Tom Atchison's Dissertation on False Consciousness (home)

• Chapter 4 - Social Construction

  • 4.1 The idea of social construction

    • 4.1.1 Marx's theory of ideology

    • 4.1.2 Social construction outside the Marxian tradition

  • 4.2 Genesis and falsehood

  • 4.3 A note on critical theory and practice

Chapter 4: Social Construction

According to the second element in the schema of false consciousness, false consciousness is produced or constructed by oppressive social systems. This chapter will examine this idea. One goal will be to sort out some of the views people have had about how this production is accomplished. We will look first at Marx's ideas about this and then at some of the ideas of feminist and anti-racist writers. My main goals in this part of the chapter are simply to explain, classify, and clarify the ideas I have found about the processes or mechanisms of 'social construction'. But I will also try to address the complaint that people who believe in these things are adopting something called a 'conspiracy theory', which is supposed to be a silly and implausible view. In the second section of the chapter I will take up the idea that there may be a connection between the way forms of consciousness are socially constructed and their falsehood (or some other defect). It is sometimes claimed that asserting any such connection must involve committing a 'genetic fallacy', but I will try to show that this is not so. Finally, I will return to the theme of the relationship between critical social theory and its 'subjects' and argue that some of the ideas worked out in this chapter lend further support to my view that critical theory and practice must be participatory.

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4.1 The idea of social construction

It has been fashionable for some time now to speak of one thing or another as 'socially constructed' -- gender, sexuality, race, beauty, reality, and so on. Usually the point in speaking this way it to draw attention to the fact (if it is one) that what has been socially constructed in one way could have been constructed in some other way. That is, the point of saying that my sexuality, for example, is socially constructed is to allege that it was not inevitable or natural that it should take the form it has. By adopting this term, though, I don't mean to endorse any particular doctrines about these matters. I simply want to bring into view the fact that people who use the term "false consciousness" almost always take themselves to be talking about something whose presence can be explained by pointing to the particular social system in which it is found. Our leading question will be: What sorts of explanations do these people propose? First, we will look at Marx's ideas on this subject.

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4.1.1 Marx's theory of ideology

In this section I want to draw on several of Marx's texts in order to provide an account of his theory of ideology. In particular I want to give some idea of what Marx meant when he wrote (in his "Preface" to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) that "social being determines consciousness."

The context from which that dictum is taken runs as follows:

The sum total of [the] relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

Speaking of "social revolution" Marx goes on to say

With the change of economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophic — in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production.[1]

I want to ignore, as much as possible, the much disputed metaphor of foundation and superstructure as well as the issue of how to understand Marx's so-called historical materialism. We need not try to decide whether Marx was a 'technological determinist' or an 'economic determinist' or whether something like Richard Miller's 'mode of production interpretation' is closer to Marx's intentions. What I want to explore is how the "mode of production of material life conditions . . . intellectual life . . .."

We get a bit more illumination from a passage in The German Ideology

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force in society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an 'eternal law'.[2]

There seem to be two distinct ideas here. First, "the ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas . . .." I take it that the remark about the doctrine of the separation of powers is supposed to be an example of this. When "mastery is shared," it is somehow natural for people to suppose that it is good that it is shared and to invent the idea of an 'eternal law' which endorses this arrangement. The example is not very convincing, but the general idea may be salvageable. I'll look at it more closely in a bit. The second and much clearer idea we can get from this passage is this: one way in which people's ideas are determined by the economic structure rises from the fact that the people who hold the dominant position in that structure (that is, the people who control the means of production) are thereby able to exert considerable influence over the ideas of people in subordinate positions, to "regulate the production and distribution" of ideas (because among the means of production they control are the means of intellectual production).

This part of Marx's theory of ideology, which I will call "the thesis of ideological hegemony," has continued to be both attractive and repellent to social theorists. Sometimes it is castigated as a 'conspiracy theory.' There are really two issues tangled up in the charge of 'conspiracy theory.' One is whether or not the people who are exerting ideological hegemony are doing it on purpose. The other is whether or not they believe in the ideas they are spreading or inculcating. Marx's account, quoted above, does not say to what extent ideological hegemony is a product of intentional deception or of coordinated efforts to win support for views which are acceptable to the ruling class. The paragraph which follows in The German Ideology suggests that ideological hegemony is produced intentionally (by ideologists whose business is the production and dissemination of ideas), but that the intention is not to deceive. Ideologists "perfect the illusion of the class about itself," which on one reading anyway, implies that members of the ruling class are also taken in by the ideology and are not putting it forward (and resisting other views) cynically. In other places, however, Marx does charge purveyors of ideologies with intent to deceive. In the Preface to the second edition of Capital Marx's attitude towards the "naive" but "great" and honestly scientific Ricardo contrasts with his contempt for later, "vulgar" economists. Ricardo's scientific approach was possible, Marx suggests, only as long as the class struggle between capitalists and proletarians "is latent or manifests itself only in isolated and sporadic phenomena." When class struggle became more "outspoken and threatening":

It sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economy. It was thenceforth no longer a question whether this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not. In place of disinterested inquirers, there were hired prize fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and evil intent of apologetic.[3]

Here Marx's view seems to be that the virulence of the class struggle makes impartiality more difficult and intentional deception more likely (because more necessary to continued domination).

Cohen supposes that there is no general answer to the question whether the members of the ruling class believe the dominant ideology: "There is always a mix of manipulation, self-deception, and blind conviction in adherence to an ideology, the optimal proportions varying with circumstance."[4] I will return to these issues below.

Another point left in doubt by the texts we have examined so far is why and in what respect the ideas promulgated (or permitted) by the ruling class are illusions. Why does the ruling class use (cynically or sincerely) its "control over the means of intellectual production" to foster illusions? The reason, according to Marx, is that "each new class, which puts itself in the place of the one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interests as the common interest of all the members of society."[5] The ruling class, seeking to rule, must convince a sufficient portion of the populace that the innovations which will benefit it will benefit all. When its rule is consolidated it needs illusions to stave off the realization by those it oppresses of the fact that their oppression is unnecessary and that their interest thus lies in the overthrow of their rulers. To this we may add that, insofar as people want to think well of themselves, members of the ruling class, too, need to be shielded from awareness of the oppressive role they play. As Elster puts it, "Only by the belief that one is acting on behalf of society will the enthusiasm be generated that is necessary for great achievements."[6] He calls this "the benefit of bias." It suggests that there will be limits to how much dominant groups can accomplish through deceit and propaganda, not because these techniques cannot win the assent of their targets, but because they can do so only when deployed with an enthusiasm possible only for true believers. Alternatively, the benefit of bias may be understood more broadly as an enhanced ability to engage in all the activities of political struggle and, then, political rule. Not only persuasion but also violence, voting, planning, or whatever else is necessary may be done more energetically or effectively by those who believe themselves to be working for the common good. Sometimes this is accomplished by believing that their subjects are not oppressed, sometimes by believing that their oppression is inevitable, necessary, or legitimate.

