Traditional Marxism
Traditional Marxism -- concerned with how novels get published and how they deal with different classes,grasping its forms, styles and meanings as the products of its socio-historico-economic conditions
Tradition of Marxism:
- Marx and Vulgar Marxism--reflectionism, (the failure of the second international 1914) //Soviet socialist realism
- Hegelian turn (e.g. Lukacs)—relative autonomy, "reflection" of "the full process of life" ((R) Williams)
- Frankfurt School—views on modernism and cultural criticism (Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht)
- Poststructuralist (scientific) turn—Althusser, ((R) Eagleton)
- American (F. Jameson) and British Marxism (R. Williams and T. Eagleton)
- Post-Marxist (E. Laclau and C Mouffe)—against its totalizing schema
Two statements by Marx--
- Hegel's Aesthetics
- It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. (Consciousness does not determine life; life determines consciousness.)
- In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. (the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 1859)
- The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various way; the point is to change it.
Material determinism
---Hegel: the world is governed by thought, that the process of history is the gradual dialectical unfolding of the laws of Reason, and that material existence is the expression of an immaterial spiritual existence.
Marx reverses this formulation and argues that all mental (ideological) systems are the products of real social and economic existence. The material interests of the dominant social class determine how people see human existence.
the relations of exploitation and domination which govern the social and economic order of a particular phase of human history will in some sense 'determine' the whole cultural life of the society.
the ecnomic aspect--as the ultimate determinant
art and lit--relatively autonomous
the superstructure (ideology, politics); the base (socio-economic relations)
culture is inseparable from the historical conditions in which human beings create their material lives
Key Words:
- Means of production -- 製造媒介（工具﹚。For example, machines as the means of production of the capitalist, who uses them to increase
production output and gain more profits (surplus values). In a broader sense, media and computer can be seen as two major means of production in our age of Information; those who own them, or know well how to use them, get to hold power over those who don't.
- Modes of production -- 製造形式。In the industrial society, the major mode of production is mechanical reproduction; in our "post-industrial" age of ours, it is electronic reproduction.
- Relations of production -- 製造關係 e.g. between the capitalist class who owns those means of production, and the proletarian class whose labour-power the capitalist buys for profit. For Marxists, the dominant relation of production in a capitalist society is exploitation.
superstructure
the superstructure (ideology, politics); the base (socio-economic relations)
culture is inseparable from the historical conditions in which human beings create their material lives
1. forms of law and politics, a certain kind of state, whose essential function is to legitimate the power of the social class which owns the means of economic production
2. certain 'definite forms of social consciousness'--ideology
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