Lecture notes for Marx: German Ideology
Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German social philosopher whose
concern for the squalid conditions of European industrial workers
and dissatisfaction with ways of thinking about the world then
dominant led him to develop a view which led to his exile from
his own country (Germany), and then from the European contintent.
He spent the last half of his life in England studying and
writing about the relationship between social organization and
the conditions from which the particualr social forms of such
organization is generated.
Because of the political and ideological controversy surounding
Marxism, and the rhetoric and dogmatism of many so-called
Marxists, it is In THE GERMAN IDEOLOGY Marx is attempting to
critique and draw together various ideas of thinkers, especially
those influenced by Hegel, in the first decades of the 19th
century. Although he addresses the ideas of a variety of
thinkers, he focuses on Ludwig Feuerbach, an early 19th century
German philosopher. Feurbach argued that our conceptions of the
world (e.g., Knowledge, Religion) reflected our material being,
that is, our consciousness reflects our material existence,
rather than some transcendant principle. Feuerbach was
attempting to "turn Hegel on his head," in that Hegel argued that
our knowledge is an attempt to strive for some "absolute"
principles that existed independently from us. Hegel called this
Geist, or Absolute Spirit.
Marx's critique--in fact, all of his work--proceeds from the
following:
1. People are not abstract, but individual beings, who act in
specific situations that are grounded in their immediate
existence.
2. The first premise of human history is thus the existence
of living individual humans. The "first fact" that we
should establish, then, is the physical organization of
these individuals. That is, we must, to study any
society, see how their existence is shaped by their
relation to nature (that is, how people actively produce
their existence.
3. Marx believes that people are distinguished from other
animals as soon as they beging to produce their means of
subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical
organization. By producing their means of subsistence, he
says, people indirectly produce their MATERIAL LIFE. This
is the first step toward his materialist philosophy. As a
consequence, we must examine both what is produced and how
we are socially organized to produce it.
4. Marx argues that the production of ideas, of conceptions,
of consciousness, and EVEN THEORY, is at first interwoven
into the material activity of people.
Marx then suggests that Ideology is what keeps us from fully
recognizing how we create our own world and conceptions of it.
Although Marx does not fully define or clarify what he means by
ideology, we can make the following suggestions.
IDEOLOGY refers to those beliefs, attitudes, and basic
assumptions about the world that justify, shape, and organize how
we perceive and interpret it, and how we give accounts (or
theories) about it. Ideology, in this sense, underlies norms,
values, beliefs, theories, and generally-shared ideas. Ideology
is set of the most-basic assumptions and rationaizations about
our social world. Examples include the belief in "justice for
all," belief in "civil rights," the view that "all people are
created equal," or the views that some classes of people (eg,
ethnic groups, women) are "second class citizens." AN IDEOLOGY,
IN SHORT, PROVIDES THE BASIC FRAMEWORK FOR THE DECISIONS WE MAKE
ABOUT HOW THE WORLD SHOULD BE, AND ALSO SERVES AS THE BASIS BY
WHICH WE JUSTIFY "WHAT THERE IS."
Ideology suggests a False Consciousness. Marx calls this a
camera obscura (ie, an inverted image). This means that ideology
prevents us from seeing the world as it "really is," and the
trick is to identify the ideological constraints that block our
understandings of the world and trace their SOCIAL sources.
Ideologies are thus partial and incomlete, and because we take
them for granted, we seldom, if ever, question our beliefs and
assumptions, and in fact, often have elaborate mechanisms that
prevent such questioning (eg, through limited theories, by "not
questioning authority," by deferring to "experts," by belief in
"science," etc. More specifically, IDEOLOGIES ARE THE CONCEPTUAL
MACHINERIES FOR MAINTAINING SOCIAL ORDER.
Ideologies create and generate the ideas, concepts, and theories
approprate for our social world, and also legitimize and promote
particular conceptions of how things OUGHT to be. In doing so
they exclude allother alternative conceptions. This is why they
are partial.
Ideologies have several features:
1. They are pre-conscious
2. They are emotionally charged (consider, for example,
politics and religion).
3. They are shared among a large group of individuals (ie,
they are NOT simply individual attitudes, but bind groups
together).
4. They contain assumptions about the state of the world and
how it ought to be.
5. They are distorted pictures (ie, partial, and generate,
therefore, false, or perhaps a better term, incomplete)
consciousness.
Marx feels it is important to critique ideology because
1. They justify the status quo
2. They guide activity and policy of a dominant group or
organization
3. They maintain dominant class positions
4. They support an appropriate social order, and guide
correspondng activities, WITHOUT use of coercion or
violence.
In sum, Ideologies contain the major conceptions and symbols
accumulated in our culture. They represent views of social
order, right and wrong, and identify how policies, for example,
should be made. By examining ideologies, especially the
ideologies underlying our own views and theories, we can do the
following:
1. Our analysis helps understand the complex nature of the
social world
2. We can identify how our "consciousness" is shaped
3. We can illustrate the contradictions in society
4. We can illustrate how power (eg, the state, ideas, etc)
creates ways of seeing and talking about the world (eg,
through education, public policy, laws, etc)
5. Our understandings help us guide our analysis of society
and help set strategies for social change.
Marx thus sets out a strategy for analyzing this. He identifies
three basic aspects of social activity:
1. The first historical act is the producton of the means to
satisfy our needs (eg, shelter, food)
2. Satisfying needs creates new needs, and means to satisfy
them
3. We then create our social existence, develop social
arrangements (eg, forms of family, division of labor) for
satisfying them, and out of this, particular social orders
emerge.
We can now identify several basic features of Marx.
1. Doctrine of Internal relations: This means that the natur
eof anyobject we may happen upon in the world is a
function of its relation to other things. Inother words,
we cannot consider any particular phenomenon without also
considering its relations to other phenomena. This refers
to the complex inter-related connections through which we
interaction.
2. Human Nature: Although Marx never directly addressed
this, we can conclude several things.
a) Marx distinguished between animal and species nature.
b) Here Marx introduces additional concepts (although
never very fully), and we can elaborate by identifying the
concepts of 1) reification, 2) objectification, 3)
objectivation, and 4) alienation.
Alienation is perhaps the most important. Marx, following
Hegel, calls alienation the condition in which "we are
separated from the objects of our affirmation." Marx
identifies four basic kinds of alienation in our own
society:
1) Separation from our productive activity
2) Separation from the outcome (or product) of our work
activity
3) Separation from others
4) Self-alienation.
3. Work activity. For Marx, people put society together and create and
appropriate social arrangements that allow us to interact,
exchange commodities, and create systems of control. The
key concept here is PRODUCTIVE RELATIONS. These include:
a) What resources exist
b) How we produce things (tools, etc)
c) Social relations (how we are oranized in society)
d) Culture (expectations, shared values, language, law, etc)
The first two are called MEANS OF PRODUCTION, and the second
two MODE OF PRODUCTION.
Marx notes that some people control and benefit,and are also
more-able todominate thedistribution of goods and resources and
privileges. These are CLASSES, and represent a STRUCTURAL
variable rather than, as for Weber, for example, a social or
economic status (SES).