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The League for Proletarian Culture (German: Bund für proletarische Kultur) was a short-lived German left-wing organisation for the promotion of proletarian culture. It was founded in Berlin in spring 1919 by Alfons Goldschmidt, Arthur Holitscher, and Ludwig Rubiner and was dissolved in early 1920.[1] It sought to promote "the eternal values bequeathed by the illustrious spirits of the past."[2]
They published Aufruf zu einem Bund für proletarische Kultur (Call for a League for Proletarian Culture) which referred to Alexander Bogdanov and the Proletkult movement he had established as a mass movement in Russia. They set out to "lay the foundations for a new proletarian culture" to which end they subsequently published their Grundsätze und Programm. Here they claimed they sought to wipe out the last traces of bourgeois culture from working class consciousness, seeing the disappearance of this pseudo-culture as no loss. They envisaged a new proletarian culture dormant within the working class which could be woken up and play a role in the revolutionary transformation of society.[3]
- ^ Sheppard (2000, 261-262) and Willett (1978a, 14).
- ^ Sheppard (2000, 261).
- ^ W. L. Guttsman (1997). Art for the Workers: Ideology and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0-7190-3634-7. Retrieved 23 June 2020.