False consciousness and the dominant ideology thesis

Power, ideology, and the hazardous project of diagnosing other people's interests and explaining their delusions.

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This corresponds to the second topic and lecture in my ‘Politics, Truth, and Ideology’ course. The first covered the debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey over the implications of our epistemic limitations for questions about democracy and technocracy.

A recent article in The Economist is titled “Are British voters as clueless as Labour’s intelligentsia thinks?” It observes a recent strain of “nihilism” that has “infected” the experts and advisors to the United Kingdom’s Labour Party in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s presidential victory.

According to this nihilistic stance, the project of “deliverism”—trying to win elections by delivering outcomes that materially improve people’s lives—is dead. Joe Biden’s presidency delivered. The economy performed well. The government intervened on behalf of the most disadvantaged members of society. And what did the Democrats get for it? Donald Trump.

The Economist observes that this

“critique of deliverism relies on an old idea: false consciousness, or the notion that people are so misled about reality that they act against their own interests. What was once the preserve of Marxists, flummoxed that workers refused to lose their capitalist chains, is now the fall-back position for the modern British centre-left, which worries that voters cannot accurately comprehend the world in which they live.”

Although The Economist is scathing towards this attitude, the core idea behind false consciousness is far more widespread among the intelligentsia and commentariat than its diagnosis suggests, including within its own pages.

For example, the entire post-2016 anti-“misinformation” and -“disinformation” industry—a highly influential intellectual and political project that traces the appeal of populism to pervasive misperceptions adopted by a credulous public—repackages the core idea of false consciousness in a technocratic vocabulary and framework appealing to establishment liberals.

Of course, the populist right has its own versions of the same basic narrative. The idea that gullible sheeple or “non-player characters” have been victimised by a sinister left-wing intelligentsia and “woke mind virus” is a popular theme among those seeking to explain the cultural “hegemony”—to use another concept introduced by Marxists—of progressive politics within the most prestigious institutions of liberal democracies.

On one level, the widespread appeal of the concept of false consciousness is easy to understand. Most of us hold or at least profess “sociotropic” political opinions rooted in ideals such as equality, justice, or improving the general welfare of society. Given this, if you think large numbers of people hold wrong political beliefs, there’s some sense in which you must think they have fallen victim to something like false consciousness—that they are misrepresenting reality in ways that lead them to support policies at odds with the general (and hence, presumably, often their own) interest.

Moreover, despite the negative reputation of the concept of false consciousness, there is something eminently plausible about the idea that people “cannot accurately comprehend the world in which they live.” In the last article, I reviewed Walter Lippmann’s arguments for this conclusion, which seem to be vindicated by a vast body of empirical research showcasing ordinary people's pervasive political ignorance and misperceptions. And if people cannot—or at least do not—comprehend the world in which they live, why would it be surprising that they inadvertently act against their interests? More generally, what would prevent those who are ignorant and misinformed from being manipulated by powerful elites who benefit from specific forms of ignorance and misinformation?

In this article, I will explore these ideas by returning to the originator of the concept of false consciousness: Marx. Specifically, I will (i) present the main ideas underlying Marx’s analysis of the nature, origins, and functions of pervasive misperceptions, (ii) identify some of the main objections you might raise to these ideas, and then (iii) step back and extract some broader lessons relevant to thinking about politics and political epistemology today.

But first, a note on “ideology”.

Ideology

In the previous article, I explored Walter Lippmann’s observation that our understanding of society necessarily involves simplifying and distorting systems of stereotypes. These stereotypes reduce the unimaginable complexity of reality to low-resolution mental models that render the world understandable.

To many people, this analysis likely conjures up the concept of ideology, which plays a central role in Marx’s approach to political epistemology. Nevertheless, the word “ideology” has many inconsistent uses in academic and popular discourse.

Initially, the term “ideology” meant the systematic study of ideas, much like “epistemology” involves the systematic investigation (or ‘theory’) of knowledge, episteme. However, the term quickly mutated into a way of referring to systems of ideas themselves.

