When analysing the development of the project of modernity, Habermas foregrounded the divorce between the spheres of specialist cultures and the quotidian, and argued that the project of modernity remains unfinished because the "autonomous systemic dynamics of the economic and administrative system" have inhibited the application of the Enlightenment cognitive potentials to the sphere of human everyday praxis. As he put it, "a differentiated reconnection of modern culture with an everyday sphere of praxis that is dependent on a living heritage and yet is impoverished by mere traditionalism will admittedly only prove successful if the process of social modernization can also be turned into other non-capitalist directions, if the lifeworld can develop institutions of its own in a way currently inhibited by the autonomous systemic dynamics of the economic and administrative system" (1981/1996: 52-3).

The reconnection of culture with the sphere of praxis and other, non-capitalist alternatives are very difficult under the regimes of North-Atlantic modernisation, that is, within a modernity articulated to capitalism, bureaucracies, nations and the divorce between culture and society. But the sphere of everyday praxis has produced formations and institutions of an alternative modernisation -- a renewal of modernity in which the democratic and the cultural changes of what Raymond Williams called the long revolution point to the possibility of non-capitalist development. Working-class culture, adult education and cultural studies belong to the renewal of the modern project.

1

The history of modernity under the regimes of North-Atlantic modernisation is also the history of the long revolution. The long revolution is still going on: the industrial revolution, the democratic revolution and the cultural revolution are still going on. The North-Atlantic modernisation constituted -- and was constituted by -- the separation, the divorce, between culture and society, and this separation, this divorce, constructed both culture as a sphere of power and society as the hegemonic project of the bourgeois middle class. Culture was constituted within North-Atlantic modernisation as an apparatus against both industry and democracy, against the long revolution.

2

If you accept and work within the discourse of culture and reproduce it in your research and analysis, culture at the end the nineteenth century means the High Culture of Modernism as opposed to its Other, stereotyped as mass culture. But if you refuse to be programmed by the discourse of culture, you will perceive that at any given moment in modern history there are in any society as many cultures as the ways of life and ways of struggle of the social groups and classes and class fractions actively engaged in the practices of production and reproduction of their quotidian.

Within the discourse of culture, the cultural system -- that is, the hierarchical system of the national high culture -- remains a unified, stable structure for the duration of a whole historical period, and change, in due time, will come from above. But if you break away from that discourse, you will perceive that in any modern society, in any given period, because of the structures and relations of power, the different cultures inhabit different spaces and different times -- different geographies and different histories -- and that change may occur simultaneously in many of them, but certainly not at the same rhythm and with the same depth, and certainly not in the same direction and with the same historical significance.

Noting the "often messy and uneven nature of socio-historical change, national and local specificities and the profoundly differentiated experience of different classed, gendered and ethnic social groups," Alan O'Shea reminds us of Marx's "argument that historical change operates simultaneously at different levels and temporalities, and unevenly so, and that there are discontinuities as well as continuities" (1996: 12). I am not sure that historical change always operates simultaneously at different levels, but I agree with O'Shea's point about the profoundly differentiated experience of different social groups with their different temporalities.

3

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, in London, there was the culture of Modernism, but there was also the culture of casual labour in the East End and West Ham (Marriott 1996). There were masculine cultures of Empire, but also feminine cultures of suffragette militancy and of consumption in the West End, centred on department stores like Harrods of Knightsbridge and Selfridge's of Oxford Street. Is it not significant that while Whitehall and Westminster denied women the vote, the department stores "manufactured, displayed and supplied a wide range of goods -- from tea services to outer garments -- in purple, white and green, the symbolic colours of the movement"? (Nava 1996: 55)

The culture of casual labour in the East End of London and in West Ham proved a stronghold of pre-modern refusal of capitalist modernisation well into the 1920s and 30s, until it was finally wiped off the cultural map by German bombs in 1940. It belonged to a temporality completely different to that of the West End feminine culture of consumption, which was part of the culture of feminine emancipation. It did not look forward, but backward. It refused incorporation, and disappeared from history.

