KS100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Working Class Culture, Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci
Document Summary
Practitioners of cultural studies (15-1600"s), by a large, they were all communists or socialists. Socialism tends to be a theory of government, tends to be attached to the state system. Capitalism is a means towards justice: early cultural theorists believed in the importance of working class for popular culture. Tendency was to privilege high culture and exclude cultures of other forms. Culture seriously and don"t dismiss the other class cultures: at the time, it was believed that the working class culture was under threat. From war, the dominant culture was doing what it could to equalize everyone, to bring the working class up into the middle class. And from the threat coming from american culture. Posed a threat to other cultures: cultural theorists believed that working class culture, and later pop. Culture, could have some contribution to make to the emergence of a future socialist state. Popular culture was used to created cultural forms in opposition of dominant cultural forces.
