patronizingly romanticized at the expense of the former. Certain 'folk' conceptions, Gramsci holds, do indeed spontaneously reflect important aspects of social life; 'popular consciousness' is not to be dismissed as purely negative, but its more progressive and more reactionary features must instead be carefully distinguished. ²³ Popular morality, for example, is partly the fossilized residue of an earlier history, partly 'a range of often creative and progressive innovations . . . which go against, or merely differ from, the morality of the ruling strata of society'. ²⁴ What is needed is not just some paternalist endorsement of existing popular consciousness, but the construction of 'a new common sense and with it a new culture and a new philosophy which will be rooted in the popular consciousness with the same solidity and imperative quality as traditional beliefs'. ²⁵ The function of the organic intellectuals, in other words, is to forge the links between 'theory' and 'ideology', creating a two-way passage between political analysis and popular experience. And the term ideology here 'is used in its highest sense of a conception of the world that is implicitly manifest in art, in law, in economic activity and in all manifestations of individual and collective life.' ²⁶ Such a 'world-view' cements together a social and political bloc, as a unifying, organizing, inspirational principal rather than a system of abstract ideas.

[. . .]

We have seen how a theory of ideology can be generated from the commodity-form. But at the heart of Marx's economic analysis lies another category also of relevance to ideology, and this is the concept of exchange value. In the first volume of Capital, Marx explains how two commodities with quite different 'use values' can be equally exchanged, on the principle that both contain the same amount of abstract labour. If it takes the same quantity of labour-power to produce a Christmas pudding and a toy squirrel, then these products will have the same exchange value, which is to say that the same amount of money can buy them both. But the specific differences between these objects are thereby suppressed, as their use value becomes subordinate to their abstract equivalence.

If this principle reigns in the capitalist economy, it can also be observed at work in the higher reaches of the 'superstructure'. In the political arena of bourgeois society, all men and women are abstractly equal as voters and citizens; but this theoretical equivalence serves to mask their concrete inequalities within 'civil society'. Landlord and

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