Abstract
On first impressions, the interests of marketing scholars and practitioners seem at odds with Marxism’s political, economic, and philosophical commitments. Where marketing theory mentions the name of Karl Marx, then, it is with a palpable sense of hesitation or laboured opposition. He is a taboo theorist. But does this antithesis of marketing and Marx hold empirical scrutiny? This paper provides a hauntological reading of how the discipline has tried, and failed, to exorcise Marxism. Drawing on a systematic review of 40 marketing journals, we reveal four spectres of Marx in marketing theory. We label these Prescriptive, Critical, Literary and Paradigmatic Marx. They indicate Marx’s historic and continued relevance to marketing theory and offer paths to renew this engagement – which we articulate as Marxist marketing theory. Broadening the discussion beyond Marx, we ask what it is about some theorists that make them taboo in marketing theory.
Keywords
Introduction
There has been a general broadening of the field of marketing over recent years as scholars have uncovered forgotten figures and championed repressed voices. But there are still some theorists who seem too controversial for inclusion in polite scholarship (Holbrook, 2015). Their ideas might be interesting, their concepts might even shed light on markets and consumption, but received wisdom has it that they should be avoided (see Cluley and Desmond, 2015). They are ‘taboo’ (Firat, 2009: 832).
By no means the only taboo theorist in marketing scholarship, Karl Marx is emblematic of the kind of theorist we have in mind here. Although he is a foundational analyst of economic and social relations, with clear relevance to marketing and consumer research, Brown summarizes the prevailing attitude towards Marx in the marketing field: ‘who cares what Marxists think? We’re marketers, aren’t we’? (2007: 292). This attitude goes back to the inaugural issue of Journal of Marketing, where Marx makes an appearance (Cassels, 1936) that is immediately questioned (Drury, 1937). Ever since, Marx has been manifested by his absence. We are told that he is ‘rarely seen’, at least ‘in the American marketing literature’ (Hirschman, 1985: 179), as marketing scholars learn to ‘stay away from that M-word’ (Firat in Bradshaw and Dholakia, 2012: 121). Even when marketing researchers find his ideas interesting, there is a clandestine quality to the reception of Marx’s work in marketing. It is smuggled in through theorists such as the Frankfurt School. As a result, for Brown, ‘compared to its penetration in cognate disciplines like history, politics, economics or even organization studies … marketing must be regarded as a marxian-free zone’ (2005: 58).
Inspired by Freud's (1913) understanding of a taboo as something both desired and feared, this paper questions the idea that taboo theorists are simply omitted from marketing theory. Rather, we contend that taboo theorists, like Marx, are attractive to marketing scholars because they offer powerful but unwelcome understandings of markets and consumption. As such, they keep reappearing in marketing theory and keep having to be repressed. Focusing on Marx as our case study, we explore these appearances through a thematic synthesis of marketing journals between 1932 and 2023 (N = 174). Drawing on Derrida’s thinking about the reception of Marx, which is inspired by Freud and sees Marxism as an unfinished and evolving intellectual project, we recognize four spectres of Marx that have been admitted into marketing theory. Marketing scholars, we show, have treated Marx as a model for non-capitalist social relations, as a resource to critique consumer capitalism, as a perspective to interpret consumer culture, and as a paradigm for research.
Whether these are mis-readings, caricatures, and clichés is not our concern. We do not wish to police the literature. Instead, we want to emphasize that taboo theorists such as Marx are made both absent and present. They are feared and desired. Looking at what is admitted into marketing theory, not what is prohibited, enables new thinking with a taboo theorist. In the case of Marx, it helps to outline the potential for Marxist marketing theory and provokes wider debates about disciplinary limits. Before getting to this, though, we clarify our conceptual framework, then our methodological approach and analytical findings. After, we outline our hopes for Marxist marketing theory. We conclude that taboo theorists such as Marx reflect marketing scholarship’s inability to embrace an unknown future.
Haunted by taboo
There are some theorists that marketing scholars seem reluctant to write about. Marx is an example. From Pollay’s influential critique of advertising, where he explicitly ‘excludes the European Marxist tradition’ (1986: 19), through to comments by Firat that Marxist theory ‘has been mostly taboo in North American marketing literature’ (2009: 832), we get the impression that marketing theory has no place for Marx. In an interview, Firat elaborates on the lived experiences of this: ‘when I was in Denmark in 1995 and 1996, a leading scholar sent me a paper he wrote, and on a Post-It note he had said, “you will see that I didn’t reference any of your work...to stay away from that M-word”’ (in Bradshaw and Dholakia, 2012: 121–131).
Here, we want to take seriously the idea that there is a taboo on some theorists in marketing. Does it mean that marketing scholars cannot put a theorist’s name into print? If not, why?
For Freud (1913), a taboo is a complex object. It is not simply something that we cannot speak about. Rather, a taboo is entangled with unconscious fears and desires. A taboo object is something ‘uncanny, dangerous, forbidden, and unclean’ and something ‘sacred, consecrated’ (1913: 18). Due to this highly charged, ambivalent relation, taboos always find the means of expression – even if, as in the case of Marx, it is only to say ‘Boo!’ (Brown, 2007). We deny their existence because we want them so much it hurts.
