False Consciousness/False Needs

False consciousness is a concept that developed in Marxist theory, in conjunction with ideology, to denote working-class people's inability to understand the economic and social conditions of their exploitation, especially insofar as they have been deceived by the forces of religion and nationalism. The concept of false needs emerged in the mid-twentieth century among scholars associated with the Frankfurt School in response to the consumer culture's use of advertising and marketing to manufacture desire and demand. The common thread linking both is the idea that oppressed peoples have been distracted by cultural and ideological processes that prevent them from understanding the sources of their oppression and from organizing to effect a social revolution. Both concepts have frequently been criticized by cultural theorists, including neo-Marxists, on account of their assumptions about what constitutes true consciousness and true needs.

The phrase false consciousness was never used by Karl Marx himself. It was Friedrich Engels who first used it in a letter to Franz Mehring, written in 1893, in which he declared, “Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all” (quoted in Eagleton 1991, 89). False consciousness was thus related to a notion of ideology that Marx and Engels developed in The German Ideology, in which distortions of thought are produced by material conditions and social contradictions. Insofar as ideologies appear to be independent of material reality and disguise the contradictions in society, they serve to reproduce and legitimate the interests of the ruling class.

Marxists gave more consideration to questions of consciousness and ideology in the period between the two world wars, in large part as a consequence of the failure of revolutionary working-class movements [Page 570]and the rise of fascism. Georg Lukács theorized the phenomenon of reification in relation to class consciousness, explaining how capitalist society could appear to have a life of its own such that its conditions seem to be natural, eternal, and inevitable. Reified consciousness is “false” not simply because one believes in mistaken ideas or erroneous illusions, but also because it fails to grasp the totality of social relations, the processes of historical change, and the potential for revolutionary agency. Reification is thus characterized by fragmentation or, more precisely, by a mixture of specialization, mechanization, and quantification that Lukács illuminated by linking Marx's concept of commodity fetishism with Max Weber's account of rationalization. Lukács wrote that “the barrier which converts the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie into ‘false’ consciousness is objective; it is the class situation itself. It is the objective result of the economic set-up, and it is neither arbitrary, subjective or psychological” (1971, 54). As bourgeois thought is certain to be limited by reification, Lukács theorized that only the proletariat, in a situation of revolutionary praxis, would be equipped to comprehend the whole of social relationships and the historical process of dialectical movement through class struggle.

During the interwar period, other Marxists offered complementary theoretical concepts to explain the distortions and limitations of consciousness under capitalism, such as Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemony and Henri Lefebvre's critique of mystification. In the postwar years, critical theorists turned their focus to the consumer culture and its manufacture of false needs. In their famous essay on the culture industry, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno argued that radio, film, and other media of entertainment had colonized leisure time with the same capitalist logic of exchange value that defines labor time. Horkheimer and Adorno recognized that workers, because of their experiences of alienation and boredom at work, do in some sense “need” distraction and fantasy in their leisure time. However, they maintained that the culture industry never delivers on its promises but instead cheats its audience out of pleasure and only produces the same kind of standardized conformity and monotonous uniformity that characterizes the workplace.

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