Proletcult

Front matter

PROLETCULT

(PROLETARIAN CULTURE)

BY

Chapter 1

PROLETCULT

CHAPTER ONE

EDUCATION AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE

The communists never cease … to instil into the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat.—Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848. (Manifesto of the Communist Party, § V.)

A few weeks ago the authors were discussing the ground plan of this book with one of the good friends and comrades to whom it is dedicated. "Your first chapter," he said, "should contain an outline of the general characteristics of the claim for Independent Working-Class Education. You should discuss the nature of the need; should describe the material our system of working-class education has to deal with; should explain the fundamental requirements of the modern working class and of the working-class movement. A chap leaves school at fourteen, and in most cases he gets no further education in any purposive sense until he is twenty. It is not until he is about twenty that we [our comrade was speaking in the Labour College] have a chance of getting hold of him. Then, from our point of view and his, the first need of the education he is craving for, and of the education which we want to give him, is to show him his place in the fighting organisation of trade unionism. That is why it is out of the question for us to think of giving him what is called 'an all-round education.' There is no time for that; and if we attempted anything of the kind we should defeat our own ends."

What, then, is the-fundamental requirement of the modern working class? Unhesitatingly we reply: It is to use the economic power of the workers for the overthrow of the capitalist system, the abolition of wagery, and the inauguration of a classless commonwealth. Consciously or unconsciously, that has been the aim of the modern working-class movement since it first came to life. The struggle for higher wages, shorter hours, better working conditions, and latterly the struggle for workers' control in industry, have all been parts of the struggle for the ending of the dominant social system. For this purpose, the workers organise on the economic field, at first in small craft unions and subsequently in the larger industrial unions. For this purpose, they organise on the political field in the endeavour to wrest from the master class the political. machinery of the bourgeois State. For this purpose, they are creating a press of their own which shall inform them regarding current events without the capitalist bias which pervades the press owned and controlled by the plutocracy, Quite recently, during the last ten years or so, the workers' vanguard has come clearly to recognise that all other efforts will be misdirected unless guided by knowledge. The workers' demand for education is no longer a demand for graduated doses of bourgeois culture. It is a demand for an education which shall make the workers understand their place in the economic and social system, and shall help them in the successful waging of the class war. It is a demand for Independent Working-Class' Education. To satisfy this demand, the workers have to do their own thinking. The hirelings of the master class, of the class which is economically organised in employers' federations and politically organised as the "democratic" State, will continue to fool the workers so long as they are permitted to think for the workers, and to sing the soothing lullabies of social solidarity and harmony of interests between employers and employed.

But we are outrunning the mass of the workers when we say that they no longer demand graduated doses of bourgeois culture. We shall see in subsequent chapters that, historically considered, the demand for adult education was nothing more than this for nearly three generations. Even to-day, the demand is often enough no more than this, in so far as it finds conscious expression. Apart from the Labour Colleges in London, Glasgow, and elsewhere, apart from the Plebs League, which is the most effective exponent of the demand for a distinctively proletarian culture, the network of British organisations through which the craving for adult education is mainly satisfied, is not consciously partisan. The Workers' Educational Association, for instance, makes a parade of impartiality. Its tendency is one of unconscious bias in favour of the institutions of the bourgeois State. Nevertheless, the education which the pupils of the Tutorial Classes predominantly demand, is something very different from a vague "general culture." The working men and women who attend the Tutorial Classes desire instruction, before all, in such subjects as economics and industrial history. That is to say, they want to understand the nature of the system in virtue of which, when employed, they are galley-slaves chained to the bench, and, when out of employment, they are unchained, and jettisoned to fend for themselves at the mercy of wind and water. They wish to know how that system grew up. Having learned that it did not always exist, they desire to grasp the means by which the working class can effect the revolutionary transformation of a system which is obviously inefficient to fulfil the first requirements of a "social" order. But this last they will never learn from the "unbiased" exponents of social solidarity and class collaboration. Nor will they learn it for themselves until they become genuinely class conscious, do their own thinking, and achieve a culture of their own. Bourgeois education acts like poison gas. "Revolutionary class-conscious education is the only effective gas-mask for the workers."

