Page 169 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

evoked in song, could never lead to the decline of religion. Nor could
exhaustive accounts of how prisons or clinics came about significantly
affect their persistence in real life. It would seem obvious that it was not
the power of discourses, of ‘dividing practices’ – not the power of the
word – which led to the development of prisons and clinics. Rather, it
was the requirements of reality itself which gave power to these words.
Autonomous discourses by themselves, no matter how insightful, could
never achieve such an outcome. On the contrary, for cultural criticism to
have any lasting effect, it had to be united with real struggles to eliminate
the actual material conditions of distress. Thus, the distinction between
the two spheres not only provides the theoretical justification for the
essential importance of intellectual work, it also explains why theory
needs to be united with practice if theory itself is to have its theoretical
effect, let alone if our goal of the permanent end to the systemic bases for
exploitation and human misery is to be achieved.
Both cultural as well as sociological theories have, in differing ways,
broken the link between the noisy sphere and this hidden abode. For the
fundamental theoretical assumption of both outlooks is that the cultural
sphere and the sphere of everyday life, although having a powerful polit-
ical effect, are either autonomous or where determined by political econ-
omy at all, this is a political economy of the market abstracted from the
relations of production out of which it arises. This has culturalized and
sociologized both fields, making them unable to propose viable solutions
to the most burning problems of contemporary culture or economics. It
is also responsible for creating false oppositions between identity politics
and class politics which profoundly weakens both.
There is thus a need to bring political economy back in. First, in order
to focus analysis and thinking on just and workable solutions to the acute
economic problems facing the vast majority of peoples in both the devel-
oped and developing parts of the world. Second, it is for the purpose
of developing a more effective cultural and sociological criticism: to be
able to penetrate to the core of the cultural prejudices and relations of
production which imprison hundreds of millions of people. This mental
slavery makes them vulnerable to political manipulation for anti-human
ends or unable to realize their full human potential. This work is a step
in this direction. By critiquing cultural and sociological theory for sepa-
rating culture and society from the material foundations from which they
arise and by explaining what has been lost by this sundering from the
production relations of political economy, this work hopes to contribute
to the recovery and strengthening of that tradition which links intellec-
tual activity firmly to the task of enhancing human development.

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