File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-03-14.105, message 80


Date: Tue, 11 Mar 1997 20:34:41 -0500
From: Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu (Yoshie Furuhashi)
Subject: Popular Culture and the Left (was Re:M-I: Final word on Solidarity and Alan Wald)



>Gay comments:
>This kind of elitist bullshit permeates any leftish group I've had
>acquaintance with here in Canada. Any time I join, participate,
>help, or  socialize with lobby groups, parties, activist organizations,
>etc. I can't help but run into the *"I don't watch TV"* group of people.
>They won't read popular newspapers or listen to country/rap/dance
>music either. Now, I enjoy a good foreign flic and classic literature,
>but these people are positively smug about it. (Of course, I'll take a
>John Candy movie and a hockey game the next night.)
>
>What is it about the left that attracts and fosters this anti-working
>class snobbery?
>
>This remoteness and cultural divide is a major obstacle to building
>"solidarity" and a mass movement. As you point out, working
>people spot this snobbery a mile away. I think this is why the people
>I find myself admiring the most are those who challenge bourgeois
>hegemony by  *participating* in popular culture.
>
>I always find Gary MacLennan's work on culture very
>illuminating too. And it's very encouraging to see that his work
>gets presented in popular Australian media. I wish more academics
>(especially Canadian academics) would follow this model.

I agree that snobbery is or should be antithetical to left activism and I
think that popular culture ought to be taken seriously by marxists.
However, I dare say that watching too much TV doesn't make for a revolution
either. In one of the earlier threads, where people were discussing the
disappearance of working class culture, a sense of community, oppositional
consciousness, etc. in the core capitalist countries, I think that some
pointed to TV as one of the cultural influences that tend to isolate
people, to turn them into atomized individuals, to make them sedentary, and
to induce them to internalize the "middle-class"--sorry I know this is an
imprecise term, please remember Chris B's contribution a while ago for
elaboration--outlook, etc.

Another thing that occurred to me: whenever the issue of elitism vs mass
mass movement, "high" vs "popular" culture, "middle class" vs working
class, "academy vs real world," etc., comes up, I am struck by the gender
divide that often comes with it. I think most people on this list seem to
imagine the "real" worker in masculine terms. Or at least the words and
metaphors they use to describe the ideal-typical worker suggest gendered
imagination. (If I don't watch hockey on TV, it has more to do with the
fact that I have been socialized as female and am not that enthusiastic
about spectator sports than the fact that I am a graduate student; almost
all my male grad student colleagues watch sports on TV and it seems that
they have to do that to have something to talk about besides the dismal job
market. My parents could not go to college and my father was a steelworker
and my mother has worked in diners and supermarkets. My father has been an
avid sports fan while my mother has always thought of men's infatuation
with spectator sports as something silly and infantile.) I don't know if
other women--there are so few!--on this list agree with me on this; I hope
to hear from them as well as men.

I appreciated Carrol Cox's comments on the problem of describing women as
"fellow travellers." I say that the same problem seems to lurk in the ways
in which the list subscribers talk about "real" workers; it's the opposite
side of the same coin.

Yoshie Furuhashi





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