ABSTRACT
Dialectical materialism is Marx’s way of looking at the world, society, and class societies. Materialism stresses the importance of material factors in the world. Culture, communication, and the media have to do with the production, distribution, and consumption of ideas, meanings, and symbols. The question therefore arises: what role do they play in society? Materialism is a way of answering the question of what role culture and consciousness play in society. In Marxism, this question is also known as the base/superstructure problem.
This chapter introduces foundations of materialism (Section 3.2), discusses structuralist Marxism’s base/superstructure model (Section 3.3), and outlines foundations of the approach of communicative and cultural materialism (Section 3.4).
Structuralist Marxists such as Louis Althusser use the spatial metaphor of an edifice and posit the economic as the base that determines the superstructure, to which ideas, consciousness, culture, and communication belong. The problem with this model is that it is static, mechanistic, and anti-humanist.
Cultural materialists such as Raymond Williams and Georg Lukács stress that Karl Marx wanted to avoid, and argued against, separating ideas from matter and the economy. Cultural materialists solve the base/superstructure problem in a dialectical manner.
