Marx also extends the model from religion to morality and ethics (i.e. theoretical treatments of morality), which in The German Ideology and the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) he treats as thoroughly ideological and therefore expects to see completely abolished under communism.44 His position here is evidently in part the familiar and by no means implausible one that the notion of objective goodness or obligation that is built into our moral concepts is an illusion (compare here Hume’s likening of moral qualities to secondary qualities such as colors and smells, or J. L. Mackie’s similar but more recent “error theory” of morality).45 But it is also in part that the specific directives that are contained in morality have their source in, and serve the function of supporting, exploitative class relations. Thus in the Manifesto of the Communist Party he explains the prevalence of moral notions in all hitherto known forms of society in terms of the circumstance that “one fact is common to all past ages, viz. the exploitation of one part of society by the other,”46 and elsewhere he writes more specifically that “laws, morality, religion are only so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which hide just as many bourgeois interests.”47 Accordingly, in The German Ideology he characterizes both Kantian and utilitarian ethics as standing in the service of the class interests of the bourgeoisie.48
Marx also extends the model from religion to economics, including not only the theories of bourgeois economists,49 but also, and perhaps even more interestingly, the phenomena of everyday economic life (compare with this double focus his double focus on both ethical theories and everyday morality, as just discussed). For example, in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts he writes concerning private property and wealth that “though private property appears to be the ground and cause of externalized labor, it is rather a consequence of externalized labor, just as gods are originally not the cause but the effect of an aberration of the human mind,” and that wealth, like God, is “the alienated actuality of human objectification, of man’s essential capacities put to work.”50 Similarly, in On the Jewish Question he gives the following account of money:
Money is the jealous god of Israel before whom no other god may stand. Money debases all the gods of mankind and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-constituted value of all things. It has therefore deprived the entire world—both the world of man and of nature—of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and existence; this alien essence dominates him and he worships it…As long as man is restrained by religion he can objectify his essence only by making it into an alien, fantastic being. In the same way, when under the sway of egoistic need he can act practically and practically produce objects only by making his products and his activity subordinate to an alien substance and giving them the significance of an alien substance—money.51
Similarly again, in Capital he famously criticizes both ordinary people and political economists for what he calls the “fetishism of commodities” (note here the allusion to religion in the word “fetishism”; Marx also draws the analogy with religion explicitly). This is the complex illusion that the objects that are bought and sold in an economy have certain values in and of themselves over and above their physical qualities, that they consequently in and of themselves have certain powers over human beings, and moreover that these values/powers are eternally present characteristics of objects of the kinds in question. According to Marx, this complex illusion first arises within the socio-economic system of capitalism. For capitalism is the first system that places the sort of emphasis on exchange that makes possible the emergence of the stability in rates of exchange that forms the underpinning of the illusion.52 And it is also the first system that eliminates the sort of direct, transparent subjection of individuals to one another in economic life that had characterized feudalism (e.g. the serf’s subjection to his lord or to the church), and which had precluded the sort of illusory transfer of power from such relationships to objects of exchange that Marx considers to be the core of the illusion of such objects’ intrinsic value.53 This complex illusion serves to reinforce the prevailing socio-economic system of capitalism in the interest of capitalists by distracting its participants from the fact that the real basis of their economic life lies in certain contingent forms of socio-economic relationship, instead making them believe that they are in the power of the objects produced in economic life, and in addition thereby conferring on the existing form of economic life an appearance of eternal validity.
Finally, Marx also extends the model from religion to art. This can be seen from his inclusion of art among the types of ideology that he lists in the passage from the preface of Toward a Critique of Political Economy quoted earlier, for example.54 However, this is an area in which he is much less generous with details (a point to which I shall return later).
This review of some of the specific applications of Marx’s theory of ideology beyond the case of religion confirms the account that I have given of the theory’s genesis and character. It also at least suggests that not only in the case of Christian religion but also more broadly Marx’s specific applications of the theory have considerable prima facie plausibility.
40.4 OBJECTIONS TO THE THEORY
Marx’s theory of ideology has not been treated kindly by critics, either in the past or more recently, however. I would therefore like now to try to answer some of the main objections that have been leveled against it.
A first (quite old and common) objection to the theory is that it reduces the sorts of beliefs in question—religious, political, legal, and so on.—to mere epiphenomena of underlying socio-economic conditions, caused by the latter but without any effect on them, and that this is very implausible. However, this objection rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the theory. In fact, the theory not only allows room for a causal impact of ideas on socio-economic conditions, but implies such an impact. For the theory says that the beliefs in question arise because they serve to support certain socio-economic class interests. Accordingly, Marx writes in The German Ideology concerning the two sides of this relationship of “the reciprocal action of these various sides on one another.”55
A second (likewise old and common) objection to the theory is that Marx is guilty of the so-called “genetic fallacy,” that is, the fallacy of inferring from the invidious source of beliefs (in oppressive class interests and the function of supporting them) to their falsehood. The answer to this objection is basically that he does no such thing. Instead, he discovers the falsehood of the beliefs in question in an empirical way prior to (or at least independently of) determining their source, and then looks for an explanation of the prima facie puzzling fact that despite their falsehood they are nonetheless widely held, which leads him to explain this in terms of their source in class interest and their function of supporting it.
