The Lost Meaning of Ideology

Recovering Marx's Concept

“... in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura ...” — Marx and Engels, The German Ideology

IDEOLOGY is a term whose meaning has been obscured by ideology. With his treatment of this concept, Marx progressed the explanation for mental distortions of reality beyond individual psychology to the distorted consciousness generated by class society as a whole. Although Marx’s innovation was to move ideology from a subjective to an objective basis, this term now circulates with precisely the opposite connotation.

Indeed, you will typically hear “ideology” used today as a neutral term to describe a particular set of beliefs that an individual selects from the marketplace of ideas. “Liberal ideology,” “conservative ideology,” “feminist ideology,” “Marxist ideology,” etc., denote the particular worldview that an individual adopts. In this pluralistic conception of ideology as one set of ideas among many, individuals may change their ideologies as often as they change their minds, and the ideology that they possess is whatever belief system to which they presently adhere.

This subjective account of ideology could not be further from the objective connotation it receives from Marx, for whom “definite forms of social consciousness” correspond to that society’s “mode of production of material life,” which “conditions the social, political, and intellectual life process in general.” Individuals, in this view, do not possess “an ideology” as the expression of their subjectivity. Rather, ideology possesses individuals as an objective expression of the social relations that shape their “intellectual life.” “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”¹

Individuals do not choose a particular ideology among several and then conform their way of life to this mindset. Instead, their existence within the contradictory relations of class society puts them into a certain ideological state of mind whose purpose is the rationalization and reproduction of that society. Whereas ideology appears in liberal discourse as a pluralistic set of competing views to be selected by individuals, Marx only speaks of ideology in general, as the distorted consciousness necessarily produced by the contradictions of class society. In short, there is no such thing for Marx as “an ideology” or “ideologies” in the plural, only ideology.

It is not only liberals, however, who have altered Marx’s original conception of ideology, as Marxists themselves have played a major role in distorting Marx’s theory of distorted consciousness. Many Marxists in the present indeed affirm the subjective interpretation of ideology when they speak of the “socialist” or “Marxist ideology” they have chosen as their worldview against “liberal ideology.”

Perhaps more often throughout its history, however, the Marxist tradition has opposed this liberal notion of ideology as something consciously chosen by individuals with a more objective account that treats it as a set of ideas that express the interests of a class (eg., bourgeois or proletarian ideology). But in assessing the merits of ideology based on its class position, Marxists pluralize it and strip it of its purely negative, critical meaning.

Marx’s “negative concept of ideology,” as Jorge Larrain observes, “passes judgement upon ideas, whatever their class origin,” insofar as they conceal contradictions.² For Marx, there is not a good ideology (proletarian) and a bad ideology (bourgeois), there is only ideology in general, the distorted forms of consciousness that harmonize social contradictions at the level of ideas.

“Whereas for Marx the idea of a ‘proletarian ideology’ is totally foreign,” as Larrain writes, “for the new generation of Marxists,” beginning especially with Lenin, “each class produces its own ideology, or at least an ideology that serves its interests can be ascribed to it.”³ In Lenin’s hands, “a move from ideology to class ‘ideologies’ is firmly established which loses the originally negative sense of the concept.”⁴ In this positive, neutral version, ideology merely becomes the thought that serves a particular class. Ideology is not a pejorative itself, only “bourgeois ideology,” which is false because it is bourgeois, not because it is ideology.

Here, Marx’s problem of ideology in general becomes that of the false ideology of one class at odds with the true ideology of another. While Lenin adapted ideology to the relativity of the class struggle, claiming each side of the conflict has its own, he and the Marxist intellectuals who followed him rid Marx’s concept of its specific meaning: “Detached from its critical connotation, ideology loses what for Marx was its essential feature and becomes a concept which covers the whole range of social and political thought, whatever its origin, function or validity. Thus the value which the concept had in Marx's work as a tool of analysis and critique has almost disappeared.”⁵

As Larrain observes, a crucial factor in the evolution of a positive, neutral concept of ideology “is the fact that the first two generations of Marxist thinkers after Marx's death did not have access to The German Ideology.”⁶ Unpublished until 1932, only after theorists such as Lenin, Lukacs, and Gramsci shaped discussion of the concept, The German Ideology is the text that most clearly demonstrates Marx and Engels’s critical, negative treatment. For them, ideology is not the subjectivity of a particular class, but the objective result of a “limited material mode of activity” that produces both contradictory social relations and the distorted consciousness of those relations.⁷

Larrain uses such insights to articulate a more precise Marxist theory of ideology as “a solution in the mind to contradictions which cannot be solved in practice.” As “the necessary projection in consciousness of man’s practical inabilities,” ideology is not a neutral term to describe the worldview of this or that individual or class. It is the distorted consciousness that conceals the social contradictions that give rise to it. By “hiding the true relations between classes, by explaining away the relations of domination and subordination,” ideology “legitimates the class structure and, in general, the whole social structure, thus it becomes indispensable for their reproduction.”⁸

Far from neutrally designating one worldview among many, Marx’s notion of ideology therefore has a specific negative connotation whose essential features are (1) the objective concealment of contradictions, which attempts to “reconstitute in consciousness a world of unity and cohesion,” and (2) that it necessarily accomplishes this in the interests of the dominant class, since the objective conditions it works to conceal “are always the conditions of the rule of a definite class.” ⁹

Ideology is thus an important condition for the functioning and reproduction of the system of class domination. It is the necessary consciousness that makes contradictory “social relations appear harmonious and individuals carry out their reproductive practices without disruption.”¹⁰ But it is precisely because ideology emerges from real, historical social relations that it cannot be eliminated by “Marxist” or “socialist” ideology, or any ideology at all.

Ideology “cannot be dissolved by mental criticism,” as Marx and Engels write, “but only by the practical overthrow of the actual social relations which gave rise to this idealistic humbug” in the first place. Although a theoretical critique of ideology can and must interact with this practical overthrow, the dissolution of ideological reflexes, “the removal of these notions from the consciousness of men” will only “be effected by altered circumstances, not by theoretical deductions.”¹¹

As a result, it is ideological to think that the problem of ideology can be overcome at the level of ideas, when its hiding of contradictions is in fact “mainly carried out by attributing independent existence to ideas, as if they could rule over material life.” Thus, the leftist who seeks to displace “liberal ideology” (wrong ideas) with “socialist” or “Marxist ideology” (right ideas) performs just this ideological function in which “the problems of mankind are attributed to wrong ideas” instead of “the real and practical contradictions.”¹²

Moreover, they invert Marx’s purely negative critique of ideology in general, turning it into a particular, positive ideology. But in Marx’s lost meaning, “ideology” is not a particular set of ideas or beliefs. It is only used pejoratively, as the hiding of contradictions generated by class society. Therefore, whenever someone touts their “socialist” or “Marxist ideology,” it is a testament to the historical contradiction in which the concealment of Marx’s critical concept has coincided with Marxism becoming just another ideology.

1. Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: Preface” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978), 4.

2. Larrain, Marxism and Ideology (London: Macmillan, 1983), 89.

3. Larrain, Marxism, 89.

4. Larrain, The Concept of Ideology (London: Hutchinson, 1979), 77.

5. Larrain, Concept, 77.

6. Larrain, Marxism, 54.

7. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), 36.

8. Larrain, Concept, 46-47.

9. Larrain, Marxism, 29.

10. Larrain, Concept, 47.

11. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), 54, 56.

12. Larrain, Concept, 53.