Page 71 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

STUART HALL AND THE MARXIST CONCEPT OF IDEOLOGY 59

equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of
what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself.
(1974:I, 172)

These four principles were for Marx the basis of bourgeois political
ideology. And as in all ideology, these principles concealed what went on
beneath the surface where ‘this apparent individual equality and liberty
disappear’ and ‘prove to be inequality and unfreedom’. This is why
unemployment and/or low salaries by and of themselves do not necessarily
transform the beliefs of people. There is no ‘cloud of unknowing’ for Marx
that obscures an easily seen reality. Such a view can perhaps be attributed
to Bacon and his theory of idols or to Holbach and Helvetius and their
theory of prejudices, but not to Marx. This is why, for Marx, what
can dispel ideological forms are not critical ideas or science, but political
practices of transformation.
As for the rest of the ruling ideas, it is not true either that Marx
explained their success and penetration within the working class by
recourse to false consciousness. His explanation in The German Ideology is
quite different. If the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas it is
because

the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same
time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of
material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the
means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the
means of mental production are on the whole subject to it.
(Marx and Engels, 1976:59)

Hall seems to believe that for Marx ‘the control over the means of mental
production’ is the reason why the masses have been duped. In fact Marx in
this passage is not talking about ideology at all, but about the ruling ideas,
which are two different things. But Hall does otherwise understand
exceedingly well the point of this quotation when he describes some of the
‘insights of the classical marxist explanation’:
The social distribution of knowledge is skewed…the circle of
dominant ideas does accumulate the symbolic power to map or
classify the world for others…it becomes the horizon of the taken-for-
granted. Ruling ideas may dominate other conceptions of the social
world by setting the limit to what will appear as rational, reasonable,
credible… the monopoly of the means of intellectual production…is
not, of course, irrelevant to this acquisition over time of symbolic
dominance.
(Hall, 1988a:44–5)