The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception is a critique of popular culture by critical theorists Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer. This reading is a look into the development and organization of the culture industry as a tool of mass control and conditioning. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the culture industry was basically what we refer to today as popular culture. However, to them culture was only genuinely popular when the people had actually produced it, not just consumed it. Simply put, the culture industry is a factory that mass-produces inadequate cultural goods.
Through this we have learned that as working class, we expect and accept that we will be exploited by the ruling class in terms of our surplus value. This is known as a crisis of Hegemony. They go on to say that we have internalised the DVS to such an extent that any other value system seems absurd, resulting in a state of false class consciousness. Marx believed that we will see a social revolution which will overthrow capitalism and replace it with true communism. Marxism sees religion as a feature which is only relevant in a society based on class division I.E the ruling classes and the working classes.
Lastly, the economic causes which was the need of new markets in which to sell their manufactured goods, Europeans needed raw materials to keep their factories busy, and place to infest profits. The political causes are the European needed bases for trade and navy ships and the spirit of nationalism. Document 3 is an excerpt, from Raymond Aron’s book The Century of Total War, suggests another cause for imperialism. For example, a nation should be in power and should be motivated for the quest of capitalist profits. In document 4 Cecil Rhodes, a successful British imperialist in Africa, expressed his position in Confession of Faith, written in 1877.
Some of the events that led up to this included the replacing of labor with machines and the need by the factory owners to reduce costs. Writers in the Marxist perspective of sociology claim that there is a conspiracy in the education system designed to prevent children from working class backgrounds from realizing their true position in society this can be referred to as the hidden curriculum. The education system reinforces the ideology that the rich and powerful should control society and promotes an ideology or belief that our society is fair and just and that the proletariat should quietly accept capitalist society. In Advanced Industrial Societies the mains relationships are those of work. These are known as the
“Fascism also recruited admirers from the ranks of the political theorists who sought an alternative to the representative model of liberal democracy and a radical prescription against the alleged decline of western civilization” 36. “In central and eastern Europe, fascism was markedly racist and anti-Semitic. In Hitler's Germany the genocidal "Final Solution" was the consequence” 37. “The fundamental structure of fascism is sometimes taken to be an authoritarian, centralized state apparatus sustained” 38. “A revival of Latin American fascism is possible, perhaps in response to the swallowing up of national economies in globalization; violence will undoubtedly remain endemic” 39.
- This criticism focuses on class oppression and looking at how different levels of society interact - It looks at what each text has to say about class relations - The class that owns the means of production is the most powerful  Venetian Senate owns everything - Each ruling class has a system of ideas that the other classes accept as the dominant outlook UNTIL THE OTHER CLASSES BECOME REVOLOUTIONARY  Emilia’ conversation with Desdemona is revolutionary - Marx himself was fascinated by the late 16th C in England because of the change in social class. Eg. The rise in the working class (proletariat) and the rise of the middle class (bourgeoisie) - Marxism has always been concerned with development of different classes in history - Marx wrote ‘Shakespeare portrays the essence of money excellently… if money is the bond that binds me to human life, that binds society to me and me to nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds?... is it not therefore the universal means of separation? It is the universal whore, the pander between men and peoples.’ Karl Marx, ‘the economic and philosophical manuscripts’ (1844).
Marx predicted that capitalism within a socioeconomic system would inevitably create internal tensions between social classes leading to its demise and replacement by a new system, communism. For Marx, the concept of class has always existed in society. Historically, a society has always been arranged into various orders of social rank. A defining characteristic of capitalism however, is that “it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat” (Marx and Engels 1848).
the changes in the mechanisms of ‘volkisch’ anti-semitism and how it developed throughout the preceding decades, with particular scholarly movements including the inception of scientific racism, the volkisch movement in correspondence with new imperialism and militant nationalism. The approach suggests that the holocaust was exclusively akin to Germany’s rising ‘volkisch’ culture and that the aggressive notions of supremacy produced in the late nineteenth century influenced their attitudes towards the other races within Germany at the time and subsequent to the century’s turn. This particular approach is therefore beneficial for understanding how the very concept of a civilised genocide was manifested and how anti-semitism transformed according to the circumstances of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and is therefore the synthesis of the intentionalist and functionalist schools as the German anti-semitism was developed in the long-term through cumulative radicalisation. It adds to our understanding of how ‘völkisch-antisemitisch’ developed from mere prejudice into genocide and how it was influential in the development of advancement of National Socialism, being spawned through nineteenth century scholarly ideologies and social movements including Social Darwinism as a product of emerging ‘scientific racism’, with this and the association with romantic nationalism being
In this new capitalist period, the more simplified means of production as seen in feudalism, had developed into a “complex industrial state” as stated in Haralambos and Holborn (2008). Capitalism brought a new way to sustain humanity; industrial production. Marxism, as a sociological theory, focuses on the economics of Britain. Lee and Newby (1983) say that to “organize the production of its subsistence” is the most basic human instinct. The economy provides us with our means of survival and defines our society.
Outline the postmodernist view of the role of Education Postmodernists take a diversity approach when considering the role of education. They argue that the Marxist view is outdated and that society has entered a new postmodern phase. Marxists believe that capitalism cannot function without a workforce that is willing to accept exploitation. They also see education as reproducing and legitimating class inequality. Postmodernists reject this view of Marxism, that we still live in a two-class society and the claim that education reproduces class inequality.