Page 60 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

CLASSICAL MARXISM

the priest, the poet, the man [sic] of science, into its paid wage-
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labourers”. In volume I of what is widely regarded as Marx’s
masterpiece, Capital, we find a further development of this
understanding of alienation in the concept of “commodity fetishism”,
a perhaps unfortunate term by which he chose to refer to that process
by which human relations come to take on the appearance in a market
economy of relations between things (that is, between commodities).
Capitalist culture is thus a fetishized culture in which “a definite social
relation between men [sic]…assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form
of a relation between things”. 7
For Marx, modern civilization is one founded essentially on
commodified, alienated labour, as distinct from that kind of free,
unalienated labour which finds only occasional expression in residually
uncommodifiable instances of intellectual work. Thus the culturalist
antithesis between culture and civilization becomes transposed into
that between culture as unalienated labour and capitalist civilization
as commodification. Furthermore, for Marx, as for Arnold, this
fetishized culture “tends constantly to become more so”. The crucial
difference between them, however, consists in Marx’s stress on
production as distinct from Arnold’s on cultural consumption. And it
is precisely this difference that propels Marx away from any possible
pedagogical solution to the cultural crises of capitalism—for any such
solution can only ever aspire to a reform of the habits of consumption
(or “taste”)—and towards the alternative of a revolutionary
transformation in the system of production itself.
The single most important idea in Marx, insofar as cultural theory
has been concerned, is nonetheless not that of alienation but rather
that of ideology, an entirely original notion (though not in itself an
original term) with no counterpart in Arnold, designed so as to express
the inner connectedness of culture and economy (or class). In its most
general form, Marx’s theory of ideology maintains simply that: “Life
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is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life”. But
this gives way, by turn, to two much more specific theses: firstly, that
the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas; and secondly, the
famous, perhaps even notorious, base/superstructure model. The first
thesis is that argued in The German Ideology itself: “The ideas of the
ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the class which is
the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling
intellectual force”. Culturally dominant ideas thus become, for Marx,
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