Page 59 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

MARXISM

Classical Marxism

It is, of course, quite impossible to do anything like justice to a theoretical
legacy as rich and as complex as this in the short space available to us
here. What does remain possible, however, is a relatively schematic
account of what I take to be adequately representative instances of
the major kinds of Marxian, and quasi-Marxian, cultural theory. Our
obvious starting point must needs be the work of Marx himself, and
also that of his close friend and collaborator, Frederick Engels (1820–
95). We might begin by noting that Marx was a near contemporary
of Matthew Arnold, and that many of the categories of his political
economy, in particular, were derived from, but also counterposed
against, that same English utilitarian tradition which Arnold had
rejected in the name of culture. It should come as little surprise, then,
to discover in Marx one element, at least, that runs closely parallel to
Arnold: the notion of an antithesis between cultural value on the one
hand, and modern capitalist civilization on the other.
This antithesis is present, above all, in Marx’s theory of alienation.
It is in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 that
Marx first explores this notion. He does so by way of a conceptual
dichotomy between actually existing alienated labour, in which labour
power is transformed into a commodity and the worker reduced to a
mere thing, and an ideal of non-alienated labour incorporated in the
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notion of “species-being”. By the latter term Marx means, quite simply,
the humanness of humanity, constituted, above all in his view, by our
capacity for conscious, collective, creative production: human beings
alone of all the animal species are by nature social, conscious and
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creative, he insists. Interestingly, Marx’s attempts to concretize this
notion of unalienated labour almost invariably involve instances drawn
from art and intellectual culture. Thus Marx: “Animals produce only
according to the standards and needs of the species to which they
belong, while man is capable of producing according to the standards
of every species…hence man also produces in accordance with the
laws of beauty”. 5
It is, moreover, one of the central features of capitalist civilization,
according to Marx, that all such labour should become progressively
commodified, and hence alienated. “The bourgeoisie has stripped of
its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with
reverent awe”, he writes: “It has converted the physician, the lawyer,

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