Character mask

Character masks versus social masks

As a psychological term, "character" is traditionally used more in continental Europe, while in Britain and North America the term "personality" is used in approximately the same contexts. Marx however uses the term "character mask" analogously to a theatrical role, where the actor (or the characteristics of a prop) represents a certain interest or function, and intends by character both "the characteristics of somebody" and "the characteristics of something". Marx's metaphorical use of the term "character masks" refers back to carnival masks and the masks used in classical Greek theatre. At issue is the social form in which a practice is acted out.

A sophisticated academic language for talking about the sociology of roles did not exist in the mid-19th century. Marx therefore borrowed from theatre and literature to express his idea. Although György Lukács pioneered a sociology of drama in 1909, a sociology of roles began only in the 1930s, and a specific sociology of theatre (e.g. by Jean Duvignaud) first emerged in the 1960s. Marx's concept is both that an identity appears differently from its true identity (it is masked or disguised), and that this difference has very real practical consequences (the mask is not simply a decoration, but performs a real function and has real effects, even independently of the mask bearer).

The nearest equivalent term in modern English for Marx's "character masks" is social masks. However, such a translation is not entirely satisfactory, for several reasons:

Nevertheless, the Argentinian/Spanish sociologist Pablo Nacach has used the concept of "social masks" in a wider, critical sense.

"False awareness"

There is a link between character masks and the concept of deliberate misrepresentation and hypocrisy. Yet character masks need not be hypocritical, insofar as the motive for their use is genuine, sincere, principled or naive – or a product of (self-)delusion. People can also mask their behaviour, or mask a situation, without being aware that they are doing so. Paul Ricœur explains:

What distinguishes false-consciousness from error or falsehood, and what motivates a particular kind of critique, of denunciation, is the possibility of signifying another thing than one believes was signified, that is, the possibility of the masked consciousness. These two words, "false consciousness," pertain usually to Marx... Consciousness, far from being transparent in itself, is at the same time what reveals and what conceals; it is this relation of conceal/reveal which calls for a specific reading, a hermeneutics. The task of hermeneutics... has always been to read a text and to distinguish the true sense from the apparent sense, to search for the sense under the sense.

The "false awareness" (falsches Bewusstsein) in the classical sense used by Friedrich Engels does not necessarily refer to "errors" in the content of awareness. It refers rather to an absence of awareness of what is really behind the ideas being worked with, how they have originated, or what the real role or effect of the ideas is. The first result of that is, that the ideologists believe themselves to be performing certain intellectual operations with regard to an issue, which, in reality, have quite a different significance than what they imagine. The second result is that their intellectual creations can then function as a mask for what is really at stake, precisely because the issue is portrayed in a one-sided or distorted way – without the ideologists being aware of how that works. The ideologists are aware and unaware at the same time. The problem, says Engels, is that they exaggerate the power of ideas, even to the point where ideas seem to be the cause of all that happens. This occurs especially if the intellectual productions occur at quite some distance from the practical context to which they properly refer, or if they concern specialized, highly abstract ideas which cannot easily be verified (this concept differs from the Marxism–Leninism ideology, where "false consciousness" is thinking which deviates from the political line of the Communist Party).

Historical

The "character masks of an era" refer, according to Marx and Engels, to its main symbolic expressions of self-justification or apologism, the function of which is to disguise, embellish or mystify social contradictions ("the bits that do not fit"). A purported "mystical truth" in this context is a meaning which cannot be definitely proved, because it results from an abstractive procedure or cognition which is not logical, and cannot be tested scientifically, only subjectively experienced.

Terry Eagleton explains:

A dominant power may legitimate itself by promoting beliefs and values congenial to it; naturalizing and universalizing such beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently inevitable; denigrating ideas which might challenge it; excluding rival forms of thought, perhaps by some unspoken but systematic logic; and obscuring social reality in ways convenient to itself. Such `mystification', as it is commonly known, frequently takes the form of masking

Economic

Marx also argues that, insofar as capitalist class society is intrinsically a very contradictory system – it contains many conflicting and competing forces – the masking of its true characteristics becomes an integral feature of how it actually operates. Buyers and sellers compete with other buyers and sellers. Businesses cannot practically do so without confidentiality and secrecy. Workers compete for job opportunities and access to resources. Capitalists and workers compete for their share of the new wealth that is produced, and nations compete with other nations. The masks are therefore not optional, but necessary, and the more one is able to know about others, the more subtle, ingenious and sophisticated the masks become.

One of the centrepieces of Marx's critique of political economy is that the juridical labour contract between the worker and his capitalist employer obscures the true economic relationship, which is (according to Marx) that the workers do not sell their labour, but their labour power, making possible a profitable difference between what they are paid and the new value they create for the owners of capital (a form of economic exploitation). Thus, the very foundation of capitalist wealth creation involves – as Marx says explicitly – a "mask". More generally, Marx argues that transactions in the capitalist economy are often far from transparent – they appear different from what they really are. This is discovered, only when one probes the total context in which they occur. Hence Marx writes:

Vulgar economics actually does nothing more than to interpret, to systematize and turn into apologetics – in a doctrinaire way – the ideas of the agents who are trapped within bourgeois relations of production. So it should not surprise us that, precisely within the estranged form of appearance of economic relations in which these prima facie absurd and complete contradictions occur – and all science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence – that precisely here vulgar economics feels completely at home, and that these relationships appear all the more self-evident to it, the more their inner interconnection remains hidden to it, even though these relationships are comprehensible to the popular mind

This implies another level of masking, because the economic character masks are then straightforwardly ("vulgarly") equated with authentic behaviour. The effect in this case is, that the theory of "how the economy works" masks how it actually works, by conflating its surface appearance with its real nature. Its generalities seem to explain it, but in reality they do not. The theory is therefore (ultimately) arbitrary. Either things are studied in isolation from the total context in which they occur, or generalizations are formed which leave essential bits out. Such distortion can certainly be ideologically useful to justify an economic system, position or policy as a good thing, but it can become a hindrance to understanding.

