False Consciousness

An Essay on Mystification

Guenter Lewy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351520621
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In this book, Guenter Lewy explains and critiques the idea of false consciousness - that people living under capitalism do not know their best interests. This idea was prevalent in the writings of nineteenth century Marxism, modern communism, and the New Left. Lewy applies what German scholars call Ideologiekritik to the Marxian concept of ideology or false consciousness itself, to demystify the concept of mystification. He also presents an account of the historical development of the concept, and the dangers of its application in society. Belief in false consciousness inspired many social scientists to propose that elite classes in capitalist countries use the media and the education system to manipulate the proletariat, thus perpetuating their own power. Lewy marshals social scientific evidence to refute that idea, demonstrating that education and the mass media in the United States in fact often challenge accepted values and the status quo. Lewy documents Soviet and Chinese brainwashing efforts to eradicate dangerous political ideas and values derived from a belief in false consciousness. He also reviews attempts by Marxist and neo-Marxist educators and social scientists in the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) to free young people from false consciousness by means of emancipatory pedagogy--a program of intense political indoctrination.

PART I
The Theory of False Consciousness

1

False Consciousness: From Marx to Marcuse

Antecedents of a notion of false consciousness can be found as far back as Plato’s myth of the cave in Book VII of the Republic. Francis Bacon relied upon Plato’s notion of false appearances when he developed his doctrine of “idols,” errors into which the human mind is prone to fall and which impede human progress and scientific knowledge. However, it is the Marxian idea that the masses under capitalism suffer from false consciousness by not knowing their own best interests, which has had a lasting impact on modern revolutionary thought.

The Founders: Marx and Engels

The term “false consciousness” appears for the first time in a letter by Friedrich Engels to Franz Mehring written on July 14, 1893. “Ideology,” Engels wrote, “is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him: otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or seeming motive forces.”¹ Ideological thinking is thinking that is ignorant of the true factors determining history. Ideologies look at the world as shaped by ideas whereas man’s thinking is merely an echo of material conditions. In turn, such false consciousness leads to a failure to understand the direction in which history is moving and to ignorance of the correct role that the various classes have to play in the unfolding historical process.

Without using the term “ideology” or “false consciousness,” Marx and Engels from their earliest writings on stressed the idea that men suffer from illusions and mystification that must be cleared away by philosophy. For example, in The German Ideology, written for the most part between September 1845 and the summer of 1846, they declared: “Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. . . . Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, the dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away.”² Two years earlier, in September 1843, in a letter to Arnold Ruge, Marx had set forth the same task: “The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it its own actions.”³

False or illusory consciousness, in the Marxian view, afflicts all classes, though in different ways. For the bourgeoisie, as for all ruling classes, false consciousness hides the true nature of bourgeois class rule — from itself and from those whom it dominates and oppresses. Each new ruling class, Marx and Engels wrote in The German Ideology. “is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interests as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.”⁴ Bourgeois false consciousness is a “selfish misconception” that considers the transitory capitalist mode of production and form of property the result of “eternal laws of nature and of reason.”⁵ Bourgeois false consciousness thus sustains the belief in the eternal rule of the bourgeoisie. It can do so because “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production.” The individuals composing the ruling class “rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas.” Some of them function as “ideologists, who make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood.”⁶

False consciousness for the proletariat, on the other hand, involves the failure to recognize that the interests of the working class require the abolition of capitalism and that this revolutionary change will liberate not only the proletariat but society as a whole. “False consciousness, in this sense,” Ralph Milliband correctly notes, “is also the failure to realize the universal task which the proletariat is called upon to perform. . . . The worker is falsely conscious when he fails to realize the universal nature of his role, the bourgeois because he fails to realize the partiality of his class.”⁷

The proletariat, according to Marx and Engels, suffers from false consciousness at an early stage of its development as a class. The economic revolution wrought by capitalism at first transforms peasants into workers. “The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself.”⁸ One of the forms in which this intellectual backwardness expresses itself is religion — “an inverted world consciousness.” Religion, as Marx put it in a famous phrase, is “the opium of the people,” which, by stressing the importance of salvation in the next world, provides man with an “illusory happiness” on earth.⁹

Only gradually, and after prolonged suffering and struggle, does the proletariat become a class conscious of its own class interests and of its unique role in history. This transformation of the proletariat into a revolutionary class, aware of its historical mission, is one of the inevitable results of the social changes brought about by capitalism. “The question is not,” Marx and Engels emphasized, “what this or that proletarian, or even the whole of the proletariat at the moment considers as its aim. The question is what the proletariat is, and what, consequent on that being, it will be compelled to do.”¹⁰ Moreover, as the contradictions of capitalism become more pronounced, some sections of the ruling class, who have comprehended the direction of the historical process, make common cause with the proletariat and provide it with additional enlightenment. They join the socialists and communists, the theoreticians of the proletarian class. As history moves forward, these theoreticians “no longer have to seek science in their minds; they have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece.”¹¹ Scientific socialism, as the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, thus imparts to the proletarian class “a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish.”¹² The theoretical conclusions of the communists, declared the Communist Manifesto, “are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.”¹³

