Marx On Ideology

The term ‘ideology’ indicated for Marx the society-dependent framework of an individual’s thoughts influencing the way one would interpret the world without the individual in question being aware of being influenced at all. The logic of this rests within the assumption that a system of production will influence the relations of production between the people within the system, which will in turn influence the relations within society of those same people, which will in turn influence the political form of life amongst these people. A society’s ideology, or superstructure, is therefore determined by its productive forces, or base.

History would therefore be the study of the changes in the material conditions of life of a society: explaining these would allow us to explain the evolution of a society’s ideology.

This reductionist approach was justified by Marx through the interpretation of history as a movement forward driven by tensions in a process following a thesis, antithesis and synthesis, whereby opposite points of view are reconciled through enlightenment and society may evolve as it tends towards the best possible system. Marx, being a left-wing Hegelian, took this understanding of history to be the manifestation of man coming to a self-awareness which must be applied to society in order to improve it.

Marx lived through a time of new social mobility as capitalism followed feudalism, bringing with it a fall in the quality of life of the proletariat, the life expectancy of which dropped to the level of the poorest peasants during the time of the Black Death. Productiveness and efficiency became the new values of society as life was quantified and time turned into a commodity in a system which divided people from birth between the motivated and unmotivated classes.

Marx saw numerous flaws in the capitalist ideology and anticipated its inevitable negation as leading to the fifth and final stage of history. The sheer size of the proletariat discontent could not but assert itself; but the very nature of capitalism sealed its own doom, according to Marx, because of the fundamental contradictions with a system which strives for maximisation of profits and minimisation of costs in such a way as to ensure that potential consumers could have no money with which to consume. He anticipated the downfall of capitalism to come in the form of increasingly dangerous waves of crises which would eventually shatter the system which caused them.

Marx proposed communism as the synthesis, the enlightened resolution, of history. By taking Darwin’s theory of evolution and comparing the ideas of competition and cooperation, he argued that man is not necessarily selfish: if born into a different ideology, man might accept the idea of taking “from each according to their abilities” and giving “to each according to their needs”. Whereas capitalism harnesses man’s selfishness and makes it productive, communism would harness man’s ability to cooperate as an equally powerful driving force.

What was keeping this revolution from happening, according to Marx, was man’s difficulty to overcome ideology, which was determined by the bourgeoisie through religion acting as “an opiate for the masses”. As long as Sunday made the six working days which came before it worthwhile and sent the working man back to work confident in the belief that, in heaven, “the last shall be first”, capitalism

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