Ashcroft & Race

[Gordon Fitch]

Wojtek Sokolowski:
> ...
> In the good old days, the progressive thing was to make "high culture" and
> lifestyle open to the working class, instead of being a bourgeois
> privilege.  Workers (an ex-slaves too) aspired to high culture and
> bourgeois life styles.  There was nothing noble in poverty and "rural
> idiocy" as Marx aptly described it. The main goal was to abolish it.
>
> Today, poverty and underclass have become cultural identities that are the
> opium for the downwardly mobile and the countercultural commodity for those
> who can afford it, especially bleeding-heart intellectuals.   And this
> debased identity politics passes for progressive discourse nowadays.

Impatience with rural idiocy shows the Whiggish streak in
Marx.  If he'd only been educated to the point of decadence
he'd have read the Eclogues and the Georgics, and known that
Italian shepherds could exchange Mozartianly effortless
hexameters.

And speaking of high culture: if culture can be low or high,
then it is being ordered by power and can never belong to the
working class except where they are obedient, deferential
recipients.  But if, instead of imparting the higher things,
one could figure out how to get the peasants however crude
to revolt -- leftishly, of course -- you'd have a revolution,
nekulturnaya, perhaps, but a real revolution nevertheless.
Want it?  Maybe Virgil is nicer.

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