What is "Ideology"?

[Ritzy Cat]

I always see ideology used by socialist authors as some sort of abstract concept but I have no idea what it means, other than the definition. I feel like there's something more to it. Can someone explain to me exactlyw hat it is?

[blake 3:17]

It's a big idea. Usually it refers to either a conscious belief system eg. Marxism or the unconscious belief system that the society one is in produces.

[Zoop]

I think ideology is like a form of dogmatism. Often those who adhere to a certain ideology consider their ideology gospel, immune to criticism.

[oneday]

I think watching The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2152198/) will explain it well. :laugh:

[DOOM]

Ideology is basically every thought and every action - conscious and subconscious - that reinforces and defends the rule of capital. Capital needs ideology so it can reproduce itself, otherwise people would recognize the misery of capitalism. Everything ranging from seemingly obvious thoughts (like private property being something ahistoric) to seemingly lesser obvious thoughts (like good work is fullfilling) can be ideology.

[human strike]

Ideology is those things you don't know that you know.

[Ritzy Cat]

Ideology is those things you don't know that you know.

sounds hot. i need to read more abotu this

[Rafiq]

Zizek uses the chicken joke to explain ideology.

Some delusional guy thinks he's a piece of corn and is terrified of being eaten by a Chicken. He gets clinical help, and is convinced that he isn't a piece of corn. But it doesn't work.

The psychiatrist, puzzled, is told that "I know I'm not a piece of corn, but does the chicken know it?"

That's how ideology works, essentially.

[Decolonize The Left]

So you live in a house and go to work and eat and drink and shit and live your life. Ideology is the way you frame that material reality in your head. It is the story you construct to explain who you and others are, where you came from, what you're doing, and why you're here.

From a leftist perspective, ideology is a distinct part of life which exists in relation to material reality. These two frameworks interact regularly (and, indeed, they are not separate--only so insofar as it is useful for explaining) and by understanding how capital works in each we can understand our lives under capitalism.

[Tim Cornelis]

Ideology is any thought system that mystifies and obfuscates the class nature of society. It doesn't have to be capital.

[PhoenixAsh]

Depending on whether you want a Marxist definition or not:

The term ideology is the structure of conscious and subconscious norms and ideals about the political, the economic and the social which is abstracted from or, if you want, a reaction against the class consciousness of the dominant class which uses it to justify the current reality. It is intrinsically linked to the class position you have and the reality that is created through your relationship with the means of production in respect to the elite class of the specific epoch. Which is why we speak of false consciousness which essentially means that the norms of the ruling elite are copied and used to substitute the normative values which are/should be part of your own class by accepting them as a justification for the current reality. In Marxism ideology is used predominantly for the ruling elite and according to a lot of Marxists all other ideological positions are either residual from the previous epoch, or are developed in relation to the current dominant ideology.


In more general terminology:

Ideology is a set of highly personal (but often shared) set of moral positions which is intrinsically linked to a person's consciousness and perception and view of the world with which they define themselves, their actions and those of others and add normative value to them. It is the basis for the formenting and creation of ideas and subsequent positions.

[ñángara]

Ideology is any thought system that mystifies and obfuscates the class nature of society. It doesn't have to be capital.
And this would be the exact definition of false ideology. Is it all about a scientific reasoning?

[PhoenixAsh]

And this would be the exact definition of false ideology. Is it all about a scientific reasoning?

In Marxism ideology usually denotes the ideology of the ruling class. If Marxism speaks about ideology it usually talks about the class consciousness of the ruling class and their subsequent justification for the current reality.

So yes. Ideology in Marxism often means the justification with which the ruling class creates the social, political and economic reality. False consciousness is when you actually buy into that and adopt this justification/ideology as your own contrary to your class own consciousness.

[Tim Cornelis]

"class consciousness of the ruling class" this is false. Class consciousness is counter-posed to ideology. The proletariat may be the first class to become class conscious, Marx argued.

[Alet]

And this would be the exact definition of false ideology. Is it all about a scientific reasoning?

In Marxist terminology "false ideology" is a tautology, because Marxism does not know any "true ideology". It does know the objectivity of material conditions. Anything which mystifies these is already an illusion and therefore ideology.


Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. [...] He works with mere thought material which he accepts without examination as the product of thought, he does not investigate further for a more remote process independent of thought; indeed its origin seems obvious to him, because as all action is produced through the medium of thought it also appears to him to be ultimately based upon thought.
- Friedrich Engels to Franz Mehring, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93_07_14.htm


[...] reconstruct the world [...] in one's head is ideology [...] As Dühring proceeds from "principles" instead of facts he is an ideologist [...]
- Friedrich Engels, Preparatory Writings for Anti-Dühring https://mecollectedworks.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/marx-engels-collected-works-volume-25_-ka-karl-marx1.pdf

[PhoenixAsh]

"class consciousness of the ruling class" this is false. Class consciousness is counter-posed to ideology. The proletariat may be the first class to become class conscious, Marx argued.

