On Cultural Production

This dissertation composes an initial theoretical system of interpreting the historical development and evolution of human cultural production from a viewpoint of the mode of production. Based on a research framework of Marxist political economics as well as the Marxist theory of mental production, the author starts from examining the history of cultural production in human society, investigates and analyzes the basic composition, structural features, historical phases and its law of evolution by combining theory with practice. This dissertation lays its emphasis on examining how cultural production re-produces the production relations and the morphology of social organization. It analyzes and summarizes the historical conditions and foundations of the formation and development of cultural industry (i.e., the productive transformation of cultural production) with exchange as its aim. More important is that it examines, based on Marx's studies on the capital production as a mode of production in a special period of history, the process of the mode of capital production in human history, and its movement, development and progress expands from material production into the field of cultural production, and further makes productive production of culture the major body of social production, pushes capital production to its historical end, to create conditions for culture surpassing capital.The modern definition of culture is a comprehensive one. But cultural production usually refers to productive production of culture engaged in the organization of modern industrial form. The comparatively narrow definition of cultural production could not be applied to the whole activity of human cultural production. This dissertation takes the position of Marxist theory of mental production, and re-establishes the definition of cultural production through sorting and analyzing the history of connotation-forming of culture, i.e., acknowledges that cultural production is one of the two basic forms of the mode of production for human beings. The author puts forward the idea of the historical division of human production of culture, distinguishes productive nature from non-productive nature in cultural production, and summarizes and describes the historical condition and foundation of human cultural production transformed from non-productive to productive nature.The author maintains that it is the non-material nature of culture that determines an objective process in which cultural production creates, communicates and realizes its value. This process is restricted by time and space, so that the economical value of cultural production is indefinite and unstable. The common culture has the nature of national attendance, pervasive sharing and being non-profitable. The culture of human society has its common nature ever since it was born, therefore, the existence and development of common culture is essentially the morphology of non-productive production of culture. The development of productive production of culture, i.e., cultural industry, is the concrete expression of contemporary social economy, politics and culture in its merging and developing on the stratum of industry. Promoted by new technology, cultural industry with its unique evolution of morphology and forms of operation establishes extensive an complicated relationship with the other industries, and greatly influences social culture and national economy for a country.The author believes that the urban economy is inherently and closely related to cultural production. In its process of the up-grading of industrial structure, urban economy will be chiefly expressed as the cultural industry is continuously extending its scope and ratio in urban economical structure. The life-span of cultural industry is different from that of the other ordinary industries. It always realizes its self-promotion and self-development supported by new technology, and becomes a symbolic morphology for urban society. It is also an important component part of urban economy and functions to re-organizes the space for a continuous development in urban economy.The author holds that the formation and development of creative industry an inevitable trend in which productive production of culture is combined with scientific and technological R & D and cultural creativity under the condition of current capital production, i.e., by the function of the law in which the organic composition of capital is ever-raising while the average rate of profit of social production is ever-descending. Capital production is, as a mode of production, a historical category. Marx predicates that, with the expansion of capital production, the non-material (cultural) production in capitalist society is inevitably transformed into productive non-material (cultural) production. The cyber nature of contemporary capital production demonstrates that the capital production has been expanding into the field of cultural production, the last territory of human production. But that the productive production of culture becomes the subject of social production predicates that the capital production as historical category of mode of production begins the way to its historical end. In this phase, the proposition of capital limit, which means the innate contradiction and flaws of capital, put forward by Marx, is exposed thoroughly. Culture has its nature of common-sharing and transcending, so that the productive production of culture becomes the subject of social production and, at the same time, creates the condition for productive production of culture to return to non-productive production (as well as the total emancipation of human being) and lays a foundation for human culture of its ultimate transcending over capital.