Allman

When Marx and Engels wrote The German

Ideology, there were two predominant theories of the origin of consciousness.

Idealism, one of these theories, and the one with the longest historical legacy, holds

that ideas, or consciousness, are antecedent to the material (real) world. In other

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words, the real world is the result of consciousness. The other theory, which is a

form of materialism, a mechanical and unhistorical form, proposes the exact

opposite; ideas and consciousness are the result of sensory projections of material

phenomena. Marx was critical of the dichotomised type of thinking that

underpinned both of these theories. In each case the real world (material world)

and consciousness are conceptualised as separate and distinct entities/phenomena.

There also is no reciprocity between material reality and consciousness; all

movement between the two takes place in only one direction. These two theories

differ only in so far as the entity to which causal significance, and thus movement,

is attributed. Marx was critical not just of how dichotomised thinking produced

these theories but also of how the dichotomising of reality and consciousness

encouraged reified, and in its worse form fetishised, thought (both of which are

discussed later in this chapter).

In contrast and critical opposition to these theories, Marx formulated an

inimitable and revolutionary theory of consciousness that permitted no dichotomy,

or binary separation, between consciousness and reality. As readers may already

have anticipated, Marx conceptualises consciousness and reality as an internally

related unity of opposites. Additionally, reality is conceptualised dynamically, as

the sensuous, active experience of human beings in the material world. Therefore,

at any one moment in time, consciousness is comprised of thoughts that arise from

each human being’s sensuous activity. Moreover, the consciousness of any human

being will also include thoughts that have arisen external to the individual’s own

sensuous activity, i.e., from other people’s sensuous activity both historically and

contemporaneously. However, individuals’ only integrate these external sources of

consciousness through actively engaging with them. Since Marx’s theory of

consciousness posits the dialectical unity of human thought and practice, it is

actually a theory of praxis but more, much more, on this later. To reiterate,

according to Marx, thinking and action, consciousness and sensuous human

experience, are inseparable. Marx’s theory also proposes that the sensuous activity

that has the greatest impact on consciousness is people’s experience within the

social relations in which they engage in order to produce their material world, i.e.,

their experience within historically specific social relations of production—

relations that determine both how they produce and what they produce (1846:1976,

p. 37).

When taken together with his critical analysis of capitalism, Marx’s theory of

consciousness leads to several other significant insights. To begin with, because

human beings’ sensuous activity takes place within historically specific social

relations, e.g., capitalist social relations of production, the general characteristics of

consciousness are also historically specific. In other words, the consciousness of

people living within capitalist social relations will have general characteristics that

are different from the characteristics of consciousness that prevailed, for example,

in feudal societies and thus feudal social relations'.

Paula Allman