Masks as mediators of social contradictions

Abstractly, the masking processes specific to capitalist society mediate and reconcile social contradictions, which arise from three main sources:

"Naked self-interest"

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx & Engels had stated that:

The bourgeoisie...has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment".

This "naked self-interest" seems to contradict the idea of "masking" in bourgeois society. Supposedly market trade creates transparency and an "open society" of free citizens. In reality, Marx and Engels claim, it does not. The "nakedness" may not reveal very much other than the requirements of trade; it is just that the cultural patterns of what is hidden and what is revealed differ from feudal and ancient society. According to Marx, the labour market appears as the "very Eden of the innate rights of man", insofar workers can choose to sell their labour-power freely, but in reality, workers are forced to do so, often on terms unfavourable to them, to survive. As soon as they are inside the factory or office, they have to follow orders and submit to the authority of the employer.

Even in "naked commerce", the possible methods of "masking" what one is, what one represents or what one does, are extremely diverse. Human languages and numerical systems, for example, offer very subtle distinctions of meaning that can "cover up" something, or present it as different from what it really is. Anthropologists, sociologists and linguists have sometimes studied "linguistic masking".

The "masking" of quantitative relationships takes three main forms:

Data may be accepted as a valid result, but dismissed as irrelevant or unimportant in a given context, and therefore not worth paying attention to; or conversely, the importance of specific data may be highlighted as being more important than other related facts.

Abandoning the concept

Character masks are mentioned five times in Capital, Volume I, and once in Capital, Volume II. Here, the reference is specifically to economic character masks, not political character masks. However, both the official Moscow translation of Capital, Volume I into English, as well as the revised 1976 Penguin translation of Capital, Volume I into English by Ben Fowkes, deleted all reference to character masks, substituting a non-literal translation. English translators of other writings by Marx & Engels, or of classical Marxist texts, quite often deleted Charaktermaske as well, and often substituted other words such as "mask", "role", "appearance", "puppet", "guise" and "persona".

Marx's concept of character masks has therefore been little known in the English-speaking world, except through the translated writings of the Frankfurt School and other (mainly German or Austrian) Marxists using the term. Tom Bottomore's sociological dictionary of Marxist thought has no entry for the important concept of character masks. The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory likewise does not refer to it. David Harvey, the world-famous New Left popularizer of Marx's writings, does not mention the concept at all in works such as his The Limits to Capital. Likewise Fredric Jameson, the famous commentator on postmodernity, offers no analysis of the concept. There is no entry for the concept in James Russell's Marx-Engels Dictionary, in Terrell Carver's A Marx Dictionary or in the Historical Dictionary of Marxism.

Jochen Hörisch claims that "despite its systematic importance, the concept of character masks was conspicuously taboo in the dogmatic interpretation of Marx".

However, Dieter Claessens mentions the concept in his 1992 Lexikon, there is another mention in Lexikon zur Soziologie and the more recent German-language Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism has a substantive entry for character masks by Wolfgang Fritz Haug. Haug suggests that the conjunction of "character" and "mask" is "specifically German", since in the French, English, Spanish, and Italian editions of Capital, Volume I, the term "mask", "bearer" or "role" is used, but not "character mask". But since "character mask" is a technical term in theatre and costume hire – referring both to physical masks expressing specific characters (for example, Halloween masks), and to theatrical roles – it is not "specifically German", and most existing translations are simply inaccurate. However, Haug is correct insofar as "character mask" as a sociological or psychological term is rarely used by non-German speakers.

Marx's argument in Das Kapital

Marx's argument about character masks in capitalism can be summarized in six steps.

Roles

The first step in his argument is that when people engage in trade, run a business or work in a job, they adopt and personify (personally represent) a certain function, role or behaviour pattern which is required of them to serve their obligations; their consent to the applicable rules is assumed, as a necessity to succeed in the activities. They have to act this way, because of the co-operative relationships they necessarily have to work with in the division of labour. People have to conform to them, whether they like it or not. If they take on a role, they have to fulfill the packet of tasks which is part of the job.

People are initially born into a world in which these social relationships already exist, and "socialized" into them in the process of becoming "well-adjusted adults" – to the point where they internalize their meaning, and accept them as a natural reality. Consequently, they can learn to act spontaneously and automatically in a way consistent with these social relations, even if that is sometimes a problematic process.

Interests

The second step in his argument is that in acting according to an economic function, employees serve the impersonal (business, legal or political) interests of an abstract authority, which may have little or nothing to do with their own personal interests. They have to keep the two kinds of interests separated, and "manage them" appropriately in a "mature, professional" way. In this way, they "personify" or "represent" interests, and who they personally are, may well be completely irrelevant to that – it is relevant only to the extent that their true personality fits with the role.

