Page 45 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

THE PROBLEM OF IDEOLOGY: MARXISM WITHOUT GUARANTEES 33

fact, the market works best if each party to the transaction consults only
his or her self-interest directly. It is a system driven by the real and
practical imperatives of self-interest. Yet it achieves satisfaction of a kind, all
round. The capitalist hires his labour and makes his profit; the landlord
lets his property and gets a rent; the worker gets her wages and thus can
buy the goods she needs.
Now market-exchange also ‘appears’ in a rather different sense. It is the
part of the capitalist circuit which everyone can plainly see, the bit we all
experience daily. Without buying and selling, in a money economy, we
would all physically and socially come to a halt very quickly. Unless we are
deeply involved in other aspects of the capitalist process, we would not
necessarily know much about the other parts of the circuit which are
necessary if capital is to be valorized and if the whole process is to
reproduce itself and expand. And yet, unless commodities are produced
there is nothing to sell; and—Marx argued, at any rate—it is first in
production itself that labour is exploited. Whereas the kind of ‘exploitation’
which a market-ideology is best able to see and grasp is ‘profiteering’—
taking too big a rake-off on the market price. So the market is the part of
the system which is universally encountered and experienced. It is the
obvious, the visible part: the part which constantly appears.
Now, if you extrapolate from this generative set of categories, based on
market exchange, it is possible to extend it to other spheres of social life,
and to see them as, also, constituted on a similar model. And this is
precisely what Marx, in a justly famous passage, suggests happens:

This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale
and purchase power of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of
the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality,
Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a
commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own
free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come
to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their
common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the
other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange
equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of
what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself.
The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation
with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of
each.
(Marx, 1967:176)

In short, our ideas of ‘Freedom’, ‘Equality’, ‘Property’ and ‘Bentham’ (that
is, Individualism)—the ruling ideological principles of the bourgeois
lexicon, and the key political themes which, in our time, have made a