scholars to validateoppositional and alternative culturalpractices.Given the ori-
gins of these debates in historicallyspecific class formations, even the demands
for access to social,cultural, and symbolic capital remain an integralpart of the
dynamics of classdifferences.Accordingly, the speaking about cultureand edu-
cation can be read as either anticipatory or preemptive performances of status
and privilege. Under the conditions ofWilhelmine class society,these symbolic
performances not onlymodeled the moral regimes of outraged rectitude thatal-
lowed theradicalizedworkersto make political demands, but also they provided
compensatory pleasures by projectingformative experiences of lack–of resour-
ces or opportunities–onto the abundancepromised by lofty ideas about culture
and education.
To further complicatematters, the socialist discourse surroundingculture
and education mayhavefunctionedprimarilyasastrategic performance of em-
powerment,asymbolicgesture of expropriation directed against the ruling
classes and their culturalinstitutions. However,the socialist appropriation of
bourgeois heritagealso servedto contain the growingthreat to the humanist tra-
dition from twoequallypowerful rivals,the world of science andtechnologyand
the modern cultureindustry.Inthis context,the socialist validation, if notven-
eration of culture, especiallyifnarrowly defined as literature, sometimesimplied
acritique of scientificrationality asadominantepistemology, despite thewide-
spread belief in historical materialism as political philosophyand the embrace of
Darwinism as an evolutionary theory of revolution. Meanwhile, the almosthabit-
ual tributes to the literaryclassics legitimatedacompletebracketingofthe mass
culturaldiversions that reached the urban masses through new technologies of
reproduction, communication, and perception, including earlycinema. By equat-
ing culturewith highculture, and the classics in particular, the socialistscould
at once critiquethe commodification of cultureincapitalist societies and diag-
nose the political failureofthe bourgeoisie in completingits historicalmission.
And by reconceiving the project of humanism in collectivistrather than individu-
alist terms,the socialists wereabletoreuniteits aesthetic with its political
goals–aconnection established first in the writingsofMarx and Engels–
and to present the appropriation of bourgeois forms and traditions asafirst
step towardthe democratization of culture.
The double meaning in Marxist theory ofBildungas both cultivation and for-
mationgoesalongway in explaining its prefigurative functions in the imagina-
tion of proletarian culture.Bildungis accorded this relational quality alreadyin
TheCommunist Manifesto,namelythrough the two meanings that,inthe German
original, suggest aclose connection between humanistic education and classfor-
mation. On the one hand,the wordBildungrefersto the process by which the
workingclass is givenaccess to newBildungselemente,translated into English
The Socialist Project ofCultur eand Education 161