False Consciousness

164 Pages·1991·1.099 MB·English

by  Denise Meyerson

Title Pages
False Consciousness
Denise Meyerson
Print publication date: 1991
Print ISBN-13: 9780198248194
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198248194.001.0001
Title Pages
(p.i) Oxford Philosophical Monographs
(p.iii) False Consciousness
Editorial Committee
Michael Dummett,
Anthony Kenny
D. H. Rice,
Ralph C. S. Walker
FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS (p.ii)
(p.iv) This book has been printed digitally and produced in a standard
specification in order to ensure its continuing availability
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
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It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research,
scholarship,
Page 1 of 2
Title Pages
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© Denise Meyerson 1991
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Page 2 of 2
Dedication
False Consciousness
Denise Meyerson
Print publication date: 1991
Print ISBN-13: 9780198248194
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198248194.001.0001
Dedication
(p.v) To my parents (p.vi)
Page 1 of 1
Preface
False Consciousness
Denise Meyerson
Print publication date: 1991
Print ISBN-13: 9780198248194
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198248194.001.0001
(p.vii) Preface
The aim of this book is to provide a philosophical elucidation and defence of the
concept of false consciousness. In one way this might seem a problematic
enterprise in that the idea is inherited from a tradition, the Marxist tradition,
which is not merely vague about the concept but actually divided on the question
of its usefulness. But the book is not intended to be a scholarly survey of Marx's
or Marxist thought. The aim is to show that there are some interesting claims
about certain kinds of irrationality which can be reconstructed from Marxism in
a philosophically defensible way. To show this will require a lot of discussion of
issues in the philosophy of mind which may be unexpected. It is an unfortunate
fact that Marxists tend to be disdainful of orthodox analytic philosophy while
analytic philosophers usually assume Marxism to be an impossibly hermetic area
not worth cultivating. The truth, though, is that Marx wrote with great insight
about phenomena of philosophical interest, and although he frequently did so
allusively and suggestively rather than precisely and abstractly, it is analytic
philosophy, with its exacting standards of clarity and sensitivity to subtleties,
which can help to reveal how compelling Marx's positions are. It would be a
reasonable suspicion that there is an emotional or wishful contribution to the
beliefs of those in both camps who deny this. I hope this book will not only
overcome their mutual dismissiveness but also explain how it is possible for
beliefs to be coloured by animus in this way. (p.viii)
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Acknowledgements
False Consciousness
Denise Meyerson
Print publication date: 1991
Print ISBN-13: 9780198248194
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198248194.001.0001
(p.ix) Acknowledgements
No ordinarily reflective person who lives, as I do, in South Africa can fail to be
impressed by the efficacy of ideology, and its overwhelming impact on people's
beliefs and attitudes; it is this perception which explains my interest in the
topics discussed in this book. I submitted a thesis on the subject for the B.Phil.
at Oxford in 1979, and another for the D.Phil. at Oxford in 1987, and I must
thank, for their kindness and generous help, my supervisors, Jerry Cohen,
Charles Taylor, and especially David Pears, who commented liberally and
invaluably on various drafts. I must also mention Sheldon Leader, Michael
Nupen, and Jonathan Suzman, my teachers at the University of the
Witwatersrand, who introduced me to Marxist social theory and to philosophy;
my examiners, Patrick Gardiner and Alan Montefiore, for their encouragement
and many useful remarks; an anonymous reader for Oxford University Press for
excellent advice; and those who have commented at other times on ideas
expressed in this book—Jonathan Bennett, Dick Hare, Mark Leon, Nigel Love,
Ian Macdonald, Tom Nagel, Michael Pendlebury, Andrew Prior, Lawrie Reznek,
Alan Ryan, Augustine Shutte, and Tom Sorell. I owe a special debt to David
Brooks, on whose willingness to discuss philosophy and philosophical knowledge
I have frequently relied. But I owe most to my husband, Paul Taylor, who has
read and reread everything I have written. The influence of his judgement is
everywhere in this book, as in my life.
The Human Sciences Research Council provided generous financial assistance
for my research and Liz Carlos efficiently transferred the manuscript onto disk. I
am grateful to David Bishop for assistance with the index.
I must record some non-philosophical debts. I thank my parents for their years
of support and encouragement. I am grateful to Dr Roger Melvill, whose surgery
and care restored (p.x) my health which suffered a crisis while I was writing
this book. It is not the usual exaggeration to say that without him the book
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Acknowledgements
would never have been completed. And finally there is our son Max who, by
leading me to spend an undreamt-of amount of time in his company, not only
compelled me to make diligent use of what remained, but also tutored me in
previously unimagined subjects.
Page 2 of 2
Introduction
False Consciousness
Denise Meyerson
Print publication date: 1991
Print ISBN-13: 9780198248194
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198248194.001.0001
Introduction
Denise Meyerson
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198248194.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords
Marx has not treated systematically the concept of ideology and ‘false
consciousness’, which was a term her never used, even if he certainly described
the phenomenon to which Engel gave the name. However, Marx's thoughts are
scattered through his various texts which even the Marxists agreed appear to be
inconsistent. This chapter aims to extract those themes and to explain the
philosophical questions they raised. It is said that certain deep kinds of
irrationality are possible. People are not necessarily the best judge of their
interests. They can make motivated mistakes about their characters. Beliefs can
be tenacious and held against the weight of what is taken to be good evidence.
This thinking should appeal to other political groupings who believe that vested
interests can play a role in explaining beliefs and that forces like conditioning
can get in the way of and frustrate a true perception of interests.
