The production and communication of ideas is therefore for Marx not detached from material social life, but is itself material and social: ‘Men are producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., that is, real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms’ (Marx and Engels 1845, 42). Culture is a social product of human social relations in society.
Marx applies this materialist concept of culture also to the world of ideology understood as a ‘camera obscura’ that makes humans and their social relations ‘appear upside-down’ (Marx and Engels 1845, 42). Ideologies are not abstract ideas existing eternally outside of history. They are produced and reproduced by specific ideological workers such as consultants, managers, bourgeois journalists and intellectuals, etc. Marx therefore speaks of a division of labour within the ruling class ‘so that inside this class one part appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists, who make the formation of the illusions of the class about itself their chief source of livelihood), whereas the others in this class have less time to make up illusions and ideas about themselves’ (Marx and Engels 1845, 68).
7.2. Georg Lukács: Teleological Positing
So Marx in this part of the German Ideology asks profound questions about society: how are the economy and culture related? What is the connection of labour and ideology? Georg Lukács in his Ontology of Social Being, the subject of this book’s second chapter, re-poses Marx’s questions. He felt that in his History and Class Consciousness he did not ask questions about the role of labour in society and focused too much on ideology. He therefore posed a foundational question of cultural Marxism, namely the one about the relationship of culture and economy, in his final book. The ontological critical theory of society that he worked out in the Ontology does not eliminate the ideology critique Lukács formulated in History and Class Consciousness. Ideology is a profound part of the Ontology. So one can say that the Ontology subsumes History and Class Consciousness and generalises Lukács’ critical theory of society.
Lukács argues that human production is a teleological positing with a purpose, orientation and goal. This means that humans are inherently creative beings, who reflect on the potential outcomes before undertaking an activity. Marx formulated this circumstance of teleological positing in diferent words in Capital Volume 1’s chapter 7 (see Fuchs 2016, chapter 7):
A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not only efects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes [verwirklicht] his own purpose in those materials. And this is a purpose he is conscious of, it determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it (Marx 1867, 284).
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Critical Theory of Communication