Editors’ Introduction: Marxism and Cultural Studies (original) (raw)

Marxist Traditions in Cultural Studies

2018

Cultural studies seeks to understand and explain how culture relates to the larger society and draws on social theory, philosophy, history, linguistics, communication, semiotics, media studies, and more to assess and evaluate mass media and everyday cultural practices. Since its inception in 1960s Britain, cultural studies has had recognizable and recurring interactions with Marxism, most clearly in culturalist renderings along a spectrum of tensions with political economy approaches. Marxist traditions and inflections appear in the seminal works of Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, work on the culture industry inspired by the Frankfurt School in 1930s Germany, challenges by Stuart Hall and others to the structuralist theories of Louis Althusser, and writings on consciousness and social change by Georg Lukács. Perhaps the most pronounced indication of Marxist influences on cultural studies appears in the multiple and diverse interpretations of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Cultural studies, including critical theory, has been invigorated by Marxism, even as a recurring critique of economic determinism appears in most investigations and analyses of cultural practices. Marxism has no authoritative definition or application. Nonetheless, Marxism insists on materialism as the precondition for human life and development, opposing various idealist conceptions whether religious or philosophical that posit magical, suprahuman interventions that shape humanity or assertions of consciousness, creative genius, or timeless universals that supersede any particular historical conjuncture. Second, Marxism finds material reality, including all forms of human society and culture, to be historical phenomenon. Humans are framed by their conditions, and in turn, have agency to make social changing using material, knowledge, and possibilities within concrete historical conditions. For Marxists, capitalist society can best be historically and materially understood as social relations of production of society based on labor power and capitalist private ownership of the means of production. Wages paid labor are less than the value of goods and services produced. Capitalist withhold their profits from the value of goods and services produced. Such social relations organize individuals and groups into describable and manifest social classes, that are diverse and unstable but have contradictory interests and experiences. To maintain this social order and its rule, capitalists offer material adjustments, political rewards, and cultural activities that complement the social arrangements to maintain and adjust the dominant social order. Thus, for Marxists, ideologies arise in uneasy tandem with social relations of power. Ideas and practices appear and are constructed, distributed, and lived across society. Dominant ideologies parallel and refract conflictual social relations of power. Ideologies attune to transforming existing social relations may express countervailing views, values, and expectations. In sum, Marxist historical materialism finds that culture is a social product, social tool, and social process resulting from the construction and use by social groups with diverse social experiences and identities, including gender, race, social class, and more. Cultures have remarkably contradictory and hybrid elements creatively assembled from materially present social contradictions in unequal societies, ranging from reinforcement to resistance against constantly adjusting social relations of power. Five elements appear in most Marxist renditions on culture: materialism, the primacy of historical conjunctures, labor and social class, ideologies refracting social relations, and social change resulting from competing social and political interests.

Bad Marxism: Capitalism and Cultural Studies

2004

'Hutnyk packs more dynamite in his sentences than any other writer I know.' Amitava Kumar, Penn State University Cultural Studies commonly claims to be a radical discipline. This book thinks that's a bad assessment. Cultural theorists love to toy with Marx, but critical thinking seems to fall into obvious traps. After an introduction which explains why the 'Marxism' of the academy is unrecognisable and largely unrecognised in anti-capitalist struggles, Bad Marxism provides detailed analyses of Cultural Studies' cherished moves by holding fieldwork, archives, empires, hybrids and exchange up against the practical criticism of anti-capitalism. Engaging with the work of key thinkers: Jacques Derrida, James Clifford, Gayatri Spivak, Georges Bataille, Homi Bhabha, Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, Hutnyk concludes by advocating an open Marxism that is both pro-party and pro-critique, while being neither dogmatic, nor dull.

