Workers Vanguard No. 1010 12 October 2012 TROTSKY LENIN Human Culture: A Marxist View (Quote of the Week) Speaking in Moscow in 1926, Leon Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the October Revolution of 1917, stressed that the working class in power would need to acquire and build from the cultural achievements of previous class societies. Culture is everything that has been created, built, learnt, conquered by man in the course of his entire history, in distinction from what nature has given, including the natural history of man himself as a species of animal....   In the process of adapting itself to nature, in conflict with the hostile forces of nature, human society has taken shape as a complex organization of classes. The class structure of society has determined to a decisive degree the content and form of human history, that is, its material relations and their ideological reflections. This means that historical culture has possessed a class character. Slave-owning society, feudal serf-owning society, bourgeois society, each engendered a corresponding culture, different at different stages and with a multitude of transitional forms. Historical society has been an organization for the exploitation of man by man. Culture has served the class organization of society. Exploiters’ society has given rise to an exploiters’ culture. But does this mean that we are against all the culture of the past?   There exists, in fact, a profound contradiction here. Everything that has been conquered, created, built by man’s efforts and which serves to enhance man’s power is culture. But since it is not a matter of individual man but of social man, since culture is a social-historical phenomenon in its very essence, and since historical society has been and continues to be class society, culture is found to be the basic instrument of class oppression. Marx said: “The ruling ideas of an epoch are essentially the ideas of the ruling class of that epoch.” This also applies to culture as a whole. And yet we say to the working class: master all the culture of the past, otherwise you will not build socialism. —Leon Trotsky, “Culture and Socialism” (1926), printed in Labour Review (Autumn 1962)