The demand (even in the Tutorial Classes which would fain "unite labour and learning") for a "narrow" culture, is in itself a manifestation of a dawning class consciousness. A worker who is given special opportunities for adult education, and who, instead of asking for lectures on Shakespeare or on Greek Art, demands information on the mechanism of contemporary social life, is at any rate well on the way to an understanding of the fact that the working class and the employing class have nothing in common. But it is in the organisations which have come into existence as conscious expressions of the demand for proletarian culture, and as conscious attempts to fulfil this demand, that we find the most characteristic simplifications of method, and the most characteristic concentration on primary and essential subjects. The recognition that the knowledge is required for immediate action, or for action in the very near future, is an additional incentive to simplification and concentration. These requisites are reinforced by the peculiarities of the students. Of course those freak members of the working class who take up some highly specialised study as a hobby, and pursue it through a life of contented toil and scant leisure, may rejoice (within inexorable limits) in numerous and imperfectly mastered technicalities. But the students of the Labour Colleges and of the educational classes which are animated with the spirit of the Plebs League, being class conscious even before their adult education begins, being keenly aware of the limitations imposed by the deficiencies of such "general culture" as they secured in childhood at the elementary schools, and being for the most part imbued from the outset with the idea that a social revolution is imminent and that it behoves them to play their part in intensifying and clarifying the revolutionary impetus, will emphasise the need for simplification and concentration of aim.

Aim, tendency, purpose, this is the leading feature of proletarian culture. Not "education for education's sake"; but revolutionary education, i.e., education for revolutionary ends. The origins of this class-conscious and partisan education are but new illustrations of the working of the forces which, in Marxist theory, are summarised under the name of the materialist conception of history. Developing industrial technique brings about a development of proletarian consciousness. This gives rise to a proletarian culture, to Proletcult. And the first aim of Proletcult (in its prerevolutionary phase) is to simplify, to concentrate, to discard everything which does not contribute to the growth of a fighting culture. Not general culture, professedly unbiased, but a fighting culture, admittedly tendentious, is the avowed aim of the revolutionary proletariat. Does this horrify the champions of "unbiased education"? Nay, but we are ready, we are eager, to offer a general apologia for tendency in science! We echo Bergson and say: "We do not aim generally at knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but in order to take sides, to draw profit—in short, to satisfy an interest." (Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 35).

The essential thing in science, the essential thing in education, is the human interest. We live by desire and emotion; by the gratification of will and by artistic appreciation; it is for these ends that we strive to know. Emotion is the driving force of human life; what distinguishes man, as man, from other animals, is the extent to which he endeavours to make reason his guide. But he cannot rationalise his activities, he should not try to rationalise his activities, to the degree of making them unemotional, of depriving them of "tendency." Thus in proportion as, in science, we move from the purely abstract to the biological and social plane, in proportion as the direct human interest comes to predominate in any branch of study, do we find that the subject becomes tendentious; do we find that it is studied with a desire (conscious or unconscious) to fulfil an underlying purpose, to advance a cause. We do not mean that there is no human interest in the higher mathematics. Our essential thesis, that all science is tendentious, is an assertion of the contrary. It is a question of degree; but even in such abstract sciences as history and philosophy, writers are readable, are instructive, precisely in proportion as they refrain from attempting an impossible "impartiality." But the more abstract the science, the more, in the interest of truthful statement, must tendency be kept under control. Broadly speaking, the gradation is plain enough. Tendentious algebra would be ridiculous; tendentious arithmetic has landed many an accountant behind prison bars. These are abstract sciences, with which tendency has little to do, and in which the emotional element must be severely repressed. But the science of economics is studied primarily for its bearing upon the advancement of human life. Untendentious economics, untendentious sociology, are, we would urge, as absurd, as impossible, as untendentious violin-playing or untendentious football.

