What is Ideology?
“Attempts to define reality in particular ways”

Ideology brings together power and social construction of reality; Possibility of a direct link between meaning making and reality

Reality is the result of false consciousness, the belief in that everything is naturalized. People are suffering from false consciousness because they are taking as true knowledge ideas that are false. Labour =/= commodity. Capitalist class tells the world that labour power should be sold as commodity on the market.

Realistic Theory of Ideology

• Possibility of a direct link between meaning making and reality
• Ideology thwarts this possibility / distortion of reality
• ‘Underneath’ ideas knowledge and culture are more ‘real and determining social and economic relations’ (Marx)
• False consciousness
• Experience has no significance

The ideologies of the dominant class of a society (dominant ideology) are proposed to all members of that society in order to make the ruling class’ interests appear to be the interests of all.

The most commonly held theory of ideology, a realist theory, defines ideology as ‘false consciousness’. Marx and Engels claimed that the dominant ideas of a society are the ideas of the dominant class. That is, the class that holds power attempts to impose its ideas, its versions of reality, on the rest of society. These ideas intentionally misrepresent the world, at least from the point of view of the real interests of the working class. … The capitalist class has its own interests and its own truth. The problem comes when the truth of the capitalist class is universalized and naturalized, then offered as the truth for everyone, as if it were both the way the world is and the way it has to be. In other words, ideas, knowledge, and culture are simply a reflection of the social position of those who produce them. They are not real; they are nothing but the effect of more real and determining social and economic relations.

Experience and ideology

• Reality is always in someway false
• Experience has its own truth, meaningful
• Phenomenal, humanistic, role for meaning not mirror/reflex
• Position in world determines experience
• Ideology suppression of some groups authentic experience

Social Constructionism

• No reality outside of social representations
• No way to falsify an ideology, no reality to measure it against
• Reality has to be made to mean
• Experience is an ideological code
• Interpellation ‘putting into the space’
• Media construct our identity

Interpellation, a term coined by French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, describes the process by which ideology addresses the individual.

Basic assumptions

• Institutions, social relations, culture guide social reproduction
• Systemic inequality and power imbalances (Grossberg, 193)
• Need to make power appear legitimate (force or ideology?)
• Yet, people oppose injustice and politics is ideological struggle
• Oppression by way of meaning, thought, the unconscious, material social relations