Page 66 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

54 JORGE LARRAIN

consciousness fostered by the capitalist market. In fact it is possible to
maintain that the mechanism of ideology remains basically the same in all
of these forms of consciousness which Marx successively analysed in his
intellectual career.
Marx’s early critique of religion first outlines such a mechanism: religion
compensates in the mind for a deficient social reality; it reconstitutes in the
imagination a coherent but distorted solution which goes beyond the real
world in an attempt to resolve the contradictions and sufferings of the real
world. As he put it, ‘religious suffering is at one and the same time
the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion
is the sigh of the oppressed creature’ (Marx, 1975:244). Religion appears
as an inversion because God, being a creature of the human beings’ minds,
becomes the creator, and the human beings, who create the idea of God,
become the creatures. But this inversion in the mind responds to and
derives from a real inversion: ‘this state and this society produces religion,
which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an
inverted world’ (Marx, 1975:244).
When Marx criticizes the German philosophers and left Hegelians the
same mechanism of inversion is present. The German ideologists believed
that the true problems of humankind were mistaken, religious ideas which
they could destroy by criticism. They forget, Marx and Engels aver, that ‘to
these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and they are
in no way combating the real existing world’ (Marx and Engels, 1976:41).
Their ideological inversion consisted in that they started from
consciousness instead of from material reality; instead of looking at
German reality ‘they descended from heavens to earth’. Again, this mental
inversion responds to a real inversion in reality: ‘If in all ideology men and
their circumstances appear upside-down, this phenomenon arises just as
much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the
retina does from their physical-life process’ (Marx and Engels, 1976:47).
Similarly, when analysing the capitalist mode of production, Marx
distinguishes the sphere of appearances (the market) from the sphere of
inner relations (production), and argues that there is a basic inversion at
the level of production, namely, the fact that past labour dominates living
labour (the subject becomes an object and vice versa), and that this
inversion ‘necessarily produces certain correspondingly inverted
conceptions, a transposed consciousness which is further developed by the
metamorphoses and modifications of the actual circulation process’ (Marx,
1974:III, 45).
These examples, taken from Marx’s analyses at different points in his
intellectual evolution, show a consistent pattern in spite of their different
nature. In all of them there is a reference to an ‘inverted consciousness of
the world’ which corresponds to an ‘inverted world’. This inverted world is
practically produced by a ‘limited material mode of activity’ as a