Ideology has in capitalist society a double nature:
- Capitalism has an inherent fetishist character because producers and consumers do not experience the entire social relations and process of commodity production in its totality so that the thing-status of the commodity and money hides the underpinning class relations and makes capitalism appear as a natural and infinite system without alternatives;
- Naturalisation is an important feature of ideologies in general, an important ideological strategy that makes domination appear necessary, timeless, inevitable, and infinite in order to justify and legitimate oppression. For Lukács, ideology is a necessary legitimating feature of capitalism. The “veil drawn over the nature of bourgeois society is indispensable to the bourgeoisie itself. […] the need to deceive the other classes and to ensure that their class consciousness remain amorphous is inescapable for a bourgeois regime” (HCC, 66).
Just like there is the labour of producing ideology conducted by managers, consultants, bourgeois scientists, intellectuals and journalists, etc, there is the ideology of labour: according to Lukács, the ideology of Calvinism is constitutive for “bourgeois reified consciousness with its things-in-themselves in a mythologised but yet quite pure state” (HCC, 192).
Ideology partly operates with the reification of language. Lukács quotes Marx from the German Ideology and remarks in a footnote: “Marx goes on to make a number of very fine observations about the effects of reification on language. A philological study from the standpoint of historical materialism could profitably begin here” (HCC, 209, footnote 16). Marx argues in the passage mentioned by Lukács that capitalism’s “relations of buying and selling” penetrate and shape language:
For example, propriété – property [Eigentum] and characteristic feature [Eigenschaft]; property – possession [Eigentum] and peculiarity [Eigentümlichkeit]; “eigen” [“one’s own”] – in the commercial and in the individual sense; valeur, value, Wert; commerce, Verkehr; échange, exchange, Austausch, etc., all of which are used both for commercial relations and for characteristic features and mutual relations of individuals as such. (Marx and Engels 1845/46, 231)
Chapter Three | History and Class Consciousness 2.0
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Ideology and Reified Consciousness