Page 14 - Culture and Cultural Studies

AN INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES 13

relations – consciousness, culture and politics – are said to be structured by economic
relations (see Chapter 2).
For Marxism, history is not a smooth evolutionary process. Rather, it is marked by
significant breaks and discontinuities of modes of production. Thus, Marx discusses the
transformations from an ancient mode of production to a feudal mode of production
and thence to the capitalist mode of production. Different forms of material organization
and different social relations characterize each mode of production. Further, each mode
of production is superseded by another as internal contradictions, particularly those of
class conflict, lead to its transformation and replacement.

Capitalism
The centrepiece of Marx’s work was an analysis of the dynamics of capitalism. This is a
mode of production premised on the private ownership of the means of production (in
his day, factories, mills, workshops; and in a more contemporary vein, multinational cor-
porations). The fundamental class division of capitalism is between those who own the
means of production, the bourgeoisie, and those who, being a propertyless proletariat,
must sell their labour to survive.
The legal framework and common-sense thinking of capitalist societies declare that the
worker is a free agent and the sale of labour a free and fair contract. However, Marx argues
that this appearance covers over a fundamental exploitation at work. Capitalism aims to
make a profit and does so by extracting surplus value from workers. That is, the value of
the labour taken to produce a product, which becomes the property of the bourgeoisie, is
less than the worker receives for it.
The realization of surplus value in monetary form is achieved by the selling of goods
(which have both ‘use value’ and ‘exchange value’) as commodities. A commodity is some-
thing available to be sold in the marketplace. Thus, commodification is the process associated
with capitalism by which objects, qualities and signs are turned into commodities. The
surface appearance of goods sold in the marketplace obscures the origins of those com-
modities in an exploitative relationship, a process Marx calls commodity fetishism.
Further, the fact that workers are faced with the products of their own labour now sepa-
rated from them constitutes alienation. Since the proletariat are alienated from the core of
human activity, namely the labour process, so they are also alienated from themselves.
Capitalism is a dynamic system whose profit-driven mechanisms lead to the continual
revolutionizing of the means of production and the forging of new markets. For Marx, this
was its great merit in relation to feudalism. This is because it heralded a massive expansion in
the productive capacities of European societies. It dragged them into the modern world of
railways, mass production, cities and a formally equitable and free set of human relations in
which people were not, in a legal sense, the property of others (as were serfs in feudal societies).
However, the mechanisms of capitalism also give rise to perennial crises and will ultimately
lead, or so Marx argued, to its being superseded by socialism. Problems for capitalism include:

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