Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Marxists have analyzed power relations in many different ways. But four interrelated themes typify their overall approach. The first of these is a concern with power relations as manifestations of a specific mode or configuration of class domination rather than as purely interpersonal phenomena lacking deeper foundations in the social structure. The significance thus attached to class domination by no means implies that all forms of power are always exercised by social actors with clear class identities and class interests. It means only that Marxists are mainly interested in the causal interconnections between the exercise of social power and the reproduction or transformation of class domination. Indeed Marxists are usually well aware of other types of subject, identity, antagonism, and domination. But they consider such phenomena largely in terms of their relevance for, and their overdetermination by, class domination. Second, Marxists are concerned with the links – including discontinuities as well as continuities – between economic, political, and ideological class domination. Despite the obvious centrality of this issue, however, it prompts widespread theoretical and empirical disagreements. For different Marxist approaches locate the bases of class power primarily in the social relations of production, in control over the state, or in intellectual hegemony over hearts and ... log in or subscribe to read full text