Phil. 1000
Fall 2019
Instructor: Chris Wells
Marx: The German Ideology Handout I
Ideology and Economic Determinism
Initial Critique of “Enlightenment” as material change brought about by the progress of our ideas, i.e., identifying the problem and setting the tone for where we’re going: “Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away. Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts.”
I. “Life Determines Consciousness”
You’ve been sold a story so far in this course. More likely than not, you’ve been sold the same story throughout your non-academic life: Our lives are guided and governed by our ideas, by our reason, and that these thoughts and choices are free. We don’t have to mean this abstractly. Why do you think the political positions you may hold are correct? Perhaps more intimately, why do you believe that the ethical or religious beliefs you hold are correct? Why do we believe humanity has improved in some manner throughout history? The answer, almost always, circles back to the contention that our ideas guide our action, that our ideas determine history, that historical events, historical progress, and historical development track the progress and development of new ideas.
Marx, emphatically, challenges this claim. In order to understand what Marx thinks we are, how history moves, how and why change happens, in order to determine why you think what you think, why you are who you are, we must realize the answers to these questions have nothing to do with the force of the better argument or the proximity of our beliefs to truth. The answers to these questions have everything to do with how life is lived, economically, by human beings.
A. Marx states: “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.”
Put simply to begin: The ideas of any time (“consciousness” here) are determined by, formed from, the concrete modes of life of that time and place, as that way of living, of “expressing life,” is actually lived by concrete people. Our ideas are reflections of our activity, not the other way around. So, in attempting to understand who and what we are, and why, we must as Marx puts it “ascend from earth to heaven,” not from “heaven to earth.” This claim is meant to indicate nothing religious. What Marx is saying is that to study human beings, to understand them, requires beginning on the ground, through empirical analysis of what they do and how they live (“earth”). We do not begin by conjuring up ideas about human beings, mere abstractions (“heaven”), that we then claim are true representations of human beings.
B. More clearly: What do we mean when we say “What we do” or “How we live?”: Marx is very specific here. When he says that the mode of human life existing at a time and in a place determines what living there and then are and think, he specifically means that the form of economic activity through which human beings secure the means of their survival determines who and what they are, as well as what they think, believe, and value.
“As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce.”
“Economic activity” here can be as simple as the manner through which we secure our sustenance, our shelter, or survival. However complex our economies and economic activity may become, securing these things is really always what guides and motivates that activity. In the absolute simplest form this is human beings gathering food, building themselves shelters, fending off nature in order to survive. In our context, this is an intricate process of wage and salaried labor, wherein you contract out your time and effort in order to receive monetary compensation, which will itself be used to purchase goods and services (sustenance, shelter, comforts) on a market based in (relatively free) exchange (as well as all the behavior and activity you must participate in in order to do so, like sitting in a college classroom); it is all the production of these goods and services. When we say we, and our ideas, thoughts, and beliefs, are produced by our “activity,” this is what Marx has in mind. The form of economy in which we participate shapes and determines our lives.
Marx often uses the term “mode of production” to name the form of economic system.
C. Therefore: “The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.”
“Material Conditions”: This term does a lot of work for Marx. With it, Marx is capturing all of the economic activity human beings engage in in that place and at that time. Further, though, he’s capturing the conditions of those people’s lives: What divisions between people are created by this form of economy (for example, classes)? To what resources and to how much do individuals have access in this society? To what degree is that access to resources equal or unequal? Further still: What is lived life like for these people? What are the concrete conditions of their lives? How is labor divided up between them? Who does what kind of labor, and how do they end up doing that labor?
This set of conditions determines not only how our lives will go (which it does do), but also who we will be, what we will think, what we will value, what we will desire. It will determine everything we think and are.
II. Ideology and Ideological Reflexes:
A. Ideology
“We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and the echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life process[.]”
“The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life.”
We like to think that we are in control of what we think, of the thoughts we have, of the things we believe, and of the reasons why we believe those things. We like to think that our perspective, our worldview, our personality, our commitments, our values are freely determined, decided upon actively and purposefully, on our own. We like to think that new ideas are our making or doing, that ideas can be innovative and independent. We like to think that the ideas and beliefs we hold are a testament to who we have freely made ourselves as individuals. We like to think that whatever humanity is, or even our smaller communities are, they are so because we determine, decide, and will them to be so. All of this is very much in line with Kant’s concept of Enlightenment, both at an individual and at a human level.