This ambivalent view of the taboo underpins Derrida’s (1994) account of Marx. In a series of lectures, delivered at the University of California, Riverside, which were subsequently published as Spectres of Marx, Derrida asks us to pay particular attention to quick dismissals of Marx and claims about ‘the end of the whole Marxist tradition, even of the reference to the works of Marx’ (1994: 69). These expressions, as taboos, reveal what is feared and desired about Marx. On this, Derrida writes of a ‘dominating discourse’ that has the ‘manic, jubilatory, and incantatory forms that Freud assigned to the so-called triumphant phase of mourning work’ (1994: 64). Derrida continues: The incantation repeats and ritualizes itself … To the rhythm of a cadenced march it proclaims: Marx is dead, communism is dead, very dead, and along with it its hopes, its discourse, its theories, and its practices. It says: long live capitalism, long live the market, here’s to the survival of economic and political liberalism (1994: 64)
For Derrida, though, while specific states associated in various ways with Marxist thinking may have crumbled, the death of Marx is not an established fact. By this, he means that, while those who deny the existence of a Marxist future may do so in the hope of maintaining the present, they are haunted by their knowledge of this future and must continually work to repress it. As Ahlberg et al. put it, the ‘forsaken possibility of social organizing based on Marxist ideas’ brings with it ‘a sort of eerie feeling of atmospheric excess that still remains “in the air” due to this loss of an alternative’ (2021: 158).
Spectres of Marx is Derrida’s ‘most influential text by some distance’ and has prompted recent discussions in marketing scholarship (Brown, 2007: 291). In particular, its concept of hauntology has been used to theorize temporality, branding and retroconsumption (Ahlberg et al., 2021; James et al., 2023; Södergren, 2022). But Brown reminds us that the book ultimately makes ‘the case for Marxism when the left was at its lowest intellectual ebb and right-wing triumphalism was in the ascendant’ (2021: 291). In short, it is not an analysis of market relations or consumer behaviour. It describes the state of Marx’s thinking in consumer culture. Hauntology is a way of explain how Marx keeps reappearing.
On this, Derrida argues that there is not a fixed Marx manifest in ‘Marxism, the Marxist ontology, or the Marxist critique’ (1994: 86). Marx metamorphosizes. He is a symbol of an unfinished intellectual project. One moment he is a cultural icon, at another a cipher for a theoretical system or synonym for a political movement. Some find these attractive, either because they want to fix one idea of Marx in place as the authority, or because they are inspired to developed his ideas. Others construct their own ideas of Marx, which they find repulsing. Accordingly, Derrida writes ‘this will be our hypothesis or rather our bias: there is more than one of them, there must be more than one of them’ (1994: 14). In short, there are many different ideas and associations with Marx.
Derrida’s explanation for this multiplicity is Marx’s ‘performative interpretation’ – that is, Marx offers us ‘an interpretation that transforms the very things it interprets’ (1994: 63). Distinct from descriptive grand theories and mid-range theory, Marx links ‘worldwide forms of social organization’ with ‘a new concept of the human, of society, economy, nation, several concepts of the State and of its disappearance’ (Derrida, 1994: 114). Derrida continues: Whatever one may think of this event, of the sometimes terrifying failure of that which was thus begun, of the techno-economic or ecological disasters, and the totalitarian perversions to which it gave rise … whatever one may think also of the trauma in human memory that may follow, this unique attempt took place … whether we like it or not, whatever consciousness we have of it, we cannot not be its heirs. (1994: 114)
For Derrida, then, there is a ‘Marxist inheritance’ (1994: 15). Since Marx, we know that it is possible to think new worlds into existence. They might be dangerous, disastrous even, but they are possible. The taboo on Marx, and the glee with which some claim that Marxism is dead, is a way of rejecting this inheritance. It is similar to what Freud (1905) calls a reaction formation. It is a construct designed to defend us against that which we both fear and desire. It is a taboo.
Here, then, building on the psychoanalytic concept of the taboo, Derrida’s hauntological framework asks us to look at Marx not only in terms of his repression but also in terms of his concealed appearances and outright expulsions. Hauntology analyses these and the philosophical consequences for concepts of temporality, presence and possibility of the Marx’s inheritance. Spectres of Marx, in other words, challenges us to think about the spectral appearances of Marx as much as his absenting. It asks us to test the hypothesis that there is more than one Marx. Based on this, and in an effort to explore the nature of taboo theorists in marketing more generally, we want to ask: is there more than one Marx haunting marketing theory?
Methodology
To identify the spectres of Marx constructed in marketing theory, we sought a methodological approach that would enable us to focus on what has been published by marketing scholars in marketing journals. Recognizing the controversial nature of taboos, we also sought a method that was relatively value-free and would minimize the researcher degrees of freedom. We therefore adopted a systematic literature review methodology. It is a way to reduce reviewer bias, to increase transparency and to facilitate an inclusive identification of relevant literature.
