MARXISM
With Marxism we are talking about popular cultural representations
of social class and of capitalism itself.
Capitalism and Needs
Marxism
is a critique of capitalism. I’m sure you’ve heard all sorts of things about
Marxism. What is important to remember as you read this is that most of Marx’s
basic ideas (that he formulates inDas Kapital (1867) are ideas that he takes from the kinds
of classical economists most Republicans would point to as being correct. Marx
and Republicans would describe the same kind of economic system. They would
just disagree about whether that system is a good thing or a bad thing. It is
the whole communist revolution thing that bothers people. I will address that
in the last paragraph of the text.
The first thing to understand about Marxism is what capitalism means. Capitalism is not the same
thing as a free market economy. People have traded goods and services with each
other for thousands of years. What makes capitalism different is this idea of
labor. In a capitalist system you do not own the fruits of your own labor. When
you work in an auto factory, you and your fellow workers do not own the car you
produce. The corporation does. This is very different than a weaver a few
thousand years ago who might have grown cotton and sold the fabric s/he made
from it. When the corporation sells a car it pays you a set wage and keeps the
profit. It then uses that profit to advertise, buy other car companies, etc. It
rarely uses it to increase your wages. Not only do you not own the product you
make, but you also don’t own the means of production. For most of us, if we get
fed up at work, we can’t just quit and make cars or whatever on our own.
Commodity fetishism describes the way those goods we produce through our labor become
the most important things in our society. Lury (1996)
argue that capitalist goods “not only hide but come to stand in for or replace
relationships between people” (p. 41). Does shopping make you feel better when
you are sad?
Fetish is a term taken from psychoanalysis, where it refers to misplaced
sexual desire. For example, people with a foot fetish have transferred their
erotic desires from their “proper” place to the foot. Psychoanalysts take the
idea of a fetish from a simplistic understanding of what they called
“primitive” cultures. A small statuette of a deity, for example, was considered
a fetish because spiritual feelings became focused on the on the object itself,
not the abstract deity. This is not an accurate interpretation of the religious
practices that incorporate such “fetishes,” but from a Judeo-Christian
perspective prohibiting idolatry and the worship of “graven images,” such a
religious practice was indicative of a misplaced spirituality.
From a Marxist perspective, commodities are fetishes because our
desire for them operates in such a way as to obscure the actual situation of
their production. Put another way, our desire for products ends up expressing a
desire for the entire capitalist system. As we continue to want more and more
goods, our desires can only be met by the continuing operation of the
capitalist system. We actually just want the process of more. What are we
doing, for example, with all the action figures in boxes to preserve their
worth that we will nevertheless NEVER sell?
(http://realmenrealdads.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/action_figure_102.jpg)
A commodity is something of value in an
economic system. So when you hear about “the commodities markets” on the news
or in movies like Trading
Places, those markets are about the exchange of products that have some
kind of economic value like oranges and corn and oil. Marx points out that in a capitalist system commodities have a strange kind of
valuation. The price of oranges, for example, is not dependent on use value, or, how much we
might actually get by eating the orange. It is not as if we value food based on
its intrinsic vitamin and calorie content. Oranges go up in price when there is
a freeze and there is a shortage. We value commodities based on exchange value, or what we can
get for it in a trade. So when date farmers or the owners of diamond mines
hoard their product to drive up prices we have all bought into exchange value.
Similarly, the actual use value of a Barry Bonds rookie baseball card is small.
If I just wanted his picture and the statistics on the back, I could get that
from Sports Illustrated. I
might collect baseball cards for their presumably high exchange value.
This whole system leads Marxists to argue that capitalism works by
enforcing false needs through advertising (Adorno, 1991). Lury (1996)
summarizes the way we are taught this in advertising and marketing class. It is
branding. You don't sell the car, you sell the lifestyle. You don’t sell the
steak, you sell the sizzle. You don’t sell beer. You sell . . . ..
If
we value things based on potential for exchange, we get out of touch with what
we really need. For example, my brother always buys the most expensive stereo
equipment available. He assumes that the price (its measure of exchange value)
is the ultimate determinant of how valuable it will be to him. Often he gets
the same or even less actual productive use out of his equipment than people
who bought cheaper models. We begin to fetishize these commodities, and this fetishization takes all sorts of different forms. We begin
to want to have expensive things just because: because it is a sign of success,
or to impress the neighbors, etc.
Commodity fetishism means not only is there mystification of real value (or, the obscuring of
reality), there is a mystification of the capitalist system that produces the
commodities. Companies need to advertise to get you to continually buy stuff.
