ENGL 200 D: Reading Literature: Literature in the Marketplace

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”

What Marx meant by this is that humans are capable of making or shaping their own nature to some extent depending in the social class they belong to. The members of the ruling class have the same ideas. These ideas rule the whole society. That is, the class which owns the property, factories, and, in fact, all the means of material production, at the same time controls the means of mental production. The ruling ideas of a society are the ideas of the ruling class. These ideas express and justify the power of the ruling class over the rest of society. Just as there is division of labor in factories, there is also division of labor in the field of thought. Some members of the ruling class earn their living by being the thinkers of that class. They come up with the ideas which express what the ruling class wants to think about itself. Other members of the ruling class don’t have time to make up these ideas. This creates conflict  but, in reality, this conflict never comes to anything because, at bottom, the members of the ruling class all have the same beliefs.