This is the most debate this blog has ever seen. Thanks to everyone who's participating: I really appreciate your constructive points of view. It's helping to clarify my own thoughts and, judging by the response, is an important question. Some days I feel like I'm shouting into the void; definitely not today.

It's a debate that, I feel, should continue, because I'm still not convinced of the equal utility of culture and economics. Along with some respondents, I feel that Marxists are neglecting economics, and that this is both a cause and symptom of our weakness.

I agree, but why?

First, a little of where I'm coming from. While I'm currently a cultural studies major, I know very little of the field itself, either the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School, the Birmingham School, or the poststructuralism of Foucault, Derrida et al. This is a serious weakness, and I'm open to the suggestion that I should figure out what I'm talking about before I slag it off.

However, my criticism is, instead, based on a) what I know of Marxism - or, more properly, what I don't know - and b) how cultural studies is taken up by most of its students.

Cult-ural studies

Taking the last point first: cultural studies is dominated by post-structuralism. Marxists created the field of cultural studies, because they felt they needed better tools to understand capitalism. (Or, more particularly, 'late capitalism'. Will someone explain to me why capitalism is late? Do they think it's ending any time soon, and if so, why?) The traditional tools of ideology, politics and economics weren't enough to explain the ebb of revolutionary sentiment, after the upsurge of the 1960s. This is an important point that Perry Anderson makes, writing before the birth of cultural studies proper: Marxist theories of culture were born of the defeat of the working class movement. That doesn't make them wrong, but it shapes their outlook.

I'd argue this opened the space for the marginalism of cultural studies - a sibling, by relation if not blood, of the marginalism in neoclassical economics. Today, the field studies 'texts', theories of reading those texts, embodiment... well, it's tough to pin down post-structuralism. It most definitely does not study culture with a view to changing it. 'Troubling', 'play', 'problematizing' with no clear sense of what that accomplishes - those are post-structuralism's priorities.

"Is that a counter-hegemonic reading?"
"Yes, dear."

Political economy is the science of capital

Back to the first point: I've been a proud Marxist for over a decade. I read political theory and history because the stories of how people resisted exploitation are exciting. I bought economics books and they sat on the shelf: like Nathaniel said below, I believed they were too complicated for me, and that I'd get to them eventually. Possibly when I retired.

I had to go back to school to start learning about economics - where most cultural studies Marxists are too. But, unlike cultural studies, economics isn't restricted to the academy. It's the language of power: the capitalists, the people who run this world, speak in dollars, profit and accumulation.

The obvious rejoinder is that culture takes place outside the university too. But is culture a means of power? Yes - otherwise I wouldn't be blogging about Hamas and the furor over the cartoons. And no, not in of itself: capital runs through culture, like it runs through politics, social relations and ecology. Capital totalizes: it draws everything into itself. Economics is its language.

Insulting to rats - Mr. Moneybags

Who controls capital? The capitalists and their minions, the stockbrokers, the investment bankers, the financial analysts. If they want to destroy an economy, they do it, like the Mexican peso crisis of 1982(?), the Asian crisis of 1997, the Russian crisis the following year, the so on. These bloodthirsty bastards hold the reins of power. They dictate to governments who deploy troops. They wipe out communities by closing or opening industries.

I'm part of a movement, a theoretical tradition, that opposes capitalists with every ounce of organizing and rhetorical strength. So what does it say that, after over a decade, I don't know what the fuck they're talking about?

It could mean that I'm just a bad Marxist or, as Poulod suggested earlier, that I'm not a Marxist until I understand economics. Or it could go even deeper: that our entire tradition has abandoned the field of power when we need it most. I ignored economics because I thought it was just ideology, something the capitalists have to worry about, not our side.

From worldsocialism.org

It is ideology. But, as a prof of mine put it, it's ideology made into objective reality, by the force of the capitalists themselves, who need to quantify and objectify the entire world, to accumulate profit. If we can't understand that, the consequences are numerous:

a) we can't understand what they're doing on their own terms
b) we can't understand what's happening to the billions of people whose lives are ruled by their decisions (really, everyone on earth)
c) we can't create counter-strategies

Questions that need answering

Is capitalism growing, and if so, at what rate? Is it inherently unstable, or can it slough off those instabilities on workers? If so, to what extent? Is the U.S. the sole imperialist power, a leading power, or one of a few centres, some declining, some rising? How much autonomy does the state have from capital? How much freedom do the capitalists have to implement decisions? How responsible are they? Who rules and who helps rule?

Is he our main enemy?...

These are questions that, if we don't study economics, we can't answer. Yet they're essential for understanding the world today, and they bear directly on socialist strategy: who we oppose, and how.

