RICHARD WOLLHEIM is Reader in Philosophy 
at University College, London 

THE ARGUMENT in this pamphlet is necessarily fragmentary. Parts of it 
have already appeared in Partisan R eview and Spectator, and I am grateful 
to the editors of those reviews for permission to reprint. I should also like 
to thank various friends with whom I have discussed a number of points 
and who have offered me their comments and criticisms: C. A. R. Crosland, 

Stuart Hampshire, William 
Williams, Angus Wilson. 
Phillips, Meyer Schapiro, Ed Shils, Bernard 
R.W. 

FABIAN TRACT 331 


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Note.-This pamphlet, like all publications of the 
FAB/AN SOCIETY, represents not the collective 
view of the Society but only the view of the indi\'idual 
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which it issues as worthy of consideration within the 
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May, 1961 


I. Culture and Socialism 
THE QUESTION 

The great mass of what most non-socialists at least consider 
at present to be part of socialism, seems to me nothing more 
than a machinery of socialism, which I think it probable that 
socialism must use in its militant condition: and which I 
think it may use for some time after it is practically established 
: but this does not seem to me to be of its essence. 

T
T
HE words are William Morris', written some seventy years ago, and 
though there are things in them with which a supporter of the Labour 
Party today is likely to disagree, there is also one thing here which he 
loses sight of only to his great detriment. And that is the distinction between 
what Morl'is calls 1he machinery and ·the essence of Socialism : or, as I 
should prefer to put it, between the means of Socialism and its end. 

The distinction is of great importance, and to it there correspond two 
radically different ways in which Socialism can be, and historically has 
been, conceived. For-to put it rather less portentously than Morris-
we can conceive of Socialism in terms of the means that it advocates : or, 
again, we can conceive of it in terms of the end or ends that these means 
are intended to realise. On the one view, Socialism is seen as intimately 
connected with certain fairly specific political measures, like progressive 
taxation or nationalisation, or workers' control: measures which it is 
ty;p.ical of Socialist politicians to advocate out of office and to implement 
(it .is to be hoped) when in office. On the other view, Socialism is closely 
associated with a certain kind of society, a certain way or manner in which 
free human beings can organise themselves and live together. We might 
put this by saying that it is possible to conceive of Socialism either as fundamentally 
a Programme or as fundamentally an Ideal. 

In practice, of course, the distinction between these two ways of conceiving 
Socialism is not quite as neat as this suggests. For it would be 
incorrect to think of everything that is political or institutional as relevant 
to Socialism only when conceived of as a Programme, nor would it be 
right to imagine that the Socialist Ideal can be stated in exclusively social 
or non-poliotical terms. No conception of an end can ever be totally 
independent of what are thought to ·be the best means towards that end. 
For if we are really to adopt some state of affairs as an end, we must have 
some idea, however shadowy, of what it would be like for this state of affairs 
to ·be realised : and this in turn means that we must have some conception 
of how it could ·be realised. Accordingly, into our picture of the good 
society we must introduce some indication of the institutions, or the political 
measures, upon which it depends. 

Any attempt, then, to express Socialism as an Ideal must, if it is not 
to be incoherent or partial, contain some political detail. Nevertheless 
it is a perfectly legitimate exercise sometimes to try and abstract thi;; 
political element from our Ideal, and consider what remains. What, we 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 

might ask, is the quality of life incorporated in the society that we wish 
into existence? How are men to be related to one another? !What is to 
be the character of their work, and how are they to spend their leisure? 
What do we expect them to know, and what store do we expect them to 
set by knowledge? What will the arts be like? Will they be the preserve 
of .the few, or the common province of all? Will non-conformity be a 
private virtue or a public vice? Will life become freer, or will freedom 
become unnecessary? 

Answers to these questions would define, or help to define, what L 
have called the quality of life experienced in a Sociali&t society. Another 
way of characterising this very general aspect of social existence, which 
is separate from, though closely dependent upon, political factors, would 
be to use the word culture: and it is in this sense, vague but not, I hope, 
dmbiguous, that I intend to use it, when I raise the question, What should 
be the culture of a Socialist society? 

Why Should We Ask? 

So much for the legitimacy of the question. Some, however, might 
accept this :but question its utility. Granted that one way of conceiving 
Socialism is as the realisation of a certain kind of society, and granted 
that the description of any such society must involve a cultural specification, 
what is the use or value of conceiving Socialism in this way? What 
can one profita·bly say about the quality of life to be enjoyed by the 
future? How can one reasonably legislate for the culture of a society as 
yet unborn? 

Before answering this 01bjec.,tion 1 should like to make two important 
concessions in its direction. In the first place, J think that we should 
never discuss the culture of Socialism in any except the most general terms. 
lf it is now objected that this will tend to make our discussion vague and 
unrealistic, I can only say that I think we are far more likely to lose our 
sense of reality by making our speculations too specific than we are by 
keeping them too general. Indeed if we accept-as traditionally all 
Socialists, indeed nearly all reformers, have done-some theory of the 
dependence of cultural upon material conditions, it would be clearly 
irrational to specify for Socialist society its cultuml character so far ahead 
of knowing what its material nature will be. 

Secondly, I think that there is also grave danger in talking about the 
culture of Socialism as though it were something static and timeless. It 
is no part of a progressive way of thought to believe that the entry into 
Socialism will coincide with the exit from History: even Karl Marx, who 
certainly attributed an exaggerated importance to the Socialist revolution, 
believed that beyond it society would continue to change, even if in rather 
different respects from before. And if society changes, so will culture. 
To env.isage, as some would, the arts and pleasures of Socialist society fixed 
in a timeless and eternal mould is to indulge in a form of vanity; it-is an 
arrogant effort to try to secure immortality for the products of our wishes 
and our tentative speculations. 

However, once these two qualifications are inserted and we admit the 
necessarily general and the necessarily historical character of all speculation 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 

aJoout SociaLism and culture, I don't think that it can any longer be maintained 
that the whole inquiry is useless. Indeed its utility can be directly 
derived from its urgency. For just as the nineteenth-century case for 
Socialism acquired much of its appeal from the realisation that the economic 
system was not, after all, the product of impersonal and abstract forces, 
and that the suffering and hardship it involved could be attributed to human 
agency, so the case for extending the Socialist ideal to take in more and 
more aspects of social life. more and more of the activities and interests 
of man in society, derives its strength from the awareness that increasingly 
this whole side of life is becoming organised for us by powerful private 
forces. Laisser-faire is no truer an account of cultural life in the mid-
twentieth century than it was of economic life in the mid-nineteeth century. 
1f Socialists do not devote any thought to what they want life to be )ike in 
the future, they can be sure that advertisers, newspaper-owners and the 
purveyors of mass-enter·tainment will; although I suspect that the efficacy of 
these agents is sometimes exaggerated. In a certain kind of political literature 
today the Advertiser plays the role that the Armaments-King did a generation 
ago. He is the chief conspirator in yet another version of the old 
conspir-acy-theory of history; a theory which we all hoped that Marx had 
destroyed years ago. Nevertheless, this attempt on the part of private and 
irresponsible power to influence and mould our ideals of life, should not 
be ignored or go unchallenged : even if only because the full extent of its 
efficacy is as yet unknown. And if we intend to challenge it, we must 
know what we want instead. 

New Traditions 

It is, therefore, not surpnsmg that in the last two or three years there 
should have been a determined effort to work out afresh the cultural 
implications of the Socialist Ideal, and to restate Socialism in terms of 
the quality of life that it wishes to realise. A few years ago the typical 
voice of radical protest was raised by movements li'ke the Keep Left 
group and Victory for Socialism : movements which were preoccupied with 
certain political measures which, they felt, were no longer being advocated 
with fervour and wholeheartedness. They detected a degree of compromise, 
of pusillanimity, in Labour politics, and they were against it. Today this 
has changed. If we look now for what is most vigorous and fresh on the 
radical fringe, we find it among the New Left. And what gives unity to this 
group is ·not a particular political programme but rather a very general 
impatience with what is felt to be the excessively practical and empirical 
tradition of the British Labour movement and a deep desire to produce a 
new theoretical basis for our Socialism. Socialism must 1be seen in terms 
of the society that it offers: and ultimately its appeal should reside in the 
promise that it holds out of a new way of life. (Indeed, it may seem to 
many just another symptom of the political confusion of the day that the 
New Left should have adopted the particular attitude it did over the Clause 
F our controversy, and should have lent its support to the dogmatic 
retention of nationalisation as a political means.) Seminal works in the 
diffusion of this new approach are Raymond Williams' Culture and Society, 
and The Long Rerol11tion, and Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy. 


4 SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 

It is some indication of how far this movement has gone that one of its 
adherents, Dennis Potter, should announce in The Glittering Coffin, a young 
man's hook typical of much around it, that the "so-called 'obl'ique' attitudes 
to Socialism-attitudes which realise that the quality of our whole culture, 
particularly as expressed and exploited by the mass media, is a potent 
factor in creating that better and more noble society which is the one 
constant quality of the Socialist vision"-have already >become the new 
'tradition' of the Left. 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 5 

11. The Present Compromise 
THE RISE OF MIDDLE-GLASS CULTURE 

O
O
NE of the main difficulties in defining the cultural implications of 
Socialism is to decide where to start. As good a place as any, it seems 
to me, is our present situation. For, in the first place, it provides the 
discussion with a basis in fact. And, secondly, since the cultural condition 
of Great Britain today is -like much else in our society-clearly in a 
smte of transition, it is a matter of some moment for Socialists to decide 
what they feel a•bout the direction in which the movjng parts are going. 
Are we, or are we not, progressing towards a Socialist society? 

To understand the present situation we must go •back somewhat in time. 
In 1853, Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, asked Sir Stafford 
Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan to prepare for his use a report on the 
general condition of the Civil Service. In November of that year the report 
appeared, a highly conscientious piece of work, complete with criticisms 
from eminent administrators and educationalists and with replies to these 
criticisms from the authors. Amongst other things the report recommended 
that the old system of patronage-whereby, as Bright said, the Service was 
the outdoor relief department for the aristocracy-should be aJbandoned, 
and recruitment effected by open examination. This dry, practical document 1 has been one of the great factors in the formation of the dominant culture 
in England today : for it has secured the establishment of the system and the 
class on which this culture ultimately depends. 

Nor was this result so alien or so tangential to the motives of the 
reformers as one might at first suppose. Undoubtedly par~t of their inspiration 
was the desire to have an efficient bureaucracy and to remove the 
various aJbuses and anomalies of which Dickens' Circumlocution Office was 
no great parody. But another aim, of which they showed themselves not 
totally unconscious, and between which and their original inspiration they 
saw no real conflict, was in some way to 'provide' for the younger generations 
of the new middle-class : not, of course, in any way, but in a decent 
and suitable way. For there were around, ~in increasing numbers, young, 
intelligent, conscientious men who were not particularly interested in the 
occupations either of their elders or of their betters, who were averse 
both to sweating la~bour and to hunting foxes, and who very much wanted 
to do something for others, provided, of course, that doing so would also 
do something for them. They wanted a respectable and literate occupation, 
which was not mercenary but equally not unlucrative. It was quite evident 
that a reformed Ci•vil Service, if such a thing could be brought into being, 
would ideally suit their requirements. 

By 1870 the recommendations of the report had been implemented in 
full. Meanwhile, the older uni~versities, shaking themselves out of their 
eighteenth century slumbers, had ccme to see that it would be increasingly 
their role to prepare young men to take up their place in the reformed 
bureaucracy-or, if not exactly in the bureaucracy, then in some other 
profession that, in virtue of its resemblance or propinquity to the •bureau



6 
SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 

cracy, had acquired a similar status and degree of respectabi~ity-and they 
had raised their standards accordingly. Some years previously the public 
schools had made good their claim to ,provide the preparatory education 
for this new channel of preferment; indeed it was in large part the country's 
inability to absorb satisfactorily the output of the public schools that gave 
rise to the prorblem to which the reformed bureaucracy was the answer. 

The result of these various processes was that there was set up, in the 
very middle of English social life, a funnel, or chute, graduated in degrees 
marked 'Public School (or Grammar School) : Oxford or Cambridge : 
Profession', and into this funnel, and up it, and out at the top, were drawn, 
in their generations, the sons of the English middle classes, instructed, as 
they passed through it, in the classics, in the value of judgment, and in the 
control of the emotions. English middle-class culture as it exists today, 
and as it has existed for nearly a hundred years, is to be understood in 

\ 
terms of, even if it is not wholly produced by, the operation ol this 
educational funnel. The virtues and vices, as well as the whole range of 
neutral characteristics, of the dominant culture of this country, relate 
to this particular set of institutions. 

The Culture Reviewed 

To hegin with, tl:Le culture is predominantly literary. The classical learning. 
on which it was'origmally grounded, may no longer be widely diffused, 
but its influence endures, if only in the low cultural rating still assigned 
to the sciences. Secondly-and this may also, in part at least, relate to 
ins philological origins__, English middle-class culture is strongly ;mtitheoretical 
in tendency: 'genual ideas', in fields as diverse as politics .or 
the criticism of the arts, or educational theory, are fiercely resisted in a 
way which would be, and is, found unaccountable in France or in the 
United States. Thirdly, there is an intense resistance to any new cultur~l 
movement. The causes of this are complex, and all but impossible to 
diSentangle. In part, it is due to the proverbially strong traditionalism of 
English life. In part, again, it requires no special explanation, being a 
natural feature of any society untouched by that benign materialism, such 
as one finds in America, which automatically assigns to anything that exists 
a place in the culture. Fourthly, English middle-class culture has always rcontained a very high level of criticism. This is true not merely of academil:: 
subjects, but also of the higher journalism, which is remarkable by 
European as well as by American standards. And this seems to be 
intimately connected with the highly personal (and to many highly 'uneconomic') 
character of the higher education. The close connection between 
teacher and student and the absence of the professorial manner help to 
introduce and sustain an atmosphere of ready criticism. Fifthly, English Igenteel culture is hostile to professionalism in any form. The syllabus 
of the public school and Oxford and Cambridge are still thought to 
provide all that it is necessary for, say, a Treasury official or a high 
executive in industry to know. And, finally, English middle-class cultur.:: 
{ has a strong class character, so that the line between education and manners, 
between culture and convention, would be frightfully hard to draw. 
And this, of course, is the direct result of the close connection between the 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 7 

culture and the restricted educational system within which it has been stored. 

Of recent years the educational system has become noticeably less 
restricted. The bottom of the chute has now been splayed out so that 
it can pick up not merely the children of the professional classes but also 
cleverer children of the classes tbelow. An important qualification is that 
the public schools still remain a middle-class preserve, constituting (if 
nothing else) a ridiculous source of wastage for the teaching talent of the 
country. But if we set aside this gross anomaly and the extent to which it 
weights educational opportunity in favour of one particular class, we can + say that in Britain today access to middle-class culture is in principle open 
to all. It is, of course, open on highly competitive terms: but the terms 
of the competition are set in ability, not class or money. 'Clerisy', to 
use Coleridge's expression, is now a carriere ouverte aux talents. 