People are slotted into functions insofar as they have characteristics which are at least compatible with the functions. They always have a choice in how they perform their role and how they act it out, but they have no choice about taking it on. If they succeed in their role, they can advance their position or career, but if they fail to live up to it, they are demoted or fired. Human individuality is then conceptualized in terms of the relationship between buyer and seller.

Masking

The third step in his argument is, that the practices just described necessarily lead to the "masking" of behaviours and personalities, and to a transformation of personality and consciousness. It is not just that people can rarely be "all of themselves" while performing a specialized function in the division of labour, and must also express something new and different. There are also many competing, conflicting and contradictory interests at stake – and these must somehow be dealt with and reconciled by the living person.

Different interests have to be constantly mediated and defended in everyday behaviour, with the aid of character masks; these masks exist to mediate conflict. It means that people are obliged or forced to express certain qualities and repress other qualities in themselves. In doing this, however, their own consciousness and personality is altered. To be part of an organization, or "rise to the top" of an organization, they have to be able to "act out" everything that it requires in a convincing way, and that can only happen if they either have, or acquire, real characteristics which are at least compatible with it. That requires not just an "acculturation" process, but also sufficient behavioural flexibility, intelligence, acumen and creativity – so that a person does not inappropriately "fall out of the role". Discord between identity and function is tolerated only in contexts where it does not matter.

Inversion

The fourth step in his argument concerns an inversion of subject and object. It is not just that the commercial relationships between things being traded begins to dominate and reshape human behaviour, and remake social relations. In addition, human relations become the property of things. Inanimate things, and the relationships between them, are endowed with human characteristics. They become "actors" relating in their own right to which people much adjust their behaviour, and they are also theorized in that way. This is a special case of anthropomorphism because it occurs within human relations, not in relation to an object external to them.

A symbolic language and way of communicating emerges, in which inanimate "things" are personified. A market (or a price, or a stock, or a state etc.) gains an independent power to act. Marx calls this commodity fetishism (or more generally, "fetishism"), and he regards it as a necessary reification of the symbolizations required to traverse life's situations in bourgeois society, because the relationships between people are constantly being mediated by the relationships between things. It means that people are eventually unable to take their mask off, because the masks are controlled by the business relationships between things being traded, and by broader legal, class, or political interests. If they are actually unable to take the mask off, they have effectively submitted fully to the power of abstract, impersonal market forces and legal rules. As many philosophical texts suggest, by being habituated to a role, the role is internalized by individuals, and becomes part of their personality: they become the thing that they acted out.

Alienation

The fifth step in the argument is that on the world's stage, the "dance of masked people, and of the things they have endowed with an independent power to act and relate" leads to pervasive human alienation (the estrangement of people from themselves, and from others in contacts which have become impersonal and functional). It durably distorts human consciousness at the very least, and at worst it completely deforms human consciousness. It mystifies the real nature, and the real relationships, among people and things – even to the point where they can hardly be conceived anymore as they really are.

The masks influence the very way in which realities are categorized. People's theorizing about the world also becomes detached from the relevant contexts, and the interpretation of reality then involves multiple "layers" of meanings, in which "part of the story" hides the "whole story". What the whole story is, may itself become an almost impenetrable mystery, about which it may indeed be argued that it cannot be solved. The real truth about a person may be considered unknowable, but as long as the person can function normally, it may not matter; one is judged simply according to the function performed.

In what Marx calls "ideological consciousness", interests and realities are presented other than they really are, in justifying and defining the meaning of what happens. People may believe they can no longer solve problems, simply because they lack the categories to "think" them, and it requires a great deal of critical and self-critical thought, as well as optimism, to get beyond the surface of things to the root of the problems.

Development

The last step is that effectively capitalist market society develops human beings in an inverted way. The capitalist economy is not primarily organized for the people, but people are organized for the capitalist economy, to serve others who already have plenty of wealth. In an increasingly complex division of labour offering little job security, there is more and more external pressure forcing people to act in all kinds of different roles, masking themselves in the process; by this act, they also acquire more and more behavioural and semiotic flexibility, and develop more and more relational skills and connections. The necessity to work and relate in order to survive thus accomplishes the "economic formation of society" at the same time, even if in this society people lack much control over the social relations in which they must participate. It is just that the whole development occurs in an imbalanced, unequal and uncoordinated way, in which the development of some becomes conditional on the lack of development by others.

Commercial interests and political class interests ultimately prevail over the expressed interests of individuals. In the periodic economic crises, masses of people are condemned to the unemployment scrapheap, no matter what skills they may have; they are incompatible with the functioning of the bourgeois system, "collateral rubbish" that is swept aside. Even highly developed people can find that society regards them as worthless – which quite often tends to radicalize their opinions (see extremism and radicalization).

Revolution

A seventh step could in principle be added, namely a big crisis in society which sparks off a revolution and overturns the existing capitalist system. In that case, it could be argued, the false masks are torn off, and people have to stand up for what they really are, and what they really believe in. But that is a possibility which Marx did not comprehensively theorize in Das Kapital.

Engels on character masks

The "mask metaphor" also appears already in the early writings of Friedrich Engels, and his influence on Marx is often underestimated.

