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įrom what we know about Marx’s method and other writings, interpretation (1) seems highly uncharacteristic, and indeed, as Daly also concludes, Marx’s position was not that material conditions determine everything in an ‘inevitable’ way.Īn example is the supposed inevitable victory of the proletariat over capitalism. He concludes:ĭepending on the chosen inflections, then, the passage can be used to imply either: (1) a strongly deterministic theory in which art is seen as being wholly preordained by the economic context within which is it produced or consumed - in fact is virtually reducible to it - and thus plays a negligible role in ‘real’ historical processes or (2) a theory in which, although ultimately dependent on and influenced by economic forces, art has a variable freedom (or ‘relative autonomy’) from the economic system within which it arises. In the passage from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy cited before, Daly writes, Marx “reiterates a central idea in varied phrasing in a manner typical of someone intent on persuading a reader of a novel notion (for Hegelians a heretical notion).” He points out that the passage offers three alternative verbs to describe the relationship between base and superstructure - ‘give rise to’, ‘conditions’ and ‘determines’, depending upon the translation - each of which implies a different sort of relationship. Marxism is a determinist philosophy, but not in the strong sense where A determines B when B depends entirely upon A.Īmbiguities in some of Marx’s writings are partly to blame for the confusion, as examined for example by Macdonald Daly in his introduction to the anthology Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on Literature and Art. They also, it must be said, come from some who consider themselves Marxists (so-called ‘vulgar Marxism’) - Stalinism has in particular been responsible for crudely mechanical interpretations of theory. These accusations come partly from people who do not properly understand Marxism, and partly from outright enemies who distort it so it may more easily be discredited. Marxism is accused with tedious regularity of thinking that everything can be reduced to the mode of production, of being highly deterministic, etc.