Like Peñaloza et al. (2023), we utilized the CABS Journal Guide (2019) to define the domain of marketing scholarship. We included every journal listed under its ‘Marketing’ section (N = 40) and systematically reviewed the outputs of these journals through two methods. First, we queried each journal’s online database for ‘Marx*’. The addition of the wildcard (*) picked up terms such as Marx, Marxism, Marxist, and so on, and was intended to ensure we captured as many relevant texts as possible. We searched from the inauguration of each journal until June 2023. This produced an initial corpus (N = 1161). To validate these results, and ensure an extensive search, we also queried Business Source Premier for the same search terms, date range and journals. This produced a second corpus (N = 703).
We compiled the two corpuses into a single database. We removed duplicates and manually screened the remaining records (N = 1280) to remove texts that did not refer to Karl Marx. We also excluded book reviews. In total, we excluded 349 sources at this initial screening stage.
We next established the level of engagement with Marx in each of the remaining sources. We included sources that made more than four separate references to Marx for full review (N = 174). We applied this rule manually. Although arbitrary, it developed from discussion between the research team as a means of discounting texts where, for example, Marx was referenced but not singled out for sustained discussion such as ‘Classical sociologists from Durkheim and Marx to Weber and Simmel’ and ‘From Durkheim, to Mauss, to Marx to Weber we have a grand narrative of social sciences’. There was no statistical difference in the frequency of marketing publications included for full review (r (7) = 0.959, p = .001) and others (r (7) = 0.907, p = .001) (z = 0.598, p = .275). As such, we felt that our inclusion criteria did not bias the corpus. To be clear, while these statistics suggest an absolute increase in the rate at which published articles engage with Marx, it does not mean that Marx is becoming more prominent within marketing scholarship as the total number of published marketing papers has increased over time as well.
Frequency of publication by journal (full review (other)).
Most cited papers.
aGoogle scholar 24th June 2023.
Figure 1 illustrates the engagement with Marx’s texts in the corpus. It suggests that marketing scholars have largely drawn on Marx’s analysis of capitalist economic relations, formalized in texts such as Capital Vol I, Grundrisse and Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, rather than his political polemics. The latter are represented in marketing scholarship primarily in the form of the Communist Manifesto. Frequency of references to Marx’s texts.
We executed a thematic synthesis of the articles included for full review to highlight the spectres of Marx within marketing scholarship. Thematic synthesis is an approach developed in medical scholarship to summarize qualitative data including the results of a systematic literature review (Thomas and Harden, 2008). To begin with, we extracted each reference to Marx from every article. We recorded the Marxist concept used and the marketing or consumer phenomena discussed in each extract. The average extract was three pages of text. This provided the material from which we generated spectres of Marx.
Summary of thematic synthesis.
Treating each synthesized theme, or spectre, as an ideal type, we proceeded to categorize each text included for full review in terms of its main spectre of Marx. Like Cluley and Green (2024), to appreciate broad trends and distinguishing characteristics from the literature, we coded each article to the most applicable spectre and did not allow articles to be coded to than one spectre. Where a small number of articles sat at the boundary between spectres, the authors negotiated the most appropriate spectre. Full results of the systematic review and thematic synthesis can be found in Supplemental Table 1. Figure 2 illustrates the prominence of each spectre over time. Frequency of theme by decade.
Analysis
Prescriptive Marx
An early stream of research in marketing discusses Marx as an advocate for a non-capitalist economic model. Here, Marx is treated as a synonym for socialism, communism, Leninism, Stalinism and other non-market-based economic relations. Marxist economies, in this spectre, is a generic term for non-market-based societies. There is an assumption, in this spectre, that Marxist thinkers, and the economic systems associated with them, render marketing theory and practice unnecessary. For example, in the earliest example of such work, Markham reminds readers of the Journal of Marketing that: the idea of commercial advertising was rejected by the Soviet government as a bourgeois capitalistic excrescence which artificially stimulates the economy by forcing people to buy what they do not need and cannot afford … Marxist-Leninist philosophy rejected the use of advertising as wasteful and furthermore not needed in socialist states (1964: 31).
Here, Prescriptive Marx challenges marketing scholars to understand exchange relations and consumption practices in non-capitalist contexts. In this respect, marketing theorists starting from this spectre were surprised to find more marketing activities and unique marketing theories in Marxist economies than they expected. Markham, for example, notes that ‘British firms were reported to have bought a small volume of advertising in Soviet media as early as 1944’ (1964: 31–32). He concludes that ‘the premise that advertising flourishes only in a capitalistic, profit-motivated economy must be revised’ (1964: 37).
Shortly after, Moyer makes a comparable juxtaposition, also in the Journal of Marketing. He notes that: ‘although some marketing activities previously have been performed in Communist societies, their economic systems are production-oriented and not marketing-oriented. But this condition may be changing’ (1966: 3). Using Marx as an advocate for non-capitalist economics, both Markham and Moyer treat marketing’s existence outside of capitalist economies as something warranting further analysis.
