Marx defined culture as accumulated human mastery over nature transmitted through language and labor.

Evidence

However, Marx and, more especially, Engels rarely use “culture” or its cognates in this simply descriptive sense. They use it more dynamically and more developmentally—as a decisive material or productive force . Human culture is the result and the record of man’s developing mastery over nature, his capacity to modify nature to his use. This is a form of human knowledge, perfected through social labor, which forms the basis for every new stage in man’s productive and historical life. This is not a “knowledge” which is abstractly stored in the head. It is materialized in production, embodied in social organization, advanced through the development of practical as well as theoretical technique, above all, preserved in and transmitted through language . In The German Ideology Marx speaks of “a material result, a sum of productive forces, a historically created relation of individuals to nature and to one another, which is handed down to each generation from its predecessor … is, indeed, modified by the new generation, but also … prescribes for it its conditions of life and gives it a definite development, a specific character.” It is this which distinguishes men from the animal kingdom. … Marx in a famous passage in the first volume of Capital , compares favorably “the worst of architects” with the “best of bees” in this: “that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.… He not only effects a change of form … but he also realizes a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi .” Earlier, Marx and Engels had identified language, the principal me dium through which this knowledge of man’s appropriation and adaptation of nature is elaborated, stored, transmitted, and applied, as a form of “practical consciousness” arising “from the need, the necessity of intercourse with other men” (The German Ideology ). Later, Marx describes how this accumulated knowledge can be expropriated from the practical labor and skill of the worker, applied as a distinct productive force to modern industry for its further development, and thus pressed “into the service of capital” (Capital , Vol . I ). Here, culture is the accumulated growth of man’s power over nature, materialized in the instruments and practice of labor and in the medium of signs, thought, knowledge, and language through which it is passed on from generation to generation as man’s “second nature.” — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 884

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the Marxist sense of culture as productive force — culture as materialized knowledge, embodied in labor and social organization, not abstract ideas.
• XREF: The architect-worst/bee-best passage and ‘second nature’ concept connect to Raymond Williams’ and Thompson’s revisions of the culture concept noted in paragraph 883.
• CANDY: The architect versus best-of-bees contrast — building in imagination before reality — is a punchy, shareable Marx line.