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Created: October 14, 2003
Latest Update: October 14, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Marx and False Consciousness

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, October 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

On Monday, October 13, 2003, Latoya Lewis asked about Marx and "false consciousness."

Marx believed that society could evolve to a place of equality and concern for the Other. He was an optimist in that sense. So he believed that people, workers particularly, could be educated to understand the exploitative nature of capitalist society. However, in the process of learning about capitalism, there is also a parallel socialization going on in our schools, work places, and especially, today, the media. Some people are confused by the arguments of those in power, including the media. Gayatri Spivak speaks of this as "deception" (somewhere around p. 251 in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason).

When we say that someone is confused by "false consciousness" we mean that the complex arguments, and they are complex, about who should and can wield power and how others over whom that power is wielded should behave in the best interest of all of us, we mean that the person has fallen for or been deceived by the other side's arguments. So a Democrat who voted for a Republican in the recent recall election could be said to have been suffering from "false consciousness," especially from the Democratic perspective.

A student who asserts his/her sense of answerability may be considered by a monologic nonanswerable hierarchy as suffering from "false consciousness," i.e. the administration might say that in the best interest of all of us we must have rules and regulations even though sometimes some of us, as in the case of the classroom furniture, are harmed by those rules. We also refer to this on the part of the administration as structural violence, causing harm without acknowledging that the root of the harm lies in rigid rules of monologic nonanswerability.

Will that do for now? jeanne