Over time, the empirical site of this research has shifted from Soviet states (Kostecki, 1985; Ostlund, 1973; Wells, 1997; Wills and Hayhurst, 1971) to other geographical contexts (Dong and Tian, 2009; Shultz and Pecotich, 1997). Deng and Dart (1995), for example, ask how this apparent historical contradiction between marketing and non-capitalist economic relations has played out in China. More recently, work in this area considers the ambivalence of Islamic thought towards Marxist principles (Choudhury, 1999; Jafari, 2022). Others adopt historical methods to explore other contradictions between Marx’s principles and economic realities (Fox et al., 2005; Tadajewski, 2009).
Across all these contributions, marketing scholars find themselves struck by the fact that marketing practices exist beyond free market economies. Such thinking is premised on a spectre of Marx as a theorist of and advocate for non-capitalist economic relations. These relations are imagined as operating without marketing theory or marketing practice. As such, this spectre involves a political manoeuvre. It aligns marketing theory and practice with capitalist economies and capitalism. No doubt, this move is shaped by the Cold War context. But it also helps marketing theorists identify with the historic triumph of capitalism over other economic systems. This allows marketing theories to justify the exorcism of Marx on both moralistic and rational grounds. It implies that Marx not only stands against the freedoms afforded by market-systems but is the architect of a failed economic system. The implication is that if his ideas did not work in the past, they cannot work in the future.
Critical Marx
A second spectre frames Marx as a critic of capitalist social relationships including marketing practice and consumption. The first substantive appearance of Marx as a straightforward opponent of marketing is Steiner (1976). Steiner traces Marx’s attack on political economy back to the Aristotelian critique of the tradesman as a kapelos or a trickster. Just as the ancient trickster was maligned for benefiting from a deception, according to Steiner, Marx’s maligns the marketer for profiting from unproductive puffery. Hirschman tells us that this interpretation puts Marx at odds with mainstream marketing thinking. Marx’s ‘ideas and values’, she writes, ‘are likely to be in conflict with those adhered to by many readers’ of marketing journals and are, consequently, rarely seen in print (1985: 179–180). Nevertheless, Hirschman, also drawing on this spectre of Marx, promotes him as a means of exposing the excesses of free market capitalism.
In the 1980s, others turned to Critical Marx to identify the inequalities, immoralities and maladies of capitalism. Fahey (1983: 157–158) demonstrates the compatibility between Marx’s thinking and feminism (see also Brace-Govan, 2010; Lane, 2000). Belk et al. (1989) emphasizes the relevance of Marxism to consumers and consumer researchers while Buttle deploys Marxism against the psychologization of need (1989: 205).
Critical Marx becomes more prominent in the 1990s following the seminal work by Murray and Ozanne (1991). This article inspired a fresh wave of discussions both with and against Critical Marx (Hetrick and Lozada, 1994; Murray et al., 1994). On the affirmative side, Desmond et al. (2000) advocate Marx’s contribution to counter-cultural thought (see also Boutlis, 2000; Miles, 2013 and Zavetoski, 2002). On the negative side, Hackley (2002) deems Marxism inadequate to the realities of contemporary advertising. Others question if Marx is a sufficient basis for critical marketing studies (e.g. Brown, 1994; Firat and Venkatesh, 1995; Fitchett and Saren, 1998).
More recent work has turned again to Marx as a critic of capitalist economic relations. For example, Jafari and Süerdem (2012) underline the renewed relevance of Marx and Engels’ critique of religion. Bradshaw (2013) suggests that the Marxist account of value should inform a critique of contemporary consumerism (see also Arnould, 2022; Chatzidakis and MacLaran, 2022; Dholakia et al., 2020). Dymek (2018) illustrates how Marxism can underpin a critique of social media.
In so doing, the critical spectre downplays Marx’s advocacy for non-market-based systems. It imagines Marx as someone who attacks marketing theory and practice associated with consumer capitalism. The idea here is that Marx equips you to criticize marketing. But, implicit in this spectre is the idea that it is possible, even desirable, to have capitalism without the problems introduced by existing marketing knowledge and actions. That is, Marx is imagined as someone who stands against marketing and capitalism in its current form. His critiques can identify areas where consumer capitalism can be improved – not overthrown.
This is a key distinction within the thinking based on Critical Marx. The critics of Critical Marx argue that Marx’s diagnoses of marketing and consumption reveal his own uselessness. Critical Marx presents us with a simple choice ‘between (a) our liberal, Judeo-Christian, Marxist ethics, which regard pushing soap as vulgar and, believe it or not, unclean; and (b) our pragmatic observation that if you really want to get rich as a country or world, sell the damn soap’ (Farmer, 1977: 15). The victory of capitalism and the need for marketing and consumption render Critical Marx inadequate as a marketing theory. In Farmer’s (1977) words, marketers and marketing theorists have already chosen to sell the soap (see Hutchinson, 1952). For those who use Critical Marx to attack Marx, then, if Marx does not like how we sell soap, it is his problem.
