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Beverley Best - Distilling A Value Theory of Ideology From Volume Three of Capital
Beverley Best - Distilling A Value Theory of Ideology From Volume Three of Capital
3 (2015) 101–141
brill.com/hima
Beverley Best
Concordia University, Montreal
bev.best@concordia.ca
Abstract
Keywords
Critics have perennially slated the concept of ideology for retirement. For the
past decade, various theories declaring ideology-critique as inoperative have
taken up the torch – analyses of unmediated modalities of biopower, theories
of non-representational affect dynamics, methods of surface reading. Most
recently, the ‘end of ideology’ has been announced once again by various ‘new
Thank you to Rick Gruneau for his astute comments on an earlier version of this paper, as
well as to my anonymous reviewers at Historical Materialism for their insightful suggestions
and challenges.
1 For this reason, many argue that if a transformative anti-capitalist revolution were to
emerge it would do so from the global South and be characterised by the contradictions and
deprivations particular to those regions (the dubious distinction of having less to lose than
populations in the North).
and organised as to modify its course and predictably dire outcomes? That the
answer appears to be ‘no’, for the foreseeable future, is precisely the reason why
the question of ideology will continue to return to the agenda, for the foresee-
able future, despite the perennial pronouncing of its obsolescence.
A flourishing of social movements and mass protests, many of which evinced
some version of anti-capitalist orientation, however oblique or diffuse, punc-
tuated the years following the global economic crisis – from the Arab Spring
uprisings, the anti-austerity protests across Europe, anti-union-busting pro-
tests in the US, and the global mushrooming of Occupy, to the student move-
ments in Chile, California and Québec. Without discounting the profound
historical significance of these revolutionary gestures, what Marcuse once
called the Great Refusal, a majority-declared ‘no’ to capitalist society, appears
to be as distant a possibility as at any time since the 1970s. How is it so? What
ingredients are missing from the mix, what obstacles need eradicating before
even the vague outline of a fundamentally different kind of society can present
itself as a feasible option?
These are both the ‘big questions’ as well as the excruciatingly ordinary day-
in, day-out examples of popular allegiance to what Jodi Dean calls neoliberal
fantasy that keep the question of ideology nagging. It is in light of this deeply
perplexing situation that such an obstinate and, for some, old-fashioned ques-
tion persists in harassing equally obstinate and old-fashioned critical theorists:
how do we account for the lack of a concerted popular response (in the global
North, at least) to the deprivations of capitalist society, and, what are the his-
torical conditions that contribute to foreclosing (or, alternatively, exercising)
collective imagination around the desirability and feasibility of a different pos-
sible world? I argue this question remains timely in the current age of austerity
and, as such, we are far from being done with that old-fashioned category of
ideology. In this discussion, I propose rethinking ideology by turning back to
Marx (once again); I argue that ideology-critique has fallen from favour, again,
at a historical conjuncture when it is required most as a lever for radical social
analysis.
A brief survey of contemporary iterations of ideology-critique reveals that
the legacy of Althusser’s formulation of ideology continues to carry a signifi-
cant portion of the burden. In other words, many, if not most, contemporary
articulations of ideology-critique overtly or tacitly accept Althusser’s formu-
lation of ideology as a mechanism of subject formation where the subject is
produced as an effect of its interpellation or misrecognised identification with
the formal, empty subject position of the narratives and representations that
constitute the social. The partnership of ideology-critique and psychoanalysis
has been fruitful for social theory in many respects. However, as illuminating
2 Rehmann 2013, p. 7.
3 Rehmann 2013, pp. 8–9, 71.
early work, most prominently in Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology, and
continues throughout Marx’s work to what I will argue is its apotheosis in
Capital.
Nonetheless, from Marx’s formulation of the concept of ideology (however
that is understood) to the present, many alternative and, often, competing ver-
sions of ideology-critique have been offered, most of which, however diverse,
can be characterised as either critical or neutral formulations based on the fol-
lowing two orientations: 1) a critical formulation posits ideology as a particular
perceptual economy that is a spontaneous and organic dimension of the capi-
talist mode of production and therefore historically specific to it, and which
functions to stabilise and aid in the reproduction of the exploitative social rela-
tions that are the substance of capital; 2) a neutral formulation, on the other
hand, posits ideology as the modality by which subjects cohere into a larger
social group, collectivity, or historic bloc (to borrow Gramsci’s term), in Stuart
Hall’s words, the ‘images, concepts and premises which provide the frame-
works through which we represent, interpret, understand and “make sense” of
some aspect of social existence.’4 Deployments of a neutral formulation of ide-
ology have either focused on the content of ideological discourses, worldviews,
social imaginaries, political narratives, etc. (as in the work of Michael Freeden,
or in Hall’s justly-celebrated analysis of Thatcherism), or have focused on the
formal and often unconscious mechanisms that facilitate such social cohesion
and investment (as in the work of Žižek, and in the work of Althusser), or both
(as in the work of Laclau). However, what is characteristic of all neutral for-
mulations, and which differentiates them from critical formulations, is that
ideological interpellation is conceived as a transhistorical modality of subject
or social formation, and not a historically particular and immanent movement
of capital, per se.
