Concerning Marx’s Theory of Ideology, Term Paper Example

Karl Marx’s theory of ideology is interesting, inasmuch as it was never entirely fleshed out by him over the course of his life, and yet has gone on to become quite influential, even within the context of a tremendously influential career. Although Marxists themselves have been diverging from Marx on the question of ideology, Marx’s conceptions of ideology remain interesting, illuminating, and topical. In essence, Marx used ideology firstly as a description of mental, as opposed to manual, labor: thus, an “ideologue” was an individual who engaged in mental labor, such as a clergyman. However, Marx also used something approaching the original form of the word, the sense in which it describes the science of ideas. Following this usage, Marx, often with the aid of Engels, formulated a theory of ideology that held that ideologies were produced from the building blocks of ideas, which in turn were produced by experiential encounters with the real world. Thus, in opposition to Hegel, Marx held that reality ultimately drove the formation of thoughts and ideology.

As Wood (1988) explains, Marx’s conceptions of ideology are not especially clear, and neither Marx nor Engels devote a great deal of time to the concept in their writings (p. 345). And, too, the word has been expanded considerably with respect to the range of concepts that it covers, compared with how Marx himself used it (p. 345). Indeed, Marxists have diverged from Marx on the subject of ideology, largely because upon his death in 1883, Marx’s own usages of the term left much to be desired: he had not even defined ideology as such (Torrance, 1995, p. 1). Still, Marx’s conceptions of ideology have proven quite influential, inasmuch as they have influenced subsequent thinkers to adopt a similar view of ideology and the relation between people and reality that it brokers. In some of his earlier writings, Marx used an earlier definition of ideologue, favored by Napoleon Bonaparte, as an individual engaged in mental labor, rather than manual labor, and it is with regards to this definition that Marx and Engels referred to priests as “’the first form of ideologues’” (Wood, 1988, p. 346).

However, in The German Ideology Marx approaches the still-older and in fact original definition of the term, namely of ideology as a kind of “’science of ideas and their development’” (Wood, 1988, p. 346). And inasmuch as the foundations of Marxian thought are found in Hegel, some accounting of Hegelian philosophy is requisite in order to ascertain the philosophical context in which the Marxian conception of ideology may be placed (Morrison, 2006, p. 61). In Hegelian thought, ideas play an important role in history, as active agents and historical causes: that is to say, ideas may be conceptualized as very real forces acting upon history in their own right, and not as simply the artifacts of sociocultural and philosophical construction and ideation (p. 61). Although much of Marx’s own thinking was rooted in Hegel, specifically the concept of the Hegelian dialectic, it was over conceptions of ideology that Marx, together with Engels, broke quite significantly with Hegel (p. 61).

For Marx and Engels, the Hegelian view of ideas was profoundly erroneous, for precisely the reason that its inexorable, inescapable conclusion was the idea that ideas, as objectively real forces, have a kind of material existence (Morrison, 2006, p. 61). Thus, in The German Ideology Marx and Engels focus on the concept of the realm or dominion of thoughts for the purposes of critiquing and rebutting it: they seek to establish an understanding of ideology and ideas as a result of reality, rather than the other way around (Wood, 1988, p. 346). Consequently, Marx and Engels held, Hegelian philosophy outright distorted reality by conceptualizing it as “a manifestation of internal ideas” (Morrison, 2006, pp. 61-62).

Their competing thesis was the idea that in fact, ideas and conceptions derive from reality, the exact inverse of Hegel’s idea: in other words, instead of ideas creating and shaping external reality, external reality creates and shapes the ideas that people have about it (Morrison, 2006, p. 62). In particular, Marx and Engels were interested in the ideas that people have about social, political, and cultural patterns, institutions, behaviors, and structures (p. 62). This theoretical perspective was actually used by Engels “to describe how workers attribute false motives to the causes of their hardship and suffering”, and later, in the 1960s and 1970s, by George Lukacs to describe ideology as a kind of false consciousness (p. 62).

