Ideology

Marxist Origins

Now commonly assumed in communication scholarship, Marx's main philosophical argument is that the way the world is materially arranged determines how we think about it. Until the articulation of this philosophy, it was widely assumed that society as we know it is the product of human ingenuity: A group of individuals got together and dreamed up the way society should look and function and then went about making society in conformity with that dream. If this were truly the case, suggested Marx, then why hasn't Utopian thinking brought about a better world? When Marx was working out his philosophy in the mid- to late 19th century, he witnessed an increasingly prosperous class of people (capitalists) exploiting poorer people for profit. Factories were inhumane, and people—sometimes even children—worked long hours for a meager wage. Despite the increasing successes and growing wealth of the individuals who owned the factories, their workers were getting poorer, even dying. Observing how willingly the working class accepted their poor conditions, Marx concluded something was wrong; thought had become “inverted” or turned upside down from what it should be. Ideology was the concept that Marx developed to help explain how this inverted thought came about.

Although it is true that one must imagine and then create a blueprint for a building before it is built, Marx argued that the ideas behind the blueprint were actually influenced by material conditions including (a) what resources were available for building, (b) who owned the resources for building, (c) what class of individuals was ruling society, and so on. Marx argued, in other words, that the building imagined by an architect and then subsequently built would reflect the way the world was materially arranged at the time, ultimately serving the interests of those in power (e.g., those who owned the resources and means for making things).

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