10 1163@1569206x-12341424

Historical Materialism 23.
3 (2015) 101141
brill.com/hima
Distilling a Value Theory of Ideology from

Volume Three of Capital
Beverley Best
Concordia University, Montreal
bev.best@concordia.ca
Abstract
This discussion is a reformulation of ideology-critique from the point of view of Marxs

theory of the value form. This rethinking of ideology a formulation I call a value theory
of ideology is carried out through a reading of Marxs analysis of the capitalist percep-
tual economy articulated most systematically in Volume III of Capital. In the course of
this rethinking I also revisit several concepts that have become associated with Marxian
ideology-critique and which are often presented as grounds for the latters dismissal:
inverted appearance, false consciousness, economism, and the base-superstructure
metaphor.
Keywords
ideology Marx value capital perceptual economy
Introduction: End of Ideology, Again?
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.
koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 5|doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341424

102 Best
materialisms (new generations of actor-network theory, object-oriented ontol-

ogy or phenomenology, Speculative Realism), analyses in which the emancipa-
tory orientation of critical theory, a hermeneutical approach, or any sort of
depth model are succinctly dismissed.
Despite these analytical detours around the problem of the social (and its
reproduction or transformation), the question of ideology continues to nag.
And is it any wonder that it does, 35-odd years into the unfurling of the histori-
cal conjuncture referred to now, perfunctorily, as neoliberalism? The dynam-
ics of the neoliberal conjuncture, however uncoordinated and unplanned,
have nonetheless generated outcomes that are remarkably consistent and
predictable: in the global North, rising levels of unemployment and precari-
ous employment, stagnating wages, and acute material inequality marked by
levels of income disparity not seen since the 1920s; and in the global South,
what could only be called the neocolonial organisation of industry and agri-
culture around the needs of global capital, thus creating immense populations
of rural and urban poor the likes of which seem only imaginable within the
pages of dystopian science fiction.1 While contemporary critical theorists and
political economists have pursued the project of scrutinising the mechanics of
the neoliberal conjuncture with a vengeance, one question continues to haunt
radical social analysis: how does this system of state-facilitated market funda-
mentalism and its political and economic architects continue to successfully
manufacture consent on the part of the majority whose interests are so deeply
subverted by its dynamics?
The fallout from the 20078 global economic crisis exacerbates the ques-
tion. The response to the crisis on the part of political and economic leaders
(particularly those in Europe), consistent with neoliberal doctrine, was to
institute a regime of austerity measures, the depth of which, until now, had
been reserved for punishing members of the global South for offences such as
national debt, political volatility, and aspirations for economic independence.
Such austerity measures have entailed that, predictably, the most vulnerable
silent majority will continue to bear the burden of ensuring continued capi-
tal accumulation without sharing in the recovery. This remarkable yet unsur-
prising history, and its subsequent inauguration of the Great Recession, begs
the question, at once obvious and ultimately unanswerable: will a globalised
austerity regime be met by a popular response sufficiently forceful, pervasive,
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).
Historical Materialism 23.3 (2015) 101141

distilling a value theory of ideology 103
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 Qubec. 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 Althussers 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 Althussers 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

104 Best
as this work has been, the concentration on a psychoanalytic reading of ide-

ology has had two problematic effects on current debate: first, it has tended
to pose the question of ideology within the analytical register of unconscious
mechanisms for which there is no intentionally-directional political response;
second, it has, to a large extent, foreclosed inquiry into Marxs crucial lesson
about what I will call the perceptual economy of capital an economy of
appearances organised by the exigencies of the socially mediating value form.
Consequently, a sense of what is radically historical about the perceptual econ-
omy of capital is sidelined.
Marxs analysis of the value form as perceptual economy, I will argue, can
reframe the debate on ideology, situating it not as a modality of subjectivity
but rather as a radically historical modality of capital itself. The objective of
the following discussion is to reformulate the question of ideology from the
point of view of Marxs economic texts and his critique of the movement
of capital therein. This formulation amounts to what I call a Marxian value-
theory of ideology, or, a reading of Marxs analysis of the capitalist percep-
tual economy as articulated most systematically (although, not exclusively) in
Volume III of Capital.
The Value Form as Ideology-Critique
The Critical and the Neutral Conceptions of Ideology

The following formulation of a Marxian value-theory of ideology is oriented
by the longstanding differentiation between a critical and a neutral concep-
tion of ideology within Marxist thought, and the ongoing debate between the
proponents, in their various iterations, of each conception. The debate (or,
rather, a history of pendulum swings between competing articulations and
usages)2 over how to conceive of ideology and the nature of its analytical util-
ity is indeed longstanding; as Jan Rehmann points out in his recent compre-
hensive mapping of theories of ideology in Theories of Ideology: The Powers
of Alienation and Subjection, the debate can be traced back to the evacuation
of the critical dimension of Marxs conception of ideology and its replace-
ment with a neutral iteration in both the Social-Democratic Marxism of the
Second International and the official Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet bloc.3 As
Rehmann illustrates, the evolution of a critical conception of ideology a con-
ception from which the neutral concept of ideology departs begins in Marxs
2 Rehmann 2013, p. 7.
3 Rehmann 2013, pp. 89, 71.

early work, most prominently in Marx and Engelss The German Ideology, and
continues throughout Marxs work to what I will argue is its apotheosis in
Capital.
Nonetheless, from Marxs 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 Gramscis term), in Stuart
Halls 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 Halls 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 iek, 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, iek 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 Lukcs, as well
4 Hall 1981, p. 31.

106 Best
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 Marxs
(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 Williamss 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 Laclaus 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 societys narratives, images, prejudices,
affective comportments, and structures of feeling are too many to catalogue,
and proliferate daily. And even though, as with all capitals 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 Laclaus
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 Halls 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 Halls 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 Marxs 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 societys 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 Rehmanns 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 Rehmanns 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 Rehmanns own description of this work, and on the exegesis of
the same in Koivisto and Pietil 1996, it does appear that the source of this blended theory

