/goth [bw]itch/

the exaltation of SR as "the highest art form in history to date" is a folklorist position that loses the actual theoretical content of what socialist realism claimed to be. For Lifschitz and Lukács, SR's superiority over critical realism is specifically a superiority of method: its partidism is conscious, rooted in the Marxist-Leninist comprehension of historical development, where the partidism of a Balzac or a Tolstoy was spontaneous, conditioned by class position in ways its author could not fully theorize. This is a historically determinate claim about a historically determinate form, and it cannot be generalized into a transhistorical aesthetic hierarchy without losing precisely the content that made the claim. Lifschitz's own treatment of beauty as dialectically constituted (absolute beauty existing as an accumulation of non-absolute cases) makes this kind of absolutist elevation incoherent on its own terms, because it performs the fetishization of a particular that Lifschitz identified as the root of dogmatist and relativist aesthetic positions alike.

The quote tweet performs the standard ideological operation applied to Soviet theoretical production broadly, that SR was a sort of political imposition on an "authentic artistic life" that would have flourished in its absence, specifically by catering to the low intellectual capacities of the reactionary peasantry. This has the same structure as the dismissal of dialectical materialism as arid dogmatism that suppressed philosophical advances: in both cases an externally imposed political form is said to have suffocated an authentic content that preceded or existed beside it. The avant-garde occupies here the same position that "authentic Marxist philosophy" occupies in anti-diamat discourse, the repressed vitality that the party machine stifled. But Lifschitz's critique of abstraction was developed from within the theoretical premises of the reflection theory, in 1927 at the Vjutemás, which was the institutional center of Soviet vanguardism. Simply, there was a theoretical argument whose conclusions were unflattering to the abstractionist tendency. The claim that SR was anti-intellectual placation for peasants also contains a specific class contempt towards the peasantry that was coincidentally levied by Trotsky in his attacks against the USSR until his death. Aside from this, the claim assumes that formal accessibility is a concession to cognitive limitation, when it actually is an artistic reflection of the essential contradictions of an epoch made legible to the popular classes because those contradictions constitute their lived existence.