There was, however, in the same years but in a different temporality, another culture of labour which proved forward looking, and which changed British societies. It had its origin in the renewed socialism and trade unionism of the 1880s and 90s, and it promoted and was promoted by adult education and university extension classes. If you select these three cultures -- the high culture of Modernism, the middle-class culture of feminine consumption and suffragette militancy, and the working-class culture of socialism and trade-unionism -- in their complex social structures and relations of power, and compare their history-making potential, the socialist working-class culture comes first as the decisive force of social change, and the feminine consumption and franchise culture as a forward-looking runner-up. It is worth noting that the high culture of Modernism was easily and quickly incorporated into the dominant culture of the English establishment and became part of the hegemonic. I do not deny its cultural significance in the reorientation of the dominant culture; but I do say that its cultural significance in the twentieth century was the result of its incorporation into the hegemonic and effected by the hegemonic.

4

Tom Steele has argued that "firstly, through their educational contact with liberal intellectuals, working people constructed and were constructed by a notion of a common culture which transcended class and, secondly, that these negotiations contributed to a modernised version of the nation which inscribed the working classes into 'Englishness'" (1997: 33). This inscription into Englishness, after the extension of the franchise in the 1860s and 1880s, entailed the extension of citizenship as participatory democracy to the working people.

Excluded from the land-owners' English Establishment in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, and then from the upper- and middle-class English Nation for most of the nineteenth century, the working people first constituted themselves as the working class (Thompson 1963/1968) through their working-class culture, and in the decades after the defeat of Chartism developed and consolidated this culture in its most characteristic features (Hobsbawm 1984). It is the effectiveness, the reality-producing power of this working-class culture that ultimately accounts for the foundation of the Labour Party and its growth as a proletarian party (from about half a million votes in 1910 to four and a half million votes in 1922) and an alternative government party (Hobsbawm 1968/1999), the social welfare legislation in 1912, the commitment of the labour movement to the nationalisation of industries, the Labour Government of 1945 and the Welfare State.

As Tom Steele remarks, "By 1950 a settlement between the classes had been reached in which the dominant order still maintained its overall hegemony but at the expense of significant concessions to the 'social wage' and to the 'common culture' that the organised working class was demanding" (46). The working class was inscribed into Englishness as a subordinate class, but its identification as English was part of its identification as working-class. And it was the working-class culture -- with "the intelligent creation of institutions and associations for the maintenance of a distinct way of life different from and owing nothing to the middle class, but also the active appropriation of education and 'higher' culture for individual and class advancement" (Steele, 39) -- that produced the most significant social changes in Britain up to the 1970s.

5

While the culture of casual labour, with its pre-modern roots and outlook, could for some time locally refuse, but could not change, the fast modernising capitalist order, working-class culture did change it. From the beginning of the twentieth century in the USA, and from the 1930s and especially after World War Two in Great Britain, the working people changed their mode of presence and participation in the industrial circuit: from producers of commodities to consumers.

As Alan O'Shea points out, the late nineteenth-century "transformations in the sphere of consumption constituted an even more fundamental break with the earlier period, for the major new market for the increased number of commodities produced was labour itself -- the lower middle and working classes. . . . As soon as they become an identifiable market, their needs and desires can no longer be written off. Not only do markets have to respond to those desires, but in the long run the cultures which underpinned those needs have to be accommodated" (17). And Raymond Williams, looking at the same social processes from another angle, wrote: "The working people, in town and country alike, will not listen (and I support them) to any account of our society which supposes that these things are not progress: not just mechanical, external progress either, but a real service of life. . . . Any account of our culture which explicitly or implicitly denies the value of an industrial society is really irrelevant; not in a million years would you make us give up this power" (1958/1989: 10).

The "active appropriation of education and 'higher' culture for individual and class advancement" must be seen in this context of extended citizenship and principled working-class participation in a developed industrial society.

6

Adult education -- in corresponding societies, Mechanics Institutes, trade unions, co-ops, and non-conformist chapels -- is one of the greatest achievements of the working people in the second half of the nineteenth century and for most of the first half of the twentieth century. There are three constitutive elements in it I want to highlight.

Firstly, adult education was a counter-hegemonic project put in place by the working class to overcome the social isolation and knowledge deprivation imposed upon the worlds of labour by the upper and middle classes as part of their strategic defence of their national and knowledge privileges.

