Working class culture is a range of cultures created by or popular among working class people. The cultures can be contrasted with high culture and folk culture, and are sometimes equated with popular culture and low culture (the counterpart of high culture).
Working class culture is extremely geographically diverse, leading some to question whether the cultures have anything in common. Many socialists with a class struggle viewpoint see its importance as arising from the proletariat they champion. Some states that claim to be communist have declared an official working class culture, most notably socialist realism, which aims to glorify the worker. However, glorification of the worker in abstract is seldom a feature of independent working class cultures. Other socialists such as Lenin believed that there could be no authentic proletarian culture free from capitalism, and that high culture should not be outside the experience of workers.
Working class culture developed during the Industrial Revolution. Because most of the newly created working class were former peasants, the cultures took on much of the localised folk culture. This was soon altered by the changed conditions of social relationships and the increased mobility of the workforce, and later by the marketing of mass-produced cultural artefacts such as prints and ornaments, and events such as music hall and cinema.
Read more about Working Class Culture: Portrayals in Popular Culture, Further Reading
Famous quotes containing the words working class, working, class and/or culture:
“That’s what being in the working class is all about—how to get out of it.”
—Neville Kenneth Wran (b. 1926)
“Roughly speaking, any man with energy and enthusiasm ought to be able to bring at least a dozen others round to his opinion in the course of a year no matter how absurd that opinion might be. We see every day in politics, in business, in social life, large masses of people brought to embrace the most revolutionary ideas, sometimes within a few days. It is all a question of getting hold of them in the right way and working on their weak points.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“A poet is no rattlebrain, saying what comes uppermost, and, because he says every thing, saying, at last, something good; but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is nothing whimsical or fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions, and pointed with the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“When a culture feels that its end has come, it sends for a priest.”
—Karl Kraus (1874–1936)