False Consciousness

This paper analyzes the empiricat utility of cossensual and conNictual theories in explaining the social cohesion of the liberal democracies of Britasn and the United States. After clarifying conceptual problems of value consensus tSleory and Marxist theory, it examines the forms and extent of value-commitment in these countries. The conclusion is that both theories grossly overstate the amount of both value consensus betweee individuals and value consistency within individuals that actually exists. Cohesion in liberal democracy depends rather on the lack of consistent commitment to general values of atry sort and on the "pragmatic acceptance" by subordinate classes of their limited roles in society. Suggestive evidence is also found for the existence of some "false consciousness" among sgbordanate classes.

The present paper will analyze the theme of power, corruption, and dystopia in George Orwell’s Animal Farm in terms of Marxist critical approach. The paper will discuss how Orwell uses the dystopian to criticize how revolutionary ideals were corrupted and how a new order of authoritarianism was created. The political allegory of the Russian Revolution and the coming of totalitarianism in Russia, the analysis illustrates how political power is gradually concentrated in the hands of the pigs to lead to social inequality, manipulation of ideologies and oppression of freedom. On the basis of major Marxist principles that include the class struggle, ideological domination, and false consciousness, the paper will be used to unveil that, the revolutionary movements can be used to recreate new forms of oppression as soon as power is centralized. The paper also brings out the use of propaganda, language twist and reorganization of social order in creating dystopian political order through close textual analysis. Finally, the paper states that Animal Farm is still a strong protest against authoritarianism and an unforgettable lesson against the degradation of the ideals of political ideals by the regimes of absolute power.

Socialist thinking is linked to democratic thought in so far as socialist theories originated in the attempt to take liberalism at its word: not to reserve its promise of freedom and self-determination to the bourgeoisie but to extend it to ‘the people’. At the same time, German socialist thinking has always been marked by its scepticism towards democracy and its distrust of just those ‘people’. The article undertakes to trace back this distrust to prominent traditions of German political philosophy: the Kantian tradition of the ‘rule of reason’, Hegelian ideas about the ‘realm of reason’ and the ‘ethical form of life’ and the Marxist notion of ‘false consciousness’. In a second step it analyses the writings of a group of academics known as the ‘neo-Marxists’ in the 1970s who proved to be influential, especially in the social sciences in Germany. The focus is, first, on their view of the individual, its lack of ‘autonomy’ and its ‘wrong preferences’ and second, on the futility of democracy and the ‘illusion of the social state’. It concludes with a brief criticism of the turn to deliberative democratic theory recently taken by some of the authors, supporting a theory which seems bent more on reforming the individual than on reforming the circumstances which he or she has to endure.

This article examines how and why Edith Wharton's representations of disability played a key role in shaping the early interpretive community's reactions to Ethan Frome. Several reviews converge to demonstrate that Wharton's preoccupation with atrophic bodies and minds provoked a disenchantment with Ethan Frome after its initial appearance in print in 1911. In the eyes of some reviewers, disability amounted to a controversial feature that made Ethan Frome seem unassimilable within the concept of an ideal novel and self. Contextualizing the novel within its immediate reviews reveals how it engages with the Progressive Era's take on the “proper sphere” of disabled people both on the literary and cultural landscapes. The strong responses—even objections—to disability in the 1911 reviews stirred noteworthy discussions about impairment and normalcy, signifying that Wharton's work not only provoked resistance toward manifestations of unresolved disabledness but also participated in the debates about the acceptability of cultural expressions of disability.

ABSTRACT: Everybody knows most white working people no longer vote for Democrats, but there’s no agreement why. Leftists blame neoliberals for enacting policies that deregulated business instead of redistributing wealth. Conservatives and some liberals argue that the fault lies in cultural ideas and principles that progressives have compelled Democrats to embrace—from transgender rights and restrictions on gun ownership to critical race theory and a dismissal of religious faith. Others, echoing the Marxist notion of “false consciousness,” accuse ordinary white people of fearing Black Americans and undocumented immigrants instead of making common cause with fellow workers of different racial or national backgrounds.

This paper looks to make a contribution to the critical project of psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff, by elucidating her account of ‘drug-centred’ psychiatry, and its relation to critical and cultural theory. Moncrieff's ‘drug-centred’ approach to psychiatry challenges the dominant view of mental illness, and psychopharmacology, as necessitating a strictly biological ontology. Against the mainstream view that mental illnesses have biological causes, and that medications like ‘anti-depressants’ target specific biological abnormalities, Moncrieff looks to connect pharmacotherapy for mental illness to human experience, and to issues of social justice and emancipation. However, Moncrieff's project is complicated by her framing of psychopharmacological politics in classical Marxist notions of ideology and false consciousness. Accordingly, she articulates a political project that would open up psychiatry to the subjugated knowledge of mental health sufferers, whilst also characterising those sufferers as beholden to ideology, and as being effectively without knowledge. Accordingly, in order to contribute to Moncrieff's project, and to help introduce her work to a broader humanities readership, this paper elucidates her account of ‘drug-centred psychiatry’, whilst also connecting her critique of biopsychiatry to notions of biologism, biopolitics, and bio-citizenship. This is done in order to re-describe the subject of mental health discourse, so as to better reveal their capacities and agency. As a result, this paper contends that, once reframed, Moncrieff's work helps us to see value in attending to human experience when considering pharmacotherapy for mental illness.

