Page 39 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

THE PROBLEM OF IDEOLOGY: MARXISM WITHOUT GUARANTEES 27

Thus, for example, he spoke in a famous passage of the ‘ideological forms
in which men become conscious of…conflict and fight it out’ (Marx, 1970:
21). In Capital he frequently, in asides, addresses the ‘everyday
consciousness’ of the capitalist entrepreneur; or the ‘common sense of
capitalism’. By this he means the forms of spontaneous thought within
which the capitalist represents to himself the workings of the capitalist
system and ‘lives out’ (i.e., genuinely experiences) his practical relations to
it. Indeed, there are already clues there to the subsequent uses of the term
which many, I suspect, do not believe could be warranted from Marx’s
work. For example, the spontaneous forms of ‘practical bourgeois
consciousness’ are real, but they cannot be adequate forms of thought,
since there are aspects of the capitalist system—the generation of surplus
value, for example—which simply cannot be ‘thought’ or explained, using
those vulgar categories. On the other hand, they can’t be false in any
simple sense either, since these practical bourgeois men seem capable
enough of making profit, working the system, sustaining its relations,
exploiting labour, without benefit of a more sophisticated or ‘truer’
understanding of what they are involved in. To take another example, it is
a fair deduction from what Marx said, that the same sets of relations—the
capitalist circuit—can be represented in several different ways or (as the
modern school would say) represented within different systems of
discourse.
To name but three—there is the discourse of ‘bourgeois common sense’;
the sophisticated theories of the classical political economists, like Ricardo,
from whom Marx learned so much; and, of course, Marx’s own theoretical
discourse—the discourse of Capital itself.
As soon as we divorce ourselves from a religious and doctrinal reading
of Marx, therefore, the openings between many of the classical uses of the
term, and its more recent elaborations, are not as closed as current
theoreticist polemics would lead us to believe.
Nevertheless, the fact is that Marx most often used ‘ideology’ to refer
specifically to the manifestations of bourgeois thought; and above all to its
negative and distorted features. Also, he tended to employ it—in, for
example, The German Ideology, the joint work of Marx and Engels—in
contestation against what he thought were incorrect ideas: often, of a well-
informed and systematic kind (what we would now calls ‘theoretical
ideologies’, or, following Gramsci, ‘philosophies’; as opposed to the
categories of practical consciousness, or what Gramsci called ‘common
sense’). Marx used the term as a critical weapon against the speculative
mysteries of Hegelianism; against religion and the critique of religion;
against idealist philosophy, and political economy of the vulgar and
degenerated varieties. In The German Ideology and The Poverty of
Philosophy Marx and Engels were combating bourgeois ideas. They were
contesting the anti-materialist philosophy which underpinned the