This, then, is the first seminal characteristic of Marx’s and Engels’s theory of ideology: the idea that ideas come from the external world, notably the external world of sociocultural, sociopolitical, and socioeconomic systems, particularly those involving hierarchies of class (Morrison, 2006, p. 64). So, if ideas arise from the experiences with reality that people have, where does that leave ideology? As Morrison explains, from this perspective ideology is a system of ideas: a kind of unifying grand theory that ties together ideas, and attitudes, and conceptions of all kinds (p. 64). Through the framework of an ideology, an individual’s perception of reality is altered—thus, reality drives ideas, ideas coalesce to form an ideology, and ideologies shape how reality is perceived and thus how new ideas are formed, accepted or rejected (p. 64).

And it is this conception that provides the basis for Marx’s and Engels’s idea of historical materialism. The seminal question that the theory of historical materialism seeks to answer is What is the basis of history? While there have been many answers to this very question, Marx and Engels rejected such competing theoretical approaches as the development of ideas, as promoted by Hegel, and even the development of political institutions (Wood, 1988, p. 347). Instead, Marx and Engels held, the basis of human history has to do with the development of the economy, “civil society” in Hegelian terms: how societies go about the business of production, appropriation and redistribution (p. 347).

Secondly, then, ideologies change how we see and understand our world: thus, even as our ideas are rooted in perception, so too do they affect perception (Morrison, 2006, p. 65). Consequently, we do not simply encounter the material world as it is, but rather interpret it through the lenses of our own ideologies: thus, ideology serves as a filter for perceptions. Morrison gives the example of luck, a commonly-held but hardly rational belief per se: people who believe in luck hold that it plays an important role in affecting their own outcomes and destinies (p. 65). Thus, they believe that luck determines a significant part of reality, and because of this belief they relate to the world in a way that is fundamentally based on imagination and is therefore profoundly fictional (p. 65).

Though the example may seem pedestrian, the point is an important one: for Marx, the conception of luck is fundamentally an example of relating to the world through ideology (Morrison, 2006, p. 65). Foundationally, this view is ideological with respect to the real world because those who hold to it believe that “an external agency determines the outcome of things… before they actually occur” (p. 65). This belief is ideological, and, more importantly for Marx, it is a belief that can be situated within a rather distinct social framework: it does not simply arise de novo from a single individual, but rather comes about and is maintained through social behavior (p. 65).

From this follows a second complete definition of ideology: ideology pertains to “the relation between the common ideas and conceptions, and our own conception of the way the world works and our relation to it” (Morrison, 2006, p. 65). If our ideas arise from reality, the argument goes, then we cannot actually encounter reality itself, because, again, everything is filtered through this ideational, ideological lens (p. 65). A case in point is attitudes about material possessions, with all of their social and cultural baggage: to a considerable degree, social status is ascribed based on the perception of material things (p. 65).

What, then, do we have but a social world, rather than a simply ‘natural’ one? (Morrison, 2006, pp. 65-66). And with that social world comes particular ideas about class, particular ideas about the social positions that different individuals occupy in relation to each other, and these ideas in turn have a powerful, profound impact on reality (p. 66). One of the ways in which they impact reality concerns a third definition of ideology as a concept: ideology can be conceptualized in terms of “activities that take place in relation to the world rather than being divorced from it” (p. 66). Ideology is enacted, experienced, lived out, and all of this is discernible in activities that take place in the experiential, social world (p. 66). Consequently, these activities reproduce the assumptions of ideology, including assumptions of class and status in society.

