Cultured Marxism

 Culture, the Left and the Working Class

Nearly every Bolshevik, from Lenin on down, along with the Social-Democrats of Germany, from Bebel on down, along with most other Marxists, from Mao and Gramsci on down, uphold culture as a necessary gain for the proletariat and farmers.  And that includes ‘high’ culture and the work of bourgeois periods, at least for most leading theorists and leaders.  Lukács was famous for his support of the tradition of realistic novels from England, France, Russia and elsewhere.  Lenin, like every other Russian Marxist, read and mostly promoted the great novels produced by the Russian intelligentsia. The USSR to the very end did not just highlight folk traditions – as did many other workers’ states – but also ballet, painting, classical music, opera, sculpture, literature, experimental film and the like.

Wish It Were True!

Take a look at the U.S. Left.  Given its weak political and organizational position, there is not much to look at, but there are bits.  Most leftists who read, read non-fiction. If they listen to music, it is protest music or stuff they heard years ago.  A weird ex-CP sect, the Party of Communists USA, has robbed the title of the old CP culture magazine, the “New Masses.” This new one has almost no culture in it and when it does, it’s a reprint from the past.  Occasionally a ‘progressive’ movie will be reviewed in a Left newspaper, usually from a somewhat liberal perspective, which figures.  In journals like Monthly Review the review might be more searching, but usually never gets written anyway, and when it does, its clumsy.  Union newspapers are the same.  Cultural influences are confined to what Leftists remember from their 20-something youth.  The Left reflects the U.S. in microcosm.  

Yet proletarians and farmers in the U.S. are immersed in cultural propaganda constantly. Many don’t bother about some kinds.  Few go to museums, to plays, to art exhibits or to many concerts where ‘high’ culture might lurk.  Some never even go to a movie theater and don’t watch streaming.  If they do watch a movie, it is a romance or a super-hero slog.  Travelers flow by cultural, historical or political sites to concentrate on a beach, hotel room or a meal. This even extends to food. Visiting a Moroccan restaurant on a work trip, they find the hamburger on the menu.    

Bars are about the only space left to regularly hear roots music or forms of popular music.  Some white collar women are the most enthusiastic members of book groups, but there it is.  I’ve gone into homes where there is not one picture on the walls.  Others with no book shelf.  Some with no music. Sports fill the empty cultural space for many. Money and time are issues, but they only partly hinder cultural understanding and breadth.  Anecdotally, the more conservative a person is, the less likely they will be to engage in culture on many levels.  Parochialism and lack of sophistication are rampant here, which connects to a familiar topic – anti-intellectualism in the U.S.  This slides into opposing scientific understandings and mates with fundamentalist religion and right-wing politics.  

EDUMACATION

This extends to opposition to university education as a principal, an idea closely held by the Republican Party. This is behind their plan to eliminate the Department of Education. The enormous rise in tuition and banning of affirmative action is also part of this, barring ‘the unwashed’ from college and even trade schools.  Turning schools into direct training centers for corporations is really the goal, which explains the growing hostility to ‘the liberal arts,’ libraries and books as part of the anti-culture war.  Of course capital has a ‘culture industry’ on the internet, in Hollywood, in gaming and the rest, so I wonder where these workers will come from.  Evidently that will be the next target. It also relates to factory discipline in elementary, junior and senior high schools, along with privatization through for-profit charter schools and private education vouchers.

Literacy and reading are highest in college towns across the U.S., something hated by the new Know-Nothings.  Yet going to college is no guarantee of ‘intellectualism.’  If you’ve gone on Youtube for interviews of college students about who is buried in Grant’s Tomb, you’ll see basic thinking and knowledge is sometimes lacking even in this environment.  Most higher degrees – Ph.Ds, MBAs and JDs - create specialists in labor disciplines like medicine, law, engineering, education, business, finance, science or architecture, which is their necessary intention.  A BA might qualify one for most white-collar cube positions.  An MA is required of teachers now, but that does not necessarily mean teachers are a leading strata of philosophic depth, although in many situations they are more acquainted with logic, reason, science and research than the average BA.  Techies have been known to bypass all this, but that is increasingly rare.

