The struggle for social domination between the different groups is, in part, a struggle by each to impose its view of society, its way of organising social activity, upon the others. It has to assert that its notions are ‘true’ and the others ‘false’; or at least to show that the meaning given by other social groups to their activities can be subordinated to its own overall visions of the world.
The attempt of philosophers to measure rival conceptions of the world against a single lodestone of ‘truth’ is pan of this struggle. They attempt to generalise the experience of a particular class in such a way as to enable it to dominate the thinking of other classes. But because of the real contradictions between the experiences and interests of different classes, this is an endless quest. Any philosophical view can always be countered by another, since each has roots in the contradictory experiences of material life. That is why every great philosophy eventually slides into mysticism.
But this does not mean, for Marx, that different views of the world are equally valid (or equally false). For some provide a more comprehensive view of society and its development than others.
A social group identified with the continuation of the old relations of production and the old institutions of the superstructure necessarily only has a partial view (or a series of partial views) of society as a whole. Its practice is concerned with the perpetuation of what already exists, with ‘sanctifying’ the accomplished fact. Anything else can only be conceived as a disruption or destruction of a valuable, harmonious arrangement. Therefore even at times of immense social crisis, its picture of society is one of a natural, eternally recurring harmony somehow under attack from incomprehensible, irrational forces.
Ideology and science
A rising social group, associated with an advance of the productive forces, has a quite different approach. At first, at least, has no fear of new forms of social activity which disrupt the old relations of production and their superstructure along with it. It identifies with and understands these new forms of activity. Yet at the same time, because it is also in collision with the old order, it has practical experiences of that as well. It can develop some sort of view of society which sees how all the different elements fit together, the forces of production and the relations of production, the base and the superstructure, the oppressed class and the oppressing class.
Because it has a practical interest in transforming society, its general ideas do not have to be either a blind commentary on events or a mysticism aimed simply at preserving the status quo. They can be a source of real knowledge about society. They can act not just as a banner to rally people behind, but as a guide to effective action. They can be scientific, despite their origin in the practice of one social group.
Marx certainly thought this was the case with classical political economy. Again and again he refers to the ‘scientific’ merit of the writings of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and even of some of the mercantilist and physiocratic economists who preceded them.
They were ‘scientific’ because they tried to cut through the superficial appearances of society to grasp the ‘inner connections between the economic categories – or the hidden structure of the bourgeois economic system’, ‘to attempt to penetrate the inner physiology of bourgeois society…’[58]
This ‘esoteric’ approach, which looks to the underlying social reality, is in marked contrast with a simply ‘exoteric’ approach which takes for granted the existing external social forms. The classical political economists never succeed fully in breaking with the ‘exoteric’ method, but they begin to move in that direction, and in doing so lay the basis for a scientific understanding of the inner structure of capitalism.
Their ability to develop a scientific understanding is related to the class they identify with – the rising industrial capitalists. Marx described Smith, for instance, as ‘the interpreter of the frankly bourgeois upstart’,[59] ‘writing in ‘the language of the still revolutionary bourgeoisie, which has not yet subjected to itself the whole of society, the state, etc’.[60]
Because the industrial capitalists do not yet control society, they have to adopt a critical view of its external features, to seek an objective analysis of the extent to which these features fit in with the drive to capital accumulation. This leads to the attempt to locate the production of wealth in the labour process, and to contrast ‘productive’ labour which creates surplus value with the parasitic functions of the old state, church and so on.
Ideology and the superstructure
The situation changes radically when the rising class has consolidated its hold. Then it no longer has any use for a revolutionary critical attitude towards society as a whole. The only practical activity it is interested in is that which reproduces existing economic and social relations. And so its ‘theory’ degenerates into attempts to take different superficial aspects of existing society and present them as if they provided general laws about what all societies must be like.
For Marx, ‘ideology’ is a product of this situation. The dominant social class controls the means by which a distinct layer of people can be freed from physical labour so as to engage in intellectual production. But, dependent upon the ruling class for their sustenance, these ‘intellectuals’ will tend to identify with it – the ruling class establishes all sorts of mechanisms to ensure that.
