BY ANDRÉ BRETON  
It is well known that the notion of proletarian literature, which is actually quite simple, nevertheless has resulted in many abuses of thought and language. To tell the truth, I persist in thinking the words “proletarian literature” are rather unfortunate. I believe however, that if we cannot interpret them to the letter the best we can do is to try to see what they sanction in terms of use-value. It suffices to recall here how the question was resolved in a passage from the Kharkov theses (“Resolution on the International Revolutionary Proletarian Literary Movement”)….

If we carefully examine this declaration we may find that the discussion has suffered from misdirected zeal. Is this because it explicitly says that “In its essence proletarian literature…is opposed to all past and present literature of other classes?” This, it seems to me, would be viewing “opposition” in a less than dialectical sense. Besides, didn’t Lenin take pains to specify that the workers will participate in the elaboration of an independent ideology only when efforts are made to raise their level of consciousness? It is important, he says in What Is To Be Done?, that they “not confine themselves to the artificially restricted limits of ‘literature for workers’ but learn, in increasing degree, to master general literature. It would be even truer to say ‘are not confined’ instead of ‘not confine themselves,’ because the workers themselves wish to read, and do read, all that is written for the intelligentsia, and only a few pitiable intellectuals believe that it is enough ‘for workers’ to be told a few things about factory conditions and to be reminded over and over again what has long been known.”

Let us not forget that, as Lenin has also said [in The Tasks of the Youth Leagues, 1920], “proletarian culture…is not clutched out of thin air; it is not an invention of those who call themselves experts in proletarian culture. That is all nonsense. Proletarian culture must be the logical development of the store of knowledge mankind has accumulated under the yoke of capitalist, land-owner and bureaucratic society.…”

May it be said that the present forms distinguishing those works summarily called proletarian, whether in the capitalist countries or in Soviet Russia, should be taken as the definitive, complete forms of proletarian literature? Such would serve only those who are incapable of conceiving these forms dynamically, it having been claimed that we are waiting for such forms to be constituted on the model of the fixed, unchangeable forms exemplified by the sonnet and the classical tragedy in five acts. Assuredly, these forms are only transitory moulds which of themselves must not be regarded as objects of imitation for their own sake. I believe, in sum, that we must guard against two deviations; that we must guard against either underestimating or overestimating the present possibilities of existence of a proletarian literature. (The same considerations apply, needless to say; to proletarian art.)

Is this literature completely realizable under the economic and social conditions imposed by the contemporary world—the building of socialism in the USSR, the proliferating contradictions of capitalism in other countries? I think not. Not only do I think not; but I hardly regret it. I do not regret it because the possibility of integral realization of a proletarian art and literature, particularly under a capitalist regime, would give us one reason less to overthrow that regime. But may it be said that proletarian literature announces itself and begins to characterize itself, through the most important works coming to us today from Soviet Russia and Germany—may it be said that such a literature is now on its way to realization? Yes, it is necessary to say so. Thus I think we must be very careful in the view we adopt towards proletarian literature; we must not forget that it can be only a transitional literature between the literature of bourgeois society and that of a classless society.

To the extent that it already exists, it is easy to see that proletarian literature is more the work of a milieu than of a man. It can only be, in fact, the emanation of a mass proletarian consciousness: I mean that it depends on the degree of general emancipation of the working class in a given country.  
 
 
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