Page 44 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

32 STUART HALL

thought. On the other hand the distortions limited its scientific validity, its
capacity to advance beyond certain points, its ability to resolve its own
internal contradictions, its power to think outside the skin of the social
relations reflected in it.
Now this relation between Marx and the classical political
economists represents a far more complex way of posing the relation
between ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’ inside a so-called scientific mode of
thought, than many of Marx’s critics have assumed. Indeed, critical
theorists, in their search for greater theoretical vigour, an absolute divide
between ‘science’ and ‘ideology’ and a clean epistemological break between
‘bourgeois’ and ‘non-bourgeois’ ideas, have done much themselves to
simplify the relations which Marx, not so much argued, as established in
practice (i.e., in terms of how he actually used classical political economy
as both a support and adversary). We can rename the specific ‘distortions’,
of which Marx accused political economy, to remind us later of their
general applicability. Marx called them the eternalization of relations
which are in fact historically specific; and the naturalization effect—
treating what are the products of a specific historical development as if
universally valid, and arising not through historical processes but, as it
were, from Nature itself.
We can consider one of the most contested points—the ‘falseness’ or
distortions of ideology, from another standpoint. It is well known that
Marx attributed the spontaneous categories of vulgar bourgeois thought to
its grounding in the ‘surface forms’ of the capitalist circuit. Specifically,
Marx identified the importance of the market and market exchange, where
things were sold and profits made. This approach, as Marx argued, left
aside the critical domain—the ‘hidden abode’—of capitalist production
itself. Some of his most important formulations flow from this argument.
In summary, the argument is as follows. Market exchange is what
appears to govern and regulate economic processes under capitalism.
Market relations are sustained by a number of elements and these appear
(are represented) in every discourse which tries to explain the capitalist
circuit from this standpoint. The market brings together, under conditions
of equal exchange, consumers and producers who do not—and need not,
given the market’s ‘hidden hand’—know one another. Similarly, the labour
market brings together those who have something to sell (labour power)
and those who have something to buy with (wages): a ‘fair price’ is struck.
Since the market works, as it were, by magic, harmonizing needs and their
satisfaction ‘blindly’, there is no compulsion about it. We can ‘choose’ to
buy and sell, or not (and presumably take the consequences: though this part
is not so well represented in the discourses of the market, which are more
elaborated on the positive side of market-choice than they are on its
negative consequences). Buyer or seller need not be driven by goodwill, or
love of his neighbour or fellow-feeling to succeed in the market game. In