Page 86 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

74 COLIN SPARKS

of the relationship between economic and social relations and cultural
relations but that they had been unable to resolve the problems involved
satisfactorily.
The second, and now perhaps most surprising, charge was that marxist
writers tended to use terms like ‘art’ and ‘culture’ in the narrow and
restrictive sense:
In all these points there would seem to be a general inadequacy,
among Marxists, in the use of ‘culture’ as a term. It normally
indicates, in their writings, the intellectual and imaginative products
of a society; this corresponds with the weak use of ‘superstructure’.
But it would seem that from their emphasis on the interdependence of
all elements of social reality, and from their analytic emphasis on
movement and change, Marxists should logically use ‘culture’ in the
sense of a whole way of life, a general social process.
(Williams, 1963:273)

The latter of these formulations, of course, is the one for which the book as
a whole was to become famous. Marxists made the same error as the
devotees of the ‘Great Tradition’: they, too, reified a narrow concept of
culture and constructed their own selective tradition of the best that has
been thought and said. Once again, the criticism is not that the marxists
were wholly mistaken. If they were to pursue their own logic consistently,
they would come to the same conclusions as Williams and develop an
anthropological theory of culture.
Taken together, these two criticisms seem to relate to some of the
fundamental concerns which were later to become ‘cultural studies’. It is
not, however, clear that they constitute an approach radically different to
marxism. Culture and Society and marxism address a common set of
problems. Both lay a heavy stress on social class as the defining element of
cultural experience. When Williams argued that the ‘crucial distinction …
between alternative ideas of the nature of social relationships’ was the
discriminating factor in class-based cultures he was very close to an
orthodox marxist affirmation of the centrality of class consciousness
(Williams, 1963:312). In his assertion that political and trade union
organizations formed the central cultural achievements of the British
working class, Williams is again very close to the concerns of the marxists
(Williams, 1958:314). The major difference between the dominant
determinist form of marxism of the 1950s and Williams’ own position at
that time lies in the stress he placed upon the active and conscious sense-
making process in culture. This he developed most fully in The Long
Revolution (Williams, 1961:3–71).
The third of the Founding Fathers, Edward Thompson, was by far the
most explicitly marxist. Not only had he been a long-term member of