We choose economics as our illustrative science for two reasons. In the first place, it is the favourite subject in working-class adult education. Secondly, it is a test instance. The Plebs League has been repeatedly blamed for advocating the teaching of "merely socialist economics." On the other hand, the Workers Educational Association prides itself on the impartial character of the economic science taught in the Tutorial Classes. Quite true, proletarian economics is communistically tendentious, being economics studied by communists for communists. The underlying purpose of the study is to promote communism. The affect (as the New Psychology would phrase it) is a deep-rooted and emotionally tinged conviction that communist economics is calculated to advance the workers' cause. But "orthodox economics," which means pre-Marxist economics, is in reality no less tendentious. The difference between the Marxists and the non-Marxists is that the Marxists are frankly aware of the nature of their prepossessions, whereas the non-Marxists falsely imagine that they can keep emotional leanings out of a study which by its very nature is tendentious. Economics that is not "merely socialist" is the economics of the master class. "Official" economists are—almost literally—"chaplains to the pirate ship!"

There is an excellent story of an oriental student at a western university who was asked why he regarded with so much disfavour the works of the orthodox economists, the writers who claim to be purely scientific, to be quite free from distorting tendency. "These writings," he answered, "are variations upon a single theme. They all endeavour to teach the art of extracting honey from the hive without alarming the bees." Very different is the purpose of proletarian economics, of prerevolutionary Proletcult. Its purpose is, as the Plebs League phrases it, "to further the interests of Independent Working-Class Education as a partisan effort to improve the position of labour in the present, and ultimately to assist in the abolition of wage-slavery." In a word, the primary object of our tendentious economics, and of all our tendentious proletarian education. is to alarm the bees.

Aux armes, citoyens! To arms, comrades! You are being robbed every hour of your working day, and every hour of your unemployment. Not merely do the drones rifle you of your material goods (no small thing, though it may seem a trifle to those who have never known want). But inasmuch as you are robbed of these material things, and in virtue of the whole system which robs you of these things, you are being robbed of far greater treasures; of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If you would end this despoilment, overturn the old order, and create the new. There are three means by which, in collaboration, you will bring about this revolutionary change: political organisation in the ranks of the Communist Party; mass action on the part of the organised workers; and proletarian culture.

Now Proletcult is the lamp whereby all roads of advance are lighted.

Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO

WHAT IS PROLETCULT?

New ideas make a more definite impression on the mind when they are associated with a new name.—Walter Rathenau. (In Days to Come, p. 247.)

Proletarians who are alive to their class interest (which is the true interest of civilisation) will insist upon doing their own thinking; they will insist upon Independent Working-Class Education, upon proletarian culture, upon Proletcult. The term Independent Working-Class Education is about twelve years old. The word Proletcult is fire-new, and brings us up with a jar against the question of terminology.

Proletcult is a compact term, a "portmanteau word," for proletarian culture. In the prerevolutionary phase, when a specifically proletarian culture is requisite as a fighting culture, as a means ‘to the social revolution, Proletcult is practically synonymous with what is generally known in this country by the cumbrous name of Independent Working-Class Education. What do we understand by education? In the widest sense of the term, education signifies the sum of the environmental influences which act on the individual so as to promote his mental development, and transform him from the savage he is at birth into a civilised human being. But as a method of culture deliberately employed, Proletcult, like all educational methods, is tendentious, for it has a definite aim. Just as bourgeois education—"higher-class" education in public schools, private schools, and universities, and "lower-class" education in the State schools—has the definite aim of promoting the maintenance of the existing order; so Independent Working-Class Education has the definite aim of subverting that order. Both types of education are tendentious. The only difference between them in this respect is that bourgeois education is less consciously tendentious, and often claims to be entirely above the battle, to be purely impartial. Independent Working-Class Education proclaims itself to be candid but not impartial. Its frankness in this respect is a source of strength. An essential element of proletarian culture is the belief that all education outside the domain of the extremely abstract sciences like mathematics and outside the domain of the purely physical sciences like mechanics, all education which involves imparting a knowledge of man’s place in nature and society, is necessarily tendentious. In the first chapter we offered a reasoned justification of tendency in science and education. Our present concern is not to justify Proletcult, but to explain what the word means.

