Williams and Markus on Production

The work of Raymond Williams has been a regular point of reference in Gyõrgy Markus' discussions of the Marxian production paradigm, Marxian theories of culture and the practice of ideology critique. These discussions constitute a welcome alternative to the interpretative orthodoxies within the scholarship on Williams that has proliferated since his death in 1988. Few studies of Williams' work, especially those written within 'cultural studies', have broken from the Althusserian constraints of Terry Eagleton's 1976 critique (Eagleton, 1976) or the sometimes co-existing romanticisation of Williams as a well-intentioned class-conscious post-Leavisite literary analyst who never quite coped with 'theory'. Such interpretations have even tended to continue the conflation established in the 1950s between Williams' work and that of his contemporary, Richard Hoggart, who founded the Birmingham Centre For Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964 (c.f. Jones, 1994).