In 1894, Engels referred to character masks in his Preface to Capital, Volume III – when rebutting a criticism of Marx's theory by Achille Loria. Engels's substantive sociological suggestion seems to be that:

The problem with this kind of argument is just that, in defining the meaning of what is happening in society, it is very difficult to provide definite scientific proof that this meaning is the objective truth. It remains an interpretation, which may make sense of things at a certain level, without providing the whole truth. Engels's comment illustrates that the concept of character masks is not infrequently used in a polemical way to describe a false or inauthentic representation.

Engels, like Marx, also used the notion of a "mask" in the more general sense of a political "guise" or "disguise", for example in several of his historical analyses about religious movements.

Early Marxism

Lukács

György Lukács referred to the "very important category of economic character masks", but he never provided a substantive analysis of its meaning. He only referred candidly to his own "Socratic mask" in a 1909 love letter to a friend. In a 1909 essay, Lukács opined that "the bourgeois way of life" is "only a mask", which "like all masks" negates something, i.e. the bourgeois mask denies vital parts of human life, in the interests of money-making.

Lukács restricted the application of the idea to capitalists only, claiming that Marx had considered capitalists as "mere character masks" – meaning that capitalists, as the personifications ("agents") of capital, did not do anything "without making a business out of it", given that their activity consisted of the correct management and calculation of the objective effects of economic laws. Marx himself never simply equated capitalists with their character masks; they were human beings entangled in a certain life predicament, like anybody else. Capitalists became the "personification" of their capital, because they had money which was permanently invested somewhere, and which necessarily had to obtain a certain yield. At most one could say that capitalists had more to hide, and that some had personal qualities enabling them to succeed in their function, while others lacked the personal prerequisites. According to Lukács, the character masks of the bourgeoisie express a "necessary false consciousness" about the class consciousness of the proletariat.

Post-war Western Marxism

In the post-war tradition of Western Marxism, the concept of character masks was theorized about especially by scholars of the Frankfurt School, and other Marxists influenced by this school. Most of the Frankfurt theorists believed in Freud's basic model of human nature. Erich Fromm expanded it by developing the social-psychological concept of "social character".

Theodor Adorno

Adorno argues that Marx explained convincingly why the appearance-form and the real nature of human relations often does not directly coincide, not on the strength of a metaphysical philosophy such as transcendental realism, but by inferring the social meaning of human relations from the way they observably appear in practical life – using systematic critical and logical thought as a tool of discovery. Every step in the analysis can be logically and empirically tested. The hermeneutic assumption is that these relations require shared meanings in order to be able to function and communicate at all. These shared presuppositions have an intrinsic rationality, because human behaviour – ultimately driven by the need to survive – is to a large extent purposive (teleological), and not arbitrary or random (though some of it may be). If the "essential relationships" never became visible or manifest in any way, no science would be possible at all, only speculative metaphysics. It is merely that sense data require correct interpretation – they do not have a meaning independently of their socially mediated interpretation. In that sense, the mask presupposes the existence of something which for the time being remains invisible, but which can be revealed when one discovers what is behind the mask. It may be that the essence suddenly reveals itself on the stage of history, or more simply that the understandings which one already has, are altered so that the essence of the thing is finally grasped.

Frankfurt School analysis

Inspired by Marx's concept of character masks, the founder of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer, began to work out a critical, social-psychological understanding of human character in the so-called Dämmerung period (in 1931/34). Horkheimer stated the Frankfurt School perspective clearly:

The equality of free individuals, which renews itself through the exchange, the labor of each as the basis of their possessions and power, in short, the principle of the bourgeoisie upon which rests its ideology, its justice, and its morality... reveals itself as a mere façade that masks the true relations.

The Frankfurt School, and especially Herbert Marcuse, was also concerned with how people might rebel against or liberate themselves from the character-masks of life in bourgeois society, through asserting themselves authentically as social, political and sexual beings. The Frankfurt School theorists intended to show, that if in bourgeois society things appear other than they really are, this masking is not simply attributable to the disguises of competitive business relationships in the marketplace. It is rooted in the very psychological make-up, formation and behaviour of individual people. In their adaptation to bourgeois society, they argued, people internalize specific ways of concealing and revealing what they do, repressing some of their impulses and expressing others. If people are dominated, they are not dominated only by forces external to themselves, but by ideas and habits which they have internalized, and accept as being completely "natural". Max Horkheimer puts it as follows: "The principle of domination, based originally on brute force, acquired in the course of time a more spiritual character. The inner voice took the place of the master in issuing commands."

Contradictory masks

The "masking" of an alienated life, and the attempts to counteract it, are thought of in these Marxist theories as co-existing but contradictory processes, involving constant conflicts between what people really are, how they present themselves, and what they should be according to some external requirement imposed on them – a conflict which involves a perpetual struggle from which people can rarely totally withdraw, because they still depend for their existence on others, and have to face them, masked or unmasked.

The struggle for identity

To the extent that the commercial and public roles impose heavy personal burdens, and little space exists anymore "to be oneself", people can experience personal stress, mental suffering and personal estrangement (alienation), sometimes to the point where they "lose themselves", and no longer "know who they are" (identity crisis).

Ultimately, there exists no individual solution to such identity problems, because to solve them requires the positive recognition, acceptance and affirmation of an identity by others – and this can only happen, if the individual can "join in" and receive social acknowledgement of his identity. Marx himself tackled this problem – rather controversially – in his 1843/44 essay "On the Jewish Question".