Secondly, adult education meant the pursuit of an effective, reality-producing and -changing knowledge, an interested knowledge, which could be appropriated from a working-class perspective and put to use by the working class in a better understanding of their position in the capitalist society and in the formation of a new social consciousness. It was knowledge to be translated into political practices.

Thirdly, adult education provided the framework and conditions of possibility of a productive encounter between workers and liberal, radical and socialist intellectuals. One way of analysing this encounter is to underscore what intellectuals gave workers, for instance socialism in its different forms. Another way is to emphasise that the encounter was a major condition of emergence of what Gramsci called "organic intellectuals."

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, adult education and university extension courses began to converge as alternative knowledge projects. As Tom Steele clearly shows, the convergence played a decisive role in new definitions of Englishness, and in the emergence, in the 1930s and 40s, of a new intellectual practice later known, when institutionally identified in Birmingham in the 1960s, as cultural studies.

7

Raymond Williams put it very cogently on March 21, 1986: "it can hardly be stressed too strongly that Cultural Studies in the sense we now understand it . . . occurred in adult education: in the WEA, in the extramural Extension classes. . . . It was a renewal of that attempt at a majority democratic education which had been there all through the project. . . . [I]ntellectual questions arose when you drew up intellectual disciplines that form bodies of knowledge into contact with people's life-situations and life-experiences. Because of course that is exactly what happened in adult education. Academics took out of their institutions university economics, or university English or university philosophy, and the people wanted to know what it was. . . . [T]hese new students insisted (1) that the relation of this to their own situation and experience had to be discussed, and (2) that there were areas in which the discipline itself might be unsatisfactory, and therefore they retained as a crucial principle the right to decide their own syllabus. . . . These people were, after all, in a practical position to say, 'well, if you tell me that question goes outside your discipline, then bring me someone whose discipline will cover it, or bloody well get outside of the discipline and answer it yourself.' It was from this entirely rebellious and untidy situation that the extraordinarily complicated and often muddled convergences of what became Cultural Studies occurred; precisely because people wouldn't accept those boundaries. . . . In its most general bearings, this work remained a kind of intellectual analysis which wanted to change the actual developments of society" (1986/1989: 154-8).

By putting these notes together I meant to acknowledge my indebtedness to the authors mentioned in them. I also meant to use them as a reminder that change and progress come, to a significant extent, from the sphere of everyday praxis, and from the popular - from not giving in, and not giving up. But I suppose that I needed to outline some sort of approach to the questions of hegemony and incorporation, and working-class culture, adult education and cultural studies provided a stimulating approach. You can't help being hegemonised and incorporated, but you can turn your being hegemonised and incorporated, your subordination, into an art of survival and into an alternative formation and project. That's something the hegemonic can't take away from you.

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Selected references

Habermas, Jürgen (1981/1996) "Modernity: An Unfinished Project," in d'Entrèves, Maurizio Passerin and Seyla Benhabib, eds, Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press

Hobsbawm, Eric (1968/1999) Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day, This edition revised and updated with Chris Wrigley, London: Penguin Books

Hobsbawm, Eric (1984) "The Formation of British Working-Class Culture," in Worlds of Labour, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson

Marriott, John (1996) "Sensation of the Abyss: The Urban Poor and Modernity," in O'Shea and Nava, eds

Nava, Mica (1996) "Modernity's Disavowal: Women, the City and the Department Store," in O'Shea and Nava, eds

O'Shea, Alan (1996) "English Subjects of Modernity," in O'Shea and Nava, eds

O'Shea, Alan and Mica Nava, eds (1996) Modern Times: Reflections on a century of English Modernity, London and New York: Routledge

Steele, Tom (1997) The Emergence of Cultural Studies: Adult Education, Cultural Politics and the "English" Question, London: Lawrence and Wishart

Thompson, E. P. (1963/1968) The Making of the English Working Class, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books

Williams, Raymond (1958/1989) "Culture is Ordinary," in Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, edited by Robin Gable, London - New York: Verso

Williams, Raymond (1986/1989) "The Future of Cultural Studies," in The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, edited and introduced by Tony Pinkney, London - New York: Verso