Part of what Marx means in saying that social being determines consciousness, then, is that the interests of members of the ruling class (in coming to power, in retaining power, and in feeling justified in their exercise of power) are well served by "illusions," and that members of the ruling class are well placed to promulgate and preserve these illusions — the illusory content consisting chiefly in the belief that what is in the interest of a few is in the interest of all.

This is not all that he means, however. Another part of his meaning can be expressed in the claim that a certain economic structure tends to produce a characteristic mentality. This need not come about through the processes of ideological hegemony. It can be regarded, so to speak, as a natural by-product of a particular organization of society. I will discuss this aspect of the 'production of consciousness' in two parts, relying on the familiar, if somewhat misleading, distinction between beliefs and preferences or desires.

The production of illusory beliefs by an economic structure receives its most extensive discussion within the Marxian corpus under the heading of 'the fetishism of commodities' in Capital .[7] Commodity production is production for exchange (as opposed to production for use) and in its developed form exchange of commodities is mediated by money. Producers of commodities (individuals or groups) "carry on their work independently of one another." There is no tradition, dictator, or democratically formulated plan which coordinates their actions; coordination is via the market. Nonetheless, their labour is social inasmuch as it is "a part of the labour of society," satisfies "a definite social want," and is "a branch of a social division of labour that has sprung up spontaneously." "Since the producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products, the specific social character of each producer's labor does not show itself except in the act of exchange." Consequently "a definite social relation between men...assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things," and "the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of their labour."[8]

This is pretty obscure. The point, so far as I can make it out, is that the exchange value of commodities, which seems to inhere in them by nature, is actually a consequence of a certain social organization of production, and, moreover, the amount of exchange value an object possesses depends on the amount of labour time put into it, but appears to depend on other factors. Since this last point seems to require us to accept the much-criticized labour theory of value, I prefer to ignore it here. The claim that exchange value is something belonging to products in virtue of their role in a particular mode of production (commodity production) is surely correct. The claim that capitalist production relations lead people to believe that products have value intrinsically or autonomously is more problematic. But it is at least true that most people neglect the social relations lying behind 'economic facts' and treat fluctuations of prices and other economic quantities as natural processes only partially subject to human control. (Of course, this is not as true as it once was.)

There are other false beliefs which, according to Marx, are encouraged by capitalist social relations. One is discussed by Cohen under the title 'fetishism of capital'. One makes a fetish of capital by attributing to the social form of production in capitalist society the power which inheres in the productive forces commanded by capital. This confusion is engendered by the fact that within a capitalist society "means of production are available only as capital," i.e., they are privately owned. The confusion is reflected in our practice of ascribing the label 'manufacturer' not to the people who actually produce the goods but to the people who hire the direct producers, own the machines, etc. It is further reinforced by our practice of paying interest on borrowed capital, which makes it seem as if capital were productive even when not embodied in labour power and means of production.[9]

A closely related error consists in believing that a wage worker receives in wages the full value of his or her labour. According to Marx the fact that a worker is paid for every hour worked conceals the fact that some of the value produced by labour is appropriated by the capitalist as profit. This contributes to the fetishism of capital by making it seem as if the capitalist's profit is somehow produced by his capital and not by his hirelings.[10]

Similarly, the fact that workers can bargain for their wages, can resign one job and take up another, engenders the belief that they are free agents —and they are more free than serfs or slaves. But their freedom is more limited than it seems. Since the capitalists monopolize the means of production, workers can live only by selling their labour power to some capitalist or other. Their ability to bargain is sharply constrained by their need to work.[11] (The practice of collective bargaining changes this imbalance of power, making use of the fact that the capitalist, after all, needs someone to work for him. It is instructive to remember the violence with which the introduction of this practice was resisted.)

What I want to emphasize about Marx's account of these various errors is that they are not (or not only) the result of the exercise of ruling class control over the means of intellectual production. Misunderstandings of capitalist social relations are, according to Marx, natural for people caught up in those relations. No doubt these errors are reinforced by bourgeois ideology, but they do not depend on it so much as they produce it. Explicit rationalizations of capitalist social relations (ideologies in a narrow sense) are created, for the most part, by people who are confused in one or more of the ways I have mentioned (whose pre-theoretical consciousness of their society may thus be characterized as ideological in a broader sense).

One puzzling aspect of Marx's discussion of the commodity fetish is his insistence that, even after a scientific understanding of the real nature of commodities has been attained, this "by no means dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves."[12] The illusion produced by the form of production is not dissolved by mere understanding, but only by a change in the actual relations of production. Cohen says that the illusions are, "like a mirage," "located in the external world."[13] "Things do not seem different to a worker who knows Marxism. He knows they are different from what they continue to seem to be. A man who can explain mirages does not cease to see them."[14] Cohen seems to think this objective status is possessed by all the illusions discussed above. It is not altogether clear why this should be so. In the case of the capital fetish, it seems that capital itself is productive (is a necessary condition of production), while in reality capital is productive only by virtue of the labour power and means of production in which it is embodied (so the social

relations that turn means of production into capital could be abolished without abolishing the means of production or otherwise making production impossible).

After this is understood, what illusion is still 'seen'? We might say that we still see that within capitalist property relations capital is productive and is an indispensable condition of production. But this is true, not illusory. A more plausible candidate is the claim that even after grasping Marx's theory it still seems that capital is autonomously productive when in fact its productive power derives from the labour power and means of production it is socially empowered to command. But how does someone who understands Marxism see even a semblance of autonomy in capital's productive power? I think it goes like this: Certain social facts are observable. People with more money than they need can lend it out at interest. Merchants who buy commodities and resell them without materially increasing their value can make a profit. Workers are paid for every hour they work. Workers without capital must hire themselves out. Workers with only assembly line skills could not produce anything on their own even if they had access to tools and raw materials. Without Marxist theory these facts suggest that capital is productive and is a necessary condition of production. Marxism enables us to understand that these facts are artifacts of a certain system of property relations and not inherent in industrial production. But we do not cease to 'see' these facts, which thus deserve the appellation 'objective appearances'. We only cease to interpret them in the 'natural' way.

Beyond this, it is perhaps worth remembering that people are only imperfectly rational and that intellectual understanding of the illusiogenic nature of capitalist society does not straightaway dissolve the habits of mind, desires, etc. engendered by that society, which continues to reinforce them.

