Ideology is a production of ideas which the self-conscious subject has no access to. And each time it tries to understand what is really going on, it gets it wrong.
Marx actually wrote his phd on the ancient materialists interestingly enough.
In Berlin Marx meets the young Hegelians, who generally think against the idealistic undertones of Hegel’s philosophy, but who engage with it positively as well. Bruno Bauer was among these.
Marx emigrates to Paris, being forced to flee, and then forced to flee to Belgium and lastly to the UK. In Paris Marx meets Engels. Engels was incredibly rich, due to his family being linnen traders. This is why Engels and Marx usually have linnen business as their examples, they had direct experience of this business.
In Paris, Marx meets the parisian revolutionaries, the socialists, the communards. Such as Proudhon and Bakunin.
The German Ideology was produced in Paris. It was written between Engels and Marx, and its about the second earliest of their writings. It was a critique against those he hung out with in Berlin. Ie. Feuerbach, Stirner and Bauer.
Marx writes a couple of theses in which he develops a new direction for his own thinking, the theses on Feuerbach. One of these is to focus on the a thinking which, if it doesn’t lead to revolutionary change, it is not good philosophy. It is about intervening actively in the cause of the events. In a sense, it puts off truth until we get to a social context in which truth might be able to actually appear.
Historical materialism is a science which takes inspiration from multiple different fields of research, producing an overarching narrative.
”Until the breakdown of the Berlin wall and the end of the USSR, there existed all sciences, the liberal economical sciences and the material sciences. You had a good astrophysics and a bad astrophysics. The inspirational basis for all the sciences was based in historical materialism. No science is produced against or besides it. It is considred to have failed, due to having some fundamentally unscientific premises. It supposes that it can anticipate a direction of history. That the main operatiors of historical materialism is the struggle between the two classes. And this struggle, is omnipresent, and has been present as long as history has been present. History is class struggle. ”
Historical evolution: the transformation and the distribution of the material conditons of production.
Motor of history: contradiction betweeen two classes, the proletarian and the bourgois class.
When material and intellectural labour is divided, the class struggle began.
This is a very different project of history. History has been written by and for those who work, and not those who are in power. Bourgois history is the history of the great people, the geniuses and aristocrats. It puts the spotlight on certain important men, and what is forgotten thereby is every other person in the world. The people who actually did something. Historical materialism puts the emphasis on the people. It puts the finger on the vast majority.
On the basis of this reading, historical materialism formulates a hypothesis, or more like a law, that the struggle between the classes is going to intensify until the outbreak of a worldwide class war which leads until the inauguration of the proletarian government, and its withering away. Global world-wide socialism will prevail.
It tried to dominate the contingent cause of historical events, a failure.
Historical materialism is an interpretation of historical importance, but it doesn’t aim at a pure interpretation of the world, it aims for it only in-so-far as it can lead to revolutionary action.
Philosophy is of course not abandoned by Marx and Engels. Rather, theory in general is about the societal and philosophical critiques that then become possible.
If a theory is correct, it permits efficient political action.
It is about thinking in such a way that I can efficiently change the thing I am thinking about.
The German Ideology.
Ideology: False consciousness. It is about having wrong ideas. This falsity, this illusion, is not just an error that could be easily corrected, such as a typo. But ideology is a kind of error that is structurally installed in the consciousness itself. There is no overcoming of this kind of error. It is a state of disillusionment which is necessarily part of the human being.
It is systematic and necessary. Truth is in the same way distorted.
”conceals the exploitation intrinsic to the socio-economic relations between classes”
Exploitation means that the worker produces more value during his working time than they get back as a salary.
It conceals the fact that some will have it all, and others nothing, and furthermore justifies this fact. Ideology justifies the system of exploitation.
This book specifically is against the young Hegelians.
Two camps immediately formed after Hegel’s death. The right Hegelians and the left Hegelians. The right Hegelians mainly followed Hegel traditionally and also as he himself likely would have considered it possible to write. The Left Hegelians wanted to overthrow the sort of things that oppressed people. They couldn’t generally criticise the king and the state so they instead focused on christianity, such as Feuerbach’s ”the essence of christianity” and Stirner published ”The Only and its property”.
The notion of ideology is much older however. It existed since Plato. Ideologists are those that interpret the history of philosophy as a transformation of ideas.
In Marx it has a new outlook.
Fundamentals of Hegel:
« Identity between reality and the idea
« The process of history is fully rational
« History: self-realisation of reason
Hegel is very optimistic about history. It progresses in the form of more and more rationality. (though I think he thinks we are already pretty rational?).
”Vernunftig ist, das ist virklich, und was virklich ist, das ist vernuftig.”
