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p According to the ideologists of the radical Left (whose theories find particularly clear expression in the writings of Marcuse and Sartre) the discovery of the feasibility of Utopias and the advocacy of Utopianism as a principle of historical creativity presupposes that the imagination of the active subject be without fail liberated, for it is precisely imagination which is capable of taking (or transcending) him outside the confines of society as he finds it, where to use Marcuse’s expression, which echoes Freud, the "reality principle" reigns. Viewed in this way imagination links together politics and aesthetics constituting simultaneously an ar- , tistic category and a category of political thought. Marcuse declares: "If now, in the rebellion of the young intelligen- , tsia, the right and the truth of the imagination become the demands of political action, if surrealistic forms of protest , and refusal spread throughout the movement, this apparently insignificant development may indicate a fundamental change in the situation. The political protest, assuming a total character, reaches into a dimension, which, as aesthetic di- ’ mension, has been essentially apolitical. And the political protest activates in this dimension precisely the foundational, organic elements: the human sensibility which rebels 149 against the dictates of repressive reason and, in doing so, invokes the sensuous power of the imagination.”  [149•* 

p In actual fact the link between Utopia, as a specific form of project for freedom, and the imagination is predetermined by the very inner nature of Utopia. Utopia stands as it were on the borderline between science and art. While science is based on categories and develops on a basis of rational, logical analysis of actual trends of social development, and art is concerned with aesthetic (i. e. sensuous) images, Utopia is born as a blend of the logical and the aesthetic, the rational and the sensuous. Utopia is an attempt to convince the members of society of the solubility of problems which either appear insoluble or whose solution appears as the province of an inconceivably distant future, an attempt stemming more often than not from dissatisfaction with the existing state of affairs, from an emotional rejection of existing social relations, which could find no outlet in analysis of real trends of social development. The framework of scientific analysis is too narrow for it and the force of emotional negation is too great for it to be calmly contained within the domain of logical questing.

p Plekhanov in his commentaries on the work of Ferdinand Lassalle noted that socialist Utopias of the first half of the nineteenth century were not only the fruit of free imagination and the emotions but also appealed directly to the emotions and the imagination: it was not accidental that preoccupation with Utopian conceptions usually coincided with periods of intellectual exhaustion, "disappointment of hopes and expectations”.  [149•**  Utopianism thus can be seen not merely to be rooted in emotions and imagination but in its turn to appeal above all to emotions and the imagination.

p The significance which the radical Left attributes to imagination in its socio-political aspect can be deduced from the slogans brought out in the May events of 1968, slogans which represented political principles and summarised political programmes, as for example, "Let imagination take over!" or "Be realists—demand the impossible!”

p The very appeal to the imagination as a political category 150 was linked by the members of the protest movements with the anti-conformist outlook, with the realisation—albeit still vague—that the prosperity of the bourgeois world was an illusory prosperity. The point is that the problem of imagination becomes a particularly acute one in critical social situations. When Kant turned to the problem of imagination, he was speaking out not as philosopher attempting to come to terms with the dichotomy of empiricism and rationalism, but as a contemporary of the French Revolution, as a representative of Germany which the bourgeois revolution had by-passed, but which felt urgent need for revolution. In that situation the problem of imagination confronted Kant as the problem of the rational substantiation for the activity of the subject, the problem of the "call to action", a call expressed in the language of idealistic philosophy.

p It is hardly surprising that today, when a crisis of bourgeois values is clearly upon us and the need for social activisation in making itself urgently felt, the problem of imagination occupies an important place in the thought of the members of the protest movements.

p Of course rank-and-file members of the radical Left who intuitively sensed the topicality of this problem were hardly equipped to clarify in distinct terms what the significance of the call for a reign of the imagination really was. Marcuse and Sartre attempted to explain that which was not entirely clear even to the authors of the May slogans, all the more so since the problem of imagination had occupied a definite place in their creative work long before the student unrest.

