Jim Beggs

ENGL 956
Prof. Lingyan Yang

I enjoyed reading The German Ideology because I think Marx's analysis of human social
relations and systematic uncovering of the history class struggle has much truth to it. From his
own education and interest in philosophy he began with an extremely forceful attack on the
iconoclastic German idealists as sheep in wolves' clothing. The problem for Marx was that
idealism was merely another kind of false consciousness that occluded the true material nature
and basis of conflicts and ideology. Individual consciousness was not a transcendent thing-in-
itself. It was socially constructed. Human social relations went through major transformations
according to the survival needs of people and class struggle. I really enjoy Marx's thorough
human history, tracing the transformations from tribal ownership, trough communal and State
ownership, and up to feudal property. Exploitation of various groups took place in the various
periods, with the earliest form being in the family. “The slavery latent in the family only develops
gradually with the the increase of population, the growth of wants, and with the extension of
external relations, both of war and of barter.”
The means of production determine the nature of society and how people interact with
one another, down through all strata of society all the way to the level of the individual. “The
nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.” The
division of labor and cleavage between individual and common interest leads to increased
alienation as his deeds become “an alien power opposed to him.” Marx is remarkable to me
because he wanted to expose the true nature of historical conflicts, more equitably distribute
capital, and end the exploitation of wage labor. The oppressed are still waiting for his classless
society.
From my perspective, the intellectual lineage from Marx to theorists like Althusser
remains unclear to me. While Althusser liberally mentions Marx and his works, I have trouble
seeing connections between the two. I like his point from Gramsci that “the distinction between
the public and the private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law and valid in the (subordinate)
domains in which bourgeois law exercise its 'authority.'” Much of the purpose of the excerpt
seemed to differentiate between the Ideological State Apparatus and the Repressive State
Apparatus, and Gramsci's point forces us to include ostensibly “private” institutions such as “the
family” in our analysis of how capitalist ideology is produced and reproduced. The use of
“reproduction” seems a superficial allusion to Marx—I am not seeing the deeper connection.
Eagleton's tackles in-depth the seemingly obvious question of “what is literature,” but
also draws attention to the role of consumption and criticism. His thorough interrogation of the
formalist criteria for literature showed how the value of different texts and therefore our very
notion of literature can change over time. “There is no such thing as a literary work or tradition
which is valuable in itself, regardless of what anyone might have said or come to say about it.
'Value' is a transitive term.” Eagleton's argument is liberating because it means that any text, no
matter how “unliterary” can have literary value, but also opens up the problem of what, then,
exactly makes the discipline of English so special? Science departments read biological texts
probably with a lot more expertise and present their knowledge as some version of truth while we
in English departments see them as limited by the ideologies of their particular social contexts.
That kind of nuance is essential in true truth seeking, I think, but simpler versions of truth are
more pleasurable and palatable.