Page 49 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

common sense, cultural conditions and practical activities. As a consequence,
Gramsci makes the distinction between a war of position that involves the winning
of hegemony within the sphere of civil society and a war of manoeuvre constituted
26 by an assault on state power. The latter is dependent on the former so that civil
society is the critical domain of ideological struggle.
Following Gramsci, key cultural studies theorists conceived of popular culture as
a substantive element of civil society and the site on which hegemony was won and
lost. By now the concept of civil society has been transformed from its Hegelian use,
where it indicated a domain between the state and the family, and comes instead
to connote the heterogeneous arena of personal life that encompasses the family,
sexual relationships, leisure pursuits, the mass media, youth culture and so forth.

Links Common culture, hegemony, ideology, nation-state, public sphere

Class In general terms class can be understood as a classification of persons into groups
based on shared socio-economic conditions. However, classes do not exist as stand
alone groups but are to be understood in relation to other classes in the context of
an overall stratification system. As such, class can be grasped as a relational set of
inequalities with economic, social, political and ideological dimensions. Since class
is a cultural classification rather than an ‘objective’ fact, post-Marxist writers such
as Laclau and Mouffe approach it as a discursive construct.
Within cultural studies, the most influential understanding of class has been that
associated with Marxism where class is broadly defined as a relationship to the
means of production. Here the organization of a mode of production is not simply
a matter of coordinating objects but also of the relations between people. These
relations, while social, that is, cooperative and coordinated, are also matters of
power and conflict. Indeed, Marxists regard class antagonisms, which are an
intrinsic part of a mode of production, as the motor of historical change. For Marx,
class is constituted by an objective relation to property ownership and the mode of
production. Nevertheless, he also recognizes that consciousness of those
circumstances is significant. Thus he makes a distinction between class-in-itself and
class-for-itself where the latter includes a self-consciousness that is absent from the
former.
The core of Marx’s work was his analysis of the dynamics of capitalism wherein
the fundamental class division is between those who own the means of production,
the bourgeoisie, and those who, being a propertyless proletariat, must sell their
labour. Although, for Marxists, capitalists and workers form the core of the
contemporary class system, it is acknowledged that other class divisions are also in
evidence. For example, small shopkeepers, clerks and students form part of what
Marx called the ‘petite bourgeoisie’ while the unemployed and the criminal
fraternity are at the heart of the so-called ‘lumpen-proletariat’.
It is now widely felt that the class system of contemporary capitalism is much
more complex than that envisioned by Marx during the mid-nineteenth century
and involves a more graduated set of unequal relations. That class is constituted by
more than one’s relationship to the means of production has long been the