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How Did Marx Fall Prey To Elster's Suicide

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I am now going to provide my response to the worry, by looking at how far thought is determined by life. In order to do this I will take a more charitable reading to show that Marx does not fall prey to Elster’s worries. Elster seems to think Marx’s theory on life determining consciousness does not attribute what Elster thinks he does. Elster’s view then is that Marx’s theory requires thought to be monolithic. Meaning that there is just one set of beliefs that we all universally share, and that those beliefs are completely determined by our social situation. However, his theory is not entailing this. There are occasions in the German Ideology where he talks about things like ideology, ideas and beliefs. However he talks about them as though …show more content…

He says this is determined with the “…ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out” For a belief to then becoming dominant it must somehow defeat rival beliefs. This seems to show that there is something wrong with the monolithic reading, since thoughts and ideas can be divided into different types. This shows that what Marx is actually saying is that a variety of views about society exist at any time, but only some of these will serve ideological functions. These will then be false on Marx’s reading of things. This can further be seen in the German Ideology: “The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships…grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance” . The ideas and interests of the dominant classes are the ones that serve the function then. This puts a distinction between dominant and non-dominant beliefs, showing that ideas are not monolithic. Rather, the ideological beliefs are the dominant ones that win the battle even though there are other non-dominant beliefs kicking around. This then begins to show a way out of the …show more content…

There are two ways to think about how life has an effect on consciousness. 1: Life somehow giving rise to beliefs that are directly kicking around. Or 2: Life acting as a constraint on the beliefs becoming dominant. Both ways would be consistent with what Marx says about life determining consciousness, however the second way frees Marx from the self-defeating worry. This is through the following: all sorts of people can think of all sorts of things, but as the philosopher Daniel Dennett famously calls them, which one of those things becomes dominant or a ‘popular meme’ is determined by social and economic life. Imagine trying to promote atheism in a time of theism, it would probably be seen as being incongruent with existing ways of thinking. It would act as a constraint for what you can put out into the public domain and what can be accepted. Marx’s claim is similar to this, in that the bits of life that are doing the constraining are the functions to fit to existing ways of producing. If people have a natural resistance to something then gaining attraction will be hard, since it is going to involve some sort of emotional cost. So even though there is a big set of ideas, some of those will be constrained by certain things that are preventing them from being

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