For Marx, human culture arises only through socially organized labor.

Evidence

Culture has its roots in what Marx, in The German Ideology , called man’s “double relation”: to nature and to other men. … This is the beginning of social organization, and of human history. From this point forward, man’s relation to nature becomes socially mediated. The reproduction of human society, in increasingly complex and extended forms, and the reproduction of material existence are fundamentally linked: in effect, the adaptation of nature to man’s material needs is effected only through the forms which his social collaboration with other men assumes. … From this given matrix—the forces and relations of production, and the manner in which they are socially organized, in different historical epochs—arise all the more elaborate forms of social structure, the division of labor, the development of the distinction between different types of society, new ways of applying human skill and knowledge to the modification of material circumstances, the forms of civil and political association, the different types of family and the state, men’s beliefs, ideas, and theoretical constructions, and the types of social consciousness appropriate to or “corresponding to” them. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 881

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines base/superstructure metaphor as the conceptual link between material production and human culture.
• XREF: Connects to any exposition of Marx’s base-superstructure distinction and the German Ideology thesis. — connects to: Capitalism now annexes life processes beyond labor, which orthodox labor-centered Marxism cannot explain. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 143