Cultural Theory and Popular Culture

Classical Marxism 61
What Engels claims is that the economic 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 economic
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.
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, 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).
Given the uncertainty of this project, ideological struggle is almost inevitable. During
periods of social transformation it 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 ultimately economic; therefore cultural
analysis can quickly collapse into economic analysis (the cultural becomes a
passive reflection of the economic). 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
would have to weave together into focus both the economic changes that produced
its audience and the theatrical traditions that produced its form. The same also
holds true for a full analysis of music hall. Although in neither instance should performance
be reduced to changes in the economic structure of society, 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 economic structure of society. It is these changes, a Marxist analysis would argue,
which ultimately produced the conditions of possibility for the performance of a play
like My Poll and My Partner Joe, 10 and for the emergence and success of a 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. I have made a similar argument about the invention of the ‘traditional’
English Christmas in the nineteenth century (Storey, 2009b).