Socialism and culture

[jinx92]

I know that a socialist society will produce a new culture, because culture is a response to the material conditions of society. My question is, what do you think the new "socialist culture" will look like?

[Comrade1]

I know that a socialist society will produce a new culture, because culture is a response to the material conditions of society. My question is, what do you think the new "socialist culture" will look like?
most important thing is if your look at socialism to refer to the stage between capitalism and communism, then the main difference would be social gain before monitary.

[thesadmafioso]

I recently wrote a blog on this matter, where in I dealt with the necessity of ensuing that a new socialistic based culture would emerge from the remains of capitalism, and of the necessity of such to the overall progression of socialist thought.

Here is the link if you are interested in the exact details, and it should be accessible from my username title as well.
http://www.revleft.com/vb/blog.php?b=1342

[The Man]

I know that a socialist society will produce a new culture, because culture is a response to the material conditions of society. My question is, what do you think the new "socialist culture" will look like?

Socialism is just a waypoint from the transfer from Capitalism to Communism. But I think a socialist culture would look like today, with the exception of Legal Theft, the Bourgeoisie, and bosses that exploit the worker.

[ckaihatsu]

I know that a socialist society will produce a new culture, because culture is a response to the material conditions of society. My question is, what do you think the new "socialist culture" will look like?





Socialism is just a waypoint from the transfer from Capitalism to Communism. But I think a socialist culture would look like today, with the exception of Legal Theft, the Bourgeoisie, and bosses that exploit the worker.


A socialist culture would be like any educational / artistic / sports / hobbyist intentional-community culture of today, except that it would be "mainstream" and would actually actively shape society -- a renaissance of government, so to speak.... (Imagine if what went onto cable access was the mainstream and also determined public policy.)

[hatzel]

...what do we even mean by 'culture', can I ask? Of course if one is talking about cultural pursuits, such as the arts, dance and music, or the traditional English Sunday roast...well, then of course talk of bosses and so on makes no difference to anything, and has little if any impact...I wonder if the OP could clarify what exactly they're talking about :)

[ckaihatsu]

...what do we even mean by 'culture', can I ask?


Jumping in here -- politics relates to the exercise of power whereas culture does not, necessarily.





Of course if one is talking about cultural pursuits [...] then of course talk of bosses and so on makes no difference to anything


Not necessarily.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Whatever the workers want it to look like.

Hopefully, at the time of revolution, enough workers will be class conscious enough to be able to look past X factor, Heat magazine and Matt Cardle as the pinnacle of culture.

[jinx92]

...what do we even mean by 'culture', can I ask? Of course if one is talking about cultural pursuits, such as the arts, dance and music, or the traditional English Sunday roast...well, then of course talk of bosses and so on makes no difference to anything, and has little if any impact...I wonder if the OP could clarify what exactly they're talking about :)

When I used the term culture, I meant societal norms, commonly held beliefs, customs, values, folkways, mores, etc.

[Fawkes]

When I used the term culture, I meant societal norms, commonly held beliefs, customs, values, folkways, mores, etc.

That's going to differ greatly on a geographical basis, so no holistic conjecture can really be made. Perhaps a commonality though that I would definitely welcome would be the destruction of the "celebrity" as this mythical, unattainable character possessing all of the things, both material and immaterial, that people in capitalism have grown to desire.

[Os Cangaceiros]

I can't fucking believe that this thread existed just a day before mine. :bored:

[ckaihatsu]

Perhaps a commonality though that I would definitely welcome would be the destruction of the "celebrity" as this mythical, unattainable character possessing all of the things, both material and immaterial, that people in capitalism have grown to desire.


Why? What have I ever done to make you not like me this way?


x D

[Red Commissar]

It will focus more on common human values and things to reinforce the meaning of being workers without borders. No longer focus on the national, but the international and ties that bind rather than divide.

There are somethings that Gramsci wrote on the issue and I believe many other Communists did too:


We need to free ourselves from the habit of seeing culture as encyclopaedic knowledge, and men as mere receptacles to be stuffed full of empirical data and a mass of unconnected raw facts, which have to be filed in the brain as in the columns of a dictionary, enabling their owner to respond to the various stimuli from the outside world. This form of culture really is harmful, particularly for the proletariat. It serves only to create maladjusted people, people who believe they are superior to the rest of humanity because they have memorized a certain number of facts and dates and who rattle them off at every opportunity, so turning them almost into a barrier between themselves and others.

...

