e. Unless they are blind or deranged they know they are digging into the ground or aiming rifles at other people, or whatnot. At this level their activity and their consciousness coincide. But the content of this consciousness is minimal. In fact it hardly deserves the name 'consciousness' at all.
But alongside such immediate awareness there is always a more general consciousness. This attempts to go beyond that which people immediately know and to provide some overall conception of the context they find themselves in. It tells them, for instance, that they are not simply digging, but are providing themselves with a future livelihood, or that they are not simply aiming their rifles, but are defending their 'fatherland'.
There is no guarantee of the 'truth' or 'Reality' of this general consciousness. An economic crisis can mean that, however hard you dig, you won't be able to sell the crop you grow and gain a livelihood; your rifle may be defending the profits of a multinational, not some alleged 'fatherland'.
Whereas immediate consciousness is part and parcel of your activity and therefore must be 'real' in certain very limited senses, general consciousness can be no more than a blind accompaniment to activity. In this sense it finds no expression in the world. It has, in Marx's words, no 'this-sidedness' and no 'reality'. Or the outcome of the activity it guides is different to what is expected. Its objective content is different to its subjective content. It is at best partially 'real'. [53]
Yet Marx is insistent that even 'false' general consciousness originates in real activity. So in criticising one particular form of 'unreal' consciousness, the 'German' ideology of idealist philosophy, he writes:
'The philosophers would only have to dissolve their language into the ordinary language from which it is abstracted to recognise it as the distorted language of the actual world and to realise that neither thought nor language in themselves form a reality of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life ...
For philosophers one of the most difficult tasks is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they had to make language into an independent realm. This is the secret of philosophical language in which thoughts in the form of words have their own context. The problem of descending from the world of thoughts to the actual world is turned into the problem of descending from language to life. '[54]
'We have seen that the whole problem of the transition from thought to reality, hence from language to life, exists only in philosophical illusion. '[55]
Such a view of abstract philosophical thought leads straight to the contempt for it expressed in the Theses on Feuerbach: 'Social life is essentially practical. All the mysteries which mislead theory into mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the contemplation of this practice. '
On the face of it, the view he puts forward is very close to that of philosophers who have denied any possibility of general philosophical, social or historical notions. Thus the linguistic philosophy of Wittgenstein claims that all the traditional problems of philosophy arise because philosophers have taken the concepts of ordinary life and used them out of context. [56]
In a somewhat similar way 'historicist' thinkers have insisted that no idea or social practice can be understood outside the particular historical and cultural context in which it is found; any attempt at a wider explanation must be false. [57]
But Marx's view is very different to these. They see false notions as arising as a result of the strange desire of philosophers to generalise, of a weird 'mental cramp' which afflicts people. And they conclude that all generalisation is wrong.
Marx, by contrast, sees false generalisation, the result of the divorce of theory from practice, as itself having material roots. Only in a society without classes can the general notions develop straight out of the immediate experiences of people, without distortion. For everyone in society is then involved in a single, shared cooperative activity.
Ideology and class society
Once there is a division between exploiting and exploited classes, and, based on that, a growing division between mental and manual labour, the single practice disintegrates and with it, the possibility of a single view of the world.
In a class society the social whole is continually rent asunder by the clash between the development of the forces of production and the existing relations of pro...
