Marxist Approach to Culture

MARXIST’S APPROACH Renea Lee Alcantara Central Luzon State TO University CULTURE ▪ The Marxist approach to culture insists that texts and practices must be analysed in relation to their historical conditions of production (and in some versions, the changing conditions of...

MARXIST’S APPROACH Renea Lee Alcantara Central Luzon State TO University CULTURE ▪ The Marxist approach to culture insists that texts and practices must be analysed in relation to their historical conditions of production (and in some versions, the changing conditions of their consumption and reception). ▪ What makes the Marxist methodology different from other ‘historical’ approaches to culture is the Marxist conception of history. Marx argues that each significant period in history is constructed around a particular ‘mode of production’: that is, the way in which a society is organized (i.e. slave, feudal, capitalist) to produce the material necessaries of life – food, shelter, etc. ▪ In general terms, each mode of production produces: ▪ (i) specific ways of obtaining the necessaries of life; ▪ (ii) specific social relationships between workers and those who control the mode of production, and ▪ (iii) specific social institutions (including cultural ones). ▪ At the heart of this analysis is the claim that how a society produces its means of existence (its particular ‘mode of production’) ultimately determines the political, social and cultural shape of that society and its possible future development. ▪ As Marx explains, ‘The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general’ (1976a: 3). ▪ This claim is based on certain assumptions about the relationship between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’. It is on this relationship – between ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ – that the classical Marxist account of culture rests. ▪ The ‘base’ consists of a combination of the ‘forces of production’ and the ‘relations of production’. ▪ The forces of production refer to the raw materials, the tools, the technology, the workers and their skills, etc. ▪ The relations of production refer to the class relations of those engaged in production. That is, each mode of production, besides being different, say, in terms of its basis in agrarian or industrial production, is also different in that it produces particular relations of production: the slave mode produces master/slave relations; the feudal mode produces lord/peasant relations; the capitalist mode produces bourgeois/proletariat relations. It is in this sense that one’s class position is determined by one’s relationship to the mode of production. ▪ The ‘superstructure’ (which develops in conjunction with a specific mode of production) consists of institutions (political, legal, educational, cultural, etc.), and ‘definite forms of social consciousness’ (political, religious, ethical, philosophical, aesthetic, cultural, etc.) generated by these institutions. ▪ The relationship between base and superstructure is twofold. ▪ On the one hand, the superstructure both legitimates and challenges the base. ▪ On the other, the base is said to ‘condition’ or ‘determine’ the limits of the content and form of the superstructure. ▪This relationship can be understood in a range of different ways. It can be seen as a mechanical relationship (‘economic determinism’) of cause and effect: what happens in the superstructure is a passive reflection of what is happening in the base. This often results in a vulgar Marxist ‘reflection theory’ of culture, in which the politics of a text or practice are read off from, or reduced to, the material conditions of its production. ▪However we view the relationship, we will not fully understand it if we reduce the base to an economic monolith (a static economic institution) and forget that for Marx the base also include social relations and class antagonisms. ▪According to the materialist conception of history [Marxism], the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. ▪The economic situation is the basis, but the various components of the superstructure... also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases determine their form.... We make our own history, but, first of all, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one (2009: 61). ▪ What Engels claims is that the base produces the superstructural terrain (this terrain and not that), but that the form of activity that takes place there is determined not just by the fact that the terrain was produced and is reproduced by the base (although this clearly sets limits and influences outcomes), but by the interaction of the institutions and the participants as they occupy the terrain. ▪ Therefore, although texts and practices are never the ‘primary force’ in history, they can be active agents in historical change or the servants of social stability. ▪A brief discussion of ideology should make the relationship between base and superstructure a little clearer. Marx and Engels (2009) claim that, ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force in society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force’ (58). ▪What they mean by this is that the dominant class, on the basis of its ownership of, and control over, the means of material production (the mode of production), is virtually guaranteed to have control over the means of intellectual production. However, this does not mean that the ideas of the ruling class are simply imposed on subordinate classes. ▪A ruling class is ‘compelled... to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society... to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones’ (59). ▪Unless we include both formulations (ruling ideas and compulsion, and especially the way the second qualifies the first), we arrive at a very simplified notion of power: one in which class struggle is replaced by social control; where power is simply something imposed rather than something for which men and women have to struggle. ▪During periods of social transformation ideological struggle becomes chronic: as Marx (1976a) points out, it is in the ‘ideological forms’ of the superstructure (which include the texts and practices of popular culture) that men and women ‘become conscious of... conflict and fight it out’ (4). A classical marxist approach to popular culture would above all else insist that to understand and explain a text or practice it must always be situated in its historical moment of production, analysed in terms of the historical conditions that produced it. ▪There are dangers here: historical conditions are reduced to the mode of production and the superstructural becomes a passive reflection of the base. It is crucial, as Engels and Marx warn, and, as Thompson demonstrates (see Chapter 3), to keep in play a subtle dialectic between ‘agency’ and ‘structure’. ▪For example, a full analysis of nineteenth-century stage melodrama (one of the first culture industries) would have to weave together into focus both the changes in the mode of production that made stage melodrama’s audience a possibility and the theatrical traditions that generated its form. The same also holds true for a full analysis of music hall (another early culture industry). ▪Although in neither instance should performance be reduced to changes in the material forces of production, what would be insisted on is that a full analysis of stage melodrama or music hall would not be possible without reference to the changes in theatre attendance brought about by changes in the mode of production. ▪ It is these changes, a Marxist analysis would argue, that ultimately produced the conditions of possibility for the performance of a play like My Poll and My Partner Joe and for the emergence and success of a music hall performer like Marie Lloyd. ▪ In this way, then, a Marxist analysis would insist that ultimately, however indirectly, there is nevertheless a real and fundamental relationship between the emergence of stage melodrama and music hall and changes that took place in the capitalist mode of production.