Capitalist formation required the continuous re-education and cultural remaking of working people

Evidence

Throughout the long transition into agrarian capitalism and then in the formation and development of industrial capitalism, there is a more or less continuous struggle over the culture of working people, the laboring classes and the poor. This fact must be the starting point for any study, both of the basis for, and of the transformations of, popular culture. The changing balance and relations of social forces throughout that history reveal themselves, time and again, in struggles over the forms of the culture, traditions, and ways of life of the popular classes. Capital had a stake in the culture of the popular classes because the constitution of a whole new social order around capital required a more or less continuous, if intermittent, process of re-education, in the broadest sense. And one of the principal sites of resistance to the forms through which this “reformation” of the people was pursued lay in popular tradition. That is why popular culture is linked, for so long, to questions of tradition, of traditional forms of life—and why its “traditionalism” has been so often misinterpreted as a product of a merely conservative impulse, backward looking and anachronistic. Struggle and resistance—but also, of course, appropriation and ex -propriation. Time and again, what we are really looking at is the active destruction of particular ways of life, and their transformation into something new. “Cultural change” is a polite euphemism for the process by which some cultural forms and practices are driven out of the center of popular life, actively marginalized. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 993

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies ‘transformation’ and ‘reform’ as the central analytic vocabulary of popular-culture studies, distinguishing active reworking from mere decline.
• XREF: Connects to Raymond Williams on ‘residual, dominant, emergent’ cultures and to E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. — connects to: Horace Mann saw schooling as the sole counter to capitalist class domination — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 333; Corporate capitalism’s rise shaped the Progressive Movement in American schooling — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 654; Education simultaneously raises worker productivity and defuses class conflict to preserve profits — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 226
• SEED: A possible essay: why ‘traditionalism’ among working-class culture is misread as conservatism when it is actually resistance to capital’s re-education campaign.
• DEEPTHINKING: A dense theoretical passage reframing cultural change as active marginalization and reworking, resisting the modernization narrative and offering transformation as the key analytic category.