In the postrevolutionary phase—for instance, in Soviet Russia—Proletcult broadens out in two directions. Before the social revolution, it is mainly if not exclusively a fighting culture. Dominated throughout by the tactic of the class struggle, Independent Working-Class Education can pay little attention to the arts and graces of life. At best, its interest in these is incidental merely, in so far as they are vehicles of propaganda—what Tolstoi termed "means of infection." Economics, economic geography, history, biology, sociology, psychology, politics (in the Aristotelian sense)—these are the subjects which, taught from the proletarian outlook, render the worker's mind immune to bourgeois ideology. They arouse the revolutionary spirit and mentality essential to the overthrow of capitalism and to the upbuilding of a society based upon labour instead of ownership, upon production for use instead of production for profit. After the revolution in any particular country, and until the world-wide proletarian revolution has been achieved, the need for a fighting culture still remains; but such a culture differs in certain respects from prerevolutionary Proletcult. The workers' vanguard has overthrown the capitalist State, has achieved the dictatorship of the proletariat. Just as, under capitalism, the aim of capitalist State education is to produce in the children of the workers a mentality suitable to the purposes of the capitalist State, to inoculate with bourgeois ideology those who are proletarian by status, to make of them docile wage-slaves and submissive instruments of capitalism; so, under workers' rule, the workers will use the machinery of State education to produce an average mentality tending to stabilise the workers' State. This is what the Soviet Government is successfully accomplishing in Russia.

Except for the fact that after the revolution the whole curriculum can be directed towards these ends, whereas in the capitalist State the influences of Independent Working-Class Education can for the most part be brought to bear only as an occasional antidote or as a supplement to the bourgeois culture of the State schools, there is not much difference at first sight between prerevolutionary and postrevolutionary Proletcult. But apart from these elements of a fighting culture, the workers' State can now to an increasing extent devote its attention to what we have termed the arts and graces of life. The social revolution will have released the creative forces slumbering in the proletariat; art and science will blossom abundantly and will assume new forms. It is to these developments that the term Proletcult was first applied in Soviet Russia. They will be fully considered in a special chapter. Enough here to say that in Germany, Proletcult is understood in the wider sense in which the word is employed in this book. Indeed, the more ample conception of Proletcult is now gaining ground in Russia itself.

Before quitting the somewhat arid field of definition, it seems expedient to say that no definition of such terms as proletariat, bourgeoisie, class struggle, revolution, etc., is considered requisite. This is a study of Proletcult, not of economics or sociology. The words are employed in the sense usual in modern Marxist literature. In so far as the authors may have any message of their own to convey upon such topics, they have conveyed that message in a little volume entitled Creative Revo- lution. Enough to say here that Proletcult, as a fighting culture, is based upon the conception of the class struggle; that its fundamental aim, in the prerevolutionary phase, is to render the workers class-conscious, and thus to give them both the knowledge and the fighting impetus which will enable them to achieve their historic mission—the final overthrow of capitalism and the inauguration of the classless State The idea of the class struggle will run through this book like a red thread, differentiating proletarian culture from bourgeois culture supplied to proletarians.

Culture is not synonymous with education. Education is something which acts; it is an agent. Culture is often used to denote the agent, but it is also used to denote the result. Education produces culture. This culture, the result of education, is what the Marxists term an ideology; it is a system of ideas, a "Weltanschauung" or outlook-upon-the-world, a philosophy of life. Regarded as an ideology, the culture of each class, each social group, each occupational group, differs from the culture of all the rest. To take a familiar instance; the ideology of a doctor, his outlook on disease, differs fundamentally from the ideology of his patient—and this simply as an outcome of training, quite apart from a possible conflict of interests between doctor and patient when both are under the capitalist harrow. Similarly as regards master and servant, as regards employer and employed; the different relationships give different ideologies, different cultures. We see these contrasts at every turn. The culture of the sportsman is at variance with the culture of his quarry. Assuredly it is not surprising that an exploited class endeavouring to throw off the yoke of an exploiting class should find it essential to develop the elements of its own culture.