What has tended to generate ambiguity around the distinction between a
critical and a neutral formulation of ideology is that many important think-
ers within the critical tradition of social theory mobilise a neutral concept of
ideology – thinkers such as Gramsci, Althusser, Hall, Laclau, Žižek – in the ser-
vice of analysing the dynamics of the social relations of power and domina-
tion in capitalist societies. That the analyses of these theorists are correctly
identified as ‘critical’ in the sense of being historically oriented analyses of
capitalist modalities of power has obscured the fundamental distinction
between the neutral conception of ideology that is formulated in this work
and a critical formulation that evolves in the work of Marx and is then refor-
mulated by subsequent Marxist theorists, most famously Georg Lukács, as well
as the Frankfurt School critics Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert
Marcuse. This ‘fundamental distinction’ between a critical and a neutral ori-
entation requires further clarification. What I have chosen to call here Marx’s
(critical) value theory of ideology refers to a certain perceptual economy that
emerges as an objective dimension of capitalist production. In capitalism this
perceptual economy functions as a tendency of the movement of capital that,
to borrow Raymond Williams’s phrase, sets limits and exerts pressure on the
formation of the worldviews, common sense, political narratives, etc. that are
able to become hegemonic and participate in cohering a collectivity. The criti-
cal formulation of the ideological operation in capitalism, therefore, does not
subsume or displace a neutral sense of the ideological operation in the con-
text of capitalist societies. Nor can the situation be the reverse; i.e., nor can it
suffice, contra the thrust of Laclau’s work from his co-authored (with Chantal
Mouffe) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy forward, to replace a critical for-
mulation with a neutral formulation of ideology5 in the analysis of capitalist
reproduction. Rather, the critical and neutral formulations of the ideological
operation are distinct but articulated; in capitalist reproduction, the two modes
of ideology operate within distinct ontological and epistemological registers,
and a comprehensive analysis of capitalist reproduction6 requires capturing
both this distinction and the mode of their articulation.
One way of characterising both the distinction between, and articulation of,
critical and neutral conceptions of ideology is as such: the perceptual economy
of capital establishes the foundation, building blocks, or ‘raw material’ for the
development of collective imaginaries, common sense, and so on. For exam-
ple, it is a tendency within the perceptual economy of capital to foreground
the category of the individual agent in everyday consciousness while sideling
the category of collective agency. The various ways in which this tendency
then manifests in the repertoire of a society’s narratives, images, prejudices,
affective comportments, and structures of feeling are too many to catalogue,
and proliferate daily. And even though, as with all capital’s tendencies, these
narratives confront, and must negotiate, counter-tendency narrativisations,
5 For example, it does not suffice to replace a critical formulation of ideology with Laclau’s
neutral formulation wherein ideology is the provisional discursive-ideological suturing of
the transhistorical emptiness of the social.
6 A ‘comprehensive’ analysis of capitalist social reproduction that articulates the dynamics of
both the critical and neutral senses of that operation would, of course, be too vast for any
single study. Not even the three volumes of Capital approach such a scope. What I mean by
comprehensive, then, is the recognition of the supplementary character of different studies
produced across the fields of the analytical division of labour in social theory.
those that give priority to the category of the individual are on a path of least
resistance in capitalist societies. That this is the case is an objective feature of
the movement of capital and constitutes the particular representational ‘base’
in capitalism for the emergence of a network of interlocking discursive for-
mations that would otherwise emerge as part of any social formation, pre- or
post-capitalist.7
In his analysis of Hall’s treatment of the phenomenon of Thatcherism, Jorge
Larrain has captured the distinction between a critical and a neutral concep-
tion of ideology along with the potential complementarity that exists between
them, precisely because they take different but articulated objects of analysis.
Larrain explains that Hall’s neutral ideology-critique of Thatcherism is impor-
tant and necessary, but it is also ‘partial’ and ‘must be complemented by the
critical approach’, more specifically what Larrain calls Marx’s ‘negative’ con-
ception of ideology.8 Both the distinction and the complementarity between
the critical-negative conception and a neutral conception of ideology,9 Larrain
explains in this way:
7 The idea that ‘the structural characteristics of capital fetishism provide “significant raw
material”, such as the “primacy of the individual” for the specific regions of the superstructure’,
is one, rare moment of agreement between my own analysis and that of Dimoulis and
Milios (Dimoulis and Milios 2004, p. 40; quotation from Wayne 2005, p. 196). Dimoulis and
Milios proceed to attribute almost no significance to this ‘raw material’ or to the objective
movement of capital fetishism in their deeply misguided reading of Marx. Still, I do not
disagree with their point that a critical conception of ideology (or the modality of fetishism
in this case) has a more ‘modest’ and less ‘determining’ relationship to the generation of
a society’s hegemonising narratives than has often been attributed to it. And while I may
disagree with Mike Wayne, then, as to the merit of positing capital fetishism as having the
more ‘modest’ function of furnishing the ‘raw material’ for subsequent discursive formations
in capitalism, my reading of Marx is vastly more aligned with that of Wayne and with his
critique of Dimoulis and Milios than it is otherwise. As I will touch upon below, my reading of
Marx on the question of fetishism is indeed aligned with that of Wayne on many individual
points as well as in its more general thrust.
