from a positive term into one of denunciation.
Marx and Engels adopted this reformulated concept of “ideology” and connected it with their own analysis of capitalist class society. The term “class” to denote a segment of society was then also new in English usage. It derived from the Latin classics of antiquity, where it designated classes of draftees in the call to arms (Quine 1987, 23). In English usage it first meant a cohort in school. Yet references to “lower classes” appeared in England in 1772; “higher classes” and “middle” or “middling classes” followed in the 1790s; and “working classes” appeared in about 1815 (Williams 1959, xiii). Equivalent terms became popular in France in the 1830s (Hobsbawm 1962, 209). A song called “La Proletarienne” appeared there in 1833, together with a call to arms—“Aux armes, Proletaire” (Sewell 1980, 214). By 1837 Marx was writing to his father about the proletariat “as the idea in the real itself” (Bottomore 1983, 74). In 1845 Engels published The Condition of the Working Class in England (1971), based on two years of experience in Manchester, and in 1845–1846 the two together wrote The German Ideology (“abandoned to the criticism of the mice” and not published until 1932) (Marx and Engels 1976), in which they addressed both their political economic theory of the working class and the issue of ideology. In that work they also formulated their view that “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” (in Sayer 1989, 6).
In this initial axiomatic statement on ideology, Marx and Engels followed the promptings of the Enlightenment to interpret the “ruling ideas” as forms of “interested error,” presented as ostensible truths intended to mystify the people about social reality and thus wielded as instruments of domination over hearts and minds. Unlike other Enlightenment thinkers, however, they did not ascribe this form of “interested error” either to the workings of a universal human nature or to agents of darkness trying to exploit it. For them humans were “corporeal, living, real, sensuous, objective beings,” able to acquire real knowledge of the world by acting upon it, even if by that same token they were also “suffering, limited, and conditioned” creatures (Marx 1844, in Ollman 1976, 78, 80). Mastery of the world through labor, together with the capacity for language developed in the course of laboring together with their fellows, would multiply human knowledge and expand the human grasp upon the world. Practical engagement with the world would produce realistic thought and an “increasing clarity of consciousness, power of abstraction and of judgement” (Engels 1972, 255) while driving out “fantasies” that took no tangible object and only filled the mind with apprehension and fear.
In this perspective ideology was made to resemble religion, because—like religion—it mystified the real capacity of humans to change nature through active material practice and because it accentuated human dependence upon forces beyond their control. For Marx and Engels such mystification was due not to human nature or human weakness but to the connection of ideology with the contradictions posed by class society. Class society fostered illusions precisely because it was riven by the social polarization into the many who labor and the few who dominate the productive process. To deny or veil the resulting tensions, such a society produced ideology as “a particular, distorted kind of consciousness which conceals contradictions” (Larrain 1979, 50). Marx and Engels thus hoped that reason and political action based upon it could lift the veils of misrepresentation and allow knowledge to go forward unhampered by figments of the mind.
This phrasing of ideology as “the ruling ideas of the ruling class” is useful for its grasp of social realities, but its authors did not specify how it was to be understood. Do managers of the ruling class hire intellectual agents to produce ideas that exemplify their interests, or did they mean that the asymmetrical structure of society determines the conditions under which ideas are produced and propagated? Did their notion of ideology imply that the ruling ideas “reflect” or “mirror” the real power of the ruling class? Marx and Engels used these metaphors frequently. Alternatively, they spoke of ideas as “corresponding” to certain conditions “most appropriate” to them, as when Marx says that Protestantism, “with its cult of abstract man,” is the most “suitable” (entsprechendste) form of religion for simple commodity producers exchanging equivalents of abstract labor (1923, 42). These terms resemble Max Weber’s later concept of “elective affinity” (Wahlverwandschaft) between ideas and group interests, but Marx and Engels did not lay out how social relations were connected with particular ideational representations. Their language suggests a field of force, undergirded by productive relations, setting the terms for how people are to comprehend their world; but they left open the question of how particular forms of ideation arise and how some kinds of representation achieve precedence and power over others. The search for an adequate answer to that question continues in the present.
Soon after Marx and Engels advanced the notion of a link between ruling ideas and ruling classes, this theme vanished from their writings (Balibar 1988). It was replaced in 1867, in Kapital, by a new mode of analysis focused on “the fetishism of commodities.” This phrasing appeared in the context of the notion that things produced for the market—commodities—embodied human labor deployed and allocated under the auspices of capitalist social relations. In this mode of production, human labor power, purchased by the capitalist in labor “markets,” is incorporated into commodities. The workers then lose any connection with what they have produced, which belongs to the capitalist who paid them wages for their labor power. The goods are placed upon “commodity markets,” and the proceeds from their sale belong to the capitalist. Thus animate human labor, which is a physical and cognitive attribute of people, and inanimate commodities produced by that labor are treated as if they belonged to the same category.
The merging of these qualitatively different entities, according to Marx, masks the real social relations that govern the way people are harnessed to the production process. Moreover, when worker-producers of commodities and buyers of commodities are equated, the social relations among workers, employers, and buyers are all made to look like relations among the commodities themselves. “It is nothing but the definite social relations between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things.” Just as in “the misty realm of religion . . . the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own. . . . So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands” (Marx 1976, 165). This notion does not rely on a model of ideology as distortions and errors promulgated by a ruling class; rather, it traces the source of deception to a particular kind of social reality, that of capitalism. That reality mixes what is real with fictions; as a result, the participants in the transactions are deceived about the reality of capitalist social relations.
Marx drew the concept of fetishism from studies of religion. The term came from the French scholar Charles De Brosses, who described in his book on the Culte des Dieux fétiches (1760) the behavior of West African carvers who supposedly first sculpted wooden images (“a thing made,” feitiço in Portuguese), to then treat them as if they were divine beings. De Brosses, like others after him, saw in this “fetishism” evidence of primitive, nonlogical modes of thought. Marx, however, applied it to the structural effects of a particular mode of mobilizing social labor—that of capitalism.
Marx applied a similar logic to characterize the structure of non-capitalist social formations, where—as he understood it—a chief or despot, standing above individuals or communities, embodied the sway of an encompassing community or state, thus making that wider entity “appear as a person.” This interpretation has been revived in modern Marxian anthropology. For example, Jonathan Friedman used it to characterize the role of the chief in Southeast Asian tribal groups as representative of the higher unity, exemplified in sacrifices to the territorial spirits (1979). Pierre Bonte applied it to the “cattle complex” in African pastoralist societies, where cattle constitute the subsistence base, wealth that underwrites descent marriage, and offerings to the supernaturals: “cattle fetishism is thought of and justified as reproducing the supernatural order” (1981, 38–39).
In