Denise Meyerson takes up this last point in her book, and emphasizes that it allows a different understanding of 'fetishism' from Cohen's. She says that Cohen's view locates the illusion in the worker's experience, whereas her view is that the illusion is only based on experience. For Cohen the illusion is, or is like, a perceptual illusion: the stick partially submerged in water really does look bent, even after we know that it's not. But Meyerson points out that ideological illusions are different from perceptual one's in an important respect: once we have been presented with the evidence that the stick is really straight, we give up the belief that it is bent fairly readily, even though it still looks bent. Ideological illusions are stubborn; we can free ourselves from them only by changing the social world (as Cohen notes on p. 340). So, she argues, it is better to say that the ideological illusions are cognitive illusions. They are beliefs which are inferred (by induction) from a misleading set of experiences. Their stubbornness can then be explained by appealing to psychological research which shows that people quite often fail to change their beliefs, even when they are presented with what should be good reasons to do so.[15] Here is her best psychological example:

. . . high school students were asked to solve mathematical puzzles. Half of them had received a clear coherent lecture that provided the technique to solve the puzzles; the others merely a 'rambling and unhelpful series of exhortations'. Unsurprisingly, the first group performed very well, the second group poorly. Half the pupils in each group were then meticulously 'debriefed' on the cause of their performance, the experimenter analyzing the superiority or inferiority of the lecture they had received. All the pupils then judged their abilities for the task . . ..Both the pupils who had been debriefed, and those who had not, rated their ability according to their initial experience of success or failure. . . . The pupils who had been debriefed absorbed the evidence, for they were able to predict accurately how others exposed to the same two lectures would perform at the task. . . . So the information was registered but not appropriately utilized in inference.[16]

She (correctly) notes that we cannot just leap, on the basis of such examples (she describes several others), to the conclusion that ideological beliefs are resistant to evidence in this way. We need to ask what explains the failure to reason well in the experimental case and whether those same factors are present in the ideological case. She cites two factors, present, she says, in both domains: the evidence is inductive and not deductive, so there is 'wiggle room' to avoid drawing the warranted conclusion; and the evidence leading to the erroneous conclusion is 'more salient' than the evidence that is supposed to undermine it. (Salience here has several dimensions: earlier experiences tend to be more salient than later ones, direct experience more salient than testimony or reportage, emotionally charged experiences more salient than neutral ones, and so on.)

The examples she gives of ideological cases are familiar: belief in the freedom of wage contracts, failure to perceive one's class identity (as specified by Marxism), belief in the legitimacy of the state and in racial and sexual stereotypes. In each of these cases, she says, there are "influential everyday experiences" which skew people's beliefs and which are more vivid than the rather theoretical refutations Marxists (etc.) have to offer.

Actually there are two problems about these sorts of ideological illusions. One problem, which I think Meyerson's account helps to solve, is how people are able to hold on to them when presented with good reasons to give them up. The social psychologists give us laboratory data to support the common sense observation I made above (that people don't change their views easily), and the various dimensions of salience help, I think, to understand why some kinds of experiences are more effective than others at loosening the grip of these beliefs. The other problem, though, doesn't come clearly into focus in her discussion. That is the problem of where these beliefs come from in the first place. Elster has addressed this problem. Part of his answer has already been mentioned: members of ruling (or rising) classes engage in wishful thinking to convince themselves (and then others) that what is in their interest is in everybody's interest. Some of the beliefs generated in this way may have the character of objective illusions in that, given the tendency to wishful thinking, the belief is natural under the circumstances and people come to hold it without needing to be instructed. But he also claims that "there is a natural cognitive tendency to believe that statements which are true from the point of view of any individual agent remain true when applied to the totality of all agents."[17] That is, we have a natural tendency to commit the fallacy of composition. Capitalists, noticing that any one of them can sell off their capital goods and invest their money at interest, suppose that they all could do this -- this makes them mercantilists, a disadvantageous illusion. Workers are paid an amount which is adequate to the value of their labour-power, that is, as much or more than the value of what they could produce working all by themselves. The capitalist makes the same bargain with each of a hundred workers who, working together, can produce far more than one hundred times the value of an isolated laborer. Individually each wage bargain is an equal exchange. Taken in the aggregate the capitalist is reaping a large surplus value, which seems to be the creation of his capital, and thus is the worker led to accept his or her exploitation.

A similar tendency is what Elster calls "conceptual imperialism." This is applying to other social groups (in other times or places or in one's own society) categories which make sense for one's own (but not for the others) as when capitalist categories are applied to non-capitalist sectors of the economy and the tools of the craftsmen or the land of the peasant farmer are considered their capital (whereas only when productive resources are not owned by those who use them are they considered capital by Marx). Ethnocentrism and anachronism are similar tendencies. All these (in this paragraph and the preceding one) are instances of the general pattern: mistaking the local for the global, or the (culturally or historically or positionally) specific for the general. Often this serves an ideological function, by leading to the (false) conclusion that what I am experiencing here and now (oppression, exploitation, etc) is what is experienced everywhere, is what I would experience no matter what changes took place, and is thus inevitable.

Elster doesn't say how much of the class of spontaneously arising illusions can be accounted for in this way. I'd say, most of them, at least in part. For example, the generation of racist stereotypes might involve generalizing from how members of a group behave when hobbled or degraded by oppression to how they will behave under any circumstances, and from falsely generalizing the behavioral norms of one's own group. But this is surely only part of the story. Be that as it may, I want to come back briefly to the issue of the stubbornness.

Meyerson says that the explanation of the stubbornness of ideological beliefs (their resistance to evidence) cannot be explained by desires (by wishful thinking, for example), because they are believed by people for whom they are not beneficial. Having nothing to gain by believing they have no motive to discount the contrary evidence. (We encountered a similar argument from her above in Chapter 2.1.) The mistake in this reasoning is in supposing that we can have an emotional investment in a belief, only when it is beneficial for us to believe it. This is not so. If I have always believed, in the face of some evidence to the contrary, that my father was faithful to my mother, have believed in large part out of loyalty, because I wanted to believe, must this have been to my benefit? I don't see why. Disillusionment on this point may be very helpful to my emotional development (or to my therapy), yet I may not want to give up the illusion. Surely this kind of thing can happen in more clearly ideological cases as well. (Not that the politics of the family don't generate ideologies and illusions of just the sort we are trying to understand!)

