Page 62 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

CLASSICAL MARXISM

nonetheless denied both by the carefully qualifying verbs—rises/
correspond/conditions, but not causes, nor even determines, in the
sense of causation as distinct from that of cognition—and by the
clear implication that cultural transformation, unlike material
transformation, cannot be determined (that is, known) with the
precision of natural science.
But if there is no necessary incompatibility in the sense of the two
theses themselves, there certainly has been an incompatibility between
the rival systems of subsequent interpretation which have attached to
each. In general, “scientific” Marxisms such as those of both the pre-
1914 socialist movement and the post–1917 communist movement,
tended to opt for a version of the base/superstructure model that
drifts towards a theory of mechanical causation; and “critical”
Marxisms, whether German, Italian or French, for a version of the
ruling ideas thesis which theorizes the relation between economy and
culture in terms of the category of totality, rather than that of cause/
effect. The difference can be described as that between models of,
respectively, mechanical and expressive causality. We will turn to
13
examine each of these instances in the history of Marxism very shortly.
But first let us raise one last question about Marx’s Marxism, that of
its own epistemological status, as either science or ideology There is no
doubt that Marx imagined his work to be in some significant sense
scientific. On the other hand, he understood it also as political, as a
14
form through which the socialist movement would become conscious
of itself in the class struggle. As such it is a superstructure, and presumably,
therefore, subject to those self-same processes of material conditioning
that operate on all other superstructures, processes which might well
be interpreted as denying to Marxism any extra-social objectivity such
as is often implied by the term science. In short, Marxism’s pretensions
to scientificity might run contrary to its claims to political efficacy. For
Marx himself this does not appear to have been a problem. Subsequent
Marxisms have found it much less easy, however, to reconcile the two
notions. Marxism has often appeared in the guise of an objective science,
dispensed normally by a proletarian, or supposedly proletarian, political
party; sometimes as proletarian consciousness, or ideology, whether
that of party or union; and sometimes as the critical consciousness of
oppositional intellectuals. But the sense of Marxism as science and that
as ideology have rarely been combined so effectively, and so apparently
unproblematically, as in Marx.

53