Let us pass on from these aspects of culture, to consider a still broader meaning of that elusive term. We must speak of culture in the widest possible sense, as the product of education in the widest possible sense. We must speak of culture as including all the achievements whereby man has gained the mastery over nature; all the acquirements which are enabling him by degrees to control the social environment and his own complex personality; and all the iridescent manifestations of art and science wherein man seeks self-expression and whereby he is enabled to enjoy the splendour of life. Culture in this extended sense is at once the raw material of civilisation and its finest fruit. As the raw material of civilisation, as the culture of those whom Müller-Lyer (History of Social Development) classifies as the Nature Peoples, culture of course existed prior to civilisation Savages had and have their typical cultures; the culture of the lower hunters, the higher hunters, and the fishers, respectively. Barbarians had and have their cultures; the culture of the pastoralists, and the cultures of the various types of agriculturists. But the higher developments of culture occur only among the Culture Folk; among horticulturists, plough culturists, and commerce culturists. Accompaniments of the more intensive cultivation of the soil, their predominant cause is leisure. In the elementary stages of civilisation (all that man has hitherto traversed) leisure is possible only through the division of labour, through the differentiation of men into professions and trades, and through the segregation of society into classes. The workers do not yet do their own thinking. They are slaves, peasants, serfs, journeymen, or wage-slaves. Art and science, the richer developments of the life of feeling and thought, are the product and the privilege of a leisure class, and have their roots in the exploitation of labour. "In capitalist society, spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole lifetime of the masses into labour-time." Marx, Capital, vol. i., p. 540).

Thus the higher culture arises only as the product of leisure. One of the paradoxes of what is termed "social" development has been that all down the ages of civilisation it has been rendered possible solely through the break-up of the unity of primitive society, thus producing a type of "society" rent asunder by the class struggle. For the higher culture to be possible, "man" must be freed from the need to give his whole time to the immediate tasks imposed by the struggle for existence. That is to say, certain men (and women) must be freed from these immediate tasks. Moreover, human mentality must be so far advanced that these men and women have a desire for active mental employment during the leisure which class differentiation has granted them. At all times hitherto, and among all classes, desire for the advancement of culture and capacity for the enjoyment of higher culture, have been con- fined to a small minority of-our race. Among civilised humanity, most grown-ups devote their spare time to games and sports, and other forms of pseudo-culture. This is just as true of the proletariat as of the bourgeoisie. The reduction of the hours of toil which has been achieved by the mass action of organised labour is turned to account, for cultural purposes, only by the few. An essential element of Proletcult is the design to make the workers realise that, apart from what is really needful for physical relaxation and mental refreshment, amusements and pseudo-culture are part of the dope whereby their attention is diverted from the class war and whereby their slave status is maintained. It is probable that only a minority is intellectually capable of responding to the call of Proletcult—but in critical hours a sufficiently large, well-informed, and enthusiastic minority can always sway the inert mass.

We must now consider the phaseology of culture, of that higher culture which is characteristic of civilisation. For our present purposes, three main phases may be distinguished: aristocratic and theocratic culture; democratic culture; ergatocratic culture, or the culture of the phase upon which civilisation is now entering, the culture which is at once the cause and the effect of ergatocracy or workers' rule.

Aristocratic and theocratic culture are avowedly the privilege of a leisure class, which avowedly aims at perpetuating its rule. In both cases, the sustainers of culture are the stipendiaries of the exploiting caste, but they are not always by origin members of that caste. The members of a hereditary aristocracy are often rude and uncultured persons; but some of them love culture for its own sake; and many of them are patrons, willing to grant leisure to those talented members of a lower class who can devote themselves to the advancement of culture. In a theocracy, culture is the privilege of a priestly caste, sometimes hereditary, but more often recruited from among all strata of the population. But whether the culture of this phase be aristocratic or theocratic, it is invariably and jealously reserved for members of the governing class and their hangers-on. There is no culture for the "common people," for the hewers of wood and the drawers of water.