Marxists claim that capitalism generates typical preferences as well as typical beliefs. One such preference involves what Cohen calls 'the capitalist mentality'.[18] A person who has the capitalist mentality is someone who pursues exchange-value for its own sake and not merely in order to exchange it for use-values. The principle of capitalist production is the use of exchange value to attain a larger quantity of exchange value. This is accomplished through investment. A certain quantity of money is used to purchase commodities or the means of producing commodities (or shares in one of these) with the intention of selling those commodities for a larger quantity of money. So long as one does this with the further intention of exchanging the larger quantity of money for use-values, i.e, for something one wishes to consume, the capitalist mentality is not yet present. The capitalist mentality involves a desire to increase one's abstract wealth irrespective of any intention to exchange that wealth for consumer goods. Capitalism engenders this mentality by selecting for it (in a quasi-Darwinian sense). Firms must increase their exchange value (by growing or by producing a profit) or lose out in the competition for stockholders and credit. Hence, their owners or managers are constrained to pursue such increase. Generally, this will be done more effectively by those who have internalized the capitalist principle, and thus acquired the capitalist mentality. (Cohen admits that this account of the genesis of the capitalist mentality is "highly stylized.")[19]

Market competition also engenders another preference typical of capitalism, the preference for increased purchasing power over increased leisure time.[20] The conditions of competition require firms to increase their output.[21] Their need to dispose of this increased output motivates efforts aimed at increasing consumption. Chiefly this is done through advertising. (Planned obsolescence is also directed at increasing consumption.) Advertisements are generally designed to increase people's desire for some particular good or some particular kind of good (e.g., dairy association ads for milk) or for the goods of a particular firm (e.g., ads emphasizing the reputability of a firm). But the techniques used to accomplish this also have the effect of increasing the desire for consumer goods in general by encouraging people to think of them as the answer to every need, or, at least, as an adjunct to the satisfaction of every need. (This is done, for example, by connecting the purchase of goods with images of the satisfaction of other important needs -- e.g, , for affection, approval, sex,'fun', etc.) Since there is no comparable effort to increase people's desire for better working conditions and more free time, these come to be less eagerly sought after. This preference, unlike the one discussed in the previous paragraph, is a product of intentional efforts to influence people's desires. But it is not exactly the product those efforts are intended to produce.

Let us take stock of what we have learned about Marx's view of the determination of consciousness by social being. First, there are forms of influence which are not well captured in the thesis of ruling class ideological hegemony: It is also true that for Marx certain beliefs and preferences come naturally to people placed within a certain social system. (I have discussed only capitalism, but the point could be generalized.) This seems to be the only plausible reading of Marx's doctrine of 'fetishism'. But this account does not fit very comfortably into the schema of false consciousness, because there is no connection between the functionality of these errors and their causes. The illusions and cravings spontaneously created by capitalism are, sometimes, useful to ruling class interests. They help perpetuate people's commitment to the status quo, and their inability to see their way beyond it. But, according to the account we have drawn from Elster and Meyerson, they are not produced (intentionally or unintentionally) because they serve that function. They are a sort of windfall for the ruling class. The sense in which they are socially produced is also fairly attenuated. Society is what it is, and then (innate?) tendencies of the human mind lead to misperceptions. These errors would fit our schema better if the tendency to make them was itself socially encouraged. Could this be true?

One reason for thinking so is advanced by Alex Callinicos. He argues that the idea of a 'natural interpretation' of social phenomena (or anything else) is incoherent. Social reality is not self-interpreting, we must be taught to understand it in one way or another.[22] Elster and Meyerson try to get around this problem by supposing that the human mind is pre-programmed (so to speak) to make certain sorts of inferences -- a tendency which may be helpful in some contexts but which leads us astray in regard to these matters. This might be true, I suppose, but I'm not aware that cross-cultural research has been done to see if the Nisbet and Ross results generalize to other sorts of cultures. Even if this is shown, it still may be worth asking why these errors are allowed to stand. Why, that is, don't people learn, and then teach others, that these perceptions are unreliable, in the way that we all learn about mirages and partially submerged sticks? Why isn't it part of our common stock of knowledge that our social and economic practices are not natural or inevitable? An answer to these questions might show that there is a more robust sort of social causation at work here. (Of course, I am simply assuming here that people do have the beliefs Marx attributes to them and that those beliefs are false. My purpose here is not to evaluate Marxist theories about capitalist economies, but only to explore the structure of Marxist explanations of capitalist consciousness.)

Here is an example of the kind of account that might help explain the persistence of the sorts of illusions we have been discussing. It is not an account that is meant to explain those illusions (except, in part, consumerism), but it is directed at the way people's epistemic habits can be shaped by social influences. In "Advertising and the Social Conditions of Autonomy," Richard Lippke argues that persuasive mass advertising (the sort with minimal informational content) carries a number of "meta-messages." These are "messages about how to deal with messages, or more precisely, about how to approach claims made by others."[23] The general thrust of these messages is to encourage sloppy thinking, sophistry, cynicism, and confusion. In Lippke's view the important (though unintended) effect of this kind of advertising is to undermine people's capacity for the kind of critical thinking necessary for autonomy. Advertising is, of course, only one influence on people's mental habits, but in Lippke's view, it's epistemic effects are not effectively countered by other influences (e.g., education) for most people. Instead, much of the rest of our informational environment is similarly flawed. I introduce this example, let me emphasize again, not because I think it helps to provide an explanation of the fact that people interpret the social world in a 'fetishized' way and then do not unlearn that interpretation. Rather, Lippke's account illustrates the more general possibility of an account of the social causation of peoples inferential (or, more generally, cognitive) dispositions. But, again, to introduce that sort of explanation is to undermine the claim that these 'cognitive illusions' are spontaneous or natural and to blur the distinction between the theory of ideological hegemony and the theory of fetishism.

Next, I would like to return to the issue of 'conspiracy theories'. Clearly, some parts of Marx's account cannot be seen in this light at all. The doctrine of fetishism does not fit, nor does the idea that members of the privileged classes "make up illusions about themselves." This is wishful thinking, not a conspiracy to deceive. So we are left with the part of the account that points to ruling class control of the means of intellectual production and their use of that control to enforce ideological hegemony (to make their ideas the ruling ideas). But even here "conspiracy" seems to be the wrong word if they believe their ideas are correct.

