Marxist Critique of Ideology in Capitalist Society

Formation of Ideologies

Each of the forms of alienation generates symbolic or ideological productions. In the sense of Marx, an ideology is a conception of reality upside down, distorted and deformed. Ideology is a misrepresentation, a distortion of reality, or an opaque, dark consciousness of the world, which serves to rationalize both the social and historical conditions alienating and inauthentic existence of the subject.

The forms of false consciousness arise as a result of alienating economic and social relations. An ideology is an inverted projection of a dehumanizing social practice in which men do not control the material production of goods (work) and the individual and social production of their own life (social relations). From a social practice emerge deformed and distorted mental representations that are false. By deviating from the actual practice, men construct ideas and theories with an empirical (historical) basis that is falsified.

All theoretical training, even the most speculative or metaphysical, ultimately meets certain social or historical facts. Every historical epoch creates its own ideologies.

Deformation of Ideologies

Each of the major ideologies associated with the capitalist mode of production and social relations has a particular form of obscuring or distorting reality.

The Role of Ideologies

The role of ideologies is to rationalize (justify by unreal and fictitious arguments) the economic and social relations existing in a given period of history. Ideology is a reflection or projection of such a relationship, but it is not a purely theoretical or uninterested reflection. Conversely, although all ideology is consciously presented as a way to understand and explain reality, its purpose is to hide and justify it.

In every society, there is, as we have seen, a set of dominant ideologies. Marx said that ideologies are always the dominant ideologies of the ruling class.

Critique of Ideology

The role of philosophy is the critique and unmasking of ideologies. However, the critique of ideology is not purely theoretical, as the authentic critique of ideology is the disappearance of collective consciousness. Hence, the Marxist theory of speculative thinking replaces traditional philosophy (one of the most powerful ideologies) with the so-called philosophy of praxis.

The real demise of an ideology can only be achieved once the material conditions that led to its emergence and consolidation have disappeared. Therefore, the mission of the philosophy of praxis is twofold:

• Firstly, to report the symbolic or ideological investment of false consciousness that makes up reality.
• Secondly, to promote the change of economic, social, and political conditions that made the ideological formation possible.

Thus, ideologies that rationalize and justify capitalist society (the political and economic thinking of liberalism, the false humanism of utopian socialism, the political and social principles of formal bourgeois democracy, the religious mode of existence, the rigid moral classes of dominant philosophical idealism and metaphysics, science, and bourgeois art) will only disappear in practice when the socialist mode of production is established, the workers’ state is dissolved, and a communist society or a classless society is established.