Moved by a similar preoccupation with culture and society, another train of thought originated in the 19th century also made sense of human affairs in a comprehensive spirit, yet in a manner radically different from Arnold’s elitist position. Although its scope reaches far beyond cultural studies, Karl Marx’s historical materialism hits upon the question of culture with remarkable strength, in ways that proved significantly influential for the study of popular music and urban culture in the
41 Arnold’s work will be the object of attention and criticism until the end of the 20th century at least (see
20th and 21st century. Roughly speaking, this philosophical trend synthesises aspects of the German idealism and humanist materialism towards a comprehensive apparatus of social critique. This section will focus on its basic tenets, in light of key idealist notions as drawn by Marx from Hegel’s thought.
Marx opens his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy ([1859] 2009) referring to his study on the Hegelian philosophy of law, where he concludes that legal relations and political forms cannot be understood in terms of the development of Geist, but rather in relation to the material conditions of life. At this point, it is convenient to clarify the way in which this controversial Hegelian term—Geist—will be understood henceforth. Also at play in Kant’s third Critique as the faculty for the presentation of aesthetic ideas (Kant [1790] 2000: §49), Geist takes up a much wider scope in Hegel’s work, where it nominates a manner of general consciousness, spirit, or mind that sets humankind on a universal metaphysical footing without disregard to its individual manifestations. Importantly, Geist qua consciousness serves an epistemological purpose as regards the ‘self-conscious knowing subject’ of Hegelian idealism (Solomon 1970) 42
In that connection, it is fruitful to invoke Hegel’s notion of culture—Bildung43—
which refers to the self-development of Geist as constitutive to the life process of all spirited entities, be they individual or collective (Wood 2005, see Hegel [1807] 1988: ¶32ff). As far as human communities are concerned, Hegel’s culture speaks of ‘society that emerges from legal status, in which subjects objectify their individuality and thereby produce an actual social world through language’ (Burbidge 2001: 48). I suggest
42 Among other theories on the matter, Hegel’s Geist has been said to originate in Kant’s Transcendental Ego (Solomon 1970, see Kant [1781/1787] 1998). To my knowledge, there is no philosophical connection
between Kant’s Geist and Hegel’s homologous.
43 Bildung ‘might be translated as ‘education’, but it could also be rendered, more appropriately in many
reading Marx’s historical materialism from the Hegelian standpoint of objective culture, specifically regarding physical and societal relations.
‘In the social production of their existence’, Marx explains in the preface to the Contribution, ‘men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production’ (Marx [1859] 2009: ¶6). Such material forces comprise ‘means of labour’ (equipment, land, and infrastructure) and ‘labour power’ (ability to work). It is the social relations of production, the philosopher sustains, that make for the base from which the legal and political superstructure of society towers up, for the ‘mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life’ (idem). Briefly, the idea is that consciousness does not determine existence (as German idealism has it), but the other way around. This means, in our reading of Marx, that material life holds sway over the process and objective outcomes of Bildung in a Hegelian sense.
Against this background, social revolution is defined as the moment of conflict between such forces, which occurs when the relations of production between the bourgeoisie (owners of the means of labour) and the proletariat (holders of the labour power) hinder the full productive potential to the detriment of the latter. Such conflict gives the cue to changes in the relational foundation of society, eventually leading to the transformation of the whole (cultural) superstructure. Therefore, awareness of the relations of production and their actual status is crucial for the dynamics of social life. Later cultural critiques informed by Marxism will draw heavily on this observation and give utmost importance to the problem of opacity in social relations.
In volume one of Capital, Marx states: ‘from the moment that men in any way work for one another, their labour assumes a social form’ (Marx [1867] 2010: Ch.1 §4 ¶2). Opacity becomes fully manifest in the context of capitalist exchange—of wages, prices, and market trade—where the relations of production (who does what for whom) are not perceived as something social but rather as something objective, that is, happening among produced things instead of producing people. In Marx words, ‘the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as […] material relations between persons and social relations between things’ (ibid. ¶6). The kind of socialisation that results from this mode of production necessarily unfolds, following this rationale, on the level of mere exchange value. It is not surprising, then, that people with such a transactional social existence take the exchange value of their labour and its products as intrinsic, though that is actually not the case. Marx finds such value judgements nonsensical:
Exchange value, at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort, a relation constantly changing with time and place. Hence exchange value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e., an exchange value that is inseparably connected with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms (Marx [1867] 2010: Ch.1 §1 ¶5)
The fetish of commodities is the terminology coined by Marx to refer to this unaware attribution of value. Under its rule, the moment of conflict that promotes social change may slip unnoticed, because values and compensations become ‘mystifying’ rather distanced from the straightforward usefulness of labour and its products. For that reason, disproportionate relations of production capable of fettering the productive forces may prevail under the opacity of the social. This dark picture renders the determining relation between base and superstructure upside down. In this case, it is culture (economic, legal, political, or otherwise) that defines social relations and shapes social existence, instead of the other way around. The hope to overcome opacity and the fetish of commodities lies in a robust mode of human consciousness—free, disciplined, and true; non-obtrusive regarding the primacy of the material conditions of life:
The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. This, however, demands for society a certain material ground-work or set of conditions of existence which in their turn are the spontaneous product of a long and painful process of development. (Marx [1867] 2010: Ch.1 §4 ¶16)
This quote brings the argument back to Hegel and culture, this time with an emphasis on its processes instead of its objective articulation. This shift makes room for the semantic nuances of Bildung as education and formation. For Hegel, Bildung is the inner activity through which objects are rationally known in ways that transcend the
immediacy of appearances. The principle behind the process is that true rational cognition does not content itself with the evident insight furnished by the familiarity of the object. Instead, Geist must find itself in the externality of things via the concept, for it is Geist the truth of nature, and the concept the essence of Geist (Hegel [1830] 1959: §§381 and 384). This involves a positive moment of recognition, a negative moment of estrangement, and a positing moment of unity with the object through the concept. Wood explains it eloquently:
What was given immediately as familiar at the start of the process is now an otherness overcome; the object is no longer present in its immediate form, but is now grasped by means of a universal concept produced by the mind [Geist], which therefore recognizes itself in the object (2005: 301)
This is what the freedom of spirit means in the Hegelian tradition: a state in which any reference to the obstructive otherness is discarded by virtue of dialectic activity. Culture is, in this connection, a process towards freedom beyond the positivity of the seemingly obvious, which beginning coincides with the ‘removal from the immediacy of substantial life’ (Hegel [1807] 1988: 5-6, translation mine). Thus conceived, yet with some adjustments, this definition of culture is compatible with what Marx envisions as the remedy to opacity, because its crystallisation would empower human beings as critical agents, free from the ambush of appearances (and therefore of fetishism), attentive to the truth. Only the primacy of consciousness (Geist) over material production (substantial life) would have to be reframed, from the extra-natural self-
identity of an absolute Geist to the mindful human consciousness fully aware of the material social existence it is indebted to. Thus, the idealist tenet of innate true concepts beyond objectivity is replaced by a materialist account that locates universal truth in the factual world shared by everyone.
This Hegelian reading of Marx is helpful to realise why cultural analysts influenced by Marxism are usually concerned about the dangers of false consciousness and cultural hegemony, as well as why they advocate for a critical relation to reality as a cultural stance. It illustrates culture’s wide scope, in connection with education though far beyond educational institutions. It also tells us of its epistemological and ontological proportions. Finally, it makes sense of the quarrel of Marxist cultural theory against reification and commodification. All these tropes come back in the sequel of Marx’s project into the 20th century and onwards—with notable momentum in popular music studies.