Marxist cultural analysis: Difference between revisions

Part of a series on
Marxism
Theoretical works Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 The Condition of the Working Class in England The German Ideology The Communist Manifesto The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Grundrisse Capital Critique of the Gotha Programme Dialectics of Nature The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State What Is to Be Done? The Accumulation of Capital Philosophical Notebooks Terrorism and Communism The State and Revolution Essays on Marx's Theory of Value History and Class Consciousness Prison Notebooks The Black Jacobins On Practice Theses on the Philosophy of History Dialectic of Enlightenment A Critique of Soviet Economics The Long Revolution Guerrilla Warfare The Wretched of the Earth Reading Capital The Society of the Spectacle Pedagogy of the Oppressed Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses Ways of Seeing How Europe Underdeveloped Africa Social Justice and the City Women, Race and Class Marxism and the Oppression of Women Imagined Communities Hegemony and Socialist Strategy The Sublime Object of Ideology Time, Labor and Social Domination The Age of Extremes The Origin of Capitalism Empire Late Victorian Holocausts Change the World Without Taking Power Caliban and the Witch An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital Capitalist Realism Capital in the Anthropocene
Philosophy Alienation Dialectical materialism Ideology Philosophy of nature Philosophy in the Soviet Union Reification
Critique of political economy Capital (accumulation) Crisis theory Commodity Concrete and abstract labor Factors of production Falling profit-rate tendency Means of production Mode of production Capitalist Socialist Productive forces Scientific socialism Surplus product Socially necessary labour time Value-form Wage labour
Sociology Base and superstructure Bourgeoisie Class Class consciousness Classless society Commodity fetishism Communist society Critical theory Cultural hegemony Democracy Dictatorship of the proletariat Soviet Radical Democratic centralism Exploitation False consciousness Human nature Immiseration Imperialism Lumpenproletariat Metabolic rift Proletariat Private property Relations of production State theory Working class
History Class struggle Historical determinism Primitive accumulation Proletarian revolution World revolution Theory of historical trajectory
Aspects Aesthetics Archaeology Criminology Cultural analysis Cultural Studies Ethics Film theory Geography Historiography Literary criticism Marxism and religion Sociology Philosophy
Common variants Structural Autonomist Marxism–Leninism Guevarism Maoism Titoism Trotskyism Neo-Gramscianism Regulation school Third-worldist Hegelian Budapest School Frankfurt School Humanist Neue Marx-Lektüre Open Political Praxis School Both Black Classical Communization Feminist Leninism Neo Post Western
Other variants Analytical Austromarxism Centrist Council communism Eurocommunism Instrumental Marxism–Leninism–Maoism Nkrumaism Orthodox Revisionist Situationist Socialism with Chinese characteristics Wertkritik
People Marx Engels Morris Lafargue Kautsky Plekhanov Du Bois Connolly Lenin Luxemburg Liebknecht Kollontai Bogdanov Stalin Trotsky Grossman Zinoviev Bloch Lukács Korsch Bukharin Ho Serge Gramsci Galiev Pashukanis Bordiga Benjamin Mao Basu Mariátegui Horkheimer Dutt Brecht Marcuse Kalecki Fromm Cox Lefebvre James Adorno Padmore Sartre Deutscher Hoxha Beauvoir Sombart Nkrumah Sweezy Emmanuel Hill Bettelheim Draper Jones Hobsbawm Althusser Hinton Williams Freire Mandel Sivanandan Miliband Cabral Thompson Bauman Fanon Kosik Berger Castro Guevara Liebman Heller Guattari Mészáros O'Connor Wallerstein Mies Tronti Debord Amin Hall Nairn Parenti Negri Jameson Gonzalo Dussel Harvey Laclau Bahro Poulantzas Vattimo Badiou Harnecker Altvater Anderson Löwy Vogel Sison Easthope Rancière Berman Przeworski Cohen Therborn Losurdo Ture Postone Rodney Bannerji Spivak Newton Sakai Wood Federici Wolff Balibar Eagleton Kurz Hartsock Rowbotham Mouffe Geras Brenner Davis Massey Cleaver Bishop Haraway Panitch Clarke Jessop Davis Wright Fraser Burawoy Holloway Rose Screpanti Tamás Hampton Cano Žižek Berardi Sankara Hennessy McDonnell Douzinas Roediger Foster West Ghandy Marcos Heinrich Prashad Kelley Dean Lordon Linera Fisher Li Coulthard Malm Seymour Toscano Bhattacharya Moufawad-Paul Srnicek Horvat Hamza Saito
Journals Antipode Capital & Class Capitalism Nature Socialism Constellations Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory Historical Materialism Mediations Monthly Review New Left Review Race & Class Rethinking Marxism Science & Society Socialist Register
Related topics 21st-century communist theorists Anarchism Creative destruction Conflict theory Criticism of Marxism Communism Communalism Economic determinism History of communism Left-wing politics Marxian economics New Left Old Left Municipalism Political ecology Socialism Authoritarian Democratic Market Reformist Revolutionary Social Utopian Left-wing populism Universal class Vulgar Marxism Economism Worker cooperative Workers' council
Outline Communism portal Philosophy portal Socialism portal
v t e