For Hegel the function of philosophy is entirely theoretical and has as its object to conceptualise things and observe the world.
Much of this is rejected by the young hegelians.
”The world, reality and their essences, are not simply reasonable, but have a material, non-ideal, natural, irrational ground”. All the young Hegelians agreed with this.
For Feuerbach, Religion is all about human beings. What we celebrate in God is the essence of Man as such. The same predicates that we worship in God are those predicates that we love of ourselves. We are only projecting the characters of humanity onto God. But in doing so, we lose our own essence, we alienate our essence from ourselves into God. So religion becomes an alienation, because we are conscious of ourselves only in the face of another. But we are only conscious of our predicates, in relation to the way in which we put them elsewhere.
Feuerbach thinks we ultimately should worship Man, ourselves, and no longer God.
What Feuerbach calls materialism is the realisation that God is nothing else than a copy of the material conditions of mankind, our anthropological situtation. We need to be conscious of this.
Marx & Engels:
”Feuerbach’s whole deduction with regard to the relation of men to one another is only aimed at providing that men ned and always have needed each other. He wants to establish consciousneess of this fact, that is to say, like the other theorists, he merely wants to produce a correct consciousness about an existing fact; whereas the real Communist, it is a question of overthrowing the existing state of things.”
What Feuerbach’s materialism does is simply to remain an idealism that replaces on idea with another.
What is actually at stake is an important and essential turning point in philosphy. It seems that philosophy has been about dealing only with concepts. But this dealing with concepts, where does it go? Nothing is getting better, despite the thinking that philosophers do.
”Since the young hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men, it is evident that the young hegelians have to fight only against these illusions of consciousness. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret the existing world in a different way, ie. To recognise it by means of a different interpretation. The young hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly world shattering phrases, are the staunchest conservatives.”
They suffer because they believe in the values of the aristocrats, which are not their values. The ideas are only a mask for what is behind: the real material domination and power. This expresses itself in the first place in the sphere of production. In the unjust distribution of the means of production.
The ruling class wants the working class to merely fight the ideas. Let the workers fight against the ideas, and not anything that actually matters. The main conflict of the communist party was always the conflict about the means of production. The conflict that happen between the corporate and the syndicates.
This is the main, fundamental, contradiction of the system. This implies that other social struggles are secondary to this, and will be resolved once the main struggle is resolved. This is why the communist party lost a lot of support in 68, because the young generation wanted social change, not primarily any change in the sphere of production.
The demand of the young hegelians only led to a new intepretation, and so failed.
They only substitue on opinion with another
They only provide another interpretation of reality.
And so believe that ideas and intellectural constructions are the virklich motor of human actions and history in general.
They still believe that things change when ideas change.
For marx and engels, the ideas of freedom came from the formerly oppressed bourgois class, and so tricked the working class and installed their own ideas as the leading ideas which the working class can fight against.
”The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in teh imagination. They are the real ndividuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life, both those which htey find already existing and those produced by their activity.”
”Men are essentially productive, they are not only what, but how they produce; under which material, technological, social and political conditions.”
The essence of the human being is the activity (an idealistic undertone). For Hegel ideas and concepts are productive, they are not inert, so it’s not so much that Marx actually removes the idealism of Hegel, but aims it elsewhere, to the worker, gives it back to the people.
They project the idea of the human being as essentially productive, but project it onto the sphere of production. The romantics lacked an idea of material production, whilst Marx sees that the essence of history can be found in the sphere of production. Human beings are not simply productive, but are also determined by how they produce. It is so on always a histroically situated kind of production. It is shaped according to certain means of production; the machines, the farmland etc. etc.
The rhythm of the work is determined by the means of production. So the worker is essentially subjected to the current means of production. This in turn shapes the kind of being we are. It defines us at our core. For Marx, any historical moment must take into account what is produced and how.
This is what Marx and Engels calls political economy.
It is an economy ruled under the heading of the political organisations. Taxation, tariffs, and a state etc etc. have to exist for any kind of organisation to exist in regards to how the economy manifests. Everything has at its mid-point the sphere of production, everything leads back there.
The problem of production, the problem of economy, is a political problem.
Production: ”Not of goods only, but of ways of life, social relationships, forms of self-understanding, consciousness, relationships of domination and repression.”
This furthermore determines the mode of consciousness that the individuals produce in. People think in the way they produce. ”I subject myself to the functioning of the world, because there is nothing else to it”.
”As individuals express their life, so they are. What the are, therefore, conincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. Hence what individuals are depends on the material conditions of their production.”
This is why they claim that their philosophy does not start with ideas, but rather with the material origin of all ideas. Why they claim that their philosophy is scientific.
”Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious being, and the being of men is their actual life-process.”
Concsciousness is not something detached from the being that is conscious, it is conscious being (a material being engaged in production that is conscious), it is the mode of presence, of the one who is engaged. It is wrong to believe that ideas are not subjected to the conditions in which they are form. Consciousness is an attack against all kinds of dualisms. Consciousness of matter is only consciousness itself of how matter appears to it.
Consciousness is not an autonomous and independent realm deattached from reality.
Their function consists in reproducing and eschewing and guaranteeing this organisation that it rests in itself.
These ideas are at the same time the kind of operators that maintain the current modes of production. We find it quite normal to work 8 hours a day and then going to get drunk. If we are conditioned to believing that that life is normal and usual, we will subject ourselves to the belief that this is all life is.
If social orangisation is built on repression, consciousness internalises that domination. Furthermore, it creates the mental conditions for its own reproduction.
Ideas in a dominated society are always ideas with reproduce the domination itself.
If people suffer from their lives, and are unhappy, how is it possible that everything continues as it is.
What is ideology then?
Ideology emerges with the division of labour. Which is the moment that we decide that producers are specified and must focus on certain branches of production. This increases production, but also the quality of production. However, for Marx and Engels, this is the beginning of everything dangerous.
The most important division of labour is that between material and mental labour. Someone does the thinking, someone does the working. At this moment, we have not only a divison of labour, but also a division of consumption and production. Those who think will not produce actually, they only begin consuming. They are not engaged in the concrete process of production, and so only consume. And with time, they consume more and more. They know how to justify their consumption, they have the leisure, time and energy to explain why they should be where they are.
This divide has had many names before.
”From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really (wirklich) represents something without representing something real (etwas Wirklich). From now on consciousness is in aposition to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of ”pure” theory, theology, philosophy, morality etc.” The German Ideology.
At the same time, they hold onto the idea tha is withheld that every consciousness is false as a reflex of his own condition. There is a material ground for this consciousness, so even that which seems to be detached from material grounding, is materially grounded. The problem is that even the bourgois is not conscious of the fact that he has to eat and shit. Also the bourgois believes in reflexes that are of their material condition, which relies on production, but they do not participate in production, so it rests on exploitation. Only through exploitation can the bourgois retain their non-material ground on a material basis. The bourgois ideas are ideas that are always implemented on a background of exploitation that at the same time hide exploitation.
The consciousness believes itself to be something detached from existing practice, it believes itself to be universal or eternal, and that it wirklichly represents something real.
Ideology is an alienated consciousness: belief in consciousness’ autonomy and freedom from the social and material conditions of production.
It is also a structural illusion based on the unjust and unequal distribution of property. In every society like this, there will be ideology.
Or it can be the belief that ideas are the ruling factor of the world and human history
In sum: the consciousness of the dominating and ruling class believing in the determination of the world through mere ideas. It is reserved to any kind of thinking that claims independence from consciousness.
On one hand there is a metaphysical ideology:
Philosophers are blind for the true ”substance” of the world, which is: not self-consciousness, spirit or reason (nothing ideally and purely mental)
But the sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercouse.
”This sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and every generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as ’substance’.”
On the other, there is a socio-political ideology.
The ruling classes invent a set of ideas which explain historical events, which always claim a kind of universality.
”If now in considering the course of history, we detach the ideas of the ruling class from the ruling class itself and attribute to them an independent existence, if we confine ourselves to saying that these or those ideas were dominant in a igven time, without bothering ourselves about the conditions of production and the producers of these ideas, if we thus ignore the individuals and world conditions which are the source of the ideas, then we can say, for instance, that during the time the aristocracy was dominant, their ideas were the right ones.”
Ideas detached from the concrete conditions of production will be considered as being themselves the conditions of history. Rousseau and Voltaire only called out the bourgois ideas into the open, and made them easily graspable.
Every ruling class procedes to such a disconnection. Ideological ideas do not change the course of the events, they only change the interpretation of them.
”For each new class which puts itself in the place of aruling class, it is compelled to present its interest as the common interest of all the mombers of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of iniversality, and present them as the only rational, universally valid ones.”
But the ruling class believes itself in the independency and autonomy of their ideas. So also the proletation would develop this consciousness if we shoot the bourgois who sits there. We have to rid ourselves of the relationships in which this happens.
So ideology becomes a thinking through which the dominant class structurally tends to forget that their allegedly ”universal” ideas are nothing but expressions of their own class interests.
In the first place historical materialism is not a fight for new forms of consciousness, but rather a fight for a real organisation of the sphere of production, which in turn will change consciousness.