Dialectical difficulties

Much of the scientific controversy about Marx's concept of character masks centres on his unique dialectical approach to analyzing the forms and structure of social relations in the capitalist system: in Das Kapital, he had dealt with persons (or "economic characters") only insofar as they personified or symbolized – often in a reified way – economic categories, roles, functions and interests (see above). According to Marx, the capitalist system functioned as a "system", precisely because the bourgeois relations of production and trade, including property rights, were imposed on people whether they liked it or not. They had to act and conform in a specific way to survive and prosper. As the mass of capital produced grew larger, and markets expanded, these bourgeois relations spontaneously reproduced themselves on a larger and larger scale, be it with the assistance of state aid, regulation or repression. However, many authors have argued that this approach leaves many facets of capitalist social relations unexplained. In particular, it is not so easy to understand the interactions between individuals and the society of which they are part, in such a way, that each is both self-determining and determined by the other.

Marx's concept of character masks has been interrogated by scholars primarily in the German-language literature. Werner Sombart stated in 1896 (two years after Capital, Volume III was published) that "We want a psychological foundation of social events and Marx did not bother about it".

Soviet Union

The historian Sheila Fitzpatrick has recorded how, in the Soviet Union, "The theatrical metaphor of masks was ubiquitous in the 1920s and '30s, and the same period saw a flowering of that peculiar form of political theater: the show trial." Those who supported the revolution and its communist leadership were politically defined as "proletarian" and those who opposed it were defined as "bourgeois". The enemies of the revolution had to be hunted down, unmasked, and forced to confess their counter-revolutionary (i.e. subversive) behaviour, whether real or imagined. It led to considerable political paranoia. Abandoning bourgeois and primitive norms, and becoming a cultured, socialist citizen, was "akin to learning a role". In the 1920s, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) adopted the slogan "tear off each and every mask from reality". This was based on a quotation from Lenin, who wrote in his 1908 essay on Leo Tolstoy as mirror of the Russian revolution that the "realism of Tolstoy was the tearing off of each and every mask"(sryvanie vsekh i vsiacheskikh masok). The communist authorities kept detailed files on the class and political credentials of citizens, leading to what historians call "file-selves".

Much later, in 1973 (16 years before Slavoj Žižek entered the intellectual scene) the German New Left critic Michael Schneider claimed that:

The animosity towards psychology that marked the Stalinist era and determines the communist reception of Freud to this day is based primarily on the Marxist concept of the "character mask". The Leftist 'anti-psychologism' of neo-Stalinist and Maoist groups in Germany and elsewhere also seeks to condemn psychoanalysis time and again with the argument that Marx's concept of the "character mask" has superseded psychology once and for all. Such a vulgar anti-psychologism, however, mistakes the polemical nature of the concept. Marx used it primarily to attack bourgeois psychologism which sublimated the principle of homo homini lupus est [i.e. 'man is a wolf to man'] into an eternal verity of human nature.

According to this interpretation, there was a "blind spot" in Marx's explanation of bourgeois society, because he had disregarded psychological factors. Moreover, Marxists had interpreted Marx's theory of the "personification of economic functions" as an alternative to psychology as such. Thus, equipped with a simplistic "reflection theory of consciousness" and an "objectivist concept of class consciousness", the Russian revolutionaries (naively) assumed that once the bourgeois had been liberated from his property, and the institutions of capitalism were destroyed, then there was no more need for masking anything – society would be open, obvious and transparent, and resolving psychological problems would become a purely practical matter (the "re-engineering of the human soul"). Very simply put, the idea was that "the solution of psychological problems is communism". However, Raymond A. Bauer suggests that the communist suspicion of psychological research had nothing directly to do with the idea of "character masks" as such, but more with a general rejection of all approaches which were deemed "subjectivist" and "unscientific" in a positivist sense (see positivism).

The USSR became increasingly interested in conceptions of human nature which facilitated social control by the communist party, and from this point of view, too, the concept of the unconscious was problematic and a nuisance: by definition, the unconscious is something which cannot easily be controlled consciously. However, psychoanalysis was considered bourgeois; this situation began to change only gradually Nikita Khrushchev had made his famous secret speech, in which he condemned the "personality cult" around Stalin (see "On the Personality Cult and Its Consequences"). The obligatory official broadsides against Freud and the neo-Freudians in the Soviet Union ceased only from 1972, after which psychoanalysis was to a large extent rehabilitated.

The New Left and the Red Army Faction

The New Left was a radical trend which began in 1956/57, a time when large numbers of intellectuals around the world resigned from the "Old Left" Communist parties in protest against the Soviet invasion of Hungary during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. These New Left intellectuals broke with the official Marxism–Leninism ideology, and they founded new magazines, clubs and groups, which in turn strongly influenced a new generation of students. They began to study Marx afresh, to find out what he had really meant.

In Germany, the term Charaktermaske was popularized in the late 1960s and in the 1970s especially by "red" Rudi Dutschke, one of the leaders of the student radicals. By "character masks", Dutschke meant essentially that the official political personalities and business leaders were merely the interchangeable "human faces", the representatives or puppets masking an oppressive system; one could not expect anything else from them, than what the system required them to do. Focusing on individual personalities was a distraction from fighting the system they represented.