A third (more recent) objection might be called the problem of the missing mechanism, and is more interesting. Michael Rosen in his book On Voluntary Servitude complains that whereas the theory of ideology holds that a given social system generates corresponding ideological beliefs in order that they may serve to perpetuate it, such a thesis could only be justified if the mechanism responsible was successfully identified, which it is not in this case. In particular, according to Rosen, Marx appeals here to a functional model of society which turns out not to be defensible.
However, this objection again fails, and for several reasons. For one thing, it is far from clear that such a thesis does have to be unjustified until and unless the responsible mechanism is identified (the example of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection before Mendel’s discovery of the mechanism of the gene comes to mind). For another thing, Marx does not rest his theory of ideology on social functionalism but instead on the less ambitious observation that in certain cases false beliefs attain widespread acceptance because they serve the interests of a particular class against those of another class with which it stands in competition (in ways which according to him will indeed often
be functional for society as a whole (either in the short or the long term), but in other cases not, as for example in the case of the ideology of the petty bourgeoisie during the Montagne uprising that he discusses in The Eighteenth Brumaire). For yet another thing, Marx himself in fact already implies an extremely plausible general mechanism through which that happens: most fundamentally, he treats the tendency of groups to believe even false things that serve their own interests against the interests of groups with which they compete not as a controversial thesis but rather as a truism of human psychology, and moreover very reasonably so (for example, dentists notoriously tend to believe that receiving high-quality, expensive dental care must be a top priority for anyone who wants to lead a happy life, and similarly mutatis mutandis for other professions). But nor is Marx empty-handed when it comes to the aspect of ideology that most puzzles Rosen: the fact that an ideology that serves the interests of a ruling class also comes to be accepted by an oppressed class against its own interests. For in this case, the psychological truism just mentioned explains its acceptance by the ruling class itself, and then the rest of Marx’s explanation is that the ruling class also owns virtually all of the institutions that communicate ideas within society as a whole, such as schools, universities, the church, and the media:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.56
Rosen is not altogether unaware of this aspect of Marx’s theory, but he finds it fantastic that such a mechanism of indoctrination could make people accept false beliefs that go against their own interests “like obedient chicks.”57 However, this complaint is weak. In order to see why, it suffices to note two things: first, contrary to the sort of philosophy of common sense that Rosen seems to be implicitly presupposing here, it is plausible to say that most human beings are in the grip of false beliefs much or indeed even most of the time (think, for example, of the past several millennia of extravagantly false Greek mythology followed by equally extravagantly false Christian religious fantasy, the geocentric worldview that predominated until recent times, or the widespread belief in the objectivity of secondary qualities such as colors), and moreover often in ways that clearly do go against their own interests (think, for example, of the many traditional societies in which women believe firmly in their own inferiority or of the widespread conviction among smokers in the past and sometimes even today that tobacco is relatively harmless).58 Second, the mechanism of indoctrination that Marx identifies here is not one that is merely transient or very limited in its impact, but rather one that is enduring and pervasive, one that over the course of generations influences virtually everyone in society through multiple channels from early childhood and throughout their lives.59
This is not to deny that Marx’s explanation invites further elaboration. It is one of the most distinctive features, and arguably also one of the greatest virtues, of his theory of ideology that it does not claim that an ideology is the product of conscious intentions on the part of members of the class it serves, or those who distribute it on their behalf, to promote their class interests by propagating falsehoods (such cases do, of course, occur, but they might more aptly be called cases of propaganda rather than of ideology in Marx’s sense). Nonetheless, as Marxists of such different stripes as Engels in Ludwig Feuerbach, Sartre in Search for a Method, and Jon Elster in Making Sense of Marx have all argued, the required elaboration will presumably still lie in the general area of human psychology. How exactly it should go is a difficult question that we need not pursue here. But two very general observations may be appropriate. First, it will be crucial to distinguish between several different questions in this area which are likely to require very different psychological answers, in particular: (a) how does the class that an ideology benefits come to adhere to it?, (b) how do the original inventors of the ideology come to adhere to it?, (c) how do the distributors of the ideology on behalf of the class that it benefits come to adhere to it?, and (d) how does the class against whose interests it works come to adhere to it? Second, given that the class benefited by an ideology and the ideology’s distributors do not normally consciously intend to benefit that class by propagating falsehoods, the answers to questions (a) and (c) will presumably need to choose between either appealing to unconscious intentions of that sort (as Engels and Sartre tend to) or to psychological mechanisms of other sorts (as Elster tends to)60 or to both. But the really crucial point for our present purposes is just that this all sounds much more like a promising research program into a mechanism whose general character is already known than a symptom of a missing mechanism.