Marx agrees you’d like to think that. But this is wishful thinking, a fairy tale. For Marx, all ideas, concepts, beliefs are produced by the material conditions and modes of production of a given society. Said more plainly: Ideas are simply reflections of the way people actually, concretely, live, i.e., of the way they produce the means of their survival. Economic activity generates ideas. You have those ideas, and those specific ideas because they make sense of they way you (have to) live.
More bluntly: Human beings do not posit their ideas freely. Human economic activity determines those ideas for them, in the reflection of the mode of production. What we think is a reflection of what we do.
More pointedly: The ideas we hold, the scope of the things we can think, the things we believe are, effectively, intellectual justifications for the mode of production and material conditions in which we live. Our ideas are generated to make sense of life and what that life is like, as we live it.
Marx’s term for these ideas, as they are determined by and represent their mode of production and of life is “ideology.”
B. “Ideological Reflexes”: When struck the right way, your joints (like your knee) will cause motion in your limbs, and they will do so without anything conscious, controlled, or free on your part. Just as you do not choose your reflexive movements, Marx’s point is that you do not choose your ideas (or, further, which ideas are even possible or possibly convincing to and for you); your ideas are reflexive products of the life you live and the society/economy in which you live. As you do, you will think.
For Marx, the boundaries of what you will think, the concepts available to you in the first place, are set by and limited to the existing ideology of the time, place, and context.
C. What’s Encompassed by Ideology?
What’s Encompassed by “Ideology?”: We’ve been a bit abstract to this point. Let’s be more concrete: We mean, “mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc. of a people.”
For Marx: Any and all moral beliefs, regardless of their specific claims are intellectual reflections of and justifications for the economy and form of life out of which they arise. The same is true for any and all political claims, positions, and platforms. The laws of any time and place are direct products of, and facilitators for, the modes of production at that time and in that place. All religion is a reflection of the economic conditions under which human beings live. All notions of human nature – of what we even are – are shaped by the intellectual needs of a way of life.
III. Economic Determinism:
It follows, then, that you (so to speak) are an ideological reflex of the conditions in which you live. You are determined by forces outside of yourself. As Marx puts it elsewhere, you are the “plaything of alien forces.” Your perspective, your worldview, your consciousness are the products of, are fashioned by, the material conditions of your society. Depending on your reading of Marx, the claim here may well be that you are determined all the way down.
Let that sink in: Everything you have ever valued, every plan you have ever set for your life, everything that feels meaningful to you, everything you desire, you hope for, or you pursue is shaped for you, from the outside. Further, the nature of your relationships, of who you care for, of who you are attracted to, of what you think of as meaningful human interactions and what you want out of them, are the effects of forces beyond yourself. Do you believe in god? You do so because the economic system in which you live necessitates that you do so. And all of this functions to provide justification for the mode of life in which you find yourself.
Key: If these claims about ideology are true, then it cannot be our ideas, the new or better argument, that motivates, guides, or produces material change, that move history forward, that guide what we’ve called “progress.” Why not? First, crucially, the thoughts we think, the ideas, arguments, claims we make, the beliefs we hold, and the values we appeal to are bounded to the context in which we live. In a sense, we cannot clearly see beyond our own world to a world that does not yet exist. We’re epistemologically limited in being determined by the material conditions in which we live. What we think will always mirror back the basic premises of the economic system and form of society in which we live. Second, if this is true this creates a problem for “positive” claims, for Marx. We don’t mean “positive” as we often use it here; rather, we mean the kind of thinking we use when we posit some idea or claim. We can describe the world in which we live. We can (as we’ll see) criticize the world in which we live. We cannot think and argue beyond that world. To do so uses the ideology of the present in order to imagine something other than the present. Marx’s claim is that, in doing so, we will simply restate the premises of the existing world, since we are using the justifications for that world to make arguments for changing that world.
Transition to Next Time: The only thing that change the world, for Marx, is concrete changes in our activity, in what we do, in the material conditions and mode of production of a society. History develops and moves as forms of economic activity change, on the basis of new circumstances and conditions, new active possibilities, and new technology.
