ABSTRACT
This chapter considers different ways of conceptualizing the relationship between capitalism and culture, and their consequences for thinking about the politics of the anti-capitalist movement in various manifestations. Ideas about the cultural effects of capitalism are themselves dependent upon more fundamental sets of ideas about what capitalism is and what it does, ideas such as those discussed at the beginning of the last chapter. Capitalism has tended to produce a general set of social and cultural effects which has caused anxiety even amongst those commentators who, like Marx, have been relatively gung-ho about the modernizing benefits of capitalism. The most celebrated strands of contemporary anti-capitalist thought to have something like a theory of culture are heavily preoccupied with the issue of commodification. Most Marxist cultural criticism takes as its object of attack the basic cultural effects of capitalism, which are usually understood in terms of the logic and consequences of commodification.
