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 and/or culture:
“To get away from one’s working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one’s self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“Much of the wisdom of the world is not wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame, and are not writers.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing—he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)