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vk's avatar

Every mode of production produces or must produce its correspondent culture. It is, using more general Marxist terminology, part of the superstructure.

By "culture", I mean it in the broadest sense: the set of moral and ethic conventions, taste in art, customs and habits, sense of what is polite and what is not, beauty conventions (in the broadest sense of the word: human beauty masculine or feminine, fashion, use of color and materials you should use in this or that stuff, etc.), and, most important, the average level (basic) of education of the population, by class.

So, for example, every capitalist child must learn Math to some degree and how to read and write in its national language. That alone is much more knowledge a child and even an adult in feudalism or antiquity ever learned; by high school, the average child has already more accumulated knowledge than the even most prosperous feudal and ancient men. This high level of minimum education required changed the way the capitalist society saw children: they were children even at 12 years old, and became teenagers/adolescents until 18, when they finally became adults; in Ancient Rome, a boy became a man at 9 years old and a girl became a woman at 12 or 13 years old, there was no concept of adolescence.

Capitalism promotes "greed" because that's how people must behave in order to survive in it. Since it is necessary, then the culture must adjust accordingly, making "greed" a positive cultural trait. First, since the word "greed" has negative connotations, it must be changed e.g. "entrepreneurial spirit" in Keynes, "ambition", "hard work", "providence" (Calvinism) etc. etc.

When the system starts to fail -- and all of them start to fail eventually, because Marx demonstrated all of them are historically specific -- what was culturally good dialectically start to become bad: it becomes "greed" again in the example we're working with. In philosophy, we say the system entered its historically "negative stage", the phase where it becomes reactionary and not revolutionary; where it becomes deleterious instead of advantageous.

But the maxim remains the same: it is, ultimately, the material base (economy) that determines the superstructure (culture and the State). The economy is the "environment" that determines the "fitness" of all possible (in potentia) forms of culture. The USA has evolved into the purest form of capitalism ever, it necessarily must have generated the correspondingly purest form of capitalist culture ever.

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P.S.: And this is also a huge challenge for China. As the socialist society of the 21st Century, it must be aware of the fact that they must build a culture that corresponds to its system. That's why I think the CPC's insistence in maintaining some fossils of the imperial era is a mistake, e.g. Chinese Traditional Medicine, which is a pseudoscience, but has even colleges. Socialism, being the next stage after capitalism, must have an even higher basic level of education and enlightenment than capitalism; science must be the moral and ethic guide of the average socialist person, which means pseudoscience, superstition and religion are pure poison to socialism.

The original Bolsheviks had this cultural aspect very clear in their minds, and failed in the task of building a socialist culture because the capitalist world successfully deprived it of the material (economic) means: the Tsarist Empire was a very backward region of human civilization, and WWII destroyed too much of the USSR's material base to allow it to ever recover. The CPC must seize this positive phase of Chinese Characteristics Socialism to start to weed out the ossified habits of the Chinese Empire.

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Henry's avatar

Love this analysis

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