Page 111 - Culture Society and the Media

MESSAGES AND MEANINGS 101
dynamics of capitalist society. Marx never wrote systematically about ideology
and culture but nevertheless a theory of ideology is contained within his work
and scattered throughout his work are a series of programmatic outlines. Marx’s
concept of ideology rested on a substructure/superstructure model which is
clearly set out in the much quoted passage from the Preface to a Contribution to
the critique of political economy.

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations which
are indispensible and independent of their will, relations of production
which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material
productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production
constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which
rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite
forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life
conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is
not the consciousness of men that determines their being but, on the
contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a
certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society
come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or—what is but a
legal expression for the same thing, with the property relations within
which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the
productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an
epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the
entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In
considering such transformations 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, religious, aesthetic or philosophic—in short
ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and
fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he
thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation
by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be
explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing
conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of
production. (Marx and Engels, 1962, pp. 262–3)

This passage has often been read as an economically determinist view of
ideology in which both the ‘ideological forms’ and the ‘consciousness of men’
are moulded by the economic substructure. This has been the justification for the
focus in Marxism on the problem of transforming the capitalist infrastructure.
Yet, Marx was well aware that the superstructural forms—the organization of the
state, religion, etc.—could exert considerable influence on the course of events
and his empirical work often points to the relative autonomy of these areas of
society in specific historical circumstances. A great deal would seem to hinge on