The problem of culture

[From Avanti!, 5 april 1913]

The recent controversy that took place in the columns of Avanti! between Professor Fabietti and Adelino Marchetti, secretary of the Milan Chamber of Labor regarding “culture,” has barely touched on the very important problem, reproducing that profound disagreement of methods and conceptions that constituted the core of all discussions at the last National Congress of Young Socialists, expanding to include the whole general question of the method of preparation and the mission incumbent on the Socialist Party.

It will perhaps not be useless to put the problem in its true terms, summarizing it briefly in the columns of  Avanti! in order to draw the attention of all comrades to it. First of all, it is necessary to rectify an erroneous interpretation given to the thesis made by those who, like us, have certain distrusts of the work of cultural preparation as it is commonly understood, distrusts which we shall go on to justify and explain.

No one – and certainly not Comrade Marchetti – would accept the epithet “enemy of culture” in the absolute sense, and no one considers the state of ignorance of the proletariat desirable for the future of socialism. We only want to investigate to what extent and with what values the cultural preparation of the masses can be part of the subversive action of socialism, because we believe that, while recognizing the undeniable advantages, some forms of such preparation, especially in so far as an attempt is made to give them fundamental importance, end up by going too far outside the characteristic lines of the revolutionary program of socialism. The socialist party has the mission of attending to the intellectual development of the proletariat as well as its economic interests: We do not dispute this premise of the advocates of culture either. On the contrary, we go so far as to argue that the party must vigorously counter the corporatist and localist degeneration by setting itself against the immediate interests of certain workers’ groups, if these compromise the ultimate goal of the whole working class – socialism.

But we urge comrades not to forget that this collective aim (which we may call “ideal”, if one wishes to employ that term) according to the Marxist conception has its basis in the “material” fact of the contrast existing between the interest of the proletarian class and the present forms of production.

That ideal is thus felt by the workers insofar as they live in the straits of that real and economic contrast. The development of the worker is the direct consequence of his economic status. And in this sense socialism seeks to concern itself with the intellectual emancipation of the worker at the same time as the economic emancipation, always holding that the former is a consequence of the latter, and that if one cherishes the progress and culture of the masses, one must not despise but accept in its highest value the program of his “material” redemption.

It is therefore abundantly clear that as, by the very evolution of capitalist society, the strength and economic cohesion of the proletariat is accentuated, its ideal consciousness and intellectual preparation must also be accentuated. The Socialist Party indicates to the proletariat in which direction to direct the forces resulting from its need in order to reach as soon as possible the class goal, namely, the abolition of the wage-earner.

Thus, then the party can and must guide workers’ education and “culture”. And no revolutionary socialist can be against this second part of the program without falling into contradiction with their anti-egoistic and anti-reformist conceptions of the workers’ movement.

But “reformism” and “democracy” see the problem of culture from a quite different, indeed exactly upside-down point of view. In working-class culture they see the parallel consequence of economic emancipation, the main means and “necessary condition” of that emancipation.

How reactionary and anti-Marxist such a concept is, does not require many words to prove. If we believe that the ideology of a class is a consequence of the position assigned to it in a given epoch of history by the system of production, we cannot “wait” for the working class to be “educated” in order to believe that revolution is possible, because we would be admitting at the same time that revolution will never happen.

This purported cultural educational preparation of the proletariat is not feasible within the framework of present-day society. On the contrary, the action of the bourgeois class – including reformist democracy – “educates” the masses in a precisely anti-revolutionary sense, by a complex of means with which no socialist institution can ever remotely compete. But it is not on this that we insist. Let socialist schools arise, especially where it is necessary to train propagandists, perhaps… among the intellectual class, which is, in matters of socialism, very ignorant. But let us not run the risk of spreading, perhaps unwittingly, that reformist criterion of the “necessity” of culture.

It would be a mighty means of numbing the masses, and is in fact the means by which the ruling minority persuades the exploited class to leave the reins of power in their hands.

We are well aware that socialist schools are often directed in the revolutionary direction, and that many comrades who advocate them do not accept at all those criteria that we point out as dangerous. That is all very well.

But the danger remains. The worker is logically reluctant to assiduously attend these schools which impose a very serious intellectual effort on him, given his conditions of overwork and poor nutrition. A lively inducement is therefore needed to commit him to such a sacrifice, and the means by which this inducement is made ends up being equivocal.

Proletarians are told that they have almost no “right” to be militant in the trade union field and especially in the political field because of their lack of education; this is intended to make them blush at their own ignorance. However, they should instead be convinced that this ignorance is one of the many infamous consequences of bourgeois exploitation, and that the intellectual inferiority of the worker, rather than being a cause for hesitancy and cowardice, ought to serve as a springboard to make him rise up, just as his economic inferiority does.

This is the danger. It is the danger of excess, not of the thing itself, when the theoretical direction of these schools of culture is clearly revolutionary. But it then becomes inevitable if reformist theories are followed. Zibordi explicitly says that the worker, before “swearing at bourgeois society,” must educate himself, and “not only” in the field of socialist culture, but rather in that of an education in every sense… As a result of this softening of our propaganda Giolitti was able to congratulate our representatives in parliament for the work of pacifist “education” done in the masses. Socialism, instead of making the proletarians the untamable rebels to the present condition, would end up making them docile sheep, domesticated, “educated” and… ready for shearing.

But reformism goes further and goes so far as to demand from the proletariat “technical preparation” and “culture of concrete problems.” It is remarkable that reformism which is all positive, all “economist”, all mechanical, arrives at these far more unattainable desires than those of which we are accused. It is the utopianism of practice, of technique, catalogued in the minimum programs, inflated with electoral advertising, that would require many more centuries to be realized than those that its advocates – practical people, who do not think of their grandchildren! – cathedrally assigned to the advent of the social revolution.

It is against these exaggerations that we must react. Comrade Marchetti is quite right to fear for the solidity and subversive physiognomy of the resistance organizations, just as the majority of the Youth Congress felt that an exclusively cultural direction of preparation would discolor the Socialist youth movement altogether.

The mission of the Socialist Party is to subvert, to stir up the masses, by agitating an “idea,” certainly; but an idea deeply rooted in reality.

The Party’s intransigence must become a profound differentiation from democratic methodology. For democracy, the economic problem is the underground that needs to be explored with the light of “culture” that descends from the empyrean of philosophers, teachers, thinkers.

But Marxist socialism reverses in theory and in politics the democratic equivocation. It shows that the social underground is in ferment and will find within itself the way to unleash the latent forces that agitate it.

Workers’ thought and ideology are determined outside the philosophy led by the class that has the monopoly of the means of production, and the monopoly of “culture”. The action of the Socialist Party succeeds in accomplishing a work of synthesis of those latent forces, in giving the proletariat the consciousness of its “entire” self, and the courage not to seek outside itself the means of its ascension. All our propaganda and agitation daily clash against the mistrust the workers have in their own strengths and against the prejudice of inferiority and inability to conquer power; errors warmed by bourgeois democracy that would like the political abdication of the masses in the hands of a few demagogues. And it is precisely the danger of favoring this game – attempted in the conservative interest of present institutions – that makes us wary of the exaggerations of the work of culture.