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The word “ideology” usually denotes the entirety of human thought. It is, so to speak, ideology in the broadest sense. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels use the word in a somewhat different sense. They call ideology only a narrower range of thought, specifically those thoughts that have become disconnected from material reality, have lost awareness of this connection, reflect this reality incorrectly, in an inverted manner, and are unaware of this inaccuracy. Marx and Engels wage war against ideology; their methods of materialist dialectics are precisely the tool that produces a radical revolution in thinking and destroys the “ideological” point of view.
In a letter to Konrad Schmidt dated October 27th, 1890, Engels writes:
The reflection of economic relations as principles of law is necessarily also an inverted one. The process takes place without the participants becoming conscious of it. The jurist imagines that he is operating with a priori propositions, while the latter are after all only reflections of the economic process. And so everything remains standing on its head. This inverted reflex so long as it is not recognised for what it is constitutes what we call ideological conceptions. That it is able to exert a reactive influence on the economic basis and within certain limits to modify it, seems to me to be self-evident.
And in a letter to Franz Mehring dated July 14th, 1893, Engels writes:
Ideology is a process which of course is carried on with the consciousness of the so-called thinker but with a false consciousness. The real driving forces which move him, he remains unaware of, otherwise it would not be an ideological process. (F. Engels, Four Letters on Historical Materialism, 1893)
Again, as we see, the lack of accountability of this process is noted, and this lack of accountability, this absence of critical awareness of the connection and dependence of thinking on material reality is presented as an essential point for the definition of what Marx and Engels call ideology.
In ‘Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy’, Engels defines ideology as:
Every ideology, however, once it has arisen, develops in connection with the given concept-material, and develops this material further; otherwise, it would not be an ideology, that is, occupation with thoughts as with independent entities, developing independently and subject only to their own laws. In the last analysis, the material life conditions of the persons inside whose heads this thought process goes on determine the course of the process, which of necessity remains unknown to these persons, for otherwise there would be an end to all ideology. (F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach & the End of Classical German Philosophy, 1886)
When ideology comes to an end, the possibility of clear theoretical thinking emerges, consciously addressing the object of study, remembering that thought is only a reflection of this object, and the task of science is to ensure that this reflection corresponds as closely as possible to the object. We see, therefore, that “ideology” is opposed to scientific, theoretical thinking.
In the preface to his ‘Ludwig Feuerbach’, Engels wrote that in 1845 he and Marx “set about developing their views,” i.e., the materialist explanation of history found by Marx, “in opposition to the ideological view of German philosophy.”
In the work ‘The German Ideology’, in which the mentioned development took place, Marx and Engels wrote the following about ideology:
If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process. In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. (K. H. Marx & F. Engels, The German Ideology, 1846)
We see, therefore, that in this final work, in which Marx and Engels made a final reckoning with their philosophical consciences and achieved complete clarity on the question of their fundamental points of view, they speak definitively about what ideology is and where it comes from. Engels wrote approximately the same thing in its basic outlines in 1890.
Ideology is a peculiar aberration of the mind, reflecting reality in a distorted, inverted way. People perceive the products of their thinking, their ideas, as independent entities. They believe that these mental creations define all of reality, whereas in fact, they are unconsciously incorrect reflections of truly existing relationships.
Thus, ideology can be defined as a consciousness divorced from reality, having lost its conscious connection with this reality and reflecting it incorrectly, in an inverted manner. Marxism is the enemy of ideology.
Now let us consider the question of the reason for the emergence of this “ideological view.” Why did ideological thinking develop? The world around them — nature and their social relations — is reflected in people’s consciousness. Human productive activity, their impact on nature to transform it and adapt it to their own ends; this aspect of human activity provides a solid foundation for theoretical scientific understanding of an object, because without correct knowledge, without concepts that generally accurately reflect reality, fruitful productive activity is impossible. On this foundation, knowledge of nature develops, and the laws of natural science are understood. This is the solid ground upon which materialistic views rest.
That the reflection of objects in people’s minds is generally correct, that there are no great absurdities in their views — the best proof of this is the very existence of the human race. Before reflecting, man acted. In the chain of phenomena that is associated with human existence, their thoughts play a certain, very significant role. The correctness and objectivity of these reflections is proven by practice.