Through the lens of historical materialism, Marx and Engels saw history in terms of economic production, or “’form of intercourse’” (German Verkehrsform) (Wood, 1988, p. 347). They divided history into periods, or epochs, based on the prevalent modality of production relations or ‘intercourse’ in each epoch (p. 347). The seminal point here is that these forms of ‘intercourse’ define economic roles, particularly ownership of the “means, process, and fruits of production to the occupants of certain roles, while excluding the occupants of other roles” (p. 347). From these economic arrangements class differences and distinctions are produced, classes being defined in terms of their position with respect to production (p. 347). However, as Wood explains, in Marxian thought there is a difference between classes an sich, potential classes defined in terms of their situation with respect to economic relations, and classes für sich, actual classes that have gained a kind of class consciousness, thereby enabling them to pursue common class interests (p. 347).

Of course, as any student of history knows, living societies cannot remain essentially static forever: sooner or later, a society will be compelled or impelled to change. From the perspective of historical materialism, the cause of such social change is a change in the social relations governing production, that is, the society’s socio-economic structures, institutions, and arrangements (Wood, 1988, p. 347). In essence, the reason for such change is rather simple, and entirely material: when the means of production changes, including everything from human knowledge to social relations, particularly patterns of cooperation and competition, and technology, then the social relations of production must shift (pp. 347-348). When the social relations of production shift, then society as a whole must change, replacing or readapting social relations that have become outmoded, outdated, obsolete, and even dysfunctional with new ones (p. 348).

It is well worth the exercise to examine these stages of historical materialism in Marx’s own writings. In The German Ideology (GI) (n.d.), Marx delineated, firstly, a stage of tribal (Stammeigentum) ownership of the means of production (GI). In this stage, a society lives “by hunting and fishing, by the rearing of beasts or, in the highest stage, agriculture” (GI). Under the tribal stage, ownership of the means of production is essentially familial and tribal, and there is little in the way of a division of labor: little more than the division of labor that one finds in the family, at any rate, with “patriarchal family chieftains, below them the members of the tribe, finally slaves” (GI).

This tribal modality in turn gives way to the ancient state, particularly the city-state, as with the Greek poleis or even the Sumerian city-states (Marx, n.d., GI). The reason for this is largely a growth of population, which tends to produce increased demand for various commodities, as well as wars and trading relations between burgeoning tribes that tend to bring them together, either by conquest or by peaceful commerce and intercourse (GI). Consequently, they form city-states, which continue to use slavery, and which also foster earlier forms of private property (GI). At this point political society has its first class division, that between citizens and slaves, and this form of communal private property “compels the active citizens to remain in this spontaneously derived form of association over against their slaves”, the reason being that if they should leave the city-state, then they will be unable to maintain their ownership (GI). Consequently, such a society is also notable, Marx believed, for the more marked division of labor that it possesses, as well as the urban-rural divide (GI).

As every student of European history indeed knows, in the West the ancient modality was brought down by the fall of the Western Roman Empire, thereby inaugurating a new feudal system of land tenure (Marx, n.d., GI). Marx accurately described the downfall of urban life and agricultural and industrial productivity that characterized post-Roman Europe, and the influence of the Germanic tribal arrivistes, which produced a productive class of “enserfed small peasantry” as opposed to the slaves of Roman times (GI). Marx also accurately identified the antagonism of the feudal system, of necessity a rural one, to the towns: the land tenure and armed retinues of the nobility gave them power in the countryside, but availed them much less in the towns (GI).

In the towns, Marx explained, the feudal organization of land gave way to the feudal organization of trades: “Here property consisted chiefly in the labour of each individual person” (n.d., GI). Marx then delineated, very neatly, the contributing forces and factors that brought about the rise of the medieval guilds: “the necessity for association against the organized robber-nobility, the need for communal covered markets in an age when the industrialist was at the same time a merchant, the growing competition of the escape serfs…” (GI). This arrangement produced the set of social relations that encompassed the journeyman and the apprentice, so that the towns finally had a hierarchy comparable to that in the countryside (GI).

