Ideology has been described as a ‘sense of abstract, impractical or fanatical theory’, originally described as a term philosophy of mind; the current everyday use of term refers to belief system that someone holds onto. It is often associated with the work of Marx and Engels, and their assessment of society’s outlook between material conditions and relationships, better known as Marxist Ideology. (Raymond, 1985, 154-155) This Marxist ideological sense, has had tremendous influence in fields of communications, sociology and economics, but does not exist in isolation. Marxist ideology is one of a number of working concepts including: ideology as a terrain of struggle or as false consciousness. Through these different senses, ideology has been
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This ideology holds that the belief system behind capitalism would seem to have no other purpose than to conceal the truth behind the inner workings of our consumer society. False consciousness postulates that society holds in its mind an intentionally a skewed view of the way the world works. This distorted world doesn’t fight back because workers, or what Marx referred to at the proletariat, fail to recognize their own suppression at the hands of the powerful ruling class or bourgeoisie, clinging to views that are at odds with their real economic interest in capitalist system. (Marx, Engels, 2001, 40) Arguing that a society we are blissfully ignorant of the inner workings of commercialisim, we suppress the true values of the goods we consume. This ideology argues that the value of items comes from their history: the working conditions of the laborers who produce the goods, the social relationships contained in every product, but we hide those relationships from our own awareness. Because the history of our products are concealed, we make fetishes of these commodities by investing magical powers in them, willfully ignoring their true costs and turning them into objects of lust. A modern day example of this is how we choose to ignore working conditions of clothing factories overseas, instead focusing on the low-cost high fashion products conveniently located in our favorite grocery store. Even
This ideology holds that the belief system behind capitalism would seem to have no other purpose than to conceal the truth behind the inner workings of our consumer society. False consciousness postulates that society holds in its mind an intentionally a skewed view of the way the world works. This distorted world doesn’t fight back because workers, or what Marx referred to at the proletariat, fail to recognize their own suppression at the hands of the powerful ruling class or bourgeoisie, clinging to views that are at odds with their real economic interest in capitalist system. (Marx, Engels, 2001, 40) Arguing that a society we are blissfully ignorant of the inner workings of commercialisim, we suppress the true values of the goods we consume. This ideology argues that the value of items comes from their history: the working conditions of the laborers who produce the goods, the social relationships contained in every product, but we hide those relationships from our own awareness. Because the history of our products are concealed, we make fetishes of these commodities by investing magical powers in them, willfully ignoring their true costs and turning them into objects of lust. A modern day example of this is how we choose to ignore working conditions of clothing factories overseas, instead focusing on the low-cost high fashion products conveniently located in our favorite grocery store. Even