publishing industry, more than almost any other industry, is a risk business. And the degree of risk a publisher is willing to take depends almost entirely on his costs. The break-even point (the pub lisher's cost of producing a book plus the author's advance against royalties, promotion and advertis ing costs, and the like) used to be a sale of 4,000 copies of a hardcover book. However, the infla tionary impact (caused by taxa tion necessary to finance a welfare state) and restrictive labor union practices has doubled the pub lisher's costs until the break-even point is seldom less than 8,000 copies. In practice, the publisher knows that a serious work of liter ature will ordinarily sell fewer than 5,000 copies, far below his break-even point.

So he does not publish the man uscript of a serious novel which he knows has considerable merit. Instead, he publishes what is known in the publishing trade as a promotable item. Recent ex amples would include The Green Berets (an adequate adventure story news-pegged to the Viet Nam War) and Valley of the Dolls (a badly-written, prurient look into the private lives of Broadway and Hollywood types). While there is no literary law which says that a promotable item cannot also be a serious work of literature, I know of no instance in the entire history of American literature where such has been the case. The Green Berets could hardly meas ure up to a war story like The Red Badge of Courage, nor would any knowledgeable critic class the Valley of the Dolls with The Scar let Letter or Sister Carrie. What has, of course, happened is that the freedom and oppor1968 THE ARTIST UNDER SOCIALISM 345 tuni ty of the writer has been re stricted in favor of the benefici aries of welfarism and organized labor. But he does not suffer alone. The cultural climate of the whole country is poorer. Nor is the inflationary impact limited to literature. Its unfortunate conse quences extend to the other arts as well. Until the last couple of decades, it was the custom of art galleries to nurture painters and sculptors of talent until they could cultivate a demand for their work. Few galleries would be so foolhardy as to attempt doing so these days on any kind of a mean ingful scale. Because of the high cost of doing business, galleries increasingly find that they must select their artists not on the merit of their work, but on whether they follow popular trends. Traditionally, American opera and symphony companies have been financed through vol untary subscriptions. Today, they are caught between rising costs on the one hand, and the fact that excessive taxation has dried up their revenue sources on the other.

Academic Pressures under Socialized Education Even more destruction is done to the arts in a socialized state by academic pressures than by eco nomic ones. Economic circum stances may in time be· changed or altered. But bureaucracies once established become almost impos sible to root out. And basic to any socialist or welfare system is the bureaucratization of educa tion. Neither art nor writing can be taught. What can, of course, be taught are the technical skills used in the arts. A competent teacher would concentrate on these, and let the prospective artist or writer develop his own imaginative con cepts, style, approach, the hun dreds of intangibles which go into the making of fine art or litera ture. But when education is bu reaucratized, as it is today, the teacher feels that he must justify his ever-higher salary and status by teaching not the skills, but art itself. In the past, "schools" of art and literature evolved because some writers and artists had common literary or artistic goals. This, however, is no longer the case.

Today, such "schools" are insti gated by the colleges and universi ties which teach art and writing. This has led to what a critic for the New York Tirnes has aptly termed "an age of prolix medioc rity." Although Wilde proved to be a poor social prophet, he could be a perceptive critic. Addressing the art students at the Royal Acad emy, he warned them: "Those who advise you to make your art repre346 THE FREEMAN June sentative of the nineteenth cen tury are advising you to produce an art which your children, when you have them, will think old fashioned." The same thing, of course, could be said about the art being taught in welfare state edu cational institutions. It defies the first requisite of fine art. It won't last, and it dies a few years later when the bureaucratized educa tors decide to instigate a new trend. A variety of social forces which are part and parcel of the welfare state are antithetical to the true artist. His greatest need is abso lute privacy, and every noble sounding concept so beloved by the modern liberal and radical is aimed at tearing away its last shred. Such ideas as "universal brotherhood" and "fraternity" can only destroy the artist who is above all else an individual. It is true of him - as it is of everyone else - that to survive he must have public consumption of his work.

But he can never permit public participation in it ; and that, in the last analysis, is just what any socialist system will demand. ~ Joint Monopoly THIS has been the usual evolution of collective bargaining in England and Western Europe and in the United States. Every where the same results follow. The employer-union relations become substantially collusive arrangements. Concessions are more willingly granted because everybody makes them simul taneously and because labor concessions can forthwith be trans lated into price increases which also everybody simultaneously makes. The public interest, then, is subordinated to this new joint interest of capital and labor, or employers and union, and the influence of competition is further impaired. In practice, under such arrangements, employers' associations join with unions in fixing costs and prices' and lose n1uch of the interest competing businesses have in keeping their costs and prices down.

LEO WOLMAN, Industry-W'ide Bargaining HIGHER EDUCATION" THE SOLUTION OR PART OF THE PROBLEM? CALVIN D. LINTON My TITLE may strike you as odd, whimsical, even wrong-headed. Surely education is a "good thing." It is by its very nature beneficial, not harmful; promethean, not me phistophelean; our saviour, not our destroyer. The more of it the better. But everyone of these popular beliefs is doubtful. It all depends on what kind of education \ve are talking about, and ,vhat kind of people receive the education. Let me say at once, therefore, that I am speaking of that kind of education which is secular, large ly technological, and chiefly aimed at teaching people how to do Calvin D. Linton is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences of George Washington University, located a few blocks from the White House. He has written several books and many articles. His field is English literature. This article is reprinted by permission from the February 16, 1968, issue of Christianity Today. Copy~ right 1968 by Christianity Today.