1. The Development of Ideas in Social Production

How do ideas arise and what are they? For thousands of years people have observed that men, unlike animals, have a unique ability to think and religious people have explained this capacity by saying that God created man “in his own image” and there by endowed him with certain qualities which animals do not have.

Marxism, however, as the scientific theory of the working class, focuses its attention upon material production in order to explain the development of human thought, for while it is always possible, as Marx and Engels put it, to distinguish men from animals “by consciousness, religion or anything else you like,"

they themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization.[1]

The activity of production requires the evolution of the species to the point in which man's immediate ancestors began to adopt an upright posture, to develop manual dexterity, vocal cords capable of articulating speech sounds, and a complex nervous system in the brain, so that the formation of abstract ideas becomes possible. Indeed, the simplest act of production — the manufacture of stone flints, for example — is only possible if there is the coordination of all mental and manual faculties. To make something, we not only have to use our hands, we must also be able to identify the objects in our environment, and describe them with words and ideas to those with whom we cooperate, for production is and always has been, a social activity. This means—the question which concerns me here—we must develop the capacity to think. Just as natural evolution enables us to understand how it became physically possible for men to actually produce their means of subsistence, so the act of material production makes it possible to explain why men need to think as a necessary part of their social activity as producers. In a famous passage on “The Labour Process” in Capital, Marx comments:

Alternative Orange Pedagogical Texts:

Introductions to Marxism, Philosophy and Class Struggle

[sic.]

a spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.[2]

The use of ideas is an essential part of the activity of production, for as Marx adds,

at the end of every labour process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement.

It is true that we are able through our imagination to conjure up ideas which bear no obvious connection to the external world, and it is for this reason that idealists argue that ideas exist as “other worldly spirits” originating in a world all of their own. In fact, there is no mystery about the origin of our ideas, even in their most fantastic and unreal form: all ideas arise as a necessary part of our social activity, our relationships to one another and to the world around us. Because our outlook on life has its roots in the way we produce, Marxists reject all attempts to explain the differences between people simply in terms of their religion, nationality or “race." The thoughts people have, the culture they develop, the society they build arise in the last analysis from their activity in social production.

But if the roots of our ideas are to be found in the world of material production what relationship do the ideas in our head bear to the objective world of reality? This is a vital question to answer if we are later to tackle the whole question of “truth” and “falsehood." To explore it more fully, it is necessary first to go into the problem of: [...click "Next"]