p For the ideologists of the radical Left imagination acquires significance as a specific faculty of consciousness embodying the function which takes us outside the limits of reality with regard to existing but unreasonable reality which is subject to negation, a faculty of consciousness immune to the "reality principle" which rules the bourgeois world and oppresses man, a faculty which gives man access to a Utopian as yet non-existent world. Imagination begets the Marcusian Great Refusal and Sartre’s “nothingness”. In his Eros and Civilization Marcuse writes: "Under the reality principle, the human being develops the function of reason: it learns to ‘test’ the reality, to distinguish between good and 151 bad, true and false, useful and harmful. Man acquires the faculties of attention, memory, and judgment. He becomes a conscious, thinking subject, geared to rationality which is imposed upon him from outside. Only one mode of thought activity is ’split off’ from the new organization of the mental apparatus and remains free from the rule of the reality principle: phantasy is ’protected from cultural alterations’ and stays committed to the pleasure principle.”  [151•*  Since the " reality principle" in this specific positivist interpretation upholds the status quo, imagination from Marcuse’s point of view appears as the only intellectual faculty possessed of real critical power: it bridges the gap between possibility and reality, art and politics, projection and action.

p Marcuse stresses that only the Utopian world conceived by the free imagination can become a real world, and that imagination is capable of standing up and saying “No” to the world based on the "reality principle", while for the “integrated” individual all paths to the "realm of freedom" are closed. Sartre in his turn maintains that “imagination” having become a psychological and empirical function, is the necessary condition for the liberty of empirical man in the midst of society.  [151•**  It is in the imagination that negation of the world takes place, which reveals the real world to be non-free, the negation of the determinism that fetters the individual and the birth of a new unreal world in which man attempts to realise his freedom.

p This means that for the ideologists of the radical Left within the framework of modern state-monopoly organisation, where the ultimate goal is the total manipulation of men’s minds and everything possible is done to assure that creative imagination is suppressed, brought down to earth and placed at the service of the irrational technological order, imagination emerges as the only nonintegrated faculty, although it too is exposed to danger.  [151•*** 

p In the protest movement of the younger generation these ideologists perceived the sudden emergence of a possibility for the "Liberation of imagination", when imagination might 152 find an outlet in projections of new social morals and new free institutions and be able to say its “No” to the existing world as unreasonable and illusory. Sartre stated to CohnBendit that the interesting fact about his activity and that of [his fellow-protestors was that it ushered in the rule of imagination: while Sartre and his contemporaries had been brought up to have a clear idea of what was possible and what was impossible, Bendit’s contemporaries’ imagination seemed far richer and the slogans they wrote on the walls of the Sorbonne Sartre saw as a demonstration of this. He _} maintained that the militant students had given society ; something new, a something that astonished, disturbed and negated all that had made society what it is today.  [152•* 

p Of course the formation of revolutionary consciousness constitutes a departure beyond the limits of actually existing I relations and an ideal arrangement of new socio-political structures. Imagination comes into its own in projects for ’ a new set of social morals and new freedoms, provided it itself is free. The vital question here however is how to define freedom of imagination and where to plot the dividing line between freedom of imagination and subjective arbitrariness or non-freedom. It is precisely in their solution for this question that the theoretical vulnerability of Marcuse’s and Sartre’s view of imagination comes into the open (and the practical untenability that stems from this vulnerability), vulnerability which is rooted in "negative dialectics”.

p For the "negative dialectician" of the radical Left social reality is a monolith which must be totally destroyed, subjected to total negation as something thoroughly corrupt and therefore worthy of only one fate—ruin. In his frenzy of total negation he does not notice the internal fragmentation and unmonolithic nature of social reality, he overlooks the action of other essentially socialist forces that have taken shape in the fabric of capitalist society, and rejects the existence of another world, in which socialism finds its true incarnation.

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p This radical-negative approach also determines the way in which Marcuse and Sartre interpret imagination based on the absolutisation of its function designed to detract attention from reality. The revolutionary character of imagination is deduced here from its capacity for building a “free” ideal world fundamentally different from the “non-free” actually existing world. Yet at the same time the revolutionary character of imagination is reduced to the Great Refusal, that is to the perpetuation of the gulf that separates the “radiant” world of the imagination from the “dark” real world, to categoric negation of the latter. Admittedly both Sartre and Marcuse view this negation as a converted form of affirmation, for the unreal is affirmed in the capacity of “nothingness” through its being opposed to the real world: for the centaur to appear unreal it is necessary for the world to be apprehended as centaur-less (Sartre). However this in no way changes the issue: freedom of imagination still remains limited by its capacity for negation, for postulating “nothingness”, for the freeing of the subject from the power of images foisted upon him by the given reality as untrue reality and for the destruction of prevailing necessity as obsolete.

