Page:Anatoly Vasilievich Lunacharsky - Self-Education of the Workers.djvu/2



The culture of the proletariat struggling to free itself is a class culture, sharply defined, and based on strife. It is romantic, and, from its very intensity, its form suffers, because time does not allow a definite and perfect form to be elaborated from its stormy and tragic substance.

Classes and nations which have reached their highest development are classical in their culture. Classes striving for self-expression are romantic, and their romanticism possesses the typical characteristics of the "storm and stress"; classes doomed to decay assume another form of romanticism, that of melacholy, disenchantment, and decadence.

We must not conclude that there is no intimate relationship between Socialist and proletarian culture because they so substantially differ from each other. We must bear in mind that the struggle is one for an ideal: that of the culture of brotherhood and complete freedom; of victory over the individualism which cripples human beings; and of a communal life based not on compulsion and the need of man to herd together for mere self-preservation, as it was in the past, but on a free and natural merging of personalities into super-personal entities.

Not only do the very characteristics of this ideal prescribe definite forms of co-operation in the midst of the prevailing world strife: these forms are themselves the direct outcome of the peculiar position occupied by the working class in the capitalist world order, which has forced the workers to be the best organised and most united class in the community.

No ideal can spring from a soil or seed alien to it; the methods and weapons used for its attainment must be in harmony with itself. Therefore from the struggling proletariat we must not expect the splendour of the harvest and the perfection of form and unfettered grace of victorious strength. These will reveal themselves in the future. Nevertheless, we have every reason to expect that proletarian culture, because of its