Towards an economy of memory: Defining material conditions of remembrance

Introduction

Pedro Almodovar’s 2021 film “Parallel Mothers,” has been promoted by the mainstream Spanish media as “Historical Memory” during the last two decades. As a backdrop to the intersecting stories of two babies exchanged at birth, one of the main protagonists, Janis, played by Penélope Cruz, is searching for her grandfather who was buried in a mass grave from the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Without further political references, the film depicts her involvement with a private archaeological company devoted to exhuming bodies which is merely a dramatic device to portray the various romances and sexual affairs in the film. In that sense, Almodóvar’s film is not creative. He is simply reproducing the current hegemonical ideology when remembering the recent Spanish past. He stereotypically commodifies the image of exhumations which has articulated the discourse on past historical events in the Kingdom of Spain in recent decades; a discourse which apparently began in 2000 with the exhumation of a mass grave in Priaranza del Bierzo.

Subsequently, mass grave exhumations have proved to be the fundamental component of memory in Spain (Ferrándiz, 2014; Hristova, 2023) and attracted the attention of scholars, creating a local Memory Studies scene around the concept of the memory of violence, trauma, witness and the perception of the Holocaust (Hristova et al., 2014). At the societal level, an image of memory as a traumatic issue was articulated (Yusta Rodrigo, 2014) and passed down generationally to the grandchildren (Miñarro and Morandi, 2014). Other academics also addressed the subject of a resurgence of the past (Aguilar Fernández and Payne, 2018) and even a return of the spectres (Ferrándiz, 2006). This institutionalised vision of memory precisely exposes this hegemonic conceptualisation which has also pervaded the arts (Lapeña Gallego, 2020), literature (López de Abiada, 2008), cinema (Sánchez Biosca, 2006) and among other fields. As a result, there is an individual search for restitution through the recovery of the body of a murdered person, denied a Christian burial and also any political background which might have made them unionists, communists, anarchists, socialists, suffragettes or freemasons. Today they are mere ‘victims’, their agency in life reduced to an image of skeletal remains on the screen. However, the background to the War and the Dictatorship in Spain encompassed economic struggles: the risk of land reform, revolutionary trade unionism and the republican project in giving voice to an oppressed people in an underdeveloped economy. This posed a risk to landowners, the church and reactionary sectors of the army (Brenan, 2015). How is it possible, then, that today we find ourselves confronted with the interpellation of family pain as the hegemonic interpretation of memory in both the media and academia? Consequently, there is neither a memory of the economy nor a memory analysed economically.

The image of the mass graves in Spain, internationally disseminated by the media, is unequivocally referenced by Enzo Traverso. In his study on how the imagination of the left has shifted from utopian to nostalgia in the last few decades, he mentions the Spanish case as part of that transnational history (Traverso, 2017). Thus, it is symptomatic that the crisis of materialist theories coincides with the ‘memory boom’. Gal Kirn (2022) argues that not only has there been a lack of exchange between Marxism and Memory Studies because of the differences between their objects of research and methodologies, but that this ‘missed encounter’ between the two is the result of a historical process of disengagement of Marxism from Memory Studies, from the 1980s onwards. Perhaps, the economy is absent from memory as in Almodóvar’s film. However, it is precisely this absence of materialist theories and political economy in the study of memory which must be addressed to understand the reasoning behind Almodovar’s trompe l’oeil.