Literary Marx
The 1980s saw the emergence a third spectre of Marx: Literary Marx. Here, Marx is treated as offering a hermeneutic perspective through which marketing scholars can read marketing phenomena, adverts and popular culture. The work of Elizabeth Hirschman is pivotal here. She claims that Marx’s thinking allows us to see political ideologies at work within marketing and consumption texts. Indeed, she contends that popular culture texts themselves draw on Marxist thinking in their construction of characters, plotlines and cultural values. In her seminal analysis of 1980s American TV, for example, she writes: Ironically, then, ‘Dallas’ and ‘Dynasty’ convey a Marxist theme. In general, virtuous characters are linked with true or sacred consciousness that arises from communalism and working with nature/land; evil characters are linked with false consciousness that comes from capitalism and the management of technology (1988: 349; see also Hirschman, 1998: 261)
Subsequent engagements with Literary Marx have tended in two directions. On the one hand, following Hirschman’s lead, we find unconventional or surprising texts brought into the purview of the marketing discipline through a Marxist reading. Examples of this include readings of Don Delillos’s White Noise (Eid, 1999), of cinema (Hashamova, 2004) and of cookbooks (Brownlie and Hewer, 2007). On the other hand, we find Marxist hermeneutics applied to quintessentially marketing phenomena, practices and experiences including coupons (Stern, 1999), adverts (Campbell and Deane, 2019) and brand imagery (Fowler et al., 2022; Freund and Jacobi, 2013). In the inaugural issue of Consumption, Markets and Culture, Brottman epitomizes the tendency to ‘read’ marketing phenomena through a literary framing of Marx’s thinking: because shopping requires money and, on a large scale, can only really occur within the structures of an economically successful capitalist society, many of the critics who write about shopping as a text do so from a neo-Marxist, anti-capitalist, dystopian perspective, regarding shopping as the object of reprobation so common in Marxist influenced cultural critique. (1997: 46)
Literary Marx is also championed as ‘an arresting literary stylist’ whose writing, if not ideas, marketing scholars should emulate (Brown, 2002: 261). Indeed, analysing their methods of analysis and rhetorical styles, Brown concludes that: ‘Philip Kotler and Karl Marx are indistinguishable. That’s right, indistinguishable, interchangeable, inseparable. They are cerebral clones, scholarly synonyms, intellectually identical’ (2005: 57). That is to say, for Brown, the success of marketing’s most influential writer is down, at least in part, to his Marxist literary style.
Critical also use Literary Marx. He is held up as a symptom of the questionable ‘literary turn’ within the field of marketing (Brown et al., 2001; O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy, 2002). The emergence of this spectre reflects the translation of post-modernism into English-speaking academia and the culture wars in the 1980s and 1990s. At this point, many European critical theorists including Marx, Barthes and Freud were purged from curriculum in their home disciplines. Scholars interested in these traditions took shelter in various humanities. Here, the traditions were reframed as equivalent lenses that be applied to a text, like a consumer good. As such, Literary Marx is imagined as someone produced, and reproduced, within capitalist consumer culture.
Paradigmatic Marx
Reflecting broader debates in the philosophy of marketing science, the 1990s saw the emergence of our final spectre. It discusses Marx through the lens of research paradigms. One example of this approach is the use of Marx as a reference point around which other theoretical perspectives can be oriented. For example, Cochoy (2015) opposes the pragmatism of actor-network theory to the criticism of Marxism; Sinclair (2016) contrasts Marxist epistemology to the sociology of Norbert Elias; Earley (2014, 2019) highlights French philosopher Alain Badiou’s epistemological indebtedness to Marx; while the experimental piece of Bádéjọ and Gordon (2022: 237) implies that Marxism is a derivative system of thought.
However, Paradigmatic Marx is primarily used as a resource in discussions about normal science and paradigmatic incommensurability. At one extreme, Marx is imagined as someone who’s thinking contradicts the traditional research philosophy of marketing theory and, therefore, should be ignored. This view is set out in a series of articles by Shelby Hunt. These criticize Marx as being historically mistaken (1991), as being hostile to objectivity (1993), and for possessing a level of dogmatism comparable to that of Nazism (1992). For Hunt, then, the Marx’s critique of capitalist social relations is flawed not because it inhibits freedom, or is ineffective, but because it falls outside of the bounds of positivist marketing science.
At the other extreme, Paradigmatic Marx is promoted as someone who has the potential to unlock new theory and emancipate new practices precisely because he stands outside of normal science (e.g. Davies and Fitchett, 2005; Hulberg, 2006; Izberk-Bilgin, 2010; Tadajewski et al., 2014). For example, following French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, Østergaard and Fitchett (2012) prioritize Marxism’s epistemological credentials (see also Østergaard et al., 2013). Brown (2007) excoriates the SDL literature for its failure to engage with Marx’s understanding of value (see also Arvidsson, 2011; Cova et al., 2011; Karababa and Kjeldgaard, 2014). Bonsu and Darmody (2008) illustrate the extent to which an innovative reading of Marx enables us to shine old light on new problems such as social media.