Culture is something quite different. It is organization, discipline of one's inner self, a coming to terms with one's own personality; it is the attainment of a higher awareness, with the aid of which one succeeds in understanding one's own historical value, one's own function in life, one's own rights and obligations. But none of this can come about through spontaneous evolution, through a series of actions and reactions which are independent of one's own will -as is the case in the animal and vegetable kingdoms where every unit is selected and specifies its own organs unconsciously, through a fatalistic law of things.The fact is that only by degrees, one stage at a time, has humanity acquired consciousness of its own value and won for itself the right to throw off the patterns of organization imposed on it by minorities (ie ruling class) at a previous period in history. And this consciousness was formed not under the brutal goad of physiological necessity, but as a result of intelligent reflection, at first by just a few people and later by a whole class, on why certain conditions exist and how best to convert the facts of vassalage into the signals of rebellion and social reconstruction. This means that every revolution has been preceded by an intense labour of criticism, by the diffusion of culture and the spread of ideas amongst masses of men who are at first resistant, and think only of solving their own immediate economic and political problems for themselves, who have no ties of solidarity with others in the same condition.

...

This means that every revolution has been preceded by an intense labour of criticism, by the diffusion of culture and the spread of ideas amongst masses of men who are at first resistant, and think only of solving their own immediate economic and political problems for themselves, who have no ties of solidarity with others in the same condition. The latest example, the closest to us and hence least foreign to our own time, is that of the French Revolution. The preceding cultural period, called the Enlightenment, which has been so misrepresented by the facile critics of theoretical reason, was not in any way or at least was not entirely a flutter of superficial encyclopaedic intellectuals discoursing on anything and everything with equal imperturbability, believing themselves to be men of their time only if they had read the Encyclopedie of D'Alembert and Diderot; in short it was not solely a phenomenon of pedantic and arid intellectualism, the like of which we see before our eyes today, exhibited most fully in the Popular Universities of the lowest order. The Enlightenment was a magnificent revolution in itself and, as De Sanctis acutely notes in his History of Italian Literature, it gave all Europe a bourgeois spiritual International in the form of a unified consciousness, one which was sensitive to all the woes and misfortunes of the common people and which was the best possible preparation for the bloody revolt that followed in France.

In Italy, France and Germany, the same topics, the same institutions and same principles were being discussed. Each new comedy by Voltaire, each new pamphlet moved like a spark along the lines that were already stretched between state and state, between region and region, and found the same supporters and the same opponents everywhere and every time. The bayonets of Napoleon's armies found their road already smoothed by an invisible army of books and pamphlets that had swarmed out of Paris from the first half of the eighteenth century and had prepared both men and institutions for the necessary renewal. Later, after the French events had welded a unified consciousness, a demonstration in Paris was enough to provoke similar disturbances in Milan, Vienna and the smaller centres. All this seems natural and spontaneous to superficial observers, yet it would be incomprehensible if we were not aware of the cultural factors that helped to create a state of mental preparedness for those explosions in the name of what was seen as a common cause.

~Socialism and Culture, Il Grido del Popolo (1916)

There's a line in the same article where he finishes with "to know oneself better through others and to know others better through oneself" as the ultimate aim of culture, which I think is a good summary of what we might want to see in a proletarian culture.



Do elements for an art, philosophy and morality (standards) specific to the working class already exist? The question must be raised and it must be answered. Together with the problem of gaining political and economic power, the proletariat must also face the problem of winning intellectual power. Just as it has thought to organize itself politically and economically, it must also think about organizing itself culturally. Although through such organizations it is not yet going to be possible (no more than in the economic and political sectors) to obtain positive creative results before the system of bourgeois domination has been broken up, it should still be possible to pose the fundamental questions and outline the most characteristic features of the development of the new civilization. According to our Russian comrades, who have already set up an entire network of organizations for 'Proletarian Culture' (Proletkult), the mere fact that the workers raise these questions and attempt to answer them means that the elements of an original proletarian civilization already exist, that there are already proletarian forces of production of cultural values, just as the fact that the workers create class organizations in order to carry out their cultural activity means that these values too, unlike in the bourgeois period, will be created by the working class on the basis of organization.

~Questions of Culture, Avanti! 1920


Though I might add that unfortunately with the Proletkult organization, a common excuse in censoring or rejecting work was on the perceived nature of it being too "bourgeois" and squashing a lot of energy at times, and setting up unfortunate precedent in the future.

What should be emphasized is up to the terrain you are working on, but it is important in all cases to prevent a disconnect between those who study and "create" new parts for culture and those who will receive it. This is a recurring theme for Gramsci in his life. I'll try to dig up more, but I just happened to have those open for the group I post things into.

[Hoipolloi Cassidy]

'For a start, we should be satisfied with real bourgeois culture,' countered Lenin; and he got his wish, as anyone can tell you who's seen those old Soviet productions of Aida. Love those inflatable elephants... - Paul Werner, The Red Museum. New York: The Orange Press, 2010. :rolleyes: