Marx: Economy, Ideology, and Alienation

Economy and Ideology in Marx

The term ideology was created to designate the science of knowledge, the set of ideas that characterize a time or a group of people, but over time, it acquired a negative meaning, which Marx maintained. For Marx, ideology is false consciousness; it is the belief that human thoughts are independent and only depend on brainpower. For him, ideas and beliefs are conditioned by the economy; material reality governs thought. In short, ideology tends to distort reality because, being dependent on the economic situation, it is a false consciousness, as he pointed out earlier.

Whoever controls the economy will control ideology. In capitalist society, the bourgeois class controls the economy and ideology.

Marx distinguishes between:

• Infrastructure: A set of material elements, consisting of the economy.
• Superstructure: A set of ideas and beliefs—social, political, etc.—by which people try to organize human relations as a whole.

The latter depends on the infrastructure.

Marxist Theory of Alienation

Following Marxist thought, there is a desire to transform society; it is necessary to denounce injustice.

Forms of Alienation:

Infrastructural or Economic Alienation

This is the root of the other forms of alienation. Work is man's creative activity. Man, through work, puts something of his being into each product. He is productive through creative work. The working man creates himself; he transforms the power of nature through work. Through this work, human beings are manifested in the fruits of their labor. If this separation is not abolished, the worker is alienated because the work product is not his own.

The end product is that man does his job; production serves for life and can be used to live (food, clothing, housing, health, education, etc.).

In capitalist society, there has been no such meeting: man is on one side, and the products are on another. They have not served the social production of life.

That's when alienation occurs: man empties himself and, not attributing to himself the reality of his products, considers them alien, different from him. The worker is alienated because he attributes to a being distinct from him a set of qualities that are his own personality. Alienation occurs at two levels:

• With regard to the product of their work: When considering the products of their work as something other than himself, there is a distancing from himself.
• With regard to the act of work: The worker sells his labor to another being than himself, who uses that power for profit. As a human being creates himself through productive activity, having to sell his own activity to another means he is selling his own personality to do what the other wants (thus, he becomes the instrument of another man).

To overcome this form of alienation requires the abolition of private ownership of the means of production.

Superstructural or Ideological Alienation

• Social Alienation: Society gives rise to two social classes: the proletariat, which actually produces goods, and the capitalist class, which appropriates them. Objective: To eliminate all classes.
• Political Alienation: Given the division of classes, the state is also divided: first, a political class that commands and another that obeys. Objective: To eliminate all kinds of states and make the world one country.
• Religious Alienation: Evasion of reality into a transcendent world. Marx rejected all religions and denied transcendence; for him, God does not exist, and religion is the opium of the people.