And there is, of course, a certain appropriateness in using this antiquated 
expression. For despite the changes in recruitment, the structure and 
character of middle-class culture remain very much as they were. Under 
the new dispensation the role of the universiti·es is to absorb the abler 
and more ambitious sons of the lower classes into the ranks of the upper 
classes; and they do so by means of the old culture of which they are the 
proprietary agents. 

Mass Culture 

But the position of the old culture in England is by no means monopolistic. 
Alongside it there now exists a new culture, which, in its entry 
requirements and in its geneml Characteristics, stands in marked contrast 
to the old cul.ture. For whereas the old culture is exclusiv.e, the new 
culture aims at the maximum diffusion. Whereas the old culture is primarily 
literary, the new culture is a !ejsure culture. Where the old culture 
is highly critic"il, the new culture is based on acceptance. Where the old 
culture is modest and unobtrusive, the new culture is ostentatious and 
essentially bound up with high consumption. And while the old culture 
is a class culture, the new cliffiire is classless. 

The new culture is generally referred to as Mass Culture, and I shall 
follow this practice myself, though I am aware that the term, ibeing an 
import from American descriptive sociology, is only approximate to British 
conditions. Some have argued that its use is inappropriate, and that the 
phenomenon to which it is applied is neither a 'mass' phenomenon, nor 
is it a 'culture'. I admit some force to both these objections, but I think 
that what they estabiish is that we should be cautious in our use of the 
term, not that we should abandon it altogether. 

Raymond Williams has argued that the use of the word 'mass' in ex · 
pressions like 'mass-communication' or 'mass-democracy' is the natural heir 
of the old expression 'mob', and carries with it the same as~ociations of 
gullibility, fickleness, herd-prejudice, lowness of taste and habit. To applythe word already assumes a patronising air, and its continued usage can 
only lead to the adoption of an anti-democratic attitude. 'There are', he 
reminds us 'no masses: there are only ways of seeing people as masse~'1 

Raymond Wi!liams, Culture and Society, p. 300. 


8 SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 

While accepting this salutary reminder, I think that the objecion misfires. 

t 
t
The word 'mass' does not, of course, merely describe people: it also 
descr1bes a certain attitude adopted towards people. But then what is 
called 'mass-<:ulture' is a characteristic product of those who do adopt 
just this attitude towards others, and it is this fact that makes the expression 
useful. 
Personally I would characterise the attitude •that underlies the production 
of mass-cuLture somewhat differently from Williams. In the first 
place, the question of size, which the word 'mass' emphasises, is veryl
l
important. The producers of modern commercial art and entertainment 
have in mind a very J!rge audience indeed. And, secondly, they have in 
mind an audience distingmshoo 1by no common characteristic: their market 
is essentially unorganised and indefinite in extension. It is sometimes said 
that they produce for a 'homogenised' audience. This is misleading for it 
suggests that they depend upon a similarity holding throughout their vast 
audience, whereas the truth is that the character of their audience is a 
matter of total indifference to them. All that they ask of the members of 
their audience by way of a common quality is that ~~ should all like 
what is given to them: what they don't go on to demand is any common 
~reven any common halbits, out of which this liking 
springs. The peculiarity, perhaps the uniqueness, of this mode of cultural 
production justifies us, I thin'k, in characterising its products as 'massculture'. 
As to the other o1bjection, it has sometimes •been claimed that what is 
provided for •the entertainment and consumption of the masses is not 
properly called a 'culture', or is so-according to an alternative version 
of the objection-only in the 'anthropological' sense of the word. The 
argument at this stage runs the risk of falling into verbalism. But if everything 
except 'high culture' is not to be a contradiction in terms, then I 
should have thought that the fact that what we are dealing with is so 
articulate entitles it to the name of a 'culture'. There are, moreover, other 
characteristics, all perhaps connected with articulateness, which further 
justify the expression. In the first place, mass culture is essentially subject 
to change, it has a history; and in this way it is different from folk or 
savage culture. Secondly, the changes that occur are not coincidental or 
imposed from the outside: they take place in accordance with tradition. 
There is a constant effort to embody the 'achievements' of earlier works 
in later works, and this process we can see in action over a whole range 
of artifacts like films, clothes, pop-songs, or motor-cars. Finally, mass 
culture is reflective. Those who consume it can recognise on inspection 
whether new products live up to the demands and standards of the culture, 
whether they are sufficiently 'sharp'. The existence of this kind of self-
consciousness, which, as I said, is probably a direct consequence of articulateness, 
definitely raises mass culture a~bove the level of a mere anthropological 
phenomenon : in coherence, that is. though not, of course, necessarily 
in quality. 

The Present Compromise 

Here then are the outlines of the Present Compromise. On the one hand. 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 

we have the old genteel or middle-class culture, preserved within certain 
traditional institutions, though now offered-on highly competitive terms 
-to many to whom it was •traditionally denied. And below this we have a 
literate self-conscious mass culture, very assertive and very dynamic, which 
provides the sustenance for those who are un-willing or unable to partake 
of the higher culture. 

Of course, this is not the whole picture. There are in Great Britain today 
many other cultural elements. There is, for instance, an extensive 'middleculture', 
which is essentially conservative and caters for a refined and 
educated taste that finds serious art too demanding or too disturlbing. 
Middle culture still commands a large audience, and in certain fields like 
the West End theatre, remains, despite the fashionable gloss of working-
class naturalism, the dominant tradition. Again, there are the surviving 
fragments of proletarian culture, which is in many cases •the survival of an 
earlier rural culture. And, finally, there is the admirable and still fairly 
well diffused 'autodidact' culture of the true self~taught working-class 
intellectual. But though these elements all exist and will doubtless continue 
to do so for some time, it seems to me that they lack both the scale 
and the resources of energy to count as protagonists in the cultural drama 
in its present stage. 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 

Ill. A Reaction 

THE INTEGRATED SOCIETY 

T
T
O many Soci·alists the 'Present Compromise, as I have called it, seems so 
immediately repugnant that they have rejected it in toto and looked 
around for an entirely different system of culture which would be more 
consonant with the demands of Socialism. The exclusiveness of middle-
class culture, the cheapness and banality of mass culture, and the highly 
competitive nature of the structure into which these ·two elements are fitted 
seem to them to rule the existing arrangement out of couPt as even the 
starting-point for the new society. I want to put aside for the moment 
the criticisms they raise against the Present Compromise, and concentrate 
upon their alternative proposals. 

What these proposals amount to is the construction, or reconstruction, 
of an organic or integrated way of life, which would be unified by a 
common culture, common interests, common activities, common 'meanings'. 
In such a society, culture would be 'ordinary'-in a sense which i:; 
opposed rather vaguely to 'unfamiliar' or 'esoteric' or 'highbrow'-because 
all arts would be closely related to, would be ultimately merely extensions 
of, the skills lby means of which the ordinary members of the society 
control their environment and earn their living. 

The vision of the integrated society, a recurrent theme in the political 
speculation of the last hundred and fifty years, has a close connection with 
some of the traditional ideals and aspirations of Socialism. For in the new 
society or the old society revi•ved (and there is often a certain ambiguity 
or indecision het!Ween these two conceptions), commercialism will exist no 
more, work will be humanised and reacquire significance, private property 
will be eliminated or at least markedly reduced , human beings will no 
longer be divided from one another by cruel and meaningless barriers, 
and the exploitation of Nature by Man will supersede the old exploitation 
of Man by Man. The appeal of the integrated society gains a further 
intensity and depth when, as so often happens, it is identified wi·th a rural 
or pastoral society: for, as Freud point out,1 the nostalgia for a form 
of life that is closer to the earth, a demand that is so frequently heard 
in any sophisticated culture, is in large part a romantic or poetic expression 
of the nervousness and the emotional frustrations genera.ted by 
'civilised' sexual morality. And even the current admiration for the old 
working-class life can be seen as an example of this kind of nostalgia. 
For English proletarian culture is essentially the survival , inside the hideous 
nineteenth-century urban shell, of an older but now uproo.ted form of life. 
But for all its manifest attractions, any such ideal immediately lays 
itself open to a number of objections, once we come aotuaiiy to formulate 
it. In its contemporary version one difficulty we are brought up against 
straightaway is the ambiguity that I have already mentioned. Is the ideal 

Sigmund Freud, Collected Pl~per:>, Vol. 11, p. 80. 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 11 

for which our sympathies are being canvassed, a construction, or a reconstruction? 
Are we being asked to support a revival of an old form 
of society, or is the future to witness a new form, based at best analogically 
upon a historical model? There is an ambiguity, an exclusiveness on this 
point, running through the whole modern literature from Leavis and 
Thompson's Culture and Environment-a work of major influence-
onwards. As a consequence, it is possible in any given book of the 
movement to make out a number of themes but nothing that could be 
called its thesis. 

The 'Older' Order 

The most radical and by now the most persistent theme is the plea for 
the reconstruction of traditional working-class life-what Hoggart calls \ 
"an 'older' order". Here, .it is claimed, we have a ground for the culture of 
the future, which is superior at once to the tired and esoteric culture of 
'the classes' and to the cheap tawdry 'homogenised' culture of 'the masses'. 
The case has been presented with great brilliance and subtlety and illustrated 
by passages of fine descriptive writing, but even in its most persuasive 
form it is open to certain powerful, and to my mind unanswerable, 
objections. 

Can it be Revived? 

In the first place, it must be, on any v1ew of society, a doubtful matter 
whether it is possible at .this stage to revive working-class culture and to 
give it a position of ascendancy even in the class of its origin, let alone 
in society at large. Moreover, I should have thought that to anyone who 
radopted a Socialist, or any sort of 'reformist' attitude, the whole project 
must seem clearly imposs~ble. For it is surely integral to reformism to 
bold that, in some sense or other, to a greater or lesser degree, the cultural 
condition of a society is dependent upon the prevailing material conditionsH 
Accordingly it is bard to see how a social reformer could consistently 
advocate the retention of working-class culture, if be also wants (as surel 
he must) the abolition of the old economic position of the working-classes. 
Indeed, even to someone who has no a priori commitment to a theory 
a.bout the general dependence of a culture on material conditions, it must 
seem pretty obvious that there is an intimate connection between traditional 
English working-class attitudes and traditional Enrglish working-class 
poverty: intimate enough for it to be quite unreasonaJble ·to expect that 
the latter could be eliminated and the former conserved. 

Nostalgia a~bout the old working-class life seems to me directly comparable 
to that strong desire, which many express, and many more, 
perhaps cherish, for a return to the comradeship and the warm easy 
intimacy of wartime life. The sudden dropping of social barriers, the 
sense of a common purpose, the occasions of heroism, of insouciance, of 
that unflinching, unglamorous, unheroic endurance which holds a special 
appeal for the British imagination, make the long days and nights, spent 
in the Western Desert or in the London shelters or even in government 
offices, seem in retrospect a sort of Golden Age of feeling, in which it 


12 SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 

1 
1 
was possible to have and to communicate strong and simple emotions. 
But we have no good reason to think that this spontaneous fraternity and 
unity of sentiment can .be recreated without the circumstances that were 
its occasion : and no-one in his sane mind would think the price worth i•t. 
Very rarely,. durin·g moments of exceptional soci,al outrage, at a protest 
meeting in TrafaJ,gar Square or in a multiracial Tenants Association in 
No.tting Hill, we may be aJble for· a brief period to call up the 'spirit of 
the Blitz'. But the experience is transient, and it holds no general message 
for us about how life should be lived. As T. S. Eliot has put it 'We 
must distinguish at all events between the kind of unity which is necessary 
and that which is appropriate for the development of a culture in a nation 
at peace'.1 

Should it be Revived? 

Secondly, even if we were to allow that working-class culture of the old 
style could be retained as the culture of a Socialist society, it is far from 
clear to me that this would be desirable. For if we examine the attitudes 
that constitute this way of life, we find that they very roughly fall into 
two groups or constellations: what may be called external and internal 
attitudes. On the one hand, there are those attitudes which relate to outside 
forces and pressures and which make for the un.ity and cohesion of the class. 
These include various attitudes towards those in authority, in particular 
the 'them' attitudes so brilliantly described by Hoggart, which range from a 
sullen resistance to an external and alien way of Life to a magnificent and 
dignified refusal to participate on servile terms in a system that, by its 
very nature, cannot be entered in.to on terms of equality. And then there 
are the attitudes to suffering and disaster and adversity: a kind of noble 
stoicism. On the other hand, there are those working-class attitudes which 
are internally directed, and which determine the ideals of life. These 
include the strong sense of family life : the attachment to a kind of 
simplified Christian morality or 'primary religion' as Hoggart calls it: a 
lack of curiosity about the unfamiliar and the unknown : a residual puritanism 
in sexual matters: a cheerful friendly easy-going sentimentality. 

Now, the first group of attitudes is utterly admirable, but also, let us 
hope, superfluous in a socialist society. For all these attitudes very specific-. 
ally refer to conditions which will not be allowed to survive inside 
Socialism: a rigid and hierarchical class-system, or poverty and deprivation. 
The second group of attitudes, on the other band, is, by and large, unadmiTaJble 
and ultimately undesirable. Of course ther·e are individual 
elements in it that are attractive; the attraction may be greater for some 
than for others : though there can 'be few to whom Hoggart's picture of 
Hunslet, even Orwell's of Wigan, make no appeal whatsoever. But I am 
convinced that, all in all , this way of life is purchased at too high a price. 
For its roots lie in, and ultimately its character derives from, an intensive and 
pervasive family-life which extends across the generations and which is 
bound to be an agent of conservatism on the one hand and conformism on 
the other. I cannot see bow any form of life with this kind of social basis or 

T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, p. 51. 

SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 

grounding can be anything but hostile to innovation and deviation. The 
new and the different are inevitably suspect in any highly cohesive society, 
or indeed in any society that rests upon natural as opposed to consensual 
relations holding between its members. 

The question of the value or desirability of the working-class family as a 
cultural unit has, of course, a topical relevance outside the 'utopian' speculations 
of thinkers like Hoggart. It also arises in connection with certain practical 
proposals which have recently been advanced by sociologists concerned 
with problems of social hardship or 'secondary poverty' as it continues to 
exist inside the ~welfare State'. Much of this work has been done under 
the auspices of the Institute of Community Studies, and the pro1blems 
investigated include the position of old people, of the physically or mentally 
defective and of young wives. In each case the conclusion was reached that 
the problem could not be dealt with as a conventional welfare problem. 
and that the only effective solution was the preservation or reconstruction 
of the family: moreover, the family bad this moral advantage over other 
forms of 'welfare service', that its operation was reciprocal and therefore 
less offensive to human dignity.1 Now, it will be observed that these 
proposals, though they are argued for on quite different grounds, coincide 
in effect w.ith those of Hoggart. For the family system that meets with the 
approval of Michael Young or Peter Townsend or Brian A1bel-Smith, is not 
the two-generation family of middle-class life but the three-generation 
family which is essential to the old working-class culture. I have no 
wish to doubt the f.orce of the practical arguments that support these 
proposals. It may be that the reconstruction of old-fashioned family life 
is the most efficient method of dealing with a number of very urgent 
and painful problems. But I would suggest that all those who feel a concern 
with liberty and innovation, who think that there may be some good cause 
advanced by the permanent rebellion of youth, should very seriously reflect 
upon the dangers involved in so firmly ensconcing family life in this extended 
sense into the structure of the society to be. 

