Tretyakov is really an interesting example …

Interviewee: Grant Kester

Tretyakov is really an interesting example. On the one hand you have this desire to challenge the division of labour and to appeal to a concept of concrete practice over the abstractions of theory. The writers have to go to the countryside to learn about the working class, because our material reality informs our consciousness, and they have acquired their knowledge of the world through an artificial, class-based experiential separation. You see that in Maoism as well. Mao early on produced some interesting writing on the relationship between theory and practice and he talks about how important it is for the intelligentsia to understand the nature of class struggle through an immersive experience. In fact I think when Mao was a librarian in Beijing in the 1930s he came across the work of John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher, and there are some people who suggest that Dewey had an influence on Mao’s early writings. So you have this positive desire to break down some of the divisions between intellectual analysis and practice, but then it goes horribly wrong when you start to round up the artists and writers and send them to the collective farm for forced “re-education”. For me that history, unfortunate though it is, doesn’t mean you give up entirely on the need to critique these divisions, because they continue to plague us.