The ruling class however is already conscious by necessity...after all they had their revolution which advanced the epoch, and all other classes are kept unconscious through the ideological justification for the current reality....and they can't become the ruling elite if they aren't conscious of their class reality, potential and interests. The bourgeoisie per definition became the ruling elite because of their class consciousness led to their struggle with the old epoch's elite (feudalism...the French/American revolutions etc).

[Tim Cornelis]

"Class consciousness" refers to a 'scientifically conscious' understanding of historical processes, i.e. historical materialism. Few people realise this. I remember a few years ago on this forum that a noob Marxist said "if all people understood historical materialism there'd be a worldwide socialist revolution by now". He was criticised over "idealism". Ironically, he was closer to a truer understanding of Marxism than many of those 'long-term' Marxists.

The bourgeoisie fought for liberty, equality, brotherhood, this is false consciousness and ideology.

[Alet]

The ruling class however is already conscious by necessity...after all they had their revolution which advanced the epoch, and all other classes are kept unconscious through the ideological justification for the current reality....and they can't become the ruling elite if they aren't conscious of their class reality, potential and interests. The bourgeoisie per definition became the ruling elite because of their class consciousness led to their struggle with the old epoch's elite (feudalism...the French/American revolutions etc).

You mean this:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas

But I think Tim is talking about this:

The separate individuals form a class [which means being conscious imo] only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors.

Both from "The German Ideology"

e: nvm he did not mean what I thought he did.

[PhoenixAsh]

"Class consciousness" refers to a 'scientifically conscious' understanding of historical processes, i.e. historical materialism. Few people realise this. I remember a few years ago on this forum that a noob Marxist said "if all people understood historical materialism there'd be a worldwide socialist revolution by now". He was criticised over "idealism". Ironically, he was closer to a truer understanding of Marxism than many of those 'long-term' Marxists.

The bourgeoisie fought for liberty, equality, brotherhood, this is false consciousness and ideology.

The bourgeoisie fought for their class interests regardless of the phrases they used to frame that. The workers fought for bread, soviet power and whatever in the Russian revolution.

The rulings class holds its consciousness because it always acts in its class interests by exploiting the other producing classes and as a result create their justification (ideology) for this reality to set up the idea of the "end of history" in order to perpetuate their position. But their class interest is the maintaining of class society and the position of power and they are very conscious of their position and the historic processes that led up to it (if they were not, they wouldn't be in the position)

You are wrong when you equate class consciousness with purely the act of scientific understanding of the historic processes...it is, in part, through a scientific understanding of historic processes that class consciousness for the proletariat is reached because it unravels the idea of the end of history narrative and the naturalist narrative....which are essential in order to create the ideological uniformity in society.

When it comes to the proletariat however they are the only class that is able to move past the limitations of history and class and deconstruct class society itself. At least according to Lukacs.

[Rafiq]

I remember a few years ago on this forum that a noob Marxist said "if all people understood historical materialism there'd be a worldwide socialist revolution by now". He was criticised over "idealism". .

Of course you're right, but it's important to understand that all people understanding historical materialism would entail different conditions and implications already.

Likewise, class consciousness necessitates a scientific understanding of social processes, but it isn't reducible to it. That is to say, class consciousnesses can only be practically expressed through action - likewise even if hypothetically the whole world "understood historical materialism", this wouldn't entail a socialist revolution if this understanding was relegated to a mere acknowledgement of a narrative. The evidence we have, on a very basic level, is the reality that all Communist states in the 20th century institutionalized and formalized "Historical materialism", embedded it into "official" ideology and so on. And yet these societies clearly did not possess real social consciousness. Because the consciousness they did possess did not extend beyond the limits of their own conditions of being, i.e. the project of destroying the remnants of feudalism, which made them unable to see how they fit in a wider historical process, because that would entail an acknowledgement of the long-term inability for socialism to grow in their countries (which would destroy the whole project to begin with).

Hence why the overwhelming majority of "Marxists" in the 21st century do not possess socialist consciousness, but accept narratives that crystallize previous forms of consciousnesses.


The bourgeoisie fought for their class interests regardless of the phrases they used to frame that. The workers fought for bread, soviet power and whatever in the Russian revolution.

