Page 61 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

MARXISM

the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, produced in
the interests of the ruling class, and by that class’s own specialist
ideologists. Though the ruling ideas may be dominant, they are not
thereby uncontested. Rather, rival classes produce rival ideas in the
struggle for social leadership, and historically these become increasingly
more abstract and universal in form: “For each new class …is
compelled…to represent its interest as the common interest of all the
members of society…it has to give its ideas the form of universality,
and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones”. 10
Like the class struggle itself, this struggle for intellectual and cultural
mastery will come to an end only in the future classless society to be
ushered into being by the proletarian revolution.
The base/superstructure model, by contrast, appears initially in
the 1859 “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy. So succinct is Marx’s own formulation that it is as well to
quote it at length: “The totality of…relations of production constitutes
the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises
a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite
forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material
life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual
life”. Marx adds, in an important qualification, that a distinction
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should always be made “between the material transformation of the
economic conditions of production, which can be determined with
the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious,
artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men [sic]
become conscious of this conflict and fight it out”. 12
There is no necessary incompatibility between the two arguments.
Neither directly denies the sense of an antithesis between cultural
creativity as a positive value and the commodity fetishism of capitalist
civilization. But both insist that culture is also always ideology, that
is, that it is conditioned by material reality. The first, it is true, lays
much greater stress on the significance of class, as distinct from that
of economy. But this is partly a matter of semantics: the “relations of
production” referred to in the 1859 “Preface” are, for Marx, invariably
relations of class. The second, it is true, makes use of a peculiar analogy
with construction (foundation/superstructure), and combines this with
a powerfully evocative reference to the precision of natural science,
so as to suggest a process of mechanical causation, where the economy
is the cause and culture the effect. But much of that suggestion is

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