Cultural Power

Karl Marx, Max Weber, Antonio Gramsci and Pierre Bourdieu all conceptualize culture power in different ways. Each identifies the agent (the specific social group) which acquires and makes use of cultural power as well as the means by which the agents acquire and maintain cultural power.

As Marx and Engels observe in The German Ideology, "The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it" (64). Thus, for Marx, laborers were the specific group that needed to acquire power from the elites (capitalists), owners of the means of production. The means of production were, of course, the laborers. Communism was the ideology that would free the laborers from subservience to the owners of capital.

For Weber, culture power is a class struggle that emanates from a "status structure," which can take various forms -- ethnic structure, class structure and so on: for example, "A status segregation grown into a caste differs in its structure from a mere ethnic segregation: the caste structure transforms the horizontal and unconnected coexistences of ethnically segregated groups into a ver-tical social system of super- and subordination" (Weber "The Distribution of Power within the Political Community:Class, Status, Party" 934).... Thus, cultural power is essentially based on organization and segregation. The means by which the culturally powerful obtain and maintain their power is the organization principle itself. Weber explains it thus: "Domination in the most general sense is one of the most important elements of social action" (Weber "Domination and Legitimacy" 42) and again lays out the organizing essence that serves as the basis of domination: "The purest type of the former is monopolistic domination in the market; of the latter, patriarchal, magisterial, or princely power" (Weber "The Distribution of Power within the Political Community:Class, Status, Party" 943). In other words, the more organized the structure in terms of concentrating power in the hands of a few, the more monopolistic the power play becomes. This theory is no surprise coming from Weber who is the father of modern day bureaucracy.
Antonio Gramsci view cultural power as having a political basis, which is why he discusses at length the influence of Machiavelli, Savonarola, and others in his Prison Notebooks. He poses the framework in these questions: In what sense can one identify politics with history, and hence all of life with politics? How then could the whole system of super-structures be understood as distinctions within politics...?" (137). For Gramsci, the means of power are political and the special social group that acquires power is the group with the most relevant political…