But it's also important to take notice of the fact that much of this rhetoric was aimed at the peasantry. Soviet power wasn't so much vague ideological rhetoric as it was an immediate demand - the Soviets, unlike "liberty, brotherhood", etc. were very real and concrete.

To put it plainly, I think the confusion arises from a misunderstanding about what class consciousness means. When we say that the bourgeoisie lacked class consciousness, we mean that a conscious understanding of their historic and social role was missing. Of course, the interests of the bourgeoisie were embedded in their rhetoric, and in their actions, but it's not so simple. For example, during the French revolutions the Jacobins were bourgeois, but they didn't have much support among the bourgeois, who mainly supported the girodins. So we have a situation where the bourgeoisie couldn't even carry out what it needed to do in the long run because it was constrained by its immediate interests.

Ideology works like this: You don't know that you know something. In other words, you designate something as a tacit given, which you don't even have the language to confront consciously, that could otherwise be known. But revolutionary workers are fully conscious of not only their existence, but the relationship between their sentiments, ideological foundations and their prerogatives as a class. The ideology designates the unknown future, who no one in present day capitalist society can know will really look like (Hence Communism as a process).

So you're right that the bourgeoisie fights for their class interests, regardless of the rhetoric they use, but that rhetoric doesn't consciously entail an understanding of themselves as a class. If it did, then we would be living in a planned society that is conscious of itself socially, but this negates the very preconditions of a dynamically chaotic of capitalism. The bourgeoisie can never be class-conscious, not even in a civil war against the proletariat, because they have to use grand narratives like fighting for liberty, for god, for the nation, and so on to do this. The bourgeoisie's existence is inevitably bound up with the necessity of false-consciousness for the proletariat, so they embed that in their actions. Perhaps what you are trying to say is that the bourgeoisie don't possess false consciousnesses, but true unconsciousness? That is to say, the bourgeoisie do have an imaginary relationship to their real conditions of existence, but there is no dissonance between them that would otherwise be constitutive of social transformation.

[Guardia Rossa]

So class consciousness means not that we are conscious of our participation in a common group of people with similar objectives but consciosness of the whole class sistem and our own class role in it?

[Tim Cornelis]

The bourgeoisie fought for its class interests, but this doesn't mean it was class conscious, even if we assume they were conscious of this self-interest (I don't believe they were). As Marx points out in relation to the petty bourgeoisie, "This content is the transformation of society in a democratic way, but a transformation within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie. Only one must not get the narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egoistic class interest. Rather, it believes that the special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions within whose frame alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided."* (18th brumaire) Similarly, the bourgeoisie genuinely believed in the ideological forms they had adopted (liberty, equality, fraternity), believing them to be universal values. I don't see any reason to believe that behind closed doors this was some deliberate and convoluted conspiracy to fool the masses. According to Marxism, history processes develop logically and predictably, but this logic is not necessarily, and usually not, shared with the agents that propel it. Except, in the future, the proletariat (so he believed, I have a slight disagreement).

*And as a bonus, class composition vs. class character:

"Just as little must one imagine that the democratic representatives are indeed all shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers. According to their education and their individual position they may be as far apart as heaven and earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the latter practically. This is, in general, the relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class they represent." So in fact, bourgeois revolutions don't need to be made by the bourgeoisie. Members of the aristocracy can adopt the ideological forms of the bourgeoisie. Marxism is not a reductionist theory of rational self-interested agents.

If you believe that what is at stake is of universal proportions, rather than sheer and narrow material self-interest, you are more likely to throw your full weight into the struggle. Competing interests can be mediated, diametrically opposed paradigms that each see their perspective as the only universally logical one, cannot.

Class interest and class consciousness:

"The proletariat - the class of those exploited - is the only potentially revolutionary subject inside the capitalist system. Proletarians, being excluded from the possession of the means of production and alienated from the product of their own work, have historical and immediate interests opposed to those of capital. But, the proletariat can be effectively revolutionary, only if it acquire the necessary class unity and the consciousness of its own intimate antagonism in respect to capital. For this purpose, it is necessary that in the sphere of the proletarian class there is an organized vanguard, able to analyze the dynamics of the relations of production, to draw lessons from the experiences of class struggle, to elaborate and advance a program to overcome the capitalist society and to guide, politically, the class on this road.

In fact, a profound difference exists between “class instinct” and “class consciousness”. The first one springs up and develops inside workers’ struggles as a patrimony of workers themselves; it is placed into existence by the antagonism of material interests and it feeds with growing economical and political contradictions, originated by the same antagonism; finally, to exist, it requires that relations between proletarians and capitalists are sufficiently tense to imply a certain generalization of workers’ struggles and a certain hardness of confrontations. The second one, consciousness, springs up from the scientific examination of class contradictions, it grows together with those contradictions; it lives and feeds with the examination and elaboration of data generated by the historical experiences of the class.

