False consciousness is a term used by some to describe ways in which material, ideological, and institutional processes are said to mislead members of the proletariat and other class actors within capitalist societies, concealing the exploitation intrinsic to the social relations between classes. Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) used the term "false consciousness" in an 1893 letter to Franz Mehring to address the scenario where a subordinate class willfully embodies the ideology of the ruling class. Engels dubs this consciousness "false" because the class is asserting itself towards goals that do not benefit it.
"Consciousness", in this context, reflects a class's ability to
politically identify and assert its will. The subordinate class is
conscious: it plays a major role in society and can assert its will due
to being sufficiently unified in ideas and action.
Later development
Marshall
I. Pomer has argued that members of the proletariat disregard the true
nature of class relations because of their belief in the probability or
possibility of upward mobility. Such a belief or something like it is said to be required in economics with its presumption of rational agency; otherwise wage laborers would not be the conscious supporters of social relations antithetical to their own interests, violating that presumption.
The Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of cultural hegemony,
the process within capitalist societies by which the ruling classes
create particular norms, values, and stigmas, amounting to a culture in
which their continued dominance is considered beneficial.
Structuralism
During the late 1960s and 1970s, the philosophical and anthropological school of structuralism
began to gain popularity among academics and public intellectuals,
focusing on interpreting human culture in terms of underlying structures
such as symbolic, linguistic, and ideological perspectives. Marxist
philosopher Louis Althusser popularized his structuralist interpretation of false consciousness, the Ideological State Apparatus.
Structuralism influenced Althusser's interpretation of false
consciousness, which focuses on the institutions of the capitalist
state—particularly those of public education—which enforce an
ideological system favoring obedience, conformity and submissiveness.Contemporary developments
The Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci
(1891–1937) developed cultural hegemony to explain the control
structures of society, and said that the working class must produce
their own intellectual leaders to counter the worldview of the ruling class.
In Marxist philosophy, cultural hegemony is the dominance of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class who manipulate the culture of that society—the beliefs and explanations, perceptions, values, and mores—so that the worldview of the ruling class becomes the accepted cultural norm. As the universal dominant ideology, the ruling-class worldview misrepresents the social, political, and economic status quo as natural, inevitable, and perpetual conditions that benefit every social class, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class.
In philosophy and in sociology, the denotations and the connotations of term cultural hegemony derive from the Ancient Greek word hegemonia (ἡγεμονία), which indicates the leadership and the régime of the hegemon. In political science, hegemony is the geopolitical dominance exercised by an empire, the hegemon (leader state) that rules the subordinate states of the empire by the threat of intervention, an implied means of power, rather than by threat of direct rule—military invasion, occupation, and territorial annexation.
To that end, Antonio Gramsci proposed a strategic distinction between a War of Position and a War of Manœuvre. The war of position is an intellectual and cultural struggle wherein the anti-capitalist revolutionary creates a proletarian culture whose native value system counters the cultural hegemony of the bourgeoisie. The proletarian culture will increase class consciousness, teach revolutionary theory and historical analysis, and thus propagate further revolutionary organisation among the social classes.
On winning the war of position, socialist leaders would then have the
necessary political power and popular support to begin the political manœuvre warfare of revolutionary socialism.
The initial, theoretical application of cultural domination was as a Marxist analysis of "economic class" (base and superstructure),
which Antonio Gramsci developed to comprehend "social class"; hence,
cultural hegemony proposes that the prevailing cultural norms of a
society, which are imposed by the ruling class (bourgeois cultural hegemony), must not be perceived as natural and inevitable, but must be recognized as artificial social constructs (institutions, practices, beliefs,
et cetera) that must be investigated to discover their philosophic
roots as instruments of social-class domination. That such praxis of
knowledge is indispensable for the intellectual and political liberation of the proletariat, so that workers and peasants, the people of town and country, can create their own working-class culture, which specifically addresses their social and economic needs as social classes.
In a society, cultural hegemony is neither monolithic intellectual praxis, nor a unified system of values, but a complex of stratifiedsocial structures,
wherein each social and economic class has a social purpose and an
internal class-logic that allows its members to behave in a way that is
particular and different from the behaviours of the members of other
social classes, whilst co-existing with them as constituents of the
society.
As a result of their different social purposes, the classes will be able to coalesce into a society with a greater social mission. When a person perceives the social structures of bourgeois cultural hegemony, personal common sense
performs a dual, structural role (private and public) whereby the
individual person applies common sense to cope with daily life, which
explains to them the small segment of the social order stratum that each experiences as the status quo
of life in society; "the way things are". Publicly, the emergence of
the perceptual limitations of personal common sense inhibit the
individual person's perception of the greater nature of the systematic
socio-economic exploitation made possible by cultural hegemony. Because of the discrepancy in perceiving the status quo—the
socio-economic hierarchy of bourgeois culture—most people concern
themselves with their immediate (private) personal concerns, rather than
with distant (public) concerns, and so do not think about and question
the fundamental sources of their socio-economic oppression, and its discontents, social, personal, and political.
