ABSTRACT
Marxist aesthetics tends to be at its most retarded when faced with the newer mass cultural forms of the twentieth century. With the exception of cinema, which soon became generally accepted as the 'seventh art', the bulk of Marxist writing on the mass cultural forms has been hostile. Enzcnsberger's ability to see the electronic media as a system of cultural forms has not been shared by other Marxists working on the same area of problems at the level of theory. Marxist film theory and criticism had a fitful history until after the Second World War. The theoretical problems posed by any analysis which takes the scientific character of psychoanalysis as given, for a Marxist perspective, are similar in film to those in literature. During the 1960s, radical and Marxist considerations of popular music tended to be of a sociological type, including at least one attempt to theorise 'youth' as a new proletariat.