8 Larrain 1991, p. 8.
9 Rehmann’s conception of ideology – ‘renewal’ of ideology-critique, according to the author
(Rehmann 2013, p. 8) – claims a critical and Marxian orientation while offering more of a
‘blend’ of critical and neutral formulations. Such a blending, however, introduces a categorial
ambiguity that is problematic. The objective of Rehmann’s renewal is to sustain the valued
characteristics of each formulation; the result, rather, is a neutralised conception of ideology
that undermines its critical dimensions. Rehmann describes in Theories of Ideology the debt
his approach owes to Wolfgang Fritz Haug and the Projekt Ideologietheorie (PIT) that Haug
founded in 1977. Based on Rehmann’s own description of this work, and on the exegesis of
the same in Koivisto and Pietilä 1996, it does appear that the source of this blended theory
of ideology can be located in the work of Haug and the PIT. In turn, both Rehmann and
Kiovisto & Pietilä describe the influence on Haug and the PIT of the thought of Engels
(hence their revival of the term ‘ideological powers’) and of the thought of Althusser
in a qualified rethinking of some of Althusser’s central categories. Both of these
influences contribute, I would argue, to the kind of critical-neutral category ambiguity
that is a characteristic of this blended conception of ideology. For a summary of what is
problematic about Rehmann’s formation, see the Appendix to this paper.
10 Larrain 1991, p. 21.
11 Larrain 1991, p. 8.
12 See Rehmann 2013, p. 29.
13 The emergence of an intellectual tenor in the form of various ‘new materialisms’, ‘object-
oriented ontologies’, and ‘speculative realisms’ is fascinating with respect to the desire
animated in these forms of thought to say something ‘objective’, ‘solid’, material – ‘true’,
in an outmoded language – while denying themselves any access to an epistemological
framework that might facilitate such statements. It is a kind of intellectual asceticism
(appropriate for this ‘age of austerity’) that reverberates with the living contradictions
that are an index of the present historical conjuncture.
14 Rehmann 2013, p. 243.
camera obscura. Unlike Rehmann, however, who questions the precision of the
inversion formulation and hence downplays the significance of the metaphor,15
and unlike John Mepham, who refutes the inversion dynamic outright,16 I
will argue that the inversion formulation remains central and becomes more
precise in Marx’s later ‘economic’ texts. However, as if anticipating Larrain’s
lament that the critical and neutral formulations of ideology needlessly dis-
pute over the same concept, Marx, by the time he is writing Capital, comes
to abandon the term ‘ideology’ in its critical usage and replaces it with the
concepts of fetishism and mystification, precisely in order to avoid this confu-
sion. The objection sometimes heard, that Marx’s interest in the question of
ideology is an occupation of his ‘early’ work but abandoned in his later work,
is therefore inaccurate. Marx’s theory of fetishism and mystification is, rather,
a retooling and renaming of a critical theory of ideology.17 Georg Lukács – and
in the wake of Lukács, Adorno and Horkheimer – understood very well the
centrality of the concept of the fetish in a Marxian analysis of capitalism (the
concept remaining central to their own work, and Lukács in particular) and
its lineage with respect to the critique of ideology. It is with Althusser that
the question of ideology, using the term as such, is restored to prominence.
However, while Althusser’s critique of ideology made significant contributions
to the analysis of capitalist social reproduction (not the least of which in its
influence on thinkers such as Hall), Althusser mistakenly dismisses the impor-
tance of the concept of the fetish to Marx’s analysis of the movement of capital
and, in doing so, obscures its genealogy in a critical concept of ideology. In
my own formulation, I am intentionally reverting back to the use of the term
‘ideology’ to refer to these immanent, everyday, objective processes of capital
(i.e., fetishism, mystification) in order to demonstrate how far contemporary
prominent formulations of ideology have travelled from the Marxian analyti-
cal path, what is lost by doing so, and what can be gained when the question of
ideology is restored to Marx’s critical line of inquiry.
My own formulation of ideology that follows, therefore, is a critical, Marxian
theory of ideology18 that introduces a focus on the importance of the material
False Consciousness
The term ‘false consciousness’ was never used by Marx; rather, it was a term
used only once by Engels in correspondence. A Marxian theory of capital’s
inverted appearances (to which Marx refers in his later work as the modality
of the fetish and/or mystification) can indeed be traced back to its early for-
mulation in The German Ideology, a text co-authored with Engels.19 However,
Engels’s later use of the term ‘false consciousness’ does not capture (nor was
Engels making reference to) the more developed theory of capital’s inverted
appearances that Marx elaborates throughout the three volumes of Capital. It
is misleading, therefore, to refer to ‘Marx and Engels’s critical ideology-theory’20
if one conceives of the latter as informed by the later development of Marx’s
thought, just as it is misleading to link the qualifiers ‘false’ and ‘inverted’,21
which gives the impression that false consciousness is as much Marx’s term
as Engels’s. Despite all this, the term has since become virtually synonymous
with a Marxian, critical formulation of ideology that it really doesn’t fit. Lukács,
while recognising it as a coinage of Engels, likely bears chief responsibility for
locking in the term, even though his own analysis was a problematising of it –
a demonstration of why ‘false consciousness’ was an oversimplification of
Marx’s analysis – and his tendency was to put the term in quotation marks to
flag its deficiency. He proceeded, nonetheless, to use it repeatedly in Chapter 3
of History and Class Consciousness (replaced later in the chapter by ‘reified’
or ‘psychological’ consciousness) to designate an ideological understanding,
My reading of fetishism was early on influenced by the work of I.I. Rubin. I have also
found support for my reading of fetishism in the work of Moishe Postone, and Massimo
De Angelis. William Pietz’s essay on Marx’s deployment of the notion of fetishism is
especially insightful on numerous points.
