The demolisher of ideologies and father of the most perverse one
Marx: Critique of Ideology and False Consciousness
To understand why Marx was so critical of “ideology,” we must first strip the word of its modern connotation.
Today, we use “ideology” as a synonym for a “system of ideas.” For Marx, however, ideology was something closer to a social mirage: a distorted vision of reality that serves to preserve the status quo.
His position rests on the following pillars.
Historical Materialism: Base and Superstructure
Marx maintains that reality is not constructed from ideas (idealism), but from material and economic conditions.
The Base is the economic structure: who owns the factories, how labor is organized.
The Superstructure includes laws, religion, philosophy, and politics.
According to Marx, ideology resides in the superstructure. Its function is to justify the economic base.
“It is not the consciousness of man that determines his being, but his social being that determines his consciousness.”
From this initial conception of ideology, Marx is already destroying the foundation of the historical construction of human thought, denying that it has been refined and improved throughout its development.
Ultimately, for Marx, prior thinking was unnecessary and even perverse.
Ideology as “False Consciousness”
Marx argues that the ruling class controls not only the means of material production (factories), but also the means of mental production (press, education, culture).
“Ideology makes the interests of the bourgeoisie appear as the interests of society as a whole. For example, the idea that ‘private property is a sacred natural right’ benefits those who possess it, yet it is taught to the worker (who owns nothing) as an absolute truth.”
Marx uses the metaphor of an old photographic camera in which the image is projected upside down. Ideology presents reality inverted: it makes what is historical and artificial appear “natural” and “eternal.”
Although rigid systems of ideas can promote a view that everything is seen through a self-induced lens, Marx generalizes by asserting that all ideas modified over time by human progress and reality itself are ideology.
The Role of Religion and Philosophy
For Marx, these represent the highest forms of ideology because they offer imaginary consolations that distract from the real struggle.
“The opium of the people”: religion is an ideology that promises justice in the “afterlife,” dulling the need to seek justice in the “here and now.”
He criticized philosophers who devoted themselves to interpreting the world in various ways, when what matters, according to Marx, is to transform it.
In religious matters, Marx enters the domain of Faith in order to strip the human being of a conception that transcends rationality and is purely spiritual and personal.
In his critique of philosophy (the love of knowledge), Marx begins to outline his mental totalitarianism and his exclusive, purely Marxist ideology.
At first glance, Marx was not against having ideas, but against the deceptive function of ideologies.
After deconstructing ideology as a static and distorted way of seeing reality, Marx reconstructs and validates it as a totalitarian ideology: an instrument of domination.
His “new” Marxist ideology removes the veil from everything society has built, both good and bad, and promotes revolutionary action against EVERYTHING in the “current order.”
Through the lens that everything existing is an ideology of exploitation, Marx advances an ideology aimed at destroying everything, and toward a utopia that inexorably leads to totalitarianism, empirically proven to be inhumane.
The human being IS NOT PERFECT, and never will be.
To pretend that all human anomalies can be corrected by destroying all prior thought on the grounds that it is ideological is to fabricate an ideology out of human flaws and to believe that the same imperfect human being, through ideological construction, can forcibly redeem himself.
Marx claimed that social science only truly begins when we manage to tear away the veil of ideology; confusing human thought and reality with a scientific laboratory in which ideas can be placed in a test tube and, through a magical potion, stripped of selfish content.
To prove his scientistic theory, Marx believes everything is legitimized in the struggle against ideology (a concept under which he subsumes everything around him), even when thought is simply a subjective human construction that perceives reality as through a distorted visor.
To fight against a reality he does not like, that does not suit him, or that opposes his scientistic intention of perfection, Marx reaches the boundary between theory and political ethics.
For him, the struggle against ideology—the politically imperfect world—is not an intellectual exercise of merely “lifting a veil,” but a historical scientific necessity.
In this way, he turned his “ideology” into an amoral and inhumane technique, violent in nature, designed to correct the imperfections that prevented him from living like the bourgeois who worked, strove, and lived better than he did.
It is not a struggle against “ghosts,” but against their causes
Marx does not believe ideology can be destroyed simply by debating or writing books (although he wrote many).
The material root: if ideology is a reflection of material conditions, the only way to eliminate the “distortion” is by changing the reality that produces it.
For this purpose, EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED.
“It is not enough to convince people that religion is a consolation; one must create a world in which people no longer need that consolation because they no longer suffer oppression.”
“The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of the vale of tears of which religion is the halo.” — Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
The seed of irrational violence within his “scientific” ideology.