108 Best
The critical concept of ideology, and therefore Marxs concept, is cer-

tainly inadequate to account for the formation, articulation and trans-
formation of discourses, currents of thought, political ideas, in short,
ideologies in the neutral sense. But then it was not produced to perform
that task, but to criticize certain distortions. What is to be lamented is the
fact that these two aspects, which are different and must be complemen-
tary, should dispute over the same concept of ideology. In fact they oper-
ate with totally different logics. Ideally, the concept of ideology should be
restricted to only one of them, to avoid confusions.10
And earlier in the same essay:
A negative [i.e., critical] concept of ideology is inherently capable of dis-

criminating between adequate and inadequate ideas, it passes epistemo-
logical judgement on thought, whatever its class origin or the expressed
intention of its supporters. An ideological idea is a distorted idea. The
neutral concept of ideology does not, of itself, discriminate between ade-
quate and inadequate ideas, it does not pass epistemological judgement
on them but emphasizes that through them human beings acquire con-
sciousness of social reality and links those ideas to some class interests or
to some articulating political principle.11
The poststructuralist denunciation of the epistemological violence of truth

claims, important and necessary in so many respects, has now, post poststruc-
turalism, become incorporated into a kind of intellectual common sense. One
way that this was accomplished was through the erroneous yet conventional-
ised association of the point of view of a totalised (and dialectical) objectivity
the goal of critical theory with positivism (in part, a consequence of the often
unacknowledged but deep influence of the thought of Althusser on many
poststructuralist thinkers).12 What was misunderstood in this association was
the way in which for Marx, as for other thinkers following his line of inquiry,
of ideology can be located in the work of Haug and the PIT. In turn, both Rehmann and
Kiovisto & Pietil 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 Althussers 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 Rehmanns formation, see the Appendix to this paper.
10 Larrain 1991, p. 21.
11 Larrain 1991, p. 8.
12 See Rehmann 2013, p. 29.

the truth claims of critical theory were in fact anti-empiricist culminations,

manifestations of the very critique of positivism, per se. It was ironic that in
rejecting an ostensibly Marxian oriented positivism Laclau would formulate a
version of discourse-theory based, not on notions of truth or error, but rather
facticity (a discursive, contingent facticity, but facticity all the same). The asso-
ciation has stuck to this day, and in this milieu, the very notion of adequate
and inadequate ideas (distorted, non-distorted, etc.), not to mention the idea
that the function of theory is to aid in revealing which ideas are which, is either
unspeakable altogether or looked upon as a dubious relic from the past that
could only be taken seriously by an intellectual Rip Van Winkle.13 Even Jan
Rehmann, in his recent project to return a critical ideology-theory to respecta-
bility for radical social theory, assures his readers that a critical ideology-theory
deals with systematic illusions supporting relations of domination rather than
with the epistemological question of truth and error in general.14 We will
leave aside the problem that without the epistemological framework of truth
and error at least a specific-to-capitalism framework of truth and error
we have no apparatus to discern which illusions are systematic and which are
not. My own formulation of ideology that follows intentionally reanimates
this old-fashioned, apparently outmoded, theoretical problematic (and the
language to couch it in) which, in Larrains passage above, published in 1991,
Larrain was likely one of the last theorists to invoke without feeling required to
issue such a warning: Danger! Unutterable truth-claims ahead.
Another source of ambiguity surrounding the distinction between a criti-
cal and a neutral conception of ideology is that Marx, himself, deploys both
conceptions in his work. For instance, a kind of neutral usage denunciations
of various bourgeois ideologists, or the ideologies of vulgar economists are
scattered throughout all periods of Marxs work. Nonetheless, as Rehmann
demonstrates in his account, Marx articulates the first substantial formula-
tion of a critical conception of ideology that retains the term ideology with
Engels, in The German Ideology. Here (again as Rehmann demonstrates), Marx
and Engels introduce the formulation of ideology as an inverted appearance of
peoples real life-process, along with the somewhat notorious metaphor of the
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.

110 Best
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 Marxs later economic texts. However, as if anticipating Larrains
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 Marxs interest in the question of
ideology is an occupation of his early work but abandoned in his later work,
is therefore inaccurate. Marxs theory of fetishism and mystification is, rather,
a retooling and renaming of a critical theory of ideology.17 Georg Lukcs and
in the wake of Lukcs, 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 Lukcs 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 Althussers 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 Marxs 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 Marxs 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
15 Rehmann 2013, pp. 26, 312.

16 Mepham 1979, p. 164.
17 William Pietz makes this same point: Indeed, such a materialist analysis of ideological
theories is expressed in the notion of fetishism that Marx developed in the course
of his writings: revisiting Marxs theory of fetishism is a way to reopen the question of
materialist criticism (Pietz 1993, pp. 1289).
18 My formulation of ideology-critique shares certain premises with preceding critical,
Marxian-oriented formulations, in particular those of Georg Lukcs, Jorge Larrain, John
Mepham, John Thompson, William Pietz and, on several crucial points, Jan Rehmann.

assembled in the third volume of Capital. Before proceeding directly to the

exposition of a Marxian value-theory of ideology, I will address two concepts
that have traditionally hamstrung the reception of a critical conception of
ideology namely false consciousness and economism and situate these
concepts with respect to the formulation I am proposing.
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 capitals
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,
Engelss later use of the term false consciousness does not capture (nor was
Engels making reference to) the more developed theory of capitals inverted
appearances that Marx elaborates throughout the three volumes of Capital. It
is misleading, therefore, to refer to Marx and Engelss critical ideology-theory20
if one conceives of the latter as informed by the later development of Marxs
thought, just as it is misleading to link the qualifiers false and inverted,21
which gives the impression that false consciousness is as much Marxs term
as Engelss. Despite all this, the term has since become virtually synonymous
with a Marxian, critical formulation of ideology that it really doesnt fit. Lukcs,
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
Marxs 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 Pietzs essay on Marxs 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 Engelss 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
Engelss 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.

112 Best
in other words, an understanding that proceeds from a subjective and partial

point of view, an understanding that does not proceed from a concrete, total-
ised, dialectically reconstructed point of view a point of view that an empiri-
cal approach is unable to achieve.22
Marx, at all stages of his work, traffics in the discourse of consciousness
(although it becomes a much more central category for Lukcs); granted, it
is a new terrain of materialist consciousness,23 an irreducibly social, collec-
tive and historical consciousness.24 For Marx, the motive force of history is
human beings collective doing and making of the social world the practical
life-process and psychological consciousness (however limited) and the cog-
nitive work of agents are a part of that process, even if they are not identical
with it. Therefore, for Marx more so than for Lukcs and even more so again
than for the Frankfurt School theorists whose deep pessimism is not shared
by Marx25 the potential of human consciousness and perceptive power is
somewhat more evenly matched against the seemingly impenetrable, oppres-
sive processes of bourgeois society. As is well known, for Marx, social being
real life-practice thoroughly informs human consciousness and cognition.
Nonetheless, bourgeois society offers up appearances to the consciousness of
its bearers where understandings about the social world and ones place in
it resonate, are processed, configured in one way or another, and eventually
acted on.26 Consciousness, therefore, in Marxs analysis cannot be qualified as
true or false27 (or reified, I should add). More accurately, capitals immanently-
22 This is Lukcss argument articulated throughout chapters 3 and 4 of History and Class
Consciousness; see, for example, Lukcs 1971, pp. 767.
23 Rehmann 2013, p. 29.
24 It was not, however, the decentred consciousness of twentieth-century critical
social theory. Lukcss 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 mans (psychological)
consciousness of them (Lukcs 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. 79.
27 As many Marxist critics of ideology have also pointed out, such as Lukcs, Althusser, Hall,
Mepham, Larrain, Eagleton, Thompson, Rehmann, and De Angelis.

