The concepts we have explored are drawn from a range of theoretical and methodological paradigms. The most influential theories within cultural studies have been: Marxism, culturalism, structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis and the politics of difference (under which heading, for the sake of convenience, I include feminism, theories of race, ethnicity and postcolonialism). The purpose of sketching the basic tenets of these theoretical domains is to provide a signpost to thinking in the field. However, each is developed in more detail throughout the text and there is no one place in the book to look for theory. Theory permeates all levels of cultural studies and needs to be connected to specific issues and debates rather than explored solely in the abstract.
Marxism and the centrality of class
Marxism is, above all, a form of historical materialism. It stresses the historical specificity of human affairs and the changeable character of social formations whose core features are located in the material conditions of existence. Marx (1961) argued that the first priority of human beings is the production of their means of subsistence through labour. As humans produce food, clothes and all manner of tools with which to shape their environment, so they also create themselves. Thus labour, and the forms of social organization
that material production takes, a mode of production, are central categories of Marxism. The organization of a mode of production is not simply a matter of co-ordinating objects; rather, it is inherently tied up with relations between people. These relationships, while social, that is, co-operative and co-ordinated, are also matters of power and conflict. Indeed, Marxists regard social antagonisms as being the motor of historical
change. Further, given the priority accorded to production, other aspects of human relations –consciousness, culture and politics – are said to be structured by economic relations.
For Marxism, history is not a smooth evolutionary process. Rather, it is marked by significant breaks and discontinuities of modes of production. Thus, Marx discusses the transformations from an ancient mode of production to a feudal mode of production and thence to the capitalist mode of production. Different forms of material organization and different social relations characterize each mode of production. Further, each mode of production is superseded by another as internal contradictions, particularly those of class conflict, lead to its transformation and replacement.
Capitalism
The centrepiece of Marx’s work was an analysis of the dynamics of capitalism. This is a mode of production premised on the private ownership of the means of production (in his day, factories, mills, workshops; and in a more contemporary vein, multinational corporations). The fundamental class division of capitalism is between those who own the means of production, the bourgeoisie, and those who, being a propertyless proletariat, must sell their labour to survive. The legal framework and common-sense thinking of capitalist societies declare that the worker is a free agent and the sale of labour a free and fair contract. However, Marx argues that this appearance covers over a fundamental exploitation at work. Capitalism aims to
make a profit and does so by extracting surplus value from workers. That is, the value of the labour taken to produce a product, which becomes the property of the bourgeoisie, is less than the worker receives for it.
The realization of surplus value in monetary form is achieved by the selling of goods (which have both ‘use value’ and ‘exchange value’) as commodities. A commodity is something available to be sold in the marketplace. Thus, commodification is the process associated with capitalism by which objects, qualities and signs are turned into commodities. The surface appearance of goods sold in the marketplace obscures the origins of those commodities in an exploitative relationship, a process Marx calls commodity fetishism.
Further, the fact that workers are faced with the products of their own labour now separated from them constitutes alienation. Since the proletariat are alienated from the core of human activity, namely the labour process, so they are also alienated from themselves. Capitalism is a dynamic system whose profit-driven mechanisms lead to the continual revolutionizing of the means of production and the forging of new markets. For Marx, this was its great merit in relation to feudalism. This is because it heralded a massive expansion in
the productive capacities of European societies. It dragged them into the modern world of railways, mass production, cities and a formally equitable and free set of human relations in which people were not, in a legal sense, the property of others (as were serfs in feudal societies). However, the mechanisms of capitalism also give rise to perennial crises and will ultimately lead, or so Marx argued, to its being superseded by socialism. Problems for capitalism include:
- a falling rate of profit;
- cycles of boom and bust;
- an increasing monopoly;
- the creation of a proletariat which is set to become the system’s grave-digger.
Marx hoped that capitalism would be rent asunder by class conflict. He envisaged the proletariat’s organizations of defence, trade unions and political parties, overthrowing and replacing it with a mode of production based on communal ownership, equitable distribution and ultimately the end of class division.
Marxism and cultural studies
Cultural studies writers have had a long, ambiguous, but productive relationship with Marxism. Cultural studies is not a Marxist domain, but has drawn succour from it while subjecting it to vigorous critique. There is little doubt that we live in social formations organized along capitalist lines that manifest deep class divisions in work, wages, housing, education and health. Further, cultural practices are commodified by large corporate culture industries. In that context cultural studies has been partisan in taking up the cause of change. However, Marxism has been critiqued for its apparent teleology. That is, the positing of an inevitable point to which history is moving, namely the demise of capitalism and the arrival of a classless society. This is a problem on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Theoretically, a determinist reading of Marxism robs human beings of agency or the capacity to act. This is so because the outcomes of human action appear to be predetermined by metaphysical laws (ironically posing as objective science) that drive history from outside of human action. It is a problem on empirical grounds because of the failure of significant numbers of proletarian revolutions to materialize, and the oppressive totalitarian outcomes of those that made claims to be such revolutions. In its engagement with Marxism, cultural studies has been particularly concerned with
issues of structure and action. On the one hand, Marxism suggests that there are regularities or structures to human existence that lie outside of any given individual. On the other hand, it has a commitment to change through human agency. Cultural studies has resisted the economic determinism inherent in some readings of
Marxism and has asserted the specificity of culture. Cultural studies has also been concerned with the apparent success of capitalism – that is, not merely its survival but its transformation and expansion. This has been attributed in part to the winning of consent for capitalism on the level of culture. Hence the interest in questions of culture, ideology and hegemony which were commonly pursued through perspectives dubbed culturalism and structuralism.
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