Williams (1921-88) grew up in the Welsh village of Pandy, Abergavenny, the son of a railway signalman. He attended the local grammar school. He became a socialist in his teens, reading the Communist Manifesto (1848) with great interest. He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, feeling an outsider because of his background. For a few years, he was a member of the Communist Party, but left rejecting Stalinism in politics and culture. Williams was put off by Stalin's cruel treatment of the peasants, not to mention his cultural policy, including social realism. During the Second World War, Williams served as a captain in an anti-Tank armoured division, taking part in the D-Day invasion of Europe. After the war, he taught (1946-60) in adult education programs at Oxford University, publishing Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), which established his reputation as a major communications/cultural studies critic and theorist. In due course, Williams distanced himself from Marxism: he replaced the Marxist concept of "mode of production" with "mode of information" as the dynamic core of society, and he redefined revolution as a long process of cultural change rather than a class struggle for political power. Later, he taught (1961-74) at Jesus College, Cambridge. In addition to teaching, he wrote articles and reviews for a number of newspapers and magazines, including The Listener, the BBC in-house publication. During the period 1974-83, Williams was Professor of Drama at Cambridge, where he refined his position on Cultural Studies. He wanted to add the cultural dimension to the project of human emancipation, and earlier than many Marxists he took up such topics as the central role of ecology.

Editors' note: In this important essay, which first appeared in "Resources of Hope" (1958a), Williams forces us to think about the symbolic dimensions of our lives in a new way, i.e., he wrenches "culture" from the private space of artistic production and specialist knowledge into the lived experience of the everyday. What follows is a synopsis of his essay.

1. introduction

Life in the U.K. has changed considerably since the Industrial Revolution, that period of industrialization which extended (roughly) from 1750 to 1850. During this period, our social, economic, and political institutions took shape (Williams, 1958b, p. xiii). Interestingly, a number of key words we now use came into common English or in cases where they had already been used acquired new significance during this period. Five words, i.e., "industry," "democracy," "class," "art," and "culture" provide significant points from which to map the changes I refer to. In charting the changes in ways in which people used these words during this period we in fact chart the changes in the ways they thought about our common life. In doing so, we chart the impact the industrial system of production had on our social, economic, and political institutions. We can thereby better understand the purposes these institutions were designed to serve, our relations to these institutions, and our activities with regard to learning, educations, and the arts.

2. my project

The word which more than any other reflects these shifts in meaning is culture, and in this paper I propose to describe and to analyze these dynamics, and to provide a brief account of the formation of this concept (Williams, 1958b, p. xviii). I challenge the traditional manoeuvre by which the (British) gentry has privileged itself as the custodian of culture, thereby denying the possibility of a working-class culture. In addition, I try to clarify the tradition, but it may be possible to go on from this to a full restatement of principles, taking the theory of culture as a theory of the relations between elements in a whole way of life. Yet we spend most of our energy rejecting the fact, rather than seeking to understand its nature and conditions. I think a good deal of factual revision of our received cultural history is necessary, in such matters as literacy, educational levels, and the press. I wish to show the emergence of the term "culture" as an abstraction, an emergence which merges two general responses: first, the recognition of the practical separation of certain moral and intellectual activities from the driven impetus of a new kind of society; and second, the emphasis of these activities, as a court of human appeal, to be set over the processes of practical social judgment and yet to offer itself as a rally alternative. A fuller discussion of this matter can be found in Culture and Society (1958b). In this way, I celebrate culture as (a) a form of (spontaneous as well as deliberate) expression and as (b) what is common to the people of a community (or a region) as opposed to what divides them.

3. theoretical framework and methodology

I approach this project from a neo-Marxist perspective, that is, I set out to understand the base-superstructure relationship, employing (a) the ideology critique, critiquing the ideologies which have shaped my life as a boy growing up in Wales and later as a man making my living in England. I take as my point of departure a statement Karl Marx made in the Preface to Critique of Political Economy (1859): that is, it is not the consciousness of men and women that determines their existence, but on the contrary their (material) existence determines their consciousness. I also employ (b) an auto-ethnography to make an otherwise abstract discussion concrete.

4. findings

To begin with, I take a journey back in time, to the Border Country, to the Black Mountains region of Wales, where I grew up. I refer to a bus trip I as a schoolboy took to visit a museum, to see the Mappa Mundi, with its rivers out of Paradise, and the changed library. I remember seeing signs of the class system everywhere: I had to wait an hour to get in, but a party of clergyman got in easily. We have all made a journey like this, reflecting on our cultural heritage (Williams, 1958b, p. 5).

I was born and grew up in Pandy, a village situated halfway along that bus journey. This area is till a farming valley, even though the road through it is being widened and straightened to accommodate the heavy lorries which make their way to the north. Not far away, my grandfather and so back through the generations worked as a farm labourer until he was turned out of his cottage, and, in his fifties, became a roadman. At thirteen or fourteen his sons went to work on farms and his daughters went into service. My father, his third son, left the farm to become a boy porter on the railway, and later became a signalman, working in a box in this valley until he died. I went up the road to the village school, where a curtain divided the two classes--second to eight or nine and first to fourteen. At eleven I went to the local grammar school, and later to Cambridge.

I start with a simple observation: Culture is ordinary, in the sense that culture is not a collection of special objects locked away in a museum. Three observations can be made here (pp. 5-6):

• to grow up in that country was to see the shape of the culture around us, i.e., to see the big picture. The members of working class communities (like Pandy) make their own culture. In this sense, culture is part of everyday life;

• every society has its own shape, purposes, meanings. Every society expresses these via its institutions, arts, and learning. Making a society means finding common meanings and directions. At the same time, society is made and remade in every individual mind. We note two aspects of culture: the known meanings and directions and the new meanings and directions which must be tested. These are the ordinary processes of human society/individual minds (p. 6); and

• we use the word "culture" in these two senses. We can understand culture as (i) a whole way of life (the common meanings) and (ii) the arts and learning (the processes of discovery and creative effort. [The first is an anthropological definition.] I insist on using both uses.

