ABSTRACT
The cultural studies defense of popular culture seeks a certain intellectual and political redemption in the arts of the people. Orthodox Marxists disdain the study of culture for much the same reason as cultural neoconservatives: they are puritans who resist the 'softness' of culture and cultural studies and instead prefer the 'hardness' of Marxian economics. Orthodox Marxists disdainful of cultural studies argue that culture is the realm of the superstructure that functions to conceal capitalism ideologically. Cultural neoconservatives reject mass culture as a legitimate topic of theoretical and critical intervention because they favor bourgeois high culture, and their own places within it. The analyses of the culture industry need not foresake ideology critique simply because it focuses on cultural commodification. Cultural commodification and cultural reification are inextricably linked in the various cultural lifeworlds comprising the international-capitalist global village.
