Cultural critique under capitalism faces a paradox. It can reveal how capital exploits and sanitises opposition, yet it often halts at Marxist analysis. The Frankfurt School identified the industrialisation of culture with sharp insight, and Baudrillard analysed the spread of sign-value with notable brilliance. However, both eventually withdrew from class struggle, falling into pessimism, nihilism, or a focus on the simulacrum's metaphysics. While their descriptions are insightful, their political outcomes can be harmful.
The CUPRA ad campaign—a shiny interpretation of “street
culture” aimed at selling a €26,000 electric vehicle—serves as a prime example
for exploring this contradiction. It shows how cultural critique can shed light
on capitalism's ideological workings while also exposing the limitations of
viewing culture as separate from production. The ad’s boldness, its cynical
awareness, and its portrayal of “rebellion” as a buyable lifestyle make sense
when examined through the ideas of Adorno, Horkheimer, Debord, and Baudrillard.
However, the campaign’s most profound contradiction isn’t in its imagery.
Still, in the social relationships it omits: the workers at Martorell who
assemble the car, the union officials overseeing them, and the gentrification
of Barcelona’s neighbourhoods, which the campaign's aesthetic exploits.
The Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School’s concept of the culture industry
remains one of the most detailed analyses of how culture is produced under
monopoly capitalism. Adorno and Horkheimer recognized that culture had become
industrialized, standardized, and turned into a commodity; that false
uniqueness concealed the uniformity of mass-produced items; and that the idea
of personal expression served as a tool for ideological control. However, their
cultural theory was inherently biased politically. It was based on the idea
that the working class had been fully integrated into capitalism, with its
revolutionary capacity depleted. The notion of a “totally administered society”
was not an insight but a conclusion based on the failures of the 1930s and the
betrayals by Stalinism. The culture industry concept was created to explain why
the working class no longer pursued revolutionary change — not to explore
capitalism’s inherent contradictions.
This is the Frankfurt School’s critical flaw. Their
descriptive insights are compelling because they remain detached from the
political outcomes they aim to support. While their analysis of commodified
culture can be adopted, the political implications cannot. The CUPRA campaign
exemplifies this well. The ad’s false rebellion, its industrial-like aesthetic
of “authenticity,” and its simplification of lived struggle into stylish
consumption all align with the Frankfurt School’s framework. However, the political
conclusion Adorno might make — that resistance is pointless, that the working
class is co-opted, and that critique is the sole form of negativity left — is
contradicted by the very production conditions the ad hides.
Baudrillard: When Cultural Critique Becomes Liquidation
If the Frankfurt School embodies the more pessimistic side
of Western Marxism, Baudrillard represents its end. His early work on consumer
society offers insightful observations on advertising, identity fetishism, and
the spread of sign-value. However, the turning point comes with The Mirror of
Production (1975), where Baudrillard sharply rejects Marxism, calls use-value
and exchange-value outdated categories, and argues that signs have replaced
production as society's main organising principle. This shift is not just a
theoretical development; it is a direct challenge.
Baudrillard’s focus on consumption rather than production
highlights the political decline of a petty-bourgeois class that abandoned
revolutionary efforts after 1968. His disdain for the masses — “they know they
are nothing and they have no desire to know” — conveys despair rather than
understanding. His later adoption of nihilism, simulacrum, and the vanishing of
reality symbolises intellectual capitulation and political surrender.
Stefan Steinberg’s WSWS obituary accurately traced
Baudrillard’s trajectory, portraying his work as the ideological voice of a
generation that confused its own demoralisation with a sense of inevitable
history. Baudrillard’s observation — that advertising promotes identity over
utility — remains relevant. The CUPRA campaign doesn't merely sell a car; it
promotes a lifestyle, an attitude, and a deliberately crafted rebellious
identity. However, Baudrillard’s conclusion that class analysis is irrelevant
is challenged by the very existence of the workers who assemble the cars. While
the description can be borrowed, the underlying framework should be rejected.
The limit of cultural critique is its tendency to treat culture as autonomous
from production.
The CUPRA campaign’s omission of the material base is
deliberate and central to its ideological message. CUPRA, a brand owned by SEAT
and Volkswagen Group, has experienced notable workforce cuts—such as 686
layoffs in 2005 after strikes—and has faced wage reductions and deteriorating
working conditions amid the EV transition. Union negotiations, exemplified by
UGT at Ford Valencia in 2022, have led to some concessions. These unseen
workers are the backbone behind the campaign—whose labour produces the items
that marketing depicts as rebellious. Their exploitation sustains the illusion
of individual freedom that the advertisement champions.
The Raval neighbourhood in Barcelona, chosen as the
campaign’s visual backdrop, has experienced swift gentrification. Working-class
and immigrant communities are being pushed out to make room for the demographic
CUPRA aims to attract. The “street culture" highlighted in the ad is
gradually being erased from the streets it professes to honour.
The core fact remains: a worker in Martorell is assembling
the car. She knows the sign-value doesn’t deceive her; she understands her
wages and the car's selling price. The difference between these figures
highlights exploitation. The disconnect between the ad’s illusion and actual
production isn't a complex puzzle but a clear class contradiction. Such
contradictions are ultimately addressed through struggle, not just critique.
The CUPRA campaign’s focus on “self-expression” and
“creating your own way” embodies neoliberal notions of the entrepreneurial
self—viewing each individual as a brand and every life as a startup, with
structural constraints seen as personal shortcomings. Marx and Engels countered
this in The German Ideology, stating that bourgeois freedom is simply about
individual independence separated from social relations. They argued that true
freedom is a collective, conscious control over the conditions of life. While
CUPRA offers the fantasy, Marxism exposes the reality.
Cultural critique can expose contradictions, reveal
ideological operations, and illuminate the mechanisms of commodification. But
it cannot explain the social relations that produce those mechanisms. It cannot
account for exploitation, surplus value, or the role of the union bureaucracy.
It cannot identify the agent of historical change. And it cannot provide a
political strategy. The CUPRA campaign is a perfect specimen of late capitalist
advertising because it makes its own contradictions visible. It sells rebellion
while suppressing the conditions that produce rebellion. It sells authenticity
while erasing the workers whose labour makes the commodity possible. It sells
cynicism as a lifestyle while relying on the very social relations it denies.
The scope of cultural critique is limited by the tendency to
see culture as separate from production. The Frankfurt School recognised the
symptoms but failed to address the root causes. Baudrillard outlined the
problems but declared the organism dead. The Situationists revealed the
mechanism yet mistook exposure for genuine politics.
Marxism, however, offers a comprehensive method to integrate
cultural phenomena within the broader framework of capitalist social relations.
It uniquely identifies the working class as the agent capable of resolving the
contradictions that cultural critique merely describes. Only Marxism firmly
asserts that the real has not disappeared—though it is masked by ideology, it
still underpins the terrain on which history unfolds.
The CUPRA campaign is not merely an advertisement. It is a
window into the ideological operations of contemporary capitalism— and a
reminder that cultural critique reaches its limit precisely where Marxism
begins.