Others demonstrate how Marx’s thinking enables a reconceptualization of the ontology of the consumer (see Arvidsson, 2008; Biraghi et al., 2021; Cluley and Dunne, 2012; Cova and Dalli, 2009; Denny, 2021). On this point, Brown argues, marketing theory must engage explicitly with Marx if it is to improve ‘its standing as a legitimate social science’ (2007: 294). This, he argues, is a way to challenge ‘the perception’ that marketing scholarship is ‘peopled by blinkered, benighted barbarians, beholden to a money-grubbing managerial agenda’ (2007: 294).
Another notable stream of thinking with Paradigmatic Marx considers the ontology and epistemology of Marx’s concepts. For example, the existence of ideology becomes treated as a primarily epistemological issue (Kozinets and Handelman, 2004; Marion, 2006; Schmitt et al., 2022). Hirschman (1993), by contrast, defends Marxist epistemology by providing a detailed exegesis of its distinction between ideology and science. Mascarenhas (1995) argues that Marx shows how the social structures and knowledge regimes of capitalism minimize and perhaps even eliminate our moral agency (see also Elliott, 1997).
In this spectre, then, Marx is imagined as a meta-theorist. He is promoted as offering an alternative way of thinking in the marketplace of ideas. Not only does he, as in Literary Marx, help us to read existing phenomenon, he lets us see conceptual and empirical objects we would overlook otherwise. As a result, for his advocates, Paradigmatic Marx has emancipatory potential. He is not, as in Critical Marx, a resource for attacking what is but helps us to imagine what could be. This framing also fuels a hostility to Marx. If we can only see things through Marx, the critics contend, they are not worth looking at.
Discussion
Our analysis challenges the idea that Marx has no place in marketing scholarship. Despite the supposed antithesis of marketing and Marx, marketing theorists have written a lot about Marx. Marxist ideas, associated with critical theory, postmodernism, feminism, sociology, anthropology and culture studies appear in critical marketing (e.g. Ellis et al., 2010), philosophical and radical thought in marketing (e.g. Firat et al., 1987) and studies of the dark side of marketing (e.g. Hill and McDonagh, 2021). Marx, himself, makes many appearances in marketing theory, even in the pages of the most long-standing and managerial journals.
This is not to say that Marx is a cornerstone of mainstream marketing scholarship, nor an authority who cannot be questioned. Rather, as a taboo theorist, Marx has received unusual attention. His name and thoughts are used, positively and negatively, to question the operation of marketing in different economic systems, to critique the excesses and inequalities of consumer capitalism, to look in new ways at marketing texts and consumption practices, and to consider the philosophy of marketing science. His name comes up when marketing theorists say what they should not speak about and what they should. He haunts the discipline – appearing in different forms that scare and attract marketing theorists.
But a result of this taboo status is that marketing scholars often use Marx’s concepts without grounding them in Marxism as a grand narrative nor as an intellectual and political movement. This is true of both those who want to purge marketing theory of Marxism and those who advocate for Marx. Typically, Marx’s ideas are used to confirm that something is wrong with marketing and consumption without unlocking new understandings or new practices. In short, Marx’s concepts are often picked off the intellectual shelf to reinforce the antithesis between marketing and Marx – even by his advocates.
In recognizing the ambivalent and hauntological nature of the taboo on Marx – that is, in recognizing that as much as Marx is omitted, he also appears in marketing theory – we can begin to outline a different way of engaging with Marx. It starts by explicitly and positively speaking Marx’s name to address marketing. We might call this ‘Marxist marketing theory’. It has the potential to enhance the impact and social value of marketing scholarship by confronting the operation, effects and contradictions in contemporary capitalism (Callinicos, 2023; Mau, 2023; Saito, 2023) and looking to a progressive future for marketing and consumption (Arnould, 2022; Bachouche and Sabri, 2019; Coffin and Egan-Wyer, 2022; Schmitt et al., 2022). Indeed, if we accept that marketing keeps ‘global capitalism ticking over’ (Hill and McDonagh, 2021), as Cova and Paranque put it, ‘far from rendering Marxian concepts obsolete’, contemporary marketing practice ‘highlights their relevance’ (2019: 449). In what follows we sketch some possibilities for Marxist marketing theory based on the spectres of Marx is marketing theory.
Understanding the spectres
We have shown that marketing theory has created its own versions of Marx, some of which are used to scare people away from Marx, others to show how Marx can enrich marketing theory. Aside from their scholarly rigour, each cannot be understood without reflecting on geo-politics, wider disciplinary movements, as well as the influence of institutional gatekeepers. The history of marketing thought shows us, for instance, how Marxist ideas were explicitly and implicitly exorcised from the field in the Cold War era (see Tadajewski and Stole, 2016).
Reflecting the ambivalent nature of taboo theorists calls for similar analysis of the ways in which historical and ideological controversies have created space for Marxism within marketing theory and practice. Here, our systematic review pinpoints moments deserving further study. For example, the inaugurations of Consumption Markets and Culture and Marketing Theory coincided with increased engagements with Literary Marx and Critical Marx, while the ending Cold War appears to have muted discussions of Prescriptive Marx.