Working-class Life and The Arts 

The third objection that can be brought against the attempt to regard 
working-class life as providing a basis for socialist culture is the difficulty 
of identifying anything in this form of life that can be regarded as cultural 
in the narrow sense of the word. In the descriptions of Hoggart and Potter 
we find references to entertainments and social activities which often 
reveal a deep and intense capacity for enjoyment. We read of street-
carnivals and club-outings, music halls and the 'close group-games l'ike 
darts and dominoes' (Hoggart). We find evidence of an interest in serious 
and earnest discussion, generally of a moralistic kind. But of the arts 
themselves, of the free expressive activities of man, we find not a hint: 
nor, worse still, even a hint that these things are missing. 

This silence on the sulbject of Art on the part of those who urge the 
claims of working-class culture is strange: and I can only think of two 
reasons to account for it. The first is a false assimilation of the present 

See the excellent essay 'A Society for People' by Peter Townsend in Conviction. 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 

cultural problem in this country to other problems involving an oppressed 
or exploited class or group where the class or group genuinely has an 
indigenous culture that it seeks to preserve. There is, for instance, the 
problem of the peasant communities of Eastern Europe, where the doctrine 
of proletcult began, and where we do find (or did) a real tradition of folk-
learning and folk-art. Or, again, there is the plight of the Latin or Slav 
immigrant groups in the New World who struggle to maintain their cultural 
identity as against a 'race-less' education, which is in effect merely the 
vehicle of the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture. But it would ·be quite wrong 
to think that British working-class culture can in any serious sense be 
compared to what these other groups have to offer. In the narrow sense 
of the word 'culture' there is no thr.iving popular culture in England. If 
one is seriously concerned about the painting and the music and the poetry 
of the socialist future, then it seems to me quite unrealistic to think that 
these can spring from the thin soil of English proletarian life. 

And this leads me to the second reason why it might be that those wh:> 
urge the claims of working-class culture say so little about Art; and that 
is because, fundamentally, ~hey are not interested in it. Art as a free 
expressive activity of man is not for them a matter of vital concern. They 
talk about the arts, certainly, but they value them more as some kind 
of harmless but enjoyable activity which a man does to keep himself happy 
-just as those who urge the claims of mass culture think of the arts 
as something that is done to man, in order to keep him happy. The doctrine 
of Art as Expression gives way in the theory of mass culture to a doctrine 
of Art as Catering; in the theory of working-class culture it gives way to 
a doctrine that may be more attractive but is ultimately no less trivial, 
that of Art as Hobby. 

The Case Reconsidered 

Of course I don't want to deny that there are elements in the traditional 
EngJ.ish working-class way of life that should be preser·ved and incorporated 
in any Socialist society. And I also think-though this is a 
quite separate point-thaJt the more features are incorporated, the smoother 
and less emotionally disturbing the social revolution will be for those 
who stand most to gain by it: the sons of the old working-class. There 
will be more in the new way of life that will be familiar to them, less 
to which they will have to adapt themselves. What I am opposed to is 
that the working-class life in its entirety, with its comprehensive demand~ 
about how man should live and enjoy himself, should form the pattern, 
the model for the social existence of the future. 

We see the problem realised in a very concrete form ·in the issue of 
rehousing. It is surely right to protest against a great deal of what occurs 
on the new housing esta·tes on grounds of ugliness and banality and sheer 
indifference to the natural human demands of people living together. But 
I think that if we lend too ready an ear to the complaint that rehousing 
involves the disruption of an old way of life without the offer of a new, 
we shall fall ei1her into complacency or into authoritarianism. We shall 
either do nothing or else we shall construct a new society on the model 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 15 

of the old with this disadvantage in addition : Vhat it is imposed. Twenty-
five years ago, in Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier we were shown all the 
agonies of an intellectual, hi,ghly sensitive to the emotionai appeal of 
old-style proletarian life, not over-concerned with the claims of eccentricity 
or rebellion, confronted by the prospect of a duU, unfeeling, unimaginative 
rehousing scheme. Orwell ultimately came down on the side of rehousing 
but by the time he did it was no longer clear why. I find it a strange 
distortion of the old Socialist ideal that we shoUJld bui,Jd a new Jerusalem 
in the image of the slums of Wi,gan or Hunslet. 

Other Ideals 

However, as I said earlier, not all attempts to conceive an integrated 
or organic Socialist society conS'ist of advocating the retention of existent, 
or the revival of past, forms of social ,Ji.fe. In some conceptions the olosed 
society of the future is modelled in only a loose or analogical fashion upon 
some historical model. Now it might weB 1be thought that when the ideal 
is modified in this way jt is less open to criticism. But unfortunately, in so 
far as it is less open to criticism, it has also less to recommend it. For 
it preserves itself fwm criticism only by becoming indetermin'ate : an<! its 
indeterminacy makes it unacceptable. We are told that the new society 
will be like the old, on.Jy different. The differences, however, are rarely 
specified : and when they are, they make the resemblances obscure. An 
ideal that possesses such little content may be difficult to reject, but there 
is little reason to accept it. 



16 
SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 

IV. 
What's Wrong with 
Middle-Class Culture? 
11IE CHALLENGE 

I
I
T is natural at this stage to turn away from Utopianism, and to go back 
to wha1 I have called the Present Compromise and consider to what 
extent i•. is satisfactory and to what ex1ent unsatisfactory, as a starting-
point~for we demand no more than that -for the culture of the future. 
My intention is first to examine separately each of the two components of 
which it is constituted, and then to consider the relation in which they 
stand to one another o.r what I shall call the Present Structure of Culture. 

First, let us examine middle-class culture. It was Trots'ky's assertion, 
as against the contemporary supporters of proletcult, that the proper aim 
of Socialism was not to institute a workers' or proletarian society, but 
rather to create a truly dassless society in which the proletariat would 
lose its identity and the highest values of bourgeois society would be 
available to all as the ground of a still higher culture. Is there any reason 
why we should reject this formula, which seems to offer Socialist culture 
at once a basis of fact in the past and scope for developmen·t in the future? 

Can Middle-Class Culture Become Popular? 

There are two arguments .i.1 current circulation which would challenge 
Trotsky's prognostications by calling in doubt the suita-bility of middle-
class culture to be the culture of the future. Acco.rding to the first 
argument, middle-class culture, as it exists today, is essentially an elite 
culture: it belongs to the few: it is something tha1 is naturally transmitted 
through restricted channels. If we overlook this fact and try to gicve it a 
mass-circula·tion, we shall merely destroy it : we shall in the end find 
ourselves propagating nothing, for there will be nothing left for us to 
propagate. This argument does not necessarily deny the possibility of mass 
education-and in this respect, it is not the prerog<lltive of the Right.

J What it insists upon is that minority education and mass education (if it1 exists) are quite different things, and that what was suita-ble as content 
for the former is quite unsuitable for the latter. 

The great proponent of this argument has been T. S. Eliot. Eliot, of 
course, adcvances it in the interest of his own decidedly reactionary conception 
of society : but then it is an observable fact that many of the 
arguments about culture in contemporary circulation go indifferently to the 
extreme 'right' and the far 'left'. Now, despite the authority that Eliot's 
name and his magisterial presentation afford the present argument, I feel 
that whatever in it is not false is truistic. 

At times it seems to be Eliot's case ·that middle-class culture could not be 
widely diffused, and this is so because of the essential nature of cultural 
transmission. For a culture, being as broad as life itself, can only be 
transmitted in the course of living, personally, by example rather than by 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 

precept. Accordingly must 
be, the famiJy, within rom generation to 
generafton: from this in turn it follows that a culture cannot rbe transmitted 
(save marginally) ouside the confines of the class with which it is 
initially associated. More specifically, contrary to what egalitarians would 
have us believe. a culture cannot be transmitted thr-ough education in the 
narrow sense of what occurs in schools and universities or, as Eliot prefer~ 
to call it, 'instruction'. A<t other times, however, Eliot allows that a culture 
can be transmitted •in ways which in principle permit it to cross class 
barriers, but his contention is now that in the course of the move it is 
invariably destroyed. Put in either of these two forms the argument seems 
to rest on far too narrow a cri·terion of what it is for a culture to continue 
in existence. Any serious change or modification in a culture in the course 
of its transmission is for Eliot sufficient justification in itself for saying that 
the culture has not been transmitted or (what comes to the same thing) 
that in the course of transmission it has been destroyed. But this criterion 
of cultural identity is obviously far too narrow to yield interesting results. 
Accordingly if Eliot's argument has any force, it must 1be in its third form. 
There are times when Eliot a11ows that a oulture can move outside the 
class of its origin, in fact as well as in principle: but, he claims, whenever 
it makes suoh a move, it invariably suffers marked deterioration. 'It is an 
essential condition of the preservation of the quality of the culture of the 
minority that it should continue to be a minority culture.' This is dearly 
the crucial contention: and it is a matter for serious regret, that at just 
this point, Eliot chooses to replace argument with mere assertion. We are 
given no real reason for believ-ing that, in matters of culture, diffus-ion 
means deterioration. It would be -interesting to know what ELiot would say 
if his thesis were transferred from the sphere of culture to that of religion. 

One bad reason, which may be operative w:ith Eliot and is certainly at 
work with other thinkers who adopt a similar form of conservatism, is the 
identification of mass education with mass-produced education. It is 
assumed that if a culture aims at a large audience in the collective sense, 
then it will try to achieve this by haviiTg each of its individual audiences 
as large as possi-ble and then 1by treating each of them in an identical 
fashion. It is an unfortunate fact, and a reflection upon our social 
priorities, that for the most part universal education means large classes 
and indifference to regional traditions. But the tendency is to be deplored, 
and indeed I shall later insist that a vital element -in Socialist education 
must be the preservation of that personal link between teacher and taught 
which exists, so prominently in the theory, if not always in the practice, of 
the public schools and the older universities. 

Middle-Class Culture and Science 

The second argument against middle-class culture relates to ·its content. 
Even if middle-class culture could be widely diffused so as to become the 
culture of a socialist society. it ought not to be. For it is essentially 
a literary culture, whereas what we need is a scientific culture. 

This ar-gument, translated in.to educational terms, has become one of 
the cliches of the day, and •before we examine it we should try to separate 


18 SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 

the purely technological from the cultural considerations advanced in 
support of it. When government departments or educationalists consider 
the proper level of· scientific education, they are, for the most part, led 
to their estimate 1by calculating the scientific manpower needs of their 
country-or of whatever unit they are concerned with: they work out 
ho'w many physicists or how many engineers will ,be required over the 
following X years, and then they suggest means whereby the output from 
universities and technical colleges can be made adequate to meet the 
demands. The question of scientific education and its proper level can, 
however, also be considered from a different point of view. ·We can ask 
whether there are not reasons in the nature of education itself, quite apart 
from this special social function, for thinking that education in a consciously 
progressive society should be dominantly scientific. 

Unfortunately httle effort has been made to discuss the cultural value 
of science in a way that is at once ser·ious and ca,reful. There underlies 
much of the discussion a crude 'essential,ist' view of culture, according to 
which the culture of any age is a unified and coherent body of ideas which 
centres round a core or essence, and it is this essence which ~ves to the 
various aspects of the culture both their character and their vitality. This 
essence is identified with the most progressive and most productive concern 
of that age. Anything in the way of thought or art which does not 
derive from this concern is necessarily 1barren, and permitted to attain at 
best an esoteric and steri,le beauty. In the twentieth century, according 
to this view, the domin~nt concern is the physical sciences, and in consequence 
the true culture of our age is a scientific, not a literary, culture. 

From such a view of culture it would indeed follow that traditional 
culture was obsolete, and that any system of education based upon it 
was an anachronism. But then I think that it would be quite unreasonable 
to accept ~his view of cuJ,ture. It is not the teaching of history, that in any 
given age the productive forces in thought and art have always !been 
jealously con.tained within a single exclusive movement: and if we are 
legislating for the future, it is highly undesirable that we should seek to 
con•fine them in this unimaginative way. Of course there are other arguments, 
and very good ones, for thinking tha.t science shoudd have a far 
larger place in our culture and hence in our system of higher education 
than it does in this country at the moment. But it does not foHow from this 
that we need a predominantly scientific culture and education. Indeed if anything 
of a general kind follows from the argument it is that we should not 
make the mistake of gi·v.ing our system of education and culture any sort of 
dominant or overall tone. Science and the humanities should coexist, side by 
side, in friendly competition for the attentions ·of men and it should 'be left to 
the natural variety of tastes to decide which makes the greater appeal. 
If this is so, then a consideration of the role of science in education in 
no way strengthens the case for the abolition or suppression of middle-
class culture in Socialist society. It suggests that this cul1ure may have to 
be modified in order to accommodate itself to progressive conditions: 
but this is in no way incompatible with, 1ndeed ,it was envisaged by, the 
prognostication~ of Trotsky with which this section began. 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 19 

V. What's Wrong with Mass Culture 1 
THE QUESTION POSED 

W
W
HAT, we might ask, is wrong with mass-cul·ture? Already, in posing 
the question in this unqualified way, we may appear to have a•bandoned 
the caution we insisted upon as a condition of using the term at all. For 
there is a real danger in hypostatising mass-culture and in treating what is~ 
merely the sum of the entertainments, literature and leisure-activities 
preferred at some given moment by 'the masses' as though it were a timeles~ 
phenomenon with enduring and unchan~ing characteristics. In fact, mass-
culture is something highly volatile, not merely in character but also in 
quaHty. Its general level is 1'i'ableto considemble fluctuations in response 
to changes either in SUipply or in demand. 'f.he entrepreneur, or supplier of 
mass-entertainments, might decide entirely of his own accord to raise 
(or to lower) the quality of the objects he supplies, and there seems 
no reason why he should not be ruble to do so without in any way l:osing 
or d~maging his market: for in any affluent and sophisticated society, there 
will surely be a fairly considerable bracket of quality within which the 
consumer of mass-culture is indifferent. For evidence of this one has only 
to look to the Wlidely different levels achieved ·by commercial TV in the 
United States and in this country, without it would seem, any very real difference 
in popularity. And, in the long run at least, no less potent a force in 
determining the quality of mass-culture is the factor of demand. For, \ 
just as the supplier might suddenly raise the standard of what he provides, 
so it is possible that the consumer might come to insist upon products of 
a higher quality. Whether this happens or not will, of course, depend 
primarily upon the diffusion of education. For education is required not 
merely to elevate the standards of the ordinary citizen but also to make 
him conscious of the very real power that he has, as a consum~ of 
enforcing these standards upon--me-supplier. The pess•imistic attitude 
adopted by certain radical thinkers in the mid-twentieth century towards 
mass culture is higlrly reminiscent of the pessimistic attitude adopted by 
many conservative thinkers in the mid-nineteenth century towards mass-
politics. ln each calculation the salffie factor qs left out of account: the 
effect of mass-educaJtion. 

