Page 20 - Culture Society and Economy

Robotham-01.qxd 1/31/2005 6:20 PM Page 13

BRINGING THE ECONOMY BACK IN

None of this means that political agency and cultural critique are not
of the utmost importance. In fact, it is impossible to change and trans-
form one mode of production into another without political action.
Political relationships and forces entrench a particular social system
of production, distribution and exchange as the dominant and legitimate
system, upholding it by means of law backed up by force. Especially
today, when the media and culture industries have gained such immense
global power, cultural and ideological critiques are more important than
ever in the battle to undermine the legitimacy of the dominant social sys-
tem and to weaken the psychological and mental hold it has on the minds
of millions of persons. But such critiques are weakened as critiques when
conducted largely in terms of cultural politics, neglecting the economic
foundation (in the broadest sense) on which these cultural phenomena
rest. Nor should one conclude that the relationship between economic,
political or intellectual agency is a simple mechanical one of automaticity
or reflection. Such a view has more in common with empiricism than
with Marxism. I adhere very strongly to the view that the tendencies and
relationships in the economy are extremely complex, dynamic and self-
obscuring and are by no means obvious to either popular or scholarly
consciousness. At least from the time of Kant and especially Hegel, it
became perfectly clear that, pace Baconian empiricism, ‘experience’ did
not immediately serve up truth on a platter to consciousness, popular or
otherwise. On the contrary, the deceptive nature of appearances became
proverbial. Difficult and intense intellectual and political effort by innu-
merable persons – a social effort – is required to understand the rela-
tionships and tendencies – obscured by experience itself – to accurately
penetrate to their inner core. Politics often lags behind economics, as, for
example, in the development of political parties and legal systems which
entrench the rights of the individual and democracy some time after a cap-
italist economy has developed. Intellectual work often anticipates economic
life, as in the case of eighteenth-century Enlightenment thought.
There is, therefore, no sense in conflating these different spheres of
social life, nor of portraying one as the other in disguise by means of a
simple reductionism. Intellectual work is intellectual work is intellectual
work. It is not economic activity or politics in disguise although it may
bring economic rewards and have political implications. It is not neces-
sarily motivated by economics although it may be, and clearly there is an
enormously important publishing economy, unapologetically governed
by the profit motive. It is absurd and misleading, for example, to portray
the development of postmodernism as a reflection of the development
of flexible specialization in the economy. The truth is, in fact, quite the

13