Individuals do not choose a particular ideology among several and then conform their way of life to this mindset. Instead, their existence within the contradictory relations of class society puts them into a certain ideological state of mind whose purpose is the rationalization and reproduction of that society. Whereas ideology appears in liberal discourse as a pluralistic set of competing views to be selected by individuals, Marx only speaks of ideology in general, as the distorted consciousness necessarily produced by the contradictions of class society. In short, there is no such thing for Marx as “an ideology” or “ideologies” in the plural, only ideology.
It is not only liberals, however, who have altered Marx’s original conception of ideology, as Marxists themselves have played a major role in distorting Marx’s theory of distorted consciousness. Many Marxists in the present indeed affirm the subjective interpretation of ideology when they speak of the “socialist” or “Marxist ideology” they have chosen as their worldview against “liberal ideology.”
Perhaps more often throughout its history, however, the Marxist tradition has opposed this liberal notion of ideology as something consciously chosen by individuals with a more objective account that treats it as a set of ideas that express the interests of a class (eg., bourgeois or proletarian ideology). But in assessing the merits of ideology based on its class position, Marxists pluralize it and strip it of its purely negative, critical meaning.
Marx’s “negative concept of ideology,” as Jorge Larrain observes, “passes judgement upon ideas, whatever their class origin,” insofar as they conceal contradictions. For Marx, there is not a good ideology (proletarian) and a bad ideology (bourgeois), there is only ideology in general, the distorted forms of consciousness that harmonize social contradictions at the level of ideas.
“Whereas for Marx the idea of a ‘proletarian ideology’ is totally foreign,” as Larrain writes, “for the new generation of Marxists,” beginning especially with Lenin, “each class produces its own ideology, or at least an ideology that serves its interests can be ascribed to it.” In Lenin’s hands, “a move from ideology to class ‘ideologies’ is firmly established which loses the originally negative sense of the concept.” In this positive, neutral version, ideology merely becomes the thought that serves a particular class. Ideology is not a pejorative itse
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