Marxism and Culture

Abstract

As we have seen, the theory of mass society and culture originated in those societies undergoing the rapid economic, political and social changes associated with the industrial and bourgeois revolutions. In post-revolutionary France and nineteenth-century industrial England, the old landed governing class gave way to the ‘rising’ bourgeoisie; the new dominant class attempted to impose its hegemony on the major institutions of civil society and ally all subordinate strata to its ideals and practice. In general, however, the theorists of mass society reject these hegemonic pretensions and identify cultural health and vitality with pre-bourgeois culture and traditions, emphatically repudiating the rationalist egalitarian implications of bourgeois ideology and revolution. There is thus a striking parallel between this conservative defence of the old culture and Marx’s argument that, as the bourgeoisie necessarily revolutionises the economic and political foundations of capitalism, they create simultaneously the conditions for their own overthrow — the industrial proletariat, socialist ideology, revolutionary theory and mass political organisations.It is in this sense that the theory of mass society defines bourgeois domination as inherently unstable, not simply for the maintenance of ‘old’ standards but as a check to the ‘vulgar’ pretensions of the uneducated and philistine ‘masses’ raised to cultural prominence by the same forces which have liberated the bourgeoisie.