Chapter 8
The SocialistProject ofCulture and Education
Socialism is morethanamereparty program.It is anoble cultural pursuit,aspiritual
moral force.Itcan onlysucceedwhen it inspires creative ideas and isable to transform
the rich emotional values dormant within intoapowerful spiritual experience.RichardWeimann,“Die sozialistische Bildungsarbeit”“Cultural,”“spiritual,”“moral,”and“emotional,”duringthe Wilhelmineyears,
theseterms constituted the main building blocks of an emergent–or,tobemore
precise, imagined–proletarian culture.It was in theHumboldtian sense ofBil-
dung(education, formation)asthe full realization of human potential that these
qualities werecalled upon to transformthe workingclass into the revolutionary
class.It was through recoursetoidealistaesthetics and German classicismthat
socialism–or Social Democracy,with bothterms still used synonymously–
promised to completethe emancipatory project startedbythe bourgeoisie
through the development ofKultur(culture, cultivation) as an entire wayof
life. And it was through the elusive process ofVeredelung(refinement,better-
ment) that culture and education were enlisted in the forging of proletarian iden-
tifications as well as socialist commitments.
This chapter reconstructs the socialist appropriation of bourgeoisKulturand
Bildungas part ofalargerdiscourse on class formation, and does so in full
awareness of thevery different histories of workers’libraries, worker’scultural
organizations,and workers’educational associations.Twolines of inquiry will
be pursued, the socialist debt to the bourgeois tradition, which hinged on the
Marxist appropriation of idealistaesthetics, and the socialistversion of cultural
nationalism, which includedaclass-basedversion of Herder’sfolk culture.Fo-
cusing on the effects of discourse bringsinto relief the dialogic qualityofprole-
tarian culturethatwas emerging within, through,and against,bourgeois culture
and doing so preciselythrough its proprietary claims on the bourgeois heritage.
In other words, the discussions about culture and education will be examined,
not as blueprints for actual practices of appropriation, but as acts of appropria-
tion themselves, with their anticipatory functions treated as an integralpart of
the process, if not its most important characteristic.
The intenselyemotional investment thatcharacterized Socialist Democratic
debates on culture and education beyond the substantial disagreements on spe-
cific pointswill function once more asapoint of entry into the subject matter.
HereRichardWeimann’scharacterization from 1920 of socialism as a“noble cul-