"What was Marx’s Concept of Ideology?" by Sandro Brito Rojas (Keywords: Inversion; Alienation; Capitalism; False Consciousness; Revolution)

From The Philosopher, vol. 113, no. 1 ("Marx and Philosophy")

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Today, as it has increasingly become a cliché to say, ideology can mean almost anything among social theorists, philosophers and social scientists (with Marxist or non-Marxist backgrounds). It can refer to a wide range of meanings, which we can roughly group into two different approaches: a neutral conception of ideology and a critical or negative one.

A neutral conception of ideology encompasses primarily philosophical and sociological perspectives that centre on agents’ self-understanding and the social role of ideas. Within this framework, various conceptualisations of ideology emerge: (1) as a set of ideas specific to a particular group or social class which function as action-oriented beliefs, or (2) as a system of representations through which individuals make sense of their reality and navigate their relationships with social structures (what in some strands of recent philosophy is called a “standpoint”) or (3) as the system of representations along with their embodiment in institutions that ultimately determine and shape the consciousness and practice of agents. Following the deaths of Marx and Engels and until at least the late 1950s, Marxist debates were characterised by adherence to a neutral conception of ideology, giving rise, for example, to an affirmative usage of the term “ideology”, based on the premise that class struggle inherently entailed an ideological conflict – “a struggle between ideas” – thus affirming a proletarian, revolutionary or Marxist ideology in opposition to bourgeois ideology. It should be noted, however, that Marx himself never employed the term in this manner.

The critical approach, on the other hand, consists of perspectives that seek to denounce or reveal discourses and ideas as being false, untrue, and/or unconsciously distorted, expressing hidden or concealed interests or legitimization of some kind of power. These conceptions thus entail exercising some sort of “ideology critique” that reveals the ideological character of a set of ideas or forms of consciousness. This way, within critical approaches, ideology may refer to: (1) discourse and ideas driven or motivated by concealed social interests; (2) the utilisation and defence of ideas – not necessarily false ones – to legitimise dominant political or economic powers; (3) systematically distorted communication; (4) the opposite of a “scientific” (or “objective”) point of view; (5) the entanglement of discourse and power; (6) forms of alienated consciousness that distort or conceal reality; (7) apologetic discourses and naturalizations of certain dominant social facts. The principal sense in which Marx employed the concept of ideology underpins and in fact inaugurates this critical approach that is central to the modern semantics of the term. Needless to say, phenomena that we might recognise as ideology or ideological (e.g., intellectual-discursive legitimation of the social order and biased distortions of reality) have evidently existed long before the coining of the (critical) concept of ideology.

Ideology is a concept imbued with a dense, complex range of meanings. There is no way of combining all of them into a grand totalising theory without falling into eclecticism.

Finally, it is important to mention that running through these two approaches or frameworks, there is also a division between those – most commonly – who emphasise the ideal, spiritual reality of ideology and those who focus on the materiality of ideology, or the way in which this ideal reality is embodied in material structures, practices, and institutions that possess the power to shape social agents and their actions.

As we can see then, ideology is a concept imbued with a dense, complex range of meanings. There is no way of combining all of them into a grand totalising theory without falling into eclecticism. A better way to deal with this contemporary semantic pandemonium will be to assess what is valuable or what can be discarded in each of these approaches. One central task in this regard is to clarify Marx’s use of the concept, which, while not always methodically systematic, remains without doubt one of the most theoretically and philosophically significant and influential accounts of ideology.

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Ideology is a relatively recent term. Emerging in the modern era, the term was coined and developed at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century by Destutt de Tracy, a French liberal philosopher and politician of the late Enlightenment whose economic investigations would be relentlessly criticised by Marx in Capital, where de Tracy is referred to as a “fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire”. For de Tracy, the term was meant to denote – somewhat curiously to us now – its etymological meaning: a science of ideas. This was a novel scientific endeavour rooted in Condillac’s philosophy of “sensationalism”, which sought to systematise the study of the origin and formation of ideas, starting from the assumption of an identity between sensing and thinking

A historically significant (yet somewhat vague) use of the term was introduced a few years later by none other than Napoleon, precisely in his diatribes against de Tracy and the group of intellectuals from the revolutionary elite to which he belonged. The (by then) emperor condemned “the science of ideology” and its leading representatives – whom he baptized as the ideologues – denouncing it as a source of “metaphysical speculations”, abstractions detached from French reality, and incapable of helping to resolve its problems. Napoleon was thus the first to use the term in a pejorative and denunciatory sense, to refer to ideas divorced from the political reality to which they were addressed. The manner in which Napoleon used the term soon became influential and ideology began to be used in a pejorative, disqualifying sense. Indeed, this Napoleonic use was the direct precursor of the critical uses of the term, and of Marx’s development of the concept.