The Marxian theory of ideology or false consciousness is far less systematic than our brief summary here suggests. There are many ambiguities, problems of consistency, and logical difficulties to some of which we will return in our concluding chapter.¹⁴ Among the more important questions that can be raised are the following:

1. Marx and Engels predicted that the proletariat in due course would acquire true revolutionary consciousness, but they did not make it clear when this act of maturing would occur. In an early work of 1845, The Holy Family, they asserted that “a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity.”¹⁵ On the other hand, in The German Ideology, written about the same time, they argued that only in the course of the revolution will the proletariat rid itself “of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society” and will adopt “communist consciousness.”¹⁶ Marx and Engels sometimes assumed that revolutionary consciousness would develop inevitably and on its own, while at other times they stressed the importance of revolutionary strategy.¹⁷
2. If all men see society through the distorting spectacles of self-interest, if all human thinking is ideological and represents false consciousness, why is the proletariat exempt from this rule governing human behavior? Marx and Engels asserted that the proletariat is the first class in history to acquire an undistorted knowledge of social reality, but their argument that the proletariat, because of its special position in the social structure of capitalism, will free itself of ideological thinking and enjoy what Leszek Kolakowski has called a special “cognitive privilege,” remains unsubstantiated and unconvincing.
3. Most basically, when Marx and Engels speak of false consciousness they do not mean by this an error in the cognitive sense. False consciousness for them is thinking that does not conform to their theory of history and their vision of the future of mankind, both of which contain strong moral overtones. But why should these underlying moral assumptions be considered true and those of their critics false? The Marxist distinction between false and true consciousness assumes a standard of moral truth the existence of which is nowhere demonstrated. As Raymond Aron has argued cogently:
   The petit bourgeois who refuses to be a proletarian, because he regards culture and sentiments as more important than the amount of his wages, may be cowardly or blind in the view of Marxists, but from the standpoint of logic he merely has a different scale of values. The proletarian who transforms his situation by religious faith, and looks forward to a future life, may be resigned and stupid in the eyes of the unbeliever, but the criticism is just as metaphysical as the belief. Logically, it is a matter of different conceptions of the world. All self-awareness, and consciousness of one’s own situation, implies a metaphysic and a moral theory, and what Marx regarded as authentic reality is only the expression of a particular philosophy.¹⁸

Leninism

According to Marx and Engels, the proletariat eventually would acquire class consciousness and embrace the revolutionary cause; i.e., it would rid itself of false consciousness. This expectation, that the working class would increasingly commit itself to the revolutionary abolition of capitalism, was to be disappointed. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, many working-class parties in Europe took note of the rising standards of living of the proletariat and instead of clamoring for the destruction of the capitalist system they began to work for its improvement and reform. Representatives of the workers entered parliaments and some of them even became members of coalition governments. The goal of Marxian socialism began to recede; the achievement of social legislation became more important than agitation for revolution. This was the context in which Lenin undertook his revision of Marxist doctrine.

The loss of revolutionary ardor on the part of the European working-class movement had been welcomed by Eduard Bernstein and other so-called revisionists. Lenin’s essay, “What is to be done?” written in 1902, was designed to refute a Russian revisionist group known as the “Economists.” Lenin’s attack on reformist ideas drew strength from the special conditions of illegality and oppression under which Russian Social Democracy was operating and which seemingly proved the futility of peaceful reform.

According to Lenin, the working class, “by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e. the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc.” Such a spontaneous working-class movement, trade unionism, meant the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie because it diverted them from the fight for the abolition of the capitalist system. Hence the task of the Social Democrats was to combat this spontaneity, to “take up the political education of the working class ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Part I. The Theory of False Consciousness
• 1. False Consciousness: From Marx to Marcuse
• Part II. The Practice of Eradicating False Consciousness
• 2. The Political Use of Psychiatry in the Soviet Union
• 3 Thought Reform in the People’s Republic of China
• 4. Emancipatory Pedagogy in the Federal Republic of Germany
• Part III. Are Democracy and Capitalism Sustained by False Consciousness?
• 5. The Case for the Cultural Hegemony of the Dominant Classes
• 6. The American System of Education
• 7. The Mass Media in America
• Part IV. Conclusions
• 8. False Consciousness Evaluated
• Index