Marxist critique of the Culture

Industries
 The idea that the mass media and systems
of cultural production have done a great
deal to prevent the collapse of capitalism
predicted by Marx was developed by the
theorists of the Frankfurt School. This
group of intellectuals were active from the
inception of the Frankfurt Institute for Social
Research in 1923 and their work has been
highly influential in Marxist approaches to
culture in capitalist societies.
 Through radio, TV, movies and forms of popular
music like jazz, the expanding culture industries
were disseminating ruling-class ideologies with
greater effect than Marx could have envisaged.
The further development of consumer society in
the twentieth century powerfully aided the process
of working-class incorporation by promoting new
myths of classlessness, and wedded the working
class even more tightly to acquisitive and property
owning beliefs. Even oppositional and critical
forms of culture can be marketed (consider Andy
Warhol, the Sex Pistols and Damian Hurst).
Even Anti-fashion is re-cycled as High
Fashion and then High Street fashion
 The Frankfurt School are (on the whole) highly
dismissive of popular culture because they see the
culture industry and the products that it churns
out as being little more than propaganda for
capitalism. This approach leads Theodor Adorno,
in particular, to make some damning indictments
of popular culture. Listeners to pop music are
infantile and fans of the jitterbug dance craze
were described as retarded, their dancing having
convulsive aspects reminiscent of St. Vitus dance
or the reflexes of mutilated animals. What would
he would have made of body popping?
 The very fact that popular culture is neither
difficult nor demanding and that it offers simple
and direct pleasures contributes to its
complicity in capitalist ideology. According to
Adorno, we crave standardised cultural
products because they seem to validate lives
that are themselves standardised. At work we
are alienated by dull, repetitive and
undemanding tasks, but this alienating effect is
relieved by dull, repetitive and undemanding
cultural products (like pop songs) and cultural
pursuits (like dancing).
 Popular cultural products may seem to offer us
freedom of choice and aid to self-expression,
but for Adorno, this is an illusion; a phenomenon
he terms pseudo-individualisation. In singing
along with a pop song or in recognising a
particular variation on a theme we enjoy the
feeling that we are finding expression for own
individual emotions, but in reality we are simply
imitating others. Our consumption of popular
culture simply makes us docile, apathetic and
passive, hence more susceptible to
manipulation by ruling class ideology.
 Bands like Kraftwerk have focused on the
relationship between industry, machines,
robots and popular culture
This is also expressed in many forms of
dance

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1088521/b
reakin_turbos_broom_dance/
 Critics of the Frankfurt School analysis of
popular culture have argued that it is just
too negative and too sweeping in its
characterisation of cultural products and
cultural practices as tools of capitalism. It
is difficult to find evidence amongst todays
consumers of popular culture of the
unqualified conformity that Adorno and
Horkheimer argued was responsible for
adjusting us to the norms and values of the
social system.
 It would be just as easy to find evidence of
diversity, creativity and, even, resistance to
dominant ideology in contemporary popular
cultural pursuits. This is not to say that cultural
practices have no ideological significance far
from it.
Rather, the critics of the Frankfurt School, still
working in a broadly Marxist tradition, have
suggested a more subtle relationship between
culture and ideology; one which recognises the
active role of consumers and users of cultural
products in creating meanings.