We also identify moments in the history of marketing theory when particular spectres have been explicitly invited into marketing thought. For instance, advocating an expanded conceptualization of marketing science in the Journal of Marketing, Arndt (1985: 12) calls for marketing scholars to use ‘Neo-Marxist approaches’ to engage in ‘the type of scientific activity where data sentences are confronted with value sentences’. Here, our systematic review identifies pivotal papers that have made space in the field for the spectres of Marx to take shape. As we have seen, Hunt (1991) made a significant contribution to Paradigmatic Marx – as did Murray and Ozanne (1991) for Critical Marx. Such contributions were made possible, in turn, by wider academic trends. Hirschman (1988), who influentially introduces Literary Marx, cannot be explained without pointing to the wider movement from Marx as a theorist discussed in economics departments to one discussed in the humanities. What explains these occurrences given the ideological and historical controversies associated with Marx? There is more historical work to be done here.
Moreover, the spectres of Marx that have emerged in marketing scholarship have been refracted through specificities and contingencies unique to the field. As such, they tell something about relations within the field and the relationship between marketing theory and the outside world. Marxist marketing theory can contribute to the history of marketing thought, then, by further exploring these events.
Marxist marketing theory might also look at the historical development of marketing and consumption practices through a dialectical lens informed by Marx. It can look at the material conditions that affect market relations and consider how these are shaped by the tendencies of capitalism such as the accumulation of capital and the exploitation of value. It might look at the function of structural inequalities in global supply chains and the ways these set the scene for contemporary consumer cultures. In so doing, it can look both at marketing and consumption practices in market and non-market-based economies and explain how particular ways of thinking about marketing and consumption have developed in each context.
By paying attention to non-market based economies, and the emergence of marketing and capitalist forms of consumption, Marxist marketing theory can look forwards. Showing how marketing and consumption have developed supports the idea of post-capitalist forms of marketing and consumption – that is, economics and social relations that are not market-based but involve forms of marketing and consumption. For example, outside of marketing theory Bastani (2019) argues that history is moving towards a form of fully automated luxury communism in which consumer capitalism is replaced by consumer communism. A historical stream of Marxist marketing theory might make similar predictions.
Marketing with Marx, Marx with marketing
Marxist marketing theory must delve deeper into Marxism. Looking at Marx’s texts which have been discussed in marketing theory, we see a preference for Capital Vol I and the Communist Manifesto. These are texts in which Marx rarely addresses marketing or consumption – what are sometimes described as the spheres of circulation and realization. We might wonder, therefore, how we can apply his ideas to marketing problems. Indeed, focusing on Marx’s analysis of the sphere of production, such as Capital Volume I, might support the claim that Marx has little to say to marketing theory.
However, Marx’s focus on production is the first step in his analysis of capitalism as an economic and social system. His next steps, written in notebooks in his lifetime and printed posthumously in texts such as Capital Volume II, explicitly focus on the circulation of commodities. They follow the path he charts through his earlier works, albeit it not in a straightforward manner. If marketing scholars want to reflect the totality of Marx’s system, it is necessary for them to read further into Marx’s writing and work through these logics.
For example, Marx prefaces his analysis of the circulation of commodities by emphasizing that he ‘abstracts’ these relations in an attempt ‘to grasp these forms in their pure state’ (1885: 109). The result is that his account lacks the humanity and vitality of Capital Vol I – where Marx enlivens his analysis with detailed, journalistic examples of life. Marketing and consumer research can make important contributions to Marxist theory here. It can breathe life into the consumer in Marxism.
While not easy, nor guaranteed to succeed, this has the potential to broaden the appeal of marketing scholarship. Marketing scholarship need not only be a consumer of Marx but can contribute to the Marxist project. History has moved on since Marx put pen to paper. Material relations have changed. New crises have developed. New social and economic forms have emerged. New sources of value, market systems and consumption practices have developed. Marketing scholars and practitioners are in a unique position to explore these developments and integrate them into the deepened Marxist understanding of the sphere of circulation. Here, we might take a lead from Fuchs (2019) who attempts to apply Marx’s thinking to social media and Bollmer and Guinness (2023) who analyse YouTube through Marx.
On this, we must remember that, while his advocates sometimes construct a spectre of Marx as an unquestionable oracle, there is a rich and ongoing tradition that contests, challenges and develops his ideas. As Derrida puts it: ‘Marxism remains at once indispensable and structurally insufficient’ (1994: 83). Here, then, we would extend Brown’s observation that as ‘antithesis is an integral part of Marxian analysis,’ and that, as ‘Marxism and marketing are deemed antithetical’, there is ‘prima facie evidence’ that marketing theory needs Marx (2005: 57). We would add that it also proves that Marxism needs marketing theory too. How can we understand the current moment without an account of marketing and consumption?
