A Theoretical Suggestion to Investigate Cultural Discontent and Conditions of Class Struggle—Relative Fixed Labor-power and Cultural Fix

Abstract

In an era when the effectiveness of collective class struggle is questioned, this paper presents a way to retheorize the conditions of the struggle at the structural level based on Stephen Shapiro’s theoretical suggestion. This paper first reviews the discourses of existing Marxist cultural studies and examines their limitations: humanistic and somatic materialism with a focus on human labor as a sensuous human activity, as well as culturalism that understands capitalism as articulations of various social elements, experiences, and practices. As a comparison, this paper investigates how Shapiro draws upon Karl Marx’s Capital and theorizes the way in which economic and sociocultural conditions, or base and superstructure, are interrelated as a framework to consider cultural fix alongside the economic fix of capitalism and the conditions of class struggle. This paper argues that Shapiro’s discussion extends a theoretical spectrum of cultural studies, and it presents a way of understanding the economic dynamics of the capitalist world-system as historical objectivity while distancing from economic determinism, and of comprehending consensus, discontent, conflict, and antagonism between the economic and the cultural as conditions of struggle.