There is a certain reductionism in the disciplinary perception of the history of Memory Studies. Genealogical arcs such as the one established by Astrid Erll are both conflicting and symptomatic. Erll considers that the study of cultural memory has its origins in two prevailing trends of the 1920s: Maurice Halbwach’s sociological studies of collective memory (mémoire collective) and Aby Warburg’s art-historical interest in the European memory of images (Bildgedachtnis), and there is a conceptual leap to the 1980s when Piere Nora introduces the idea of places of memory (lieux de memoire) and Aleida and Jan Assmann advanced the notion of cultural memory (Kulturelles Gedächtnis), as ‘theory which is the most authoritative in the German-speaking world and, in international comparison, also the most elaborate’ (Erll, 2011: 13). The arc is valuable for situating current cultural memory theory, but it is decidedly incomplete. In contrast, the compilation work of Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and Daniel Levy remains crucial. In their handbook, we find an anthology demonstrating that there are uses and studies of the notion of memory at the social and collective level before, during and after Erll’s genealogy (Olick et al., 2011). Nonetheless, given the historical absence of materialism and political economy in the study of memory, the following proposes lines of enquiry on which to reframe the study of memory in the future, using the Spanish experience as an example. It suggests three directions as a starting point: studying the modes of remembrance, the field of memory and memory as ideology. The theoretical proposal is based on years of empirical research regarding the practices and politics of memory developed in Spain concerning the mass graves of people murdered during the war which began in 1936 and continued during the fascist dictatorship which followed, thereby basing the construction of the arguments on situated knowledge.

Building on this premise, the text is organised into three parts. In the first section, cultural memory is examined as part of a mode of production, according to Marxist theory, and the original accumulation of memory following Gal Kirn’s argument applied to the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the Dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1937–1977). The second section explores the possibility of understanding memory as a field. It is exemplified by the Spanish politics of victimhood, victim hierarchies and the establishment of a cosmopolitan memory at a transnational level, with the Holocaust as a fundamental component defining the field, applying Pierre Bourdieu’s theory. The third section analyses memory as an ideology which, consistent with Louis Althusser’s theory, contributes to reproducing capitalism and thus ensuring societies where human and environmental exploitation is guaranteed in global terms. The conclusion will question the role of Memory Studies in this context, suggesting how the need for the materialist study of memory to elaborate an ‘economy of memory’ would break with the historical dissociation between materialism and culture and contribute to changing the agency that Memory Studies may have had at a political level.

Modes of remembrance

How memory is situated in the dominant relations of production of its time? In materialist theory, the mode of production implies everything involved in making the necessities of life, including ‘productive forces’ such as labour, tools and raw materials, as well as ‘relations of production’. For an individual, the mode of production is

a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and how they produce. (Marx and Engels, 2001: 42)

In other words, the mode of production implies the social structures that regulate the relationship between human beings in the production of goods, which becomes a fundamental principle for understanding memory from a new perspective.

In this sense, Gal Kirn proposes an investigative approach from a historical perspective. Kirn points out that, just as there is a primitive accumulation of capital, there would also be an accumulation of memory, establishing the relationships between memory and capital. Kirn argues that the asymmetrical relation between workers and capital would ultimately emerge if the essential entry point for the study of capital in Marxist theory is the analysis of commodities and value, the question of the relation between workers and capital and the process of production of ‘surplus value’. The capitalist mode of production, based on inequality and exploitation, was founded on historical conditions which already existed, the most important of which was violence. He considers how Memory Studies are based on the paradigm of violence. Therefore, primitive accumulation could be transposed to Memory Studies for understanding economic violence and the different logics of class oppression and exploitation (Kirn, 2022).

As an example of a mode of production which could explain this, Spain was perceived as an underdeveloped country when the Second Republic was proclaimed. The economy was mainly agrarian, and the society was clearly divided. On one level, a class of people held power; however, the proletarians and peasants did not participate in politics or culture nor did they own the means of production. It was a prolonged survival of the Ancien Régime sustained by the support of the Church and the Army (Brenan, 2015). Ownership of the means of production was at risk during the Second Republic, as well as specific apparatuses which ensured the hegemony of the ruling classes. The prospect of agrarian reforms (Giménez Martínez, 2017), the new role of trade unions as fundamental agents in the contracting of day labourers and representation vis-à-vis the employers (Aróstegui Sánchez, 2006), women’s participation in suffrage and institutional politics (Peris et al., 2018) or the separation of church and state (González Gullón, 2015) resulted in a threat to the ownership of capital by those who had always held it, backed by a regime of violence (Preston, 2020). The coup d’état of 1936 and the war that followed until the coup leaders took control of the entire territory, represented a reaction against the reform of the mode of production. That reaction employed massive repressive violence and delivered the capital back into the hands of the state, landowners, businessmen and the church (Aróstegui Sánchez, 2012; Recio and Fernández, 2003). This accumulation and establishment of new relations of production ensured capital reproduction in corporatism.