Identifying with the ruling class means stopping short of any total critique of existing social relations and taking for granted the form in which they present themselves. The particular aspects of existing society are then seen as self-sustaining, as lacking any common root in social production.
So you get a series of separate, self-contained disciplines: ‘politics’, ‘neo-classical economics’, ‘psychology’, ‘sociology’ and so on. Each of these treats aspects of a unitary social development as if they occurred independently of each other. ‘History’ becomes a more or less arbitrary linking together of events and personages. And philosophy becomes the attempt to overcome the separation of these disciplines through looking at the concepts they use at ever greater degrees of remoteness from the world of material production and intercourse.
Such ways of looking at the world are ‘ideological’, not because they are necessarily conscious apologetics for the existing ruling class, but because the very way in which they are structured prevents them seeing beyond the activities and ideas which reproduce existing society – and therefore also the ruling class – to the material processes in which these are grounded. They sanctify the status quo because they take the concepts it uses at face value, instead of-seeing them as transitory products of social development.
‘Ideology’ in this sense is linked to the superstructure. It plays about with concepts which arise in the superstructure, seeking to link and derive one from the other, without ever cutting through surface appearances to look at the real process of social production in which the superstructure and its concepts arise.
It is the contradictions of such ‘ideological’ arguments that can only ‘be resolved by the descent from language to life’.
But this descent can only be made by thinkers who identify with a rising class. For they alone are identified with a practice which puts into question all existing social relations, seeking to criticise what happens on the surface of society, linking it to underlying relations of material production and exploitation.
While the thinkers of an established ruling class are confined to continual elaboration in the realm of ideology, the thinkers of a rising class can begin to develop a scientific understanding of social development.
Our theory and theirs
A rising class’ thinkers cannot simply proclaim that they have the truth. They have to prove it.
First, they have to show that they can take up and develop the insights which the thinkers of earlier rising classes made. So, for instance, Marx set out in his economic writings not simply to give his explanation of the workings of capitalism, but also to show how he could complete the work of classical political economy by solving problems it had set itself without success.
Second, it has to be able to show how the superficial social features which ideology deals with can be derived from the underlying social processes it describes. As Marx puts it, it has to be able to derive the ‘exoteric’ from the ‘esoteric’. So a scientific Marxist analysis of any society has to be able to provide an understanding of the various ideological currents of that society, showing how they arise out of the real world, expressing certain aspects of it, but in a distorted way.
Finally, at the end of the day, there is only one real test of any science: its ability to guide practice. And so arguments within Marxism itself can only be finally resolved in the course of revolutionary working class struggle.
A very important point underlies all this discussion. Not all ideas about society are ‘ideological’. The scientific understanding which the thinkers of a rising class develop is not. Nor is the immediate awareness which people have of their actions. This only becomes ‘ideological’ when it is interpreted through a framework of general ideas provided by an established ruling class. By contrast, if it is interpreted through the theory of a rising class, it is on its way to becoming the true self-consciousness of a society.
‘Ideology’ is part of the superstructure in the sense that it is a passive element in the social process, helping to reproduce old relations of production. But revolutionary self-consciousness is not. It is an active element, arising out of people’s material circumstances, but feeding back into them to change them.
In the real world there are all sorts of hybrid sets of ideas which lie somewhere in between science and ideology, between true and false consciousness. People’s experience can be of partial challenges to the existing society. They gain partial insights into the real structure of society, but seek to interpret them through piecemeal adjustments to old ideological frameworks.
Even the output of the ideologies of the existing order cannot be dismissed out of hand. The worst of them cannot completely ignore those experiences of the mass of people which challenge the ruling class’s view of the world: their ideological function means they have, somehow, to try to prove that those experiences are compatible with the ruling class’s view. So the worst hack journalists or TV commentators have to recognise that there is opposition to the ruling class, reporting on strikes, demonstrations and so on, if only to condemn such struggles and to isolate those involved in them. The worst pulp novelists have to start from some image of ordinary people’s lives, however distorted, if they are to find a mass audience. The most reactionary priests are only effective insofar as they can provide illusory relief to the real problems of their parishioners.
