[Xmca-l] Re: vygotsky's theory and symbolic interactionism

[Robert Lake]

See highlighted phrase below :-).

Marx-Engels Correspondence 1893
Engels to Franz Mehring Abstract
------------------------------

Source: *Marx and Engels Correspondence*;
Publisher: International Publishers (1968);
First Published: *Gestamtausgabe*;
 Translated: Donna Torr;
Transcribed: Sally
Ryan<http://www.marxists.org/admin/volunteers/biographies/sryan.htm>in
2000;
HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.
------------------------------
London, July 14, 1893

Today is my first opportunity to thank you for the *Lessing Legend* you
were kind enough to send me. I did not want to reply with a bare formal
acknowledgment of receipt of the book but intended at the same time to tell
you something about it, about its contents. Hence the delay.

I shall begin at the end — the appendix on historical materialism, in which
you have described the main things excellently and for any unprejudiced
person convincingly. If I find anything to object to it is that you
attribute more credit to me than I deserve, even if I count in everything
which I might possibly have found out for myself – in time – but which Marx
with his more rapid *coup d’oeil* (grasp) and wider vision discovered much
more quickly. When one has the good fortune to work for forty years with a
man like Marx, one does not usually get the recognition one thinks one
deserves during his lifetime. Then if the greater man dies, the lesser
easily gets overrated, and this seems to me to be just my case at present;
history will set all this right in the end and by that time one will be
safely round the corner and know nothing more about anything.

Otherwise there is only one other point lacking, which, however, Marx and I
always failed to stress enough in our writings and in regard to which we
are all equally guilty. That is to say, we all laid, and *were bound to lay*,
the main emphasis, in the first place, on the *derivation* of political,
juridical and other ideological notions, and of actions arising through the
medium of these notions, from basic economic facts. But in so doing we
neglected the formal side — the ways and means by which these notions,
etc., come about — for the sake of the content. This has given our
adversaries a welcome opportunity for misunderstandings, of which Paul
Barth is a striking example.

Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously,
indeed, but with a false consciousness.


On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 9:24 PM, Martin John Packer
<mpacker@uniandes.edu.co>wrote:

> Wikipedia attributes the phase to Engels.
>
> Martin
>
> On Apr 1, 2014, at 8:13 PM, Douglas Williams <djwdoc@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> > Hi--
> >
> > The term false consciousness is from Walter Benjamin in a 1930 review of
> Siegfried Kracauer's Die Angestellten, drawing from Marx. The idea in Marx
> is described in terms of alienation and estrangement from real objects and
> activity.
> >
> > https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm
> >
> >
> > ________________________________
> > From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
> > To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> > Sent: Tuesday, April 1, 2014 5:14 PM
> > Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: vygotsky's theory and symbolic interactionism
> >
> >
> > Tom, so far as I know, the term "false consciousness" was invented by
> > feminists in the 1970s and was never used by Marx, and I don't think the
> > concept is consistent with his ideas, as expressed in the Theses on
> > Feuerbach which you quoted, for example.
> > Andy
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > *Andy Blunden*
> > http://home.mira.net/~andy/
> >
> >
> >
> > Tom Richardson wrote:
> >> ... In the first place, it should be noted that Marx, like Spinoza and
> later
> >> Freud, believed that most of what men consciously think is "false"
> >> consciousness, is ideology and rationalization; that the true
> mainsprings
> >> of man's actions are unconscious to him.
> >>
>
>
>