Finally, various objections have also been raised against Marx’s conception that, unlike ideologies, his own position, including his own theory of ideology, is “science.”61 A first such objection (sometimes raised by sociologists of knowledge, for instance) could be put roughly as follows:
Marx believes that all thought is rooted in specific socio-economic conditions. For example, he writes in the Manifesto of the Communist Party: “Man’s ideas, views, and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his life.”62 In particular, he believes that even natural science depends on the development of a certain level or type of industry and commerce, namely for its aims.63 And he obviously believes something similar about his own theories as well. The problem therefore arises that on Marx’s own account both natural science and Marxism must themselves be ideologies.
However, this sort of criticism is misconceived, for at least two reasons. First, although Marx does see both natural science and his own position as rooted in certain socio-economic conditions, he does not see them as rooted in such conditions in the same way as ideologies are. Natural science does, in his view, presuppose, and get its point from, a certain level or type of industry and commerce. It may even, for this reason, at a certain period disproportionately serve the interests of a particular class that most benefits from the economic system that achieves that level of industry and commerce. But, unlike ideology, it does not of its very nature serve the interests of that class against other classes. Consequently, it will continue to support the interests of society as a whole within communism, for example. A similar point applies to Marx’s own position. For while it may seem that he sees his position as serving the interests of the proletariat against capitalists, and indeed he no doubt does see it as disproportionately benefitting the proletariat under present historical circumstances, his more fundamental conception of it is that it serves to abolish class distinctions altogether—a fact on which he draws in order to distinguish it from ideology in the Manifesto of the Communist Party.64 Second, even if it did turn out that, like ideologies, natural science and Marx’s position of their very nature derived from and served particular class interests against others, there would still be no good argument from this fact to their falseness. Yet, as we have seen, for Marx falseness is an essential feature of ideology. There are two ways in which such an argument might seem to hold (for Marx), but neither of them stands up to scrutiny. (1) Someone might suppose that Marx’s ground for thinking ideological beliefs false is that they of their very nature derive from and serve particular class interests against others, so that his concession that natural science or his own position did so as well would commit him by parity of reasoning to holding that they were false too. However, as we saw when discussing the “genetic fallacy,” that is not his ground for thinking ideological beliefs false. Instead, his ground for doing so lies in independent empirical evidence (whereas he believes that in the case of natural science and his own position such evidence establishes truth). (2)
Alternatively, someone might suppose that if Marx explains our commitment to false ideological beliefs in terms of the fact that they of their very nature have a source in and serve particular class interests against others, then this commits him to saying that any belief that of its very nature had its source in and served particular class interests against others must be false as well. However, that is not correct. For example, the fact that such and such breakings of windows are explicable in terms of people having thrown rocks at them does not entail that every throwing of a rock at a window will cause it to break.65
A second objection in this general area has been developed by Daniel Brudney in his book Karl Marx’s Attempt to Leave Philosophy. The objection focuses on Marx’s official empiricism and complains that since for Marx even sensory experience is historically mutable, and in particular dependent on changing socio-economic conditions,66 this seems to preclude objectivity in his own empirical theory. This is an interesting and fruitful objection, but not in the end an incisive one. It may be helpful here to distinguish between two issues that are involved. On the one hand, as Brudney himself develops the objection, it rests on a picture of Marx as holding that under capitalism everyone’s sensory experience is so completely determined and corrupted by ideological illusions that even he could not possibly have a reliable basis for his theory in sensory experience. But this is an uncharitable interpretation (indeed, almost a caricature) of Marx’s position that has little basis in anything he actually says. His actual position is instead one that he articulates in The German Ideology: although capitalism has certainly suppressed psychological individuality more than previous economic systems, the general situation in a society is that there is a great deal of individual variation, which makes it possible to explain how individuals can sometimes already develop theories whose validity and relevance transcend their present circumstances.67 But on the other hand, Brudney’s objection also points in the general direction of some more legitimate epistemological problems, especially a problem concerning how objective empirical knowledge can be possible if sensory experience is historically mutable, and in particular depends on changing socio-economic conditions. Marx does not really address, or even seem interested in addressing, epistemological problems of this sort (see, for example, his dismissal of them as merely scholastic in the second of the Theses on Feuerbach, and compare with it his studied vagueness about such further philosophical problems as the traditional mind-body problem). However, they may well nonetheless have satisfactory answers, and perhaps even ones that Marx’s texts themselves hint at. For example, the historical mutability of sensory experience and its dependence on changing socio-economic conditions might turn out to be consistent with objectivity if either (a) only certain aspects of it were thus mutable and dependent, others instead being common to all periods and socio-economic conditions (some of Marx’s treatments of the specific examples of ideology that he discusses, such as the “fetishism of commodities,” may suggest an answer of this sort, in that they seem to appeal to more stable, fundamental features of sensory experience in order to criticize more transitory, superficial ones), or (b) objectivity were itself merely relative to a particular period and set of socio-economic conditions (Marx’s stance in the second of the Theses on Feuerbach against pursuing questions about objective truth as abstract theoretical questions in favor of instead pursuing them as a matter of practice may suggest such an answer).
The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century Page 151