Realism Modernism, + the Specter of Trotsky (part 3)

Part 1 of Neil Davidson’s three part essay, “ Lukács,” and part 2, “Greenberg” were published in earlier print and online issues of Red Wedge Magazine.

Part 3, Trotsky, Or Modernism as the Cultural Logic of Uneven and Combined Development 

Author’s Note:

I must apologise to the editors of Red Wedge, and even more so to its readers, for the delay in submitting and ultimately publishing the concluding part of ‘Realism, Modernism and the Specter of Trotsky’. This is due to my being diagnosed with a serious and potentially fatal medical condition half way through 2019, and, although I received excellent care and attention from the great institutional triumph of British Social Democracy, the National Health Service, it should not surprise readers that I was unable to write or edit at the levels of speed or coherence necessary to complete and submit my article on time. That said, the slightly unfinished character of the argument is not entirely a consequence of my illness but also because it is an intervention in a debate which is still in a relatively early stage of development and which should be treated as an invitation to engage in an emergent discussion. 

The assertions or claims which I make here are supported by detailed evidence and argumentation in work which has been published elsewhere or which is scheduled to be so in in the very near future. In particular, readers interested in pursuing either my particular interpretation of Uneven and Combined Development or my conception of the relationship between what I refer to as ‘capitalist modernity’ and modernism are invited to follow up the references given in this endnote.[1]

Introduction

In particular, I am concerned here to refocus away from the hitherto ‘ghostly’ character of Trotsky’s presence in this article to date and allow him to speak in the same way as Lukacs and Greenberg on their respective themes in parts 1 and 2. In particular, I want to introduce Trotsky’s concept - virtually unknown during the historical debates surveyed in Parts 1 and 2 -  which he called “the ‘law’ of uneven and combined development”(UCD), the current widespread deployment of which has done so much to revive and consolidate Trotsky’s reputation as an important Marxist theorist, in addition to that of revolutionary strategist.

 

M. Ryan Noble

 

Trotsky first formulated this concept in 1930, in the first chapter of his The History of the Russian Revolution in order to explain in greater detail the conditions of possibility for a particular revolutionary scenario, that of permanent revolution, which he had first proposed twenty-five years earlier in relation to Russia. In this scenario, capitalist relations of production had been established and were perhaps even in the process of becoming dominant, but the bourgeois revolution had still to be accomplished. The existence of a militant working class however, made the bourgeoisie unwilling to launch such a revolution on their own behalf, for fear that it would get out of their control. The working class, on the other hand, could accomplish the revolution against the pre-capitalist state which the bourgeoisie itself was no longer prepared to undertake and–in Trotsky’s version of permanent revolution at any rate–move directly to the construction of socialism, providing of course that it occurred within the context of a successful international revolutionary movement. For the purposes of this discussion, however, what The Warwick Research Collective (WReC) refer to as “the cultural aspects of Trotsky’s initiating formulation concerning the ‘amalgamation of archaic with more contemporary forms’[2] is most relevant. But, as WReC rightly observes, these initially received little attention–certainly in comparison with interest levels in UCD as a theoretical tool for understanding International Relations and the social and political sciences more generally.

The contemporary debate over UCD began with Justin Rosenberg’s 1995 Deutscher Memorial Prize Lecture.[3]  Since then, opinion among the growing body of those who find the concept useful has broadly divided in two, with both sides able to claim varying degrees support from Trotsky’s writings. One sees uneven and combined development as a process which only became possible during the imperialist era of capitalism, usually seen as beginning in the Great Depression of the 1870s, when geopolitical rivalry and colonial expansion partially extended industrialisation from the metropolitan centres to what we now call the Global South.  The other sees it as a transhistorical or transmodal process which can be found throughout human history, although some adherents of this position accept that it only achieved a truly systematic character during the late nineteenth century. 