Moreover, this foundation simultaneously generated a superstructure which included a narration of the past that gave it a cultural legitimation. After the war, the Spanish state’s memory policies aimed to generate a permanent image of Spain. It was an epic, mythological and fetishized history characterised by a Fascist-Catholic ritual strategy (Box, 2010). In this context, state policies were implemented, such as the recovery of the bodies of those fighting with the rebel army during the conflict or those giving political support to the coup plotters, which the regime used to consolidate its victory and their monumental exaltation as ‘Martyrs and Fallen for God and Spain’ (Saqqa Carazo, 2022). In both cases, it is essential to note a fundamental component: the state was financially committed to orchestrating and financing the process with the support of the private sector. The regime involved the businessmen who supported the coup and the dictatorship to finance and develop the memory policies. Of those partnerships, perhaps the best illustration was the use of slave labour by businessmen for their companies but also in the construction of the fascist mausoleum ‘Valley of the Fallen’ (Isaías Lafuente, 2018). In this way, the state organised an economy around the capital of businessmen and landowners who had the right to exploit people without the threat of unions and workers’ parties. At the same time, the state developed a legitimising memorial discourse using its public administration with the support of the private capital it favoured. Nevertheless, the official memory, institutionalised and formulated around cultural objects, also inspired resistance. A resistance which can only occur after dispossession by violence and social death (Patterson, 2018).

Orlando Patterson’s theory is particularly revealing in defining the possibility of communicating memory as part of a mode of production of exploitation and slavery. His approach, based on a transhistorical materialist study, indicates that for economic domination to be possible (the exploitation of the enslaved people), the slaves must be subdued through the destruction of their social relations, identity, traditions and, finally, memory. Therefore, to understand memory as part of the mode of production established after the Spanish Civil War, the violent accumulation of capital by the regime, landowners, church and industrialists must be linked to the dispossession not only of the potential means of production, such as fields or factories which were socialised during the war but also of the possibility of continuing to produce narratives about the past. Despite this, there was resistance, from ritualised visits to mass graves to bringing flowers and mourning clandestinely or openly confronting military authority (Palacios González, 2022a). Initiatives which precisely encapsulate the lack of resources and means to produce a counter-narrative with the same influence as the cultural memory promoted by the state, capitalists and the church, while they were increasing and reproducing their capital. However, the post-war fascist economy transitioned to global markets after the granting of territory by US military forces (Viñas, 1981). This submission and loss of sovereignty in favour of the reproduction and circulation of capital continued with the Transition and the reinforcement of the mode of production by the governments of the social democratic PSOE party (Viñas, 2003). This economic change also entailed a change in the rhetoric of the regime’s memory policies, which progressively abandoned belligerence and martyrdom for the idea of consensus and peace (Redondo, 2006). This situation was also reinforced in the Transition when there was a lack of compensation and restitution for the people murdered and repressed during the war and the dictatorship (Jimeno Aranguren, 2018). Only marginally did self-managed remembrance initiatives take place, such as memorials campaigned for by communities to recover the bodies of those murdered by the regime (de Kerangat, 2019). Also, hundreds of mass graves where the murdered were buried were re-signified with flowers, gardens, fences and monuments. Nevertheless, it is crucial to emphasise: these were self-managed by the communities. There was permission and passive support from the town councils. However, the weight of these memorial practices was based on voluntary work and organisation among relatives of the murdered people, communist, socialist, anarchist militants, trade unionists and neighbours (Conesa i Sánchez, 2013; Fernández de Mata, 2016; Mir and Gelonch, 2013; Palacios González, 2021).