p The orientation of the subject of the historical process to the surmounting of that necessity, the emphasis of its relativity and mutability, of the untenability of possible claims for this necessity’s extra-temporal significance constitute for all intents and purposes the inner need for free imagination. The object of imagination cannot be viewed other than as actually (materially) non-existent (not subject to determinism of the existing world or its laws).

p However since imagination is regarded as the only thing which is capable of wresting the protesting individual from the claws of determinism of the given world, existing social reality, and of opening for him the "gates^of freedom", that is since it is being made subject to absolutisation, the radical Left therefore turns it into a tool for the liberation of the individual from determinism in general, from his subordination to any laws or any necessity. Leaving the individual alone with an imagined world cleansed from reality, that is alone with himself, they cast him to the mercy of fate forcing him to seek a path into the real world of men in an 154 equally arbitrary fashion. Yet arbitrariness is no more than illusory freedom, namely blindness. "Arbitrary action as such—whether it be in real life or only on an imaginary plane, a plane of fantasy—can never even for a single moment escape beyond the framework of objective determination. The tragedy of arbitrariness, that mistakenly conceives of itself as free, lies in the fact that always and everywhere it is the slave of immediate, external petty circumstances and the force of their pressure on our minds.”  [154•*  “Absolute” freedom of the imagination results in complete non-freedom of the individual as soon as he sets foot on the sinful earth, that is as soon as his “pure”, fantasy-orientated imagination makes claims to practical value.

p Freedom (including freedom of the imagination) is always the result of the dialectical interaction of necessity that makes or rather “creates” man what he is, and necessity created by man as the subject of the historical process from material of the existing, historically shaped, tangible world. Thus free imagination that continues to negate must at the same time be affirmative (determining) and in this contradictoriness of its functions must embrace and establish the transition of the old actually existing world into the new formative world.

p Strictly speaking the imagination cannot in any way be absolutely free for the simple reason that it is not something outside the cognitive process.  [154•**  The object of the imagination accepted as something actually (materially) nonexistent nevertheless never completely loses its links with the real world, does not come completely outside the scope of its laws. Despite the unreal structure of all that is imaginary its elements are for the most part images that correspond to real objects. Imagination cannot be separated from the subject of imagination, from the imaginer who is an utterly real individual inhabiting not the heavens but the actual existing world and linked to it by a thousand threads, and 155 therefore constantly determined in his action (including his cognitive action) by that world. Although its role in relation to the real world is a negative one, imagination is positive in relation to the activity of actual consciousness. As it negates the necessity that prevails in the real world, imagination at the same time constructs another necessity, other laws—laws and necessity of a structure which it itself creates.  [155•*  However this function of the imagination which makes it free "for itself" does not make it free in relation to the real world: for the "law of the centaur" is an arbitrary “law” from the point of view of modern science, and, it follows, nonsense from the point of view of practical reason. For freedom of the imagination to acquire practical value there has to be a correspondence  [155•**  between the other necessity and the other law constructed by the imagination on which the imaginary is based, and the objective laws and objective necessity which have established themselves in the real world and are linked with the inner logic of the historical process. Otherwise the imagination will never gain access to the sphere of practical reason and will remain Utopian.

p This kind of correspondence can be achieved only if the imagination is concentrated on real objects and made subordinate to specific goals, and moreover not an arbitrary goal but one which follows on from the objective logic of development. In view of this freedom of imagination just as freedom of action as such cannot be separated from the goal of that activity. In the aesthetic imagination and particularly clearly in the domain of art this goal takes the form of an “ideal”, that is “beauty” or “harmony”.

p It is essential to point out that the “ideal” or “beauty” determines the nature of the aims pursued not only in art, but also in other spheres of human activity  [155•***  including that 156 of socio-political creativity, except that “beauty” constitutes here a socio-political ideal, an ideal of perfect human relations and a system of social institutions for the regulation of those relations.

