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136 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW Lawrence F. Schwartz, Marxism and Culture: The CPUSA and Aesthetics in the 1930s. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1980. 151pp. $13.50. Lawrence Schwartz's study of Communist literary activity in the 1930s is, in part, a corrective to earlier accounts. By examining specific "Party practice in literary affairs," he is able to demonstrate that there was no clear-cut and consistent CP policy on literature and culture and that, in contrast to what anti-Stalinist historians of the '50s and '60s claimed, '30s Maxists were not working on "orders from Moscow." But Schwartz negates his own strengths by attacking contemporary Marxist aestheticians and arguing that any Marxist aesthetics must be built, not on less political interference, but on more. Schwartz's best work comes early in his book, in a detailed analysis of Soviet literary policy, 1928-34, where he establishes that internal literary affairs in that country were "in flux" and that the Soviets could not, consequently, have been directing American literary efforts. American Marxists were taking their own leads from the Soviet Union (often in absolute ignorance of Soviet policy) and imposing their own, often contradictory programs (e.g., proletarian literature, changing attitudes toward intellectuals) based on the incomplete and soon outdated Kharkov Conference of 1930. It was only after 1935, in the popular front period, Schwartz shows, that the gap between Soviet and American policy/practice was bridged. In his second section, on "The CPUSA and Culture in the 1930s," Schwartz examines the "distance that existed between Party politics in general and Party activity in culture and literature" and tries to understand the causes for the gap. His conclusion is that the CPUSA, in a confused Party politics, never provided enough guidance to writers and intellectuals in the early 1930s. The policies of the popular front period were, finally, too little and too late: "the diluted Marxism of the popular front blocked the development of any real Marxist aesthetic." But in what seems a gratuitous and tacked-on final section, Schwartz tries to develop this historical analysis into a theory of Marxist aesthetics. He attacks current Marxist theoreticians (like Stefan Morawski, Fredric Jameson) for trying to find "a grand aesthetic formula with which to evaluate literature and art." Such an abstract formula can never be created, Schwartz argues, because a "Marxist view of aesthetics must be tied to the specific work of an active Communist Party . . . Marxist aesthetics is fundamentally political, not artistic." Schwartz has provided a partial corrective to earlier anti-Marxist accounts of the development of left aesthetic theory and practice in this country in the 1930s, but his conclusion will not hold: "The real tragedy in the cultural work of the CPUSA in the 1930s was not, as is usually argued, the intrusion of politics into literature; it was that the Party did not develop a more fully conscious political program for art." Marxist aesthetics, in his view, equals Party politics. Granted the abstract nature of much of the recent Marxist theory he attacks, Schwartz would have us back into a past that most of us are trying to transcend. The failures of the '30s were the result of incomplete Marxist theory, but the answer would not have been more Party control. The answer would have been exactly what has been happening recently in the theorists he attacks: the development of an indigenous American Marxist aesthetic theory and application. Schwartz has it backwards, then and now. David Peck ...

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