The post-fascist mode of production was globalising, but the capital accumulated through violence continued to circulate in the same hands – consequently, the means of cultural remembrance too. An economic change, however, began to occur in the 1980s and 1990s. The Spanish government implemented neoliberal policies, and massive privatisations of the public sector took place (González Sarro, 2022). This adaptation of the mode of production also shaped memory. From 2000 onwards, mass graves of people murdered during the coup, war and dictatorship began to be exhumed, but this undertaken by private companies with a public budget. Civil society acquiesced to private companies receiving subsidies from the public administration as part of memory policies. At this point, it is relevant to note the persistence of civil society being dispossessed of the means of remembrance. However, the very content of these actions has monopolised the discourse: exhumations of murdered people. It is a type of action that functions on an individual, depoliticised level, generally appealing to pain and victimhood, at a time when, as Enzo Traverso points out, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the left became despondent (Traverso, 2017).

Civil society which, in the past, developed self-managed remembrance actions was now having to wait for subsidies from the state when the practices of remembrance as public policies involved private companies. However, if we now look at the content of the memories linked to the people murdered and buried in mass graves, an economic approach to the phenomenon would be incomplete if we only address the dynamics of the accumulation of economic capital and how these have been related to the accumulation of memory. These narratives have also generated a hierarchy of values. They privileged some over others. Who and how someone could be remembered would lead us to contemplate the accumulation of other layers of capital: cultural, symbolic or social, and this brings us to Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of the field of cultural production.

The field of memory

The idea of introducing the notion of the ‘field’ into the study of memory is already present in Jeffrey Olick’s work on commemorations and images of the past in Germany. In this sense, when defining his object of study, Olick (2016) suggests that, in addition to the fact that the symbolic can be employed and instrumentalised by powerful actors for their purposes:

Views on the past, moreover, do vary significantly with generational and other social structural divisions, and images of the past can be indexes of social structure and makers of difference. To investigate such matters is to study the political economy of commemoration. (p. 37)

In this sense, the idea of the field would support this because there is no single collective memory. On the contrary, there are conflicts around them. Thus, the question of how symbolic domination is produced through memory could be interpreted from the debates deriving from Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) La Distinction, where he explains his critique of judgement and common sense.

On the basis of the idea of the field as a place of symbolic structures in which one participates in developing an activity; in this context, the activity would be the cultural remembrance of those murdered during the Spanish War and dictatorship. In a class society, certain groups accumulate not only economic capital but also a greater capacity to intervene in a specific field. In the case study of Spanish mass graves, the displacement of popular knowledge of the body, exercised by local communities (especially in rural areas), in favour of the ‘specialisation’ of the exhumations of mass graves by archaeologists, forensic anthropologists, as well as those mediations by historians, social anthropologists, psychologists and governmental political agents (Palacios González, 2022b), marked a clear division between those who, in the past, could intervene and produce memories and the agents who can produce them today. If, in the past, the poorest and the excluded remembered the mass graves, now the memories are managed by a professional class with higher incomes, university degrees and social status. This division makes a clear distinction between the types of capital each possesses in society, in which the new managers of memory also have more significant cultural and social capital aside from economic capital.

Accepting therefore that this symbolic, cultural and social capital is interrelated with economic capital when generating hierarchies and differentiated spaces where scales of value are established, the idea of memory as a field would lead to recognition of a separate hierarchy. This means that there is a hierarchical difference between those who produce ‘communicative memory’ (without economic, social or cultural capital) by which the past is narrated, and those who produce ‘cultural memory’ (holding greater economic, social or cultural capital) by which publications, reports, institutions are produced, assuming Assmann’s (1995) scheme. While a memory could be shared (e.g. the recurrent memory of the violence suffered during the War and the Dictatorship), in this sense, there would be a certain horizontality (presumably between the fact of having been a ‘victim’). However, the difference between the possibility of simply communicating and that of producing memories would generate a hierarchical difference in terms of the values of the memories of the different agents.