p The question as to the socio-political ideal and the means for its realisation emerges however as one of the most “ awkward” for the theoretician of the radical Left who starts out from the negative-dialectical standpoint. In principle he, like any other Utopian has nothing against social ideals, but he is resolutely opposed to formulating projects for their realisation in accordance with the real development of existing society, and to linking that process with the dynamics of concrete social forces and the solution of concrete political tasks. On what real project for the realisation of the ideal should the imagination focus, he asks, if all such projects have proved integrated into the system of "repressive values" peculiar to the existing society; if sensuousness cannot be free, receptive to everything which lies beyond the limits of repression; if the very socio-political language in which the project and the ideal are formulated has become a false language? Marcuse comments, that the present situation "gives all efforts to evaluate and even discuss the prospects for radical change in the domain of corporate capitalism their abstract, academic unreal character. The search for specific historical agents of revolutionary change in the advanced capitalist countries is indeed meaningless.”  [156•*  In these conditions if imagination is at all capable of putting forward any positive alternative for the destroyed necessity, then only in a spirit of abstract ethical constructions or Utopian fancies linked to existing reality in so far as they represent its complete opposite.

p An approach such as this is based on the “either-or” principle so typical of the extremist: either formulation of a concrete alternative to existing necessity, or (if it is out of the question) a rejection of all possible attempts to discern the contours of future society and unlimited freedom of imagination.

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p In actual fact concrete social reality cannot be “found” outside the confines of actual political practice nor can the structure of the new society be simply “discovered” a priori as something that is immediately and entirely revealed to the imaginative consciousness. In real historical creativity, the end products of which can be divined with only a limited degree of probability, necessity is born (of objective possibility) in the process of men’s practical activity. From this point of view the revolution constitutes a transition from one necessity to another—a transition which is not straightforward since it is shaped in a struggle between forces moulded in the course of the historical process. Historical activity that engenders new social reality is on the one hand directed towards a definite historically conditioned ideal, and on the other based on an analysis of existing relations within the given society. Furthermore, throughout the whole process of historical action the imaginary and the real interact with each other, modifying and shaping each other. Imagination cannot and should not make a break either with reality or with strategic social ideals of the relevant class. It serves to single out and define the ever growing range of objective possibilities  [157•* , some of which are brought to fruition, while others are dropped in the course of historical progress. The definition of this range of possibilities linked with the historically conditioned ideal constitutes the basic function of imagination in its capacity as a revolutionary tool.

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p Imagination as interpreted by Marcuse and Sartre fulfils a function that is quite different; it is not a tool of revolution but a kind of mechanism of psychological defence used by man in this world to protect himself from that world and from himself, a member of that world. To be more precise it protects him from his own “censor”, public censor transposed to his own consciousness. The imagination that takes man outside the domain of the establishment into the wide spaces of “non-being” is mythical. While rejecting Sartre’s and Marcuse’s concept of imagination it is important not to overlook that their very treatment of the question as a necessary precondition for revolutionary-critical activity deserves careful attention.

p Marxism presupposes the study of the historical process, including the results of the social subject’s creative activity which embraces both the aesthetic (or sensuous) dimension as art, and the formation of revolutionary consciousness—as a departure beyond the confines of given, actually existing relations and values, a projection of new social structures and cultural forms.  [158•*  Moreover, the link between historical creativity (in particular, in the form of revolution) and the imagination is shaped by the fact that this creativity is also an aesthetic phenomenon serving to embody the unity of sensuous-practical activity and artistic creation subject to laws for creating the beautiful.

p As a matter of fact, revolution for those who participate in it is a living process created and apprehended by the participants as corresponding to the historically evolved structure of their sensuousness and to norms including aesthetic ones of the culture in which they were brought up.  [158•**  As it 159 destroys the old order, social revolution inevitably confronts its popular rank-and-file participant—and social revolution is of necessity popular—with the question of the new order, its nature and forms, the methods for evolving these as a mode of that participant’s own future existence. In so far as the individual is only able to form a more or less clear picture of what will become of him, after envisaging what will become of society, he must wrest himself free of the confines of his individual horizon and project in his imagination a picture of the world of the future. Wright Mills points out with good reason in The Sociological Imagination that "the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period ,. . he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances. ... The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society.”  [159•*  Yet the mass participant in the historical action is no theoretician, and therefore in the context of revolution he carries out that task not only with the help of purely intellectual effort, but cultural forms also play an important part and it is through their mediation that the mass participant in revolution can reach beyond the confines of the “given” world and become part of the "social cosmos", thereby establishing contact with other people.

p Since the revolution is apprehended as liberation, naturally the individual’s activity appears linked with such forms of popular culture as are traditionally associated by the masses with liberation, that is with festive culture and a carnival approach to the surrounding world.