generated appearances the phenomenal forms produced by the objective

movement of capital, capitals objective thought forms28 necessarily depart
from capitals essential modality; they are systematic inversions of capitals
real movement, as I will demonstrate below. The category of false conscious-
ness does not adequately grasp this spontaneous and objective dynamic of the
perceptual economy of capital.
However, the term false consciousness is misleading in another way. It
gives the impression that capitals immanently generated appearances are in
some way illusory or not real, again suggesting erroneously that human con-
sciousness is somehow deficient. On the contrary, capitals appearances are
entirely objective and necessary (as I will show) expressions of capitals other-
wise equally objective but immaterial essence. These appearances are as real as
the social relations they materialise. As Lukcs argues, the dialectical method
does not permit us simply to proclaim the falseness of this consciousness
and to persist in an inflexible confrontation of true and false. On the contrary,
it requires us to investigate this false consciousness concretely as an aspect of
the historical totality and as a stage in the historical process.29 Consequently,
Marx puts less analytical emphasis on the collective misrecognition of capi-
tals immaterial content than on the inversion of the latters appearance in the
dynamic between essence and appearance:
We may therefore understand the decisive importance of the transforma-

tion of the value and price of labour-power into the form of wages, or into
the value and price of labour itself. All the notions of justice held by both
the worker and the capitalist, all the mystifications of the capitalist mode
of production, all capitalisms illusions about freedom, all the apologetic
tricks of vulgar economics, have as their basis the form of appearance
discussed above, which makes the actual relation invisible, and indeed
presents to the eye the precise opposite of that relation.30
According to Terry Eagleton, this emphasis emerges only in Marxs 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 Marxs from Volume I of Capital. Rehmann
2013, p. 43; Marx 1968, p. 682.
29 Lukcs 1971, p. 50.
30 Marx 1976, p. 680.

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simply by a clear-eyed attention to the real life-process, since that

process, rather like the Freudian unconscious, puts out a set of sem-
blances which are somehow structural to it, includes its falsity within its
truth. What is needed instead is science for science, as Marx comments,
becomes necessary once essences and appearances fail to coincide.31
I depart from Eagletons reading on one account: ideology can indeed be

unmasked by a clear-eyed attention to the real movement of capital. Such
attention is otherwise called analysis (Marx also calls it science)32 and in addi-
tion to being the work of theorists, it is frequently also the outcome of com-
paring ones own life experience against the days dominant narratives and
scrutinising the difference. Marx bet the farm on the potential for such popular
cognitive work, in aid of which his own analysis was intended. For Lukcs, the
structural position of the working class in its relation to capital (i.e., capitals
antithesis to labour) gave the working class an (again, structural) epistemologi-
cal advantage with respect to discerning the truth of bourgeois societys real
life-processes. Marx, on the other hand, does not claim this advantage for the
working class, but nor does he banish an adequate understanding of capitals
movement to some dark recesses of the unconscious, literally or analogously.33
Marxs famous excoriations of the ideas of this or that bourgeois economist,
philosopher or political figure punctuate his work, if not become the focus of
entire texts. Marx does not, however, denigrate the potential cognitive-analyt-
ical power of human consciousness, and certainly not the potentially revolu-
tionary consciousness and know-how of the working and oppressed classes,
except to refer to the inevitable brutalising of all human faculties under the
conditions to which these classes were typically subjected for the sake of basic
survival. That this know-how meets obstacles in the form of capitals objective
thought forms obstacles to a collective vision of a clear path towards the
overturning of capitalism and its succession by an associated mode of pro-
duction is a dynamic of the perceptual economy of capital and should be
31 Eagleton 1991, p. 87.

32 Marx 1976, p. 682: The forms of appearance are reproduced directly and spontaneously,
as current and usual modes of thought; the essential relation must first be discovered by
science. Classical political economy stumbles approximately onto the true state of affairs,
but without consciously formulating it. It is unable to do this as long as it stays within its
bourgeois skin.
33 The ideological operation is not something that takes place in the unconscious, but
rather, as Marx says, it falls outside the frame of reference of the everyday consciousness.
(Marx 1976, p. 681.)

considered as a tendency of the capitalist mode of production.34 Against the

grain of contemporary critical social theory where the category of conscious-
ness has been, for the most part, discarded as a relic of an earlier and some-
what nave theoretical discourse,35 I argue that a value theory of ideology
requires the categories of consciousness and cognition as Marx situates them,
both in the explanation of how ideology functions to further stabilise capi-
talist social relations, and in any theoretical projection of their overturning.
In the following passage, Terry Eagleton articulates the centrality of the idea
of the potential creativity of working-class consciousness for Lukcs, an idea,
Eagleton argues, which Lukcs ultimately owes to Hegel, but which could not
be formulated without the mediating intervention of Marxs analysis of class:
The cognition of the revolutionary proletariat, for Lukcs, is part of the

situation it cognizes, and alters that situation at a stroke. If this logic is
pressed to an extreme, then it would seem that we never simply know
some thing, since our act of knowing it has already transformed it into
something else.... [T]his whole conception of consciousness as essen-
tially active, practical and dynamic, which Lukcs owes to the work of
Hegel, will force us to revise any too simplistic notion of false conscious-
ness as some lag, gap or disjunction between the way things are and the
way we know them.36
Where my own formulation departs from that of Lukcs is on the question of

the greater cognitive capacity of the working class with respect to that of the
bourgeoisie to undertake the totalising analysis required to reconstruct the
objective movement of capital. The structural vantage-point of the working
class, for whom the discrepancy between ones experience of the social world
and the latters dominant (self) narrative would be more readily apparent,
often does motivate the articulation of alternative explanations. Nonetheless,
34 Capitals 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 capitals 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 categorys
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.

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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.
The Critique of Economism

If capitals perceptual economy the particular essence-appearance dynamic
that is immanent to capital exceeds in scope and nuance (more specifically,
in dialectical comportment) what is conveyed by the critique of false con-
sciousness, so does it exceed what is conveyed by the critique of economism.
The critique of economism identifies as invalid the priority ascribed to the
economy as the dominant organising principle of the social. Marxian ideol-
ogy-critique has been charged with economism by Marxists, non-Marxists
and post-Marxists alike, often identifying as ground zero Marxs base-super-
structure metaphor used only once in the Preface to A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy that posits an economic base as generating a
corresponding ideological superstructure.37 As Eagleton asks, in his take on
Marxs incipient economism, Is all that we dub ideology really reducible to
the economic operations of capitalism?38 If we are working with a neutral
conception of ideology, the answer to this question would indeed be no. With
respect to a critical concept, however, which refers to a narrower, more specific
mechanism of capitalist production, the answer is yes. A critical concept of
ideology cannot directly address the ideology of white supremacy, nor can
it directly address the ideology of mens superiority over women (Eagletons
examples). A critical concept of ideology can only address those appearances
that are generated as structural components of the mode of exploitation and
domination immanent to capital.
The difficulty reconciling the charge of economism has been a consequence
of the ambiguity surrounding what constitutes the economy in Marxs analy-
sis. Here, Marxs disputed base-superstructure metaphor can be instructive.
The dynamic that Marx identifies in the Preface as base-superstructure a
dynamic that has been traditionally understood (and often dismissed) as an
economic base that determines the ideological superstructure it generates is
37 Marx 1978, p. 4. Rehmann discusses Marxs use of the similar phrase, superstructure of
ideological strata, in Theories of Surplus Value (Rehmann 2013, p. 31).
38 Eagleton 1991, p. 87.

