Marx’s Historical Materialism: Alienation and Ideology
Marx’s Historical Materialism
The Concept of Alienation
It’s like the action of social movements conveying what is proper.
Marx considered the alienated work in modern society as the fundamental total alienation. In Marx’s conception, human work is existential activity. Through work, therefore, man develops his being in history and establishes himself as a social being.
In the relationship between the subject (worker) and the object (product produced), the object is the result of the subject’s transformative action. A situation arises where the product of man’s transformative action ceases to belong to him, becoming the property of another (alius), which is what Marx called alienation.
The human condition in capitalist society is characterized by Marx as alienation. Capitalist private property, by taking as its own the products of human labor, makes the worker alienated by becoming a thing.
Economic alienation is the basic alienation, and other forms of alienation stem from it:
- Social alienation: Men are divided into social classes.
- Political alienation: Establishes the division between society and state.
This triple alienation secretes a whole range of ideological representations, which are religious and philosophical alienation:
- The root of religion is promoted in misery and resignation, exploited with the lure of supramundane compensation.
- Idealistic and distorted interpretations of reality.
Religion is not a constitutive human religious state. It is related to the economic and sociopolitical organization, which provides ideological stability and justification. Religious justification is a form of man’s alienation, whose character is resignation, transcendent justification of social injustice, and redress in the sky for earthly oppression.
The Concept of Ideology
- Ideology is a system of representations and having a historical role. Ideology is essential and necessary in the needs of human beings. Ideology expresses the relationship of man with the world, reflecting the ideas that this relationship can make in an adequate way or in a false mode. In this second case, the term “ideology” signifies a set of “ideas” that give a distorted or falsifying image and representation of reality.
- For Marxism, ideology holds three theses:
- a) The human mind is a product of society.
- b) Ideology is formed by misconceptions and forgeries.
- c) Ideological contents of consciousness are not nouns.
Ideological forms of consciousness are designed to hide a situation of real existence, social and historical human condition, which Marxism characterizes as alienation.
How Do Ideologies Emerge?
For Marx, ideologies are a reflection of an economic structure. Ideologies belong to the superstructure, conditioned by the infrastructure or economic structure, which is the real basis on which it rises.
The ultimate ideology is that of the division of labor, intellectual and manual. Some men create pure theories, and allow others to take as real such products of imagination.
Whom Do Ideologies Serve?
The division of labor is associated with private property of the means of production, determining that society is divided based on classes. Ideology is ultimately a class ideology.