Theorising Culture: Marxism

Abstract

Towards the end of his life, irritated by what he considered to be profound misinterpretations of his work, especially by self-proclaimed Marxists, Marx vigorously protested: 'All I know is that I am not a Marxist' (Marx and Engels, 1962, vol. 2, p. 486). And in a similarly iconoclastic spirit, Engels attacked the facile assumption that Marxism was no more than a sophisticated theory of economic and historical determinism: according to the materialist conception of history the ultimately determining element in history is the production of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence, if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure : political forms of the class struggle and its results ... constitutions ... juridicial forms ... philosophical theories, religious views ... exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and, in many cases, preponderate in determining their form. (ibid., p. 48). It is this reciprocal interaction between the economic 'base' and the cultural or ideological 'superstructure' which necessarily results in the specific 'historical event'. But as Engels continued, 'Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it.' The broad tendency of social theory before Marx had been to minimise the role played by economic forces in historical and cultural development in favour of 'ideal' elements, notably political religious and philosophical 1 2 Cultural Theory and the Problem of Modernity ideas. It was as a reaction to this non-materialist perspective that Marx and Engels were led to overstate the constituting role of economic forces and, in their theoretical formulations, to subordinate culture as the realm of the 'ideal', to economic necessity. But, as Engels pointed out, when their analysis moved from the abstractly theoretical and methodological to close, empirical studies of distinct historical periods due weight was always accorded to the 'ideal' elements at work. For in analysing specific historical contexts (especially in Marx's The Class Struggles in France, 1850, and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852) emphasis was given to the active role played by ideas and culture within the economic and political structure. Analysing the revolutionary crises that gripped France in 1848, Marx noted the complex balance of forces at work within both the economic and political structures and the differentiation and plurality of social classes, going on to suggest, in one of his most brilliant passages that Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seemed engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their services and borrow from them names, battle cries and costume in order to present the new scheme of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. (ibid., p. 247)