Not aH criticism of mass culture, however, makes the mistake of 
treating it as a timeless entity. There are powerful arguments that have 
been raised against it, which make full aUowance for the reservations upon 
which I have insisted, and to them I now wish to turn. In assessing them 
it is important that we should consider the phenomenon against which 
they are brought, as a whole, and in the case Df mass culture there is a 
peculiar temptation not to do this. For, as Raymond Williams has pointed { 
out in an analogous context, there is a tendency for people to judge the 
quality of a culture by reference to that element in it which corresponds 
directly to what is of most importance to them in their own. Highly 
educated people and intellectuals in particular, confronted by mass culture 


20 SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 

I 
I 
tend to judge it largely by reference to whM Wil\li.ams calls its 'reading 
artifacts'. But there is no reason to suppose that the printed word 
occupies as large a part in the Jives of most people as it does in that of 
the highly literate person. lif we wish to arrive at a fair assessment of mass 
culture, we must not confine ourselves to the yellow press and pulp 
<literature but must take into account a far wider range of activities and 
pleasures. (It ·is to be observed that the modern critic who denies thi& 
courtesy to mass culture would never dream of doing so in the case of 
his favoured 'foik' culture.) No verdict upon contemporary mass culture 
would be anything but partial if it failed to consider such phenomena 
as the ubiquitous jazz-clUJbs; or the new taste for fŁIeign travel, with all 
that this involves in the way of the elimination of olcf-style working-class 
xenophobia; or the •prevailing disinterest in religion; or the <~Jbsence of 
sexual puritanism, and the growth of genuine toleration; or even the 
extravagant interest in sartorial fashion, which despite its commercial 
inspiration and its obvious absurdities, has •been a very real factor in 
stimulating self-expression and self-esteem. In other words, to be fair, 
one must pass in review that whole set of glossy and uninhibited forms of 
life which has been poeticised in the London novels of Colin Maclnnes. 

Mass Culture and Passivity 

The most widespread accusation brought against mass culture-and in ~some ways the hardest to assess -is that mass culture is essentially a 
passive or spectator culture. In large part this is just another way, perhaps 
an oblique way, of saying that it is of poor aesthetic quality. For it is a 
mark of the higher arts that they caH for a certain amount of ~ding'J or 'projection' on the part of their audience. A novel or play or painting1 that reqUires no interpretation from the reader or spectator, who can 
therefore totally immerse himself in it without in any way drawing upon 
the imagination or the intellect, is without that capacity to stimu<late and 
enrich the mind which we have come to expect of the arts. It is for 
this reason, for instance, because it imposes itself so unambiguous•ly and 
literally upon its audience, and not because of its portrayal of sexual 
~fl ( detail-which can, after all, •be an important artistic concern-that 

q.tfo4, pornography is aesthetically condemned. 
't"-"-{lt . Now if the objection is that mass culture as we have it today, or at 
any rate a great dea<l of it, is of low artistic value, I see little reason 
to dissent. But merely to say this is not to advance the argument very far. 
tor what we need to know is why mass culture is aesthetically so poor 
and whether its low quality is a necessary, or mewly an accidental, feature .of it. And the reference to passiVity seems hardly to ]:5'f'Ovide the explanation 
we seek: for passivity (in this sense) seems to be more a consequence 

t

than a cause of badness in art. 

There is another, rather more li<teral, sense in which the accusation of 
passivity has been brought against mass culture. J1he charge is now that 
no special action or no particula.r physical or emotional response is called 
for on the part of the consumer of mass culture: all that he is required 
to do is to lap up what is served out to him. But then in this respect 
mass culture is not significantly different from high culture. The fine arts 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 21 

may set the faculties of man in motion, but they certainly require nothing 
of him in ~be way of active response; they call for no particular skill 
gr accomplishment on .the part of the spectator, nor do they physically 
move him to any display of appreciation or sympathy. Indeed some of 
the activities of mass culture are far more exac~ing in this respect than 
anything to be found in high culture: jazz-sessions and football matches, 
for instance, call for audience-participation on a scale that is muoh dreamed 
of in the theory, but never realised in the practice, of the higher arts. 

Of course what those who urge the charge of passivity in this sense 
really have in mind is a contrast not between mass culture and high culture 
but between mass culture and fotk culture. For the element of activity, 
of direct and physical response that is felt to be missing from the massententainments, 
has its home, not in opera or in novel-reading, but in folk 
drama and in the songs and dances of traditional peoples, where thel'iii'e 
oetween participant and audience, •between agent and spectator, is indefinite 
or even fluid. But the question now arises whether it is reasonable to set 
up the arts and pleasures of the folk as the model for the culture otf a 
modern society? I do not want to decry the traditionai cultmes, or to 
deny that they possess a far greater charm, in many cases a far higher 
aesthetic value than that attained by the cultures which have superseded 
them. But in this matter a sense of history is essential. There can be no 
doubt that folk cultures belong essentially to an earlier stage of materiall 
culture and that the price of keeping them alive in modern industrial society 
must be artificiality and self-consciousness, the loss indeed of that very 
freshness and spontaneity which is their real appeal. Furthermore, in the 
United States and even in many Western European countries the theoretical 
possi•biEty of doing so does not exist. It may be useful to point out 
that mass culture has lost the vita,lity and charm of folk culture without 
attaining 1Jbe refinement or the expressiveness of high culture: but it does 
not follow that a reversion to folk culture is at this stage of hi,story either 
practical or even desirable. 

Generally when mass culture is attacked for its passivity what critics 
have in mind, either overtly or covertly, is telev,ision. But the attack 
upon television rbrings out fairly clearly the ambiguity of the ohaFge. '\ 
In one sense television is, undeniably, a passive medium: lbut this sense 
IS at once trivial and comparatively innocuous. Often enough, however, 
something more specific and more damaging is intended. But in this new 
sense it is less clear that the charge sticks. For what it now amounts to is 
a criticism of quality directed against television programmes as such. tAnd this in turn presupposes a necessary connection between the medium 
and the quality of what the medium communicates: a presupposition which 
seems in no way justified. To quote Raymond Williams again 'Modern 
techniques are at worst neutral, and to ask whether television is a good or 
bad thing is like asking whether injections are a good or bad thing'.1 

A Rootless Culture? 

A second olbjection that is frequently brought against mass culture is that 

Raymond Williams in Encounter. June 1959. 


22 SOCIALISM AND CUL 1 URE 

.)! it is classless or perhaps, more generally, that it is rootless. Once again, it 

I is not easy to appreciate the precise content of the oharge. In so far as it 
is true that classlessness and rootlessness are characteristics of mass culture 
this is only because they are, more fundamentally, characteristics of the 

t
t
ociety in which mass culture flourishes. It is in the nature of modern industrial 
society to tend towards the aJbsence of class and IJ"oots. Now it is 
not clear to me with what right Socialists can object to this state of affairs. 
For the only alternative to it is surely the differentiated society, the society 
marked by hierarchy and status. Indeed, 'classlessness· and 'rootlessness', 
as currently used, seem to be merely opprobrious ways of referring to the 
decline of the tradi~ional characteristics. Yet no Socialist could possibly 
be in favour of their continued existence. 

Against this some Socialist would maintain that it is possible to have 
a society that is clas less but rooted and moreover that this is the kind of 
society towards which we should aspire. Personally I find the position unconvincing. 
In the pre-industrial economy or in the first generation of a 
community (like a kibbutz) which has been consciously and artificially created, 
such a state of affairs may be possible. But in an advanced teobnological 
society, of which the essence is mobility, social and occupational, 
I do not see how roots can be maintained unless they are reinforced by 
undesirable pressures, nor do I see how they can do other than limit the 
opportunities that should be open to all the membei'S of that society. 

Of course what is highly undesirable-and if this is what the critic of 
modern society and modern culture is insisting upon, he is surely in the 
right-is that cla slessness and rootlessness in a society should result in the 
a1bsence of all character, in t:1e extinction of all marked traits, from that 
society. There is a false chain of reasoning which would associate the consensual 
society with the faceless or anonymous society, as though the pos


c,o·session of any definate characteristic or personality by society were al\ 
ways and necessanly afl infringement of popular liberty and hence 'undemocratic'. 
The reasoning is invalid. For providing that society offers 
alternative way of living, it can be no criticism of it that these alternatives 
are highly articulated. 

t 
t 
Mass Culture and Artificial Wants 
..J. Another common accusation that is often brought against mass culture'T is that it mini ters to spurious or artificial desires. In The Affluent Society, 
a work of considerable contemporary influence, J. K. Galbraith has argued 
the more general case that the whole of our present economyls geared to 
'synthesised' wants, and that the high level of private con umption, upon 
which it rather insecurely rests, is due solely to what he calls the Dependence 
Effect The Dependence Effect he defines as 'the way wants depend 
on the process by which they are satisfied'.1 This effect can operate passively 
or actively. It operates pa ively when 'increase in consumption, the 
( counterpart of increa es in production, act by sugge tion or emulation to 
create wants'. And it operate actively when produ er take definite step'> 
to increa e demand by means of ale manship and, above all, adverti ing. 

1. K. albraith. The Affluent Societv. p. 124. 

SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 23 

The argument has great prima facie plausibility, but I think that it runs 
rather rapidly into two considera~ble difficulties. The first is that there \ 
seems to •be no adequate method of distinguishing between genuine, and 
artificial or 'created' wants. Indeed the distinction itself seems to rest 
on two further assumptions both of which are highly questionahle. One 
is that we have a satisfactory criterion of identity for a wantz so that 
we can decide on any given occasion whether we are dealing with the same 
want as on a previous occasion or with a new want. Such a criterion is 
necessary, for in its aJbsence, we could not reasonably distinguish (as the 
argument demands that we should) between the creation of a fresh want 
and the making of an existent want conscious or articulate. The other 
assumption is that we can, in a given psychological situation, aJbstract to 
the point of saying what a man would have wanted if he had not been 
sUJbjected to such-and-such a process of inducement or persuasion. To 
be aJble to abstract in this way is necessary for the argument, for otherwise, 
even if we did possess a criterion whereby we could distinguish 
between a new want and an old want made conscious, we still could not 
causally attribute the new want to the process of inducement or persuasion. \' 

The second difficulty into which the GaLbraith thesis runs is this : that 
even if we go all the way and concede the distinction between natural 
wants and created wants, there seems no reason to assume, as Galbraith 
does, .that the latter are of a lower order of urgency, or require to be 
taken less seriously than the former. The desire for sanitation or for 
museums are in their different ways created ra~her than natural wants, and 
yet their existence seems fairly essential to culture. Galbraith's str•ictures 
don't even seem to be particulal'ly appropriate to that sub-set of created 
wants with which he is especially concerned: namely, those which are 
created by the very process by which they are satisfied. Is it not, for 
instance, a distinguishing mark of a good system of education that it 
inculcates not merely learning hut also the desire to learn? 

It would, of course, be casuistry to suggest that there is nothing to the 
argUJment rubout synthesised wants. The difficulty, though, is to see what 
it is. Part of the argument is probably this : There are in our society 
certain wants-and I suspect that these wants are peculiarly relevant to 
mass culture-which ll!re based upon emulation or the desire for social · 
recognition. Now it is an essential feature of these wants that they are l 
satisfied equally 1by the possession of the object towards which they are f 
supposedly directed or by the appearance of possessing it. A man who 
desires a second car solely to emulate his neighlbours will be as satisfied 
by his neighbours' Vhi nking that he has one as by actually having one. 
Now if this is so, the sati9faction of such wants is not going to lead to a 
higher level of welfare or social contentment than that which would have 
obtained if these wants had never existed. Accordingly, we may say that jthese wants have no social value, and that any attempt to encourage them, \ 
or any culture that depends upon them, is to that extent undesira•ble. 

Again, if the distinction between natural and created wants is inadequate 
to support a wholesale criticism of modern production, it is no less 
inadequate to support a wholesale defence of such production. And this 
is important in the field of culture. For publishers of trashy literature. 


24 SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 

backers of shoddy TV programmes, proprietors of gutter newspapers, 
makers and distributors of bad films, often try to justify their activities by 
sayjng that, though their products may be no good, they do at least 
provide the pUJblic with what it wants. But the foregoing argument should 
have sho,wn that this claim is not easy to substantiate: if, that is, it means 
not just that the public likes what it is given but what it is given satisfies 
a pre-existing want. For such a claim presupposes tihat we can identify 
this want independently of, and prior to, the oibject that satisfies it. 

~ 

I. 
I.
But this is, or is close to, an a~bsurdity. With something specific and 

complex like a book or a fHm, it is quite unrealistic to say that there 
, existed a want for ,that particular book or film before that book or filmMJ existed. For it is not merely that human desires are plastic: they are 
also, up to a poin•t, unspecific. No-one has ever claimed on behalf 
of high art that it gives people wha't they want: that Anna Karenina or 
Measure for Measure m Cosi fan Tutti satisfy pre-existing desires. What 
is often ignored is that one of the reasons why such a claim wou1ld be 
false, makes it also false of low entertainment. It may not be true that 
mass culture satisfies synthesised or created wants It does not follow 

( from this that it satisfies genuine or natural wants. And yet when its quality 
is poor, this is its usual line of defence. 

11he Culture of High Consumption 

I now want to turn to what I regard as some rather more forceful 
objections to mass culture. All of these assume as their starting-point 
that mass culture is essentially a consumer culture. In this it seems to 
me they are right. Mass culture is bound up in a way that is not, for 
instance, true of middle-class culture, with the consumption and display 
of goods-TV sets, clothes, V espas, magazines, records, cars, films, 
Ho·wever, even so, the question remains whether these ob1ections t:elate to 
necessary aspects of a consumer culture, or whether the evils they indicate 
could not be effectively neutralised. 

An Agent of Public Squalor? 

The first of rhese new objections once again derives from, or at any 
rate finds its •best formulation in, The Affluent Society. Galbraith argues 
that any culture that places a hea,vy emphasis upon the consumption of 
goods is 1bound to lead to what he calls 'sociatl imbalance'. Social imbalance, 
as he defines it, ar,ises when there is an unsatisfactory ratio holding 
betJween the supply of pri,vate services or goods on the one band and 
that of the services or goods of the state on nhe other. Now Gallbraith, 
it is true, depends in part upon strictly economic criteria to determine 
when this ratio is to be regarded as unsatisfa~tory : the ratio is unsatisfactory 
and the economy in a state of imbalance when the statbility and 
security of production are threatened. But Ga1braith is also interested in 
more general social considerati,ons, and these also provide criteria by 
which social imbalance is measured. Moreover, we may safely assume 
that when the ratio of private to public consumption is so high as to b<! 
economically dangerous, it will also have marked social ill-effects : when 



SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 25 

the excess of motor-cars and washing-machines over hospitals and schools 
is so great as to threaten inflation, it will also prejudice the smooth functioning 
of sooiety. 'Prirvate spending, public squalor' .is likely to be at 
least as disastrous socially as it is economically. 

