False Consciousness Essay ⋆ Essays on Controversial Topics ⋆ EssayEmpire

False consciousness is a complex cognitive-epistemological and socioeconomic political concept. First explored by the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, notably Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, its most common association is with the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Although false consciousness is one of the most central Marxian terms, Marx and Engels use it only once each in their published works to refer to distorted knowledge or inadequate expression of reality. Marx used the term in his 1854 essay, “Der Ritter vom edelmutigen Bewufisein” (The Knight of Noble-Minded Consciousness). However, he uses it not in a conceptual way to categorize a certain phenomenon but to refute a slanderous article by August Willich, claiming the latter attempted to detect “a false consciousness behind a correct fact.” The connotation of Engels’s usage of the term is something more substantial. In a letter to Franz Mehring dated July 14, 1893, he discusses the genesis of ideology (superstructure) and how it affects structure. He admits that he and Marx emphasized how structure determines superstructure but neglected to work out how superstructure affects structure. In this context he asserts that ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker. Consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or seemingly motivating forces.

Thanks to the first generation of Marxist philosophers, particularly Georg Lukacs, the concept of false consciousness assumed its current preeminence. In his classical essay “Class Consciousness,” Lukacs suggests that Marx’s concept of false consciousness arises as a reply to bourgeois philosophy and sociology of history, which reduce progress to the role of individualities or supernatural forces like God. Now, Marx resolves this dilemma of bourgeois theory of history, Lukacs suggests, by developing his concept of historical materialism and by presenting human relations in capitalist society as reification. Then, by referring to Engels’s letter to Mehring, Lukacs introduces the concept of false consciousness. He poses the question whether historical materialism takes into account the role of consciousness in history. In this connection he speaks of a double dialectical determination of false consciousness. On the one hand, considered in the light of human relations as a whole, subjective consciousness appears justified because it is something that can be understood. That is, it gives an adequate expression of human relations, but as an objective category, it is a false consciousness as it fails to express the nature of the development of society adequately. On the other hand, this consciousness in the same context fails to achieve subjectively determined goals because they appear to be unknown, unwanted objective aims determined by some mystical, supernatural alien forces.

The work of Marx and Engels explores how human relations can be brought into an agreement with human consciousness. The mature work of Marx on this question is Das Kapital, most particularly the first chapter on commodities. In his analysis of commodity, Marx differentiates between value in use and value in exchange. The use value of commodities is obtained by transforming natural objects into useful objects, say, by transforming wood into tables through useful or productive labor to satisfy various human needs. The exchange value is the relative value of commodities, or the socially necessary labor time to produce them, and is realized in the consumption of commodities. The exchange value is realized in the exchange process; that is, by relating commodities to one another and exchanging them for one another. Now, in his analysis of the relationship of use value and exchange value, Marx sees a mutual negative relationship. He thinks that this negative relationship results from reversal of the exchange process, going from the aim of production (satisfaction of needs) into the obtaining of exchange values. The aim of production, then, is no longer satisfaction of human needs but rather production and realization of exchange values. This gives rise to the fact that products as commodities dominate humans rather than humans their products. This is, in turn, the reason why everybody strives to realize exchange values and becomes commodity fetishists. As a result, human relations take the form of social relations between products.

The commodification of products, however, also requires the commodification of human labor. The commodification of human labor, in turn, requires the separation of laborers from their means of production and monopolization in the hands of the few (original accumulation) so that the laborers have nothing to sell but their labor forces, that is, the physiological and intellectual functions of their bodies. This is also the source of the rise of social classes in capitalist society with their class consciousnesses or ideologies. In capitalist society, then, there are two contradictory sets of ideologies: on the one hand, the institutionalized ideology of the ruling class claiming to represent the whole of society and, on the other hand, the subaltern ideology of subordinated classes. In short, ideology as a form of consciousness arises from social class relations.

Marx’s concept of ideology is often equated with false consciousness. But as Theodor W. Adorno showed in the early 1930s and as Hans Heinz Holz and Istvan Mesaros reinforced in the 1970s, equating ideology with false consciousness is undertaken in the tradition of Weberian sociology—in particular in the sociology of knowledge of Karl Mannheim. Ideology in Marxian thought has many meanings, and false consciousness is just one of them. To introduce a historical perspective into the debate on false consciousness, Lukacs suggests considering Marx’s concept of ideology in the light of class position vis-a-vis the means of production. Only in this manner, Lukacs thinks, can one obtain objectivity to overcome consciousness as ideology and false consciousness. He thinks that, because of its position vis-a-vis the means of production, the only class that is objectively interested in overcoming consciousness ideology and false consciousness is the working class, an idea Marx and Engels formulated as early as 1848 in The Communist Manifesto.

Bibliography:

Mesaros, Istvan. 1986. Marx’s Theory of Alienation. London: Merlin.
Mesaros, Istvan. 2005. The Power of Ideology. New York: Zed.

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