Page 18 - Cultural Theory

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Cultural Analysis in

CHAPTER ONE Marxist Humanism
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John Scott

Marxist humanism, in its broadest sense, can be traced back to some of the earliest
attempts to combine a Marxist approach to philosophical issues with Hegelian and
interpretivist ideas. It involves the attempt to construct a philosophical standpoint
that begins from real, conscious human beings and explores the ways in which their
self-conscious knowledge enters into the constitution of the world in which they live
and act. History is seen as an outcome of those creative human actions through
which people both produce a social world and give meaning to it. Glimpsed during
the 1890s, this attempt has continued to the present day. Understood as a more spe-
cific approach to cultural analysis, however, Marxist humanism has a much shorter
history. Systematic cultural analyses from a Marxist humanist standpoint were a spe-
cific product of the 1920s and flowered in the ‘critical theory’ of the Frankfurt School
of social theory. It virtually disappeared as a distinct and active strand of cultural the-
ory with the demise of this critical theory and the absorption of its key ideas about
culture into very different philosophical and sociological frameworks.
A quite specific framework of cultural analysis was built and elaborated by these
writers, though certain of their themes were echoed by a wider group of theorists.
Most of their central arguments, however, were later accepted, even though the ori-
gin of these ideas is not often recognized.
In view of the criticisms levelled against Marxism, this point is worth emphasizing.
The growth of new approaches to culture within cultural studies has been associated
with a rejection of what is seen as the crude materialism of mainstream Marxism
(e.g., Hall, 1977). These approaches have, paradoxically, drawn much of their inspi-
ration from the work of Gramsci (1929–35), a Marxist who owes much to the same
Hegelian tradition that has also shaped the forms of Marxist humanism. Similar
points can be made about the work of such postmodernists as Baudrillard (1981),
Jameson (1991), and Bauman (1991a). Their works on the contemporary cultural
condition are widely seen as pointing social analysis in a new direction, with a
greater sensitivity to the plurality and diversity of cultural responses. Jameson, how-
ever, presents his work as a cultural complement to the economic logic central to
Marxism, reiterating precisely those points made by the writers under consideration
here. In the case of Baudrillard and Bauman, the connection is even clearer. The early

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