19 As discussed by Rehmann 2013, Chapter 2.
20 Rehmann refers to ‘Marx and Engels’s’ critical ideology-theory throughout his book,
which is a departure from the formulation I am proposing. This is not to say that Rehmann
argues that the notion of false consciousness adequately captures what he calls Marx and
Engels’s critical ideology-theory. Quite the reverse, Rehmann argues that Marx and Engels
were ‘entering a new terrain of materialist ideology-theory’ that was substantially more
involved than the notion of false consciousness is able to capture (Rehmann 2013, p. 29).
21 As does Rehmann 2013, p. 32.
22 This is Lukács’s argument articulated throughout chapters 3 and 4 of History and Class
Consciousness; see, for example, Lukács 1971, pp. 76–7.
23 Rehmann 2013, p. 29.
24 It was not, however, the ‘decentred’ consciousness of twentieth-century critical
social theory. Lukács’s emphasis makes a better candidate for a forerunner to the idea
of decentred consciousness: ‘The essence of scientific Marxism consists . . . in the
realisation that the real motor forces of history are independent of man’s (psychological)
consciousness of them’ (Lukács 1971, p. 47).
25 The pessimism of the Frankfurt School theorists is historically particular; it reflects the
seemingly definitive failure of progressive politics and the rise of fascism in Europe
between the two world wars.
26 For Marx, ‘knowledge’ of the social world is also generated in the body, in the sense-
faculties, in the correspondence between the different senses (a historical as much as
subjective configuration), that is, in ‘experience’ – in the sense that I have described it
elsewhere as an intersection of cognition and bodily-sensory knowledge. See Best 2010,
and De Angelis 1996, pp. 7–9.
27 As many Marxist critics of ideology have also pointed out, such as Lukács, Althusser, Hall,
Mepham, Larrain, Eagleton, Thompson, Rehmann, and De Angelis.
According to Terry Eagleton, this emphasis emerges only in Marx’s later work:
Note that whereas in The German Ideology ideology was a matter of not
seeing things as they really were, it is a question in Capital of reality itself
being duplicitous and deceitful. Ideology can thus no longer be unmasked
28 Rehmann emphasises this useful expression of Marx’s from Volume I of Capital. Rehmann
2013, p. 43; Marx 1968, p. 682.
29 Lukács 1971, p. 50.
30 Marx 1976, p. 680.
34 Capital’s perceptual economy is a tendency in the same way that the law of the falling rate
of profit is a tendency of capital. Near the end of Volume III, Marx describes a tendency
as a law delayed by countertendencies. In this case, the tendency of capital’s perceptual
economy is delayed by the countertendency of class struggle.
35 Again, this perception is due, in large part, to the (not unwelcome) interventions of
poststructuralism, affect theory being the most recent reaffirmation of the category’s
decided outmodedness. The critique of the outmodedness of consciousness as a
category – tacit or otherwise – is, in part, an expression of the unease with the profound
indeterminacy of the category that is unmanageable for the subterranean positivism of
theory post poststructuralism.
36 Eagleton 1991, p. 94.
the capacity for, and undertaking of, these articulations is a matter of histori-
cal contingency. The mere fact that it is only through the totalising analysis
of capital that the interests of the proletariat are revealed to be subverted by
the status quo, while the interests (narrowly defined) of the bourgeoisie are
revealed to be sustained by it, does not, in itself, explain a greater capacity to
undertake such a totalising analysis on the part of the proletariat, rather, only
the historical motivation to do so.
37 Marx 1978, p. 4. Rehmann discusses Marx’s use of the similar phrase, ‘superstructure of
ideological strata’, in Theories of Surplus Value (Rehmann 2013, p. 31).
38 Eagleton 1991, p. 87.
What the worker is selling is his labour-power. As soon as his labour actu-
ally begins, it has already ceased to belong to him; it can therefore no lon-
ger be sold by him. Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure
of value, but it has no value itself.
