<div>On 4/7/06, BklynMagus <<a href="mailto:magcomm@ix.netcom.com">magcomm@ix.netcom.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Dear list: But any cultural ranking is arbitrary.  Some people love Brahms and some love Kander and Ebb.  How can anyone say defintively that one resides on a higher cultural level than the other?</blockquote> <div> I think this is mostly a false dichotomy.  Of course I personally believe that Shakespeare is more complex, deeper and broader, and, if read seriously, provides a stronger access to human experience than Raymond Chandler. At the same time I think that any apriori ranking of cultural experience is simply engaging in a kind of religious authorization of an acceptable canon.  There are no sacred texts.  All canonical works should be questioned by the skeptical human being.  To accept authority of what is "good" art and what is bad art only destroys good art.... etc.  But the point that classical Marxism shared with classical Anarchism (the Free School movement) was the idea that ordinary people could be provided with the tools to understand, create, and think for themselves, tools they were denied them by society and indoctrination.  It was believed that these cultural tools were literary, artistic, and scientific.  It was also believed (perhaps idealistically) that, as Trotsky once put it, in a socialistic future, where all human beings were allowed to develop their full potential, the Dantes, the Shakespeares, the Einsteins, the Mozarts, would not be uncommon.  This view was propounded not only by Trotsky, but also by left Communists, and anarcho-syndicalists.  True there was an over-reliance on high European culture in their ideas, but that was mostly because that was the culture that they knew.  Philosophers such as Ernst Bloch picked up these ideas and added a bit of Kantian utopianism and developed many interesting views of the relation between utopia and art around such hopes.  What interests me is not the Utopianism of these views, but the idea that the "working class opposition" must teach itself, and that it is one of the responsibilities of writers, artists, scientists, who choose to be on the side of the "working class" to engage in this self-education.  Thus there were workers libraries, study groups, schools, etc., and these institutions were supposed to be "organic", connected to unions and neighborhoods.  They were also supposed to be oppositional.  Of course the Stalinist Popular Front drove some of these ideas into the ground.  Jerry </div> </div> -- Jerry Monaco's Philosophy, Politics, Culture Weblog is Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, and Culture <a href="http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/">http://monacojerry.livejournal.com/</a> His fiction, poetry, weblog is Hopeful Monsters: Fiction, Poetry, Memories <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/"> http://www.livejournal.com/users/jerrymonaco/</a> Notes, Quotes, Images - From some of my reading and browsing <a href="http://www.livejournal.com/community/jerry_quotes/">http://www.livejournal.com/community/jerry_quotes/ </a>