From the Critique of Political Economy to the Construction of New State Ideologies: A Strategic Analysis of Marxism and Its Contemporary Derivations
The False Promise of Marx
Marx claimed that social science truly begins only when we tear away the veil of ideology.
For him, everything related to human society was ideological. While he applied scientific reasoning to nature, he did so through dialectical preconceptions — thesis, antithesis, synthesis — a hypercritical scientistic method that attempted to subsume human reality into the scientific framework dominant in his time.
He placed society inside his own ascetic laboratory and filtered humanity through the sieve of his personal and intellectual frustrations.
The Critique of Political Economy
Marx did not consider classical economists such as Adam Smith to be liars, but ideologues. In his view, they treated market exchange as if it were governed by natural laws, like gravity, rather than as historically constructed social arrangements.
Political economy presents the exchange of commodities as something “natural” to human labor relations.
Marx argued that this conceals exploitation.
At the core of his ideological critique lies the claim that we believe objects possess value in themselves, forgetting that value is the product of human labor and social relations. We treat things as if they were persons, and persons as if they were things — mere instruments.
Yet in practice, Marx himself objectified the human being. His ideological development reduced individuals to instruments of production, while simultaneously asserting that such instruments possessed intrinsic value. The very act of using labor to obtain resources through exchange was framed as abuse.
The alternative Marx proposes is rebellion against generalized exploitation, presenting it as the path to dignifying the human condition through labor.
His scientistic and anti-human construction begins with the observable result: capital growth when one party contributes savings transformed into machinery and another contributes labor, from which both derive material improvement.
Marx never worked in the ordinary sense, nor assumed the responsibility of creating employment as a way of earning a living. To him, profit appeared inherently exploitative at a time when the first industrial revolution indeed displayed brutal labor conditions — yet even those conditions represented a significant improvement over subsistence life in post-medieval rural Europe.
His ideology collides with natural human differences and especially with the central driver of social development: the exchange of goods and services.
Marx never succeeded in isolating the quantitative essence of the “value of labor” independently of wages. Surplus value remains an unresolved conceptual device.
He left open a brutal conflict between those who seek access to labor markets as a means of advancement and those who build political power by demanding ever-expanding wage guarantees that ultimately paralyze formal employment markets, persuading both sides of their indispensability.
Modern Examples of “False Consciousness”
If Marx were alive today, he would likely identify various contemporary narratives as ideology serving to preserve systemic arrangements.
Laziness and Meritocracy
The idea that hard work enables upward mobility would be denounced as ideological because it allegedly masks structural injustice. If a worker fails to prosper, responsibility is internalized rather than attributed to wage systems deemed unfair.
Marxist praxis encourages collective protest, expanding union structures that depend on formal workers while regulatory rigidity and unrealistic wage mandates restrict the growth of formal employment itself.
Consumption as Freedom
The claim that freedom is expressed through consumer choice would be interpreted as a diversion. Citizens are offered freedom in consumption to prevent demands for autonomy in production, where most of life is spent obeying authority.
This perspective emerged not from ascetic detachment but from intellectual circles disconnected from productive responsibility. Historical evidence from applied Marxism demonstrates that devaluing work leads to stagnation and generalized poverty.
Restricting working time as a principle curtails the human drive to transcend material scarcity.
Critiques of consumption often originate not in moral discipline but in hostility toward productivity, implicitly shrinking labor markets to subsistence levels.
Consumption naturally reflects effort, specialization, and competitive diversity. Suppressing it impoverishes society without generating a superior alternative.
Violence and Revolution
Marx was neither a liberal pacifist nor a nihilist.
He considered force a legitimate instrument through which a new system emerges — but only once economic conditions have matured.
This logic later morphed into the Gramscian strategy of accelerating societal deterioration so that revolutionary transformation might fall like “ripe fruit.”
For Marx, struggle was justified not by moral truth but because the proletariat, in liberating itself, supposedly liberated humanity from ideology. This tautology served to defend a perpetually unfinished theory.
Ironically, the project to destroy ideology gave rise to regimes that constructed new state ideologies of domination.
Instead of freeing consciousness, they imposed official truths functioning precisely like the ideological obscurantism Marx denounced — concealing new hierarchies and abuses of power.
The Paradox
If every idea is shaped by its time and class position, then is Marxism itself an ideology?
Marx would answer no. He believed he was conducting science rather than philosophy, identifying the “real” laws governing capital’s movement — the very system his intellectual microscope sought, unsuccessfully, to eradicate.