In fact, a deeper understanding marketing and consumption could enhance, rather than repress, Marx’s radical intentions. If Marxist marketing theory moves past vulgar analysis that sees marketing as manipulation and consumption as being exclusively alienating to recognize their use values, it can deepen the humanism of Marxist theory. For example, we can explore the ways consumer subjects might desire their own destruction and the ways that ideology can blind societies from their problems and solutions. Such work would not only help develop Marxist thinking, it could also contribute to areas marketing theory such as the recent interest in humanistic marketing (Kotler, 2024).
In sum, having outlined the construction of four spectres of Marx in marketing theory we can not only question the premise that marketing theorists have not been able to speak about Marx, we can begin to consider the benefit of a more explicit Marxist marketing theory. It would allow us to engage with Marx as a grand theorist offering a performative interpretation. With this sentiment in mind, we do not claim to have outlined all that Marxist marketing theory could be or should be. Rather, we suggest that fruitful first steps towards Marxist marketing theory involve: historicizing Marx, marketing and marketing theory and considering post-capitalist marketing theory and consumption practices; expanding the reading of Marx’s work in marketing theory and engaging in dialogue with other fields; challenging Marx’s analysis to confront the realities, pleasures and pains, of markets and consumption.
To do so, practically, we must expose students and practitioners to Marx rather than hide his influence. Outside of marketing theory, writers such as David Harvey, Naomi Klein, Thomas Piketty, David Graeber and Mark Fisher have used a Marxist lens to understand capital accumulation in new ways and alert us to issues including exploitation in global supply chains, the extraction of value through property speculation, and the limiting of the critical imagination. They show us how supposedly meaningful individual consumer choices fit into a system of exploitation. Their work is influential in the academe, advocacy, popular discourse and policy not because they downplay their Marxist roots but because they use Marx as a springboard to better understand contemporary social issues and, vice versa. Marxist marketing theorists could follow their lead.
On taboo theorists
To close, we want to move on from Marx to think more generally about taboo theorists in marketing theory. Earlier we argue that hauntology is as an analysis of the attraction and rejection of Marx. To make this point, we emphasized the Freudian understanding of the taboo to pick out a theme in Derrida’s hauntology that has been ignored in many contemporary readings – especially in marketing theory.
That said, many of the reasons Derrida gives for a hauntological analysis of Marx apply to other writers – in particular, his emphasis on Marx’s performative interpretation as an emergent and dangerous property seems to apply beyond Marx. There are other theorists whose work is meant to achieve something through the act of being thought. In Marx, that emergence is at the level of the economic and the social. Other theorists are performative of the cultural and the psychological. For example, Barthes’ semiotics aims to fix emergent cultural ideas in place, allowing them to be critiqued and analysed and put into productive relationships. Similarly, psychoanalytic writers have a therapeutic intent. Their thinking is designed to facilitate self-discovery and self-knowledge. It is not a model of the mind based on fixed boxes.
It is notable that these kinds of theorists suffer from similar taboos in marketing thinking to Marx. There are no doubt others. This suggests that what marketing theory struggles to handle is not simply left-wing politics but thinking that is oriented to change, uncertainty and emergence. Yet marketing theory is also attracted to these ideas – sometimes through theory, sometimes through practice. This might be, as Derrida argued, due to the inherent hauntology of these perspectives. But, it might also be that it is impossible to think about markets, marketing and consumption for long without coming up against performative interpretations. In other words, perhaps Marx, Barthes, Freud and other taboo theorists keep reappearing, and keep having to be expelled, because marketing theorists keep finding themselves attracted to them, against their better judgement.
Here, we would recommend that others could follow our method in documenting the spectres of taboo theorists. Hopefully, our analysis provides a protocol and benchmark for comparisons that can expedite this research.
This is not to say, though, that Marx’s politics is not problematic. Certainly, many critics view his ideas about political economy as antithetic to marketing. This is enough for them to dismiss him. It is notable, too, that some spectres in the marketing literature depoliticize Marx. Derrida writes: ‘People would be ready to accept the return of Marx, on the condition that a silence is maintained about Marx’s injunction not just to decipher but to act and to make the deciphering [the interpretation] into a transformation that changes the world’ (1994: 37–38). On this, Marx exposes a splinter in the eye of marketing scholarship.
For all the espoused free market fundamentalism of the discipline, a political ideology which is often recruited against Marx, the treatment of Marx shows us that institutions and gatekeepers in the field are only too willing to intervene in the supply and demand of ideas when there is demand for intellectual products they do not like. As with any vice good, control leads to a shadow economy. The demand is met through smuggled references to Marx and manifest absences. This problematic is because it means that marketing scholarship limits its thinking and potential intellectual and social impact. It is also problematic because it means that advocates for Marx are left appealing to the free market, while the advocates for free markets make an appeal to managing markets. Taboo theorists certainly encourage us to think strange things.
Supplemental Material
Supplemental Material - The taboo theorist: Karl Marx and marketing theory
Supplemental Material for The taboo theorist: Karl Marx and marketing theory by Robert Cluley and Stephen Dunne in Journal of Marketing Theory.
Footnotes
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