Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT:
The base and superstructure concept developed by Marx and Engels has attracted many interpreters over the years. Most of these have focused on what it reveals about the state. But there is also a stream of writers, from Plekhanov to Eagleton, who have been fascinated with its aesthetic dimensions. Only a handful have tried to apply it to creative workers in cultural industries. The most notable attempt was made by a small group of black-listed Hollywood screenwriters, in the early 1950s. Their debate capped a century of discourse regarding the cultural ramifications of the base-superstructure concept, from its inception by Marx and Engels, through its transmutation by the Russian Marxists, to its use by Marxists and Communists in the United States.
THOUGH KARL MARX'S THEORY OF base and superstructure has been regularly analyzed by historians of Marxism, its usefulness as a guide to political activity for cultural workers was only once, in the century after his death, subject to analysis. Bertolt Brecht, in a series of written responses to Georg Lukács in 1938-39, argued that art is an aspect of material labor, constructed, to a degree, by the formative principles of the technological modes of production available to it. Thus, he concluded, art is an activity that could be made to fit any new media form. In addition, Brecht's experience in the German film industry had convinced him that art and the artist had lost their autonomy, been industrialized and commodified. But, he argued, if film workers self-consciously struggled to democratize film production and direct it toward collective human ends rather than bourgeois profits, they could overcome their alienation from the final product (Lunn, 1982, 103, 120, 125).
These letters were not, however, published until 1966, and thus were not available to the small group of recently blacklisted Hollywood Communist screenwriters who debated, in 1953-54, the role they could now play in making movies more democratic or progressive. This debate was unique to Hollywood Communists, because no other mass-media industry employed such a large number of Communist writers (approximately 125) who worked in such close proximity with one another. They had been debating the potential of the Hollywood studio product for many years, but only now incorporated the base-superstructure concept, because it had...