The theory of ideology forms an important part of Marx’s analysis of capitalist society. Ideology, in the end, is false consciousness, a system of false ideas about the nature of society but one which is the result of the way the capitalist mode of production appears to function. Appearances, Marx argued, were misleading as far as the nature of capitalism was concerned: a scientific analysis must go beyond appearances and lay bare what was really happening. As one example of the kind of discovery his own investigations had led him to, Marx observes:
The determination of the magnitude of value by labour-time is . . . a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities. (Capital vol. 1, ch. 1, sec. 4)
Here the true determining factor is masked by superficial factors.
The thinking of workers who accept and support capitalism is the consequence not primarily of the onslaught of bourgeois propaganda but of the conditions of commodity production. The very nature of the wages system gives the impression of fair exchange between employer and employee, without exploitation. Marxian economics teaches that wage-workers sell their labour-power to the capitalists, who force the workers to work for longer than is necessary to produce value equivalent to that of their labour-power (sufficient to enable them to maintain themselves and rear yet more workers). During this surplus labour, for which the workers do not receive payment, they produce surplus value, which is expropriated by the capitalists. The appearance, however, is that workers sell not their labour-power but rather their labour:
On the surface of bourgeois society the wage of the labourer appears as the price of labour, a certain quantity of money that is paid for a certain quantity of labour. (Capital, vol. I, ch. 19)
If it is assumed that the worker is selling his labour, there can be no room for surplus labour and surplus value, and the exploitative nature of the wages system is concealed:
The wage-form . . . extinguishes every trace of the division of the. working-day into necessary labour and surplus labour, into paid and unpaid labour. All labour appears as paid labour, (ibid.)
This illusory appearance makes the workers’ position appear freer than it really is, and is seized on by the economists who act as apologists for capitalism:
we may understand the decisive importance of the transformation of value and price of labour-power into the form of wages, or into the value and price of labour itself. This phenomenal form, which makes the actual relation invisible, and, indeed, shows the direct opposite of that relation, forms the basis of all the juridical notions of both labourer and capitalist, of all the mystifications of the capitalistic mode of production, of all its illusions as to liberty, of all the apologetic shifts of the vulgar economists, (ibid.)
Thus one mystification engendered by capitalism is that the workers sell their labour and not their labour power to the capitalists, and this masks the fact that part of the workers’ labour is unpaid.
There is a second mystification, namely that the relations between the producers appear to them as relations between things, or between their products:
A commodity is . . . a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. (Capital vol. 1, ch. 1, sec. 4)
Once again, the surface appearance of capitalism obscures the underlying reality:
It is . . . just this ultimate money-form of the world of commodities that actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between the individual producers, (ibid.)
In other words, commodities have exchange-value according to the amount of socially-nccessary labour time involved in their production. Value is not something which commodities have in and of themselves, but only as a consequence of human labour being expended on them. When commodities are exchanged, it is not their intrinsic properties that are measured, but properties they acquire because of the nature of capitalist production.
The classical political economists, according to Marx, regarded products as commodities by their very nature, thereby ignoring the fact that they become so only under certain modes of production, where producers relate to each other in historically specific ways:
The crude materialism of the economists, who regard as the natural properties of things what are social relations of production among people, and qualities which things obtain because they are subsumed under these relations, is at the same time just as crude an idealism, even fetishism, since it imputes social relations to things as inherent characteristics, and thus mystifies them.'(Grundrisse, p. 687)
Fetishism is the imputing to something of powers which it does not in itself have. Commodity fetishism refers to the phenomenon whereby commodities appear to possess value and exchange-value in and of themselves; capital fetishism to that whereby capital appears to be productive itself, whereas in reality it is labour power alone that creates value.
We have emphasised that it is the essential features of commodity production, not of production as such, that are hidden from superficial inquiry. With regard to the feudal society of the European Middle Ages, Marx writes:
the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour, appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations, and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labour. (Capital vol. 1, ch. 1, sec. 4)
Under feudalism, moreover, the division of the working-day into necessary and surplus labour was transparent. Feasants worked part of their time on their own holding, and part on the lord’s land, and it was clear to all that this latter labour involved working for another. Only under capitalism does it appear that the workers work all the time for themselves, so that the existence of surplus labour is concealed.
In socialism, though, there will be no mystification:
The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan, (ibid.)
The nature of society will be transparent once there is no money, exchange commodities or classes.
Consequently there will be in socialism no need for social science to analyse the workings of society, since these will be perfectly open and clear to the people who live in that society. Socialism, then, involves not only the abolition of classes and money but of social science, and in particular economics.
Paul Bennett
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