I dunno if the US left has ever been big on kulcha, much less high European kulcha -- humanistic or scientific. As Tocqueville says (see, that already marks me as an insufferable unAmerican snob, if referrences to Trotsky, Goethe, and Newton didn't already), in a democracy, of anyway in AMerican democracy, there are strong pressures to cpnform of a lowest common denominator level of consciousness. Only puts it better than that. I think the deliberate choice of large sectots of the US left has been to succumb to that (when it isn't indulging in obscurantist Marxspeak or pomese) -- the soporific CP writing style, the decision to write the ISO paper at a 7th grade level. ANd further to the right, where the Unions once had readers to read literature to the workers -- that is how Gompers got his start, I think, reading Dickens to the cigar workers -- you can use trhe UAW's Ammo (for example) to stuff your shoes, if they have holes in them.
I can't agree with Brian that de gustibus non disputandam est (eek, I really am an awful snob), that thre's nothing to be said between the Monkees and Beethoven; even though I like low art and high class trash as much as the next guy, I think it's important that people be able recognize the good stuff and know what it is good. Brian may be right that complexity may not be the key to the good stuff, it would be suprising if there were only one key.
jks
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> Chris Doss wrote:
>
> >However I think it is important to note that the
> >Akhmatovs and the Mayakovskys and the Malevichs
> >represented a small percentage of the population
> >located in the bouregousies of St. Petersburg and
> >Moscow. The majority of the population had very
> >different tastes -- it was made up of people like
> >Khrushchev, with his fourth-grade education and
> >peasant/working class roots. If anything Social
> >Realism represented a move in the direction of the
> >tastes and world view of the general masses.* Note
> the
> >similarity in structure between the Socialist
> Realist
> >novel and the popular 19th-century Orthodox Lives
> of
> >the Saints.
>
> This touches on one of the interesting - and, to be
> honest, appealing
> - aspects of Marxism: it's at once an "elitist" and
> a radically
> egalitarian doctrine. Marx himself made few
> compromises to appeal to
> a popular audience; even the Manifesto requires the
> reading skills of
> a high-school graduate (according to Microsoft
> Word's grammar
> checker, which recommends documents aspire to the
> 7th or 8th grade
> level!). Lenin and Trotsky had high cultural
> expectations for the
> working class - they wanted proletarians to
> assimilate the best of
> bourgeois culture. In fact, raising the cultural
> level of the working
> class seemed central to their revolutionary project.
> That didn't last
> through the 1920s. That's never been too big a part
> of the American
> left, has it? My Pacifica colleagues mostly frown on
> anything that
> smacks of elitism.
>
> Doug
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