According to the German educationist Ute Grabowski,

The '68 student movement transformed the concept of character masks into a concept of struggle [Kampbegriff] – even although, originally, it was nothing more than a straightforward description of the inevitability of being driven into social roles together with other particular people, without being able to hold each of them individually responsible for that.

The positive utopian longing emerging in the 1960s was that of reaching a life situation in which people would be able to meet each other naturally, spontaneously and authentically, freed from any constraints of rank or status, archaic rituals, arbitrary conventions and old traditions. In their social criticism, the youth began to rebel against the roles which were formally assigned to them, and together with that, began to question the social theory of roles, which presented those roles as natural, necessary and inevitable. In particular, the women's liberation movement began to challenge gender roles as sexist and patriarchal. There seemed to be a big gap between the façade of roles, and the true nature of social relationships, getting in the way of personal authenticity (being "for real"). Official politics was increasingly regarded as the "masquerade" of those in power. To illustrate the spirit of the times, Anne-Marie Rocheblave-Spenlé who had previously authored a classic French text on role theory, in 1974 published a book titled, significantly, Le Pouvoir Demasque (Power unmasked).

The concept of "character masks" was by no means an unimportant political concept in Germany, since it was being used explicitly by terrorists in their justifications for assassinating people.

Ten points of controversy

Questions subsequently arose in New Left circles about ten issues:

German sociologist Uri Rapp theorized that Charaktermaske was not the same as "role"; rather Charaktermaske was a role forced on people, in a way that they could not really escape from it, i.e. all their vital relationships depended on it. People were compelled by the relations of production. Thus, he said, "every class membership is a Charaktermaske and even the ideological penetration of masquerades (the 'class consciousness of the proletariat') could not change or cast off character masks, only transcend them in thought." In addition, Charaktermaske was "present in the issue of the human being alienated from his own personality."

Jean L. Cohen complained that:

the concept of the character mask collapses the rationality of the system with the rationality of social action, deriving the latter from the former... only action according to interests (imputed from the systemic logic of contradiction even if this logic is constituted by class relations) is rational action. Accordingly, the very power of "class" to act as a critical concept vis-a-vis the logic of capitalist production relations is lost.

As the post-war economic boom collapsed in the 1970s, and big changes in social roles occurred, these kinds of controversies stimulated a focus by social theorists on the "social construction of personal identity". A very large academic literature was subsequently published on this topic, exploring identity-formation from many different angles. The discourse of identity resonated well with the concerns of adolescents and young adults who are finding their identity, and it has been a popular subject ever since. Another reason for the popularity of the topic, noted by Richard Sennett in his book The corrosion of character, is the sheer number of different jobs people nowadays end up doing during their lifetime. People then experience multiple changes of identity in their lifetime – their identity is no longer fixed once and for all.

Humanism and anti-humanism

Marx's "big picture" of capitalism often remained supremely abstract, although he claimed ordinary folks could understand his book. It seemed to many scholars that in Marx's Capital people become "passive subjects" trapped in a system which is beyond their control, and which forces them into functions and roles. Thus, it is argued that Marx's portrayal of the capitalist system in its totality is too "deterministic", because it downplays the ability of individuals as "active human subjects" to make free choices, and determine their own fate (see also economic determinism). The theoretical point is stated by Peter Sloterdijk as follows:

As a theory of masks, [Marx's theory] distinguishes a priori between persons as individuals and as bearers of class functions. In doing so, it remains a little unclear which side is respectively the mask of the other – the individual the mask of the function, or the function the mask of individuality. The majority of critics have for good reasons, chosen the antihumanist version, the conception that individuality is the mask of the function.

In the antihumanist version, the individual is viewed as "a creation of the system" or "a product of society" who personifies a social function. In this case, a person selected to represent and express a function is no more than a functionary (or a "tool"): the person himself is the character mask adopted by the system or the organization of which he is part. Hidden behind the human face is the (inhuman) system which it operates. In the humanist version, the process is not one of personification, but rather of impersonation, in which case the function is merely a role acted out by the individual. Since the role acted out may in this case not have much to do with the individual's true personality, the mask-bearer and the mask he bears are, in this case, two different things – creating the possibility of a conflict between the bearer and the role he plays. Such a conflict is generally not possible in the antihumanist interpretation ("if you work for so-and-so, you are one of them"), since any "dysfunctional" character mask would simply be replaced by another.

Louis Althusser's neo-Stalinism

In the antihumanist, structural-functionalist philosophy of the French Marxist Louis Althusser, individuals as active subjects who have needs and make their own choices, and as people who "make their own history", are completely eradicated in the name of "science". In fact, Althusser recommended the psychological theory of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan in the French Communist Party journal La Nouvelle Critique specifically as a "science of the (human) unconscious". In the glossary of his famous book Reading Capital (co-written with Étienne Balibar), Althusser announces:

The biological men are only the supports or bearers of the guises ("Charaktermasken") assigned to them by the structure of relations in the social formation.

Critics of this idea argue people are not merely the "bearers" of social relations, they are also the "conscious operators" of social relations – social relations which would not exist at all, unless people consciously interacted and cooperated with each other. The real analytical difficulty in social science is, that people both make their social relations, but also participate in social relations which they did not make or consciously choose themselves. Some roles in society are consciously and voluntarily chosen by individuals, other roles are conferred on people simply by being and participating in society with a given status. Some roles are also a mixture of both: once people have chosen a role, they may have that role, whether they like it or not; or, once habituated to role, people continue to perform the role even although they could in principle choose to abandon it. That is why both the humanist and the antihumanist interpretations of character masks can have some validity in different situations.