A discussion of the bourgeois modality, the capitalist means of production, follows below, but for now the cardinal thing to note here is the purpose of all of this in Marx’s work. Marx’s seminal point was that all of these social relations concerning the means of production were precisely that, social—they arose in response to material conditions, which produced certain ideas about the ownership of property and the prerogatives and privileges (or lack thereof) of various social classes, and all of this produced ideologies which then colored how individuals in said societies perceived everything. Tribal, ancient, and feudal societies were not simply things, natural and somehow organic, but sets of ideas produced by, and modulating the individual’s encounter with, reality: true, their formations and changes were driven by changes in the means of production or the fortunes of the societies, but the point is that they all, without exception, depended on the maintenance and reproduction of certain ideas about the social arrangements governing the ownership and use of the means of production.

All of this notwithstanding, the means by which societies renew themselves, changing their social arrangements to bring them in line with the new realities that are being created by their newly-changed productive powers, is the class struggle (Wood, 1988, p. 348). This struggle is of course political; specifically, it is the struggle of the political elements and movements that represent the interests of the different parties in the class struggle (p. 368). And what constitutes the interests of the class parties? The answer is simple: the social relations governing production. Thus, the politics of the class struggle all pertain to the political economy of a society, the sociopolitical arrangements that it has enshrined to govern production, i.e. its socioeconomic state of affairs (p. 348).

As Marx and Engels so famously said in the Communist Manifesto (CM), “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (CM, n.d., ch. 1). And this, of course, takes us to Marx’s concept of alienation, and from it, his critique of capitalism. As Bailey et al. (2008) explain, the concept of alienation is an ancient one, which may date back all the way to ancient Christianity (986). However, a nearer philosophical predecessor to Marx’s conception of alienation was that of the German Romantics, who, like other Romantics from the very late 18^th century down to the mid 19^th century, tended to view the pre-industrial past with a certain nostalgia (986). As Bailey et al. explain, the Romantics believed that in pre-industrial times people lived healthier, happier, more natural and somehow more ‘whole’ lives (986). Though this idea contains a great deal of nonsense from the perspective of social history, nevertheless it was influential in industrializing Europe, owing to the social ferment, dislocations and upheavals that the process produced.

Again, as with so much else of his thought, Marx borrowed from and substantially revised the ideas of Hegel, who held that alienation consisted of “the view of the external world as outside—foreign to us—as objective and mind independent” (Bailey et al., 2008, p. 986). Recovering from this view requires the individual to comprehend the outside world as a personal and individual truth, “a fact of mind and its self-consciousness, of the ‘Spirit’ which creates the world and its history, and which is in fact embodied in nature and in our society” (p. 986). Again, as seen previously, for Hegel mind and consciousness, the realm of ideas, determined reality, and not the other way around.

Marx agreed with Hegel and the German Romantics that industrial, bourgeois capitalist society was alienating, indeed especially alienating, but saw this alienation as a materialistic process (Bailey et al., 2008, p. 986). Specifically, Marx held, alienation in industrial society was the prevailing condition established for wage laborers by the productive arrangements of capitalism. This was the bourgeois modality, the successor to the medieval arrangements of feudalism. In Marx’s thought, this alienation consists firstly of alienation from the products of their labor, which are owned by the capitalist, thus depriving the workers of any pride of achievement in what they create (p. 986). Secondly, it consists of alienation from communal action: the proletariat, the disenfranchised workers, are unable to organize in a collective to demand better working conditions and rights (p. 986). They are essentially enslaved by “an autonomous external inhuman ‘market’”, and as such they are separated from each other and from their own human nature (p. 986).

As Marx and Engels said in the Communist Manifesto, theirs was the epoch of the bourgeoisie, the property-owning capitalists, who ruled over the disempowered and alienated proletariat (ch. 1). Here Marx and Engels relate the story of the rise of the bourgeoisie, from their beginnings with the burghers of the chartered towns, to the tremendous opportunities opened up by the discovery and colonization of the Americas on the one hand, and the rounding of the Cape in the same period, which brought Europe directly into contact with the great economic domain o of the Indian Ocean (ch. 1). Ironically, Marx and Engels actually acknowledged and indeed, praised the bourgeoisie for their own revolutionary accomplishments: “It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’” (ch. 1). Thus, while Marx and Engels derided the bourgeoisie for creating and reproducing a social order of the means of production which they believed to be foundationally unjust and exploitative, they nonetheless fulsomely praised the bourgeoisie for doing away with and tearing down the old order of ancién regime Europe, the old world of the kings and aristocracies. However, the turn of bourgeoisie was coming, Marx and Engels declared: “The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself” (ch. 1).

As Bailey et al. (2008) explained, Marx actually held that the sale of goods for profit was inherently exploitative (p. 986). Drawing on and repackaging a theory of labor value articulated in some form by both Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Marx held that the only determinant of the fair value of any given commodity is the labor required to produce said commodity. Consequently, after the capitalist pays their workers, they simply appropriate the profits, or in economic terms the “rents” (surplus left over after the costs of production are met) (p. 986). Marx held that this was intrinsically exploitative, because the capitalist profits from surplus value (p. 986).

Secondly, Marx believed that when this theory is applied to the actual labor market, it will have the effect of forcing the workers into poverty and keeping them there (Bailey et al., 2008, p. 986). The reasoning is simple enough to follow readily: in a free market for labor, the value of labor is simply the bare minimum necessary to provide for the worker’s material needs to the point that they can be productive for the capitalist (p. 986). In other words, in a free market for labor, it will simply be a race to the bottom for the workers, since even if some capitalists try to pay higher wages out of the goodness of their hearts (or to attract better workers), those capitalists will be at a disadvantage competing with other capitalists who have cheaper labor costs. As such, the workers will have no other option, Marx believed, but to take whatever wage the capitalist is willing to pay them—unless they opt instead for the class struggle, and to overthrow the regnant system (p. 986).

In his own words: “Wages are determined through the antagonistic struggle between capitalist and worker. Victory goes necessarily to the capitalist” (Marx, “Wages of Labour” [WL, N.D.,]). The reason for this is that the relation between the two is profoundly unequal, Marx explains: specifically, “the capitalist can live longer without the worker than the worker without the capitalist” (WL, N.D.,). This produces a profoundly stratified economic and social arrangement, wherein the capitalists can combine and cooperate with each other quite easily, i.e. to form businesses and strike business partnerships, etc., while the workers are forbidden to organize in order to seek a rebalancing of the scales.

And again, regarding the market for labor itself, Marx argued that as with every other commodity, the demand affects productivity, i.e. supply. Consequently, if the supply of willing laborers exceeds the demand for labor by quite a wide margin, then some workers will inevitably and inescapably slip into penury and starve (Marx, WL, N.D.,). This set of arrangements is still perfectly beneficial to the bourgeois capitalist, but the worker is profoundly hurt by it in all respects. And even when the capitalist does gain, whether with a surge in demand for the commodity that their business produces, or with some secret that keeps the cost of production or transportation cheaper, it is not necessarily the case that the workers will also benefit: true, in some cases they will (more demand may mean the capitalist will hire more workers), but in other cases, the capitalist will simply appropriate a little more surplus value (WL, N.D.,). Thus, Marx believed, the capitalist’s gain is not necessarily the workers’ gain—but the capitalist’s loss will always, without fail, be the workers’ loss as well (WL, N.D.,).

What, then, about the social conditions of a capitalist society in times of economic growth and abundance? For Marx, the answer was actually rather clear: although this is the only condition that is favorable to the worker, because demand for labor exceeds the supply, it still results in significant and very real exploitations of the workers (WL, N.D.,). Marx pointed to overwork, requiring workers to sacrifice more and more of their time for the purposes of “slave-labour”, thereby depriving them of freedom, and all to enrich the bourgeois capitalist (WL, N.D.,). And, too, such economic growth will only be possible through “the accumulation of much labour, capital being accumulated labour”, leading to more and more commodities being appropriated from the worker (WL, N.D.,).