If, then, mass oulture with its emphasis upon private consumption does ,. 
lead to social imbalance, this would be a powerful objection to .it. For 
it would mean, amongst other things, that mass culture contained within 
itself the seeds, if not of its own destruction, at least of its own deterioration. 
For, as we have seen, the level of mass culture depends upon the 
degree of diffusion of mass education. But if the spread of mass culture 
entails the decline of plllblic goods and services, thi•s must mean that it 
enmils amongst other things the decline of public education : and this in 
turn means that the more widely mass culture is diffused, the lower will 
be its level of attainment. In other words, the cou~e of cultur vo\uti 
will describe a des · al. The question then arises, does mass 
cu ure ead to social imbalance? 

The argument that it does proceeds by means of a further-and undisputed-
premiss that whereas private goods are divisible, pulblic goods 
are indiv-isible. Accordingly, the only way of financing public goods is 
by means of a general levy or taxation. But in a society where emphasis 
is placed upon private consumption, though there may be no general 
resistance to plllblic services as such, everyone will resist the fact that he 
should ·be asked to contribute to them. For any contri,bution that he makes 
will to that degree impair what he really prizes: namely, his powers of 
personal consumptJion. Moreover (so GaLbraith argues) in a society where 
the cult of private consumption is highly developed, even if there is no 
actual resistance to the public services, certainly no pride will be taken in 
them and no satisfaction derived from their increase. For the sentiment 
will have grown up that the only wants that need to be taken seriously 
are those which can be satisfied privately and that it is only in satisfying 
them that the individual citizen is advancing his welfa'l'e or attending to his 
interests. 

On the face of it the thesis appears to have all the inescapahility of 
a tautology, lbut further inspection shows that this is not so. It may be 
tautological th~t a man who is drawn to spending his money on articles of 
i)ersonal consumption, will resent being asked to divert it into public 
channels. But this certainly does not mean that the strength of his resentment 
will lbe uniquely determined by the strength of his consumer-desires. 
Critics of Ga1braith have suggested that the degree of unwillingness with 
which a country surrenders its private income for public spending is a 
function not solely of its affluence but also of essentially non-economic 
attitudes: for instance, of its cultural traditions. 

Against this, however, it might be argued that Mass Oulture is such 

an attitude or tradition. Could not Mass Culture be regarded as par 

excellence the practical philosophy of a society that is committed to the 

belief that happiness can be found only in the personal consumption of 

personal objects? If this is so, then it is only to be expected that anyone 

who falls under -its spell will resist having his money spent for him on 

public objects, or at any rate public objects of a peaceful nature. The 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 
argument sounds convincing. But the fact remains that societies that have 


26 

' 
'
all equally fallen for the blandishments of mass culture, evince remarkably 
different degrees of willingness to bear the burden o.f taxation: compare, for 


t
t
instance, America and West Germany or Sweden. Accordingly, it does not 
seem as though we can in all fairness charge mass oulture with anything 
more than a tendency to be an a<gent of pulblic squalor in a world of private 
affluence. 

The Problem of Work Ignored 

I now want to turn to another objection that also considers mass culture 

i-.tas essentially a con~umer culture. According to this argument, mass culture, 

1" by the heavy emphasis that it places upon leisure and leisure activities, 
totally ignores all the immensely important issues concerned with the 
quality or character of Work in society. Preoccupied as it is with filling, 
in the most pleasura~ble or soothing fashion possible, the ever-increasing 
hours that a man spends away from his factory or his office, it has 
nothing to say, .indeed it makes light of the attempt to say anything a1bout 
what goes on, and what should go on, in the places of work. And this 
is highly deplorable. Not merely because in any industrial society-at 
least for many years to come-the greater number of men's waking hours 
will be spent in work, not in leisure: but also because these hours have a 
significance over and a.bove their quantitative predominance. For it is 
only during and through them that a man can attain true satisfaction. 
However sweet or agreea'ble his leisure hours may be, it is in his work that 
he fulfils himself, if he does at all. A culture which has nothing to say 
on this subject, which treats work merely as a means of mak,ing money 
which is then spent on leisure, is degrading and ultimately worthless. 
rt is one of the oldest complaints against Industrialism that it broke 
up the idy11.ic conditions of production prevalent in rural society, and 
that it destroyed for ever the life of craftsmanship. Without subscribing 
to the dubious historical thesis latent in this .indictment, one can scaTcely 
deny that a great deal of work that tis typical of modern industrial society, is 
heartless and unsatisfying. It makes hideous demands, physically and 
spiritually, and offers few compensating rewards. It was a br.illiant insight 
on the part of the young Marx to associate the increasing dreariness of 
work with the great organising principle of industrial society: the division 
[ of labour. It is because the worker cannot identify any single'artefact a1" 
~etof his own la•bour that he is denied any sense of creativity or 
self-fulfilment in the process. But Marx devised no solution to the problem 
and the portentous set of philosophical categories-such as 'dehumanisation' 
and 'alienation'-which is his other contr~bution to the discussion, 
has not proved very illuminating, either as used by him or, again, as 
revived by his disciples today on the New Left. Moreover there is a real 
danger in his diagnosis. For to place the blame for the utter inhumanity 
of modern labour, as it is experienced beside the production-belts of 
Wolverhampton or Detroit or Kharkov, upon the division of labour. carrie~ 
with it the suggestion that this principle might be reversed to the greater 
contentment of society. But this i~ an evident impossibility. Any project 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 

for humanising work that includes the abolition of the division of labour 
is essentially Luddite. If it means what it says. For sometimes those who 
attack the division of labour want not its actual abolition ·but some approx-
ima-tion or analogue to its a~bolition ; but then the problem has in no way 
been advanced, for now we need to know what this approximation or 
analogue amounts •to, and this we are not told. 

Nor is the ultimate aim, that of humanising work, itself free from 
obscurity. One orthodox way of interpreting it is as try~ng to find a 
form of work that would be at once demanding, dignified and creative. 
Now it certainly would •be no mean achievement to think of a mode of 
la·bour that satisfied aU those descriptions, and the fact that ·this task is 
usually undertaken in a nostalgic spirit, with one eye firmly fixed upon 
the old rural community and with the imagination dominated by thought.~ 
of the cobbler at .his last, of the wheelwri~ht in his workshop, should not 
be allowed to blind us to its very real importance for modern conditions. 
But even if we could envisage or devise a form of work that satisfied these 
requirements, such a conception would have a fairly limited value. It 
would, for instance, be a mistake to identify this kind of work, which 
we might call significant work, with satisfying work, where we mean 
work that actually satisfies those who do it. For such an identification 
would, amongst other things, totally leave out of account the obsessional 
aspect of work, or the emotional value whioh certain forms of work that 
it would be natural to think of as boring, possess on account of the 
opportunities they offer for the frequent repetition of simple and quasi-
mechanical movements. More generally, such an identification makes the \ 
common assumption, which is quite unproved, that there :is a problem 
of work; as though everyone made exactly the same demands of his work 
or found satisfaction in the same activities and exertions. This assumption 
is a. typical instance of the a priori psychology which still lingers on 
inside the science of society and is peculiarly at home in any utopian scheme. 

Of course, this is not to deny that certain forms or kinds of work aae 
too ignoble or degrading to exist in a free society, and that everything 
should •be done to eliminate them from the highly technologica•l world that 
we inhabit, no matter what emotional satisfaction some may derive from 
them. Even less is this to deny that a constant effort should be made to 
improve the conditions, as opposed to the character, of work, and to see 
that these are increasingly brought under the control of those who have 
to work under them. Not only is workers' control (in this limited sense) a 
natural extension of democratic mle, but it also seems to be, at the moment 
at any rate, the most promising way of removing the sense of drudgery 
from industr·ial work. 

Ultimately there is a common fallacy that underlies the thinking both 
of those who would concentrate to the exclusion of all else upon filling the 
leisure-hours of man in as pleasura•ble a way as possible and of those who 
urge the superior demands of 'humanising' work : and that is the idea that 
we can totally abstract work from leisure and that we can assess in 
isolation the contributions of each to the good life or to human happiness. 
Both psychological theory and empirical inquiry emphasise the fact that 


SOCIALISM AND CULWRE 

ultimately whether a man finds a certain form of work satisfying or a 
cer·tain leisure activity pleasurable depends to some degree on how be 
spends the other part of his life. 

Of course in practice we must make the abstraction, but we should all 
the time be aware of its limitations. And if we do, then I think there 
can be no doubt that it would ·be more reasonable to concentrate our 
energies -in so far as we must concentrate them-upon improving the 
leisure rather than the work of ~he ordinary citizen. And this for the 
quite simple reason that, in .the existing state of knowledge, we can expect 
better returns for our efforts in the one dirrection than in the o~her. For 
we kno·w so miser<lJbly little about <the empir.ical problem of satisfaction in 
work. 

To persist for a moment with the a~bstraction that I have condemned : 
it seems to me more consonant with the outlook of Socialism to believe that. 
for yearrs to come, in the affluent societies at any rate, humanity, save for 
a very few exceptions, is more likely to realise itself through Leisure than 
through Labour. If many SociaJ.ists resist this suggestion it is, I think, for 
two reasons. The first is the residual influence of the Puritan ethos 
within the Socillllist tradition. And the second is the influence of intellectuals 
upon Socialist tlb.ought in this connection. For intellectuals are amongst 
the exceptions that I had in mind. Fo·r them work is l1ikely to be amongst 
the most satisfying aspects of their lives. But then ~he mistake would be to 
as9imiJ.ate ordinary work to intellectual work. In one quite obvious sense 
an .intelJectual is not a 'worker' : in that his productivity is not a direct 
fun·ction of his working-day. In consequence there is no good reason 
why work should become a drudgery for him in a way that seems to be 
an almost inescapaible condition of industrial labour. 

On the whole, of course, we should try not to concentrate but to diffuse 
our energies between the demands of Leisure and Labour as objects of 
improvement. But the theoretical issue is worth raising if only because 
we should be prepared for the moment, which may well arise very soon. 
when these demands become exclusive. Perhaps a way will he devised of 
'humanising' automation. But if it isn't, we may well find that we can 
further increase the hours of leisure only by making work even more 
'soulless'. Personally I have no doubt which way our choice should go. 
I think that it would be quite wrong, in the interests of some attractive 
l:mt elusive ideal, to impose a superfluous burden of work upon the human 
beings of our society. And those who are appa\iled by the alternative I 
propose might do well to reflect that creative work may yet return to our 
society as a significant element in the life of leisure. Crude categories 
like La~bour and Leisure can often blind us to the more hopeful aspects of 
the world around us. 

It may well be that mass cultme, as we have it today, is of too low 
a quality to filltJhe leisure hours of an automated society. If so, that would 
be its condemnation. But I do not think that it stands condemned simply 
because of the emphasis it places upon leisure. 

Mass-Culture and Relativism 

A final objection that may be raised to mass culture is that it leads 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 29 

to a total relativism of values. This is, for instance, what lies behind 
Hoggart's stnctll!fes when he rather misleadingly talks of '1Jhe new tolerance' 
Genuine tolerance may with some justification be claimed as one of the 
benefits brought by mass culture, but there is no doubt that mass culture 
also propagates a state of mind which not merely accepts a vast variety 
of a·ttitudes, tastes, beliefs, habits, forms of literature or entertainment. 
but also refuses to discr.iminate between them. Everything that exists 
within the culture exists-according to this 'virtuous materialism' as 
Tocqueville called it-because someone I.ikes it, and there is felt to be 
no legitimate means of going beyond this expression of liking to a 
judgme .. t of value. Some people may pronounce Bach to be better than 
pop-songs or Flawbert to 1be superior to Leicester Square pornogr<llphy -tbut in saying so, what are they doing but dressing up their own private 
preferences as though they were objective matters of fact? Indeed the 
impossibility of arriving at universal judgments albout what is good and 
bad in the arts is thought directly to follow from the absence of any 
consensus of taste. 

It would be out of place here to rehearse the errors of relativism, 
and I shall confine myself to indicating •the nature of the connection that 
I believe to hold between mass culture and relativism. · 

The most fundamental way in which the connection holds is through the! 
notion of ,.consumer soyereienty. Basically this ·is a purely factual notion~T 
descriptive of the practice of mass culture : na~mely, that the character of 
its products is, as far as possible, determined ·by the tastes of their 
consumers. This practice is, of course, grounded ·in the fact that mass 
culture, being essentially a leisure culture and totally devoid of any 
social or ideological function, aims simply at giving the greatest amount 
of pleasure to those who consume it: and the vast commercial apparatus 
!hat supplies it, sees that this is done with bhe maximum efficiency that 
modern techniques permit. But the purely factual notion of consumer 
sovereignty spins around itself a further theory or belief, which is certainly 
not factual in character but serves as a justification or rationale of con-i 
sumer sovereignty. And this is the view that the tastes of the consumer 
determine not just the character but also the value of a given product. 
The consumer, in deciding what he likes, decides ipso facto what is good. 
And this further theory is relativism. 

Another connection between mass culture and relativism is established 
through the consideraible emphasis that mass culture places upon fashion. ) 
For implicit in the idea of fashion. is bhe idea that the value orai1y 
object is determined solely tby its date of production ; the closer this is to 
the present moment, the greater is the value of the object. 

The significance of the ~dea of fashion for the producers of mass culture 
is not hard to see. The dogma of consumer sovereignty is obviously 
valuable 'because it encourages consumption over a wide variety of objects; 
as wide, that is, as the tastes of the public. But when the idea of fashion 
is superimposed upon this situation, then we virtually arrive at the suppliers' 
ideal of continuous consumption. Varied tastes are supplemented as determinants 
of consumption by changing dates: even if there is no subjective 
reason for novelty, Time provides it. The price, however, at which ~t does 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURE

30 

so is that of bringing objective values and tastes into disrepute; which is 
perhaps the highest price we have to pay for the solaces of mass culture. 

Postscript 

In this section I have-I wish to emphasise-discussed mass culture on 
the assumption that it is one element in a larger cultural complex. I have 
therefore not criticised it, nor considered criticisms that have been brought 
again t it, on grounds of what it omits; which would, of course, become 
a relevant thing to do if one thought that we were approaching a situation 
in which mass culture enjoyed a monopoly. For the undeniable thing about 
mass culture-harmless, even benign though it may 'be in many respects 

f -
f -
is that it is quite unable to provide a substantial base on which the arts 
can grow. I shall in a later section return to the question why this is 
so, but ultimately the reason is that mass culture is a commercial product 
deriving solely from consideration of circulation and profi,t. In consequence 

a society that totally depended for its cultural sustenance upon mass 
culture would rbe badly impoverished. But this does not mean .that mass 
culture is necessarily pernicious, nor even that it has no useful function 
to perform as a solvent of certain traditional attitudes and prejudices. 



SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 
31 

VI. 
What's Wrong with the 
Structure of Culture? 
EDUCATION AND SOCIAL MOBILITY 

T
T
O many it might seem as if what ·is essentially wrong with the Present 
Compromise is not so much the class character of middle-class culture 
nor even the low quality of mass culture-for, though both these are serious 
matters, there is no reason to think it beyond the powers of educational 
reform to put them right-·but is rather the structure in which these two 
elements are contained. The real defect is the highly competitive nature 
of the structure which means .that middle-class culture is offered on excessively 
stiff terms, and that the role of mass culture is to be some kind of 
sop or palliabive for those who are unable or unwilling to pay these terms. 
Not only is such a system clearly undesiraible in itself, but it also seems 
calculated to preserve and to aggravate the character.istic vice of each of 
the two cultures: its continued existence can only make high culture more 
exclusive and low culture more banal. .f 

The most strikiing fact about twentieth-century society is the great ~ 
increase in social mobility. Ordinarily we think of this as meaning that 
fir more people nse m the social scale or change class than used to. 
But even more impressive than the acceleration in what might be called 
the collective rate of social mohility is the acceleration in the individual 
rate. It is not merely that more people change class 'but they do so at a 
much earlier age. Whereas previously the social transition was effected by 
the time a man was fifty or sixty, now it is complete at the age of twenty 


or twenty-five. 

On the face of it, this may seem a change for the better, for it means 
that everyone has now longer to enjoy the social and materia1 beneJits 
to which his natural endowment entitles him. But further reflection will 
show that the advantages are not all on one side. For unless the conditions 
of the competition have been considerably modified, what the change means 
is that the old struggle for status, which used to be fought out across the 
span of a man's J,ife, in the bard adult world of business or profession, is 
now compressed into a few years and assigned the schoolroom as its arena. 
Now, this must be an undesirable state of affairs : for three quite clear 
reasons. 

The Vices of the Educational Ladder 

In the first place, it imposes an intolera.ble emotional strain upon young 
;hildren who are now asked not merely to control their unruly instincts 
lnd to sublimate them into the acquisition of knowledge, but to do so 
'aster and more conspicuously than their companions. Success would seem 

o be purchased at too high a price, and faJilure-the knowledge that one 
1as fallen behind in the professional race, and that little, perhaps nothing, 
hat one is capable of doing will allow one to catch up -is 1brought borne 

32 SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 

to the child at an age when it can barely be expected 1o ·bear it with 
eq uaruimi ty. 

Perha;ps the system would seem less otbjectiona;ble if one were quite 
convinced that the race, however rigorous, was also just. But even this 
consolation is missing. For it is evident that, in contemporary conditions, 
the race is run in the nature of a handicap, in which children from more 
educated backgrounds have a decided crdvantage over those who come from 
homes with a lower educational standard; the wastage of clever working-
class boys from grammar-schools is still alarmingly high. It is, of course, 
very unlikely that anything can .be done to correct this iniquity, save in the 
long run: but as long as it continues to exist, it constitutes a standing 
argument in .fervour of attenuating the fierceness of the educational struggle. 

Secondly, it must ultimately have a harmful effect upon the educational 
system that it should be used primar.ily as an elaiborate and protracted 
method of social selection. Schooling is becoming like a long steeplechase 
from start to finish. Bv·ery stage that is traversed is regarded as a prelude 
to the one that follows, every examination that is passed is merely a 
means o.f manoeuvring for position for the next. Conversely, the requirements 
of University entry, which control the final lap in the whole race, 
make their influence felt all the way .back, down every previous stage in 
the course. What the Crowther Report referred to as 'the crisis of the 
Sixth Form' is in effect the crisis of the whole system: and the description 
that Sir Geoffrey in a later lecture ('Schools and Universities') applied to 
the top form-'an assault course for educational commandos'-could 
without exaggeration be gener.aLised downwards. Premature specialisation, 
the ·elimination from the syll,.Jbus of all side~issues and divagations, concentration 
upon the techniques of examination, are the inevitable concomrnitants 
of a system of which it .is becoming increasingly true that its 

j primary social function is not so much to educate people as to eliminate 
them. It is possible that the clever boy will not be harmed by this system. 
But that is poor comfort. For all ·it means is that, if the system is designed 
for any one, it .is designed for him; and he must always be in a very 
small minority. 

Thirdly, an educational system which is conceived primarily as a method 
of social selection, is bound to have the effect of instilling into those 
who pass through it, the morality of competition and a view of life in 
which streaming and grading are natural elements. Instead of the old 
public school virtues of Leadership and Character, we are going to have 
the new virtues of Efficiency and Brightness. Now I do not think for 
a moment that a Socialist society can survive without these qualities : 
I think that .it will have to encourage them, and even pay a high price 
for them: but I do not think that it need inscribe them, in golden letters, 
as the motto over its portals. 

Finally, it might be apposite to mention here (though the point is not 
strictly a cultural one) that quite apart from the general undesirability of 
converting the educational system into a system of elimination, the actual 
rate at whkh elimination takes place within our system is quite grotesque 
even from the most narrowly utilitarian point of view. In Britain today 
about 3 -4 per cent of those who enter the system stay in to the end, 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 33 

i.e. reaoh university. Considered simply as social investment, this is hopelessly 
inadequate. Indeed it is arguable that this rate .is not merely inadequate 
but positively harmful. For any system of education that is 
quite so aggressively eliminative as ours is bound to employ very narrowly 
academic criteria of selection. But there is consideraJble reason to thrink 
that people chosen by reference to strict academic albi}ity are not necessarily 
going to be those who will have most to contr~bute to economic 
efficiency. Exactly what is the proper percentage of university graduates 
for an advanced industr.ial society that wishes to preserve a high rate of 
economic growth is not clear, hut it seems likely to .be closer to 15 or 20 
per cent: and there are economists who will maintain that no degree of 
investment in higher education wi!J ever prove unremunerative. 
It is, therefore, clear that the present educational or-what comes to 
the same thing in this country -cultural market, as it is at present 
constructed, is far from satisfactory. It is not simply that ·the competition 
.is imperfect; even if it were perfect, the ensuing scramble for benefits 
would •be undesiraJble. To put the matter another way : Socialism cannot be 
identified, in a simple-minded fashion, with equality of opportunity: where 
equality of opportunity is itself identified, in a way which I think has 
come to stay, with educational opportunity. Nor do I think that there are 
many today who would deny this. C. A. R. Crosland, for ·instance, whose 
book The Future of Socialism has been attacked by critics 'on the left', 
for equating the institution of Socialism with the replacement of a h.ierarchy 
of birth or wealth by a meritocracy, is in fact insistent upon certain 
further cond.itions that must be satisfied before equality of opportunity JS 
even acceptable, let alone sufficient. He insists that, in the first place, the 
opportunities that are made open to all, should command a high average 
level of remuneration: on the grounds that the higher the level of income,. 
whatever its distribution, the greater the subjective sense of equality. And, 
his second condition, which can be seen as a kind of qualification to the 
first, is that ·the total range of remuneration should fall with.in a certain 
fixed bracket: that there should, in other words, be an established ratio 
between the income of the best-paid members of the meritocracy and that 
of the lowest-paid. 

Is the Ladder Wrong? 
I However, even if we are all agreed that equality of ·opportunity is not 
a sufficient, the question ar·ises whether it is a necessary, condition of 
Socialist society. There have always ·been Socialist thinkers to mise their 
voices against it, and today, once again, they are audi1ble. The image of 
the Ladder, they claim, has no place in the Socialist vision of society. 
Is this view correct? 
One way of arriving at such a view would be as a deduction from a 
particular conception of man in society. According to this conception both 
the rights and duties of man stem solely from his most general characteristic, 
his humanity, and have nothing to do with any particular endowment 
or illhility that he may possess. A man may not justifiably claim any 
special benefit or provision from society simply because of some superio.r 
talent he happens to have. Equally, of comse, society may not, in virtue 


34 SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 

of this endowment, lay claim to any special contr~bution or effort on his 
part. Albility or talent, on this view, is a private matter, which a man is 
free either to use or not to use. Society is not entitled to make him use 
it, and he can make no claim upon society if he does use it. 

It would be hard not to respect this ideal, for the very serious 
conception it holds of human dignity, and also for tbe emphasis it places, 
in its austere way, upon community and brotherhood. But I think that its 
consequences make it ultimately untenable. A system of rights and duties, 
which is based solely upon the universal aspects of man and which totally 
disregards all utilitar.ian considerations like rewards and incentives, is 
bound, when rpu.t into practice, to result in a decrease in social welfare. 
And if it is now ohjected that the level of social welfa·re is not to be 
reckoned in such mater·ialistic terms as the standard of living, ~he only 
retort is that the great majority of people in the world, to whose interests, 
after all, Socialists cannot be indifferent, calculate in just this way. 

A more moderate a11gument against equality of opportunity has been 
expressed by Raymond W.illiams who writes : 

'My own view is that the ladder version of society is objectionable in 
two related respects: first, that it weakens the principle of common 
betterment, which ought to be an absolute value; second, that it sweetens 
the poison of hierarchy, in particular, by offering the hierarchy of merit 
as a thing different in kind from the hierarchy of money or of birth.'1 

But the moderation of this argument is also its undoing. For the premisses 
no longer sustain the conclusion. What follows from the position to which 
Williams subscribes is, surely, not that the Ladder should be abandoned, ' 
but that its operation should in some way be modified. And I do not see 
that there is any fundamental reason to think that it could not be 
modified so as to do justice to the two very important and profound 
reservations that Williams expresses. 

Indeed, I have already concurred with the view that equality of opportunity 
is acceptalble only jf the opportunities offered do not exhibit 
too wide a range of inequality and if even the least favoured is on a 
reasonaJbly high material level. And I would also very strongly agree 
with Williams that any attempt to provide educational opportun~ty for 
the more gifted must go hand-in~hand with raising the educational standard 
for all. Indeed I too would give this second task priority over the first: 
though not for the same reason as he would. For whereas w .iJJiams 
believes that individual opportunity is incompatible with, I hold that it 
presupposes, common betterment. For there is no way of guaranteeing 
that the best education is offered to the most gifted as long as educational 
or cultural squalor survives. This principle indeed applies both inside and 
outside the educational system. It applies inside the system in that, 
as long as the bottom stream continues to flow at its present low level 
(and this in turn means as long as the school-leaving age is kept down), 
it will always be extremely difficult to retrieve out of it children of ability 
who have got into it on account of late development. And, secondly, the 
principle applies outside the system, in that children born and brought up 

1 

Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, p. 33 I. 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 35 

in areas of society which are culturally impoverished find it proportionately 
more difficult to make use of, and secure recognition for, such abilities 
as they have. 

IIn Favour of the Ladder 

I do not, then, think that the arguments adduced for eliminating the 
Ladder from our society establish anything more than that its use should 
be controlled and supplemented. On the other hand, the arguments in 
favour of its retention seem to me overwhelming. The first of these 
arguments I shall not dwell on, since it relates to purely practical considerations 
which fall rather outside the scope of this pamphlet : it is that 
the comparatively high level of prosperity and security we enjoy, and the 
far higher level that is within our reach, depend upon society's continued 
ability to make use of the individual talent and aJbility it contains. The 
only observation I want to make is that, if ~he argument is sound, it seem~ 
to show that competitive education (to some degree or other) is a prior 
condition of good education : for good education, which is an expensive 
commodity, is impossible save in a society enjoying considerable prosperity. 
Secondly, the process of Hberalising society and removing injustice 
has, rightly or wrongly, become so closely identified in the general mind 
with mob-ility and educational opportunity that it is difficult to see how 
the connection could .be 1broken or even loosened without causing a widespread 
sense of frustration and discontent. If there is any doubt on thi~ 
score, let us consider for a moment a special instance of the more general 
problem: entry into Oxford or Cambridge. Now it is clearly undesirable 
that the best brains of the country should be concentrated in these two '/fluniversities-bad from their point of view, very bad from the point of dl ·~ 
view of the other universities. But can anyone devise any method for ~ 
diverting talent from what has now come to be regarded as its natural Oth~ 
objective or destination, without inducing a deep sense of social injustice, Yk< 
a feeling of return to the old days of caste and privilege? If it has pttk·
proved impossible to devise any acceptaJble solution even in this particular Jl~~1 
case, it is hard to see how the consequences of clamping down more generally 
on the possibilities of educational advancement could 'be made palatable.~, 

How to Improve It 

The question then arises, how is it possible to preserve what is good 
in the theory of educational opportunity without setting an undesirable 
premium upon intellectual a·bility or esta:blishing competitiveness and 
ambition as the central values of our society? I have only the most general 
suggestions to make. • 

In the first place, the character of the Educational Ladder should be 
ractically transformed. It should be broadened: it should be shortened : 
and its aJbsolute position should lbe raised. Fortunately, all these three 
aims seem to be intimately linked, so that any reform which effectively 
realised any one would ·go a considerable way towards bringing the others 
about. For if we want to have a far larger proportion of students graduating 
to higher education, that means that we shall have to see that far more 


SOCIALISM AND CULlURE 

are brought up to the educational level from which the ultimate choice 
is made: in other words, in order to broaden the ladder we must shorten 
it. And if we do this, then at any rate over the span of a generation the 
absolute standard of education is !bound to rise. We have only to compare 
the prognostications made at the time of the passing of the Education 
Act of 1870 with the present standard of ·general attainment to apprehend 
the dynamic effect of education. Indeed, once this lesson has been fully 
grasped, we might hope to see the disappearance of that quite empty 
criterion which is often invoked in talking about educational opportunity: 
namely, that education should 'be offered to people according to the degree 
to which they can benefit from it. For the most important thing that 
education should teach is how to benefit from it. 

Secondly, the education that is provided should in one very important 
respect learn from the old middle-class system. It should aim, that is. 
at possessing a personal character, or, to put it .in practical terms, at 
having as high a ratio as possible of teacher to taught. If education is 
to have dynamic consequences or to be self-<perpetuating in life, it must 
induce in the pupil a sense of inquiry and of criticism. And this in turn 
can only be achieved by means of a personal relation. (It is for thi 
reason that, as Raymond !Williams has pointed out, to talk of TV as 'the 
great popular educator' is rubbish: because its content is-sometimes'
educative', .it does not follow that therefore the service 'educates'.) Of 
course, education of this kind will lbe expensive. But then education, as I 
have already said, is expensive, and the community must simply decide 
whether it knows of anything better on which to spend its money. 

Thirdly, I think ·that it is time we realised that in a sane society a 
school is not exclusively, perb'l.ps not even primarily, a place of education. 
A school .is-to use that now much abused word-a 'community'; it is a 
community in that it is a substitute for the prototype community, the 
family. There the child must learn 1o control its emotions and to acquire 
awareness of itself and to live harmoniously and co-operatively with others : 
if not for tJhe very general reason that these are prerequisites of living. 
then at least for the narrower reason that these are prerequisites of learning. 