reformulated in Capital as the essence-appearance dynamic or, alternatively,

as the dynamic of content-form. In Marxs analysis in Capital, the essence-
appearance dynamic and the content-form dynamic are interchangeable cat-
egories; they are different expressions for the same movement of capital. The
content (or essence) of capital that is, of the social relation Marx designates
as capital is immaterial, objective and singular: social labour privatised as
the property of the owners of the means of production. Despite its singular-
ity, capitals content has numerous valences or potential narrativisations; in
other words, there are many different ways of describing the same content and
Marx unfurls many alternative descriptions throughout Capital. Depending
on the particular vantage-point on the totality, capitals content may be best
captured as a social relation, a process, a function of abstraction, or a social
ontology. Nonetheless, as an immaterial substance, capitals content must take
some particular phenomenal form, that is, capitals essence always appears
in some form; in De Angeliss words, it must be cognitively apprehended. As
De Angelis argues, using Marxs alternative term for capitals content, abstract
labour, this content also articulates a particular materialist epistemology:
... [T]he conception of abstract labor, as social relation of work at the

basis of the capitalist mode or production, is the central material kernel
of Marxs theoretical contribution. The category of commodity-fetishism
must link this materiality of the capitalist social relation to the way this
relation is cognitively apprehended. This is what I would define as a
materialist conception of theory. As soon as we attempt to shed light on
the way this social relation is cognitively apprehended, we face the prob-
lem of how the form of the appearance of the object of knowledge is
intertwined, on a materialist ground, with the object of knowledge itself:
but in Marxs framework, the object of knowledge is the capitalist rela-
tion of work in all its manifestations and articulations.39
As Marx demonstrates throughout Capital, but which becomes the particular

focus of Volume III, capitals content takes a form that then becomes the deter-
mination of subsequent forms, or the base of a series of transformations of
form that index different moments in the processes of production, valorisation
and accumulation: for example, abstract labour takes the form of value, which
takes the form of exchange value, which takes the form of price; the price-form
is instrumental in the transformation of form that is the cognitive apprehen-
sion of surplus-value as profit, wages, rent, and so on.
39 De Angelis 1996, p. 12.

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If we transcode base-superstructure as the dialectic of content and form in

capitalism, Marxs category of economic base looks very different from the
object of the critique of economism. If we understand the economic base as
capitals immaterial, objective and singular content, then ideological super-
structure refers to the various forms, and the transformations of form, that
capitals content assumes and compels as the two simultaneous dimensions
of the same object, its essence and its forms of appearance in the processes
of production, valorisation and accumulation. Furthermore, turning the cri-
tique of economism on its head, if we follow Marxs analysis that capital gen-
erates, as one of its appearances, the fragmentation of the social world into
discrete and autonomised spheres of activity and jurisdiction the state and
the political sphere, the economy, culture, and so on then the abstraction
referred to conventionally as the economy signifying such things as trade,
market activity, dynamics of supply and demand, the stock market, monetary
policy, and so on does not constitute capitalisms base at all, but rather one of
capitals phenomenal forms, or, a dimension of its ideological superstructure.
The state, accordingly, is not conceived in this model as a set of institutions
that produce and stabilise certain ideologies (although in a neutral formula-
tion of ideology this is rightfully the case). Rather, in a critical formulation of
ideology, the state is ideology, itself, a mediated, phenomenal formation of a
certain content, namely, labour [when it is organised as] an indirect means of
life for individuals, to borrow Moishe Postones description of capitals essence
or content.40
When labour is organised in such a way that is, when labour is configured
as alienable private property (in the reified language of capital, a political-
legal identity as much as an economic one), or, in other words, when labour
is commodified and distributed through the mechanism of the market it
indicates that other social modalities have spontaneously and simultaneously
fallen into place.41 A societys material wealth takes the form of value; labour-
time, as the sole measure of value, becomes the universal mode of domination
of capital over labour:
On the surface of bourgeois society the workers wage appears as the

price of labour, as a certain quantity of money that is paid for a certain
quantity of labour....[However] It is not labour which directly confronts
the possessor of money on the commodity-market, but rather the worker.
40 Postone 1993, p. 300.

41 Marx 1976, p. 682: The forms of appearance are reproduced directly and spontaneously,
as current and usual modes of thought.

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
As Moishe Postone points out in his reinterpretation of Marxs theory, labour-

time/value, as the universal mode of domination immanent to capital, oper-
ates through the objective contradiction between the accumulation-oriented
drive to reduce socially necessary labour-time (the imperative to increase pro-
ductivity, typically through the introduction of new technology) and capitals
need to exploit human labour directly in production (as sole source of sur-
plus-value). In Marxs words, Hence too the economic paradox that the most
powerful instrument for reducing labour-time [machinery] suffers a dialecti-
cal inversion and becomes the most unfailing means for turning the whole life-
time of the worker and his family into labour-time at capitals disposal for its
own valorisation.43 In Postones words,
The category of value, in its opposition to that of material wealth, then,

signifies that labor time is the stuff of which wealth and social relations
are made in capitalism. It refers to a form of social life in which humans
are dominated by their own labor and are compelled to maintain this
domination. The imperatives grounded in this social form, as I shall dis-
cuss further, impel rapid increases in technological development and
a necessary pattern of ongoing growth; yet, they also perpetuate the
necessity of direct human labor in the process of production, regardless
of the degree of technological development and of the accumulation of
material wealth. It is as the ultimate ground of these historically specific
imperatives that labor, in its dual character as productive activity and as
42 Marx 1976, pp. 6757.

43 Marx 1976, p. 532.

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historically specific social substance, constitutes the identity of capital-

ism, according to Marx.
It should be clear by now that the complex dynamic I have been inves-
tigating is the essential core of the Marxian dialectic of the forces and
relations of production in capitalism.44
Here, what Postone calls the dialectic of the forces and relations of production
which in the Preface Marx describes a constituting capitals 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 capitals 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 dtre,
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 capitals 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 capitals
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-
44 Postone 1993, p. 302.

45 Marx 1976, pp. 6801.
46 This is why one cannot choose between critical and neutral formulations of ideology but
rather must consider them as mutually supplementary.

