KEY PRINCIPLES USED IN MARXISM:Materialism, Class Struggle, Superstructure

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Theories of Communication MCM 511

LESSON 25

KEY PRINCIPLES USED IN MARXISM

When we talk of Marxism we should also be clear about some important principles used in Marxism

very frequently and which are the basis of understanding Marxism. These principles will also be most

useful for the media analyst and for the understanding of different mass communication theories related

to Marxism.

Materialism

Ideology

False consciousness

Class Conflict

Materialism

When we talk about Marxist thought being materialistic, we are using the term in a special way not as

it is traditionally used in the United States, where it suggests a craving for money and the things that

money can buy. Let's first discuss this in the light of the quotation of crucial importance from Marx's

Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political economy (1964)

"The mode of production of material life determines the general character of the social, political, and

spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the

contrary, their social being determines their consciousness."

So For Marxists, materialism refers to a conception of history and the way society organizes itself. He

suggests that beneath the superficial randomness of things there is a kind of inner logic at work.

Everything is shaped, ultimately, by the economic system of a society, which in subtle ways affects the

ideas that individuals have, ideas that are instrumental in determining the kinds of arrangements people

will make with one another, the institutions they well establish and so on.

Marx also wrote in The German Ideology `1964'

`The production of ideas of conception of consciousness is at first directly interwoven with the material

activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental

intercourse of men, appear at his stage as the direct efflux from their material behavior. The same

applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion,

metaphysics of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions , ideas etc- real, active men, as they

are conditioned by the definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse

corresponding to these, up to it furthest forms.'

This passage is important because it brings people into the picture and suggests that although

consciousness is socially produced it is always filtered through the minds of real, live active men and

women and is not something that works automatically. We have now, our first important insight

namely that our ideas are not entirely our own, that knowledge is social.

Economic Determination

Everything in life is determined by capital. The flow of money affects our relations with other persons,

with nature and with the world. Our thoughts and goals are the products of property structures. Every

cultural activity (culture in its widest sense) is reduced to a direct or indirect expression of some

preceding and controlling economic content. Men find themselves born in a process independent of their

will, they cannot control it, they can seek only to understand it and guide their actions accordingly.

Class Struggle

The dynamic of a society can only be understood in terms of a system where the dominant ideas are

formulated by the ruling class to secure its control over the working class. The latter, exploited by the

former, will eventually try to change this situation (through revolution), producing its own ideas as well

as its own industrial and political organization.

Theories of Communication MCM 511

The base and the superstructure

Marx's deterministic economic conception divides the society in two layers or levels: base and

superstructure.

Base

The first, upon which everything grows, is composed by the material production, money, objects, the

relations of production and the stage of development of productive forces. The overt and tangible world

plus the economic relations that capital generates.

Superstructure

What Marx has described as the `base' represents the economic system found in a given society. This

economic system, or mode of production, influences, in profound and complicated ways, the

superstructure, or institutions and values, of a given society. Capitalism is not only an economic system

but also something that affects attitudes, values, personality types and culture in general. It means that

how ideas are transmitted to human beings- through the institutions, philosophical system, religious

organizations and arts found in a given society at a given time- that is, through the superstructure. So

superstructure are the institutions like legal system philosophy, religion, ideas (educational), Arts

(media), culture.

False Consciousness And Ideology

It is important for the ruling class to affect people's consciousness by giving them certain ideas; in this

way the wealthy, who benefit most from the social arrangements in a capitalist country maintain the

status quo. According to Marx the ideas of a given age are those promulgated and popularized by the

ruling class in its own interest.

Generally speaking, then the ideas people have are the ideas that the ruling class wants them to have.

The ruling class believes its own messages .This is because it has within itself a group of

conceptualizing ideologists who make it their chief source of livelihood to develop and perfect the

illusions of the class about itself. The ruling class according to this theory propagates an ideology that

justifies its status and makes it difficult for ordinary people to recognize. This notion that the masses of

people are being manipulated and exploited by the ruling class is one of the central arguments of

modern Marxist cultural analysis. According to Marxist approach the mass media and popular culture

are centrally important in the spread of false consciousness, in leading people to believe that `whatever

is, is right'.

Alienation

The term alienation suggests separation and distance; it contains within it the word alien, a stranger in a

society who has no connections with other, no ties, or liens of any sort. According to Marx , capitalism

may be able to produce goods and materialist abundance for large numbers of people but it necessarily

generates alienation, and all classes suffer from this, whether they recognize it or not.

There is a link between alienation and consciousness. People who live in a state of alienation suffer

from `false consciousness that takes the form of the ideology that dominates their thinking ' Besides this

, alienation may be said to unconscious, in that people do not recognize that they are in fact alienated.

One reason for this is that alienation is so all pervasive that it is invisible and hard to take hold of.

Thus people become separated or estranged from their work, from friends, from themselves and from

life. A person's work, which is central to identity and sense of self, becomes separated from him or her

and ends up actually as a destructive force. Workers experience themselves as objects, things that are

acted upon, and not as subjects, active forces in the world. The things produce become `commodities,'

objects separated, somehow, from the workers' labor. As people become increasingly more alienated,

they become the prisoners of their alienated needs and end up, as Marx puts it, `the self-consciousness

and self-acting commodity.'

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