Ideologies and discourses

Marxist approaches

• Karl Marx analysed the new profit and market dominated system, capitaslism - and the power of 2 classes within it, the rising industrial manufactures or capitalists and the working class
• Emphasised the importance of class difference, or people's different relationships to the means of production, as key to the hinds of values and political ideas they will have
• Especially interested in capitalists relationship to their employees, the working class, who, he argued, had the power to change history by their united action
• The dominant ideas of any society are those which work in the interests of the ruling class, to secure its rule or dominance. Those who own the means of production, thereby control the means of producing and circulating the most important ideas in any social order. Implies that working class needs to develop their own ideas and struggle for the means of circulating them if it is successfully to oppose the capitalist class
• He argued a base super-structure model of the social role of institutions such as the media. The ways in which the basic needs of a social order are met determine its superstructure e.g. its 'secondary', less basic, ideological and political institutions, like religion and cultural life
• Economic determinist -> economic 'base' is argued crucially to determine, not just influence, cultural and political activity
• Dominant class is able to make workers believe that existing relations of exploitation and oppression are natural and inevitable. This power 'mystifies' the real conditions of existence and how they might be changed and conceals the interest it has in preventing change