In the expression, ‘value of labour’, the concept of value is not only
completely extinguished, but inverted, so that it becomes its contrary. It
is an expression as imaginary as the value of the earth. These imaginary
expressions arise, nevertheless, from the relations of production them-
selves. They are categories for the forms of appearance of essential rela-
tions. That in their appearance things are often presented in an inverted
way is something fairly familiar in every science, apart from political
economy.42
Here, what Postone calls the dialectic of the forces and relations of production –
which in the ‘Preface’ Marx describes a constituting capital’s economic base –
is another way of describing value, or, the particular form of social labour in
capitalism; all of which are different ways of designating the singular con-
tent of capital. This singular substance – ‘value’, for convenience – is a shape-
shifter; it must continuously take on different forms throughout the processes
of production, valorisation and accumulation in order for the latter to take
place: value takes the money form, then the commodity form, then the money
form again; here it appears as productive capital, there as interest; now as com-
mercial capital, now as wages, now as rent, and so on. These transformations
of form that facilitate accumulation constitute capital’s ideological superstruc-
ture: the spontaneous expression of the social relation of one class owning
another class’ labour-power in the form of appearance of wages – a simple
dynamic from which unfurls an entire world history, according to Marx: ‘World
history has taken a long time to get to the bottom of the mystery of wages; but
despite this, nothing is easier to understand than the necessity, the raison d’être,
of this form of appearance’.45 These more elemental forms of appearance –
wages, money, the commodity, profit, interest, etc. – are the ‘raw material’ for
subsequent ideological concatenations that further situate the meaning and
material efficacy of these forms in capitalist society, and which are articulated
with other social and political modalities, narratives, modes of domination
and power that are not immanent to capital, but which pre-exist capital and
are historically entwined in capital’s emergence and development.46
The content-form/essence-appearance dynamic, or what I have referred to
as the perceptual economy of capital, as a fundamental mechanism of capital’s
mode of domination, is the adequate object of a critical, Marxian theory of ide-
ology. In the first volume of Capital, where Marx is predominantly concerned
with the capitalist production process, the analysis focuses on the ideologi-
cal form of appearance of the wage and the wage system. Here, Marx demon-
strates how the form of wage labour – the appearance that two equal values,
a certain quantity of money and a certain quantity of labour, are exchanged
freely on the market – conceals the real movement of its substance: the fun-
damental extortion at the heart of the wage relation, the appropriation of an
unpaid portion of the product of labour by the capitalist. Marx describes this
dynamic as the ‘inexorable dialectic’ of social labour when subjected to the
laws of commodity exchange:
This ongoing buying and selling between capitalist and worker is the ‘collec-
tive doing’ – the real life-process – that generates the ideological-mystified
perception, for both worker and capitalist alike, of an equal and non-coercive
exchange. In Volume II of Capital, Marx goes on to demonstrate how the origi-
nal extortion at capital’s core is concealed again in the circulatory passages of
value in the course of its valorisation as the necessary ‘other’ to the process
of production. Finally, in Volume III, production and valorisation are concre-
tised as a single, simultaneous and ongoing process splintered across a field of
competing capitals, whose collective, if uncoordinated, activity spontaneously
divides up between them the surplus portion of value produced by the work-
ing class in a way that conceals, yet again, the true origin of this surplus value,
as the singular source of capitalist growth and accumulation. Here, in Volume
III, the focus of this even more concretely totalising analysis shifts onto the
modality of profit as the form of appearance that conceals its true substance as
surplus-value. The inversion of surplus-value into what Marx often refers to as
the ‘surface story’ of profit is the ideological operation on which Marx focuses
in Volume III of Capital.
In Volume I, Marx analyses the fetish dynamic within the register of the
commodity, i.e., the more immediate and abstract register of individual com-
modities and individual acts of exchange. To prepare the ground for this exposi-
tion, Marx includes a discussion of the commodity fetish at the end of Chapter
1 to illustrate the way in which the fetish dynamic of that special, singular, dual
commodity labour/labour-power stamps the entire universe of commodities
with the fetish character that hides the source of their value.48 The culmina-
tion of the totalising analysis of the fetish dynamic, however, does not unfurl
until Volume III. In this volume it becomes clear that the commodity fetish is
only one form of a much larger system of fetishised forms that serve to mystify
the process of capitalist accumulation and reproduction. Rehmann is correct,
therefore, to refer to ‘the Marxian analysis of commodity-, money- and capital-
fetishism’, and not to limit the dynamic to the commodity form. Although, see-
ing as though Marx identifies other forms of fetish expression than these three,
I argue it is preferable to speak of Marx’s theory of fetishism unqualified, as
does I.I. Rubin when he claims, ‘The theory of fetishism is, per se, the basis of
Marx’s entire economic system, and in particular of this theory of value’; or, as
in this description from William Pietz:
48 The chronology of Marx’s writing is significant in that he added this section on commodity
fetishism as an afterthought, before the first publication of Volume I but after he had
drafted the material for volumes II and III. This explains why the category of the fetish is,
for the most part, restricted to this one section in Volume I, while it is a central category
that appears throughout Volume III.
Our concern is . . . to discover and present the concrete forms which grow
out of the process of capital’s movement considered as a whole. In their
actual movement, capitals confront one another in certain concrete
forms, and, in relation to these, both the shape capital assumes in the
immediate production process and its shape in the process of circulation
appear merely as particular moments. The configurations of capital, as
developed in this volume, thus approach step by step the form in which
they appear on the surface of society, in the action of different capitals on
one another, i.e., in competition and in the everyday consciousness of the
agents of production themselves.50
by the modality of capital.52 Specifically, in Volume III, Marx maps the way in
which the real life-process of inter-capital competition mystifies surplus-value
as the source of capitalist profit. Further, this singular outcome is generated by
a variety of everyday operations. The capitalist formation generates countless
phenomenal appearances of its own modus operandi, the conventionalisation
of which in the popular imagination as a result of their routinised iteration in
everyday life serves to conceal the extortion of surplus-value. The third volume
of Capital, chapter by chapter, is nothing other than an accounting of the gen-
eration of these forms. For this reason, I argue that Capital Volume III is, in its
entirety, a book about ideology.
Marx maps the ideological concealing of surplus-value as the substance of
profit through the everyday buying and selling that goes on between capitalists
in the pursuit of profit. In Volume I, the surface story of the buying and selling
of labour (or the equal exchange of labour for a wage) conceals the inequality
and immanent exploitation that process entails. In Volume III, another surface
story sets the stage: the capitalist spends money to make money. Even today,
this simple observation represents a hegemonic ‘truism’ of capitalist society.