Keywords:   Marx, ideology, false consciousness, Engel, irrationality, interests, characters, beliefs,
conditioning
Ideology was not a concept treated systematically by Marx and ‘false
consciousness’ was a term never used by him, although he certainly described
the phenomenon to which Engels gave that name. His thoughts can be found
scattered through various texts which are not even agreed by Marxists to be
consistent. But my interests are not scholarly and so there is no need for me to
attempt to compile or reconcile the fragments. It will be enough for my purposes
to extract some broad themes, remaining faithful, I hope, to the distinctive core
of Marx's views without getting caught up in recondite questions of exegesis.
Page 1 of 13
Introduction
The extraction of those themes and the explanation of the philosophical
questions they raise will be the tasks of this introduction.
Marx's project, in his early writings, was to show that certain conceptions of
religion and politics were misconceived. Feuerbach before him had argued that
the idealist philosophy of his time always got things the wrong way round. For
instance, it saw God as the subject and man as nothing but his instrument—
whereas in reality man is the subject and God merely his projection. Religious
dogmas, said Feuerbach, are fantasies which originate in human needs and
wishes, in particular in the attempt to compensate for human misery by
retreating to the satisfactions of an imaginary world.1 Marx endorsed these
debunking conclusions and went on to apply the same diagnosis, of getting
things back to front, to Hegel's theory of the state. Hegel saw Geist, or spirit, as
the acting subject, and social and political institutions as dictated by it, mere
forms of its life-history. But the truth, according to Marx, is that human beings
are the real agents and it is human activity which lies behind political
institutions. Hegel's view was not merely a mystification, added Marx, but a
conservative mystification, because an appearance of legitimacy is inevitably
given to (p.2) existing political arrangements once they are represented as
expressions of the will of a cosmic subject.2
In later writings Marx began to look for the source of such mystifications in
social conditions. In the fourth of the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, for instance, Marx
says:
Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-estrangement, of the
duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work
consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But that the
secular basis lifts off from itself and establishes itself as an independent
realm in the clouds can only be explained by the inner strife and intrinsic
contradictoriness of this secular basis.3
In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels went further, explaining that men are social
beings and if they and their circumstances appear upside down in all ideology, this is
to be explained by the nature of their productive activity and their productive
relationships. They called this conception of history ‘materialist’, saying that it sets out
‘from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process [demonstrates] the
development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process’.4 In particular,
the fact that through most of history the means of production have been controlled by
one class of people but worked by another has given rise to the state as an ‘illusory
community’ and to the political illusion that the ruling class is a servant of communal
interests.5 Later Marx reiterated these materialist claims when he described as the
‘guiding thread’ of his studies the belief that
in the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that
are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production
which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material
Page 2 of 13
Introduction
productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production
constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis, on which rises
a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite
forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life
conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general.6
(p.3) The materialist idea is that different modes of economic activity give rise,
somehow, to different sets of ideas. For instance, to give a characteristic
example, where contract provides the framework for economic activity, where
people are everywhere—to their mutual advantage apparently—bargaining and
exchanging in the market-place, political philosophers tend to take their cue
from that, and to view society as an artificial arrangement, like Hobbes's
leviathan, which we devise and into which we contract in order to serve interests
we have outside it. In other words, where economic transactions are based on
consent or contract, it is natural for philosophers to see consent as the
foundation of political authority too, and to think of men and women as pre-
politically self-sufficient creatures who negotiate themselves out of a state of
nature in order the better to protect their life and property. This too is an
illusion, says Marx in the Grundrisse. ‘The individual and isolated hunter and
fisherman, with whom Smith and Ricardo begin, belongs among the
unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades … The more
deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual … appear as
dependent, as belonging to a greater whole.’7
I shall say much more, in the next chapter, about all these concepts—forces of
production, relations of production, base, and superstructure—and about the
relationship between the different elements. For the moment, it is enough to
draw attention to Marx's claim that economic activity is primary and determines
or explains ideology, which is secondary or derivative.
Marx continued to pursue these themes although, from the Grundrisse onwards,
and especially in Capital, he uses the term ‘ideology’ less, and talks more about
the discrepancy between appearance and essence and about the illusory surface
of economic life. He saw capitalism as an enchanted, topsy-turvy world and
believed a scientific theory was necessary to penetrate the misleading
appearances it generates, and lift the mystical veil which conceals the true
nature of capitalist society. He argued, for instance, that workers sell their
labour (p.4) power, not their labour, and that the expression ‘value of labour’ is
as ‘imaginary’ an expression as the expression ‘value of the earth’. Yet, he said,
These imaginary expressions arise … from the relations of production
themselves. They are categories for the phenomenal forms of essential
relations. That in their appearance things often represent themselves in
Page 3 of 13