p It is interesting to note in this respect that the ideologists of the radical Left as they analyse various forms of the youth revolt and in particular the action taken by students and intellectuals in France in May and June, 1968 underlined precisely this festive, carnival aspect. Marcuse gave an 160 ecstatic description of the "youth festival" on the streets of Paris in the spring of 1968: "the hatred of the young bursts into laughter and song, mixing the barricade and the dance floor, love play and heroism.”  [160•*  As Michel Ragon was later to note, the May revolution once more brought out the hallowed meaning of festival, the spectacle of life and death, unfolded banners and placards.

p However, while emphasising the festive aspect of movements for social liberation Marcuse and many other theorists of the radical Left link it with revolt, as the free embodiment of the negating function of imagination, a spontaneous movement disrupting all forms of political organisation, sensuous and moral catharsis, self-expression for the individual that cannot be held back by anything and which leads to the liberation of the “slave” of industrial society. As the opposite of spontaneous revolt socialist revolution in its Marxist “version” is viewed by the radicals as a phenomenon that contrasts sharply with any liberation-carnival, as a gloomily ascetic, profoundly “organised”, “bureaucratic” undertaking, as a form of repression in comparison with spontaneous uninhibited self-expression of the masses. The contrasting of anarchistic revolt with the Marxist vision of revolution asks for criticism, and in this respect it is important to single out the real link between festival and revolution, between socio-political and aesthetic liberation, to indicate the significance of the festival as a form of revolutionary action, an essential condition for man’s free existence, as an important form of human culture.

p The festival with all its attributes has by tradition always constituted (and continues to constitute today) an integral element of that part of culture which is linked in the people’s consciousness with liberation, with the "unbending of the soul". "The festival (of any kind) is a very important primary form of human culture... . The festival always possessed a substantial and profound meaning and philosophical content ... no ’play at work’ and no rest or breathing-space during work can in themselves ever become festive. In order for them to become festive they need the addition of something from another sphere of being, from the intellectual or 161 ideological sphere. They must be granted a sanction not from the world of means and necessary conditions, but from the world of supreme goals for man’s existence, that is from the world of ideals.”  [161•* 

p It is for example no accident that in the Middle Ages in contrast to official festivities, which "affirmed the stability and unchanging endurance of the whole of the existing world order", the popular festival in the form of the carnival "celebrated as it were temporary liberation from prevailing truth and the existing order.... Man returned to himself and apprehended himself as a man among men. This genuine humaneness of relations was not only the fruit of imagination or abstract thought, but really came into its own and was experienced in living contact of a material, sensuous character. The ideal Utopian element and reality were temporarily one in that unique carnival experience.”  [161•** 

p The festival always appears linked with laughter as the great cleansing and destructive force, with the grotesque (in which are united elements that from the official point of view are completely incompatible viewed either artistically or politically), with a blending of all planes of the existing social structure. Let us recall that grotesque was a characteristic trait of the May movement in France giving rise to bewilderment and the same applies to many revolts staged by American students that strike the ordinary man- inthe-street as first and foremost extravagant, since he has been brought up on the official conception of “decency”. The festive, carnival outlook destroys the limits of seriousness and all claims to the eternal importance and unquestioned acceptability of concepts of present-day necessity and liberates human consciousness, thought and imagination for new possibilities.  [161•*** 

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p In the conditions pertaining in industrial capitalist Europe, and America still more so, the traditions of popular carnival have inevitably undergone substantial changes in comparison with previous centuries. However the spirit of the popular liberation-festival as the expression of the people’s opposition to all that is dogmatic, stagnant and official seems unshakeable. This spirit now moulded in modern forms, obligingly proffered by the predominant culture, today often takes the form of social movements directed against that order which is sanctified by official custom and the law. However it is in no way alien to the popular revolution led by the proletariat, just as the festive consciousness of the popular revolution is not alien to Marxist social science.

p In the works of Marcuse and other ideologues of the radical Left the link between social liberation and the festive spirit assumes a morbid, surrealist form, as an outrageous form of revolt, the very antipode of revolution. They contrast organisation with anarchic Bacchanalia, the positive goal, at which revolution should be aimed, with sheer negation embodied in revolt. However the latter represents the embodiment of a movement such as can be lent reactionary political content, since it is not determined by any historic goal outside itself, a moral or political ideal with which revolution is always associated.

p Revolution is, incontestably, something most important, and cannot of course be reduced to a festival or folk carnival: yet despite all its serious aspects any revolution, and above all socialist revolution, is a festival of the liberation of the whole people which incorporates elements of moral and aesthetic catharsis, although it cannot be confined to these.