However, from the totalising point of view of Marx’s critique of value, the ideo-
logical aspect of this narrative is that while it appears to be an apt and trans-
parent description of an everyday situation, it functions to disavow essential
dimensions of the process of capitalist accumulation. Marx’s well-known ana-
lytical conclusion is that the value that the capitalist forwards as the cost-price
of producing commodities is not equal to the value that returns to the capital-
ist from the circulation of those commodities. The second value is greater. The
capitalist calls this extra value profit, and imagines that it is created in circu-
lation whereby an advantageous balance of supply and demand has allowed
the capitalist to sell his or her commodities at a higher price than it cost to
produce them. Marx argues that this surface story of profit constitutes a false
semblance that is made possible because the capitalist makes no distinction
between (and from the point of view of the capitalist, there is no distinction
between) the various production materials for which capital must be advanced
to produce commodities: machinery, raw materials and labour-power.
Marx, however, makes a distinction (as the analyst must do) between these
production materials because, from the point of view of the movement of cap-
ital as a whole, there is a significant distinction. The value of constant capital –
raw materials and the used-up portion of tools and machinery – returns to the
capitalist in the same quantity; the value of variable capital – labour-power –
increases, i.e., produces surplus-value. Fortunately for the capitalist, when pur-
chasing labour-power s/he does not receive what s/he pays for (as we saw ear-
lier). The capitalist pays an equivalent to the value of labour-power, that is, the
cost of reproducing labour-power. What s/he receives is ‘living, value-creating
labour-power that actually functions as productive capital’.53 What the capital-
ist pays for and what s/he receives are two different things and two different
quantities of value. However, in the imagination of the capitalist (i.e., accord-
ing to the surface story), there is no distinction between constant and variable
capital, there is only the cost price of the production of the commodity, a value
that enters circulation and returns valorised.
In the process just described, two operations have taken place: the first,
accumulation; the second, mystification, or, the generation of the appearance
that profit is created in circulation subject to the contingencies of supply and
demand. This appearance mystifies the source of capitalist profit, that the lat-
ter is actually surplus-value created in production through the agency of coop-
erative (that is, socially combined) living labour, realised in circulation, and
appropriated as the private property of the capitalist: ‘Profit is the [ideological-
mystified] form of surplus-value’.54 Again, ideology refers to the operation that
conceals that portion of unpaid labour, the fundamental extortion that fuels
capitalist movement and growth. This formulation of ideology demonstrates
what is crucial about the dialectical category of totality in Marxian political
economy and why ideology-critique is necessarily a form of totalising analysis.
We cannot arrive at the conclusion that profit is the ideological form of sur-
plus-value from any single abstracted standpoint. It is only arrived at through
what Althusser called theoretical deduction as the only mode of capturing the
dynamic of capital as a structural totality. The modality of capital itself, while
extant, ensures the necessity of totalising analysis and the relevance of the cat-
egory of totality therein (however persistent is the misunderstanding of their
meaning and movement).55
the ‘objectionable’ Hegelian version of totality. Nonetheless, Rehmann uses the term
‘totalising’ in the sense advanced by poststructuralist thinkers in the 1980s and early ’90s,
as a sort of invalid and imprecise conceptual homogenising or collapsing of identities
that should otherwise be kept discrete. So, for example, Rehmann speaks of Lukács as
‘totalising Marx’s critique of fetishism, [where the former] tended to bury people’s actual
social practices under the weight of reification’ (Rehmann 2013, p. 81); or, Horkheimer
and Adorno’s ‘totalising interpretation . . . conditioned by . . . generalising the categories
of Taylorist rationalisation of production and . . . transferring them immediately onto the
domain of culture and ideology’ (Rehmann 2013, p. 88).
56 Marx 1981, p. 242.
Certainly, many workers protest their immediate redundancy, and many (if
fewer, perhaps) recognise the situation as a non-isolated, enveloping contra-
diction of a dysfunctional system. These dissenting narratives, however, have
not only to confront capital in the form of industry, but also in the form of the
state. Since the 1980s in Canada, for instance, it has become common practice
for federal and provincial governments to pass ‘back-to-work’ legislation in
order to foreclose labour action (that is, not only in response to labour action
as a strike-breaking tactic, but rather in response to the threat of labour action
in order to preclude it) by declaring various industries, public and private
alike, as ‘essential services’.60 Canadian popular opinion tends to support this
legislation as the kind of ‘tough love and discipline’ that keeps the Canadian
economy from going off the rails. Here, we can identify the ideological role
of the state in two distinct, but complementary, ways. From the perspective
of a neutral conception of ideology, the state represents a set of institutions
(including laws and their enforcement) that both generate and give support,
through action, policy and direct propaganda, to ideologies that serve capital’s
domination over labour. From the perspective of a (critical) value theory of
ideology, the state, in this example, is itself one of the phenomenal expres-
sions of the capital-labour dynamic, the form that capital-labour takes in the
political sphere.
The distinction between these formulations is significant in two ways. First,
while a neutral conception of ideology is equipped to survey the field of ideo-
logical struggle – the particular historical alliances and internal fractioning,
the hits and misses, the mobilisations from above and below that can never
be anticipated or predicted – a value theory of ideology is only, and crucially,
equipped to discern the objective circumstances that will slant that field of
competing ideas in one direction or another. Second, as a neutral ideology-
critique attributes the source of ideology to particular institutions and actors,
the implication is that efforts to transform the ideological field should target
these entities as well. For a value theory of ideology, however, there is one sin-
gular source of all mystified appearances: value, or, the historical process of
socialised labour objectified as private property. Therefore, the eradication of
the value form itself is the only means of transforming the ideological field.