In this sense, the term can be understood descriptively or pejoratively. According to the descriptive use, which is probably the dominant use in popular discourse and among social scientists, it denotes something like a worldview shared by a community (e.g., nation, class, political faction, etc.).

For example, Buchanan and Levinson define ideologies as

“shared sets of beliefs, evaluations, attitudes, expectations, and interpretative frames that play a role in coordinating the behavior of large numbers of individuals and guiding individual lives. Ideologies are descriptive-evaluative maps of the social world, necessarily simplified representations with directions for where one should go and with whom.”

Several things are noteworthy about this characterisation. First, ideologies are necessarily simplified. To perform useful intellectual functions and facilitate social coordination, they must present reality in highly selective and idealised ways. Second, ideologies do not merely represent how things are; they also evaluate and prescribe actions. Third, this sense of the term says nothing about whether ideologies are good or bad. In fact, implicit in the definition is the idea that ideologies are likely inevitable in the context of politics. To coordinate political action among diverse individuals confronting unimaginably vast, complex realities, ideologies in this sense of the term seem unavoidable.

Although Marx was not always consistent in using the term, this is generally not how he understood the concept of ideology. Instead, the term “ideology” is essentially pejorative for Marxists and many later generations of critical theorists highly influenced by him. Very roughly, it denotes widespread ways of interpreting or representing society that are defective or “false” in ways that support oppressive or exploitative social orders.

The basic idea is helpfully introduced by a quote from Rousseau’s The Social Contract in which he claims that “the strongest is never strong enough always to be master unless he converts his force into right and obedience into duty.” In other words, Rousseau assumes that ruling individuals or classes can never maintain their rule by force and coercion alone. Instead, they must achieve a kind of legitimacy in the eyes of those they rule over.

The “theory of ideology” within the Marxist and critical theory tradition is typically understood as an attempt to explain how this perceived legitimacy arises. Hence the famous quote that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”. By embracing mistaken ideas that advance the ruling class's interests, the masses misrepresent social reality in ways that lead them to support their own exploitation.

To understand this proposal, you need at least a passing familiarity with Marx’s theory of historical materialism.

Historical materialism

As with every aspect of Marx’s vast and complex body of work, there is intense disagreement over how to interpret historical materialism. As a rule of thumb, you can bet that any interpretation that makes the theory vulnerable to criticism or empirical disconfirmation will be dismissed as intolerably “naive” by many academics who treat Marx as a religious figure.

Nevertheless, here goes.

The first thing to say is that the “materialism” in historical materialism is not a metaphysical doctrine (i.e., the claim that everything is made of matter) but a sociological one about the priority of “material” factors over ideas in explaining historical change.

Roughly, Marx thinks that to understand and analyse a society, you should start not with its dominant ideas, beliefs, moral values, or political institutions but with its “material” foundation: how the society organises production to meet human needs and thereby sustain and reproduce itself. This economic foundation or “base” then in some difficult-to-understand sense “determines” or “specifies” or “conditions” the society’s cultural and ideological “superstructure” (e.g., legal system, religious ideas, philosophical doctrines, and so on).

The core theory

Marx’s most famous (and succinct) expression of this theory is in the Preface to his ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’ (1859), the most famous passage of which begins as follows:

“In the social production of their lives men enter into relations that are specific, necessary and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a specific stage of development of their material productive forces. The totality of these relations of production forms the economic structure of society, the real basis from which rises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond specific forms of social consciousness.”

In one of the most famous quotes in the history of political theory, Marx then declares that

“the mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life-process generally. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary their social being that determines their consciousness.”

Several technical concepts are necessary for understanding what is going on here.

First, Marx distinguishes between the “forces of production” (e.g., technology, tools, human labour, techniques, skills and knowledge relevant to production) and the “relations of production” (i.e., who owns what, who works for whom, and who belongs to which economic class). Together, these determine a society’s “mode of production”.

According to Marx, history can be understood as a series of developments through different modes of production, including the “primitive communism” of pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies, ancient slave societies, feudalism, and capitalism, which combines industrial forces of production (e.g., factories, steam-powered machinery, etc.) with capitalist relations of production (e.g., private property, wage labour, competitive markets, etc.)

