materialist, he was critical of both philosophical materialism and idealism and integrated them into one thing.
MARX ON CONSCIOUSNESS
Marx’s enormous intellectual project and political activism were driven and sustained by a motivation far more profound than scholarly curiosity. He had an abiding belief in the possibility of human beings and also humanity becoming more than they were at any one point in history. For Marx, to be fully human, human beings, meant that people would be continuously engaged in a process of becoming, a process of developing all of their potentials (Marx, 1844a:1972; 1858: 1973). Of course, Marx understood that the realisation of this latent potentiality depended upon human beings’ collective engagement in self and social transformation. His critical utopian vision together with his understanding of the prerequisites for achieving it were almost certainly the main factors that motivated him to discover the laws of capitalism—thus producing for humanity at least the intellectual weapons that would be needed for a transformational struggle against capital. Marx began his economic studies in the early 1840’s, but it was not until the late 1850’s that he was in a position that would allow him to devote his full intellectual energies to discovering and then communicating the laws of capitalism. However, ten years before he undertook this endeavour, he produced a unique and equally important theory of consciousness. In 1846, Marx, in collaboration with Engels, completed The German Ideology, the text in which this theory of consciousness was first expressed. Unfortunately, this important work was not published until 1932, despite the best efforts of the authors. Nevertheless, the basic tenets of the theory together with its further elaboration are integral to Marx’s economic writings. In fact, Marx’s theory of consciousness explains why the laws of capital can only be discovered by means of a critical scientific analysis. It is also a theory with enormous implications for education, implications that are considered in the next chapter. First, however, it is important to explain the theory and to discuss the general implications and logical extensions pertaining to it.
THE THEORY, ITS LOGICAL EXTENSIONS & IMPLICATIONS
Quite often, Marx presents his ideas in the form of a critique, and his original presentation of his theory of consciousness was no exception. In other words, he presents his theory through a critique of other people’s thinking, i.e., the general form of their thinking as well as, in this case, their understanding of consciousness, especially the origin of consciousness. When Marx and Engels wrote The German Ideology, there were two predominant theories of the origin of consciousness. Idealism, one of these theories, and the one with the longest historical legacy, holds that ideas, or consciousness, are antecedent to the material (real) world. In other words, the real world is the result of consciousness. The other theory, which is a form of materialism, a mechanical and unhistorical form, proposes the exact opposite; ideas and consciousness are the result of sensory projections of material phenomena. Marx was critical of the dichotomised type of thinking that underpinned both of these theories. In each case the real world (material world) and consciousness are conceptualised as separate and distinct entities/phenomena. There also is no reciprocity between material reality and consciousness; all movement between the two takes place in only one direction. These two theories differ only in so far as the entity to which causal significance, and thus movement, is attributed. Marx was critical not just of how dichotomised thinking produced these theories but also of how the dichotomising of reality and consciousness encouraged reified, and in its worse form fetishised, thought (both of which are discussed later in this chapter). In contrast and critical opposition to these theories, Marx formulated an inimitable and revolutionary theory of consciousness that permitted no dichotomy, or binary separation, between consciousness and reality. As readers may already have anticipated, Marx conceptualises consciousness and reality as an internally related unity of opposites. Additionally, reality is conceptualised dynamically, as the sensuous, active experience of human beings in the material world. Therefore, at any one moment in time, consciousness is comprised of thoughts that arise from each human being’s sensuous activity. Moreover, the consciousness of any human being will also include thoughts that have arisen external to the individual’s own sensuous activity, i.e., from other people’s sensuous activity both historically and contemporaneously. However, individuals’ only integrate these external sources of consciousness through actively engaging with them. Since Marx’s theory of consciousness posits the dialectical unity of human thought and practice, it is actually a theory of praxis but more, much more, on this later. To reiterate, according to Marx, thinking and action, consciousness and sensuous human experience, are inseparable. Marx’s theory also proposes that the sensuous activity that has the greatest impact on consciousness is people’s experience within the social relations in which they engage in order to produce their material world, i.e., their experience within historically specific social relations of production—relations that determine both how they produce and what they produce (1846:1976,
p. 37).
When taken together with his critical analysis of capitalism, Marx’s theory of consciousness leads to several other significant insights. To begin with, because human beings’ sensuous activity takes place within historically specific social relations, e.g., capitalist social relations of production, the general characteristics of consciousness are also historically specific. In other words, the consciousness of people living within capitalist social relations will have general characteristics that are different from the characteristics of consciousness that prevailed, for example, in feudal societies and thus feudal social relations.