This research study focuses on the analysis of reflection of Marxist ideology through the Asuran film (2019), which is directed by Vetrimaaran. The contemporary marxist film is observed contextually through the historic literary work of Kral Marx. The attributes derived from the literary works of Marxism by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles from their books- The Communist Manifesto (1848), Das Kapital (1867) and The German ideology (1932) have become the core marxist principles for this study. Among them, the core concepts of Marxism include - class conflict, base and superstructure, false consciousness, class consciousness alienation, materialism, and Capitalistic society are chosen as variables. In borrowing those marxist ideas the researcher has observed and analysed it through thematic, characteristic and symbolic representation in the Asuran Film. This research gave findings of how to understand film through marxist approach. The researcher did understand the relevance of marxism in storytelling, how marxist elements can be used in building story and what all should be present to consider a movie is oriented to marxist ideology. How to cite this article:Akash K. Reflection of Marxist Ideologies through the Film ‘Asuran (2019)’. J Adv Res Jrnl Mass Comm 2023; 10(1): 8-12. DOI: https://doi.org/10.24321/2395.3810.202302

Marx's significant discussions on problem of population production are scattered in a series of his works, especially in <i>Capital</i> and its manuscripts. Research reveals that through the preliminary construction of historical materialism in <i>German Ideology</i>, the critique of classical and vulgar economics' population theories in the <i>Capital</i> manuscripts, and further research and elaboration in <i>Capital</i> itself, there exists a theory of population production embedded in Marx's critical system of political economy. Marx's theory of population production can be summarized as follows: one core law, three pairs of important relationships, and three key issues. Trying to explore and construct Marx's theory of population production is not only the need of innovating and developing Marxist political economy, but also the need of explaining and responding to practical problems.

The individual and Marx's theory of change

The last five decades have witnessed sociologists formulating various scales to measure and assess the degree of alienation of workers. Critical Marxists, however, argue that de-ideologisation and valueneutrality cannot be seen as desirable properties of a reconceptualization of the Marxian notion of alienation. Most Marxist scholars are not in favour of a comparative-quantitative analysis of Marx's theory of alienation. Nevertheless, Sen situates Marx's theory in the category of those which carry out “realization-focused comparison” (as opposed to “transcendental institutionalism”), by comparing societies that actually exist or may evolve. This paper articulates the need for an operationalization of the concept of alienation in empirical terms and calls for a meaningful dialogue between the capability approach to meaningful work and the emerging and significant body of literature on alienation and capabilities. It argues that alienation, translated to the capability vocabulary as “impairments in responsible agency to attain the capabilities one has reason to value” may also be mapped onto failed social relationships. Even when we do not limit the concept of alienation to the system-anti-system binary, we need to understand it in the context of the failures of economic institutions existing in the contemporary world.

Probably no area of thought has been neglected and abused by orthodox Marxism as much as the field of legal theory. Literature from the Left hearkens back to the dreary reductionism of such concepts as the state as an instrument of the bourgeoisie, culture as ideology and base-superstructure models of society. Marxists have rarely granted law any explanatory significance in their understanding of the organization of human communities. Rather, legality is considered a sphere of ideological domination, intrinsic to capitalism, that becomes superfluous with the inevitable demise of bourgeois property relations. An escape from 'the deepening crisis in Marxist theory' would require a revised critical analysis of law.' Such a critique may move Marxism closer to filling the gap left by its founder in the conceptualization of the political under socialism. Promising a 'conceptual analysis of the idea of socialist rights', Tom Campbell's recent book, The Left and Rights, is a welcome contribution to the formulation of a radical perspective on the place of legal rights in an emancipated society.2 Campbell states his aim to be to 'establish the appropriateness of the language of rights to describe the normative human relationships within a fully socialist community' (LR I93). He identifies a 'family quarrel' on the Left between 'revolutionaries', who contend that the whole notion of rights is 'incurably bourgeois', and 'reformists', who argue that there is something of lasting value to salvage from the traditional concept of rights (LR, 3). Campbell seeks to develop a coherent reformist position by investigating and refuting the revolutionary's objections to the concept of socialist rights. The book launches a three-pronged attack on 'moralism', 'legalism', and 'individualism' in order to establish an alternative basis for rights. 'Moralist' attempts to ground rights in natural law are rejected for a more 'positivistic' approach, which, although sceptical of the legalistic claims prominent in rule-based theories, affirms that rules would be an essential tool in the organization of socialist society. Such rules need not be coercive, however, since socialist man would be such that force would not be necessary to command obedience. These rules are given content by a theory of rights based on altruistic interests rather than the individualism integral to liberal