Thus, material productive activity, in which people act on nature in accordance with the impressions received from it, remake it and are again subject to its influences, is the solid basis for cognition of the object, the basis of correct thinking.
But the scope of this activity is not uniform; the extent of human power over nature has varied in different eras. All of nature as a whole has influenced humans, but how they perceived these influences with their consciousness and how they themselves in turn influenced nature has varied.
The relatively narrow circle of power of primitive people over nature did not prevent the fact that people existed. But the low level of economic development did not yet allow knowledge of nature and its laws to be deep. The shortcomings of knowledge of nature, errors and nonsense in understanding causality had their basis.
The narrow circle of human power over nature put obstacles to the free movement of man, his spread across the earth, etc. But these mistakes and absurdities in thinking no longer greatly interfered with people in their struggle for life in order to destroy everyone. These primitive views, at best, only did not interfere with productive and material activity, and at worst, they directly interfered, were an obstacle to it, interfered with the development of productive forces and could cause the death of a mass of people. But the need to fight nature corrected all the mistakes and delusions of the mind and forced people to do the right thing. This was the natural course of development of knowledge. The basis of knowledge lies in human active activity. The whole object as a whole, all nature in all its complexity affects man, who is part of nature, but a person in his activities actively captures only an insignificant part of it. The object located outside this circle has not yet been known by man, but this circle is expanding, and at the same time knowledge is expanding. There are no limits to this expansion.
Human societies existed, were engaged in production, the productive forces of human society grew, and the consequences of all these circumstances were only known by people after their occurrence, only post factum a person was aware of what was happening, was aware of his own actions.
With the development of productive forces, the division of labour was established, private property emerged, and exploitative relations arose. With the formation of classes, when the means of production and surplus product began to accumulate in the hands of certain, relatively speaking, small groups, it became possible for certain groups to devote themselves exclusively to thinking. The division of labour separated mental from physical labour. This became inevitable and necessary. This was a great advantage for the development of thought, but it also entailed particular inaccuracies and distortions in thought. This is what developed and strengthened the so-called “ideological view.” Thought began to imagine that its products possessed the same reality as material reality. Moreover, it imagined that these products of thought were the primary cause of everything, that a “spiritual” substance was the cause of the emergence of the material world.
Thinking, by becoming the monopoly of the exploiters, received the imprint and spirit of the exploiting group. “The class which has at its disposal the means of material production has at the same time at its disposal the means of spiritual production” (from the manuscript ‘The German Ideology’). The dominant ideas of some time were always only the ideas of the ruling class (‘The Communist Manifesto’).
In the manuscript ‘The German Ideology’, Marx and Engels wrote:
Division of labour only becomes truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears. (The first form of ideologists, priests, is concurrent.) From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real… With the division of labour, which separated consumption from production, three points were able to conflict with each other: productive force, social system and consciousness. The division of labour gave rise to a contradiction between the interests of individuals, individual families, on the one hand — and the common interests of people in communication, on the other. It conditioned the domination of one class over another. (K. H. Marx & F. Engels, The German Ideology, 1846)
Ideological consciousness is a product of a system based on exploitation. It was developed by exploiters who gained a monopoly on the development of thought. Thinking began to take centre stage.
In the general economy of the entire community, all the resulting distortions and errors of thought did not prevent people from being materialists in their practice. But all these stupidities, at best, merely did not hinder. Despite them, in spite of them, people generally acted correctly. The total negative impact of these errors was, on the whole, still less than the total of positive, sober actions required to maintain material existence.
Although there could have been sects of eunuchs who disfigured themselves, all of humanity has not castrated itself. Marx’s merit was that he paid attention not only to thought, but also to another side of people’s activity — to material production — and appreciated all its true significance.
