[lbo-talk] Progress? (Was . . . Re: Catholicism, )

[andie nachgeborenen]

Depending on what you mean by culture, that takes in a lot of the whole historical left, from Lukacs, the Frankfurt School and anyone in the broadly Hegelian current of Marxism who values hoch-Europäische Kultur and the Aufhebung of what previous eras have produced, to E.P. Thompson and the tradition of romantic anticapitalism that Michael Loewy has so lucidly and respectfully described, to William Morris who (though no Hegelian!!) straddles these extremes, finding the evil in capitalism precisely in its destruction of the beauty and skills cultivated by artisans in precapitalist times, to the Old Man himself, who was nothing if not an exemplar of hoch-Europäische Kultur, see, e.g., Prawer's Karl Marx and World Literature, but just read him! The Bible and Shakespeare and the Greeks are woven all through, Latin tags -- hoc Rhodus, de te fabula, etc.; he cannot write a sentence without the whole of world and particularly European culture breathing

 through it.

Now, I myself acknowledge that the classical education that Marx got is a product of a specific historical era and an emblem of class privilege. Nonetheless, I cannot bring myself to celebrate the fact that we can no longer produce as a matter of course fairly decent numbers of men and some women who are at home in Latin Greek, German, English, French, and probably several other languages, literatures, to whom Dante and Shakespeare and Homer and the Bible are as natural as breathing. Certainly not when you see what has replaced all that.

Likewise, to wax William Morrisian or E.P. Thompsonish, it's not a gain that today it is inconceivable that someone like Shelley would, long after his death, be a figure of honor, known to and quoted by working people, but this was true of the artisanal upper end of English working class through the end of 19th century, or that the skills that workers had in their bones for centuries have been completely and irreparably lost in a few generations. If the Chrysler Building or the Sullivan-Adler masterpieces on Michigan Ave. and State St. in Chicago were destroyed, we literally would not know how to recreate them. 

So, Doug, what exactly is so great about the late (recent) industrial and post-industrial capitalist destruction of culture? When somebody said something about reducing all ties to a cold cash nexus, I don't think that was entirely meant as a positive thing.

--- On Sat, 12/13/08, SA <s11131978 at gmail.com> wrote:


> From: SA <s11131978 at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Catholicism, was Re: blacks about as morally   conservative as Republicans
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Saturday, December 13, 2008, 5:06 PM
> shag carpet bomb wrote:
> 
> > i like "useful idiots." (the point: they may
> identify with the left on economic issues but, often,
> culturally they are right wing. that's not especially
> unusual. there are lots of people sympathetic to a leftist,
> marxist economic analysis who weep over the demise of
> "culture" and "civil society" wrought by
> the destructive forces of capitalism. etc. and so forth.)
> > 
> 
> But this is a good description of pretty much the entire
> socialist left in, say, 1870-1914.
> 
> In fact, isn't Engels' _Condition of the Working
> Class In England_ a lot of weeping  for the demise of
> culture and civil society wrought by capitalism?
> 
> SA
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