This illustrates how different agents who communicate a memory may have a positional advantage in that field. Furthermore, their success in producing a cultural memory would depend on a subjective system of previous experiences and predispositions, or habitus, where economic capital ultimately determines who can acquire the tools that would guarantee communicative success through the cultural device of memory production. This inequality explicitly demonstrates that despite the large number of actions which, for example, were carried out on mass graves during the Dictatorship and the Transition, and notwithstanding the intense struggles against authority and to gather the necessary resources at an economic level, they had almost no visibility nationwide. While a stonemason who makes sepulchres, or a woman who accumulates the narrative of decades of repression and resistance in a rural environment, may have a rich system of memory, this is not necessarily relevant in the field of memory. On the contrary, agents with much greater economic and cultural capital: writers, artists, archaeologists, forensic experts, teachers, academics, researchers, journalists, musicians as well as institutional agents such as governments, museums, universities, foundations or NGOs could produce or privilege certain memories that, according to the value system of culture in general and the research interests of academics in particular, will be granted a superior status.

Thus, it would be worth considering from an economic point of view that a series of codes generated to privilege in the different fields the people murdered during the war and dictatorship in Spain, once again creating a distinction but in this case by the accumulated, symbolic capital. During the Transition, many locals tried to elevate the category of those killed by the regime by referring to them as people who ‘died for Freedom’ (Ledesma and Rodrigo, 2006); this was an attempt to appropriate the term of martyr designated to the perpetrators as ‘Fallen for God and Spain’ (Saqqa Carazo, 2021). The field adapts its values to a context in which the need for capital in a new market economy, required its harmonious, non-confrontational development. The field then modifies its values again at the turn of the millennium to align with the concepts of the ‘victim’ and ‘dignity’. In this regard, the individualistic character given to the murdered persons in the context of the exhumations is relevant in a differential sense (Palacios González, 2022b). The politics of memory of progressive parties were linked to a liberal understanding of social democracy and its ideological frameworks in the wake of Anthony Giddens (1991, 2008, 2013), a political trend accompanied by the great myth of individualism in society (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2001). The story of the unjustly murdered grandfather, for whose remembrance we need government agents (to subsidise) and scientists (to exhume) so that the body regains its ‘dignity’, has much to do with a way of understanding liberal democracy and how different social groups aspire to become full citizens and to organise their identity politics based on resentment and recognition (Fukuyama, 2018). Those who own the modes of remembrance, and those agents of the professional class involved in memory policies, have promoted one way of understanding the bodies of the murdered in a game of accumulation of symbolic capital: the victim.

The aspiration to be recognised as a victim has framed the activism in the field of memory during the past two decades (Montoto Ugarte, 2019). Being a victim thus allows access to a privileged status in society, where victims of political repression, racism, gender-based violence, terrorism, migration and accidents, among others, compete, as there are certain institutions which ‘make victims’ and grant privileges (Gatti Casal de Rey and Martínez González, 2017). This is illustrated by the ‘victims of ETA’ the Basque nationalist organisation (mainly military, police and other repressive agents against Basque nationalism) gaining a privileged social status. Despite their radically opposed political profile, their standing and privilege are compared with the ‘victims of Francoism’ (Alonso Guevara, 2021). Thus, the mass graves of the war and dictatorship are now defined as places of ‘victims’ (Aguilar Fernández and Payne, 2018). Paradoxically, the Spanish state still considers them ‘guilty’ under the law. This status therefore speaks to the existence of a field of memory in which the political agency of the murdered people is erased and which has reduced trade unionists, communists, anarchists, socialists, republicans, suffragettes and freemasons, to no more than remains aspiring to be recognised by the state as victims. Moreover, the term ‘victims of Francoism’ today refers to current Spanish citizens, and not the inhabitants of the colonies, despite their Spanish nationality at the time. And this also explains the exclusion of other murdered, denigrated and forgotten people from the very term memory: workers who suffer workplace accidents, women and transgender people killed because of gender violence or migrants who die on their journey nowadays. However, this phenomenon would not be local but instead corresponds to a global field of victims in which the Holocaust plays a fundamental role in generating distinctions and accumulating symbolic capital around this category.