Marxist cultural analysis is a form of anti-capitalist cultural critique which assumes the theory of cultural hegemony and from this specifically targets those aspects of culture which are profit driven and mass-produced under capitalism.^[1][2][3]

The original theory behind this from of analysis is commonly associated with the Frankfurt School and with Antonio Gramsci, representing an important tendency within Western Marxism. The Marxist cultural analysis, taken as an area of discourse, has commonly considered the industrialization and mass-production of culture by "the Culture Industry" as having an overall negative effect on society, an effect which reifies the audience away from developing a more authentic sense of human values.^[4][1]

Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher, primarily writing in the lead up to and after the First World War. He attempted to break from the economic determinism of classical Marxism thought and so is considered a key neo-Marxist.^[5]

Gramsci is best known for his theory of cultural hegemony, which describes how the state and ruling capitalist class — the bourgeoisie — use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist societies. The bourgeoisie, in Gramsci's view, develops a hegemonic culture using ideology rather than violence, economic force, or coercion. Hegemonic culture propagates its own values and norms so that they become the “common sense” values of all and thus maintain the status quo. Hegemonic power, he asserted, is used to maintain consent to the capitalist order, rather than coercive power using force to maintain order, and that this cultural hegemony is produced and reproduced by the dominant class through the institutions that form the superstructure.

E. P. Thompson's Marxist humanism as well as the individual philosophies of the founders of The Birmingham School (Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall) provide the influences for British Cultural Studies) as housed at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham.^[3] The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies developed later than the Frankfurt School and are seen as providing a parallel response.^[3] Accordingly British Cultural Studies focuses on later issues such as Globalization, Americanization, Censorship, and Multiculturalism. Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957), Raymond William's Culture and Society (1958) and E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working class (1964) form the foundational texts for the school, with Stuart Hall's Encoding/decoding model of communication as well as his writings on multiculturalism in Britain arriving later but carrying equal gravitas.^[6]

The Birmingham School greatly valued and contributed to class consciousness within the structure of British society.^[7]

Due to their positions as literary experts, Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams were called as witnesses during The Lady Chatterley Affair, a court case concerning censorship in publishing, the outcome of which is widely regarded as defining Britain in the 1960s as a "Permissive society". They argued on the side of freedom of language, and against censorship.^[8]

Within Hoggart's major work, The Uses of Literacy, he laments the loss of an authentic working class popular culture in Britain, and denounces the imposition of a mass culture by means of advertising, media and Americanisation. He argues against the concept of 'the masses' which he claims is both condescending and elitist. Later referring to this change in cultural production as "massification" and saying it 'colonized local communities and robbed them of their distinctive features'^[3][9]

Whereas the Frankfurt School exhorted the values of high culture, The Birmingham School have attempted to bring high culture back down to real life whilst avoiding moral relativism.^[1][10][11]

Within more recent history, Marxist cultural analysis has critiqued post modernism and identity politics (also known as recognition politics), claiming that redistributive politics should retain prominence within their discourse.^{[12][13][14][15]} Prominent in the construction of a oppressor-oppressed narrative analysis of culture is the concept of intersectionality, drawing various aspects of perceived identity in terms of modes of discrimination and privilege.

While the term "cultural Marxism" has been used generally to discuss the application of Marxist ideas in the cultural field, the variant term "Cultural Marxism" generally refers to an antisemitic conspiracy theory. According to this view, the "Cultural Marxists", originating with the Frankfurt School, represent one side of a culture war that seeks systematically to undermine and destroy Western culture and social traditions through intellectual and academic activity.^[16][17] As articulated in the 1990s, the conspiracy means to replace traditionalist conservatism and Christianity with the counterculture of the 1960s to promote social changes such as racial multiculturalism, multi-party progressive politics and political correctness in language.^[18][19]

In Norway, Anders Behring Breivik quoted the conspiracy usage of "Cultural Marxism" in his political manifesto 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, which he emailed to 77 people just 90 minutes before killing 77 people in his bomb and gun attacks in Oslo and on Utøya.^{[20][21][22][23]} In more mainstream political parlance, Cultural Conservatives have identified "Cultural Marxism" as the theoretical basis for aspects of cultural liberalism.^{[24][25][26][27][28]}

• Critical theory
• Culture war
• Media Literacy
• Mass communication
• Cultural studies
• The Birmingham School
• The Frankfurt School
• Encoding/decoding model of communication
• Marxist humanism

• Mendenhall, Allen: 'Cultural Marxism Is Real': The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, January 4, 2019