p Lenin referred to the socialist revolution as the "festival of the working people" and saw its social significance not only in political change, not only in the economic transformation of society, but also in the regeneration, the “ unbending” of the oppressed worker, in his "awakening to a new 163 life"  [163•* : this awakening would be such as to render the festival the permanent inner dimension of man’s existence.

p This popular festival of liberation fulfils therefore an important revolutionary function, making the mass of participants in the revolution deliberately involve themselves in social transformation. It is no accident therefore that examination of revolution (and insurrection as a factor of revolution) as an art constitutes one of the traditions of Marxism, traditions which had to be defended in a staunch struggle with opportunist purists. Lenin wrote in this connection: "One of the most vicious and probably most widespread distortions of Marxism resorted to by the dominant ‘socialist’ parties is the opportunist lie that preparation for insurrection, and generally the treatment of insurrection as an art, is ‘Blanquism’.”  [163•** 

p This same idea is expressed by Engels in his Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany: ".. .insurrection is an art quite as much as war or any other.”  [163•***  It is perfectly clear that when talking of insurrection as an art, Lenin and Engels had no intention of identifying it with artistic activity: the point emphasised here is the need to be able to seize on that particular moment of historical development, when circumstances have taken shape in such a way as best to favour the implementation of the task in hand, and the need for the skill to organise and carry out the task in hand in such a way as to ensure success. If it is borne in mind at the same time that historical situations are unrepeatable in their totality and that the application of a general law discovered by science to the given situation would therefore be successful only if certain deviations from that law were taken into account—deviations which vary from one concrete situation to the next. Also it is important to remember that the unique nature of each situation demands not merely the application of scientific concepts, but also that of images (which can later be logically formulated) and finally it would 164 appear that successful implementation of the task in hand demands a questing spirit based on imagination.  [164•* 

p Marxism clearly states its stand on the question of the link between the approach to revolution as an art and the need for the revolutionary to develop his creative imagination. Lenin appealed to his readers with the words: "We should dream!" Well aware of how this call might be taken up by the "revolutionary realist" who regarded the approach to revolution as an art as a manifestation of Blanquism, Lenin added in ironic vein: "I wrote these words and became alarmed. I imagined myself sitting at a ’unity conference’ and opposite me were the Rabocheye Dyelo editors and contributors. Comrade Martynov rises and, turning to me, says sternly: ’Permit me to ask you, has an autonomous editorial board the right to dream without first soliciting the opinion of the Party committees?’ He is followed by Comrade Krichevsky, who (philosophically deepening Comrade Martynov, who long ago rendered Comrade Plekhanov more profound) continues even more sternly: ’I go further. I ask, has a Marxist any right at all to dream, knowing that according to Marx mankind always sets itself the tasks it can solve and that tactics is a process of the growth of Party tasks which grow together with the Party?’ "  [164•**  So as to clarify his idea with regard to the need for the revolutionary to develop his capacity for imagination Lenin refers to the famous article by the Russian revolutionary democrat Dmitry Pisarev "Lapses of Immature Thought". In connection with the discrepancy between dreams and reality Pisarev wrote: "There are discrepancies and discrepancies. My dreams can overtake the natural course of events or turn off right to one side in a direction that no natural course of events could possibly take. In the first case my dreams do no harm 165 whatsoever: they can only support or fan the energy of the working man—-If man is totally lacking the capacity to dream in this way, if he were unable occasionally to run out ahead, and envisage with the help of his imagination that very creation which is just starting to take shape in his hands, as a whole complete picture, then I find it quite impossible to imagine what motive might lead man to undertake and bring to completion extensive and exhausting labours in the field of art, science, and day-to-day life___  [165•*  When there is some point of contact between dreams and life, then everything turns out for the best." Lenin in his turn noted with reference to this idea: "If there is some connection between dreams and life then all is well. Of this kind of dreaming there is unfortunately too little in our movement. And the people most responsible for this are those who boast of their sober views, their ‘closeness’ to the ‘concrete’, the representatives of legal criticism and of illegal ‘tailism’.”  [165•** 

p The Marxist views revolution as a material process of man’s reaching beyond the confines of the existing system of social relations and his transition to a new system of relations, which either take shape within the fabric of existing society, or later grow up on the basis of the material prerequisites that had developed within existing society. Without imagination it is not possible for man to discover whether prerequisites for the new within the old exist, i.e., whether that which many members of society see as “Utopia” is feasible, nor to envisage in material form the new which does not as yet exist, nor finally to discover unexplored and inimitable paths for the transition from the old to the new—a transition outside which any revolution is unthinkable, let alone the socialist variety.

