p Turning to the history of bourgeois culture and its chief milestones, we might say that it took shape at the time of the rise of a new class, the bourgeoisie, and that it inherited the achievements of classical antiquity. It developed most rapidly at the time of the first bourgeois revolutions proclaiming "freedom, equality and fraternity”, and was consonant with the interests of the popular masses and the needs of social progress and the develop- 178 ment of bourgeois society that had come to replace feudal society. The transition of capitalism to its imperialist stage gave rise to a crisis of bourgeois culture.

p A very tangible problem is the low level of public education. In capitalist society, the opportunities the children of an average family have to receive a good education or enter university are very scarce. For example, the education level in Britain is dropping visibly: 40 per cent of schoolchildren leave school at the age of 16 and receive no further education or vocational training. Three thousand university lecturers lost their jobs in 1981, and many more will be let go in due course. The inadequate opportunities of getting a proper education is only one of the things that bar the workers from culture. It is highly doubtful, too, that the several million jobless, especially the young people, who are cut off from culture, should be able to enjoy the fruits of the nation’s intellectual life, much less take part in it.

p In capitalist society, creative effort in the cultural field is also limited above all from the point of view of the numbers of those who engage in it; many of them belong to the minority that have had access to culture from a very early age. Films, plays, novels, and other works of art, are, in fact, commodities that must have a market before they can be produced and sold. A vivid example is provided by the cinema, for here production costs 179 have risen tremendously. But the market for these commodities is limited for the publisher, art dealer, film producer, cinema hall owner, etc.. will purchase and distribute only that, be it even in bad taste, which will bring in returns.

p The decay of bourgeois culture is manifested in the rejection of high cultural values, in unscientific and reactionary social nature of political and economic conceptions, philosophy and sociology, ethics and aesthetics, as well as in the crisis of bourgeois humanism unable, in the new conditions, to establish ways and means for the individual’s free, all-round and harmonious development. It is increasingly evident that the decay of culture and moral values is inherent in imperialism.

p The population at large is kept away from culture; instead, it is served the products of "mass culture" which is a low-grade substitute for genuine artistic values that are supposed to be too complex for the uninitiated masses to appreciate. The aim of this is to hoodwink the masses. The broadest coverage in the so-called popular press in the USA and Western Kurope is given to violence and scandal, to pessimism, cynicism, cruelty, and pornography, to say nothing of downright political deceit. Similarly, television shows concentrate on murder, cruelty, police violence, low-grade mystery plots, and sex. The same may be said of the cinema, books, art, 180 music, and the theatre. Most of the products of "mass culture-" are of the lowest level. There are striking differences of opinion among bourgeois critics concerning mass culture; it is either hailed as a miracle ot modern civilisation offering vast possibilities for disseminating knowledge and aesthetic values, or dismissed as an elemental lorce ol civilisation that substitutes surrogates lor genuine art.

p Unreasoning "freedom of sell-expression”, lack of political orientation and unbridled spontaneity are interpreted in bourgeois society as the ultimate in artistic freedom. Bourgeois conceptions dismiss the link between culture and a definite system of social relations, a definite mode of production; they approach cultural issues from idealistic or “technocratic” positions, stripping intellectual culture of class content and of any socially conditioned character.

p A clear indication of the profound intellectual crisis is the “counter-culture” movement in the developed capitalist countries, especially prominent since the sixties. It undoubtedly contains certain elements ol criticism of the contemporary bourgeois society; it dismisses its culture, the capitalist etho. (the complex of fundamental values) and the West’s repressive civilisation. However, the social criticism of capitalism contained in the “counter-culture” movement is unable to replace bourgeois culture with a genuinely 181 progressive system of cultural values. Although many youth organisations in the USA and other developed capitalist countries are displaying a generally negative attitude towards bourgeois culture (Which is another indication of the deepening intellectual crisis of bourgeois society), their wish to rid themselves of the dismal realities prompts young people to seek escape in drugs, religion, and mysticism. Pornography and eroticism is a kind of intellectual opium that bourgeois society has been feeding its young with.

Given the powerful labour movement of the present day and the realistic prospect of radical social change in the capitalist countries, youth terrorism, leftist mysticism, drug-addiction, and eroticism are profoundly reactionary processes, however benevolent the subjective motives used by bourgeois ideologists to justify them. The progressive forces must therefore intensify their work among young people in order to counter the reactionary forces that are seeking to drive the youth into a dead-end with socialist culture and the ideals of scientific communism.