In Spain, the similarity between the people systematically murdered during the war and the early years of the dictatorship and the victims of the Holocaust was assumed by mainstream historiography (Preston, 2008), and in fact, became a cultural phenomenon (Baer and Sznaider, 2016). Furthermore, worldwide, memory studies have recurrently established the Holocaust as a lynchpin for understanding the past (Assmann and Conrad, 2010; Dziuban, 2017; Erll, 2011; Erll and Rigney, 2009; Young, 1993). Thus, the conception of a ‘cosmopolitan memory’ has been forged in such a way that contemporary memories have involved assuming global perspectives derived from the local experience. Memories based on a notion of ‘good and evil’ symbolised by the Holocaust have transcended borders (Levy and Sznaider, 2002). However, Slavoj Žižek (2001) argues that this very depoliticisation of the Holocaust, of its elevation to absolute abyssal Evil, would have obvious ideological functions. And Žižek also warns of another dangerous implication: the right to the legitimacy of being remembered.

In this sense, one of the fundamental issues for the field of memory is who can and cannot be included, as participation in the field ensures some benefit. Therefore, the superiority of victims, violent memories and theories of totalitarianism in the field of memory would suggest that there is a consensus among the participants in the field that its structure of domination should continue to be reproduced. In this way, those who do not follow the rules of the field of memory could be subject to exclusion or even symbolic violence. Furthermore, the privileged within the field may sometimes ignore it because they assume these bases of domination to be natural. This subconscious character, given by the remembrance habitus, nevertheless conforms to objective conditions of conservation of an established order. On this basis, it is time to point out the ideological character of memory and its use for preserving specific political and social orders. Therefore, in terms of this ‘cosmopolitan memory’, it would be relevant to revisit the critique of David Harvey, who argues that, although cosmopolitanism is no longer charged with the negative connotations of the past (linked to Jews and communists), today it plays as a unifying vision of global governance of capitalism to which there is no viable alternative (Harvey, 2000). If today we face a cosmopolitan field of memory, not only in Spain but also internationally, we should therefore ask ourselves about the ideological character of memory and its use in the reproduction of a particular mode of production.

Memory as ideology

According to Žižek, ‘totalitarianism’ is an ideological notion with a clear strategic function: to guarantee liberal-democratic hegemony by denigrating any criticism of liberal democracy from the left, equating the latter’s radical alternatives as twins to right-wing fascism. The role of the cultural memory of the Holocaust is central to this. The Holocaust is often illustrated as an abomination, apolitical and linked to free will in cultural memories – a traumatic point from which to recompose history as a dark mystery. However, as Žižek points out, giving credence to such a theory of irrational and freely chosen hatred of Jews would be to give credence to the very discourse of Nazism and to omit the economic interests of German corporatism. For Žižek, to strip memory of its political, historical, and thus also economic meaning in favour of victimisation, becomes a political intervention that generates hierarchical relations, cynically manipulating the fact that Western states have committed crimes in the framework of colonialism and capitalist imperialism, which in the hegemonic framework of interpretation can only be minor in comparison to the ‘absolute evil’ of the Holocaust (Žižek, 2001). Memory can therefore be elevated from being a mere interpretation of the past to being an ideology in itself, ensuring the reproduction of capital.

The understanding of ‘memory as ideology’ leads towards unmasking the structural mechanism that produces false recognition of reality. An effect with primarily economic purposes that safeguard the interests of the ruling classes. Returning to the Spanish example, despite consensus and public policies leading to the recognition of victims as a moral exemplification of the image of the exhumation of mass graves, many local communities continue to dispute the political meaning of these bodies by the state (Palacios González, 2022c). However, even these communities, with a better or worse position in the field of memory, with greater or lesser economic, social, cultural or symbolic capital, often continue to reproduce this sort of ideology of memory.

According to a Marxist definition, the term ideology does not simply refer to belief systems, but to issues of power relating to the legitimisation of a dominant social group or class. A dominant power can legitimise itself and promote values and beliefs favourable to them, naturalising and universalising these values and making them appear self-evident and inevitable (Marx and Engels, 2001). This understanding of ideology can be glimpsed in the imperative of memory, in the normalisation of the notion of victimhood and thus, in the fact that this may be in the interests of safeguarding a neoliberal economic project. Hence, ideology, as an imaginary solution that gives meaning to real contradictions, could be the appropriate tool to understand memory. Memory as an ideology is a way of understanding the past based on a lurking evil and an innocent good, where victims and perpetrators are dispossessed of political and historical identity, and where, in the present, we must be vigilant in the face of possible totalitarian projects. Accordingly, memory as an ideology is by no means questioning real, historical or economic, but rather moral, identity and even emotional contradictions.