Introduction: Cultural Studies, Marxism and the Exile of Aesthetics

Open Cultural Studies

To reflect on the relationship between "cultural studies" and "aesthetics" is to master the art of holding two opposing insights in mind at once. In theory, at least as set out by some of cultural studies' leading lights, the aesthetic is bound up with forms of privilege, mysticism and elitism that are anathema to the key critical currents in the field. In practice, however, aesthetic engagement and aesthetic evaluation remain popular tools of the critical trade. Cultural studies, it seems, does not "do" aesthetics-except, of course, when it always does.1 And this constitutive inconsistency has deep (inter)disciplinary roots. While clearly a function of cultural studies' repudiation of philosophical aesthetics and received notions of high culture, cultural studies' fraught relationship with the aesthetic is also a legacy of the field's fraught relationship with Marxist cultural theory, a diverse body of scholarship with a long history of politically-and historicallyengaged forms of aesthetic analysis. The theme of 'capitalist aesthetics' that frames this issue, then, is dual in its critical affordances. On the one hand, it points forward, providing a glimpse of what cultural studies might look like if it more explicitly embraced aesthetic attention and aesthetic discrimination. On the other, it points backward, inviting us to trace existing histories of contact and divergence between cultural studies and an array of critical practices that have acknowledged the significance of form, sensation and judgment in shaping the political and social meaning of everyday cultural experiences. Parallel Histories "Aesthetics" has not always been a pejorative term in cultural studies circles. For Raymond Williams, a foundational figure in the field, the aesthetic named a key area of critical concern that spoke to both the experiences of everyday people and the political possibilities of form (Bérubé 9-16; Gilbert, "Cultural Studies and Anti-Capitalism" 181-4; Williams, Marxism and Literature 151-158). Yet at least as early as the 1980s-that moment when cultural studies made its "full appearance on the intellectual scene [as] an important, ongoing approach to the study of culture" (Szeman et al. xx)-a clear anti-aesthetic position began to crystallise. The position was on full display by the late 1980s and early '90s, with the formative Urbana-Champaign conferences and the influential mega-anthologies to which they gave rise. In the first of those anthologies, 1988's Marxism and Interpretation of Culture, the term "aesthetic" receives only passing mention from Franco Moretti and Fredric Jameson, while Michèle Barrett's contribution foregrounds the term only to forsake the concept, characterizing the rise of cultural studies as the "marginalization of aesthetic questions in the interpretation of culture" (701). By the time of the field-defining second anthology, 1992's Cultural Studies (Grossberg et al.), just four years later, this indifference towards aesthetics 1 While recognising that cultural studies has diverse and complex origins, we are focusing exclusively on the Birmingham and post-Birmingham manifestations of the field as the key loci for discussions regarding aesthetics, Marxism and cultural studies.

Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies: Politics, Theory and Intervention

“[Post-Marxism Versus Cultural Studies is] the first sustained scholarly assessment of the scandal of post-Marxism [which] traces the struggle – both intellectual and political – of academic Marxism to keep its footing on the long march through the institution. As the “versus” that hinges his title suggests, neither post-Marxism nor cultural studies remain unscathed by Bowman’s staging of this face off. Post-Marxism versus Cultural Studies rewards the serious reader concerned to come to terms with the discursive politics of the contemporary university”. John Mowitt (Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota). “This is an ambitious book which will make a significant impact in […] an exciting field which is beginning to open up a sustained ‘thinking about’ politics from a post-structuralist perspective”. Martin McQuillan (Professor of Cultural Theory and Analysis, University of Leeds) Contents Acknowledgements Preface 1 Cultural Studies and post-Marxism 1.1 Introduction: Of Deconstruction into Politics 1.2 The Discourse of post-Marxism 1.3 The Text of Cultural Studies 1.4 The Problem with the Text 1.5 The Institutional Articulation and Dissemination of Texts and Discourses 2 Cultural Studies versus post-Marxism 2.1 Two Texts of Cultural Studies 2.2 Stuart Hall’s Closure versus post-Marxist Discourse 2.3 The Political Disciplinary Object 2.4 Textual versus Discourse Analysis 2.5 Cultural Studies versus Political Analysis 2.6 The Object of the Subject 2.7 Deconstruction versus Marxism 3. Theory versus Practice 3.1 Practice versus Theory 3.2 Theory versus Practice 3.3 Post-Marxist Theory and Practice 3.4 Banal Pragmatism versus High Theory 3.5 The (dis)articulation of Theory and Practice 3.6 Knaves versus Fools 3.7 Investments and Institutions 4. Post-Marxist Cultural Studies’ Theory, Politics and Intervention 4.1 Relations and Effects 4.2 The Necessity of Articulation 4.3 The Necessity of Institution 4.4 The (Dis)Articulation of post-Marxism and Politics 4.5 For a New Intervention 4.6 The Necessity of Deconstruction Bibliography Index

Fundamental issues in cultural-historical research: the Marxist connection

The paper considers the relationship between current research in the cultural-historical and activity theory traditions and the methods and perspective of Marx. While acknowledging the positive contribution of 'Activity Theory' in its various versions to our critical understanding of social practices and their interconnections in today's world, the paper also notes the disappearance in such work of conceptual distinctions that are fundamental to Marx's own economic and political orientation. The paper invites further discussion of the relevance of Marx's work in the social and intellectual struggles taking place today.

