Critical theory: from ideology critique to the sociology of culture

Abstract

In Volume I of what is widely regarded as his masterwork, Capital, we find a further development of this notion of alienation in the concept of 'commodity fetishism', a term used to describe the way human relations take on the appearance, in a market economy, of relations between things, that is, between commodities. Capitalist culture is therefore a fetishistic culture, in which 'a definite social relation between men .. . assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things' (Marx, 1970, p. 72). The Arnoldian antithesis between culture and civilisation was thus transposed into Marx's between unalienated labour and capitalist commodification. Furthermore, for Marx, as for Arnold, this fetishised culture 'tends constantly to become more so'. The crucial difference, however, is in Marx's stress on production as distinct from Arnold's on cultural consumption. It was precisely this difference that propelled Marx away from a pedagogical solution to the cultural crises of capitalism-which could only ever aspire to reform the habits of 'taste'-and towards the alternative of a revolutionary transformation in the system of production itself.