Marxism as a character mask?

Althusser's "totalizing perspective" – which, by destroying the dialectics of experience, cannot reconcile the ways in which people "make history" and are "made by history", and therefore falls from one contradiction into another – does not just destroy belief in the power of human action (because "the system" dominates everything); the super-human approach also invites the objection that it leads to totalitarianism.

Specifically, in the bid of Marxist ideologists to grab state power, extract a surplus from the workers and manage the introduction of the "new order", armed with an ideological tyranny of categories, real human beings become expendable. It is alleged to be a kind of "upward mobility" strategy utilizing sympathy for the oppressed and exploited, and social envy. This (fairly cynical) interpretation leads logically to the idea that Marxism or Marxism–Leninism is itself a character mask, by which leftists who are desirous of power and influence which they do not have, disguise their real motives. This is hotly disputed by many Marxists, who claim Marxism is something that grows out of their lives.

The sociological imagination

C. Wright Mills developed a concept known as the sociological imagination, the idea being that understanding the link between "private troubles" and "public issues" requires creative insight by the researchers, who are personally involved in what they try to study. The analytical question for social scientists then is, how much the concept of "character masks" can really explain, or whether its application is overextended or overworked.

For example, Jon Elster argued that:

Capitalist entrepreneurs are agents in the genuinely active sense. They cannot be reduced to mere placeholders in the capitalist system of production. This view goes against a widespread interpretation of Marx. It is often said that he attached little importance to intentional explanation in economics, since the basic units of his theory are "character masks" rather than individuals. The capitalist, in particular, is only the "conscious support" of the capitalist process, and only enacts the laws regulating it. Even capitalist consumption can be seen as "capital's expense of reproduction". This is well in line with the view that the worker is the passive embodiment of his consumption bundle, rather than an active human being capable, among other things, of waging a struggle for a larger bundle. The conclusion often drawn from this argument is that the capitalist does not "choose" his actions, but is "forced" by his need to survive in the competitive market. I believe this way of stating the issue is misleading. "Choosing" only means comparing alternatives and picking the best of them. The choice may well be said to be forced if all alternatives but one are unacceptable, but it is no less of a choice for that. Rather, the relevant distinction is that between forced and unforced choice, for example between being forced to optimize and not being forced to do so. This distinction might for instance serve to distinguish between capitalists at different stages of capitalist development, as suggested by Weber.

Jürgen Ritsert, a Frankfurt sociologist, queried the utility of the concept of character masks:

are there special concepts in Marx's Critique of Political Economy which could mediate an application of the general concept of a specific historical totality to singular acts and particular act-meanings? Usually "Charaktermaske" (character mask) is mentioned as such a concept.... I do not think that "Charaktermaske" is one of the sought after decisive mediating terms.

Sociobiology

Faced with the problem of understanding human character masks – which refers to how human beings have to deal with the relationship between the "macro-world" (the big world) and the "micro-world" (the small world) – scholarship has often flip-flopped rather uneasily between structuralism and subjectivism, inventing dualisms between structure and agency. The academic popularity of structural-functionalism has declined, "role definitions" have become more and more changeable and vague, and the Althusserian argument has been inverted: human behaviour is explained in terms of sociobiology. Here, "the person" is identified with "the physical body". This is closer to Marx's idea of "the economic formation of society as a process of natural history", but often at the cost of "naturalizing" (eternalizing) social phenomena which belong to a specific historical time – by replacing their real, man-made social causes with alleged biological factors. On this view, humans (except ourselves) are essentially, and mainly, animals. The treatment of humans as if they are animals is itself a strategy of domination.

Postmodernism

The more recent postmodern criticism of Marx's portrayal of character masks concerns mainly the two issues of personal identity and privacy.

It is argued that modern capitalism has moved far beyond the type of capitalism that Marx knew. Capitalist development has changed the nature of people themselves, and how one's life will go is more and more unpredictable. There is no longer any clear and consensual view of how "personal identity" or "human character" should be defined anyway (other than by identity cards) and therefore, it is also no longer clear what it means to "mask" them, or what interests that can serve. Roles are constantly being redefined to manipulate power relationships, and shunt people up or down the hierarchy.

The postmodern concept of human identity – however it may be theorized – maximizes the flexibility, variability and plasticity of human behaviour, so that the individual can "be and do many different things, in many different situations", without any necessary requirement of continuity between different "acts" in space and time. The effect however is a lack of coherence; it becomes much more difficult to know or define what the identity of someone truly is. As soon as the self is viewed as a performance, masking becomes an intrinsic aspect of the self, since there still exists an "I" which directs the performance and which therefore simultaneously "reveals and conceals" itself. The corollary is, that it becomes much more difficult to generalize about human beings, since even at the most basic level the categories or units used to make comparisons remain vague. At most, one can objectively measure the incidence and frequency of different types of observable behaviour.

Aggregate human behaviour is then often explained either as a biological effect or as a statistical effect, estimated by probability theory. Some Marxists regard this perspective as a form of dehumanization, which signifies a deepening of human alienation, and leads to a return to religion to define humanity. Modern information technology and the sexual revolution, it is nowadays argued, have radically altered the whole idea of what is "public" and what is "private". Increasingly, information technology becomes a tool for social control. Some Marxists even refer to the spectre of totalitarian capitalism. Human individuals then appear to be caught up in a stressful battle to defend their own definition of themselves against the definitions imposed or attributed by others, in which they can become trapped.

