bearer of modernculture,”he insisted, the workingclasscould onlyrealize the
emancipatory potential of learning underradicallydemocratic conditions:
If we relyupon political battle, then we also relyupon education, on knowledge.“Through
educationto freedom,”that is the wrong slogan,the slogan of false friends.Weanswer:
through freedomto education! Onlyinafree people’sstatecan the people obtain educa-
tion. Onlywhenthe people fight for their own political powerdothe gates of knowledge
opento them.Without power for the people, thereisnoknowledge!Knowledge is power!–
Power is knowledge!¹²Confirmingthe strategic uses of the discourse of cultureand education, the two
speeches by Liebknecht clearlyarticulate their anticipatory and performative
functions.Against the difficulties of reconcilingtheory and praxis, the emotion-
allychargedlanguageofaspiration mobilizes the imaginary quality of dis-
course–in this case, through theredefining of key elements of dominant ideol-
ogyinthe mappingofthe socialist master narrative.Ofparticularrelevanceto
the necessary process of appropriation and refunctionalization is the redefinition
of individual practices as collective ones.Alluding to this possibilityinhis often-
cited definition of cultureasawhole wayoflife, RaymondWilliams (in one of
the founding textsofBritishculturalstudies) concludes that the crucial distinc-
tion between bourgeois and working-class cultureisnot basedonparticular cul-
tural practices,which in the ageofthe cultureindustry anyway tend towardho-
mogenization, but established through the latter’s “alternative ideas of the
nature of social relationship.”¹³
Forthe case of German Social Democracy, Williams’sremark can beread to
mean thatthe referencesto idealist aesthetics and literary classics should not
automaticallybetreated as evidence of historical inevitability,namelythe com-
pletionofthe dream of bourgeois emancipation by the revolutionary proletariat.
Just as the primacyofaesthetic experience in the making of bourgeois subjectiv-
ity cannot simplybetranslated into collectivist or communalterms, the role of
autonomous art in the ageofsecular modernity and competitive individualism
cannot easilybetransferredto the associational cultureofthe socialist move-
ment,given its heavy debts to folk cultureand mass culture. Conceptually,
then, the socialist debates on culture and education are boundto reveal the lim-
its of juxtapositions such as hegemonicversus subversive cultureoften used by
Wilhelm Liebknecht,Wissen istMacht,Festrede, gehalten zum Stiftungsfest des Dresdener Ar-
beiterbildungs-Vereins am 5.Februar 1872und zum Stiftungsfest des Leipziger Arbeiterbildungs-
Vereins am24.Februar 1872(Leipzig: Genossenschaftsbuchdruckerei, 1873), 48.
RaymondWilliams,Cultureand Society:1780– 1950 (NewYork: Columbia University Press,
1958),312.
160 Chapter8