In Spain, ideological memory policies based on victimhood and criticism of totalitarianism arose at a time when parties such as the PSOE or the Communist Party of Spain had abandoned any revolutionary programme, as did the nationalist and conservative right of the PP or Vox with their fascist origins. They all embraced differing degrees of liberalism and configured political identities based on victimhood. A context in which the victim buried in the mass grave ceases to be a trade unionist, a militant or a freemason, and they turn into ‘grandfathers’. In most Spanish Civil War and Dictatorship cultural memories, evil is wholly blurred in the political and economic sense, to become a lurking fact in which to live the drama of our lives after the end of history, endorsed by Fukuyama (1989). The political struggle can only be revitalised in this schema around identity politics (Fukuyama, 2018). For this reason, according to Louis Althusser’s theory, ideology often expresses will, hopes and nostalgia instead of describing reality.

The crucial point is that for Althusser (2014), ideology consists in the reproduction of the relations of production so that these relations are subconsciously lodged in the consciousness of individuals. Maurice Halbwachs highlighted the role of memory in the reproduction of a mode of production and devotes one of the most extensive chapters of his work on collective memory precisely to that role as part of the formation of social classes. Halbwachs, who asserted that memory depends on the environment, argued that any activity whose object is the production of commodities and the valorisation of wealth, involves techniques but also memory based on needs, customs and traditions.

Thereby are formed those traditional value judgements that each social class preserves in its memory. People carry these value judgements within themselves and find inspiration from them when they leave the family circles and social world in which these judgments were born to take a position within the professions. (Halbwachs, 1992: 162)

Those professions that may be producing and valuing those ‘cultural memories’ nevertheless have a memory that is not innocent. One should consider how they have been acquired in a specific social environment, in a mode of production.

The agents of memory in Spain, those professional classes who may be able to produce narratives: artists, teachers, archaeologists, forensic experts, journalists, musicians, activists or politicians, hold their position in the relations of production. This position must be traced back to the origin of the mass graves as a disciplinary strategy beyond extermination. The killings were planned against anyone who supported the Popular Front, and they had to make a ‘great impression’, creating an ‘atmosphere of terror’, as the coup leader Emilio Mola declared: ‘We must leave the sensation of domination by eliminating, without scruples or hesitation, anyone who does not think like us’ (Casanova Ruiz, 2007: 199). The imposed terror survives within the education system which has been unable to address key historical events of the past (Gutiérrez Díez, 2020) and this terror is transmitted across generations (Miñarro and Morandi, 2014). Therefore, terror may have played a determining role in learning the ‘rules’ of good behaviour as argued by Althusser. This attitude must be observed by each group in the division of labour, as determined by the position in the mode of production to which they are ‘destined’. Thus, rules of morality, of civic and professional conscience, are assumed. These are essentially ruling of respect for the division of labour and, ultimately, the rules of order established by class domination (Althusser, 2008).

The repressed, therefore, can aspire to attain ‘dignity’ as victims in the memory field, consistent with the scheme described by Orlando Patterson. He observed that when masters perceived the risk of enslaved people becoming free, they created the idea of ‘dignity’ as an element that would blur revolutionary emancipation derived from a desperate longing to participate in society as equal citizens, without challenging the power of the master, to who retains a monopoly on conferred honour (Patterson, 2018). In contemporary Spain, journalists, politicians, activists, educators and artists often discuss the importance of the ‘recovery of the dignity’ of the ‘victims of Francoism’ buried in mass graves. Concurrently, the family of Francisco Franco and the Spanish government exhumed and placed the Dictator’s body in a more discreet cemetery owned by the Crown with military honours, with the Dictator’s body still carrying the ‘Order of San Fernando’. This is the highest distinction awarded to ‘honour recognised, heroic and very distinguished bravery, as virtues that, with self-sacrifice, exceptional or extraordinary actions, individual or collective, always in the service and benefit of Spain’.

