Page 43 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

identifiable not simply through direct ownership of the means of production but
through share distribution, managerial control, income, education and lifestyles.
According to Marx, while the legal framework and common sense thinking of
20 capitalist societies may declare that workers are free agents and the sale of labour a
free and fair contract, this obscures the fundamental process of exploitation at work.
This is so because capitalism aims to make a profit and does so by extracting surplus
value from workers. That is, the value of the labour taken to produce goods, which
become the property of the bourgeoisie, is more than the worker receives for it. The
realization of surplus value in monetary form is achieved by the selling of goods
(which have both ‘use-value’ and ‘exchange-value’) as commodities. A commodity
is something available to be sold in the market place and commodification the
process associated with capitalism by which all spheres of a culture are increasingly
put under the sway of the market. Commodity fetishism is the name Marx gives to
the process through which the surface appearance of goods sold in the market place
obscures the origins of commodities in an exploitative relationship.
Capitalism is a dynamic system whose profit-driven mechanisms lead to the
continual revolutionizing of the means of production and the forging of new
markets. For Marx, this was its great merit in relation to feudalism, for it heralded
a massive expansion in the productive capacities of nineteenth-century European
societies and dragged them into the modern world of railways, mass production,
cities and a formally equitable and free set of human relations. However, according
to Marx, the mechanisms of capitalism lead to perennial crises and ultimately, or
so Marx argued, to its being superseded by socialism. Problems for capitalism
include a falling rate of profit, cycles of boom and bust, increasing monopoly, and
most decisively, the creation of a proletariat that is set to become the system’s grave-
diggers.
Marx hoped that capitalism would be rift asunder by class conflict, with 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. Today,
Marx’s dream of the demise of capitalism seems farther away than ever as rather than
generating its own demise, capitalism keeps on transforming itself. This process has
been explored by the theorists of ‘disorganized capitalism’ and post-Fordism
amongst others. Indeed, capitalism is the driving force of a renewed globalization
where one-half of the world’s largest economic units are constituted by 200
transnational corporations who produce between one-third and one-half of world
output. Thus globalization is, in part, constituted by planetary-scale economic
activity which is creating an interconnected if uneven capitalist world economy.
Links Alienation, commodification, disorganized capitalism, globalization, Marxism, post-
Fordism

Carnivalesque The carnivalesque is a concept appropriated into cultural studies from
the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and his study of Rabelais. The idea derives from the
medieval carnival when a degree of otherwise unpermitted freedom was granted to