ABSTRACT
This chapter laid out the central assumptions and methodological approaches of the Marxist theory of culture. The sheer undecidability of writing makes cultural studies possible, particularly a Marxist version. Cultural Marxism turns Marxist economism upside down not in order to reverse the putative structural priority of base over superstructure but to win for culture a realm of theoretical and political autonomy denied it by economizing readings of Marx. Marxist cultural theory was doomed in the early years by the extremely powerful momentum of Marxist economism which, almost inexorably, turned matters of culture into issues of political economy. One of the projects of politicized cultural studies is precisely to redevelop a Marxist cultural theory that avoids the fatal mistakes of representationality while holding fast to one or another absolutist version of left-wing critical practice and politics. The poststructural critique of Marxist foundationalism typically leads to antifoundationalism.