Kurz and Lohoff

In their famous 1989 article "The class struggle fetish", the German neo-Marxists Robert Kurz and Ernst Lohoff reached the conclusion that the working class is ultimately just "the character mask of variable capital", a logical "real category" of Capital. The identities of all members of capitalist society, they argued, are ultimately formed as bourgeois character masks of self-valorizing value. In that case, people are valued according to the extent that they can make money for themselves, or for others.

Žižek

Slavoj Žižek also attempts to create a new theory of masks, by mixing together the philosophies of Hegel, Karl Marx and Jacques Lacan with his understanding of fictional literature and political events. In Žižek's theory, just as an oppressive social reality cannot exist and persist without ideological mystification, "The mask is not simply hiding the real state of things; the ideological distortion is written into [the] very essence [of the real state of things]." Thus, the mask is a necessary and integral component of an oppressive reality, and it is not possible simply to tear away the mask to reveal the oppressive reality underneath.

In The sublime object of ideology, Žižek summarizes Peter Sloterdijk's concept of cynical reason:

The cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he none the less still insists upon the mask. The formula, as proposed by Sloterdijk, would then be: "they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it". Cynical reason is no longer naïve, but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it.

Often the pretense is kept up, because of a belief (or anxiety) that the alternative – i.e. dropping the pretense – would have a worse effect, or seriously compromise cherished values or beliefs. To maintain and build a team spirit or morale, a way of working is insisted on which affirms shared beliefs, regardless of whether those beliefs correspond to reality or not, and regardless of whether members of the organization are aware of the discrepancies or not. The result, Žižek claims, is a "symbolic order" of "fetishist disavowal" in which people act morally "as if" they are related in certain ways – to the point where "the symbolic mask matters more than the direct reality of the individual who wears this mask." Using a basically Freudian theory, Žižek then aims to explain the psychological processes by which people are reconciled with the symbolic order, or at least make it "liveable" for themselves (see also Freudo-Marxism).

Frank Furedi suggests that the concept of denial, so central to Žižek's understanding of masks, really plays a quite different role in contemporary post-Freudian society: "In today's therapy culture, people who express views that contradict our own are often told that they are 'in denial'. It has become a way of discrediting their viewpoint, or shutting them up." If people disagree, or will not cooperate, they are not taken seriously in a dialogue, but instead accused of having a psychological problem which stands in need of professional treatment. Thus, a dissident is neutralized by being turned into a patient who is "unhealthy", and people are managed according to psychotherapeutic concepts designed to invalidate their own meanings. Furedi implies that yesterday's leftist concepts can be recycled as today's tools for psychological manipulation: an idea which originally had a progressive intention can evolve until, in reality, it plays the very opposite role – even although (and precisely because) people continue to sentimentally cherish the old idea. The point is not simply to interpret the processes by which oppressed people are reconciled with, or reproduce their own oppression (Althusser's and Bourdieu's structuralist theory of "ideological reproduction"); the challenge is to create new ideas which can free the oppressed out of their oppression. For this purpose, ideas have to be situated according to how they are actually being used in the real world, and the oppressed have to be regarded as active subjects who can change their own fate (not simply as the "clients" of officials, academics and professionals who monitor their behaviour).

Philip Rieff summarizes the main problem with, as well as the main achievement of psychoanalysis, from the point of view of freeing people from the masks that may oppress them:

Freud carried the scientific suspicion of nature into ethics. It was as if, after all the pronouncements of theology and philosophy, after all the indications of experience, we had scarcely begun to understand ourselves... [According to Freud] our inner nature – the ultimate subject studied by all the moral sciences – lies hidden. Against the conventional assumption that each knows himself best in his own heart, Freud supports the Nietzschean assumption that each is farthest from his own self, and must journey through experience in search of it. He surpasses even the Romantics in his deprecation of mere intellect.... To "know thyself" is to be known by another [i.e. by the psychoanalyst].

If it is true that "we do not even know who we are", then it becomes difficult to understand how people could free themselves from deceptive masks, and change the world for the better, unless they all get a massive dose of psychotherapy to "find themselves".

Unmasking

If one successfully unmasks something, one understands it for what it really is, and can handle it; inversely, if one understands something and can handle it, it is unmasked. Yet, as Marx notes, "in the analysis of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace both."

Economic analysis not only studies the total social effect of human actions, which is usually not directly observable to an individual, other than in the form of statistics or television. The "economic actors" are also human beings who create interactions and relationships which have human meanings. Those meanings cannot be observed directly, they are in people's heads, actively created in their social relationships, and expressed symbolically.

Collapse

Capitalism unmasks itself in the course of development, when its internal contradictions become so great, that they cause collapse – impelling the revolutionary transformation of capitalism by human action into a new social order, amidst all the political conflicts and class struggles. In trying to get on top of the relations they have created, human beings are themselves transformed. Scientific inquiry, Marx felt, should be an aid in the cause of human progress, to ensure that the new social order emerging will be a real open society. Human progress is achieved, to the degree that people abolish the oppressions of people by other people, and oppressions by the blind forces of nature.