In each of these modes of production, or at least those preceding the socialist utopia that Marx predicts, the relations of production create antagonistic social classes involving oppressors and the oppressed, exploiters and the exploited. Famously, Marx assigns the bourgeoisie who own private property and the “means of production” to the former category and the proletariat (i.e., the working class) who merely own their labour to the latter.

What explains transitions from one mode of production to another? At least according to one natural interpretation, Marx thinks the forces of production determine the relations of production, which arise because they are “appropriate to a given stage in the development of [the] material forces of production.” Hence the famous quote that “the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist.”

These relations of production constitute a society’s economic “base”, which in turn “determines” or “conditions” the society’s superstructure. Historical change then occurs when the society’s relations of production cease to advance the development of its productive technology and become a hindrance:

“At a certain level of their development the material productive forces of society come into contradiction with the already existing relations of production… From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then an epoch of social revolution commences.”

For example, feudal restrictions on labour mobility (e.g., the fact that serfs were tied to land) formed part of the relations of production within feudal societies. Eventually, such restrictions prevented the efficient use of workers in industrial factories necessary for advancing the productive technologies that arose during the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of global commercial markets. A social revolution (e.g., the French Revolution) occurs in response, introducing a new set of production relations (e.g., abstract property rights) better suited to advancing society’s productive forces (e.g., industrial technology).

Back to ideology

In this alleged historical process, a society’s dominant ideas are in some sense explained by more “fundamental” or basic material factors. This is where the “theory of ideology” kicks in: a society’s dominant ideas do not float free from and do not themselves explain how the society is organised. Instead, these ideas function to support the society’s mode of production. Given that Marx thinks such modes of production are (at least before his imagined socialist utopia) characterised by brutal and exploitative relations of production involving a parasitic oppressor class and the masses it exploits, the dominant ideology plays this supporting role by misrepresenting (“masking” or “mystifying”) such exploitation.

In other words, if the proletariat understood the reality of their situation, they would collectively overpower and overthrow their capitalist oppressors and the broader economic system in which they are exploited. Since they do not do so—or at least not until they achieve class consciousness and launch a communist revolution—they must lack an accurate understanding of reality.

This theory gives rise to two questions:

1. In what ways do dominant ideologies misrepresent, distort, or mystify social reality in support of exploitative social orders?

2. How do such ideologies emerge and win widespread popularity in society?

Understanding the falsity of false consciousness

Marx’s work and its later developments and elaborations contain countless ideas about how ideologies allegedly misrepresent and mystify social reality. Nevertheless, three core ideas frequently recur.

First, dominant ideologies “naturalise” contingent social practices, treating social arrangements that are specific to certain historical periods as if they are “natural”, inevitable, or eternal. For example, institutions like private property and wage labour might be understood as inalienable “natural rights”, and brutal competition for profit and jobs might be explained in terms of ineradicable features of human nature.

Second, dominant ideologies “universalise” class interests, misrepresenting the narrow interests of a dominant class as if they are in everyone’s interests. For example, private property and abstract property rights might be treated as sacrosanct or in correspondence with abstract ideals of justice even though most people lack property and are exploited due to economic systems that respect such rights.

Finally, dominant ideologies hide or “mask” the existence of exploitation by misrepresenting exploitative, antagonistic, or zero-sum interactions as involving ideals like freedom, fairness, and mutually beneficial cooperation. For example, people might treat wages as an accurate reflection of their social value.

Mechanisms of false consciousness

Amidst the countless complex analyses of how dominant ideologies and false consciousness are alleged to come about, one can also find three big general ideas.

First, there is the simple idea that dominant classes have the power and resources to control which ideas people in society are exposed to:

The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that … the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.”

In other words, through propaganda, churches, education, media, and other avenues, the parasitic and oppressor class can monopolise a society’s ideas, driving the masses to embrace the self-serving beliefs of their exploiters.

