Lenin’s Thoughts on Attitude Towards Traditional Culture and Foreign Culture

Lenin’s remarks on the correct attitude to be held toward traditional and foreign cultures.

The construction of socialist culture depends on the practical experience of the struggles of the proletariat and the masses, and also requires a correct approach to traditional and foreign cultures, including drawing the best elements from all the best cultural achievements of humankind. With regard to traditional and foreign cultures, Lenin’s basic attitude was as follows: (1) Adherence to the view of critical inheritance under the guidance of Marxism. Marxism does not discard the most valuable achievements of the bourgeois era , on the contrary, Marxism advocates absorbing and refashioning everything of value in the more than two thousand years of the development of human thought and culture. Lenin emphasized: only further work on this basis and in this direction, inspired by the practical experience of the proletarian dictatorship as the final stage in the struggle against every form of exploitation, can be recognized as the development of a genuine proletarian culture. Furthermore, we must reject in the most resolute manner, as theoretically unsound and practically harmful, all attempts to invent one’s own particular brand of culture, to remain isolated in self-contained organizations, to draw a line dividing the field of work of the People’s Commissariat of Education and the Proletcult, or to set up a Proletcult “autonomy” within establishments under the People’s Commissariat of Education and so forth. (2) To carry forward outstanding cultural traditions in accordance with the requirements  of the times. Proletarian culture could not be clutched out of thin air; it is not an invention of those who call themselves experts in proletarian culture, it must be the logical development of the store of knowledge mankind has accumulated under the yoke of capitalist “landlord and bureaucratic society”. The development here is based on mastering all of them, absorbing them, but distinguishing the good from the bad, removing the mean and vulgar from the fine aspects, and transforming and innovating them according to the Marxist worldview and the conditions and requirements of the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat, in order to promote the development of socialist society. (3) Oppose nihilism and narrow nationalism in culture. Before the October Revolution, opposing the slogan of “national culture” raised by the Russian liberal bourgeoisie, Lenin fought resolutely against narrow cultural nationalism, and pointed out: The elements of democratic and socialist culture are present, if only in rudimentary form, in every national culture, since in every nation there are toiling and exploited masses, whose conditions of life inevitably give rise to the ideology of democracy and socialism. But every nation also possesses a bourgeois culture (and most nations a reactionary and clerical culture as well) in the form, not merely of “elements”, but of the dominant culture. Lenin made a clear distinction here between the democratic and socialist cultures of the exploited working masses and the bourgeois culture of the exploiting class, and advocated a different attitude toward these two cultures. It is then necessary to synthesize and assimilate the best of each national culture that is conducive to the development of democracy and socialism to form a new thought for the development of the workers’ movement. Furthermore, an attitude of elimination should be adopted towards what reflected the interests and demands of the exploiting class in the bourgeois culture. After the October Revolution, in response to the nihilistic and erroneous view of the Proletkultists who advocated the abandonment of all previous cultures and the creation of a so-called unique culture of the proletariat itself, Lenin acutely pointed out that this was the mentality of the inhabitant of Central Africa. Then, the only socialism we can imagine is the one that would be based on all the lessons learned through large-scale capitalist culture. Lenin pointedly stressed that socialism “cannot be won without learning to make use of bourgeois culture”. In short, he argued that both traditional and foreign cultures should be analyzed historically and comprehensively, treated selectively, critically inherited, developed and be innovated for the purpose of constructing a socialist culture.