While few discussions of modernism initially attempted to relate it explicitly to Trotsky’s concept, one critic who did so was Greenberg, providing us with a direct link to the previous part of this article. In a late interview from 1969 he invokes combined development in a discussion of how New York took over from Paris as the world centre of Modernist painting in the 1940s:

…we Americans felt so much further behind the French, or behind Paris, that we tried much harder to catch up – just catch up. Then what Marx called the law of combined development came into operation: the strenuous effort you make to catch up sends you ahead in the end; you don’t just catch up, you overtake. A dozen or so American artists did make an extraordinary effort in the 1940s in order to keep abreast of Paris–and then the next thing you knew, they were taking the lead away from Paris. This became evident by the early 1950s. I say this without any chauvinist feeling whatsoever.”[4]

In fact, Marx had no theory of combined development and the process to which Greenberg refers (‘catch up and overtake’) is in any case an example of what might be called ‘simple’ uneven development.

There are two problems with Greenberg’s argument. One is that he doesn’t explain why New York artists were driven to ‘catch up and overtake’ their Parisian contemporaries. The second, and more important in the context of this discussion, is that it does not explain why modernist approaches to art arose, or from what they originated. What in other words were the conditions that made this form of cultural/artistic expression possible? One answer, to which I alluded in the second part of this article is that modernism is what Frederic Jameson calls ‘a cultural logic’ associated with a particular phase of capitalism. However, as I argued in Part 2, there are extreme difficulties in identifying phases of capitalist development. In my view, Modernism is not the product of a period of capitalist development but rather an ongoing process. UCD arises when what I am calling capitalist modernity, i.e. the eruption of industrialisation and urbanisation into societies which were formerly underdeveloped, with primarily rural populations and agrarian economies, dominated by traditional cultural forms. The existence of uneven development depends on formerly undeveloped societies seeing both the possibility and the means of achieving the levels of development previously attained in the developed capitalist world.

 

Jackson Pollock making his drip paintings.

 

If we return to Trotsky’s own work, then – as we saw in Part 2 - he was sympathetic to at least some expressions of modernism; he was also alert to the relationship between modernism and the experience of capitalist modernity particularly in its urban form, as in these remarks on Futurism: “Urbanism (city culture) sits deep in the subconscious of Futurism, and the epithets, the etymology, the syntax and the rhythm of Futurism are only an attempt to give artistic form to the new spirit of the cities which has conquered consciousness.”[5] The city which most embodied what Trotsky called ‘urbanism’ was New York, where he lived in exile during the First World War down to the outbreak of The Russian Revolution.

It is worth quoting Trotsky directly on the subject,  for, while he does not attempt to apply his theory directly, his description of the city as a kind of embodiment of modernity highlights the way modernism is not simply a collection of artistic or cultural practices, but an environment in which those practices make sense as part of modernity: 

Here I was in New York, city of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automatism, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city in the world, it is the fullest expression of our modern age. [6] 

It is worth reading Trotsky’s discussion of New York alongside a similar reflection in John Doss Passos’s near contemporaneous novel, Manhattan Transfer [7]: both books capture what the critic Greil Marcus refers to as ‘a riot of modernism’. [8]

Trotsky did not, however, explicitly link modernism as a general movement with uneven and combined development except in a handful of passing comments. Reporting on the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 he wrote: “Like all backward countries, Bulgaria is incapable of creating new political and cultural forms through a free struggle of its own inner forces: it is obliged to assimilate the ready-made cultural products that European civilization has developed in the course of history.” However, in addition to referencing technological and political forms, Trotsky then goes on to mention “other spheres”: “Bulgarian literature lacks traditions, and has not been able to develop its own internal continuity. It has had to subordinate its unfermented content to modern and contemporary forms created under a quite different cultural zenith.”[9]  Ten years later, he similarly noted how “the backward countries which were without any special degree of spiritual culture, reflected in their ideology the achievements of the advanced countries more brilliantly and strongly”. Eighteenth and nineteenth century German philosophy was one example of this, but so too was Futurism, “which obtained its most brilliant expression, not in America and not in Germany, but in Italy and Russia”. [10]

Trotsky was not alone in seeing the possibilities for Russia to avoid supposedly necessary stages of development; but those who shared his vision tended not to belong to the ranks of his fellow-Marxists, but to be among the community of modernist writers and artists whose work–as we shall see below–was in many ways a response to, or cultural expression of, uneven and combined development. In his novel Petersburg, completed on the eve of 1917, Andrei Biely  wrote of Russia needing to accomplish ‘a leap over history’[11] in order to escape the tensions caused by its multiple temporalities, even though he envisaged this occurring in quite a different way than Trotsky did. 