60 This legislation, or the threat of such legislation, has been directed not only against public
servants, such as teachers, healthcare workers and postal workers, but also against private-
sector employees, such as pilots, machinists, ground crew, customer service and sales staff
at Air Canada, and engineers, conductors and rail traffic controllers at Canadian Pacific
Railway. For a summary of back-to-work legislation in Canada from 1982 to 2014, see:
<http://labourrights.ca/issues/restrictive-labour-laws-canada>.
As Marx observes, ‘if both wages and surplus-value are stripped of their spe-
cifically capitalist character . . . then nothing of these forms remains’.61 On this
point, my formulation of a value theory of ideology both departs from that of
Rehmann and from the formulation of the Projekt Ideologietheorie (hereafter,
the PIT), and shares an important argument with them as well. Both formu-
lations share the idea that the ideological operation, in its critical sense, is a
mechanism specific to capital – to a specific historical conjuncture and social
ontology – such that it would cease to exist in its current modality after the
obsolescence of the capitalist formation, should that come to pass. The dif-
ference between our formulations is that, for Rehmann and the PIT, ideology
emerges in the historical division of mental and manual labour that accompa-
nies the rise of class antagonisms instituted in the dominance of the state. The
obsolescence of ideology is therefore a consequence of the withering away of
the state and the class antagonisms that accompany it:62
Marx and Engels did not develop a ‘neutral’ concept of ideology, but
rather a critical concept which expected ideology to lose its functional
necessity and to ‘wither away’ (like the state) in a classless society.63
As I point out above, however, in Marx’s later work, the ideological operation
(or, as he refers to it by this time, the process of fetishism or mystification) is
the perceptual economy of the value form and not a function of the division
of mental and manual labour per se, nor of the state per se, but only insofar
as these phenomena are expressions of the dominant historical modality of
value. My analysis departs from that of Rehmann in that it is only with the
eradication of the value form – of social labour-time as the universal mode of
domination – that ideology, in its critical sense, is rendered obsolete.
Returning to the discussion of the perceptual economy of capital as it is
mapped in Volume III, Marx reveals that there is yet another way in which
capital’s ideological operation establishes for immediate perception the
appearance of profit as something other than, and in fact the inversion of,
what it actually is. The profit that accrues to a particular capitalist enterprise
appears to be the outcome of the activity associated with that individual enter-
prise. Common sense would ask how could it be otherwise? But otherwise it
is, in the upside-down world of capitalist appearances. In Volume III, Marx
demonstrates that, as a function of competition and the resulting equalisa-
tion between the rates of profit of individual spheres of production, each
individual capitalist enterprise receives, not the profit it generates directly
or individually, but its aliquot part of the total amount of profit generated by
the sphere of capitalist production across the social formation. The profit that
accrues to an individual enterprise is actually the social average of the profit
generated by the capitalist formation as a whole (a good portion of Volume
III is dedicated to the exposition of the mechanics of this process). One of
the ideological appearances generated by this process is therefore the mythical
figure of the shrewd capitalist – yesterday’s Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Hearst;
today’s Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs. More significantly, however,
this process generalises the appearance that generating profit is the ‘work’ of
the individual capitalist or capitalist enterprise, that the agents of the capital-
ist system are individual capitalists (or board of directors, CEOs, etc.), instead
of what is actually the case, that the only historically objective agent of capital
representing capital is the capitalist class; this irreducible collective subject is
the sole appropriator of the wealth generated by that other collective subject,
socially combined or cooperative labour. With respect to the reproduction of
the capitalist mode of production, it turns out that collective subjects are the
only agents of consequence. Nonetheless, as Marx explains,
of history, giving way to the force of intention in some cases, and scoffing at it
in others; in other words, as the result of people making history but not under
the conditions of their own choosing.
For Marx, the only thing it is possible to say with certainty about history,
including the history that is the substance of the capitalist formation, is that it
has built into it the possibility of turning into something else: it is structurally
open to its radical other. The present social world is built on/as the structural
possibility of becoming something else, even a non-ideological something else,
as far-fetched as that may sound. The ideological operation is radically histori-
cal, and if an associated mode of production (or, alternatively, a totalitarian
one) were to emerge to succeed the capitalist mode of production, the ideo-
logical operation, as I have defined it here, would be obsolete. As Marx argues
near the end of Volume III: ‘if both wages and surplus-value are stripped of
their capitalist character – then nothing of these forms remains, but sim-
ply those foundations of the forms that are common to all social modes of
production’.70 In these terms, there is such a thing as a non-ideological notion
of post-ideology. The possibly utopian, possibly dystopian, or simply different,
place and time ‘beyond ideology’ is an indelible part of the awkward, embar-
rassing, sometimes precarious, and always messy commitment to history, even
if it presently resists representation and has no obligation to ever arrive.