With the revolution, the power is up to the whole proletarian class, to its assembly organisms. But the party doesn’t play only a generic role of agitation and propaganda. The party sustains the revolutionary and socialist program in soviets and its militants are ready to assume responsibilities, assignments revocable in every moment, when workers’ assemblies acknowledge the slogans of the party. In conclusion, the “political direction” of the party, the relevance of the communist program, indispensable for the success of a proletarian revolution, is something which cannot be imposed on soviets, but it is to be acquired and defended through political battles."

http://www.leftcom.org/en/about-us

"To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and this the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific Socialism."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm

"According to Lukács, the proletariat was the first class in history that may achieve true class consciousness, because of its specific position highlighted in the Communist Manifesto as the "living negation" of capitalism. All others classes, including the bourgeoisie, are limited to a "false consciousness" which impedes them from understanding the totality of history: instead of understanding each specific moment as a portion of a supposedly deterministic historical process, they universalize it and believe it is everlasting. Hence, capitalism is not thought as a specific phase of history, but is naturalized and thought of as an eternal solidified part of history. Says Lukács, this "false consciousness", which forms ideology itself, is not a simple error as in classical philosophy, but an illusion which can't be dispelled."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_consciousness#Georg_Luk.C3.A1cs.27_History_a nd_Class_Consciousness_.281923.29

edit: am... am I turning into Rafiq?

[PhoenixAsh]

Lol @ Tim's edit.

Ok...well...you and Rafiq make interesting points and it has been a long time since.... so I'll have to reread a few texts and think some more about it before I comment...so I can frame my thoughts.

[Guardia Rossa]

Do you (Tim) believe new forms of proletarian ideologies can appear organically from a revolutionary struggle, after the western propaganda dictates communism is a eka-nazism of sorts? Can we see anything proletarian in Venus project and such, even if they are utopian/socratic ideologies?

[YouAreNotAlone]

Didn't Zizek say something like: "Ideology are the colored glasses in which you view the world?"

[Ceallach_the_Witch]

i think he also said "I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology." which is frankly one of the more reasonable things he's ever said

[Luís Henrique]

Ideology is what everybody thinks when they are not thinking.

There, I outžižeked Žižek.

Luís Henrique

[Hit The North]

Zizek said that ideology is our spontaneous relationship to the social world. He said that ideology is like a comfort blanket and it takes struggle to throw it off.

Yeah, so basically what Luis wrote :)

[Hatshepsut]

To put it plainly, I think the confusion arises from a misunderstanding about what class consciousness means. When we say that the bourgeoisie lacked class consciousness, we mean that a conscious understanding of their historic and social role was missing.

I'm one who's still confused on this. My knowledge of socialist thought and its history is defective, being "sound" only relative to reactionaries who've never bothered to look into it.

Regarding the above, however, it's been said elsewhere on this thread that a scientific understanding of historical place is an understanding, but not sufficient for class consciousness. One thing that might distinguish consciousness from understanding is that consciousness enables people to act together as a unit while mere understanding does not. For if the bourgeoisie of 150 years ago were ignorant of their class interests, or understood them only at an implicit, instinctive level, they're no longer ignorant about it today.

After World War II we didn't just see defense of Liberty and Franchise; we saw explicit defense of Capitalism itself, often as an assertion that only capitalism can honor fundamental rights. Politically the bourgeoisie are much more unified now than they were in the 18th or 19th centuries; the U.S. version of this dynamic shows in the absolute Two-Party hammerlock where the parties more and more differ in name instead of substance, offering only a personality contest to the public. The supposed polarization in America refers to the left and right wings within these parties. Although neither wing ever wins; it's always the pro-business "center" that comes out on top. It's hard for me to see why this would occur if the owners of capital remained blithe toward their unity as a class. Ayn Rand and allied institutions hold a major intellectual trust cementing the financially self-sufficient—if Atlas Shrugged is not quite universal yet.

I confess that I don't know whether the term "class consciousness" can be strictly applied to the bourgeoisie. I do suspect that the nature of the class system is changing, rendering some aspects of Marx's description less accurate than they once were. The Proletariat are coming to own some capital, especially in the form of homes and 401(k) accounts, while the heads of corporations are able to exert control over the capital formation process without necessarily owning it. A CEO is always pretty rich of course, but may own little or no share in the particular company she or he is running.