This leads to all sorts of contradictions within the ruling ideology. Some of its most prominent proponents can be those who make most efforts to relate to people’s lived experiences. The ideology itself encourages ‘social scientists’, historians, writers, artists and even theologians to make enormous efforts to fit empirical observation and experience into their accounts of reality. But this inevitably leads to contradictory accounts, with some of the ideologues beginning to question some of the tenets of the established ideology. Marx recognised that a great writer or artist is able to reflect all the contradictory experiences that beset people who live in his or her society, and, in the process to begin to go beyond the limits set by his or her class position. In a few cases this even leads them to a break with their own class and to identify with the revolutionary opposition to it.
A scientific understanding of social development demands a complete break with the whole method of the pseudo-social sciences of those who defend the existing social order. But that does not mean that we can neglect the elements of truth that those who practise these disciplines stumble across. Still less can we ignore the often quite profound grasp of the social process to be found in certain non-Marxist historians or in great novelists like Balzac or Walter Scott.
Marxism shows its superiority over bourgeois thought not by simply treating all bourgeois thinkers with contempt, but rather by showing that it can encapsulate the advances made by bourgeois thinkers into its own total view of reality – something which no bourgeois ‘social scientist’ can do and which no bourgeois thinker has attempted since Hegel.
The central role of class struggle
The Marxist approach begins, then, by pointing to the contradictory ways in which the forces of production and the relations of production, the base and the superstructure, material reality and people’s ideas, develop. But none of these contradictions simply resolve themselves, as the mechanical materialists assert. Their resolution only takes place on the basis of the struggles of human beings, of class struggles.
Once you have societies divided between those who produce directly and those who live off a surplus product, any growth of the productive forces, however slow and piecemeal, leads to a corresponding change in the objective weight of the different classes in society. And some ways of developing the productive forces lead to qualitative changes, to new ways of extracting a surplus, to the embryos of new exploiting and exploited classes (and, eventually, to the formation of a class that can run society without exploiting anyone).
But the new ways of producing always face resistance from at least some of those whose interests lie in preservation of the old ways. The advance of every new mode of production is always marked by bitter class wars (even if, as with the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, these ways do not always involve clean breaks between classes, but often complicated, cross-cutting alliances between the most dynamic section of the rising class and certain interest groups within the old order). Whether the new ways of producing break through depends on who wins these struggles. Economic developments are very important in this. They determine the size of the different classes, their geographical concentration (and therefore the ease with which they can be organised), their degree of homogeneity, the physical resources at their disposal.
Such direct economic factors can certainly create a situation in which the rising class cannot gain a victory, whatever it does. The objective balance of forces is too powerfully weighted the other way. But when the objective factors create a situation of near equality of forces for the rival classes, what come to matter are other factors – the ideological homogeneity, the organisation and the leadership of the rival classes.
For the mechanical materialist, ideas are simply an automatic reflection of material being. But in real historical processes of social transformation it is never that simple.
The institutions of the old ruling class are continually trying to define the ways in which people throughout society see themselves and their relations with others. The members of the rising class at first accept these definitions as the only ones available to them: so for instance, the early medieval burghers accepted the precepts of medieval Catholicism in their totality.
But the members of a rising class get involved in practical activity which cannot easily be encompassed by the old definitions. People begin to do things which the old world view says they should not. The institutions that enforce the old worldview then threaten punitive action against them.
At this point two options are open. Those involved in the new forms of activity concede to the pressures on them from the old order, and the new forms of activity cease. Or they generalise their clash with the old ideology, developing out of elements of it a new total worldview, behind which they attempt to rally all those in a similar objective situation to themselves.
A new system of ideas is not just a passive reflection of economic changes. It is rather a key link in the process of social transformation, mobilising those affected by cumulative small-scale changes in production into a force whose aim is to change social relations in their entirety.
Take, for instance, the classic debate on Protestantism and the rise of capitalism. According to opponents of Marxism, like Max Weber, it was the autonomous ‘non-economic’ development of a new religious ideology which alone provided the ground in which new capitalist ways of producing could take root. Puritanism caused capitalism.