It gets worse. Even if we're lucky enough to study Marxist economics, we end up studying previous economics. We read Lenin, maybe Luxemburg or Hilferding too, and try to apply those models to a world that's change drastically. I'm not arguing against learning the Marxist economic tradition - quite the opposite, it's essential. But we have very few people updating that tradition for today, which makes it difficult to combat the dominant economics. As has been pointed out, 'economics' in fact means neoclassical economics: a clumsy myth that has power because, well, the capitalists say it does. You're probably familiar with its outlines: we're all 'consumers', 'rational individuals pursuing choices', 'supply and demand', etc.

... or is he?

Those are lies. Outright falsehoods about the capitalist world. Can you say why? I can't - though I want to learn how. But those lies are so pervasive, they've allowed capitalists to coopt not just the economic terrain, but its resistance as well. For example: consider how popular ethical consumption is among northern social democrats. 'Fair trade', 'green investing', charity: these strategies do nothing to challenge capitalist power, and end up white/greenwashing it instead. They're based on the empowered consumer as the basis for economic functioning - when Marxist economics shows that consumer purchases are one minor circuit of capital flow.

This is what I mean about agency: if we ignore those questions, we lose our way - we cease to become agents and we forget our historical mission to spark the working class to agency. In our ignorance of economics we import concepts alien to Marxism: 'corporate rule', 'municipal socialism', 'alternative currencies', and so on. And as strategy, I rely on old shiboleths like the mass strike which, as Rob pointed out, is only one of many possible anti-capitalist strategies.

This will not change the world - in fact, it suggests capitalism can be reformed peacefully

Why Culture?

As Sontin said, linking politics, culture and economics is not an excuse to avoid any of the three. While I agree, I think in practice it happens, a lot. I'm all for materialist Gramscism (a hell of a lot better than the post-structuralist Gramscism I'm encountering in cultural studies, by the way. It's amazing how you can have 'hegemony' without a social movement behind it!) My evidence for the dominance of Marxists concerned with culture is anecdotal, but I think accurate. Here's a list of Marxists who wrote economic theory:

Marx, Hilferding, Luxemburg, Lenin, Bukharin, Baran, Sweezy, Magdoff, Harvey

Here's a list of Marxists who wrote on cultural theory:

Gramsci, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Thompson, Sartre, Williams, Hall

I'm not judging their relative merits. I'm asking who's more well known in academia. Chances are that most students, when they encounter Marxism, meet the second list. In practice, for a host of historical reasons Anderson mentions, we have become a generation of anti-capitalists who say lots about capital's ideological & cultural effects, and little to nothing about capital itself.

Culture is a process of struggle: I agree. What are we struggling over?

But we still love him - EP Thompson, 1980

The Real World beckons

Undoubtedly, in the development of the new society, the time will come when economics, cultural life and art will receive the greatest impulse forward... In a society which will have thrown off the pinching and stultifying worry about one's daily bread... in which children, all the children, will be well fed and strong and gay, and in which they will absorb the fundamental elements of science and art as they absorb albumen and air and the warmth of the sun... in which the liberated egotism of man - a mighty force! - will be directed wholly towards the understanding, the transformation and the betterment of the universe - in such a society the dynamic development of culture will be incomparable with anything that went on in the past. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution

Culture is not 'cultural production' in its stale, privileged forms, nor is it the self-referential feedback of texts. To me, culture is the unfolding of human potential on many levels, intimately bound with the struggle for freedom against capital. It's what gets erased by economics, and shaped by those forces too. If cultural studies is, in the true Gramscian sense, a study of the conditions that create the socialist movement, then I'm all for cultural studies, because that definition requires a rigorous understanding of economics. It's not a coincidence Trotsky puts them together.

I wish public transit looked like this - culture & struggle come together in Soviet agit-streetcar

However, while economics and culture are linked, they are not the same. As Trotsky writes, "Art must make its own way and by its own means. The Marxian methods are not the same as the artistic." Art and culture are not the ground zero of human organization today. Economics is - not because I want it to be, or because I think we're reducible to quantities. Economics is the tool and language that capitalism uses to exploit us. If we ignore economics, we remain its objects.

Finally, to echo a point already made, good Marxism does not come from the academy. At best we can synthesize what happens in the real world. Marxist economics (or, more precisely, Marxist critiques of economics) are not tools to defeat the neoclassicists on their own turf. They're tools for the poor and oppressed as they rise up against capitalist power, to expose the exploitation and alienation underlying formal equality.

I heard a report-back from participants at the World Social Form in Caracas, Venezuela. They said the debates have shifted from 'challenging corporate power' and 'participatory economics' to how to build socialism in the 21st century. This is the rebirth of political economy as a weapon in the struggle. Expressed, by the way, in lovely wall murals.

From the Neahtawanta Research and Education Center