THE IMPACT OF WESTERN MARXISM ON CULTURAL STUDIES

2023

Marxism is an ideology that is mixed with many currents of thought. It has been embodied as a form of government in various forms in different geographies and has evolved under the influence of cultures and thinkers in the geographies where it was shaped. In many countries where the working class did not directly take power, it also influenced the practices of bourgeois-democratic governments in capitalist countries. It had an impact on political movements such as social democracy. In addition, the struggles of the working class have influenced many practices, from the education system to the insurance system, from eight-hour working hours and holidays to equal voting rights and anti-fascist laws. Marxism, an ideology that directly influenced the social sciences, apart from the political openings and new perspectives it caused, is one of the waves of ideas that most affected the cultural structure regarding ideologies. As Adorno emphasized, science needs the disobedient, and the pioneers of many intellectual movements that have had a significant impact on cultural life are Marxists or people who look at life from a perspective close to this perspective. This study will explain the influence of the representatives of British cultural studies, an essential link of Western Marxism, on Marxism and their contributions to social sciences.

Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies

Many different versions of cultural studies have emerged in the past decades. While during its dramatic period of global expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, cultural studies was often identified with the approach to culture and society developed by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England, their sociological, materialist, and political approaches to culture had predecessors in a number of currents of cultural Marxism. Many 20 th century Marxian theorists ranging from employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life. Traditions of cultural Marxism are thus important to the trajectory of cultural studies and to understanding its various types and forms in the present age.

Intersectionality and Marxism: A Critical Historiography

In recent years, there has been renewed interest in conceptualising the relationship between oppression and capitalism as well as intense debate over the precise nature of this relationship. No doubt spurred on by the financial crisis, it has become increasingly clear that capitalism, both historically and in the twenty-first century, has had particularly devastating effects for women and people of colour. Intersectionality, which emerged in the late twentieth century as a way of addressing the relationship between race, gender, sexuality and class, has submitted orthodox Marxism to critique for its inattention to the complex dynamics of various social locations; in turn Marxist thinkers in the twenty-first century have engaged with intersectionality, calling attention to the impoverished notion of class and capitalism on which it relies. As intersectionality constitutes perhaps the most common way that contemporary activists and theorists on the left conceive of identity politics, an analysis of intersectionality's relationship to Marxism is absolutely crucial for historical materialists to understand and consider. This paper looks at the history of intersectionality's and Marxism's critiques of one another in order to ground a synthesis of the two frameworks. It argues that in the twenty-first century, we need a robust, Marxist analysis of capitalism, and that the only robust account of capitalism is one articulated intersectionally, one which treats class, race, gender and sexuality as fundamental to capitalist accumulation. Keywords Marxism – Marxist feminism – intersectionality – decolonisation – identity politics

Open Cultural Studies 2018; 2: 797-804

This essay proposes a reading of Marx's Capital that considers the correlation between life and labour, between material existence and productive activity, as essential to the book's critical project. It argues that there is a critical and paradoxical moment in the plexus of this relationship that academic discourse should consider: if Capital argues that capitalism constitutes a system of organization of life, inscribing human labour as labour power, that is, as commodity or market goods, then how can we extract critical labour itself from this totalizing structure? In other words, what kind of labour is critical labour and what function should it represent in a world in which all labour would already be inscribed within the logic of capital? Drawing on biographical, anecdotic and circumstantial considerations about Marx's labour while writing Capital, this essay traces the conditions of existence of the author and creates a reading position that explores the relationship between life and work, between Marx and Capital, and thus questions critical labour itself as a productive activity and the material life it contains. Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc. Frederick Engels' Speech at the Grave of Karl Marx, 1883 I would like to propose a reading of Marx's Capital that challenges, a century and a half after its publication, a certain analytical rigidity that still operates in academic discourse when confronting this book. This reading addresses the correlation between life and work, between material existence and labour, as an essential moment in the critical project the book articulates. There is a paradoxical moment in the plexus of this relationship that academic discourse should consider: if, in Capital, capitalism constitutes an organisational system of life, inscribing human labour as labour power, as commodity, then how do we extract criticism itself from this totalizing drift? How do we extricate that particular mode of labour which consists of producing a space (symbolic, practical) of revolutionary de-inscription? In a more precise way: what type of labour is critical labour and what function should it represent in a world in which all productive activity would already be inscribed within the logic of the capital? Along this line of thought, I will outline a series of biographical, anecdotic and circumstantial considerations that, put in a certain critical perspective, are ultimately useful to position a general reading context for this book which is so essential to critical thought. This context will allow me to confront a certain canonical sensibility that comes from a "materiality" irreducible to the text and that implies the organization of the conditions of existence of the author. In other words, of someone who produces and puts among men something they would not have, but on condition of pure and simple "expenditure of human