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:
... [E]ach individual transaction continues to conform to the laws of com-

modity exchange, with the capitalist always buying labour-power and the
worker always selling it at what we shall assume is its real value. It is quite
evident from this that the laws of appropriation or of private property,
laws based on the production and circulation of commodities, become
changed into their direct opposite through their own internal and inexo-
rable dialectic. The exchange of equivalents, the original operation with
which we started, is now turned round in such a way that there is only
an apparent exchange, since, firstly the capital which is exchanged for
labour-power is itself merely a portion of the product of labour of others
which has been appropriated without an equivalent; and, secondly, this
capital must not only be replaced by its producer, the worker, but replaced
together with an added surplus. The relation of exchange between capi-
talist and worker becomes a mere semblance belonging only to the pro-
cess of circulation, it becomes a mere form, which is alien to the content
of the transaction itself, and merely mystifies it. The constant sale and
purchase of labour-power is the form; the content is the constant appro-
priation by the capitalist, without equivalent, of a portion of the labour of
others which has already been objectified, and his repeated exchange of
this labour for a greater quantity of the living labour of others.47
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 capitals 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
47 Marx 1976, pp. 72930.

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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 Marxs theory of fetishism unqualified, as
does I.I. Rubin when he claims, The theory of fetishism is, per se, the basis of
Marxs entire economic system, and in particular of this theory of value; or, as
in this description from William Pietz:
In his mature thought, Marx understood capital to be a species of fetish.

A factory machine, a wheat field, a pension fund, and other things reck-
oned as capital by accountants and political economists are fetishes, in
Marxs view, not in their physical existence or concrete functions per se
but in their reality as material forms (part-objects) of a distinctive type of
social system. The truth of capital, for Marx, is found in its social essence
as an organizing principle, as the universal form for social processes
48 The chronology of Marxs 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.

aiming at the formation and accumulation of precisely this sort of mate-

rialized value: that odd type of sensuous supersensuous thing...called
capital.
Fetishism is the term Marx used to characterize the capitalist social
process as a whole.49
The Analytical Movement of Marxs Value Theory of Ideology in

Volume III of Capital
The dynamic of capitals ideological inversion (perceptual economy), referred
to by Marx as fetishism or mystification, is so central to the analysis in Volume
III that Marx describes the capturing of this dynamic as the texts main objec-
tive in the opening paragraph:
Our concern is...to discover and present the concrete forms which grow
out of the process of capitals 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
The reason why ideology-critique is so central to the analysis in Volume III is

that, here, Marx tells the story of capital [i]n the world as it actually is, capitals
confronting other capitals, simultaneously in competition and mutual depend-
ency, generating the surface appearances, prejudices and representations of
modern society.51 Marx employs a depth model throughout, invoking capital-
ist societys surface appearances over against its hidden core dynamics. The
unintentional outcome of peoples collective doing or real life-process, capital
is a social ontology that always-already entails a particular mode of perceiving,
knowing and representing the world in other words, an epistemology. In this
sense, ideology is the dialectical unity of ontology and epistemology generated
49 Pietz 1993, pp. 12930.

50 Marx 1981, p. 117.
51 Ibid.

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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 Marxs 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. Marxs 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.
52 If we were to transcode this formulation into the language of poststructuralism, we might

say that ideology is the relationship of undecidability between ontology and epistemology.
This transcoding of a dialectical identity into an antinomy, however, has the disadvantage
of rendering inert the otherwise radically historical and generative conjuncture of capital
whose contingencies produce an entire world whose necessity and inevitability can only
be posited as a future anterior.

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
53 Marx 1981, p. 120.

54 Marx 1981, p. 127.
55 It is curious that Rehmann does not elaborate on the central importance of the concept
of totality and of a totalising analysis for a Marxian theory of ideology. He does associate
the category with Lukcss analysis, as well as mention Althussers reformulation of

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The concealment of surplus-value in the collapsing of constant and vari-

able capital in the cost-price of production is what Marx reveals in Chapter 1 of
Volume III. Heres what is revealed in Chapter 2: a further mystification of the
source of profit is generated in the necessary divergence of the rate of profit
from the rate of surplus-value. In the capitalist formation, all profit derives
exclusively from surplus-value. The rate of surplus-value is the amount of extra
value a quantity of labour-power produces over and above its own value. As
a ratio, the rate of surplus-value would be surplus-value over variable capital
(labour-power). However, the quantity (as opposed to the rate) of surplus-
value produced in production is surplus-value in relation to the total capital
expended in production. Since the quantity of surplus-value produced is also
the amount of profit, the rate of profit as a ratio is surplus-value over total capi-
tal laid out on production i.e., the sum of constant and variable capital. The
rate of surplus-value is, therefore, surplus-value over variable capital, while
the rate of profit is surplus-value over total capital. This is a matter of simple
ratios, a situation that produces an ideological appearance that is also quite
simple to sort out: because surplus-value stands in relation to variable capital
and profit stands in relation to total capital expended, the rate of surplus-
value and rate of profit are, in almost all circumstances, different numerical
values, and their fluctuations are not immediately reflected in the other value.
For instance, the rate of surplus-value can decrease at the same time as the rate
of profit increases (in fact, this situation is the tendency of capital in its non-
crisis moments; it represents the immanent tendency of capital to expand).
Alternatively, the rate of profit can fluctuate even if the rate of surplus-value
remains constant in the case where the value of constant capital required for
the production cycle is reduced.56
This dynamic of the organic composition of capital obscures the concep-
tual path that leads from profit as a phenomenon back to its actual source
in surplus-value, in value created by living, cooperative labour-power in the
production stage of the cycle of capital: [T]he organic distinction between
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 Lukcs as
totalising Marxs critique of fetishism, [where the former] tended to bury peoples actual
social practices under the weight of reification (Rehmann 2013, p. 81); or, Horkheimer
and Adornos 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.

constant and variable capital is obliterated in the concept of profit. In actual

fact, therefore, surplus-value denies its own origin in this, its transformed form,
which is profit; it loses its character and becomes unrecognisable.57 Profit now
appears all the more to have been created in circulation,58 whether that be
through the efforts of the ingenious product designer, the shrewd manager or
salesperson, the cutting-edge advertising creative, and so on. This situation
produces the deepening of the ideological appearance of the autonomy of
profit as a category of capitalist activity and an increased conceptual obstacle
to the establishment of the category of surplus-value in generalised aware-
ness. The category of surplus-value and its function, already virtually invisible,
recede deeper into the recesses of popular imagination.
Marx goes on to demonstrate that the outcome of this immanent movement
of capital, the ideological operation fetishism is more systematic than a
simple muddling of appearances. The ideological transformation of forms that
is endemic to the movement of capital generates forms of appearance that are
systematically the inverse of their essential content; profit, for example, as the
transformed form of surplus-value, expresses the inversion of surplus-value.
Surplus-value is the product of socially combined living labour; its connection
to labour is immanent and essential. However, not only does profit appear dis-
connected from labour in the capitalist formation, labour appears anathema
to profit, as an obstacle to the creation of profit. Labour-power is an expense
that the capitalist attempts to reduce as far as possible in the name of generat-
ing profit; s/he would do away with this expense entirely if it were possible.
Marx asks, How...can living labour be the exclusive source of profit, [when]
a reduction in the quantity of labour needed for production not only seems
not to affect the profit, but rather to be the immediate source of increasing
profit in certain circumstances?59 Again, this ideological inversion supplies
the raw material for those popular surface stories of capitalist society, such as,
the generalised understanding that the laying-off of workers in times of eco-
nomic downturn is a rational, prudent and legitimate business strategy on the
part of enterprise. In fact, gaining ascendancy since the 1970s, the narrative
that it is necessary and inevitable for industry to contain the cost of produc-
tion by reducing its labour force, and therefore the amount paid out in wages,
has become so deeply embedded in the popular imagination that it even holds
sway in times of economic stability as good business sense and practice for
maintaining further economic stability! a topsy-turvy world, indeed.
57 Marx 1981, p. 267.

