Page 46 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

34 STUART HALL

powerful and compelling return to the ideological stage under the auspices
of Mrs Thatcher and neo-liberalism—may derive from the categories we
use in our practical, commonsense thinking about the market economy.
This is how there arises, out of daily, mundane experience the powerful
categories of bourgeois legal, political, social and philosophical thought.
This is a critical locus classicus of the debate; from this Marx
extrapolated several of the theses which have come to form the contested
territory of the theory of ideology. First, he established as a source
of ‘ideas’ a particular point or moment of the economic circuit of capital.
Second, he demonstrates how the translation from the economic to
ideological categories can be effected; from the ‘market exchange of
equivalents’ to the bourgeois notions of ‘Freedom’ and ‘Equality’; from the
fact that each must possess the means of exchange to the legal categories of
property rights. Third, he defines in a more precise manner what he means
by ‘distortion’. For this ‘taking off’ from the exchange point of the recircuit
of capital is an ideological process. It ‘obscures, hides, conceals’—the terms
are all in the text—another set of relations: the relations, which do not
appear on the surface but are concealed in the ‘hidden abode’ of
production (where property, ownership, the exploitation of waged labour
and the expropriation of surplus value all take place). The ideological
categories ‘hide’ this underlying reality, and substitute for all that the ‘truth’
of market relations. In many ways, then, the passage contains all the so-
called cardinal sins of the classical marxist theory of ideology rolled into
one: economic reductionism, a too simple correspondence between the
economic and the political ideological; the true v. false, real v. distortion,
‘true’ consciousness v. false consciousness distinctions.
However, it also seems to me possible to ‘re-read’ the passage from the
standpoint of many contemporary critiques in such a way as (a) to retain
many of the profound insights of the original, while (b) expanding it, using
some of the theories of ideology developed in more recent times.
Capitalist production is defined in Marx’s terms as a circuit. This circuit
explains not only production and consumption, but reproduction—the
ways in which the conditions for keeping the circuit moving are sustained.
Each moment is vital to the generation and realization of value. Each
establishes certain determinate conditions for the other—that is, each is
dependent on or determinate for the other. Thus, if some part of what is
realized through sale is not paid as wages to labour, labour cannot
reproduce itself, physically and socially, to work and buy again another
day. This ‘production’, too, is dependent on ‘consumption’; even though in
the analysis Marx tends to insist on the prior analytic value to be accorded
to the relations of production. (This in itself has had serious consequences,
since it has led marxists not only to prioritize ‘production’ but to argue as
if the moments of ‘consumption and exchange’ are of no value or importance
to the theory—a fatal, one-side productivist reading.)