WORKERS' CULTURE
The discussion on the relevance and importance of a workers' culture has been a classical debate in the sociology and history of culture. The shape of this debate has been strongly related to political and historical contexts.
In former socialist countries, it was embedded in the ideological valorisation of workers’ (or, more precisely, ‘proletarian’) ideology by leading communist parties. At the peak of this trend in the 20th century, the ‘great cultural proletarian revolution’ was initiated by Mao in China in 1966, since the Chinese leader claimed that socialist countries may themselves be the location of struggles between bourgeois and popular (proletarian) culture.
In capitalist societies, the political importance of workers’ culture has been strongly linked with the existence or lack thereof of a strong workers movement in a given country and with its more or less developed autonomy and specificity. The context of workers' culture encompasses multiple fields, including those connected to cultural policies.
For example, in France, the rise of workers' culture (culture ouvrière) in the 19th century was directly connected to a set of social and sometimes socialist experiments among certain fractions of qualified workers, especially typographers and book workers. Theirs’ was the quest for workers' autonomy against the rising domination of bourgeois communication tools.
As Jacques Rancière has shown in Proletarian Nights (La nuit des prolétaires), this movement has led to the emergence of a genuine literary genre, which is a rare contribution to the understanding of the industrial revolution and capitalism but has various implications regarding culture in general. Sometimes it is in contradiction and sometimes in harmony with the larger cultural trends of industrial societies.
Some decades later, at the beginning of the 20th century, a literary school around Henry Poulaille in France took the name proletarian literature' (literature prolétarienne). Its peculiarity, in line with Rancière’s conception, is the fact that workers themselves were the creators of original texts that were not produced under the canons of legitimate literature.
As a specification of the larger realm of ‘popular culture’, the notion of workers’ culture is polysemic and has been invested with various, sometimes contradictory, significations. For example, Michel Verret developed the hypothesis of an original and authentic workers’ culture (culture ouvrière), which was part of the emergence of a social class. On the other hand, in his critique of the ideological and normative uses of references to ‘popular culture’, Pierre Bourdieu saw ‘workers’ culture’ as far from autonomous and free from intimate relations to ‘legitimate’ (institutional and bourgeois) culture.
In sum, the notion of workers' culture can be said to be neither completely autonomous (for example, syntactic and aesthetical norms may remain strongly influenced by ‘classical’ criteria in worker’s literature) nor completely dominated by ‘legitimate’ genres. Its use makes sense provided we take it as a descriptive and empirical concept, illustrating the connections between various spheres of social activity, for example, work and leisure practices.
The relevance of workers’ culture relates to the existence of cultural practices that directly connect to the experience of work, as testified in surveys and ethnographic studies.
Testimonies and novels based on workers’ experiences are probably the first evident component of workers’ culture, but they are based on a rather narrow conception of culture. All cultural practices, varying from social integration and sociability of daily practices (i.e., everything that relates to food and drink) to more individual leisure-time activities developed among the workers (e.g., gardening in jardins ouvriers), are part of a set of coherent elements.
In terms of cultural policy, an inclusive conception points to the importance of careful consideration for all varieties of workers’ cultures. This includes the daily activities specific to particular subgroups that may at first not even be seen as ‘culture’. Constructing indicators of the intensity of workers’ culture should be part of the project of an inclusive inventory of the social reality of culture. (FL)