Certainly there is a class element to this, as if being ‘truly’ proletarian means not thinking too much, and not believing anything an expert says … even though everything involves thinking, trial and error and cultural understandings.  “Unskilled” work can require many skills and much knowledge, including physical skills.  It’s actually insulting to denigrate workers like this, as if being unknowing is part of a class inheritance.  In that vein right-wingers like Sarah Palin claimed education was ‘elitist,’ and so do her MAGA co-thinkers.  Capitalist bloodsuckers also want workers to be only as skilled as a job demands and no more.  Workerist Leftists agree with this nonsense to this day, donning their baseball hat and joining the company softball league even when they don’t play softball.  Some think playing dumb is attractive and means the revolution is that much nearer.  It’s not.

Is there such a class called ‘intellectuals’ now?  I do not think so, as most highly-educated people are found in the professional strata of the middle class a.k.a. petit-bourgeoisie.  They earn their livelihood mostly by labor, but can acquire property and real estate, start businesses, own large amounts of securities on the markets and otherwise use their earnings to become small owners too.  They are certainly the aristocracy of ‘labor’ at the very least. Even public intellectuals are usually tied to academe. Artists are another part of this strata, who if successful earn their livings by marketing themselves as actors, singers, composers, painters and musicians through ‘intellectual property.’  However most can never quit their ‘day job’ and remain somewhat proletarianized, as can happen to all ‘educated’ people.  Adjuncts and some lawyers are notorious for low salaries for instance.  Musicians, even middle-level ones, rarely make any money.   In the U.S. state support for the arts is falling, as are foundation grants.  Corporations really control who rises in many art fields.

LITERACY of Several Kinds

Every workers’ state from the USSR on up prioritized literacy, which opens the door to everything in society, including culture.  However the 2024 English literacy standards in the U.S. stand at about 21% for what is called ‘low literacy.’  The South, per normal, is the area of lowest literacy, though some of this is impacted by recent immigration. Low literacy by ethnicity, not by class, according to World Population Review is: 

“35% are White, 2% of whom are born outside of the U.S.; 23% are Black, 3% of whom are born outside of the U.S.; 34% are Hispanic, 24% of whom are born outside of the U.S.; 8% are of other ethnicities. Non-U.S.-born adults comprise 34% of the U.S. population with low literacy skills.” 

So two-thirds of those with low literacy are not immigrants and are mostly ‘white.’  The state with the most literacy is New Hampshire with northern and mountain states filling the rest of the top 10.  Minnesota, this state, is #5.  In 2015 Time Magazine identified Minneapolis as the most literate city in the U.S. This has probably changed but it does help that May Day Books is located here.

Without financial literacy as a worker you can be duped by your employer, salesman or landlord.  Without legal literacy you can be bollixed by legal fine print or word meanings.  Without medical literacy you can be fooled into bad treatments.  Without advertising, social media and journalism literacy you are at the mercy of nonsense, lies, baseless conspiracies and half-truths.  And then there is political illiteracy... 

There is also cultural illiteracy, a-literacy and low literacy, which is perhaps what I’m talking about here.  Marxists have combated this too. Part of becoming a ‘ruling class’ is for the proletariat to have a broad range of skills, understandings and knowledge. We have to beat them at their own game across the board - or plan on doing so. Marxists have normally upheld the best of prior cultures.  Having a revolution doesn’t do away with culture, it actually should preserve and strengthen it. The contrast between the East GDR and West FRG Germanys was especially clear, with the West being the homeland of the crudest cultural artifacts – porn, cartoons, advertising, bigotry, potboilers and bad TV.  We’re not going to force everyone to attend a Shakespeare play, nor are we going to burn all of Shakespeare’s work - even if we can’t quite understand all his language or the focus on kings anymore.  But the opportunity will be there to attend his plays for more people.  Perhaps the most reactionary parts of past cultures will fade away like the omnipresent religious painting prior to the Renaissance, but something else even more beautiful will – and already has - taken its place. 

Prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Empire of Illusion” (Hedges); “After the Fact,” “Southern Cultural Nationalism,” “May Day Has Books!,” “Why People Don’t Buy Books,” “A Marxist Education,” “The Debt Trap,” “Capitalism and Campus” (Roberts); “The Nordic Theory of Everything,” “The Value of Practical Skills.”

The Cultural Marxist / Sept. 9, 2024