Blog Post 4

Marxism in the media is a little different than the Marxism we know from history. The Marxist perspective is the idea that money and material conditions are what shape our dominant ideology about who’s empowered and who’s not. It’s the idea that the people with money will always hold more power than those without money. In pop culture, the goal of Marxism is to expose how these same ideas and concepts are woven into our media. It reveals how the media is reinforcing these power structures as conventional and common sense. If you were to critique a piece of media through a Marxist lens, it’s important to look at concepts such as ideology and hegemony. Ideology is a notion that “refers to the collective beliefs, attitudes, and values of a given group of people” (J. Johnson, lecture, October 1, 2015). Hegemony is the dominant ideology over another group’s ideology. Some examples of hegemonic ideologies include: the wealthy delegate the poor, men are more powerful than women, or white people make better employees than people of color. Once you’ve analyzed the power structures that have been established, it is also important to analyze the messages within the text that are challenging the status quo. For example, in High School Musical Troy Bolton, the all-star athlete, decides to audition for the school musical. This creates a problem within the power structure of high school; jocks are meant to play sports and musicals are meant for drama students. So in this example, Troy is challenging the status quo and to further prove it, there’s a whole musical number dedicated to it in the movie. These are just a couple of the steps you could take towards analyzing a piece of media through a Marxist lens.