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Contemporary Cultural Theory

determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life’ (Marx
& Engels, 1970, p. 47). But this later gave way to two much more
specific theses: that the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling
ideas; and that the economic ‘base’ in some sense ‘determines’
the cultural ‘superstructures’. The first is argued in The German
Ideology: ‘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’ (p. 64). Culturally
dominant ideas thus became, for Marx, 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 might be dominant, they are not thereby uncon-
tested. Rather, rival classes produce rival ideas in the struggle for
social leadership, and historically these become increasingly more
abstract and universal in form. Like the class struggle itself, this
struggle for intellectual and cultural mastery will come to an end
only in the future classless society, which will be ushered into
being by the proletarian revolution.
The base/superstructure model appeared initially in the 1859
‘Preface’ to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
Marx’s formulation is so succinct 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, 1975, p. 425).

Marx adds, in an important qualification, that a distinction 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, reli-
gious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which
men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out’ (p. 426).
There is no necessary incompatibility between the two argu-
ments. Neither directly denied the sense of an antithesis between

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