The terms “ideology”, “ideological”, etc., appear in many of Marx’s texts, though mostly incidentally (with the exception of The German Ideology). Nevertheless, the social phenomena and relationships to which the concept responds are present in Marx’s writings, even when the word is not, from his young philosophical inquiries, to his critique of philosophy, to his principal project: the critique of political economy.

Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism enables us to grasp how there can be a certain “ideology” inscribed within “material” conditions.

Two texts, written at different stages of Marx’s scientific, critical, and revolutionary journey, have become the principal sources of both understandings and misunderstandings regarding his conception of ideology. First, the collection of texts that we have come to know as the book The German Ideology, which represents a key moment in his critique of philosophy and the process of self-clarification in which he (and Engels) were engaged during the decade of 1840s. Secondly, the Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), a text in which Marx attempts to give a brief account of how he arrived at the project of a critique of political economy. So these two texts, we could say, opened the theoretical space in which ideology has been debated until today. Yet it is also worth noting that Marx’s infamous discussion of “The Fetishistic Character of the Commodity and its Secret” in Capital can be seen as another crucial text for grasping what ideology is for Marx. There, Marx shows how capitalist production relations – the private and independent production of useful things as commodities to be sold on the market – gives rise, due to its own structure and conditions, to certain social forms of appearance and inversion that obscure and naturalize this specific form in which collective life is organised and reproduced. Thus, Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism enables us to grasp how there can be a certain “ideology” inscribed within “material” conditions.

In the Preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in trying to summarize the main tenets of his new conception of society and history, Marx introduces an architectural metaphor with which to grasp how bourgeois society forms a totality, composed of a “base” and a “superstructure” which rests upon it. The “base” here, is an economic unity composed of the “material forces of production” and the “relations of production appropriate to them”. For Marx, this can be seen as the economic structure of society – the base, or foundation from which a legal and political superstructure immanently arises. To this superstructure, or edifice, would correspond certain specific “ideological forms” (legal, political, but also artistic, religious, philosophical, etc.) through which humans become conscious of their reality, albeit in a limited way that cannot be fully trusted. Marx insists that “just as one does not judge an individual by what they think of themselves, one cannot judge such a period [...] by its consciousness”. Yet Marx’s account here is replete with ambiguities: is every ideological form of consciousness a false representation of reality? If every form of consciousness within this “superstructure” is ideological in a negative sense, what about Marx’s account? How can this be said to escape the distortions of reality that occur at this level? In spite of these, this text has been perhaps the most influential and determining source in shaping how ideology has been understood among Marxists.

Marx, along with Engels, sets out a new conception of society and history which surpasses the limitations of both idealism and materialism.

However, it is in an earlier text (or, in reality, a set of texts and fragments), The German Ideology, that Marx and Engels make more prominent use of the term, with the concept assuming a more explicitly central role. Here, we find a ruthless critique of philosophy and its understanding of social reality, in particular the tendency of German philosophers (whether idealist or materialist) to proceed from “heaven” to “earth”, to explain human activity starting from ideas, concepts or abstractions. Marx acknowledges that idealism grasps, though only abstractly, that objective reality does not exist independently from humans but is also constituted by humans, by their subjective activity or “praxis”. However, idealism offers a one-sided account of this subject-object relationship, mystifying the subject's power to shape reality and thereby tending to conceive and explain reality as the result of ideas, treating it as autonomous or independent from materiality. On the other hand, we have a critique of traditional forms of materialism for their inability to understand the practical, social and historical dimension of materiality. The traditional materialist does not see that “the sensuous world around him is not a thing given direct from all eternity but the product of industry and of the state of society”, that sensuous human activity is a core part of reality. Thus in a broader sense, Marx refers to these two philosophical approaches as offering limited and distorted views of reality, labelling them as ideological.

As we know, in the unfolding of this double critique, Marx, along with Engels, sets out a new conception of society and history which surpasses the limitations of both idealism and materialism, and in doing so, goes beyond the philosophical terrain of inquiry of this time, which is trapped in an abstract theoreticism. Based on this result of his critique of philosophy Marx would go on to undertake a critique of the field of economic science of his time, a “critique of political economy”, as the main vehicle through which to undertake a revolutionary and scientific critique of the way in which collective human activity is organised in capitalist society.