Is it reasonable to suppose that people often adopt self-serving beliefs? Richard Miller has argued that it is. In Analyzing Marx he writes, "There is nothing mystifying about the remark that a typical nuclear engineer has an objective interest in viewing himself as a useful professional, which leads him to argue, quite sincerely, for the safety of nuclear power plants even when he should know better." And given the dependence of politicians on business support for campaign funds, as well as their own relatively privileged position, "It should seem no more mysterious to say that the objective interests of successful United States politicians lead them to promote the distinctive interests of big business, even when they sincerely appeal to the common interest."[24] How do we support the claim that it is people's interests which are the underlying motive and not the sincerely held beliefs? We look at "what they actually do," and at "the information in the background of their choices." From the information available to them we can infer that "they should have known better." From the fact that their behavior serves their interests much better than it promotes their avowed goals we infer that those interests are the real motives (whatever the psychological process that makes the discrepancy tolerable to the individual). In Fact and Method Miller offers another example of this type of explanation:

Often, a massive shift in belief is accompanied by no new evidence but by a dramatic change in objective interests. Thus, around 1800, typical leaders of the American South regarded slavery as an unfortunate relic that should be allowed to die out, though in a gradual way so as to preserve social order. By 1830, slavery was vigorously defended as a positive good. No new evidence for the benefits of slavery was discovered in the meantime. But the cotton gin was discovered, and it created an enormously strong interest in the expansion of slavery.[25]

Miller thinks that it would be "too cynical" to suppose that the people who put forward arguments in defense of slavery were normally lying, so he prefers to think that they were deluded about their own motives. But I wonder if it is not often something in between. In Moral Mazes sociologist Robert Jackall describes the values and folkways of managers in several large U.S. business firms. He attributes to these powerful people a rather tenuous relationship to truth. Theirs is a world of euphemism and indirection, and "advancement beyond the upper-middle levels depends greatly on one's ability to manipulate a whole variety of symbols without becoming tied to or identified with any of them."[26] In fact, "it seems that a prerequisite for big success in the corporation is a certain adeptness at inconsistency."[27] One must be able to say whatever needs to be said to the audience of the moment in order to justify one's actions or mollify those one has injured, and to do so "without moral uneasiness."[28] Managers who are adept at this kind of inconsistency, says Jackall, "half believe" what they say. I don't know how accurate Jackall's account is, or how widespread the phenomena he describes. But his account seems to me to provide an intermediate possibility between cynical deception and sincere wishful thinking. The managers he describes seem to adopt a purely pragmatic approach to communication, which largely ignores questions about truth.

At any rate, whether sincere or deceptive or something in between, it does not seem to me silly or implausible to suppose that there are fairly systematic and intentional efforts to shape public opinion carried on by powerful groups and organizations in a society like ours. Charles Lindblom, for example, describes efforts by business groups to shape public school curricula by providing science materials that included subtle disparagement of public ownership of utilities and by taking "very active, if inconspicuous, measures" to ensure the doctrinal purity of textbooks on this matter.[29] Lindblom sees public opinion in the U.S. as the product of a "lopsided, sometimes nearly unilateral persuasion by business, governmental, and political leadership directed at ordinary citizens who do not themselves easily command, as leaders do, the services of printing and broadcasting."[30] Since, in Lindblom's view, governmental and political leaders must largely defer to business leaders in order to induce them to invest and employ, the principal voice (or ventriloquist) is business.

Jackall describes several instances of corporate efforts to influence public opinion, and political debate, by setting up 'front' groups to disguise the source of a message they wanted the public to receive. So, for example, the chemical company he studied set up, paid for, and controlled a group which was nominally composed of small businesses, for whom the public was expected to have more sympathy, in order to lobby and propagandize against the regulation of chlorofluorocarbons. The managers believed that their efforts were responsible for the EPA's decision in 1980 to "quietly bury" proposed regulations.[31] As Jackall points out, the goal of such efforts need not be to succeed in persuading the public that business' point of view is correct. All that is necessary is to sow enough confusion on the issue to defuse concerted opposition.

Of course, that fact that efforts such as this are made, and that they may achieve some degree of success on particular issues, does not show that a ruling class has attained ideological hegemony. But it does show, I think, that there is room for some degree of 'conspiracy theory' in accounts of the shaping of consciousness. Surely, though, there are less clearly intentional processes as well. Consider as an example Chomsky's account of the functioning of the U.S. news media.[32] Though he sometimes lapses into the language of conspiracy and intentional "suppression of the facts," Chomsky's official view is that a very systematic bias in news coverage is produced by institutional processes and practices without anyone intending to distort or cover up. Chomsky is not much interested in the psychology of the journalists and managers involved, but his account doesn't depend on them having any intention to deceive, or even to promote any particular point of view. All they need to do is to carry out the established procedures of their profession, which include, for example, giving far more weight to the statements of high U.S. government officials than to the statements of foreigners or dissident academics. Journalists who have a different set of 'news judgements' will be filtered out (not hired or not kept on) by editors and managers who think of themselves not as enforcers of ideological conformity but as upholders of professional standards.

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4.1.2 Social construction outside the Marxian tradition

In this section I want to simply list a number of themes and processes of social construction which I have found in the works of feminist and anti-racist writers, and then to reflect on the ways their ideas supplement, expand, or, perhaps, contest the theories of social construction we have just examined in Marx.

1. In early second wave feminism, the term "conditioning" is common.

For example, in "The Woman Identified Woman" the Radicalesbians (as they called themselves) wrote that it was an effect of "heterosexual conditioning" that a straight woman will "make herself into an object when sex is potentially involved in a relationship," and will therefore fear lesbians because she assumes that they will use her as a sexual object. Moreover, they write, it is an effect of "male cultural conditioning" that people define women by their sexual relationships, so that a woman who has erotic connections to other women becomes "a lesbian." The modes or mechanisms of 'conditioning' are not discussed in this piece, though there are references to "the heavy socialization that goes with being female," to sex roles (and the disapproval one faces when one steps out of one's assigned role), and it is said that women "have internalized the male culture's definition of ourselves."[33]

Black writers sometimes use the term as well: James Baldwin writes "I had been well conditioned by the world in which I grew up, so I did not yet dare take the idea of becoming a writer seriously."[34]

2. Also common is the idea that certain beliefs and attitudes have been taught or produced by training. In "Woman and Her Mind" Merideth Tax speaks of conditioning, but also of teaching: women have been "taught from birth that we are" stupid, but intuitive; girls are "taught to see themselves as objects," "told they must be pretty," etc.[35]

Baldwin again: "Negroes in this country -- and Negroes do not, strictly or legally speaking exist in any other -- are taught really to despise themselves from the moment their eyes open on the world. This world is white and they are black. White people hold the power, which means that they are superior to blacks (intrinsically, that is: God decreed it so), and the world has innumerable ways of making this difference known and felt and feared."[36]

3. In both feminism and anti-racism we find the idea of internalizing the oppressor's image or definition of the oppressed. This is often said to lead to self-hatred. It is also connected to accepting the dominant group's standards (e.g. "the beauty standard") and using them to judge oneself defective or deficient.

In Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X Malcolm says, "I actually believe that as anti-white as my father was, he was subconsciously so afflicted with the white man's brainwashing of Negroes that he inclined to favor the light ones, and I was his lightest child. Most Negro parents in those days would instinctively treat any lighter children better than they did the darker ones. It came directly from the slavery tradition that the 'mulatto,' because he was visibly nearer to white, was therefore 'better.'"[37]

Baldwin writes, "You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being." "The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you."[38]

4. There is also the idea of sex (race) specific treatment which a) carries implicit messages about gender (race), and b) materially damages the development of cognitive skills. (Reading teachers sex-differentiated strategies; girls steered to home ec., boys to shop; girls complimented for appearance, boys for ideas; etc.). I think most teachers are aware of the way different sorts of students can get different sorts of uptake, and the effects this can have. It is not hard to see how people's behavior can teach me implicitly. Part of what is involved in understanding other people's behavior as intentional is interpreting their beliefs and purposes. If someone treats me as if I was unimportant or stupid, then I don't have to be told that this is what they believe. I will understand this in understanding their behavior. If many people treat me in these ways, even more so if everyone does and has done since I was a child, then it may be hard not to give their belief some credence.

Another sort of implicit teaching is suggested by Baldwin's account of the effects of his parent's fear that he would do something that provoked the wrath of white people. "And this filters into the child's consciousness through his parents' tone of voice when he is being exhorted, punished, or loved; in the sudden, uncontrollable note of fear heard in his mother's or his father's voice when he has strayed beyond some particular boundary."[39]

5. The term "male identified woman" was (is?) used by some radical and lesbian feminists. It seems to carry with it something like the following theory: since women are socially defined as valuable only in relation to men, and are given no independent route to a sense of worth or accomplishment, most women "identify with their oppressors" and try to get status and safety through men. Practically, this means finding a man to serve in return for material support and social protection. Psychologically, it means getting one's sense of worth through one's connection to a man rather than through one's own independent accomplishments and also accepting the male view of other women as not worth much, hence not worth one's attention and love.

Of interest in the context of this chapter is the idea that powerlessness can lead to a psychological identification with the oppressor, and this in turn to an acceptance (or, at least, a reinforcement of other factors leading to acceptance) of the oppressor's view of things.

6. A structuralist idea: In Decoding Advertisements Judith Williams uses ideas drawn from Levi-Straus and Althusser to develop an account of the way advertisements work. It is a bit more semiotic and less behaviorist than the idea of conditioning.

By presenting images which already have a place in a system of signs (e.g., Catherine Deneuve's face already means beauty/glamour) in conjunction with images of products, advertisements (of one very common kind) invite us to transfer the meaning of the one to the other. This is not a pavlovian conditioned response but an active bestowal of meaning, which the advertisement elicits through its structure. (Its gappy semantic structure?) This then leads to another transfer of meaning, from the product to the consumer: I am glamorous because I am the sort of woman who buys the perfume that means glamour because it is juxtaposed to Catherine Deneuve.

I think this list only scratches the surface, but it is already enough to suggest some limitations of the Marxian account. First, the Marxian account is focussed entirely on the public economy, on the market and production in the market. It ignores the family, domestic labor, and community life as sites of 'consciousness forming'. Second, it is too intellectualistic, focusing on cognitive errors and on large-scale preferences like consumption versus leisure. It ignores (mostly) the affective dimensions of life and the way these are shaped in everyday interactions. (Class oppression does include these dimensions, and they are explored very effectively in Sennet and Cobb's Hidden Injuries of Class.) Third, Marx has a view of people as structurally compelled to see one another in particular ways (e.g., under capitalism, as competitors), but he doesn't talk much about the effects on people of being treated as subordinates. This is a recurring theme of the writings of feminists and African Americans (also Fanon and Memmi), and we find there an emphasis on the damage that oppression can do to a person's will and moral personhood.

One advantage of even this quick survey of these other traditions of writing is that we find a rich variety of non-conspiratorial processes of construction. Sometimes these writers lapse into an overly intentional idiom that includes a personification of 'society' or like abstractions. But these metaphors seem to me to be fairly easily cashed out in terms of interactions between people (between dominants and subordinates and between subordinates who are aware of the structures of power they must negotiate and teach their children to negotiate), interactions in which there is sometimes explicit teaching, but also a great deal of implicit teaching, much of which is an unintended byproduct of the interactions.

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4.2 Genesis and falsehood

According to a standard view, the origin or genesis of beliefs is irrelevant to their truth or falsehood. To suppose otherwise is to commit the 'genetic fallacy.' An analogous claim could be made about other forms of consciousness: desires and needs, say. How we come to have these, it could be said, is irrelevant to their evaluation, which should involve only their effects or how they fit into the rest of our lives. If, like Meyerson, we say that belief aims at truth, and that desire aims at goodness (that is, at what is good for us), then these aims give us the criteria for judging our beliefs and desires, not any stories we might be able to tell about how we came to have those beliefs and desires. One way to explain this is to draw the familiar distinction between the 'context of discovery' and the 'context of justification.' Charles Murray may have been attracted to the views he puts forward in The Bell Curve because he is a conservative ideologue trying to justify the dismantling of affirmative action. But now that the case has (again) been made for the claim that there are innate racial differences in intelligence, the rest of us should ignore his motives, the sources of funds for the studies he cites,[40] and so on, and simply consider the evidence.

Another view, though, and a better one, is that the causal history of our mental states is relevant to their assessment, because the right kind of history makes them likely to be true (good), and the wrong kind of causal history makes them likely to be false (bad for us). There is no need, I think, to belabor the point. If I believe that a Honda Civic is a reliable, economical car because I have carefully investigated the matter, then my belief is likely to be true, though not guaranteed. If I believe it because my brother-in-law, a known liar who is trying to sell me one, has said so, then my belief is much less likely to be true. To the extent that ideological beliefs are the product of wishful thinking or some objectionable sort of social conditioning, brainwashing, manipulation, or propaganda, then their causal history is of the wrong sort, i.e. not the sort that can generally be expected to produce true beliefs.

Elster wants to say that this reasoning only applies to some ideological beliefs: "the spontaneously arising illusions of everyday life, and the theories that are barely disguised expressions of these illusions."[41] These are explained in such a way that their production is contaminated with error from the start: they are the product of erroneous generalization and other cognitive errors; they are "socially caused." But beliefs which are formulated by ideologists and then diffused through society are a different case. They are produced, for the most part, by honest intellectual labor, that is, they are rationally caused, and what is susceptible to an ideological explanation is the fact that they are taken up by others because they "correspond to their material interest or social position." But, since any belief (nearly) will flatter somebody, and will be likely to be taken up by those it will flatter, there is no presumption against the truth of these beliefs (whose original cause was rational).

