Marxism

Marxist cultural criticism maintains that texts and practices must be scrutinized and analyzed in their historical
conditions of production or the changing conditions of consumption and reception. The Marxist though has
developed thought has developed through ages which has been crucial to the study and analysis of popular
culture. Marx, Frankfurt School, Althusser, Gramsci and by other neo-Marxists and their approaches have
greatly contributed for the growth of Marxist approach embedded in a multi-disciplinary structure.

Marxism does not provide a determinist model or framework to the understanding of the concepts of ‘base’ and
‘superstructure’. The base consists of the ‘forces of production’ (raw materials, technology, tools, workers and
their skills) and the ‘relations of production’ (the slave mode produces the master/slave relation, the capitalist
mode produces bourgeoisie/proletariat relation, and the feudal mode produces the lord/peasant relation). The
‘superstructure’ consists of the different social institutions (cultural, educational, legal, and political) and the
‘definite forms of social consciousness’ that they generate (political, ethical, philosophical, aesthetic, religious
etc.)There is a constant dialogue between the ‘base’ and the ‘superstructure’, the superstructure expressing and
legitimating the base and the base ‘determining’ and ‘conditioning’ the content and form of the superstructure.
Marxism is no form of ‘economic determinism’ reducing every cultural text and practice to its economic
conditions of production. This is clarified by Marx’s friend and collaborator, Engels after the death of Marx, that
though economics is the basis, the superstructures component are not merely passive, but effect the cultural
texts, practices and relations.

Marx and Engels claim that the ‘ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas in every epoch, i.e. the class which
is the ruling material force is at the same time the ruling intellectual force.’ The ruling class, in order to
maintain the inequality of the capitalist framework, is forced to manipulate and present its ideas as universal and
‘for the common good’, thus controlling the material and intellectual forces. Given the thesis, the antithesis is
inevitable. Consequently, there is an ideological struggle. This is very clearly expressed by Raymond Williams,
‘a text is a site where cultural meanings are contested’. On similar lines, Marx said that during periods of social
transformation, men and women become conscious of the conflict and try to fight it out and a possible synthesis
is the result. This, however, is an on-going process.

To sum up the classical Marxist approach to popular culture, the text or practice, must be located in its historical
context and be analyzed by its historical conditions of production. The danger of economic analysis swallowing
up the cultural historical analysis is warned by Marx and Engels and clearly demonstrated by Thompson, ‘to
keep in play the subtle dialectic between ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ and later developed by Althusser.

When it comes to Frankfurt School and its analysis of popular culture, the ideas are best expressed in Adorno
and Horkheimrer’s ‘Culture Industry’ and Walter Benjamin’s ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.

Frankfurt School is the name assigned to a group of left-wing German intellectuals who were associated with
the Frankfurt Institute of social research in Germany, established in 1923. However, because of the rise of Hitler
in Germany, they temporarily attached themselves to the University of Columbia, United States. In 1949, they
returned back to Germany. Their idea of the mélange of Marxism and Psychoanalysis is known as ‘critical
theory’. The Frankfurt School’s study of the popular culture is associated with the writings of Theodor Adorno,
Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer coined the oxymoron ‘culture industry’ which refers to the products and
processes of mass production. They claim that the products of the culture industry are homogeneous and
predictable. ‘…film, radio and magazine…all mass culture is identical.’ They argue that five minutes within a
film, the viewer knows how the scenario would unfold; who would be punished, rewarded, or forgotten.
Similarly, once a trained ear listens to the notes of a particular song, in popular music, he/she can anticipate the
following beats and notes and is often flattered when this anticipation is met. It is the reproduction of the same
thing that comes under the critical gaze of the Frankfurt school.

In contrast to the claims of Arnold and Leavis that ‘culture industry’ threatens cultural and social authority,
Adorno and Horkheimer maintain that it ensures and reinforces social authority; what is ‘anarchy’ to Arnold is
‘conformity’ to Adorno and Horkheimer. In this situation they see the masses as the being deceived by the
manipulation and machination of the ‘capitalists’. This is very dangerous because the agency of masses is
stripped away from them, rendering them passive. This can be illustrated with an example used by Adorno
himself. The text considered is an American situation comedy where an underpaid and a forever fined (by the
principal) school teacher has her primary needs met at the cost of her friends and acquaintances. According to
Adorno, the objective humour in play obscures the humiliating and unfair conditions to which the school teacher
is subjected to and she sees herself as an ‘object of fun and free of any resentment’. On the contrary, another
Marxist, Bertolt Brecht sees the audience as active and intelligent and would argue that even though the
schoolteacher is not affected or learns nothing else, the audience is capable of doing so by observing her. This
can be very well understood in the context of Brecht’s play, Mother Courage and Her Children.

Similarly, Leo Lowenthal asserts that the culture industry, a culture of standardization, stereotypes, mendacity
and conservatism, depoliticizes the working classes which limit its horizon to political and economic goals that
could have been realized within the exploitive and capitalist framework. Further, it hampers critical thought
incapacitating them from analyzing or critically thinking of the reality they are a part of. Appreciation of and
confrontation with reality is replaced by dreams of wish fulfillment, images of glamour, wealth, adventure or
passionate love and sensationalism or creation of artificial or ‘false needs’. Revolutionary ideas are simply
culled, cut short or mitigated in mass culture.

Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man became a cult classic for the counterculture of the 1960s. ‘Marcuse’s
argument is that in the co-option and massification of the ‘authentic’ or ‘autonomous’ culture, what he prefers to
call, the ‘affirmative culture’, its radical edge is blunted, and what happens is the flattening of culture.
(‘Liquidation of two-dimensional culture’). Capitalism by providing the means to the satisfaction of certain
needs, through popular culture, is able to prevent the formation of the more fundamental desires. Therefore, the
Frankfurt school is not anti-democratic. In fact, they resent the blocking (by culture) of the full demand for
democracy ( it only stabilizes the prevailing order)

Marcuse also expands on Marx’s concept of objectification and alienation that follows in a capitalist framework.
He believes that culture industry pushes the laborers to such a limit that they begin to see themselves as
extensions of the objects or commodities they produce. He write in One Dimensional Man, ‘the people
recognize themselves in the commodities…they find their souls in the hi-fi set, the kitchen equipment, the
automobile and the split-level home’. Thus, the notion of alienation is called into question making commodities
an extension of their minds and bodies. Marcuse would have been extremely critical of Titan’s use of Mozart’s
symphonies and Mont Blanc using the ‘face’ of Gandhi to sell their products.