But once we recognise the psychological significance of the school, it 
directly follows that a great deal of what goes on inside its walls must be 
non-competitive in character. For if we make all school activities competitive 
we run the decided risk that the child will come to regard the 
whole process of learning as too overt or crude an outlet for his aggressive 
tendencies and so will pull back and refuse to compete. On the other 
hand, the complete suppression of all emulation from the curriculum is 
equally likely to arouse feelings of guilt in the child, and .inhibit hi~ 
performance. It seems, therefore, as though psychological consideration~ 
join with social demands in requiring a form of education in which :1 
careful balance is struck 1between the competitive and the non-competitive 
aspects. 

My fourth suggestion is that we should try to weaken the intimate 

connection that now exists between culture and certain educational insti


tutions. There are many arguments in favour of this. In the first place. 

it would rid culture of that sugge tion of 'superiority' which attache to it 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURR 

at the moment, and which in practical tevms means that, on the one 
hand, a number of people who have no natural interest in or sympathy 
wi~h, say, the arts, affect such a concern in order to show that they are 
educated, and, on the other hand, many people are led to reject culture 
simply •because it ·belongs to a world to which they do not belong themselves. 
Secondly, the 'disestablishment of culture' would have the effect 
of bringing the arts a-nd the higher pleasures at any rate within the reach 
of people who would otherwise be deprived of them solely because their 
educational standard was insufficient: whereas ~here is no reason to think 
that cultural sensibil-ity and scholastic attainment are positively correlated. 
'thirdly -and this I regard as the most important consequence of my 
proposal-the divorce would mean that cultural education could be 
continued past university or school-leaving age into life. Numerous institutions 
that we think of as being purely practical, could become agents 
of cultural diffusion. Wesker has already suggested that the Trades Union 
Movement should recognise its cultural responsibilities: and the factory, 
it seems to me, could gain a new significance as a place where it was 
narural for people to exchange ideas, or l·isten to music, or read books-
so that culture might become a third term in the week, mediating Labour 
and Leisure. 

Finally, I should like to see a greater admission in our society, particularly 
amongst educators, that middle-class culture and mass culture 
do not merely appeal to different people : they also, in many cases, appeal 
to different sides of the same person. Educators like to pretend that 
educated people like only high culture -although it is to be observed that 
they ~hemselves are the great consumers of middle culture. In the classroom 
they insist upon the exclusive claims of Jane Austen or Proust : while in 
fact they prefer to read Balchin or Duuell. I object to this not merely 
because it is hypocrisy, but because it helps to perpetuate the low quality 
of mass culture. It encourages, indeed it licences, the producers of mass 
entertainment to preserve the standards of a despised culture, and it discourages 
serious artists from enter-ing into the market and challenging 
their monopoly. It would not be unduly fanciful to say that, in our society, 
mass culture exhibits all rhe well-known psychological characteristics of 
privation of love. 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 

VII. Social ism and the Arts 
I 
I 
THE ARTS AND THE FUTURE 
COME at last to a topic which many, on reading the title of this 
pamphlet, may have thought would be its principal theme: Socialism 
and the Arts. The topic is at once very intriguing and very forbidding : one 
where the temptation to say a great deal is quite out of proportion to 
what any of us can .actually have to say. Accordingly I shall be br.ief. 
On what we may e~pect the Arts under Socialism to be like I have no 
opinion. Partly because I don't know; partly because I have no desire to 
know. For I should regard it as a serious criticism of Socialism were it 
suggested that the character and condition of the Arts under it were 
predictable matters. This would surely mean that the arts would lose some 
of •their in·ventiveness and some of their expressiveness. Indeed it might 
mean worse; for, in our present state of knowledge at any rate, there 
seems no way in which we could predict with any precision and any 
chance of success, the artistic character of an age, save by inference from 
some directive given to the artists, along with the assurance that the 
directive will be obeyed. 

The Arts and a Closed Society 

The question I shall discuss will therefore be not what society may 
reasonably expeot of the Arts but what the Arts may reasona,bly expect 
of socie1y. If we wish to see the institution of Socialism co.incide with the 
flourishing of the arts, what demands may we make of Socialism? Jn 
particular, what relevance does this have for a problem we have already 
discussed : namely, the identification of a Socialist with an integrated society? 

El<iot has very wisely written : 

'You cannot in any scheme for the reformation of society, aim directly 
at a condition in which the arts will flourish: these activities are probably 
by-products for which we cannot deliberately arrange the conditions.!' 

The sociology of art is one of the most primitive reaches of the social 
sciences. We do not know under what condi·tions great ar-t will be produced, 
though we sometimes feel that we know a little, in an intuitive 
way, aJbout the conditions under which it will almost certainly not be 
produced. However, it has been claimed .by some that a sine qua non 
of artistic creativity is an integrated or organic society, and this claim 
is then felt to add weight to the already powerful case for identifying 
SociaJ.ism with a society of this character. I want to consider two arguments 
that have been adduced for thinking that Art demands an integrated society. 

The Problem of Communication 

The first is concerned with the possibility of communication in Art. 
To say, as some do, that Art is communication, seems unjustified: but there 

T. S. Eliot, The Idea of Christian Society, p. 29. 

SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 39 

is clearly an element of communication in virtually all Art. It is not 
merely that the artist hopes that someone will understand what he is doing, r it seems also to be the case that he modifies, or tampers with, the work on 
which he is engaged, in certain quite specific ways in order that it should 
be understood. If this is so, then it must be that at some point in the 
process of creation, the question arises for the artist, either consciously 
or unconsciously, of what he should do so as to secure, or increase the 
chances of, intelligibility. Now it is to this stage that the ar.gument for the 
integrated society relates. If the artist is to be able to decide what to 
do so as to make his content manifest, then he must ·be in rapport with 
his audience: and for this to happen, his audience in turn must be d 
unified and identifiable body, they must constitute an integrated society. 
If this condition is unsatisfied, the arts of the society will display an 
uncertainty or incoherence that is incompatible with greatness. 

There is much here that is undeniable. The conditions under which the 
producer of mass culture .produces, are hostile to, if not destructive of, 
creativity. And this is partly at least because, as we have seen, it is 
characteristic of mass culture to be produced with no known audience in 
mind: its producers would indeed be disloyal to their occupation if they 
inserted into their work anything which would restrict .its marketability, 
even if this would also increase its significance or intelligibility within t a restricted circle. Mass culture, we might say, has no audience, only a 
circulation: whereas art demands am audience. 

But this does not entail that the artist must be in some direct relation 
with everyone who reads his books or listens to his music or watches his 
plays: nor does it even mean that he must be in touch with a typical reader 
or audience or spectator who can, in virtue of certain shared traits, stand 
for the rest who resemble him. All that is required surely is that the 
artist should enjoy a direct and mutual relation with some sub-section of 
his whole audience, whose approval he esteems, whose criticism he respects, 
whose comprehension he solicits. The people to whom he so immediately 
addresses himself should of course be a significant, not a peripheral, 
element in the total audience: but once he has their ear, there is no 
reason why he should not be able to speak with confidence to those beyond 
his awareness. It ·is art, not mass culture, that we see symbolised in the 
magical condition of Prospero's island where the air is full of strange voices. 

A Content for Art 

The second argument in favour of the integrated society as providing the 
proper conditions for artistic creativity relates to the content of art. An 
derives its content from the context of social life. In an 'atomistic' society 
where the common context shared ·by the artist and his audience is very 
small, art is 1bound to become impoverished. For ·its content either will 
become totally esoteric, derived, that is, from a context that is peculiar to 
the artist, or else will be very meagre, relating to the few aspects of life 
that occur both in the context of the artist and in that of his audience. 
The proper solution (the argument continues) is a lar·ge shared situation, 
for then we would have an art with a content that was at once rich and 
widely accessi·ble. This condition is provided by the integrated . society. 


SOCIALISM AND CUL TIJRE 

As it stands, this argument contains far too many unexamined assumptions. 
Irn the first place, it assumes a narrow and yet highly metaphorical 
conception of art as essentially a 'mirroring' process. This conception is 
one which has been traditionally associated with Socialist aesthetics to 
their great detriment. It lies, for instance, at the heart of the famous 
doctrine of Socialist Realism. According to this view. art mirrors reality 
according to the consciousness of its age. All earlier ages were. however, 
characterised by a 'false consciousness', 'and so the whole of the art of the 
past is infected with error or distoPtion. But with the coming of Socialism 
we may expect a true form of consciousness, and so we can anticipate 
a form of art which will mirror reality .in an accurate and undistorted 
fashion. Socialist art will be true realism. The curious feature about this 
doctrine is that it cannot envisage any art that .is not realistic; it allows 
for bad realism as well as true realism, but it refuses to allow art to 
have any other function but that of mirroring society. 

It is this same conception of art which appears in the present argument. 
l'he difference .is that the coming of Socialist art is here identified with 
the institution, not of a more accurate or 'truer', but of a larger or more 
comprehensive, mirror. But the assumption of art as essentially a 'mirroring' 
activity is still unproved-and for that matter unexplained. Does it, 
for instance, allow-and if it excludes, by what right does it exclude-
the expressive role of art, the function of art as revealing the deeper 
movements of the soul? 

The second assumption ·in the argument is that the spectator or audience 
1 unable to comprehend more in a work of art than he previously understood: 
a work of art must not go beyond his ex.perience, else it will 
certainly !become obscure. I find this assumption quite unjustified, and 
indeed disproved by the degree of comprehension we can have of forms 
of art deriving fwm alien and vastly diver·gent cultures. 

Of course the artist must have something in common with his audience, 
if he is to communicate. But it is not necessary that this should be 
identified with certain common conditions which are taken hold of by the 
artist, pass over into his art, and become its content. Indeed, any attempt 
to say exactly what is necessary must fail because of our incapacity to 
anticipate the future course of art. For this reason it seems to me that 
in so far as this second argument is plausible, it reduces itself to the first. 
The demand that the artist must share his exper.ience with his audience 
is either excessive, or else it is merely the old demand that the artist must 
have a means of making himself intelligible to his audience-with. in 
addition, the elementary (though sometimes ignored) stipulation that art 
must have some content, that art cannot endlessly 1be a'bout the process 
of artistic creation itself. The artist, in other words. must live in the 
world: and this in turn has the practical implication, again elementary, 
that society must see that the world is habitable by the artist. For, if it 
doesn't, .it runs the risk of being deprived of art. 

The State as Patron 

So far I have talked a~bout the conditions under wb.Icb art will be 
produced in a Sociali t society, and I have identified these entirely with 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 41 

the standing conditions of the society. It may therefore be thought that I 
have omitted from my discussion one very important element; namely, 
the direct encouragement given by the state to artistic production. For by 
many it has been thought to <be the most important single aspect of high 
culture under Socialism, that in the Socialist sooiety the arts will be directly 
connected with the initiative of the state. The Socialist state, reaching 
out across four hundred years of bourgeois history, when Individualism 
was the principle of cultural as well as of economic life, will reappropriate 
to itself a role traditionally associated with the organ of power and 
cohesion in society. The artist of the future will find in the Socialist state 
the same kind of intuitive and enlightened patron that the medieval artist 
found in the Guild or the Church and the artist of the Renaissance found 
in the Prince. The advantll!ges of this new arrangement will be twofold. 
On the one hand society will automatically and immediately benefit from 
the most advanced art produced within its confines: on the other hand, 
the artist will enjoy a direct and unfailing connection with his public. 

Personally I regard the association of Socialism with the idea of state 
patronage as a serious misfortune. In a society which displays a proper 
concern with the quality of life, the state will give considerruble encouragement 
to public interest .in and enjoyment of the arts. Museums, 
concerts, festivals, exhitbitions, theatres, will ·be the recipients of generous 
grants and endowments : education both in the practice and in the appreciation 
of the arts will be ,given a high priority in public expenditure: the 
State will set an example to society rby treating its artists with the respect 
it affords, say, to its generals in wartime. But I do not think that any good 
purpose would be served by the direct public subsidy of particular artist~ 
-any more than it is at the moment by that monstrous perversion of 
values which is a new and characteristic feature of late bourgeois society, 
the public subsidy of pr.ivate collecting 'by means of tax concessions. Of 
course up to a point, in so far as it is naturally responsible for commissioning 
buildings, or erecting 9tatues, or issuing stamps and coins and 
banknotes, the state cannot avoid 'being a patron of the arts. It is a 
patron in so far as it purveys services whose operation involves orb~ects of 
aesthetic interest. What I am opposed to is that patronage should itself 
be a service of the state. 

For it seems to me inevita·ble that as an appointed patron the state is 
bound to be crude and undiscriminating, and to support specific artists in 
virtue not of their merits or of the quality of their work rbut of some quite 
extraneous category under which they can be brought. The state will be 
influenced hy considerations of respectability, or modernity, or chic. Aibove 
all, it will tend to admire and to subsidise artists who can be regarded as 
exemplifying to a high degree national characteristics. The Englishness 
of English art may be unsuitaJble as an academic concept: as a ground 
for official patronage it seems to me disastrous. And yet the state, 
even under Socialism, is always more likely to patronise 'national' art than 
any other kind of art: if only ·because such patronage is easier to defend, 
since it can be presented as the expenditure of public money in the national 
interest. 



SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 

However, my fundamen1Jal objection to the state as systematic patron of 
the arts relates to its social consequences. For it seems to me that it is 
bound to lead to the belief that the artist owes the state a special obligation 
in return for the patronage it offers him. Without wishin·g to resuscitate 
any crude romantic or aesthetic view of the artist, I regard this belief as 
permcwus. The romantic or the aesthetic view claims for the artist 
a special exemption from duty: I merely wish to claim for him an 
exemption from any speoial duty. For what the doctrine I am protesting 
against demands of the artist is not merely the conscientious dischar,ge of 
any particular commission he may have received from the State: nor just 
the recognition on his part of the general form of service that society feels 
entitled to claim of all its mernbers: but the acceptance of some special 
indebtedness, which is neither contractual nor shared by his fellow citizens. 
This seems to me inequitable. And when one further realises that this 
special duty is generally construed as a responsihility for the 'health' of 
society, the pernicious consequences of the doctrine are fully apparent. 

It may then be asked, how are the arts to be subsidised in a Social:ist 
society? My answer would be, through tlrree different sources. First of 
all, by private ind~viduals, now enjoying a higher average level of education, 
who would patronise art out of their private net income. Secondly, by 
museums and cultuml 1bodies, heavily subsidised by the state, but exercising 
a free choice in accordance with their taste, their needs and the demand:; 
of their public. And, thirdly, by a vast number of informal and cooperative 
bodies, linked with the normal processes of work, which I 
referred to earlier on as constituting the great new agents of cultural 
diffusion in Socialist society. 