58 Marx 1981, p. 134.
59 Marx 1981, p. 270.

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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 capitals
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
[T]he German Ideology...explains the emergence of ideology from the

social division between mental and manual labour that accompanies the
genesis of the antagonistic classes and the state. According to Marx and
Engels, it is only from this division onwards that consciousness can really
flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing
practice... [This] detached position of intellectuals in society...accord-
ing to the German Ideology, was, however intimately linked to the emer-
gence of the state.64
The Projekt Ideologietheorie (PIT)...considered Marx and Engelss reflec-

tions on ideology to be summarised in the late Engelss concept of
ideological powers: Marx and Engelss analyses are focused on the con-
nections between state and ideology, their ideology-critique is oriented
towards...the withering away of the state.65
61 Marx 1981, p. 1016.

62 It is not clear in Rehmanns discussion whether he is speaking about the state more
generically or the capitalist state in particular.
63 Rehmann 2013, p. 8.
64 Rehmann 2013, pp. 2245.
65 Rehmann 2013, p. 60.

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As I point out above, however, in Marxs 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
capitals 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 yesterdays Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Hearst;
todays 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,
[the surface appearances of capital] contradict both the determination

of value by labour-time and the nature of surplus-value as consisting
of unpaid surplus labour. In competition, therefore, everything appears

upside down. The finished configuration of economic relations, as these

are visible on the surface, in their actual existence, and therefore also in
the notions with which the bearers and agents of these relations seek to
gain an understanding of them, is very different from the configuration
of their inner core, which is essential but concealed, and the concept cor-
responding to it. It is in fact the very reverse and antithesis of this.66
As the capitalist formation develops, surplus-value undergoes an increasing

number of transformations of form in its appearance in the consciousness of
the agents of capital; that is, it generates more conceptual degrees of separa-
tion from its source in expended living labour. An example of this situation
is the case of finance capital. Like all forms of profit, the interest appropri-
ated by the finance capitalist is syphoned from the profit appropriated by the
borrower (the capitalist who puts the borrowed capital to work) in the course
of production-circulation. As we have established, the sole source of interest,
as with any form of profit, is surplus-value. Finance capital, however, appears
to return to the lender having increased in value without changing form, that
is, without ever having entered into production or circulation. Here, money
takes on the magical appearance of self-valorising value, money that makes
more money, a phenomenal form that Marx signifies as MM. Finance capital,
therefore, inserts an additional conceptual degree of separation from the
source of its profit; in other words, it is a more densely mediated form of
capital than is industrial capital. Moreover, this more convoluted and densely
mediated form of capital takes the surface appearance of the most immedi-
ate, automatic form of capital imaginable, MM, doing away with, in general-
ised perception, the cycle of production and circulation, altogether. For Marx,
finance capital represents a deepening of the ideological operation of capital,
the capital fetish to a higher power, or, what Marx calls the automatic fetish.
The more convoluted valorisation process of finance capital, and the doubly
ideological form of MM, which Marx calls the mother of every insane form,67
becomes, according to Marx, the hegemonic representation of capital itself:
It is therefore especially in this form that capital is imagined. It is capital par
excellence.68 We have returned, full circle, to our capitalist who spends money
to make money, the ideological surface story par excellence.
66 Marx 1981, p. 311.

67 Marx 1981, p. 596.
68 Marx 1968, p. 892.

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Conclusion: Social Revolution is the Only End of Ideology
From the preceding exposition of the ideological operation endemic to the

movement of capital we can see that some versions of things some nar-
ratives or representations will have a more difficult time than others cap-
turing popular imagination or settling into common sense. At least in part,
the hegemony of the narrative MM can be attributed to the fact that, as a
function of the historically specific set of circumstances that constitute the
capitalist formation, money, as a structured social form, generates the appear-
ance of having the innate capacity to make more money. And this is moneys
appearance not just from the point of view of the finance capitalist (or it could
not have achieved its hegemonic status), but from the point of view of anyone
who has ever put money in a savings account and collected interest, purchased
government bonds, invested in mutual funds, speculated on the stock market,
participated in a pension plan, or from the point of view of any person who has
experienced the dire consequences of being marginalised from these activi-
ties. With respect to the specific movement of capital, alternative narratives
are relatively hindered in the hegemonic struggle of competing representa-
tions (as is the narrative that all forms of profit from interest are legal claims to
a portion of the total surplus-value socially produced across spheres of produc-
tion a narrative that, even if adequate, is structurally obscured).
This formulation represents a significant departure of a value theory of
ideology from the bulk of ideology-critique that has emerged since Althusser,
and not only the critical versions, but also those versions such as Michael
Freedens that have evacuated from ideology-critique all vestiges of a theory of
emancipation: post-ideological ages are an impossibility in exactly the same
way that post-political ages would be.69 Alternatively, the radically historical
orientation of a value theory of ideology does presuppose the possibility of an
end of ideology scenario; indeed, the end-of-ideology scenario is the principal
thrust of such a critique of ideology. As we know, for Marx, the capitalist for-
mation is not a content-less dynamic of forms; on the contrary, it is animated
by a very specific content: socialised labour subjected to market logic/laws.
As we explored earlier, this content does not reveal itself directly to percep-
tion or observation, but expresses itself in various phenomenal forms, and the
dynamic between this content and its forms of expression is precisely what I
have called the ideological operation. Moreover, this content and this dynamic
are not eternal but historical; they came into existence in the same way as they
will leave it, if they do at all: in all the unpredictable contingency of the course
69 Talshir, Humphrey and Freeden (eds.) 2006, p. 141.

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 Marxs 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 capitals 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-
tals 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.
70 Marx 1981, p. 1016.

