MARXISM, HOME, AND HABITUS

Karl Marx is the father of class analysis. Any reader of Marx becomes quickly familiar with
the two major classes that appear in his writings, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The
proletariat is the working class, which provides the labor necessary for production within the
capitalist economic system (these terms are specific to the capitalist mode of production). The
proletariat’s main contribution to the economic world is its labor power. It sells this labor power
to the bourgeoisie, the wealthy class that owns the means of production: the land, the resources,
the factories, the machines, and so forth.
What does Marx have to do with popular culture?
As it turns out, quite a lot. First, popular culture is a form of capitalist production. If we
want to understand cultural production, we need to examine it as part of the capitalist mode of
production. Within Marx’s notion of a two-class system—albeit with the nuance of a kind of
middle class that he called the petite bourgeoisie—we must think about who owns the means of
production and who sells their labor for survival. Starving artists, struggling writers, camera
technicians, and workers in the factories that make CDs, DVDs, and books are all members of the
cultural proletariat. Who are the cultural bourgeoisie? It is tempting to name the executives, the
directors, the producers, and maybe even the successful artists. But that would be a mistake. The
question is: Who owns the means of cultural production? The answer to that question is the
cultural oligopoly, a small handful of massive corporations that produce most of the commercial
culture we consume. Where does that leave the directors and producers and executives? Marx’s
work may not fully answer that question for us. We could perhaps argue their way into the petite
bourgeoisie, an undertheorized group in Marx’s writings. But they are generally interpreted as
small business owners, not wealthy leaders in the corporate system. So there is a lot of room
within Marx’s analyses to debate the role of these well-paid workers in the cultural economy.
Second, popular culture is a system of commodities. It could be described both as art
transformed into commodity and as commodities that sell commodities. It is art turned into
commodity because each of the genres of popular culture has it roots in long-standing artistic
traditions. Obviously popular music developed out of much older musical traditions, and popular
novels are the commercial variation of literature. Film and television are essentially commercial
transformations of theater. Advertising images in the print media and online are commercial
variations of fine art painting and photography. Walter Benjamin, the great aesthetician of the
Frankfurt School, argued that art lost its “aura” because of the reproducibility made possible by
technology and the system of mass production (Benjamin 1968). But this art that is turned into
factory produced commodity is also an advertisement for yet still more commodities. Television
shows sell the products advertised, the market for the network, and the seasonal DVDs. Music
sells the products advertised on the radio, the CDs and digital downloads from the artists, and
concert tickets. Popular culture is art, transformed into commodity, working double-time as
advertisement.
Commodities need values. Marx wrote about value at great length in Capital (Marx, 1978).
The use-value of a thing is the utility of that object in the day-to-day life of humans. To an
individual human, the use-value of popular culture is the entertainment or pleasure that it brings
to life. Surely some pleasure is necessary for human survival. We may not need much pleasure
to get through the day, but more pleasure and more leisure are likely to lengthen one’s lifespan.
Leisure is likely also to make us more productive during working hours. Use-value does not get
us far in determining how much a digital download should cost. We can consider the economic
value in terms of the labor costs that go into the production of the object and the investment a
consumer is willing to make to obtain it.
 Both of these determinations are difficult to calculate mathematically. If two books are
priced the same at the bookstore, does that mean that they are of equal value to the reader?
Does that mean that the exact same labor power went into producing them? If one book took
twice as long to write as the other, should it cost twice as much?
Third, and finally, popular culture provides a symbol system that teaches audiences how
to think about the economic world in which they live. Marx asserts in “The German Ideology”:
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” (Marx 1978, 172). He is claiming
that there is a dominant ideology in any era that is controlled by the ruling class. In the case of
contemporary popular culture, that means that the ideas we consume are actually the ideas of
the cultural oligopoly. “Wait,” you say, “wouldn’t it be the ideas of the rich people?” When it
comes to the means of production for popular culture, as I have mentioned before, a set of
corporations is in control, not a set of rich people. Some rich people benefit from these
corporations very much, but it is the corporations that are in control and their ideas are the ideas
of this epoch. Can corporations have ideas? Perhaps not in the usual sense, but they do have
interests that differ from the interests of the people who work within them, and even from those
of the people who run them.
Marx’s writings about capitalism apply not only to how we think about class categories,
but also to the other dimensions of identity explored in this book, because capitalism uses these
identity systems as forms of the division of labor. So class stands alongside other identity
categories—especially race and gender—as a system that influences the makeup of the labor
force.
HABITUS
The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu offers the concept of habitus (Bourdieu, 1977).
Habitus refers to the structure of dispositions that we acquire from life, especially from
our families. It is like the windows of our family home, through which we see the world. Bourdieu
describes the concept as systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures
predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and
organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes
without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations
necessary in order to attain them.
Structuring structures. Transposable dispositions. Conscious aiming. Oh my! Bourdieu is
arguing that although we do not arrive at each new situation that we encounter as a blank slate,
we also do not arrive as automatons acting out a script written from before time began. Our
habitus does not tell us what to think or how to act, but it inclines us toward thinking and acting
within certain boundaries.
Television is increasingly becoming one of the windows through which we see the world
outside of our homes. We may all look at the same picture on the screen, but the way we see
that picture depends on the habitus we acquire from within our homes and families. Our habitus
is constructed by our class positions, as well as by other factors such as our race, religion, and
political ideology.