Materialism and Ideology

Abstract

I want to begin this section by examining Marx’s relationship to Hegelian philosophy. For Marx the essence of ideology lies in its re-presentation of the material conflicts of capitalism as necessary legitimate and part of the general progress of humanity towards the realization of its essential freedom. The ideological forms which Marx implicates in this process are well known; ethics, jurisprudence, literature, philosophy, historiography, aesthetics — indeed all of the ‘humanities’ — are cited in the list of spectres which haunt the capitalist mode of production. Thus the critique of Hegel which Marx develops in his early writings (chiefly The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, The Holy Family and The German Ideology) is important because it is simultaneously a critique of the method of idealist philosophy and of the processes of ‘self-externalization and self-alienation’ that are characteristic of all ideological production (Marx, 1977c: 26–7). We need, therefore, to look at the detail of Marx’s argument.