Page 15 - Culture and Cultural Studies

14 CULTURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES

v a falling rate of profit;

v cycles of boom and bust;
v an increasing monopoly;
v the creation of a proletariat which is set to become the system’s grave-digger.

Marx hoped that capitalism would be rent asunder by class conflict. He envisaged the
proletariat’s organizations of defence, trade unions and political parties, overthrowing
and replacing it with a mode of production based on communal ownership, equitable
distribution and ultimately the end of class division.

Marxism and cultural studies
Cultural studies writers have had a long, ambiguous, but productive relationship with
Marxism. Cultural studies is not a Marxist domain, but has drawn succour from it while
subjecting it to vigorous critique. There is little doubt that we live in social formations
organized along capitalist lines that manifest deep class divisions in work, wages, housing,
education and health. Further, cultural practices are commodified by large corporate
culture industries. In that context cultural studies has been partisan in taking up the cause
of change.
However, Marxism has been critiqued for its apparent teleology. That is, the positing
of an inevitable point to which history is moving, namely the demise of capitalism and
the arrival of a classless society. This is a problem on both theoretical and empirical
grounds. Theoretically, a determinist reading of Marxism robs human beings of agency
or the capacity to act. This is so because the outcomes of human action appear to be
predetermined by metaphysical laws (ironically posing as objective science) that drive
history from outside of human action. It is a problem on empirical grounds because of
the failure of significant numbers of proletarian revolutions to materialize, and the
oppressive totalitarian outcomes of those that made claims to be such revolutions.
In its engagement with Marxism, cultural studies has been particularly concerned with
issues of structure and action. On the one hand, Marxism suggests that there are regu-
larities or structures to human existence that lie outside of any given individual. On the
other hand, it has a commitment to change through human agency.
Cultural studies has resisted the economic determinism inherent in some readings of
Marxism and has asserted the specificity of culture. Cultural studies has also been con-
cerned with the apparent success of capitalism – that is, not merely its survival but its
transformation and expansion. This has been attributed in part to the winning of consent
for capitalism on the level of culture. Hence the interest in questions of culture, ideology
and hegemony (see Chapter 2) which were commonly pursued through perspectives
dubbed culturalism and structuralism (see Hall, 1992a).

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