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Concept
Working-class culture
Summary
Working-class culture is a range of cultures created by or popular among working-class people. The cultures can be contrasted with high culture and folk culture, and are often equated with popular culture and low culture (the counterpart of high culture). Working-class culture developed during the Industrial Revolution. Because most of the newly created working-class were former peasants, the cultures took on much of the localised folk culture. This was soon altered by the changed conditions of social relationships and the increased mobility of the workforce and later by the marketing of mass-produced cultural artefacts such as prints and ornaments and commercial entertainment such as music hall and cinema.
In Western cultures, working-class culture has become increasingly associated with alcoholism, domestic abuse, obesity and deliquency.
Many socialists with a class struggle viewpoint see working class culture as a vital element of the proletariat which they champion. One of the first organisations for proletarian culture was Proletkult, founded in Russia shortly after the February Revolution, supported by Alexander Bogdanov, who had been co-leader of the Bolsheviks with Vladimir Lenin. The group included both Bolsheviks and their critics, and Bogdanov struggled to retain its independence following the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917. His erstwhile ally Anatoly Lunacharsky had rejoined the Bolsheviks and was appointed Commissar for Education.
In Literature and Revolution, Trotsky examined aesthetic issues in relation to class and the Russian revolution. Soviet scholar Robert Bird considered his work as the "first systematic treatment of art by a Communist leader" and a catalyst for later, Marxist cultural and critical theories. Trotsky presented a critique of contemporary literary movements such as Futurism and emphasised a need of cultural autonomy for the development of a socialist culture. According to literary critic Terry Eagleton, Trotsky recognised “like Lenin on the need for a socialist culture to absorb the finest products of bourgeois art”.
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