A Culture's Culture

I am writing a book about literacy and it's political background. I find splurging ideas out on this blog can help in the process of understanding the different positions. So forgive what comes next...

Marxists would support the view that the cultural life-styles of working class people should be respected and valued.

Yet, Marxism would argue that the cultures that have been developed within the working class have come about because of the relations that have been produced through the organisation of production within a capitalist economy. The working class are an oppressed group.

For Marxists, Capitalism is one important stage in the development of human societies. The next stage - a classless society - brought about by a revolution led by the working class would eradicate the state and the exploitation by one class upon another. Marxism wants to see the end of relations of production that make a working class and a middle class and with it bring in a new society where all can engage in the riches of a human culture.

No one can know what this culture will be like, but it will mean that all will have access to the fruits of humanity's scientific and artistic potential. What is certain, for Marxists, is it will not be a 'working class culture', that will never exist - not a culture that belongs to the working class. Nor would it be desired. The culture that currently corresponds with groups of working class people under capitalism cannot be looked at in a particularly favourable light by Marxists. It is simply the culture attributed to working class people under capitalism. In a sense it belongs not to workers but to the ruling class of society, but will ultimately be swept away when the next phase of human development is brought about. A culture linked to the working class could only be good in so far that it forms part of the seeds of capitalism's own destruction. It has no universal validity and it will perish.

In my reading of Marxist literature I see that Trotsky, one of the two leaders of the Russian Revolution, believed the working class to be a 'nonpossessing class' - that they own nothing - and who are not given access to the forms of culture that the more wealthy have. I shall read on...