connections between the economic categories - or the hidden structure of the bourgeois economic system ',' to attempt to penetrate the inner physiology of bourgeois society ... '[58]
This 'esoteric' approach, which looks to the underlying social reality, is in marked contrast with a simply 'exoteric' approach which takes for granted the existing external social forms. The classical political economists never succeed fully in breaking with the 'exoteric' method, but they begin to move in that direction, and in doing so lay the basis for a scientific understanding of the inner structure of capitalism.
Their ability to develop a scientific understanding is related to the class they identify with - the rising industrial capitalists. Marx described Smith, for instance, as 'the interpreter of the frankly bourgeois upstart ', [59]' writing in 'the language of the still revolutionary bourgeoisie, which has not yet subjected to itself the whole of society, the state, etc '. [60]
Because the industrial capitalists do not yet control society, they have to adopt a critical view of its external features, to seek an objective analysis of the extent to which these features fit in with the drive to capital accumulation. This leads to the attempt to locate the production of wealth in the labour process, and to contrast 'productive' labour which creates surplus value with the parasitic functions of the old state, church and so on.
Ideology and the superstructure
The situation changes radically when the rising class has consolidated its hold. Then it no longer has any use for a revolutionary critical attitude towards society as a whole. The only practical activity it is interested in is that which reproduces existing economic and social relations. And so its 'theory' degenerates into attempts to take different superficial aspects of existing society and present them as if they provided general laws about what all societies must be like.
For Marx, 'ideology' is a product of this situation. The dominant social class controls the means by which a distinct layer of people can be freed from physical labour so as to engage in intellectual production. But, dependent upon the ruling class for their sustenance, these 'intellectuals' will tend to identify with it - the ruling class establishes all sorts of mechanisms to ensure that.
Identifying with the ruling class means stopping short of any total critique of existing social relations and taking for granted the form in which they present themselves. The particular aspects of existing society are then seen as self-sustaining, as lacking any common root in social production.
So you get a series of separate, self-contained disciplines: 'politics', 'neo-classical economics', 'psychology', 'sociology' and so on. Each of these treats aspects of a unitary social development as if they occurred independently of each other. 'History' becomes a more or less arbitrary linking together of events and personages. And philosophy becomes the attempt to overcome the separation of these disciplines through looking at the concepts they use at ever greater degrees of remoteness from the world of material production and intercourse.
Such ways of looking at the world are 'ideological', not because they are necessarily conscious apologetics for the existing ruling class, but because the very way in which they are structured prevents them seeing beyond the activities and ideas which reproduce existing society - and therefore also the ruling class - to the material processes in which these are grounded. They sanctify the status quo because they take the concepts it uses at face value, instead of-seeing them as transitory products of social development.
'Ideology' in this sense is linked to the superstructure. It plays about with concepts which arise in the superstructure, seeking to link and derive one from the other, without ever cutting through surface appearances to look at the real process of social production in which the superstructure and its concepts arise.
It is the contradictions of such 'ideological' arguments that can only 'be resolved by the descent from language to life'.
But this descent can only be made by thinkers who identify with a rising class. For they alone are identified with a practice which puts into question all existing social relations, seeking to criticise what happens on the surface of society, linking it to underlying relations of material production and exploitation.
While the thinkers of an established ruling class are confined to continual elaboration in the realm of ideology, the thinkers of a rising class can begin to develop a scientific understanding of social development.