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Interpretations of Marx that revert to a “mechanistic” rather than practical materialism, which affirm that “it is not the consciousness of humans that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness”, fail to recognise that the objective world that humans confront is one that has also (at least in part) been shaped by human action, that humans make circumstances just as much as circumstances make humans. The new “practical materialist” point of departure taken by Marx leads us to approach the study of consciousness and ideas, and therefore of ideology, in a different manner. It urges us to start from the recognition that in order to understand the formation of ideas we must remain on the “real ground of history”, the real process of material activity, or production, and thus seek to explain “the formation of ideas from material practice”. The first thing to acknowledge is therefore that consciousness in general, and the production of ideas as a whole (not just ideology), are inseparable from material activity; they are “from the very beginning a social product”, “directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men”. So consciousness and language itself “only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men”.

For Marx, all ideology involves an inversion whereby humans and their relations “appear upside-down”; an ideal and unconscious inversion that conceals the real nature of things.

Yet just because consciousness, language and ideas are determined by social existence and social activity, this does not necessarily make them false representations of that existence and activity. Marx thus goes on to argue that there are some historically specific sets of ideas and discourses – such as morality, religion, metaphysics and philosophy in general, political and economic thought – that are determined as ideology; that is, as inverted and distorted forms of consciousness of reality.  The origins of Marx’s critique of an inverted consciousness of the world that conceals its true reality can be found in his early critique of religion and Hegel’s theory of the state (even though the term ideology is not used there). For Marx, all ideology involves an inversion whereby humans and their relations “appear upside-down”; an ideal and unconscious inversion that conceals the real nature of things. Yet the implication of Marx’s practical materialism – contrary to what the French Marxist Louis Althusser claimed – is that these inversions are not mere illusions, false ideas, simple (ir)rational errors disconnected from reality, which could be overcome merely by countering them with the correct “scientific”  point of view of what things actually are. They rather arise necessarily from the concrete form taken by the historical life-process. The form of collective life in capitalist societies is distinctive in its inversion of our collective activity, which transforms what we ourselves produce into a “material power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations”. Capital, Marx argues, makes the collaborative social action of humans an “alien power opposed to them”, which enslaves them instead of being controlled by them. We could thus say that the possibility of the existence of ideology, of ideological ideas and representations, is grounded in very specific historical and social conditions that give rise to the alienation of collective human activity.

For Marx, ideology, this particular form of consciousness that loses sight of the inner relation between the material and the ideal, has a historically specific condition of possibility: the emergence of a division between material and mental labour in the organisation of collective social activity. It is precisely from this key moment that “consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice”, that is in a position to "emancipate itself from the world.”

The real problems of humanity, then, are not ideologies, false or apologetical discourses of what it is, but social contradictions arising from the form in which social life is organised.

Ideology finds its material basis in the alienated nature of real social relations, with all of their real contradictions and inversions. In the upside-down capitalist commodity world, “things mediate the relations among people, while there are social relations among things”; a particular social relation among people assumes, for these people themselves, “the phantasmagoric form of a relation among things”. Things produced by the human hand, as commodities, seem endowed with lives of their own, seem to be “autonomous figures interacting with one another and human beings”. Ideology is an ideal inversion and as such an ideal alienation which cannot be but the ideal expression of real, material, alienation. Ideology is therefore a socially necessary ideal illusion; an unconscious form of expression of the social contradictions that traverse the capitalist or bourgeois form of life, an expression which ends up affirming or legitimizing that life and concealing the possibility of another.

While it is fundamental to develop a critique of ideology in order to develop a critique of society, the fact is that “not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history, also of religion, of philosophy and all other kinds of theory”. Ideology “cannot be dissolved by mental criticism”, but only by the practical overthrow of the actual social relations which give rise to it. The real problems of humanity, then, are not ideologies, false or apologetical discourses of what it is, but social contradictions arising from the form in which social life is organised. Ideology is a consequence, not the cause, of those contradictions (though it may in turn affirm and strengthen them). Thus, any change in the realm of ideas is insufficient (and at best partial or provisional) unless it is accompanied by a material change in alienated social structures.

Sandro Brito Rojas is a theorist, historian and translator specialising in Marxism and critical theory. He is a member of Cooperativa Cráter Invertido, an artist and cultural collective based in Mexico City. 

First published online on 6th July 2025

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