According to Marx, what is the role of culture in maintaining the relations of production?

According to Karl Marx, culture is the way in which humans negotiate and reproduce the relationship between economy and ideology. The "means of production" so often referenced have very much to do with culture. Unfortunately, culture is also the level at which class inequality occurs and is acted out.

Think of it this way:

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  Ideology structures ideas about the world. Much of Marx's writing was critical of pre-Revolutionary European society. Most pre-Revolutionary European societies were ordered by the ideology that there were three natural classes of people-- the nobility (who profited,) the laborers (or poor peasantry,) and the Church (who reinforced this God-given order.) Ideology like this claims that it is natural for the economy to be skewed in favor of a small group of people, and this is made a reality through culture.


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  Culture involves all of the actions and objects used by people to create and recreate their world. This is where most of the disparity of class occurs. For example, a poor peasant in pre-Revolutionary Europe would be working in the fields, using a plow, with most of their goods and services being sent to the benefit of the nobility. Their children would live this life, in similar material circumstances if not the very same their parents lived in. On the other hand, the nobility lived quite privileged and leisurely lives. The means of production (including labor, raw materials, and tools) exist and work on this level.


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  Economy deals with the flow of goods and service as justified by ideology and (re)produced by culture. Economic disparity (often co-occurring with class disparity) occurs when most or all of a surplus of valuable goods or services is available to some and not others. Pre-Revolutionary Europe saw an economic disparity characterized by almost all of the wealth being concentrated in the hands of very few nobles.

Culture serves to negotiate the relationship between economy-- the flow of goods and services-- and the ideology which justifies this flow. This negotiation can include reproduction, where people continue to participate in the established system, or revolution, where it is overthrown by one group or another. "Seize the means of production" is a rallying cry for people living in an economic, cultural, and ideological reality where they do not have personal agency over their own labor and the goods they produce. Though revolution such as this is enacted on a cultural level, it has profound and lasting effects on the economy and ideology of a society.