Lukács (1978c) argues that use-value can exist independently from exchangevalue as ‘a product of work which man is able to make use of in the reproduction of his existence’ (v). With the rise of capitalism, use-value has however become the antagonist of exchange-value. ‘The more general the exchange-value, the clearer and more precisely socially necessary labour time comes into the limelight as the economic foundation of its respective quantity’11 (Lukács, 1986b, 124). Lukács says that ‘the division of labour mediated and brought about by exchange-value produces the principle of control by time by a better subjective use of it’ (1978c, 83). Exchange-value is a contradictory form that in capitalism ‘assumes the leading role in human social intercourse’ and therefore subsumes use-value, but at the same time ‘can only come to prevail by being based on use-value’ (87).
2.3.2. Alienation and Ideology
Lukács (1986b, 635) argues that for Marx, reification and the alienation of humans and capitalist labour that results from it are connected to labour-time. Humans are reduced to a cog in the accumulation process that aims at creating as much profit per unit of time as possible: ‘Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcass. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything; hour for hour, day for day’ (Marx 1847, 127). The modern form of instrumental reason has its origin in the logic of quantification and the reduction of humans to instruments for quantitative increases of the ruling and owning elites’ power. The psychological reasons why humans reproduce ideologies would have to do with fear and hope (Lukács 1986b, 643).
Lukács connects the existence of ideologies as cultural phenomena to the existence of alienated labour in the economy. The reification of labour power necessitates ideologies that justify the existence of alienation. Ideologies attempt to alienate the human mind. They try to instrumentalise consciousness in the interest of dominant powers. Lukács (1986b, 397) is sceptical of Gramsci’s theory of ideology, in which ideologies are understood as individual worldviews. For Lukács, ideology in capitalism has its foundation in the masking of the subject by the object, for example the masking of surplus value produced in social relations as an expenditure of a specific amount of labour-time by monetary profit (Lukács, 1986b, 319–321). Ideology is made up of thoughts, practices, ideas, words, concepts, phrases, sentences, texts, belief systems, meanings, representations, artefacts, institutions, systems or combinations thereof that represent and justify one group’s or individual’s domination and power by misrepresenting, one-dimensionally presenting or distorting reality in symbolic representations (Fuchs 2015, chapter 3).
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Critical Theory of Communication