I think this argument fails on its own terms. (Nothing in Elster's account gives us any reason to think that "corresponding to my material interests" is a good criterion for screening beliefs, or for thinking that the set of beliefs produced by honest ideologues is likely to be made up largely of true beliefs. Aren't ideologues likely to be subject to biases arising from their privileged position or from the source of their funds, etc.?) But what I mainly want to reject is Elster's distinction between rational and social causation of beliefs. As he explains it, a rationally caused belief is caused by reasons, and not accidentally so, whereas a socially caused belief is one caused at least partly by such things as one's interest or position. The problem I have with this is that reasons are given and received in social contexts where everyone has a position and interests. It would be nice to think we could arrive at our beliefs through immaculately rational processes, but we are not angels. I am tempted to say that every one of my beliefs is partly caused by my interests and position (for example, by my being in a position to perceive the object of a belief, or by my having a material interest in looking into some matter). And many of my beliefs are partly caused by other people's interests and positions (for example, their having a motive to tell me something). The question, as I'm sure Elster would admit, is whether my interests and position have led to some distortion of the evidence available to me or to some defect in my reasoning, or the like. A further question is whether my position is such that only a misleading sample of evidence is available to me, or is available with the sort of salience that is likely to bring it into play in my reasoning.

Meyerson makes a similar move (similar to Elster's) when she says that ideological beliefs are typically the product of social conditioning, and that social conditioning is obviously the wrong sort of history for beliefs or desires to have. Like so many people she uses the term "conditioning" without explanation, but as we saw above, "conditioning" often comes to much the same as "teaching" or "socializing." That is, the processes that produce the ideologically defective beliefs that make up, for example, the mentality of the 'male-identified' woman are largely the same sort of processes that produce any other beliefs people have. Necessarily, most beliefs are acquired from others and not from direct acquaintance with their objects. And, perhaps necessarily, most beliefs are acquired unreflectively. Then, later, we may find occasion to doubt, to reflect, to consider where we got these ideas, to evaluate sources of evidence, to consider what sort of distortions may have been part of the process, and so on.

What we need is a more careful distinction between the sorts of social contexts which are conducive to the formation of true beliefs and undistorted desires, and the sorts of social contexts that are not. Again, even the most trustworthy sort of social context might be transmitting false beliefs: A racist society could surely provide a non-manipulative 'liberal' education which explicitly and implicitly transmitted racist ideology, and which provided none of the information necessary to figure out it was false. If we are going to say that "social causation" undermines our reasons for thinking that a belief is likely to be true, then we need to figure out why most of us should think that any of our scientific and historical beliefs are likely to be true, as I think they are.

Meyerson treats desires in much the same way, saying that the wrong kind of history undermines our confidence that they are reliably related to our interests. (In this case, though, she inserts an intermediate step: having acquired desires through 'conditioning,' we cannot regard them as genuinely our own.) But she doesn't explain what makes a history 'the wrong kind'. Her prime example is desires induced by advertising, so let's think that example through a bit.

In the literature of economics and business ethics there is a discussion, going back some forty years, of the role of advertising in creating desires for consumer goods and of the legitimacy of claiming that this leads to a distortion of people's preferences or undermines their autonomy in some objectionable way. Standard economic theory deploys a notion of 'consumer sovereignty' according to which producers compete to satisfy the preferences of consumers, and the competitive process leads reliably to results which are efficient in the sense that those preferences are satisfied to the maximum extent possible given the resources available to the economy. Within this framework of assumptions, the role of advertising, if it is discussed at all, is to inform consumers of available products and, perhaps, to remind them of desires they may have neglected.

In The Affluent Society John Kenneth Galbraith challenged this set of assumptions, claiming that "As a society becomes increasingly affluent, wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied."[42] This happens both passively, as people come "by suggestion or emulation" to want what others have, and actively, as producers strive "to create wants through advertising and salesmanship." Indeed, said Galbraith, the "central function" of "modern advertising and salesmanship" is " to create desires -- to bring into being wants which previously did not exist."[43] This claim (which Galbraith called "the Dependence Effect") then played a role in his criticism of contemporary advanced capitalism for overproducing goods for private consumption and underproducing public goods, for giving us too many cars (and cars bigger and fancier than we 'really need') and deteriorating schools and parks. The continuing expansion of the production of marketable commodities may be bringing no proportional increase in our satisfaction or welfare.

Galbraith captured his point in a memorable analogy:

Were it so that man on arising each morning was assailed by demons which instilled in him a passion sometimes for silk shirts, sometimes for kitchenware, sometimes for chamberpots, and sometimes for orange squash, there would be every reason to applaud the effort to find the goods, however odd, that quenched this flame. But should it be that his passion was the result of having first cultivated the demons, and should it also be that his effort to allay it stirred the demons to ever greater and greater effort, there would be question as to how rational was his solution. Unless restrained by conventional attitudes, he might wonder if the solution lay with more goods or fewer demons.[44]

Galbraith was soon answered by F.A. von Hayek, who pointed out that few wants are innate and most, including many of our most noble, are "created." "Professor Galbraith's argument could be easily employed without any change of the essential terms, to demonstrate the worthlessness of literature or any other form of art."[45] These goods are only wanted in a society which produces them and they are wanted more by those who have been taught to appreciate them, but this does not make the want of them 'synthetic' in any objectionable sense.

Hayek admitted that "if the producer could in fact deliberately determine what the consumers will want, Professor Galbraith's conclusions would have some validity." But he denied the premise. Producers advertise in competition with many others, and consumers are left to choose "between all these different offers." And even if their tastes are "shaped in great measure" by their cultural environment, advertising in the aggregate is only one element of this environment.

Hayek does not say so, but he seems to think that we are 'free to choose' (in the phrase of one of his eminent followers) as long as the influences on us are multiple and competing. The freedom of a choice would be compromised only if one force compelled us. This makes sense in some contexts but not always. If I am being addressed as a rational agent by a variety of persuasive but contradictory arguments, then the variety of the arguments does seem to give me the space I need to exercise my own judgement about what to believe or choose. Were only one argument dunned into me over and over, I might not see the possibility of another point of view. On the other hand, if I am being addressed by advertisers in a way which largely bypasses my rational faculties, then the variety of influences may produce a result which, though not quite what any particular advertiser would have intended, is still also not one that I can rationally endorse. (The fact that a neurotic symptom is a compromise between a variety of unconscious motives does not make it any less neurotic.)

Marx can be cited, as it happens, on both sides of this debate. He celebrates, sometimes, "the richness of needs" developed by capitalism. But he also condemns the "inhuman, artificial, and imaginary cravings induced in a process where "every person speculates on creating a new need in another . . ."[46] Agnes Heller explains Marx's position in terms of the "one-sidedness" of the needs developed in the capitalist marketplace. Developing new needs is a good thing, for Marx. But the development should bring out all the many sides of our personalities. Capitalism develops only needs for products. Moreover, it does so only when it is profitable to satisfy those needs, which therefore are the means to someone else's end.

