cupation with the question of tendency. Demanding that all true artreflect the
contradictions of the age, including art in capitalist societies, he asserted that,
“the proletarian work of art alone is capable of doing that.And for that reason,
onlythe latter can becomeatrue work of art.Itistendency.”²³ForWittfogel, two
powerful historical forces, the accumulation of capital and the heroism of the
proletariat,had produced conditions befitting Hegel’sdescription ofaheroic
agedistinguished by great art and great men.Aware of the transformative
power of art especiallyunder such circumstances, he defended contemporary ef-
forts to createaproletarian culture before the advent of the revolution by com-
paring its beginningsunder capitalism to those of bourgeois cultureunder feu-
dalism.²⁴“The proletarian work of art,unlike the bourgeois one, does not have to
be ashamed of its tendency,”he concluded:“On the contrary,itbecomes an orig-
inal, great,and true work of art simplybygiving expression to fundamental and
essentialclass experiences and class positions (always:inthe sphere of sense
perception) and simplybypossessing the courageofproletarian tendency.”²⁵
GeorgLukács’scontributionstoDie Linkskurveofferamorenuancedreiter-
ation ofWittfogel’sbasic argument,beginning with the reframingofthe problem
of modernism in light of his own earlier theoretization, inHistoryand Class Con-
sciousness,of the proletariat as the true subject of history.Publishedin1932,
“Tendency or Partiality?”marks the culmination ofalong debate on proletarian
culturethat, especiallygiven its underlying assumptions about political emo-
tions, can be traced back to the so-called tendentious art debate from the
early1910s. Thisdebate will thereforebeusedonthe remainingpages to draw
attention to the similarities and continuities between SPD and KPD positions
on socialist literature and proletarian culture, despite the obvious differences be-
tween theirrespectivemodels ofGemeinschaftskulturundKampfkultur.²⁶Primar-
Karl August Wittfogel,“Noch einmal zurFrageeiner marxistischen Ästhetik,”Die Linkskurve
2.10 (1930):22.
Karl August Wittfogel,“Entwicklungsstufen undWirkungskraft proletarisch-revolutionärer
Kulturarbeit,”Die Linkskurve3.1(1931): 17 – 23.
Wittfogel,“Noch einmal zurFrageeiner marxistischen Ästhetik,” 22 – 23.
GeorgLukács,“Tendenz oder Parteilichkeit?,”Die Linkskurve4.6(1932): 13–21,inEnglish as
“‘Tendency’or Partisanship?,”inEssaysonRealism,ed. Rodney Livingstone(Cambridge:MIT
Press, 1981), 33 – 44.For the largercontext, see David Pike,Lukács and Brecht(Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 1985), especiallythe chapter onBerlin; and Eugene Lunn,Marx-
ism andModernism: An Historical Study of Lukács,Brecht,Benjamin, andAdorno(Berkeley:Uni-
versity of California Press, 1984). The keytext here is“Erzählenoder Beschreiben?,”reprinted as
“Narrate or Describe?,”inWriter and Critic andOther Essays,ed. and trans. ArthurKahn (Lon-
don: Merlin Press,1970), 110–148. Brecht,Bloch, and Benjamin continued to debatethe polit-
ical, aesthetic, and emotionallegacies of modernism under the conditions of exile (i.e., in rela-
266 Chapter14