German Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Bowie Andrew

Author:Bowie, Andrew [Bowie, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2010-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

Ideology and commodity

Marx’s mature work in Capital (first volume published 1867) seeks to analyse the mechanisms of 19th-century capitalism which lead to the impoverishment of the many in economies that produce ever more wealth for the few. This analysis involves a critical stance towards philosophy. The dominant forms of philosophy, in Marx’s view, have an ideological function. Intellectual production is bound up with the ownership of the means of production, and so with the class divisions that are characteristic of capitalism. The ‘ruling ideas’ are, as he put it in The German Ideology of 1845, the ideas of the ‘ruling class’. This need not, though, involve conscious deception by those who propagate the ideology which justifies their interests: ideology can function unconsciously.

Were Marx to regard his critique of ideology as a strictly philosophical matter, it would have to explain philosophies wholly in terms of power-relations and forms of production. At times, Marx seems to move in this direction, and this suggests an important problem. Capital sometimes presents itself as a scientific account of capitalism, and Marx is prone to adopt the idea that knowing the scientific truth about capitalism is the direct route to achieving the practical political goal of changing it. It is not far from this to saying that society and history are subject to natural laws, and so trying to justify as natural necessity whatever actions are deemed necessary to arrive at a better form of society. Economic factors undoubtedly do create necessities which cannot be avoided: as Marx shows, once a new form of technology renders the previous way of doing things expensive and inefficient, it will generally be adopted. The distance between this historical fact, and the actual ways in which technology affects society – which have ethical and political dimensions – is vital, and Marx sometimes ignores it. His main approach to these issues is via the model of the economic ‘base’, which causes changes in the social ‘superstructure’. The approach can be illustrated by the effects of the move from agrarian to industrial production, which helps bring about the end of feudalism. The specifically philosophical importance of this issue is apparent in his account of ‘commodity form’.

Marx attempts to work out an objective measure of value which would allow him to claim scientific status for his theory. However, the key to his theory of value actually undermines this status, and opens up what will be one of his most influential conceptions for subsequent German philosophy. In the Preface to A Critique of Political Economy of 1859, Marx asserts that ‘It is not the consciousness of men that conditions [bestimmt] their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that conditions their consciousness’. A tension is apparent in the word ‘bestimmt’, which can mean ‘determines’, in the sense that a natural phenomenon is causally determined by a scientific law. If ‘bestimmt’ is translated as ‘conditions’, however, it can mean something like ‘influences’. This suggests we have a degree of autonomy, even as we are necessarily affected by the sort of society in which we live.

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