Democratic culture is characteristic of the phase in social development now drawing to a close. In its later stages, throughout all the countries where a highly differentiated capitalistic civilisation prevails, culture is professedly universal. In actual fact, however—while there is culture for the dominant class and for those aspiring members of the working class who can usefully replenish the forces of capitalism—for the working class as a whole there is only schooling. State education, in the modern bourgeois State, aims at giving that minimum of instruction which is requisite for the nominally "educated" citizens of bourgeois parliamentarism, and essential for the wage-slaves under the complicated technique of modern capitalist production. For the rest, such elements of bourgeois culture as are allowed to filter through to the "lower" classes are designed to drug the workers' minds into acceptance of the existing system.

Ever heard of a pithed frog?' said the Tramp.—'Pithed frog,' said the Angel. ‘No!’—'It's a thing these here vivisectionists do. They takes a frog and they cuts out his brains and they shoves a bit of pith in the place of ’em. That’s a pithed frog. Well—that there village is full of pithed human beings.'—The Angel took it quite seriously. 'Is that so?' he said.—'That's so—you take my word for it. Everyone of them ’as ’ad their brains cut out and chunks of rotten touchwood put in the place of it. And you see that little red place there?'—'That’s called the national school,’ said the Angel.—'Yes—that's where they piths ’em,’ said the Tramp." (H. G. Wells, The Wonderful Visit, Chapter xxx.).

We do not assert that this is the outcome of a deliberate policy, for our capitalist rulers are less intelligent than communists are apt to believe. But that is the way things work out in practice. Moreover, the bourgeoisie no less than the proletariat is becoming class-conscious; and to an increasing extent the class war is a manifestation of purposive actions and reactions. Thus, as far as may be, higher culture is exclusively reserved for the members of the bourgeois class. Proles is given nothing but the three R’s until he demands more with irresistible emphasis. Then, to divert his attention from the class struggle, he is given carefully graded doses of "impartial" education in the form of University Extension.

Ergatocratic culture is Proletcult. Elsewhere the authors have expounded their conception of ergatocracy, the new name which is to enable a new idea to make a more definite impression on the mind. Ergatocracy is "workers' rule." Through the dictatorship of the proletariat it will save civilisation from perishing in the shipwreck of capitalism. Through the dictatorship of the proletariat it will realise that higher phase of ergatocracy when there will be no more proletariat. Proletarians form a working class; under ergatocracy, when all will be workers, there will be a classless State. Primarily, as has been said, ergatocratic culture, workers' culture, proletarian culture, Proletcult, is a fighting culture, aiming at the overthrow of capitalism, and at the replacement of democratic culture and bourgeois ideology by ergatocratic culture and proletarian ideology. In this stage it is avowedly a class culture. In the postrevolutionary phase, when ergatocracy has been realised, and in proportion as it becomes possible to relax the dictatorship of the proletariat, for the first time in the history of civilisation culture will become a universal culture. It is likely enough that it will continue even then, when the proletariat has ceased to exist, to bear the name of the class from which it sprang. Walter Rathenau coins a useful phrase when he speaks of the principle of the Substitution of the Content. When historic conditions change, old names often persist, but by degrees a new wine is put into the old bottles. So significant is the contrast between bourgeois culture and proletarian culture, so tremendous is the present turning-point in the world's history, that it may well happen that the first universal culture will continue to bear the name of Proletcult long after the proletariat has passed away, having fulfilled its historic mission.

We need not concern ourselves with these distant vistas. Enough here and now for us to understand the fighting culture of the proletariat, the culture which will achieve and consolidate the proletarian revolution, and will then proceed to reap the harvest of that revolution. This is what we mean by Proletcult.