Creating a Bundist Counter- Culture: Morgnshtern and the Significance of Cultural Hegemony

Abstract

Bundists in Poland in the decade preceding the beginning of the Second World War were not likely to have been attentive to the writings of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci. They acted, however, as if they agreed, at least in part, with Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, which he developed in the 1920s. Gramsci argued that a governing class attempts to maintain its position by keeping control not only over political and economic institutions, but also over those in the intellectual and cultural spheres. According to Gramsci, cultural supremacy was in fact a precondition to political rule. Thus, he insisted, the proletariat must break bourgeois cultural hegemony, must instill its own values and achieve a limited hegemony of its own, before it could hope to seize control of the state. The Bund in Poland recognized that it was not likely to come to political power in the late 1920s or early 1930s. It continued to engage in vigorous political and economic organizing, just as it had in earlier phases of its existence, but it devoted particularly sustained attention during these years and had some of its greatest successes – in the cultural and educational spheres.