Chris Doss:
> I'm not sure that the statement that the ruling
ideas
> of any age are the ideas of its ruling classes would
> really stand up to scrutiny, except as a tautology.
I agree with Chris on this point. People's thoughts and actions within capitalism are always occurring *within* the framework of the system itself.
I think if one reads Marx closely, it is clear that the society of generalized commodity production and exchange possesses a specific logic that *every* member of society is forced to adhere to or risk personal ruin.
Capitalism is also a society with social classes, but that is not what *distinguishes* it *as* capitalism. Class societies have existed for millenia before capitalism, and in Marx's account in Capital, the section on social classes comes at the end of Vol. 3 and then the manuscript breaks off. It is clear that classes here are a derivative category of the commodity form.
Capitalism also has specific accompanying ideological forms, such as Racism (not to be confused with pre-capitalist xenophobia), Anti-semitism (not to be confused with medieval religious hatred of Jews), Social Darwinism, capitalist forms of patriarchy etc. But these ideologies are not specifically ruling class ideas, but rather general ideologies of this society that all social classes more or less succumb to.
This is essentially the problem with people like Naomi Klein: even when they bother to address capitalism as a specific social form, it is always conceived as a conspiracy of a devious ruling class, rather than an objective social structure with its own peculiar logic that we all reproduce daily. I once saw a piece of street art by the A.G. Gender Killer <http://www.gender-killer.de> which made this point very well:
"Capitalism Is Not a Capitalist Conspiracy: It Works Because You Work!"
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