My old car works well enough for my uses, but the commercials work hard to get
me to buy into the commodity values important to the car companies. For them,
their cars are valued through the exchange (sale) that makes them money. Those
commercials work hard to make me fetishize their commodities, to desire them
without regard to what my potential uses are. The classic phrase is the tagline
at the end of this GMC commercial:
This all is a vicious circle. As I splurge more and more on things
I can barely afford, I need to work harder and harder to pay for it all. I end
up working more hours or taking a second job to produce more commodities for
the company. For Marx, as a worker and as a consumer, I am enslaved to the
system. But the system works to make me think I am not. The Frankfurt School
Marxists, like Adorno, (German Marxists who fled from
Hitler in the 1930s and came to New York) developed this idea into what was
called false consciousness.
I have false consciousness if I believe that something that is hurting me is
actually to my benefit. For example, if I am a slave, if I am convinced that
the system is actually good for me, I am under false consciousness.
This kind of false consciousness works on a larger scale too. Not
only do I think I need things that I do not, I probably think that the whole
capitalist system does me good. This is the function of ideology. In
Frankfurt School Marxism, especially, ideology is a false version of the way
the world works. It is a false vision which we are trained to believe to (1)
keep us working to make more commodities for the capitalists, (2) keep us
continually buying more and more commodities, and (3) keep us from revolting or
challenging the system. A good example of this (and of false consciousness) is
how, when polled, most Americans consider themselves to be middle class. Even
people who make below the government poverty line have been known to label
themselves as middle class. Why do we all want to label ourselves as middle
class? Perhaps because people in the middle class are seen as
hardworking, movin-on-up kinds of people. We
want to believe in the “American Dream,” no matter how much our job conditions
might reveal to us that it might be impossible in our case.
Another way ideology is defined in this kind of Marxism is that it
is the ideas of the ruling class (the people who run the corporations and
businesses who own the products of our labor). So, for Marx, the base, or the economic system of
a society, determines the superstructure,
or the system of social and cultural ideas. A capitalist society creates a
certain kind of cultural ideology because that kind of culture is necessary to
keep the structure the way it is. Most Americans believe that they can someday
make themselves rich as a result of hard work. For most of us, this is simply
not true. By definition, not all of us can be rich (or there would be no one to
do the labor of making the commodities). But we have bought into the culture
which says that we can.
I think it is easy to agree with the description we have just
presented. Marx, who was very upset at capitalism, hoped that if we educated
everyone about the way the system works we could have a revolution and get a
more fair communist society. The problem is that Marx’s vision of a pure
communist society seems impossible to achieve (as we can see in the
authoritarian societies created in the so-called communist revolutions in
Russia and China). Capitalist society seems to perpetuate itself. Even if we
could have a revolution (which seems unlikely), it is unlikely that the inequality
at the heart of the capitalist system could ever be done away with, whatever
the constitution of a society.
But for Marxists today, the idea of just sitting by and letting
the capitalist system work its way on teenage girls making soccer balls for less
than a dollar a day, on middle aged men who were downsized and now can’t hold a
job, on students like you who have to go into debt to go to school to get a job
to make enough money to stay self-sufficient, is unacceptable. The question is
in what ways we can improve the way the system works.
Capitalism
In terms of the study of popular culture, critics look at the ways
in which the pop culture superstructure works in ways that help prop up this
system and continue to get us to accept the way things are. For example, in
most recent films where capitalism is critiqued, like Tommy Boy or In
Good Company or Thank You For Smoking or Michael
Clayton, there is a clear bad guy in the company. And it seems as we could
just get nice guys like Chris Farley or Dennis Quaid in charge, things would be
okay. It is a bad person, not the whole system that is at fault.
This
clip from In Good Company shows
Dennis Quaid, in his “real man” brown sportcoat,
standing up to a know-nothing CEO. As the music gets more nostalgic, he speaks
about simply capitalist virtues like making simple products for simple people.
The whole clip tells us that capitalism is fine and that what is wrong with capitalism is simply a few greedy jerks at the
top who don’t get it. But what if, really, that’s all capitalism is? That’s
never the way the story goes. We wouldn’t expect it to.
Popular culture, in telling dramatic stories, tends to want to
provide a bad guy. It is difficult to tell a story people will watch about the
flaws of “the entire system.” The closest we get is this moment from 1976’s Network. The late 70s was perhaps the
heyday for large-scale indicts of the entire system. Nixon, Vietnam,
stagflation, the gas crisis, etc. had made people feel exceptionally powerless,
perhaps even more so than today. This is the capitalist sermon that the movie
wishes to mock.
Network,
for all its critique, falls into another key trap of capitalist ideology,
though. One of capitalism’s defenses is that it is the only system that will
ever work because greed makes it inevitable. Thus, the communist party
agitators are quickly sucked in to corporate sliminess.