Second, Marx seemed to think that capitalism specifically is in some-difficult-to-understand sense inherently misleading. That is, the way that production is organised in capitalist societies—through exchange, markets, labour contracts, commodity production, and so on—inevitably produces “appearances” that diverge from the exploitative reality at their core. For example, whereas exploitation is fairly transparent in feudal societies, the appearance of “free exchange” obfuscates its existence in capitalist societies. Likewise, because of the pervasive “alienation” of workers from the products of their labour, people misperceive relations among people as relations among mere things like money and merchandise.

Finally, Marx and many later theorists have pointed to psychological factors that allegedly bias people to endorse the status quo in their society as just and legitimate. For example, believing in mystifying fairytales might be emotionally comforting.

Interim summary

In summary, then, Marx’s analysis of ideology involves three core ideas:

1. Ideologies involve dominant ideas that misinterpret or misrepresent social reality in ways that support exploitative social arrangements that benefit a dominant class.

2. Ideologies are “downstream” of (i.e., explained by their relationship to) more fundamental “material” features of society.

3. Ideologies would be irrelevant in societies free of pervasive exploitation and class antagonism.

Of course, this overview has been brief and simplistic, glossing over numerous complexities and nuances in Marx’s work. Moreover, these core ideas have been developed, adjusted, refined, and elaborated in much research since Marx, including especially within “Western Marxism” (e.g., the work of Lukács and Gramsci), critical theory and the Frankfurt School (e.g., the work of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse), and in research within feminism and critical race theory that I will return to in the third article associated with my ‘Politics, truth, and ideology’ course.

Nevertheless, this brief overview suffices as background context to raise a simple question: Is any of this—or anything that even resembles this general picture—plausible? Are there any ideas here worth salvaging?

Objections and worries

1. Ideas matter

Return to Marx’s claim that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” Even setting aside most of the other claims associated with historical materialism, this “materialist” idea looks to be obviously wrong.

Historically, one of the great pathologies of philosophers is a tendency towards absurd exaggeration. That’s on full display here. The claim that ideas do not float free of material factors is an important insight, albeit not one original to Marx. The idea that they are wholly downstream of more basic material factors is simply mistaken.

To take only one example, you cannot understand some of the major historical developments of the past century without appreciating how Marx’s own ideas have influenced the behaviour of revolutionaries and despotic regimes.

Of course, the question of how ideas influence complex social processes is a challenging one. But that is the point: establishing the relative influence of specific ideas in specific contexts requires careful, case-by-case empirical investigation. Sweeping generalisations about their role in history based on stick-figure grand theories of historical change are unhelpful.

(Admittedly, Marx’s writings about politics typically suggested a more nuanced view of the role of ideas in history than you get from his various descriptions of historical materialism as an overarching theory).

2. The question of true consciousness

A fundamental problem for any analysis of “false consciousness” and, more broadly, the postulation of widespread ideological mystification lies in the assumption that the theorist has achieved “true consciousness”—that they have “escaped ideology” and seen reality objectively.

As Buchanan and Levinson put it,

“An implicit assumption of many critical theories is that the theorists themselves are somehow immune to the distorting impact of the ideologies they criticize, even though they operate within the societies they critique. The question, then, is this: How could an individual come to occupy such a privileged epistemic position?”

In fact, this question bundles together multiple concerns.

One is a general concern for any theory of widespread error in society. If sources of error, ignorance, or delusion are widespread, how did you—the theorist attempting to explain the nature and origins of other people’s misperceptions—escape them? This worry is not unique to Marx’s views or those broadly within the Marxist tradition. For example, elsewhere, I have observed how some modern "misinformation” researchers are inconsistent in positing a vast range of factors that allegedly underlie widespread belief in misinformation—identity, group polarisation, disinformation campaigns, motivated reasoning, echo chambers, and so on—whilst simultaneously depicting any concerns about the objectivity of their own views as “postmodernism”.

Importantly, the issue here is not just one of elitism. For example, Terry Eagleton writes,

“The belief that a minority of theorists monopolize a scientifically grounded knowledge of how society is, while the rest of us blunder around in some fog of false consciousness, does not particularly endear itself to the democratic sensibility.”