From my perspective, UCD is not only a process confined to backward or underdeveloped areas within the structured inequalities of imperialism, as the modernist position tends to assume, but one universally generated by the intrusion of capitalist modernity, in other words since the beginnings of capitalist industrialisation and urbanisation in Europe, North America and Japan. If so, then all societies which have undergone the impact of factories and cities–with the exception of the very few which underwent the transition to capitalism before these processes began–have experienced uneven and combined development to some degree. The differences between them would therefore primarily be the political context in which UCD occurred, above all whether the state was capitalist or pre-capitalist in nature. 

 

Julie Mehreu mural in the lobby of Goldman Sachs.

 

Modernism must be seen then, not as a conjunctural moment in the history of capitalism, but as a form of artistic production generated by the triumph of capitalism as the globally dominant socio-economic system. The significance of 1848, in this perspective, is not the failure of the revolutions of that year, but as a marker indicating when that system became definitively established. If the argument of this article and related texts is correct, however, then the form taken by that triumph was precisely the sudden onrush of capitalist modernity into long-established pre-capitalist societies: modernism is not the cultural logic of monopoly capitalism, but of uneven and combined development, which is one of the reasons why countries as politically distinct as Italy and Russia could both manifest such similar versions prior to the First World War. Modernism is the way in which the experience of that transformation has been transmitted and understood through culture. In this interpretation, modernism would appear not as a set of artistic practices related to the historic decline of the bourgeoisie – or indeed to the fortunes of any particular class – but to the contemporary reality of class society itself; the rhythms of capitalist industrialisation, the stimuli associated with urban life and the patterns of social conflict during the epoch of Classical Imperialism – an epoch which, like modernism itself, apparently climaxed in the mid-Twentieth century, as the Second World War gave way to the great Post-War Boom and a truly global capitalist economy emerged for the first time. 

The impact of uneven and combined development in the West began some decades earlier than in Russia, but for the most part, and in most cases, occurs contemporaneously. In one sense therefore, the early Greenberg was correct, Marxism and modernism arose at the same time as different responses to that epochal moment. Far from modernism as a whole being exhausted, it seems more appropriate to say that the particular art forms in which it originally made its mark have become exhausted and the impetus for artistic renewal moved elsewhere.

Endotes

[1] Neil Davidson:

[2] Warwick Research Collective, ‘World Literature in the Context of Uneven and Combined Development’, in Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 6.
[3] Published as Justin Rosenberg, Isaac Deutscher and the Lost History of International Relations, New Left Review, 1/215: 314-16.
[4] Clement Greenberg [1969] interview conducted by Lily Leino, in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol.4 Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969, 304-5.
[5] Leon D. Trotsky [1923], Literature and Revolution (London: Bookmarks, 1991), 195.
[6] Leon D Trotsky [1930] My Life: An Attempt at An Autobiography (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), 281.
[7] John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer [1925] (Harmondsworth: Penguin books, 2000).
[8] Greil Marcus The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (London, Faber and Faber, 2006) 48-9.
[9] Leon D. Trotsky [1912], ‘In a Backward Country’, in The Balkan Wars, 1912-13: The War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky (New York: Monad Press, 1980), 49.
[10] Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 158.
[11] Biely, Andrei [1913-16], Petersburg, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1983), 65.

Neil Davidson is the author of several books, among them We Cannot Escape History, Holding Fast to an Image of the Past, and How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? His 2003 book Discovering the Scottish Revolution was awarded the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. He lectures in sociology at the University of Glasgow and is on the editorial board of rs21. Social media splash image by M. Ryan Noble.