This last point seems to me to introduce the key element which has been missing. It isn't enough to say that our desires are being shaped by forces outside us. This happens all the time and sometimes for the better. The crucial point is that the wants induced by people who have only their own interests fundamentally in mind -- who just want to sell me something to make money -- are not likely to be good for me. A process of character formation directed to that end is not likely to be good for me, but a process of character formation which was equally 'external' might be good for me, if it was undertaken by people who had my best interests at heart and who knew how I needed to grow. (Ideally, parents will shape their children's desires and dispositions in a positive way -- instilling good eating habits, for example.) It is because the advertisers don't really care about me, we might say, that they are willing to use manipulative techniques to get me to link their products to needs those products could not possibly satisfy (needs for sex or friendship or respect).

This point can be generalized. The 'wrong' sort of history for desires and beliefs cannot be specified just by pointing to the fact that it involves some social causes. The social causes must be such as to give us a reason for distrusting the process. I don't think there is any general explanation of what sorts of social causes are the wrong sort, but it is easy to give examples. Wishful thinking is the wrong sort, as is a process wherein badly motivated others try to convince me of something. Marilyn Frye describes sex-role socialization as a process wherein women are shaped to serve the interests of men. Predictably, then, this is not good for them.[47]

This more or less vindicates Meyerson's idea, I think, but the unexplained reference to conditioning needs to be replaced with a more fine-grained account of the sorts of social processes of 'desire-production' that are likely to be good for someone and those that are not. The most plausible suggestion we have found here is that the bad ones are the one's organized for someone else's benefit. But this is surely only one kind of case.

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4.3 A note on critical theory and practice

Above (4.1) we surveyed a variety of ways that 'social being' can 'determine consciousness'. I think that the fact that forms of social organization can have this kind of influence on the consciousness of the people who live within them has very important consequences for the way we treat what is sometimes called 'the problem of organization' — that is, the problem of how to organize a revolutionary party or movement. In brief, the party must be organized so as to appeal to people whose minds have been formed (in the ways discussed above and others) by capitalist social relations and so as to induce in its members the habits of mind that are required by a socialist society. If, as I believe, a socialist society is one in which production is organized collectively and democratically, then the habits of mind it requires are those which are conducive to democratic cooperation and collective rational decision.[48] I cannot specify in detail what such a form of organization would be like, but I do not see how it could be anything but democratic -- and in the most radical sense.

Marx wrote "Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew."[49] If we combine this insight with the reminder in the third of the "Theses on Feuerbach" that the educators too must be educated, then we are led to the conclusion that "in the forms of organization and in the principles of the revolutionary movement, certain elements of future social freedom must already be realized, if the revolution is to signify the realization of this social freedom."[50] Accordingly, a revolution carried out by a party elite in the name of the proletariat is ipso facto not a socialist revolution. This thesis, it seems to me, has been borne out by the course of events.

This line of thought gives further support as well to the interpretation I have been urging of the relation between critical social theory and its subjects. At first it might seem that the presence of "objective illusions" and the corresponding stubbornness of false consciousness provides, just as its critics have feared, a rationale for elitism, vanguardism, and so on. If rational persuasion, evidence and argument, are not very effective in dislodging ideological illusions, then won't social change (here, socialist revolution) have to be engineered, violently or manipulatively, by the fortunate few who have (how?) broken free? Marxian social theory, then, would not be part of the self-understanding of a mass political movement. It would be an esoteric doctrine, understood by the vanguard and used by them as a roadmap as they steered the revolution to its destination. The theory of ideology would be useful, not to the benighted masses, who will simply reject it, but to the revolutionary elite, who can use it to develop an effective public relations strategy.

This way of thinking (in more moderate form) may have been Lenin's, but it was never Marx's. He consistently ridiculed and denounced conspiratorial revolutionary projects, and he consistently said that the emancipation of the workers must be self-emancipation.[51] And his theory, or more broadly, communist doctrine, is at least sometimes described as "the self-consciousness of the revolutionary workers," that is, as simply an articulation of their own view, Admittedly it is also often described as 'science,' but I would like to pick up on the other characterization. (These may not be inconsistent, depending on what we think Marx meant by 'science'.) If we put the view explained in this section, that some ideological illusions are, in a sense, objective and that false consciousness is stubborn, together with three other Marxian ideas: that emancipation must be self-emancipation; that the sort of theory we want is one which can count as the self-consciousness of the revolutionary workers; and that the educators must themselves be educated; then I think we are pushed not only away from an instrumental model of critical theory, but even beyond an educative one as well. The theory cannot be developed by some people (revolutionary intellectuals) and then used to benefit others (by manipulating them), because this is incompatible with the claim that the educators too must be educated -- educated, that is, in the same way as anyone else, in struggle, in participation in a different set of social relations, in processes of 'democratic will formation' -- in a world where illusions are 'objective' (in the sense explained above) and false consciousness, including that of educators, is stubborn. But for the same reasons the theory cannot be developed by intellectuals and then taught to its subjects (however non-manipulatively). In essence, the problem of organization, alluded to above, and the problem of theoretical methodology turn out to be two sides of the same problem.

Let me try to sum up this rather inconclusive set of investigations. First we looked at Marx's theory of ideology and at the two different ideas of social construction developed by Marx. The theory of ideological hegemony included a variety of intentional causal processes by which members of dominant classes, or ideologues working in their interests, developed and promulgated false ideas. I tried to suggest that this did not always have to be seen as a conspiracy theory, but also that conspiracy theories were sometimes true. Marx's other idea, the theory of fetishism, was more problematic. It seemed to rely on a rather implausible, if not incoherent, notion of a 'natural interpretation'. One suggestion for understanding this was to suppose that people naturally made certain cognitive errors. I wondered why those errors would not be unlearned, if they were really not supported by some other process of mystification or confusion, and speculated that perhaps they were so supported. I then turned to feminist and anti-racist writings, finding a wealth of ideas about how everyday interactions could promote ideological beliefs and damaging attitudes. Marxism was seen to be ignoring a fertile field for the exploration of consciousness production, or, rather, several fertile fields: the family, the neighborhood, the school, and so on.

I tried, then, to make sense of the idea that the social production of consciousness might contribute to its being false. The best I could do with this idea was to notice that some sorts of belief-inducing processes were set up for the benefit of the believers and some for the benefit of the transmitters of the messages, and to speculate that this might correlate with the truth of the beliefs to some extent.

Finally I alleged that 'stubborn' false consciousness, changeable only through changing practice, was not an excuse for paternalism, but, paradoxically, a reason for anti-paternalism, which is to say, participation.

Now I will turn to the third element in our schema, a claim that false consciousness supports or helps to maintain the oppressive social systems in which it is found. This claim has come in for some rather ferocious criticism.

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