The effects of cultural hegemony are perceptible at the personal
level; although each person in a society lives a meaningful life in
their social class, to them the discrete social classes might appear to
have little in common with the private life of individual people. Yet,
when perceived as a whole society, the life of each person does
contribute to the greater social hegemony. Although social diversity,
economic variety, and political freedom appear to exist—because most
people see different life-circumstances—they are incapable of
perceiving the greater hegemonic pattern created when the lives they
witness coalesce as a society. The cultural hegemony is manifested in
and maintained by an existence of minor, different circumstances that
are not always fully perceived by the people living the culture.
Intellectuals
In
perceiving and combating cultural hegemony, the working class and the
peasantry depend upon the intellectuals produced by their society, to
which ends Antonio Gramsci distinguished between bourgeois-class
intellectuals and working-class intellectuals, the proponents and the
opponents of the imposed, normative culture, and thus of the social status quo:
Since these various categories of traditional intellectuals [administrators, scholars and scientists, theorists, non-ecclesiastical philosophers, etc.] experience through an esprit de corps
their uninterrupted historical continuity, and their special
qualifications, they thus put themselves forward as autonomous and
independent of the dominant social group. This self-assessment is not without consequences in the ideological and political fields, consequences of wide-ranging import. The whole of idealist philosophy
can easily be connected with this position, assumed by the social
complex of intellectuals, and can be defined as the expression of that
social utopia by which the intellectuals think of themselves as
"independent" [and] autonomous, [and] endowed with a character of their
own, etc.
— Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (1971), pp. 7–8.
The traditional and vulgarized type of the intellectual is given by the Man of Letters, the philosopher, and the artist.
Therefore, journalists, who claim to be men of letters, philosophers,
artists, also regard themselves as the "true" intellectuals. In the
modern world, technical education,
closely bound to industrial labor, even at the most primitive and
unqualified level, must form the basis of the new type of intellectual.
...
The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist of
eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and
passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor
[and] organizer, as "permanent persuader", not just simple orator.
— Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (1971), pp. 9–10.
Gramsci's influence
In 1968, Rudi Dutschke, a leader of the German student movement,
the "68er-Bewegung", said that changing the bourgeois society of West
Germany required a long march through the society's institutions, in
order to identify and combat cultural hegemony.
Cultural hegemony has philosophically influenced Eurocommunism, the social sciences, and the activist politics of socially liberal and progressive politicians. The analytic discourse of cultural hegemony is important to research and synthesis in anthropology, political science, sociology, and cultural studies; in education, cultural hegemony developed critical pedagogy, by which the root causes of political and social discontent can be identified, and so resolved.
The structuralist philosopher Louis Althusser presented the theory of the ideological state apparatus
to describe the structure of complex relationships among the different
organs of the State, by which ideology is transmitted and disseminated
to the populations of a society. Althusser draws from the concepts of hegemony present in cultural hegemony, yet rejects the historicism.
He argues that the ideological state apparatuses (ISA) are the sites of
ideological conflict among the social classes of a society. That, in
contrast to the repressive state apparatuses (RSA), such as the military
and the police forces, the ISA exist as a plurality. While the ruling
class in power can readily control the repressive state apparatuses, the
ISA are both the sites and the stakes (the objects) of class struggle.
Moreover, the ISA are not monolithic social entities, and are
distributed throughout the society, as public and as private sites of
continual class struggle.
In On the Reproduction of Capitalism (1968), Louis Althusser said that the ideological apparatuses of the State are overdetermined zones of society that comprise complex elements of the ideologies of previous modes of production, thus, are sites of continual political activity in a society, which are:
the religious ISA (the clergy)
the educational ISA (the systems of state and private schools)
the family ISA
the legal ISA (the courts)
the political ISA (the political system, e.g. political parties)
the company union ISA
the communications ISA (press, radio, television, etc.)
the cultural ISA (literature, the arts, sport, etc.)
Althusser said that the parliamentary
structures of the State, by which the "will of the people" is
represented by elected delegates, are an ideological apparatus of the
State. That the political system, itself, is an ideological apparatus,
because it involves the "fiction, corresponding to a 'certain' reality,
that the component parts of the [political] system, as well as the
principle of its functioning, are based on the ideology of the 'freedom'
and 'equality' of the individual voters and the 'free choice' of the
people's representatives, by the individuals that 'make up' the people".
