Book contents
- After Marx
- After Series
- After Marx
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Black Marxism and the Antinomies of Racial Capitalism
- Chapter 2 Eco-Criticism and Primitive Accumulation in Indigenous Studies
- Chapter 3 Screening Insurrection: Marx, Cinema, Revolution
- Chapter 4 Marxist Ecology and Shakespeare
- Chapter 5 There Is No “More Commodification”: Periodizing Capitalist Transformation
- Chapter 6 The Irreconcilable: Marx after Literature
- Chapter 7 The Rise and Fall of the English-Language Literary Novel since World War II
- Chapter 8 Literature and the State
- Chapter 9 Post-Soviet Aesthetics
- Chapter 10 Lu Xun’s Literary Revolution in Chinese Marxism
- Chapter 11 Latin American Literature and Dependency Theory Today
- Chapter 12 Industry Culture: Labor and Technology in Marxist Critical Theory
- Chapter 13 In Service to Capital: Theater and Marxist Cultural Theory
- Chapter 14 Hidden Abodes and Inner Bonds: Literary Study and Marxist-Feminism
- Chapter 15 Poetry and Revolution
- Index
- References
Chapter 13 - In Service to Capital: Theater and Marxist Cultural Theory
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 March 2022
Book contents
- After Marx
- After Series
- After Marx
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Black Marxism and the Antinomies of Racial Capitalism
- Chapter 2 Eco-Criticism and Primitive Accumulation in Indigenous Studies
- Chapter 3 Screening Insurrection: Marx, Cinema, Revolution
- Chapter 4 Marxist Ecology and Shakespeare
- Chapter 5 There Is No “More Commodification”: Periodizing Capitalist Transformation
- Chapter 6 The Irreconcilable: Marx after Literature
- Chapter 7 The Rise and Fall of the English-Language Literary Novel since World War II
- Chapter 8 Literature and the State
- Chapter 9 Post-Soviet Aesthetics
- Chapter 10 Lu Xun’s Literary Revolution in Chinese Marxism
- Chapter 11 Latin American Literature and Dependency Theory Today
- Chapter 12 Industry Culture: Labor and Technology in Marxist Critical Theory
- Chapter 13 In Service to Capital: Theater and Marxist Cultural Theory
- Chapter 14 Hidden Abodes and Inner Bonds: Literary Study and Marxist-Feminism
- Chapter 15 Poetry and Revolution
- Index
- References
Summary
In the vast and growing scholarship on today’s service sector, the performing arts play a starring role. But the usefulness of performance for explaining how service fits into a capitalist economy is nothing new. Karl Marx, in his critique of political economy, used theater as proof that services could be subsumed to capital. The fact that service work today is increasingly organized along capitalist lines is not evidence that society has entered a kind of post-capitalism. As Marx himself recognized, service under capitalism has always been potentially subject to the law of value. Yet the clarity of Marx’s argument about the economic relation of services like theater to capital has been obscured by the tendency of Marxist cultural theory to either focus on theater’s role in struggles against capital or misgauge theater’s economic proximity to capital. Theater, thus, has become a missed opportunity in Marxist cultural theory for studying a deindustrial society filled with service jobs. Clarifying theater’s economic relation to capital can illuminate the limits capital faces as the jobs its workers do increasingly resemble performance.
- Type
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- Information
- After MarxLiterature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 209 - 224Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022
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