Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

4 Marxisms
Classical Marxism
Marxism is a difficult and contentious body of work. But it is also more than this: it is
a body of revolutionary theory with the purpose of changing the world. As Marx
(1976b) famously said: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various
ways; the point is to change it’ (65). This makes Marxist analysis political in a quite
specific way. But this is not to suggest that other methods and approaches are apolitical;
on the contrary, Marxism insists that all are ultimately political. As the American
Marxist cultural critic Fredric Jameson (1981) puts it, ‘the political perspective [is] the
absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation’ (17).
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. The fullest statement of the Marxist approach to history is contained in the
Preface and Introduction to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. Here Marx
outlines the now famous ‘base/superstructure’ account of social and historical development.
In Chapter 1, I discussed this formulation briefly in relation to different concepts
of ideology. I will now explain the formulation in more detail and demonstrate
how it might be used to understand the ‘determinations’ that influence the production
and consumption of popular culture.
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 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