However, whether something endears itself to the “democratic sensibility” or not is irrelevant to its truth. In some cases, intellectual elitism is warranted. Scientific knowledge and expertise exist. There is a profound difference between those who defer to mainstream scientific consensus and those who believe in ghosts and astrology, democratic sensibilities be damned. The worry is whether the claim to enjoy a “scientifically grounded knowledge of society” is justified in specific contexts.

This brings us to Marx specifically. This is not a popular thing to say in some quarters (I’m speaking from experience here), but my view is that Marx’s own theories of economics, social organisation, and history were simply mistaken on almost every point of substance and detail. His claims about the role of exploitation in capitalism (in terms of the extraction of “surplus value”) rest on a discredited labour theory of value. His analysis of societies in terms of economic classes and class-based conflict rests on mistaken views about human psychology and social organisation. (For one thing, modern societies do not feature a monolithic dominant class but competing elite groups and multiple different forms of power). As a description and explanation of historical change, historical materialism is straightforwardly refuted by multiple historical events and developments, not least those influenced by self-identifying Marxist revolutionaries and dictators. And almost every single prediction Marx produced was quickly falsified.

Some brilliant people have tried to save or adjust the core ideas of Marxism in the face of these objections. However, very few people today outside of humanities academia and some fringe political movements think they succeed. The point, then, is not just that real-world communism is and always has been a complete disaster, although this is undeniable. The point is that “real” or “true” Marxism—the literal content of what Marx wrote, not the terrible political consequences of most self-described Marxist movements—is mistaken.

Given this, the most plausible reason why ordinary people do not typically see the features of capitalism posited by Marx is not because they are victims of false consciousness but because Marx hallucinated such features. In fact, some research suggests that Marx’s analysis of false consciousness in the context of capitalism got things precisely backwards: without theoretical enlightenment, most people bring simplistic, zero-sum, hunter-gatherer moral intuitions to their understanding of economic matters, which obscure or “mask” the power and efficiency of competitive markets in allocating resources, incentivising innovation, and driving growth.

Of course, none of this means that real-world capitalism is perfect or free of “exploitation” (in a commonsense understanding of that term, not the technical Marxist one). Moreover, Marxists would no doubt argue that my assessment here is itself a form of “ideology” in the bad sense. At that point, however, concepts like “ideology” and “false consciousness” simply cease to be useful. Instead, we have an ordinary first-order disagreement about what’s true in a complex world, which should be settled by empirical evidence and theoretical argument. (One of the most pernicious legacies of Marx’s ideas in academia is a willingness to dismiss views simply on the basis that they allegedly support a dominant “power structure”.)

Moreover, the fact (if I am right that it is a fact) that Marx’s specific claims about history, economics, and sociology are wrong does not undermine the entire concept of “false consciousness". The idea that powerful people benefit from certain pervasive misunderstandings which they act to bring about is highly plausible. And if “false consciousness” is simply understood to mean false belief systems that lead people to act in ways contrary to their own interests, it can be detached from Marx’s views. For example, you might view self-identifying Marxists who supported revolutions that led to despotic regimes and their own demise as a clear-cut example of this broader phenomenon. Nevertheless, how widespread should we expect false consciousness, so understood, to be?

3. Irrationality and Gullibility

Even once you set aside the specifics of Marx’s ideas about ideology and false consciousness, there is a legitimate worry that the more general ideas of elite manipulation and beliefs that mislead people about their own interests rests on a problematic ascription of widespread irrationality and credulity to ordinary people.

One might object to this ascription on philosophical grounds. However, a more serious problem is that it seems false. Research in psychology and cognitive science suggests that people are sophisticated and vigilant social learners who are difficult to persuade and highly sensitive to the distorting role of self-interest in the messages they are exposed to. And research throughout sociology, history, and anthropology suggests that even when dominant groups craft self-serving ideas designed to legitimise their elite status, dominated groups rarely accept such ideas.

As Hugo Mercier points out,

Far from having imbibed the dominant ideology, everywhere people practice “the arts of resistance” with the “weapons of the weak,” to borrow the titles of two influential books by sociologist James Scott. Even the strongest of power asymmetries, that between masters and their slaves, cannot make the subordinates accept their plight, which slaves keep fighting by any means available, ranging from “foot dragging, dissimulation, false compliance,” all the way to “arson” and “sabotage.”

