p The conventional concept of culture is based on the historical approach which enables us to identify the peculiarity of the life of society as compared to nature. In the broad sense of the word culture means all that has been created by man as distinguished from all that has been given him by nature. Originally, the word “culture” ( deriving from the Latin - cultura - tilling, cultivation) was applied to man’s cultivation of the environment, to denote achievements reached in conquering elemental forces. This concept was most widely applied by historians, ethnographers, and archaeologists in the 19th century, 172 during the rise of bourgeois culture.

p Subsequently, bourgeois theoreticians, influenced by idealistic conceptions, confused the issue badly when trying to reduce its content to ideas only.

p Historical materialism disagrees with this treatment of culture, which places it within purely intellectual brackets while disregarding its foundations in reality. It expands the concept of culture to denote not only intellectual production but the production of life, first and foremost, material life, which constitutes the fundamental and determining milieu for human activity. MarxismLeninism sees culture as the sphere of social labour activity (of the workers and progressive classes and strata in general) embracing both its material and intellectual forms rather than the individual’s intellectual self-education.

p The correct approach to culture rests on the theory of the socio-economic formations and the analysis of the development of the productive forces and the relations of production and the superstructure in a given society. These concepts, nevertheless, cannot substitute for the notion of culture, for the latter embraces achievements in all fields of man’s activity, the aggregate of the results of his intellectual and manual labour, and identifies the peculiarities of such achievements pertaining to definite historical periods, societies, nationalities and nations. Man’s creative endeav- 173 our in all realms and his attitude to labour are the source of culture and a most important indication of society’s progress. Historical materialism provides a meaningful definition of culture as labour and creative effort, considering it as a definite qualitative level of society at a definite stage of development. Culture has a more specific manifestation in the level reached by the productive forces and production relations, by material and intellectual production, by science, literature, art, etc.

It follows that culture is the sum total of the material and intellectual achievements of society constituting its cultural traditions and underlying the further progress of humanity. In a class society, culture assumes a class character both in ideological content and practical orientation.