In his article ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man’, Engels writes:
Tribes developed into nations and states. Law and politics arose, and with them that fantastic reflection of human things in the human mind – religion. In the face of all these images, which appeared in the first place to be products of the mind and seemed to dominate human societies, the more modest productions of the working hand retreated into the background, the more so since the mind that planned the labour was able, at a very early stage in the development of society (for example, already in the primitive family), to have the labour that had been planned carried out by other hands than its own. (F. Engels, The Dialectics of Nature, 1886)
Thought, divorced from reality, began to represent all relationships of reality in a distorted way. It began to explain everything by originating in the head. But even thoughts are not independent products of the head; consciousness reflects reality in its own unique way and processes these reflections under the influence of a multitude of circumstances, all of which must be taken into account in order to fully and exhaustively understand human thinking and its ideological distortions. In the ideological process, thinking broke away from its foundation. But at a certain stage in the development of society, this ideological thinking has prepared everything within itself for its own negation.
After the emergence of a group of people who specialised in thinking, thought became divorced from direct practice. Specialisation brought its benefits, but it also gave rise to the idiocy inherent in specialisation. At a certain stage of social development, this disconnect between thinking and material practical activity can be reversed.
Under the influence of the growth of productive forces, social relations changed so much that the so-called bourgeois society arose. Thought, seemingly developing independently, under the influence of an internal logic, in fact reflected, of course, all the changes in social relations. Thought, divorced from reality and unwilling to know anything about this crude, material reality, nevertheless dealt exclusively with reflections of reality. It could not escape this reality and could not become completely free of it.
Operating solely with thoughts, solely with these reflections of reality, thinking, without realising it, was nonetheless influenced by this reality and determined by it. The development of classical German philosophy paved the way for the rejection of the ideological nature of thought. Hegel’s dialectic retained only one inconsistency: its idealism. The dialectical method reflected reality more perfectly than previous forms of thought had been able to. This thinking was the result and fruit of specialisation. But it reflected the changes taking place in society, where the conditions were being prepared and matured under which this specialisation of thought, this separation of thought from immediate material practice, would be abolished. It is no coincidence that, along with the maturation of bourgeois relations, ideological thinking also reached its abolition.
Hegel had brought philosophical thinking to such a state that only one step remained to transform ideological thinking into a coherent scientific, theoretical one. This step consisted of the transition to a materialist perspective. This step was taken by Feuerbach, followed by Marx and Engels.
The method of materialist dialectics, discovered and so brilliantly applied by Marx, eliminates the ideological view, the ideological nature of thinking completely and without reserve. It means a radical revolution in the field of thinking.
In ‘The Communist Manifesto’, Marx and Engels wrote that, no matter what form class opposites take,— the exploitation of one part of society by another is a fact common to all past centuries:
No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms. The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas. (K. H. Marx & F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1847)
Above we defined ideology as thinking divorced from reality, having lost consciousness of its connection with reality and reflecting reality incorrectly, upside down:
Of the economic, political and other reflections the same thing is true as of the images in the human eye. They all pass through a convex lens and therefore appear upside down, standing on their head. Only the nervous system is lacking to set them right on their feet again. (F. Engels, Four Letters on Historical Materialism, 1893)
The method of materialist dialectics is precisely the ‘apparatus’ that destroys ideological aberration and makes possible real scientific theoretical knowledge. This scientific knowledge must be based on a thorough and conscientious study of the facts of reality.
In the preface to ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’, Marx lists the most important ideologies:
The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.
Next, Marx points out the path by which the historical process should be explored:
Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. (K. H. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859)
In one of the notes in ‘Das Kapital’ (see Volume 1, Chapter 13, approximately p. 89), Marx says that it is easier, through analysis, to find the earthly core of bizarre religious ideas than, on the contrary, to deduce religious forms corresponding to them from given real-life relations. The latter method is the only materialistic, and therefore scientific method.
In these lines, Marx outlines a scientific research program for any researcher who wants to be conscientious. In order to finally free ourselves from ideological perversion, it is necessary to overcome ideology and put in its place a sober, scientific study of the facts of reality, the study of the material existence of human society.
Now is the time when thinking can and should stop being ideological…
Currently, the proletariat, the revolutionary class, which has great tasks to accomplish, does not need ideology, but scientific theoretical knowledge, necessary for practice, for action.
Every ideology deals with thoughts as independent entities, it does not go beyond them, otherwise the end of all ideology comes. But the revolutionary class just needs it to come to an end. He just needs to go beyond the boundaries of ideology, to discard it. Legal ideology teaches about the inviolable, above all, right that dictates its will, and Marx teaches that this right is just a reflection of the economic relations of bourgeois society, that society that the proletariat must destroy at all costs and which must be replaced by Communist society.
