"False Consciousness" and Cultural Hegemony
There has been a third general attempt to grapple with the lack of class conflict within a conflict model, and that has been to attribute the passivity and conservatism of the working class to an artificially induced state of "false consciousness." There are slightly different variants of the false-consciousness argument, but their common feature is to credit the dominant ideology with a pervasive power that pummels the thinking of subordinates. The idea originates with Marx and Engels' famous dictum, laid out in The German Ideology in 1846:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. (Marx and Engels [1846] 1970, 64)
As Abercrombie and Turner (1982) point out, this postulate flatly contradicts Marx's primary prediction that people's consciousness will be
shaped directly by their experiences, that is, that people rationally perceive and interpret their experiences and that from this ability stems the inevitability of eventual class conflict. According to the dictum of false consciousness, the working class, which is designated by Marxist theory as the key agent of change in the capitalist dialectic, fails to perceive its true interests and hence lapses into a deceived acceptance of its own oppression.
Analysts have explored this idea in slightly different ways. Mann (1970) argued that, because subordinate classes display stronger support for the tenets of dominant-class ideology when they are asked about relatively abstract principles than when they are asked about specific applications of those principles, this constitutes evidence that the conservatism of subordinate classes is "false." Mann's logic is that specifics are more likely to be perceived in their context and are thus perceived with the clearer vision that comes from direct experience, whereas abstractions are imposed by dominant ideology and represent an incomplete socialization attempt. Similar arguments about the disjuncture between the abstract and the applied perspectives of the working class have been made by Parkin (1971) and Huber and Form (1973), but without the terminology of "false consciousness."
Perhaps the most sophisticated treatment of false consciousness is to be found in the concept of "cultural hegemony" developed by the Italian communist, Antonio Gramsci (Gramsci 1971). Because it offers an interpretation of the absence of class conflict within a conflict perspective, the concept of cultural hegemony has proved alluring to an increasing number of scholars. And the complexity of Gramsci's ideas and the lack of precision with which he expressed them has left room for a variety of interpretations of the concept (see, for example, G. Williams 1960; Marcuse 1964; Femia 1975; Anderson 1976–1977; R. Williams 1980; Lears 1985; Bocock 1986). The essential argument is that all the major institutions of society are infiltrated by the dominant ideology, blunting the working class's perceptions and molding its values so that the class is rendered impotent as an agent of change. The cultural hegemony of the dominant class prevents the working class from realizing its true interests or, indeed, from developing a value system that would provide the ideological infrastrcture for revolutionary change. From Gramsci's point of view, as a political activist, this meant that changing working-class values was to be an important priority in the political agenda; without a concerted effort to alienate working-class values from those of the cultural hegemony, a true revolution (that would abandon capitalist values) could not be realized.
The concept of cultural hegemony, like that of hidden resistance, offers important insights into the dynamics of ideological control. But,
like the concept of hidden resistance, cultural hegemony is hamstrung by its confinement within a conflict model of class relations. Although various interpretations of cultural hegemony have tackled the concept slightly differently, none of them has been able to resolve the intrinsic difficulties. First, the depiction of working-class consciousness as "false" involves an a priori decision about what the true interests of the working class are (is this a form of analytic paternalism for scholars to pronounce what the working class's interests are, irrespective of what people in the working class themselves believe?), and it leads to inconclusive debates about how to assess the "true" interests of a group (see, for example, Connolly 1972). A related problem (Mann's efforts notwithstanding, 1970), is that the concept of false consciousness is not empirically falsifiable—the falseness of a particular ideological postion can only be determined on a priori grounds. A second and more fundamental problem is the intrinsic contradiction noted above between the ideas of material determinism and cultural ascendancy. If the dominant class prevents subordinates from perceiving their true interests by the imposition of a cultural hegemony, this implies a persistent lack of rationality among subordinates—but the primary prediction of class conflict rests pivotally on the assumption that humans process and act on their experiences rationally. Thus, in an attempt to salvage the prediction of class conflict, some analysts have undermined the rationality assumption on which the prediction of conflict rests.