Marx on Materialism, Consciousness, and Rhetorical Theory

Introduction: Materialism Before Consciousness

For Karl Marx, an understanding of rhetoric begins with a type of chicken-or-egg question. While philosophers and critical theorists prior to Marx all assumed that consciousness preceded materialism — that human modes of thought created perceptions of the material world — Marx insists that the exact reverse is actually the case. The material world and the interactions with which humans must contend precede the modes of thought they engage in, and even the modes of thought they can engage in. This is one of the most radical and profound assertions to be made in rhetorical (and political, philosophical, and related) theory, and thus one still worthy of inspection and analysis almost two centuries after Marx first published his ideas on the subject. The following pages examine the foundations of Marx's rhetorical theory and their implications for modern understandings and the progress of human thought.

Ideology and Manifesto

Manifesto of the Communist Party is unquestionably Karl Marx's (and his partner Frederick Engels') most well-known work, and it contains many claims important to an understanding of Marx's broader rhetorical theory. However, a full comprehension of his approach to human thought and expression must include a careful reading of an earlier work, The German Ideology. It is here that Marx explicitly expresses his major break with previous rhetorical thought, examining the changes in German philosophy and ideology that occurred during his own time and then rejecting these so-called "revolutionary" changes — along with the centuries of thought that still served as their foundation. He upends the traditional view of consciousness preceding materialism that permeated all ideology and philosophy, no matter how new and different the progenitors of these ideas claimed them to be.

Marx describes his truly radical position as follows: "we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process" (The German Ideology, part IA, sec. 4). Simply put, instead of proceeding from the immaterial world of consciousness to the world of material existence and interactions between human individuals, Marx begins by examining the material existence and interactions of human beings and from this extrapolates the consciousness that must necessarily exist to support them.

Even before delving any deeper into Marx's philosophies and their implications for rhetorical theory, there is considerable fodder for analysis in this deceptively simple statement. If the material world of human existence and interaction — the means by which needs are satisfied and things are made in human society — informs or controls consciousness and the modes by which thoughts can be formed and expressed, then physical control of the material world means control of consciousness. Those who hold more resource power in a society would also hold more power in terms of defining and controlling expression — and not only expression, but the very formation of thought. These are sentiments that George Orwell would explicitly explore in one of the more extreme possibilities imaginable in his novel 1984, published a century after Marx's German Ideology.

It is also something Marx and Engels explored explicitly in Manifesto of the Communist Party, the political treatise that defines the proletariat as the labor class enslaved to the bourgeoisie, or ownership class. In the Manifesto, Marx makes the case that through their control of the means of production the ownership class controls society as a whole — not simply in regards to labor, wages, and other directly economic features of society, but down to family life and indeed all interpersonal interactions that occur within a capitalist and industrial society. With control over the material world, then, comes control over consciousness.

Implications of Marx's Rhetorical Theory

With the ideology of the ownership class necessarily becoming the dominant ideology throughout the world — not simply through the direct spread of industry and capitalism but through dramatic changes in international trade and economies brought about by capitalist and industrialist developments in single countries — the bourgeoisie acquires dramatic power to shape global events and politics. This power operates through the shaping of the thoughts that can be had and the modes by which they can be expressed: through control over rhetorical interpretation and expression, in other words.

Using a Marxist approach to rhetorical theory carries a variety of benefits and drawbacks for theorists and critics working from many different perspectives. The benefits of such a perspective are clear, if somewhat ominous: they provide concrete and measurable ways of developing an understanding of thought itself, and of how thoughts are created and expressed. Identifying the dominant ideology — the capitalist and industrialist ideology according to Marx — identifies the types of thought and modes of thinking available to individuals, and allows for cross-cultural comparisons of materialism and consciousness (through such things as language use) to identify the varying effects of different specific forces. In addition, Marx's perspective on rhetoric and consciousness provides a clear and concrete means of achieving material effects through rhetorical manipulation, or conversely of determining how changes in the material world might affect, do affect, or have affected changes in consciousness and rhetoric. Marx's theory is not alone in taking rhetoric out of the realm of the abstract and describing its concrete interactions in the material world, but it is one of the most complete and well-defined rhetorical approaches in this regard.

The drawbacks of a Marxist approach to rhetoric are not quite as easily explained, but are equally present. First and foremost is the extreme politicization of rhetorical understanding and basic consciousness — something that is an unavoidable and even explicitly important part of Marx's theory. Truly everything is political in Marx's view, and this can make discussions and dialogues with other rhetorical theories and theorists quite difficult when this basic premise of politicization is disputed. The other foundational element of Marx's theory — namely, that all rhetorical interpretations and understandings are tied to class and economics — is the very concretization of rhetoric that makes the theory so important and revolutionary. Yet it can also produce incredibly narrow and arguably myopic readings of certain texts that are meant to exist outside of the concrete and material world. The Marxist argument is, of course, that no text can actually exist outside of the material facts of its creation, but this insistence highly limits the possible interpretations of texts that are more "artistic" or non-fact-based, such as poetry. As scholars of Marxist criticism have noted, this tension between materialist determinism and aesthetic openness remains one of the central unresolved problems in the tradition.

Conclusion

Karl Marx is rightly considered one of the most important critics and philosophers of the modern era, not necessarily because he was correct in all of his conclusions, but because his conclusions were profound departures from existing thought. Though his work does not explicitly deal with rhetoric to a large degree, the implications of his writings on the nature of human thought and consciousness are undeniably related to rhetorical theory. Though there are significant drawbacks to adopting a solely Marxist approach to rhetorical interpretation and creation, there are many benefits to the ability to see through a Marxist lens.