From Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies "Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies and Marxism" by Colin Sparks.
I found this piece particularly helpful in contextualizing the relationship between Marxism and Cultural Studies, and its many iterations and transformations. Near the end of the article, Sparks makes the following statements, “The dominant view within the field today is probably that in shedding its marxist husk, cultural studies has empowered itself to address the real issues of contemporary cultural analysis. Whether one subscribes to that view or not depends on the answers one gives to two questions. The first is whether one believes that marxism has, after the events of 1989, any continuing claim to be considered a correct, or even a useful, way of analysing the world” (98-99). Here is my question:
Do we think that Marxism has any value to Cultural Studies? If yes, then what, or if not, then why not?
From Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees” by Stuart Hall.
Hall’s article foregrounds (as he says) “the problem of ideology,” which he states, “concerns the ways in which ideas of different kinds grip the minds of masses, and thereby become a ‘material force’” (26). He further states that Marx and Engels did not consider the construction/establishment of ideology and did not propose a theory of ideology robust and complex enough to “comprehend and master the terrain of ideological struggle” (26).
If, when studying ideologies within a culture, we do not also study how those ideologies were conceived and established, what is lost (i.e., what are the possible consequences)? Conversely, what do we gain by also studying the histories of the conception and establishment of ideologies?
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