Historically rooted in 1970s socialist feminism, feminist cultural materialism straddles the social sciences and humanities as a field of inquiry and methodology committed to transformative, emancipatory politics. Initially elaborated as a feminist encounter with Marxist theory, feminist materialism was theorized in the late 1970s by feminists who attempted to explain women’s specific forms of oppression within capitalist and patriarchal structures. Early practitioners interrogated contemporary Marxism for its lack of attention to women’s work and unpaid labour (Dalla Costa and James 1972), and embraced the term “materialist feminism” on the grounds that Marxism needed to be reconfigured before it could be productively realigned with feminist concerns (Delphy 1975). As the field developed, practitioners increasingly worked to interrogate the implicit white, middle-class, heterosexual subject at the heart of much mainstream feminist organizing (Bunch 1975; Carby 1982; Joseph 1981), to think across global borders in order to recognize women’s specific positioning in patriarchal and capitalist systems (Alexander and Mohanty 1997), and to theorize the complexities of “global sisterhood” (Mohanty 2003). At stake, then, was a process of realignment that involved not just a transformation of Marxist notions of value and work, productive and unproductive labour, but also a transformation of whom feminism would speak for, what forms of knowledge would be valued, and how those knowledges would be produced. Feminists called for, as noted by Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe, “a transformation of traditional institutionalized modes of acquiring knowledge” (1978: 2). In these terms, feminist materialism was a project that sought to theorize the systemic links between capitalism and patriarchy within historically specific contexts, to interrogate the implicit subject of feminist organizing, and to revalue collective organizing as a social practice intricately connected with broader forms of social organization.

The following papers were prepared for a panel discussion of William M. Dugger's and Howard J. Sherman's new book, entitled Reclaiming Evolution: A Dialogue Between Marxism and Institutionalism on Social Change, held in April of 2001 at the annual meeting of the Association for Institutional Thought in Reno, Nevada. While the immediate purpose of the discussion was to review Dugger and Sherman's book, its broader objective was to explore the extent to which Marxian and Institutional theories of social change offer a common framework for the interpretation and critique of society. This broader objective can be seen as having emerged out of a dialogue, which has been occurring with increased frequency, between Marxists and Institutionalists seeking to find common ground. This search is reflected in the growing number of papers exploring the points of convergence between Marxism and Institutionalism, to which Dugger and Sherman have contributed (1994, 1997), the growing number of panels dedicated to this topic at meetings of the Association for Institutional Thought and the Association for Evolutionary Economics, and the emergence of a Radical Institutionalist movement within the Institutionalist camp, of which Dugger is an excellent example. This search for common ground has occurred against a background of rightist politics on the one hand, with its concomitant attack against the progressive welfare state, and, on the other hand, a fatuous scientism that has prevented

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison represents Afro-American’s traumatic experiences in American society. The cultural trauma, which is the consequence of the white culture’s domination, penetrates the black’s collective experiences. As an Afro-American writer, Morrison is aware of the black’s subordinate position in America and the negative characteristics of black stereotype rooting in the public’s conception. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison selects “beauty” as the motif to disclose the complicated and ambivalent social context underneath the black’s collective experience. While the inescapable consequence for the black to reproduce their history of subordination actually results from the inaccessible trauma, Morrison knows the need to re-examine the black’s history by retelling the black’s story and expects the possibility to awaken the black’s consciousness and to reclaim their position in American history. The thesis is divided into two chapters to respectively discuss the story and the form in The Bluest Eye and further look for the political meaning in Morrison’s narrative. In the story, Morrison represents the black’s collective experience of subjecting to the white values and being confined to the cultural trauma which results in the black’s shame and guilt. Every protagonist in the story projects his/her shame on Pecola, who eventually becomes the scapegoat of the black community, and determines Pecola’s madness. However, in the form of the novel, Morrison shows her protest against the dominant power by challenging the traditional literary form, such as the juxtapositions of different narratives, texts and genres in the novel. By combining the content and form in the novel, Morrison displays the potential of the black writing which never asserts its entire separation from the white culture but rather accepts the influence of the white’s ideological domination in the black’s history. The political meaning in the novel lies in its exposition of the black’s ambivalence of being an American with the black skin and its attempt to challenge the white’s domination by the formal devices. By juxtaposing the different narratives in the story, Morrison tries to emphasize that every black’s personal experience is enwound with their cultural trauma and results in different personal meaning. It is Morrison’s strategy to challenge the black’s history is collective and unchangeable.

The author links the purview of the “new-consciousness” novel to Edward Said’s conceptualization of “decentered consciousness,” a term he uses to describe postcolonial cultural and intellectual efforts that aim at disrupting constituencies and ideologies of dominance and essentialism. Following a historical approach to understanding the emergence of novelistic genres, this chapter reviews the historical conditions surrounding the production of several Egyptian novels—from Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s Zaynab to what Sabry Hafez calls the “New Egyptian Novel” of the 1990s—to exhibit how the novel, in responding to its historical moment, defies definitional stability due to the dialectical process of historical change. The socio-political and cultural context underlying the rise of the new-consciousness novel is similarly analyzed to detect the homologies and disjunctures it has with its antecedent counterparts as well as highlight its new distinct and cohesive semantic and formal features of heteroglossia and what it achieves as a corpus.