As well, I refuse to accept two senses of the word culture:

• I reject the idea that culture has to do with good breeding, which is signalled by such outward signs as behavior. Williams was not impressed by this sense of culture--he talks about the snobbish behavior he saw in Cambridge teashops. For centuries, the city and the university have represented high culture, in terms of the arts and learning, e.g., scholarship, architecture, music etc. Medieval manuscripts (in many libraries) are chained to cabinets and desks. Williams remarks that learning is an every-day activity (pp. 6-7). In the farming community, we understand culture as activities like: making music, reciting poetry, and so on, developing and interest as well as skills in a variety of modes of human expression (p. 7).

• I reject the notion--it was formulated by poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold in works like Culture and Anarchy (1869) especially--that culture is the best that has been thought and said in the world, as artifacts locked away in museums and galleries. Over the centuries, the "good" has been narrowly defined, with a focus on technical merits primarily. Ordinary people have been influenced by marketing people in this regard (pp. 7-8).

As a student, I learned three lessons from Marxists (pp. 8-9):

• A culture must be interpreted in relation to its underlying system of production. [Editor: Fredric Jameson later explains that the critic's job is not to enhance our appreciating of a work's aesthetic qualities but to expose its roots in political and economic conditions, explaining how and why these roots have been obscured]. My experience tells me that a culture is a whole way of life and the arts are part of the social organization. Of course, economic changes affect this organisation radically (p. 8);

• I did not have to be taught that the existing economic system (capitalism) generates dissatisfaction--working people enjoy few advantages, i.e., they have trouble accessing high culture (pp. 8-9). To approach this matter in terms of class conflict is to misunderstand culture, for working people produce a distinct way of life--with its emphasis on neighborhood, mutual obligation, and common betterment, as expressed via the great working-class political and industrial institutions. The arts and learning should be available to everyone. The Marxists are wrong to say that we live in a dying culture and that the masses are ignorant. My experience tells me otherwise: and

• I also rejected the view that, since culture and production are related, the advocacy of a different system of production is in some way a cultural directive--to serve the ideology. Many approaches are possible; socialism is not the only model. Later, I proposed understanding the relationship between base and superstructure in terms of another model--which I called information (pp. 9-10).

As a student, I learned an important lesson from F.R. Leavis, the literary/cultural critic (p. 10). Marxists know a lot about modern English society and its history; by the same token, Leavis knows a lot about the real relations between art and experience. We all agree with Leavis when he said that the fine arts shape our sensibilities--making us human morally and aesthetically. However, I reject his vision of an old, mainly agricultural England (the Golden Age of culture) which gave way to a modern industrial state, the institutions of which have cheapened our natural responses. In fact, we in Abergavenny were glad of the Industrial Revolution, which brought the gift of power, including steam, electricity, and petrol or gasoline, which add up to social and political progress. After all, it is hard to produce culture in conditions of hardship, e.g., poverty (pp. 10-11).

5. conclusion

The central problem we as a society face for the next half-century is creating a good common culture, one which unites the people of the U.K.. This means getting rid of a legacy two false equations, one false analogy, and one false proposition:

• the false proposition: the factory (system) a.k.a. power brought ugliness: the coal brought dirt, the factory brought overcrowding, communications brought a mess of wires. We need not say that ugliness is a price we pay for progress. Any new ugliness is the product of stupidity, indifference, etc. (p. 11);

• the false equations: Equation #1: popular education leads to commercial culture, which has meant, i.e., let the masses in and the quality of culture drops. I can advance two arguments here: (1) From my experience, ordinary people do not resemble the normal description of the masses, low and trivial in taste and habit. There are no masses, only ways of seeing people as masses, and (2) The Education Act of 1870 introducing compulsory education did not produce a cheap and nasty press. This is a myth. There was more than enough literacy--long before 1870--to support a cheap press. In fact, the chaos of industrialism produced this formula. The new mass advertising of the 1890s changed newspapers: instead of disseminating news, editors turned to selling advertising space (pp. 11-12).

  Equation #2: the observable badness of so much widely distributed popular culture is a true guide to the state of mind and feeling of consumers (pp. 12-13). Test this statement against experience, and you will conclude: this is not true of the people we meet; and

• the false analogy: As bad money will drive out good (Gresham's Law), so bad culture will drive out good. Our response to this analogy will have to be historical. True, we have much more bad culture (it is easier to distribute and we have more leisure to enjoy it), but we also have much more good culture. In fact, we live in an expanding culture, and all the elements in this culture are themselves expanding. If we start from this, we can ask real questions about the political and the economic problems raised by conditions (pp. 13-14).

Arnold, Matthew. 1869. Culture and Anarchy. London: Macmillan and Co.

Williams, Raymond. 1958a. "Resources of Hope." In N. McKenzie (Ed.), Convictions. London: MacGibbon and Kee, pp. 24-34.

---. 1958b. "Culture is Ordinary." In Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan (Eds.), Studies in Culture: An Introductory Reader. London: Arnold, 1997, pp. 5-14.

1. Williams wrote this piece many years ago--and for a U.K. audience primarily. What problems might North Americans have grasping his meaning?

2. Try to put Williams' argument or thesis into your own words. Do you think North American readers find his views "radical" today?

3. Williams uses the word "culture" in at least two ways. Explain these ways in your own words. What examples does he provide?

4. In what ways does Williams convey his neo-Marxist roots?

5. What examples from your own personal experience would you cite to illustrate or in fact contest Williams' argument?

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