Progress rutd the Arts 

But 'With the 'ciibandonment of sta<te patronage as an essential element in 
Socialism, do we also have to aibandon the old conv.iction that the institution 
of Socialism will result ~n a raising of the general level of culture? The 
question admits of no easy answer. Personally, I think that under Socialism 
there will be a higher level of culture for a number of reasons: the spread 
of education, the pUiblic control of forces that make directly for the 
destruction of beauty, like speculative buildin1g and advertising, and greate:concern 
with non-commercial values. But note, for a number of reasons. 
For there are still people who think that there is one reason why the level 
of culture will be higher under Socialism than now, and that is, quite 
simply, that there will be Socialism. The view of Socialism as automatically 
spelling the extinction of vulgarity and tawdriness and ensurin'g the general 
elevation of the quality of life is quite unfounded. 

Moreover the belief that Socialism will result in the improvement of 
cultural life contains, for whatever reason it is held, an assumption which 
can become dangerous if taken too literally. And that is the idea, which 
recurs in much radical criticism of modern mass society, that there is 
something quite identifiaJble, called the level of culture, which runs through 
all the arts of a particular society, and which can be raised or depressed, 
as the case may be. But in any given society the standards of achievement 
r.an vary very much from one art to another : indeed, it is only 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 

the existence of a unified style that can furnish even a prima facie reason 
for thiniking that high attainment in one art will rbe accompanied by high 
attainment in another. And, equally, the standard of .interest taken in the 
arts is lia,ble to fluctuation from one art to another. In its public role 
a nation can, for instance, be very concerned with architecture and indifferent 
to painting, as in Scandinavia: or vice versa, as in the United 
States. In this respect, much prolbarbly depends upon the general view 
that the Society takes of art: so that where art is regarded as primarily 
decoratirVe or as pertaining to the embellishment of life, architecture and 
design will be thought to be of great importance, whereas in a society 
that sees art as primarily expressive, a greater concern will be taken in the 
standards of painting and perhaps the novel. This, however, is highly 
speculative. T introduce it here merely to indicate the complex considerations 
that are appropriate to any well-founded optimism about the condition 
of the arts under Socialism. 


44 SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 

VIII. Common Culture or Plural Culture 
THE ISSUE 

T
T
HERE is a question which has served as the implicit theme of this 
pamphlet: much of what has lbeen said on particular topics is relevant 
to it: it is now time to raise it ex'{)licitly. The question is, should a Socialist 
society be a single, or a multi-cultural, society? Is there an entity called 
Socialist culture which is the proper culture of a Socialist society, or, on 
the other hand, is it a mark of a Socialist society that it offers i~ts members 
a cultural multiplicity from which to choose? 

My own answer-as will have become apparent by now from what I 
have said about mass culture and the arts under socialism, about scientific 
educa~ion and the idea of a proletarian culture-is that a Socialist society 
should be a culturally plural society. Indeed I think that the historical 
mission of Socialism is to introduce to the world a form of society where 
the individual may realise himself by drawing at will upon the whole range 
of human culture which is offered up for his choice freely and in its full 
profusion. 

Many Socialists will disagree with this. For them the attractions of 
Socialism are essentially connected with the benefits to be derived from an 
integrated and cohesive society, and they employ arguments drawn either 
from the nature of culture or from the great radical ideals of Equality 
and Fraternity to support this connection. Personally I think that these 
arguments are inadequate. And I think that there are other, and perfectly 
adequate, arguments drawn from the third great ideal of progressive 
politics, Liberty, which make the case for the plural society irresistible. 

The Argument from the Nature of Culture 

The case for a common culture, based upon the very nature of culture, 
has recently received a 'Very powerful and articulated formulation in 
Raymond Williams' The Long Revolution, and it would 'be as well to 
consider the argument as it is there developed. 

The starting-point of Williams' argument is a conception of culture as 
fundamentally a system of communication, a system by means of which 
one individual citizen transmits his experience to others. The cultural 
impasse in which we find ourselves today arises from the fact that our 
society has become fragmented into different groups between which it i5 
no longer possible to commune freely. The exit from this situation lies 
through the 'common culture' of Sociali m: for with the inauguration of 
this y tern the barriers to intercourse will be down and man once again 
will be able to talk to man. 

lt i , in other words, Williams' contention that any genuine de ire for 
cultural improvement must be a desire for a common culture : tnat thi;; 
is so follow rigorou ly from the nature of culture as a ystem of communication. 
To my mind this contention is invalid, and it gain uch 
plausibility a it posse es only from an ambiguity in it u~e of the notion 
of 'culture'. 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 45 

For if we regard culture as primarily a system of communication and 
this, I think, is not so evident, because not so clear, as Williams would 
have us believe-then cultural progress does perhaps mean the .institution 
of a common culture, but, it must be noted, where this in turn means 
something like the institution of a common lan.guage. But this of course is 
not what Williams and those who argue with him, mean when they talk of a 
common culture: they mean something much more like a si1uation ~n which 
everyone is animated by the same purposes and ideals. Williams sometimes 
tries to explicate his ideal by means of the expression 'common meanings, 
common values'. But what be fails to see is that he has compressed into 
this expression two quite different ideals : the modest ideal of a societ~ 
in which people speak the same language, and the more comprehensiv 
ideal of ·a society in which people say roughly the same things. The first 
ideal does perhaps follow from his original conception of what culture 
is: the second certainly doesn't. 

Of course it is just possible that when Williams tal)<s of 'shared values', 
he has in mind merely what mi·gbt be called the 'permissiiVe' values : values 
like toleration and rationality which are the preconditions of any common 
system of inter-communication, not something to be expressed in it. If it 
is only these permissive values that W.illiams thinks should be shared, then 
his ideal is perfectly compati.ble with a diversity of positive values, and 
what I would call cultural pluralism. But I think it is fairly clear that be 
identifies the common culture of Socialism with the widespread acceptance 
of more substantive values. For why else should he insist upon the sense 
of community, of participation, that will inevitalbly flow from the new 
culture?-and what otherwise would lead him to think of the Aldermaston 
marches as an earnest of the new spirit? 

The Argument from Equality 

Those who would argue for an integrated society on the ground of 
Equality assume that a plurality of cultures is bound to involve a hierarchy 
of cultures. Now if a hierarchy here means simply a qualitative ordering, 
this can scarcely be regarded as something o·bjectionaJble : for the alternative 
would be Telativism, which is clearly undesirable. I therefore take 
the assumption to be that once any differentiation of culture exists wjthin a 
society, the differentia are bound to attract and draw to themselves distinctions 
of a purely social kind. One culture will be regarded as socially 
superior to another, and membership of it will serve as a badge of 
class or status. 

Now, in advocating a plurality of cultures I certainly am not arguing for 
a hierarchy in this pejorative sense, and I see no reason for thinking that 
support of the one commits one to the other. I envisage a plural society 
as one where various cultures coexist without any special cachet or prestige 
attaching to one rather than another. And if it is then claimed that this 
·is impossible, and that different cultures will always provide occasion for 
social discrimination I can see no reason for this. It may be claimed that 
any foDm of diversit~ can 1become a means of social distinction : 'but it does 
not follow from this that any particular form of diversity must become a 
means of social distinction. If, however, it is felt necessary to guard against 


SOCIALISM AND CULTURE

46 

the mere possibility of this ha,ppening, then we are immediately committed 
to a doctrine of social pessimism. For the only alternatives for society are 
a hierarchy or else total uniformity. 

The Argument from Fraternity 

Those who argue for a common culture on the ground of Fraternity 
maintain that it is only within a close-knit and integrated society that 
relief can be O'btained from the inhumanity and the fragmentation of 
modern life. Since the coming of industrialism and the ·break-up of the 
o~d order, Man has suffered from a certain indefinaJble sense of loss: a 
sense that life under modern conditions has become deracinate and disinherited, 
and tha,t whatever might give meaning to existence is beyond his 
reach. If he is to extricate himself from this tragic situation, if he is to 
regain the dignity of which industrialism deprived him, his hope lies m 
the restoration of community. 

It is difficult not to admire the serious concern for the quality of 
life in modern society that this argument reveals, but I am highly sceptical 
both a,bout the analysis that it offers of our present situation and a·bout 
what it proposes by way of a solution. 

For to begin with, I find it implausible to suggest a unitary overall 
e~planation of all our contemporary disorders, of everything that has been 
fundamentally wrong with society since, say, 1760, and unilluminating to 
characterise the whole of our present social predicament in terms of some 
hi·gbly general, highly abstract concept like 'alienation', which is mpposed 
to describe in some essential way the condition of us all. For behind any 
such interpretation or characterisation lies the assumption that basically 
all men are impelled by a common aim, that they seek satisfaction in a 
common ob~ective, and that happiness or a satisfactory solution, if they 
could attain to it, would be identical for all. It is, of course, admitted 
that, in fact, modern conditions being what they are satisfaction is unobtaina:
ble: but this implies that there is, even today, a common condition 
of man, deriving from a common sense of frustration. Such an 
assumption is plausible only on the further assumption of a common 
human nature, whose essence we can penetrate and thereby arrive at a 
notion of the optimum conditions for its survival and aotivity. 

Now, in a very fundamental sense, it may not be absurd to postulate an 
underlying human nature of this generic kind. But such a conception would 
be of purely theoretical interest. It would have no value or use in a 
discussion of man in society. For as soon as we occupy ourselves with 
human beings at the point at which they enter society and make demands 
upon their fellow human 1beings and ' their environment, we are dealing 
with human -nature as substantially modified by eXJperJence and upbringing 
: we are dealing, that is to say, with .formed character. And the essence 
of character lies in the different ways in which different people are disposed 
to react to, or behave in, similar circumstances: character exists when 
people have different aims and consequently find satisfaction or frustration 
in different situations. From this it directly follows that it is impossible 
to give a general diagnosis of the disorders of modern man in society or to 
indicate in a universal way the source of his frustration. And from this 



SOCIALISM AND CULTURE 47 

in turn a further consequence follows which is crucial to the present discussion. 
If the iUs of men in society are specific and particular, .if they 
relate at least as much to private and personal, as to shared environmental, 
factors, then there seems no good reason to look for, or to believe that 
there exists, a universal or general solution to those ills. We have already 
seen the error in assuming that there exists a satisfactory form of work 
which would satisfy all alike: it is exactly the same error, though on a 
larger scale, that is involved in assuming -that a common culture would 
ensure the end of frustration and general social contentment. 

Moreover, even if there was reason to believe that a common cultur.-! 

was, in principle, the proper solution to all our contemporary disorders, 

there is a further reason why it could never in fact be efficacious as a 

solution: namely, that it would have to be imposed. Those who were born ? 

into it would have to accept it. It is, however, a necessary condition of 

psychological cure that the solution offered to the patient should be accepted 

freely. Now, either the notion of a common culture is empty, or else it 

fails to satisfy this stipulation. 

It seems to me, in this connection, a curious fact that in the mid-

twentieth century, just when the positive science of mind seems to offer us 

a real insight into and understanding of the vast multiplicity and variety "2 

of human disturbance, there should be a regression on the part of sup-• 0 

posedly advanced thinkers, to a priori psychology and the antiquated meta-~• 

physical categories like 'alienation' or 'estrangement' in terms of which it , --.or? 

is expressed. For it cannot plausibly be maintained that what was good \...tVr· · 

enough for the young rMarx is good enough for us. Moreover, this retro


gressive move not merely denies us the chance of properly identifying 

the true sources of discontent and ill-health in society, but if persisted 

in, would ultimately prejudice our chances of accepting the assistance that 

psychiatry and psycho-analysis have to offer us. 

The Argument from Liberty 

The pragmatic objections to the idea of a common culture, on the 
grounds that it could not be adequate to the problems it is supposed to 
solve, that it could not bring about the regime of Fraternity and Equality, 
are reinforced by a consideration of the third great ideal of radicalism, 
L~berty. For it is surely inconsistent with the idea of Liberty that men 
should have their lives limited in any way that is not practically necessary. 
The liberalised society is one where men fulfil themselves according to their 
own view or conception of life-provided, of course, that in doing so 
they do not interfere with, or impose upon, the self-fulfilment of others. 
To achieve this end, they must be free both of the dictates of established 
authority and of the sUJbtler but no less effective power of social pressure. 
, Furthermore, they must have free access to the principal ideas evolved 
in the course of human history concerning the conduct of life: and in 
so far as these ideas do not satisfy their reasonable expectations of guidance, 
they should be free to make good the deficiency by what John 
Stuart Mill, in just this context, referred to as 'exper.iments in living'. 
And, once again, either the notion of a common culture is devoid of 

content, or else it is incompatible with just this demand. 


SOCIALISM AND CULTIJRE 

It would be no service to the ideal of Liberty to disguise the fact 
that its pursuit is often exacting. The burden of choice, wherelby a man 
has to decide what meaning he will give to his !rife, can be hard to bear, 
and sometimes he will want to lay it down and return to a society which, 
either ·explicitly or implicitly, either 'by express rule or rby tacit in!Jimation. 
provides him with an answer to problems which he must otherwise answer 
himself. By appropriating to itself the old li·beral ideal of autonomy, 
Socialism certainly does not make .itself a more comfortable doctrjne. The 
hope, however, that it holds out is that in a society from which material 
insecurity and inequality have 'ben removed, the chance o.f a man's attall1· 
ing the degree of emotional turity and integration necessary for the free 
ordering of his own life, will ave been appreciaJbly rajsed. 

But it must be pointed o t that this hope will not be attained directly 
through the institutions of oci.alist society. Throughout the nineteenth and 
twentieth centuries, ·alism has often drawn upon itself the scorn 
of great artists and thinkers, of men marked out by their singular awareness, 
their prqdigious understanding of human nature, just because they 
thought it to be the claim of Socialism that human unhappiness and misery, 
that personal suffering and the sense of loss, could ·be expunged from the 
earth by means of the proper reconstruction of the forms of social life. 
The anger and the opposition of these great men is understandaJble if the 
Socialism of their day made any such stupid or philistine claim. 

Socialism properly understood has no easy remedy for anxiety or 
unhappiness or for the various disorders of the mind. There are, howe,ver, 
things that in a Socialist society we may reasonarbly hope for. We may 
hope that the aJbsence of certain kinds of conflict and certain 'kinds of 
privation will aid the study of fundamental conflict and fundamental privation. 
We may hope tha,t in a society of universal prosperity and literacy 
these findings will be widely diffused and acted upon. We may hope 
that those whose infancy received a benign and enlightened supervision, 
will grow up to be human beings capable of making an adult choice. 
And we may further hope that, not merely in childhood but throughout 
their lives, the finest efforts of the society will be expended in presenting 
every·thing that culture and civilisation have produced that could relate 
to or affect or enrich their choice. 

It should be the ultimate boast of socialism that it decreases the possibility 
of bad upbringing, that it increases the possibility of good education, 
and that, having in this way realised the conditions upon which free 
choice depends, it further offers a man reasonarble security that as he 
chooses, so in fact he will be aJble to live. 


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