nent concepts:
'From the start the' spirit 'is afflicted with the curse of being 'burdened' with matter, which here makes its appearance in the form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short in language. Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exits for other men and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language like consciousness only arises from the need, the necessity of intercourse with other men. '[49]
Or, as he puts it elsewhere, 'language is the immediate actuality of thought '. [50]
Knowledge, then, is a social product. It arises out of the need for communication, which in turn is a product of the need to carry out social production. Consciousness is the subjective expression of objectively existing relations. It originates as consciousness of participation in those relationships. Its embodiment, language, is a material process which is one of the constituents of these relationships. 'Ideas and thoughts of people, then, are ideas and thoughts about themselves and of people in general ... for it [is] the consciousness not merely of a single individual but of the individual in his interconnection with the whole of society '. [51]
Marx's materialism amounts to this. Mind is developed upon the basis of matter. It depends for its functioning upon the satisfaction of the needs of the human body. It depends for the form of its consciousness upon the real relationships between individuals. The content of the individual mind depends upon the individual's material interaction with the world and other people.
But the human mind cannot simply be reduced to matter. The individual human be ing who thinks has the ability to act. The subjective develops out of the objective, but is still real.
As Marx put it in the first of the Theses on Feuerbach: 'The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of an object of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, not subjectively ... Feuerbach does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. '
However, if Marx asserts the reality of individual thought and activity, he also emphasises their limits. Thought arises from activity. And as soon as the link with activity is broken, thought is seen to lose some of its content: 'Man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking, in practice. '
So thinking is only 'real' in so far as it has practical application, insofar as it alters the world. There is an objective reality apart from human awareness. But it is only through their activity that humans can make contact with this reality, link their consciousness to it 'The question of whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question ... the dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question '. [52]
It is in the coming together of humanity and the world in activity that both the reality of the world and the truth of thought are determined.
Marx's historical materialism does not hold that will, consciousness and intention play no part in history. Human action is continually changing the world in which human beings find themselves, and their relationships with each other.
The mechanical materialist Kautskyite interpretation of Marxism makes the very mistake Marx himself ascribes to Feuerbach. It fails to see that history is the history of human activity. But social activity involves consciousness.
It is human beings with particular ideas who invent new tools, challenge existing ways of living, organise revolutionary movements or fight to defend the status quo. The contradictions between the forces of production and the relations of production, between the base and the superstructure, find expression in arguments, organised disagreements and bitter struggles between people. These are part of the real development of society. To deny that is to present a picture of society in which explosive antagonisms no longer exist.
But consciousness never arises in a void. It is a subjective link between objective processes. The ideas of any individual or group develop on the basis of material reality and feed back into that reality. They cannot be reduced to that reality, but neither can they be divorced from it. p> It is this link which enables us to make sense of Marx's notions of 'false consciousness' and 'ideology'.
False consciousness
When people are engaged in material practice they have an immediate awareness of their action and of the part of the world it impinges on which is unlikely to be fals...