71 Marx 1981, p. 956; my emphasis.

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Alternatively, we could follow Marx and refer to the situation simply as the
world market:
[S]eparate individuals have, with the broadening of their activity into

world-historical activity, become more and more enslaved under a power
alien to them (a pressure which they have conceived of as a dirty trick on
the part of the so-called universal spirit, etc.), a power which has become
more and more enormous and, in the last instance, turns out to be the
world market.72
The social division of labour that accidental system of all-round material

dependence73 entails that each individual is inserted into a system of (re)
production that vastly exceeds him or her, geographically, temporally, spa-
tially, and consequently tends to exceed the imagination. World market, how-
ever, seems equally inadequate for capturing capitals dizzying systematicity
today where defaulted mortgages in Sacramento can bring down the econ-
omy of Iceland, and where it seems that to transform one small corner of it
requires overthrowing the entire edifice. Here, again, the identity between the
social ontology of the world market and a perceptual economy that thwarts
the capacity to imagine a transformation towards a different social modal-
ity asserts itself even if or when the exploitative dynamics that warrant such
transformation are thoroughly elucidated. Of course, the world market thwarts
not only a collective perceptual faculty but also that now old-fashioned sound-
ing faculty called praxis. For instance, it is difficult to blame anyone for not
knowing how to proceed in the world today in a way that does not contribute
to collective stasis or, worse, aiding and abetting the system. While we may
participate in the countless banal contradictions that animate everyday life in
capitalist society, they are not our contradictions in the sense that they arise
from the unconscious, from the place of affect, from faulty reasoning, or from
the evolution of philosophical thought, although each of these things is partly
informed by them. They are the thoroughly objective, structural contradic-
tions of the world market.
The most that can be hoped for from a value theory of ideology is that by
exposing to scrutiny these structural contradictions that encourage collective
paralysis, it may alternatively give analytical and rhetorical support to direc-
tional political movement and organisation. In the end, however, nothing more
instrumental can be claimed for a value theory of ideology than its usefulness
72 Marx and Engels 1978, p. 163.

73 Marx 1976, p. 202.

in assembling better understandings of the particular movement of capital.

And while this situates the object of a value theory of ideology as significantly
more narrow than that of a neutral ideology-critique, it also makes it impos-
sible to avoid its inevitable expansion into the scope of a Marxian critique of
political economy more generally, as Rehmann warns:
One is confronted, here, with a difficult and much-debated method-

ological question. If one decides to consider Marxs analysis of capitalist
fetishism as the core of his ideology-critique,...one faces the problem
that its object tends to coincide with the overall project of the critique of
political economy aiming at dialectically reconstructing both the socio-
economic reality and the corresponding thought-forms.74
Rehmann goes on to suggest, however, that [e]quating the ideological with

the silent compulsion of economic relations (and its built-in mystifications)
leaves ideology-critique vulnerable to the charge of economism and makes
a theory of specific ideological apparatuses, practices, and struggles
superfluous.75 Confronting this allegation above, I demonstrate that the cri-
tique of economism, in its own terms, is not adequate to a value theory of ide-
ology. Nonetheless, I confirm that a value theory of ideology does identify the
objective, if negative, content of capital (value, in shorthand) and posits that
the perceptual economy of capital the modality of fetishism or mystification
is the direct expression of this singular substance. This is to say that the typi-
cally dismissed language of echoes and reflexes dismissed as a throwback
to an overly mechanical misrepresentation of Marxs more supple analysis is
actually adequate. Capitals essence is to its form of appearance like verso is to
recto; mediated by the social relation we can abbreviate as the market, wage-
labour, or private property, the expression of this mediated social relation is
nonetheless direct and spontaneous, precisely as Marx describes it throughout
Capital.
The question of the relationship of a value theory of ideology to a theory
of specific ideological apparatuses, practices, and struggles is somewhat more
complicated but no less clearly presented in Marxs analysis of the value form.
I argue above that the two theories of ideology coded as the critical and neu-
tral formulations are distinct but complementary, that they operate within
different but articulated analytical registers. I did not elaborate, however, on
the nature of this articulation. How do we determine the transitional moment
74 Rehmann 2013, p. 48.

75 Ibid.

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between a critical and a neutral analysis? How do we locate the moment when
the spontaneous raw material that is capitals 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 capitals 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, Marxs 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, capitals 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.
Capitals 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 capitals 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:
76 Marx 1981, p. 279.

77 Ibid.

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
Unlike many ideology-theorists who followed, the inclination of Marxs analy-

sis is optimistic about the ineradicable possibility of cracking open every
sedimented appearance of capital and reconfiguring it in a different regime
of perception. And, arguably, it is time to take the risk that many have (not
unjustly) identified as inherent in willful, intentional political strategy, in plan-
ning programmes of political action, in organising dissent, and in mapping
and selling to others new iterations of social production relations. The question
of persuasion is key because a value theory of ideology reveals that selling the
desirability of radical social transformation widely will be a fundamental com-
ponent of its eventuality. It will require a generalised campaign of persuasion
on the grounds of the knowledge of every persons inalienable claim on the
social wealth they collectively produce.
Appendix
While a thorough critique of Rehmanns formulation of ideology-theory is

beyond the scope of this discussion, some explanation for claiming that
Rehmanns important contribution is otherwise problematic in its attempt
to blend a critical and neutral orientation for ideology-theory is warranted.
Rehmanns description of the formulation of ideology forwarded in the PIT,
and which appears to be aligned, for the most part, with his own conception,
is an acknowledged attempt to combine the neutral approaches articulated in
Gramscis theory of hegemony and in Althussers ideological state-apparatus
theory with the critical approach of Marx and Engels.79 The critical premises
that inform both Rehmanns and the PITs ideology-theory are extrapolated
predominantly from The German Ideology and from Engelss later work. In par-
ticular, the orientation of Rehmanns critical approach involves the analysis of
the historical/practical/ideological division of intellectual and manual labour
78 Larrain 1991, p. 16.

79 Rehmann 2013, p. 241.

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(established in practice, supported through existing and emerging social rela-

tions, and stabilised through its institutionalisation) that allows those who
perform a societys intellectual labour to separate and de-integrate themselves
from the collectivity and from that societys dominating force and group one
of its ideological powers located at the top of the social hierarchy. In pre-
capitalist societies, this dominating group and source of ideological power
may take the form of the despot, aristocracy, or clergy. In capitalist society, it
predominantly takes the form of the state, and industrial and financial elites.
Only the former, however, is identified by Rehmann as the principal source
and generator of ideological discourses that support class rule, the vertical,
asymmetrical, power relation of superiority and subordination typical of cap-
italism.80 This expression of power is distinguished from the simultaneously
extant expressions of horizontal power that cohere a collectivity from below,
and do not involve domination per se. In this summary of the PITs critical
orientation, the effort to combine a critical and neutral formulation in these
terms is apparent:
The PITs ideology-critical perspective can thus be summarized in the

following hypothesis: in an association in which the free development
of each is the condition for the free development of all, and in which
the associated producers govern the human metabolism with nature in
a rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being
dominated by it as a blind power, ideology in the sense of a voluntary
subjection to class-, state-, and patriarchal domination loses it functional
necessity. If in a developed classless society the enslaving subordina-
tion of the individual to the division of labour, and therefore also the
antithesis of mental and physical labour has vanished, there is no lon-
ger any need for an illusory community that hovers above actual social
life. This is not to be confused with the assumption that all illusions and
projections would be replaced by complete transparency...A critical
ideology-theory deals with systematic illusions supporting relations of
domination rather than with the epistemological question of truth and
error in general. Since the ideological powers and apparatuses emerged
together with antagonistic classes and alongside the social divisions of
manual and intellectual labour, they can in principle be liberated from
80 Rehmann 2013, p. 242.

their alienated position, reclaimed, and reintegrated into the horizontal

structures of a democratic-socialist society.81
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 Rehmanns (and the PITs) and my formula-
tion of ideology are aligned. Nonetheless, while Rehmanns 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 capitals 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 Marxs 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 pass question of epistemological truth and error with respect to the sys-
tematic appearances (or objective thought forms, as Rehmann justly quotes
81 Rehmann 2013, p. 243.