(http://www.gonemovies.com/www/Pictures/Pictures/DuvallNetwork7.jpg)
Here,
communist leader Laureen Hobbs starts arguing with
the television network lawyers about profit sharing percentages for their
proposed TV show. William Holden’s character says, late in the movie, that she
was “destroyed” by television.
This
kind of skepticism about the ability of people to claim to abandon capitalism
is a common thematic in popular culture. It is so strong that any character
expressing a desire to get out of the system is automatically a bit suspect for
us. In 2012’s Wanderlust, the hippie
commune is, of course, highly suspect. It must be reintegrated into capitalism
by then end to succeed. The characters who are the most “hippie” are of course,
the most problematic. In this clip, you can see Alan Alda’s
character begin to not make sense.
Later,
it is revealed that he sneaks out of the vegetarian compound to eat steaks.
Justin Theroux’s character, who rails against money
and “fax machines” and wants all things shared is really, in the end just after
Jennifer Aniston. He sells everyone out.
This
is the key representational problem, then. Capitalism is almost always
portrayed as a good thing that only goes bad when bad people are in charge. Anticapitalism is impossible, thus ONLY bad or naïve people
are ever attracted to it. In how many movies is the government seen as evil or
corrupt, trying to hurt individual people, unredeemable, really, by any
individual effort because it is just too big? This kind of popular culture
pattern creates a certain kind of political effect.
Horatio Alger
Hortio Alger wrote books that created the “pull yourself up by your
bootstraps” mythology.
(http://www.washburn.edu/sobu/broach/strive.jpg)
This
has become the classic American version of success. Even though we know that
luck and connections matter, we tell ourselves that it was all from effort.
Some of this is to obscure the privilege we might have. If we believe it was
all our own work, not the family wealth (even a little bit of it), say, as a
result of race privilege (see the “Race Theory” guide), then we can feel easily
good about it. And it is all was our own work, or our grandpa’s work, then we
can easily judge all for whom it doesn’t work out as lazy or problematic. Their
success is their problem, not an inevitable outgrowth of the system. But the
dirty secret of capitalism is that there HAVE to be the poor and unsuccessful.
The system is a hierarchy. By definition everyone cannot be a CEO. But it helps
to think that those who didn’t make it are at personal fault.
This
mythology is more complex, as an individual character’s struggle to succeed can
still have obstacles. The character’s faith and ability is tested. But we see
those as individual, not societal tests.
The
classic recent example is The Pursuit of Happyness (2006):
In
that film, hard work (and the ability to keep running after
being hit by a car) pay off. In others, some innate ability is key, as Rees (1999) sees in Good Will Hunting. Of course, in that film, Matt Damon’s
character is a secret genius. Not all of us have that, which might be a
critique. But to make sure he has to work, all of his work is emotional stuff
done with his therapist:
Representations
Critics
also look at the ways pop culture serves the class interests of those in power
in a capitalist system, the bourgeoisie,
at the expense of those of us who do the work, the proletariat. The poor are often portrayed as
lazy or tasteless or trashy. Often the rich are too, and both rich and poor are
sometimes saintly, but the middle class/working class is almost always shown in
the best light, as “normal.”
Except
for Annie, where the rich and the
poor each teach each other something valuable, usually there are key flaws in
one or the other (of course, without good ol’
secretary Grace Farrell, none of it would have happened).
(http://img2-2.timeinc.net/ew/dynamic/imgs/090608/Annie-Albert-Finney_l.jpg)
So
none of this is exceptionally clear, especially because there needs to be some
kind of conflict or class mobility issues to be able to tell an entertaining
story, but there are general trends.
There
is also the hazy phenomenon by which most characters are given a kind of
unbelievably typical middle class status, as on a show like Friends. Everyone can magically afford
great apartments while apparently sitting around in a coffee shop all
afternoon:
(http://chinatravels.tripod.com/webonmediacontents/Friends.jpg?1342768432954)
Class
is often erased into this giant American Dream of having enough. TV and movies
become a dreamworld where money and class seem to not
exist. Add to that the generations of workplace sitcoms, and there is a
tremendous fantasy of nonwork, all the while other
messages tell us that hard work is the defining attribute of a good American.
by Steve Vrooman, revised March 2013
References
Adorno, T.
(1991). The culture industry. London: Routledge.
Lury, C.
(1996). Consumer culture. NJ: Rutgers UP.
Marx, K. (1867). Das
Kapital. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/
Rees, R. (1999). Good Will Hunting or Wild goose chase:
Masculinities and the myth of class mobility. Journal
of Narrative Theory, 29, 228-240.