Mercier concedes that the dominant ideology thesis has a point: extractive elites often weave stories that justify their elite status and then attempt to spread and enforce such stories through propaganda and other means. Nevertheless, it does not follow that people accept such legitimising myths: “On the contrary, these narratives are resisted everywhere, and alternative narratives created.”

On one level, this seems right. In fact, it is plausible that one of the main problems in affluent liberal democracies today is that many people are excessively and indiscriminately hostile towards elites, which drives bizarre conspiracy theorising, misplaced institutional distrust, and support for populist demagogues. Moreover, I think it’s clear that Marx’s views and those of later critical theorists rest on mistaken and sometimes absurd assumptions about human credulity and manipulability, including the influential idea that mass society and the “culture industry” involve a system of “mass deception” that controls “individual consciousness”.

Nevertheless, it is also possible to take this resistance to the idea of elite manipulation of public opinion too far. Although people exercise sophisticated capacities of epistemic vigilance and large-scale persuasion is extremely hard, the only way to be perfectly protected against deception is by discarding all information acquired from others, which is impossible in domains like politics.

Moreover, it is difficult—or at least I find it difficult— to deny that elite manipulation plays some role in shaping popular belief systems, even if establishing that role in specific cases and understanding the causal mechanisms through which it arises is challenging.

4. Collectively self-defeating behaviour

A final worry I will raise concerns the explanatory role of “ideology” and false consciousness. Throughout much research in the tradition of Marxism and critical theory, false consciousness is supposed to explain why oppressed and marginalised groups acquiesce in or even support social systems that oppress and marginalise them. If they saw reality accurately, the thought goes, they would see that the current situation is not in their interests and, hence, work to overthrow it. Given that they do not work to overthrow it, they must see reality inaccurately.

However, even if one accepts the view that people would benefit from overthrowing a system, it does not follow that they will be motivated to contribute to the collective action required to achieve that outcome. One of the most important insights of twentieth-century social science is that collective action is often inherently challenging. In many cases, groups would benefit from certain collective behaviour, but individuals within the group would benefit even more from free-riding on the contributions of others. As a result, collective action fails, leaving everyone worse off than they could otherwise be.

Collective action problems need not involve false beliefs. Instead, they arise because people accurately understand the incentives of the situation, which lead them to participate in collectively self-defeating behaviour. Given this, such problems can explain “voluntary servitude” (i.e., the acquiescence of oppressed people in oppressive systems) without appealing to false consciousness.

This is a forceful objection, but it is easy to overstate it. For one thing, false beliefs might prevent people from even noticing that they face a collective action problem. For another, the widespread enforcement of system-justifying beliefs in society might make it more challenging to solve collective action problems by undermining common knowledge of anti-regime sentiments. Ultimately, it is a difficult empirical question how these different factors interact in specific contexts.

Final thoughts

The main lesson I take away from these considerations is the importance of striking a delicate balance.

On the one hand, most of Marx’s specific views are mistaken, and we should reject a crude tendency to attribute all political disagreement to false consciousness. On this issue, Walter Lippmann’s analysis of public opinion and the “pictures in our heads” is considerably more insightful and nuanced than Marx’s. Given the vastness, complexity, invisibility, and ambiguity of political issues in the modern world, a wide range of opinions is inevitable, and systematic “falsity”—whether about our interests or anything else—is better understood as the default state we all find ourselves in, not an aberration induced by exploitative economic systems.

On the other hand, I think there is also a risk of over-correcting and denying that popular misperceptions shaped by powerful interests ever play an important role in modern politics.

The challenge is to develop more nuanced, empirically-informed frameworks for understanding how elite manipulation and power hierarchies interact with many other factors in complex ways to shape political attitudes and behaviour.

In the end, I think the most valuable aspect of Marx's approach to political epistemology is this broader insight that understanding politics requires examining how power shapes the production and distribution of knowledge and ignorance in society. While we should reject historical materialism and oversimplified theories of mass deception and credulity, this insight remains important—and in some ways still underdeveloped—within political epistemology today.