Does the working class have their own culture?

[Little-Lenin]

Dear comrades. I have a question which I have not found any good answer to.

I wonder if the proletariat have any specific culture, or if they represent the best of all human culture.

I know that in the USSR they had something called "Proletkult". But I have understood that the ICC means that a specific "workerist" culture is non-existing. (If I am wrong, please forgive me). I hope that this question is not silly.

If some of you could tell how they think about this question, I would be grateful.:)

In solidarity,

Little-Lenin

[Pirate turtle the 11th]

In some countries there are certain cultures that those who are less wealthy are likely to engage in and ones that those who are more wealthy are more likely to engage in.

That does not mean class is defined by culture though.

[Invincible Summer]

I guess it depends on how one defines "culture."

However, I'd be more inclined to say that the answer is no, primarily because workers in Cambodia do not necessarily have the same experiences being a worker as a worker in Canada.

However, classes always share common interests: the bourgeoisie/ruling classes wish to maintain their position in a hierarchical society, whereas the working class wishes to (whether consciously or not) eliminate their subordination as "only workers."

[OneNamedNameLess]

Well in in the UK I would say a distinctive working class culture is still present. Take for instance, and this is not confined to the UK, the use of dialects amongst those at the lower end of the social scale. A less healthy income also limits what people can consume so globally there are differences in leisure activities and the like.

[ComradeOm]

Just to note that Proletkult was not a broad 'proletarian culture' but rather a specific cultural organisation/movement (one of many) that existed during the Civil War years in Russia

Anyways, "culture" is a notoriously nebulous topic and there's no firm Marxist line on it.When it comes to culture you have intersecting influences (class, national, regional, etc) and its all rather messy. I did recently read a short essay on culture (Gramsci perhaps) but to be honest its just not a field that interests me

[which doctor]

An indigenous working-class culture used to exist, but is being replaced by a standardized and commodified mass culture.

[jake williams]

The working class within a specific country is not even homogenous: there are numerous "working class cultures" within Canada, the United States, and any other sufficiently large country (the use of "country" is sloppy, but I can't think of a better word). This is partly because of there being different parts of the working class from an economic perspective, and there being regional variations. There's certainly no unifying culture that the entire Chinese and Canadian working classes share, against a capitalist culture that they don't. There are surely unifying elements that respond to the material conditions of the working class, but the real life picture is more complex than that. Especially in more recent times, there is also plenty of cultural exchange between workers and capitalists.

[The Ungovernable Farce]

I'd say cultures, not culture. Obviously, workers in Cambodia and Canada won't have the same culture, many workers in Canada won't have the same culture as each other, but there are many specific cultures, some of which could legitimately be called working-class cultures. F'r instance, I think you'll be hard-pressed to find many bourgeois chavs.

[Vanguard1917]

I find Trotsky's analysis very convincing from a Marxist POV. The argument is that, since working class rule is, in contrast to the rule of previous classes, 'a brief period of transition', the working class will have neither the time nor the need to create its own culture as a class, and as the other ruling classes had before it. As a class which will dissolve itself into 'a Socialist community' and get rid of its class nature, the working class does not have an interest in developing its own class culture, in the sense that its historical aim is to free itself of class society altogether -- something which will, for the first time in human history, give way to the development of a genuinely human, as opposed to class, culture.

Anyway, read on...

"Will the proletariat have enough time to create a “proletarian” culture? In contrast to the régime of the slave-owners and of the feudal lords and of the bourgeoisie, the proletariat regards its dictatorship as a brief period of transition. When we wish to denounce the all-too-optimistic views about the transition to Socialism, we point out that the period of the social revolution, on a world scale, will last not months and not years, but decades – decades, but not centuries, and certainly not thousands of years. Can the proletariat in this time create a new culture? It is legitimate to doubt this, because the years of social revolution will be years of fierce class struggles in which destruction will occupy more room than new construction. At any rate, the energy of the proletariat itself will be spent mainly in conquering power, in retaining and strengthening it and in applying it to the most urgent needs of existence and of further struggle. The proletariat, however, will reach its highest tension and the fullest manifestation of its class character during this revolutionary period and it will be within such narrow limits that the possibility of planful, cultural reconstruction will be confined. On the other hand, as the new regime will be more and more protected from political and military surprises and as the conditions for cultural creation will become more favorable, the proletariat will be more and more dissolved into a Socialist community and will free itself from its class characteristics and thus cease to be a proletariat. In other words, there can be no question of the creation of a new culture, that is, of construction on a large historic scale during the period of dictatorship. The cultural reconstruction which will begin when the need of the iron clutch of a dictatorship unparalleled in history will have disappeared, will not have a class character. This seems to lead to the conclusion that there is no proletarian culture and that there never will be any and in fact there is no reason to regret this. The proletariat acquires power for the purpose of doing away forever with class culture and to make way for human Culture. We frequently seem to forget this."

more here: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/ch06.htm