140 Best
Marx throughout his discussion) generated by the movement of capital. On

the contrary, this question is the sine qua non of a critical theory of ideology
and is the reason why a blending of the critical and neutral conceptions of
ideology is not feasible.
References
Best, Beverley 2010, Marx and the Dynamic of the Capital Formation: An Aesthetics of
Political Economy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
De Angelis, Massimo 1996, Social Relations, Commodity-Fetishism and Marxs Critique
of Political Economy, Review of Radical Political Economics, 28, 4: 129.
Dimoulis, Dimitri and John Milios 2004, Commodity Fetishism vs. Capital Fetishism:
Marxist Interpretations vis--vis Marxs Analysis in Capital, Historical Materialism,
12, 3: 342.
Eagleton, Terry 1991, Ideology: An Introduction, London: Verso.
Hall, Stuart 1981, The Whites of their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media, in Silver
Linings: Some Strategies for the Eighties, edited by George Bridges and Rosalind
Brunt, London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Koivisto, Juha and Veikko Pietil 1996, Ideological Powers and Resistance: The
Contribution of W.F. Haug and Projekt Ideologie-Theorie, Rethinking Marxism, 9,
4: 4059.
Larrain, Jorge 1991, Stuart Hall and the Marxist Concept of Ideology, Theory, Culture
and Society, 8, 4: 128.
Lukcs, Georg 1971, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans-
lated by Rodney Livingstone, London: The Merlin Press.
Marx, Karl 1968, Theories of Surplus Value, Moscow: Progress Publishers, available at:
<www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/add3.htm>.
1976, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 1, translated by Ben
Fowkes, New York: Vintage.
1978 [1859], Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,
in The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert Tucker, New York: W.W. Norton and
Company.
1981, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume 3, translated by David
Fernbach, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
and Friedrich Engels 1978 [1972], The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert
Tucker, New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
Mepham, John 1979, The Theory of Ideology in Capital, in Issues in Marxist Philosophy,
Volume 3: Epistemology, Science, Ideology, edited by John Mepham and David-Hillel
Ruben, Brighton: The Harvester Press.

Pietz, William 1993, Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx, in
Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, edited by Emily Apter and William Pietz, Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
Postone, Moishe 1993, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marxs
Critical Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rehmann, Jan 2013, Theories of Ideology: The Powers of Alienation and Subjection,
Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.
Rubin, Isaak Illich 2008, Essays on Marxs Theory of Value, translated by Milo
Samardija and Fredy Perlman, Delhi: Aakar Books.
Talshir, Gayil, Mathew Humphrey and Michael Freeden (eds.) 2006, Taking Ideology
Seriously: 21st Century Reconfigurations, London: Routledge.
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Historical Materialism 23.

Distilling a Value Theory of Ideology from

This discussion is a reformulation of ideology-critique from the point of view of Marxs

ideology Marx value capital perceptual economy

Introduction: End of Ideology, Again?

koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 5|doi 10.1163/1569206X-12341424

materialisms (new generations of actor-network theory, object-oriented ontol-

Historical Materialism 23.3 (2015) 101141

Historical Materialism 23.3 (2015) 101141

as this work has been, the concentration on a psychoanalytic reading of ide-

The Value Form as Ideology-Critique

The Critical and the Neutral Conceptions of Ideology

Historical Materialism 23.3 (2015) 101141

4 Hall 1981, p. 31.

Historical Materialism 23.3 (2015) 101141

Historical Materialism 23.3 (2015) 101141

Historical Materialism 23.3 (2015) 101141

The critical concept of ideology, and therefore Marxs concept, is cer-

And earlier in the same essay:

A negative [i.e., critical] concept of ideology is inherently capable of dis-

The poststructuralist denunciation of the epistemological violence of truth

Historical Materialism 23.3 (2015) 101141

the truth claims of critical theory were in fact anti-empiricist culminations,

Historical Materialism 23.3 (2015) 101141

15 Rehmann 2013, pp. 26, 312.

Historical Materialism 23.3 (2015) 101141

assembled in the third volume of Capital. Before proceeding directly to the

Historical Materialism 23.3 (2015) 101141

in other words, an understanding that proceeds from a subjective and partial

Historical Materialism 23.3 (2015) 101141

generated appearances the phenomenal forms produced by the objective

We may therefore understand the decisive importance of the transforma-

Historical Materialism 23.3 (2015) 101141

simply by a clear-eyed attention to the real life-process, since that

I depart from Eagletons reading on one account: ideology can indeed be

31 Eagleton 1991, p. 87.

Historical Materialism 23.3 (2015) 101141

considered as a tendency of the capitalist mode of production.34 Against the

The cognition of the revolutionary proletariat, for Lukcs, is part of the

Where my own formulation departs from that of Lukcs is on the question of

Historical Materialism 23.3 (2015) 101141

The Critique of Economism

Historical Materialism 23.3 (2015) 101141

reformulated in Capital as the essence-appearance dynamic or, alternatively,

... [T]he conception of abstract labor, as social relation of work at the

As Marx demonstrates throughout Capital, but which becomes the particular

39 De Angelis 1996, p. 12.

Historical Materialism 23.3 (2015) 101141

If we transcode base-superstructure as the dialectic of content and form in

On the surface of bourgeois society the workers wage appears as the

40 Postone 1993, p. 300.

Historical Materialism 23.3 (2015) 101141

As Moishe Postone points out in his reinterpretation of Marxs theory, labour-

The category of value, in its opposition to that of material wealth, then,

42 Marx 1976, pp. 6757.

Historical Materialism 23.3 (2015) 101141

historically specific social substance, constitutes the identity of capital-

44 Postone 1993, p. 302.

Historical Materialism 23.3 (2015) 101141

... [E]ach individual transaction continues to conform to the laws of com-

47 Marx 1976, pp. 72930.

Historical Materialism 23.3 (2015) 101141

In his mature thought, Marx understood capital to be a species of fetish.