Like Marx’s critique of political economy, a value theory of ideology is ori-
ented by the presupposition of the capacity of people to comprehend the
modus operandi of the capitalist formation. As Marx argues in Volume III,
‘the popular mind is able to grasp the content of capital’s phenomenal forms
even though vulgar economics feels completely at home in [their] absurd con-
tradictions’.71 There is a sense, however, in which this collective capability is
presently challenged to a much greater extent than it was in earlier stages of
capitalist development. This characteristic of the present capitalist formation,
anticipated and theorised by Marx, greatly exacerbates the task of cognitively
mapping capital as well as the (related) task of projecting alternative social
formations. We could describe this characteristic as the advanced state of capi-
tal’s real subsumption of production, although this designation hardly seems
to justify the virtually unimaginable complexity, scale and uncoordinated
interconnectedness of a mode of production that has incorporated into its
organisational logic – not without seepage and spillage, but to some extent at
least – every dimension of planetary life and associated matter.
Alternatively, we could follow Marx and refer to the situation simply as the
‘world market’:
between a critical and a neutral analysis? How do we locate the moment when
the spontaneous ‘raw material’ that is capital’s forms of appearance is extrapo-
lated into ‘thicker’, historical and contingent, ideological narratives and for-
mations – i.e., into the ‘apparatuses, practices, and struggles’ that Rehmann
correctly points out are the priority of ideological analysis?
The relationship between capital’s direct forms of appearance and particu-
lar, expanded or sedimented, historical ideological formations is analogous
to the relationship that articulates value as the organising principle of every
act of exchange in capitalist society, and those particular, historical acts of
exchange that are carried out subject to ‘the accidental state of supply and
demand’.76 In the historical everyday of the marketplace, commodities rarely,
if ever, exchange at their real values; rather, commodities exchange both above
and below their real values due to the immediate contingencies of supply and
demand. This has caused some critics to come to the erroneous conclusion
that, ‘in the world as it actually is’, the labour theory of value does not have
practical import or application. However, Marx’s totalising analysis of capi-
talist exchange reveals that these fluctuations are the push and pull against a
‘centre of gravity’ – the real value of commodities in a given sphere of produc-
tion – that balances out these fluctuations on a higher level of determination,
cancelling their immediate appearance as ‘purely accidental or merely occa-
sional’: ‘The assumption that commodities from different spheres of produc-
tion are sold at their values naturally means no more than that this value is the
centre of gravity around which price turns and at which its constant rise and
fall is balanced out.’77 In a similar way, capital’s phenomenal forms function
as a kind of perceptual ‘centre of gravity’ that cancels the apparently ‘purely
accidental or merely occasional’ (i.e., purely contingent) character of more
protracted ideological formations that animate capitalist society.
Capital’s forms of appearance are the real perceptual kernel that mediate
elaborations of common sense, popular world views, administrative knowl-
edges, and so on; they are the always-already historically and contingently
worked-on raw material – epistemological building blocks – of elaborated
ideological formations. This does not mean that capital’s phenomenal forms
can determine worldviews, political ideas, etc. This raw material is worked-on
in the collective consciousness and popular imagination in ways that can be
reproductive or transformatory; as Larrain argues here, and as I argued above,
Marx did not assume that subjects were passive recipients of ideology:
For Marx, on the contrary, the real world of capitalism was not transpar-
ent; phenomenal forms created by the market concealed the real rela-
tions at the level of production. But subjects were not passive either,
bound to be deceived or bound to scientifically understand reality; they
were actively engaged in practices which, in so far as limited and merely
reproductive, enhanced the appearances of the market, in so far as trans-
formatory or revolutionary, facilitated the apprehension of real relations.78
Appendix
That ideology is ‘historical’ in the sense that, as part of the apparatus of class
domination, it will be redundant and consequently disappear in a classless
society where the human metabolism is under collective, democratic control
is one important point on which Rehmann’s (and the PIT’s) and my formula-
tion of ideology are aligned. Nonetheless, while Rehmann’s overall formula-
tion may be reconciled with the work of Engels, and with Althusser in some
respects, it is not compatible with a Marxian reading of the movement of
capital and capital’s perceptual economy on several accounts: 1) the division
of intellectual and manual labour is not the progenitor of the state, of social
relations of domination, or of ideology in capitalism in Marx’s analysis. Rather,
all these things, in capitalism, emerge as expressional forms of the substance
of capital, the particular social relation of capital-labour. For Marx, the capi-
talist state does not produce ideology, rather, it is ideology in the sense that
the capitalist state is itself one of the phenomenal forms of the capital-labour
relation; 2) a critical conception of ideology as an apparatus of domination
cannot be relativised with other forms of domination as in the phrase, ‘class-,
state-, and patriarchal domination’. Patriarchy as a mode of social domination
is thoroughly historically intertwined with capital, however these two modali-
ties of power do not share an identity that would allow us to say that what
is immanent to capital (i.e. class) is immanent to patriarchy and vice versa.
A Marxian, critical theory of ideology as a specific modality of class domina-
tion is not generalisable to other modes of domination without neutralising
the concept; 3) Rehmann distinguishes between a vertical function of ideology
(ideology produced by the state as a mode of domination from above) and a
horizontal function of ideology from below (ideology as mode of social cohe-
sion), but does not explain how one is to distinguish one form of ideological
expression from the other. To imply that we can identify a domination-ori-
ented ideology because it functions to reproduce social relations of domina-
tion is a tautology. We are left to assume that, like pornography, we will simply
know a domination-oriented narrative, image, world-view, etc. when we see it;
4) contra Rehmann, a critical theory of ideology cannot avoid the now seem-
ingly passé question of epistemological ‘truth’ and error with respect to the sys-
tematic appearances (or ‘objective thought forms’, as Rehmann justly quotes
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