Page 68 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Critical theory: from ideology critique to the sociology of culture

produce only according to the standards and needs of the species
to which they belong, while man is capable of producing accord-
ing to the standards of every species... hence man also produces
in accordance with the laws of beauty’ (p. 329). Marx also argued
that capitalist civilisation tended to substitute alienated for
unalienated labour: ‘The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every
occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent
awe’, he wrote: ‘It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the
priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers’
(Marx & Engels, 1967, p. 82).
In Volume I of what is widely regarded as his masterwork,
Capital, we find a further development of this notion of alienation
in the concept of ‘commodity fetishism’, a term used to describe
the way human relations take on the appearance, in a market
economy, of relations between things, that is, between commodi-
ties. Capitalist culture is therefore a fetishistic culture, in which
‘a definite social relation between men... assumes, in their eyes,
the fantastic form of a relation between things’ (Marx, 1970, p. 72).
The Arnoldian antithesis between culture and civilisation was
thus transposed into Marx’s between unalienated labour and
capitalist commodification. Furthermore, for Marx, as for Arnold,
this fetishised culture ‘tends constantly to become more so’. The
crucial difference, however, is in Marx’s stress on production as
distinct from Arnold’s on cultural consumption. It was precisely
this difference that propelled Marx away from a pedagogical
solution to the cultural crises of capitalism—which could only
ever aspire to reform the habits of ‘taste’—and towards the alter-
native of a revolutionary transformation in the system of
production itself.

Marx on ideology
Insofar as cultural theory has been concerned, the most impor-
tant idea from Marx is not so much alienation as ‘ideology’, an
entirely original notion (though not an original term) with no
counterpart in Arnold, designed to express the inner connected-
ness of culture and economy (or class). In its most general form,
Marx’s theory of ideology maintained simply that: ‘Life is not

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