You can complete this task, manage your activities and master social relations only when there is no ideological fog in your head, when a sober view is developed that clearly comprehends the essence of social relations. And the inviolable, highest right of “democracy” confused more than one head.
It seems to the ideologist that God is an independent being ruling the world. But in fact, this is a kind of reflection, a distorted reflection of the human personality.
It seems to the ideologist that the state unites society, that it is superior to society and protects the common interests of everyone. But in fact, the state is an organisation of power of some class, existing for the sake of protecting relations of exploitation. Everything is ultimately determined by the economic system and the resulting class structure of society and the class struggle based on this. The struggle for the material interests of classes takes on a deceptive form of struggle for political principles.
Kant said that two things struck him with their greatness: the starry sky above him and the moral law within him. Human knowledge has uncovered and continues to uncover the secrets of celestial mechanics. But the moral law is not an incomprehensible mystery either. The origins, causes, and changes of particular views on what is proper can be investigated using the method of dialectical materialism. There is nothing mystical or unknowable in this “moral law.” When examining people’s thoughts and wills, one must simply be able to move from these reflections in consciousness to the actual relationships of material people to one another, study these very relationships, understand their necessity and the direction in which they change, and then derive all corresponding ideological forms from these relationships. Rules of conduct remain, but the mystical fog in which moralists shroud them must be dispelled.
Any ideology is harmful because it prevents us from seeing reality. Higher ideology — philosophy — has prepared everything for its own denial, for the destruction of ideology in thinking in general. Engels writes in his ‘Ludwig Feuerbach’:
[The scientific] conception, however, puts an end to philosophy in the realm of history, just as the dialectical conception of nature makes all natural philosophy both unnecessary and impossible. It is no longer a question anywhere of inventing interconnections from out of our brains, but of discovering them in the facts. For philosophy, which has been expelled from nature and history, there remains only the realm of pure thought, so far as it is left: the theory of the laws of the thought process itself, logic and dialectics. (F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach & the End of Classical German Philosophy, 1886)
At the current stage of development of social relations and the evolution of thought, thinking which is tainted with ideology cannot be scientific. Science is one thing, and “ideology” is quite another.
But in order to firmly eradicate ideology, one must thoroughly develop thought. At the same time, familiarity with the history of the development of thinking and the past stages of its development plays an important role. Everything that exists arises and develops. Everything that develops must briefly repeat the entire course of previous development and go through a series of successive stages. To overcome ideological thinking, it is necessary to consciously pay off the previous steps in order to bury them forever and take advantage of the positive things they gave. This must be done so thoroughly that the ghosts of past mistakes and wrongs do not rise from the grave. With idealism, every thinking person who wants to think scientifically must make a final calculation. Thought can only become scientific when it is based on a consistently applied materialistic point of view.
But the study of the history of the development of thinking cannot be divorced from the study of the history of the development of social relations and the material reality that this thinking generated. To understand the issues of ideology, you need to research:
- How relations of inequality, exploitation, and power changed and developed;
- The causes and conditions of the emergence of ideas that formed the basis of a particular ideology;
- The course of development of ideology in connection with those social changes under the influence of which ideologies changed and developed.
As a result of such research, the final elimination of the ideological process is possible.
In relation to the bourgeoisie and its thinking, the proletariat must behave dialectically. We must recognise it and reject it, taking from the bourgeoisie all the positive intellectual achievements it has made, and at the same time, overcome the ideological standpoint inherent in bourgeois thinking and rise to the next, higher level of thought; master the method of dialectical materialism and move beyond ideology to genuine scientific theoretical thinking, which consists of studying the object and is always ready to discard any idea, any theory, that has become inconsistent with the facts of reality, understood in their true, non-imaginary connection.
It is necessary to radically transform people’s thinking, infected by long-standing clerical fabrications, from ideology, and strip these human creations of their aura of exclusivity, inaccessibility, and accessibility only to a select few. Scientific thinking is accessible to all, and any normal human brain can grasp the full wisdom of thought — we just need to approach the task of education rationally.