The system of hierarchies is evident in who can be remembered and longing for dignity and who keeps the honour, reflecting perfectly different economic positions in the system. Nevertheless, to sustain the mode of production that shapes those hierarchies, Althusser points out that what is required are ‘state ideological apparatuses’. Althusser differentiated those apparatuses from whose function is backed by violence (governments, administration, army, police, prisons, courts). However, although many are private and independent from the state, ideological apparatuses function by reproducing and disciplining in favour of hegemonic interests. He describes how churches, schools, trade unions, parties, media, families and the arts can be some of those apparatuses (Althusser, 2008). Therefore, many actors in the field of memory could be seen as state ideological apparatuses. This theory, applied to the experience of the cultural memory of the mass graves in Spain, would be relevant to how the government has not historically intervened in memory policies. Remembrance was done by state ideological apparatuses reproducing an ideology that would guarantee their condition as dominated. In this sense, the role of archaeologists, forensic experts, activists and relatives who often campaigned for the depoliticised exhumation of the graves, could illustrate this phenomenon. It is also present in music, arts, literature and journalism (Barrenetxea Marañón, 2012; Crespo et al., 2013; García Jambrina, 2004; Lapeña Gallego, 2020). Nevertheless, the repression was not a moral but an economic phenomenon, and the network of companies that supported the Dictator is still the most powerful in Spain (Hernández, 2019; Juste, 2017).

While the state organises, official memory using a wide range of methods of remembrance, the subordinate classes are thus left to aspire to dignity, wishful to the status of victim and participate in a transnational structure of cosmopolitan memory that denigrates them to a once again inferior position in the global context. Moreover, this drags society down into nostalgia. This stage has blurred the possibility of utopian imagination or the generation of emancipatory movements. However, Althusser (2008) is not defeatist and asserts that: ‘The ideological state apparatuses may not only relate to class interests, but also the site of class struggle, and often of bitter forms of class struggle’ (p. 121).

Conclusion: On reproduction

In the face of the historical absence of materialism in the study of memory, the foregoing has posited three lines on which to rethink future work, with a view to generating useful knowledge on the current state of Memory Studies and evaluating new agendas for Memory Studies.

Primarily, memory and its modes of production were examined. The violent accumulation of capital and the capitalist mode of production ultimately determine how and why differing communicative and cultural memories have been produced. Second, the development of memory into a field was explored. The prospect of communicating memories is determined by cultural, social and symbolic capital, as well as the economic. In the specific case examined, politics of victimhood have given rise to hierarchies of victims and the establishment of a cosmopolitan memory on a transnational level, with the Holocaust as a fundamental component of the articulation of the field. Finally, it is postulated that, owing to the internal logic of such a field and mode of production, memory can be elevated to the category of ideology in the capitalist mode of production. Memory as ideology would maintain the reproduction of the relations of production in the structure in which it is embedded. Therefore, we should investigate the pertinence of an economic perspective and the implications for future research on memory.

This work represents a preliminary outline of an approach which has led to the primary question regarding the relevance and potential of materialist theories in relation to the study of memory. As a final contribution to the debate, we could also consider how Memory Studies have played a role in this process. If Memory Studies have been related to a specific mode of production, what is their position in the field of memory, and are they part of the ‘ideological state apparatuses’? If that were the case, they could have been instrumental in the reproduction of our current mode of production. A detailed investigation of the contributions to conferences, seminars, book series and Memory Studies journals would be an excellent indicator in identifying the main themes which may be privileged in the field of memory. Authors such as Edward Said and Nikos Hadjinikolaou pointed out how ‘area studies’ and ‘interdisciplinarity’ were playing a role in geopolitics as part of the imperialist interests in the Middle East and the participation of corporations in universities weakening the importance of humanities in the curriculum (Hadjinicolaou, 2009; Said, 1991). Therefore, not only memory but Memory Studies could have a role in geopolitics, while an academic’s role may be part of some state ideological apparatuses, and this might be elucidated by an economy of memory. Therefore, the foregoing has highlighted the responsibility to introduce a materialist perspective into this field of research in the future.