The Politics of Culture resources of hope for the future; but, unlike facile kinds of populism, it also regards the totality of the cultural life of the oppressed critically and even with suspicion, because there is much in the cultural life of the oppressed which reflects the internalised forms of the dominant ideology and even the distortions which are produced in the consciousness of the oppressed by the mechanisms of oppression itself. On the other hand, the conception of the 'national-popular' refuses to concede the culture of the upper classes to those upper classes because it recognises that dominant culture itself is not a product of leisure but of labour, so that it is indeed the working classes and other oppressed social strata which have in fact produced, through blood and sweat, the culture that the upper classes call their own. The work of creating the "national-popular5 thus involves a critical task twice over, in other words a critical appropriation of all that is best in the cultures of the oppressed as well as the oppressors, in the service of a general liberation. Politics of culture has always had paramount importance in Marxist theory. In Marx's own writings we find two great projects. A very large part of his work was devoted to a scientific understanding of the political economy of capitalism and to a demonstration how the laws of the transition to socialism arise out of the laws of capitalism itself. An equally large part was devoted, however, to developing a materialist conception of consciousness, ideology and culture. Thus, in his 'Preface' to A Critique of Political Economy of 1859, Marx makes a very important distinction between the realm of human consciousness, as follows: "... a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of their conflict and fight it out." What is striking about this distinction is that only "the transformation of the economic conditions of production" are said to be available for being "determined with precision," in a scientific manner. The "consciousness" of that fundamental conflict is said to belong elsewhere - in "the legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophic" forms - which evidently cannot be "determined" with equal "precision" even though - or, more likely, because - that is where people actually "fight it out." Those forms are, in other words, less the outcome of objective structural laws and much more