p Thus the Marxist is set apart from the Utopian romanticist not by a lack of imagination, but by his approach to the solution of the problem as to how romanticism should be related to revolutionary realism, how dreams should be brought to life, by his ability to find the borderline (one that fluctuates although it remains constant in relation to concrete 166 conditions of time and place) between the possible and the impossible. For the Utopian from the radical Left such a question does not even exist: “Utopia” from his point of view no longer exists, while reality contains such rich possibilities, that no imagination could exhaust them all.

p The need to develop the imagination is coming to the fore all the more clearly, now that in conditions pertaining to modern advanced capitalist society the state-monopoly bourgeoisie and the cultural apparatus geared to the latter’s interests are endeavouring to lend imagination a strictly reproductive character with the help of the latest achievements of science and technology making it in this sense an essentially ‘realist’ tool of conformist consciousness.  [166•* 

p The theoretical consciousness of the radical Left and above all that of Marcuse is distinguished by an elitist, sectarian approach to the question of the development of the imagination. Realising that the anti-capitalist revolution cannot be accomplished by a caste of bureaucrats, Marcuse at the same time comes out in favour of freedom of imagination for just the revolutionary vanguard (consisting of students from the radical Left and the intelligentsia) since after freeing itself the imagination of the mass could play a reactionary conservative role. In his One-Dimensional Man Marcuse notes: "Imagination has not remained immune to the process of reification.... However, ’to give to the imagination all the means of expression’ would be regression. The mutilated individuals (mutilated also in their faculty of imagination) would organize and destroy even more than 167 they are now permitted to do. Such release would be the unmitigated horror—not the catastrophe of culture, but the free sweep of its most repressive tendencies.”  [167•* 

p In fact if the subject under discussion is mass action, motivated first and foremost by emotions and not linked with the immanent interests of a progressive social class or shaped by its political vanguard, that is spontaneous revolt, then there is no small risk of unjustified violence and unjustified destruction. A vivid example of such excesses is provided by the barbarous activities of the Chinese Hungweipings at the time of the notorious "cultural revolution". Yet as soon as we turn to revolution, and in particular to socialist revolution, in which the destructive aspect is subordinated to the prime task of creating a society more progressive in its historical perspective, revolution which expresses the interests of the proletariat and is guided by a revolutionary party, then in that case everything looks quite different with regard to the question of imagination as well.

p To become an effective instrument of historical creativity is something imagination can only do if it is deliberately and single-mindedly fostered among all members of the social movement, when the manifestation of initiative is not legally provided for, or has not become a customary prerogative for a narrow circle of persons, but the duty and right of every representative of the revolutionary mass.

p Anti-elitism is a distinctive feature of the conception of revolutionary activity and socialist construction elaborated by Lenin. Of course he was well aware that after its bursting forth into freedom after lengthy incarceration, the imagination of the masses inevitably bears the imprint of the past and may well from time to time "veer off at a tangent", over-estimate the feasibility of some project or other, and lend these or those practical and theoretical aspects of activity a Utopian romantic side, thus giving rise to failures. Nevertheless Lenin made fun of the limited ‘realists’ ( waiting for solutions based on phantasy and fearful of exaggerated manifestations of romanticism) presupposing that without free imagination there could not be any talk of revolution. ".. .We need not conceal the fact that there were a 168 good many such dreamers among us. Nor is there anything particularly bad in this. How could one start a socialist revolution in a country like ours without dreamers?”  [168•* 

Lenin’s anti-elitist principles are shaped in the final analysis by the fact that socialism is viewed by Lenin as a process and product created by the people itself, and therefore something which demands from all and everyone the ability to reach out beyond the limits of the individual’s empirical horizon, to reproduce within one’s own consciousness society as a whole, to imagine to oneself one’s place in the system of social relations, the ability to reach beyond the framework of society as a whole and, after contemplating it as it is now, to envisage what it could be like given certain possible developments. This is one of the forms in which one of the most important trends of the development of socialism manifests itself—the involvement in historical creativity of ever wider strata of the popular masses.