All of this is, of course, the Romantic idea of industrial-era alienation repackaged, but repackaged in so profound a way as to rightly be called a re-envisioning of alienation. Indeed, Marx’s thinking on this subject is quite original in many respects: diagnosing capitalism as the disease that afflicted the society of his time, Marx held that contemporary society and religion could not remedy it in the manner that Hegel prescribed (Bailey et al., 2008, p. 986). Hegel’s philosophical ideas about using a new conception of God to end alienation, Marx held, were profoundly wrong: religion was part of the problem by its very nature, because it alienated believers from their own human powers and faculties of agency and control and ascribed them to an external God (p. 986).

All of this is, again, quite in keeping with Marx’s theory of ideology. Reality, particularly human social reality, determines the ideas that people have about the world, and the ideas result in the coalescence of ideologies, particularly ideologies that pertain to extant social arrangements regarding the means of production. These ideologies in turn color everything that individuals perceive about their world: they change how people see things. Following the historical materialist schema that Marx and Engels propounded, the way to rectify the profoundly unjust and alienating social arrangements of capitalism was class struggle resulting in the re-appropriation of the means of production from the bourgeois capitalists to the proletariat (Bailey et al., 2008, p. 986).

Thus, the recipe for curing the disease of bourgeoisie rule, Marx and Engels believed, was to abolish private property (CM, N.D., ch. 2). How, then, could this be reconciled with the Communist credo that the workers should own the fruits of their own labors? Hardly: rather, Marx and Engels held that personal property was all and well and good, and indeed, should be protected from the despoliations of bourgeoisie industry (ch. 2). In other words, what was needed was the protection of personal property, the property of the industrious worker, by abolishing the private property of the bourgeois capitalist (ch. 2).

“To be a capitalist,” Marx and Engels declared, “is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production” (CM, N.D., ch. 2). This meant that capital was a social property and power, not ‘merely’ a personal one. By transforming capital, i.e. bourgeoisie property, into communally-owned property, the social character of the property changes to lose its class character (ch. 2). In fact, Marx and Engels were quite clear and quite explicit: they wanted to do away with the surplus value owned by the capitalist, and used to command the labor of others. Responding to anticipated bourgeoisie cries of alarm over this idea of abolishing private, bourgeoisie property, Marx and Engels charged that “private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths” (ch. 2). In other words, Marx and Engels claimed that their bourgeoisie detractors were simply acting out of self-interest, in seeking to preserve a system that benefited a small elite class at the expense of the vast majority of the population.

Again, the point of all of this is Marx’s theory of ideology: the reality of social arrangements, particularly those pertaining to the ownership and use of the means of production, gives rise to ideas, which give rise to ideologies, which in turn color how individuals in these societies see everything. These relations, through alienation, obscure the ability of the slave of ancient (or not-so-ancient) times to work for themselves, and of the wage-laborer to work for something other than a mere wage (Seliger, 1979, p. 40). As Ollman (1976) explained, following Marx it might very well be argued that capitalist, bourgeois ideology is particularly powerful, and—from a Marxist standpoint—especially oppressive for that (p. 229). This is because capitalism pervades essentially all of the processes and social institutions of societies in which it is established, to a very considerable degree (p. 229).

Specifically, bourgeois ideology pervades social relations to the extent that it “is both a necessary premise and an equally necessary result of all activity in capitalist society”: following Marx, everything in a capitalist society depends on bourgeois ideology as a founding, first principle (Ollman, 1976, p. 229). Because of this, and again following Marx’s theory of ideology, bourgeois ideology is also a necessary result of everything that occurs in a capitalist society, because everything that occurs in a capitalist society reinforces the capitalist system of social relations governing the means of economic productivity (p. 229). A key example, and definitely a case in point, is the way in which workers—and really, essentially all members of a capitalist society—view everything as privately-owned property (p. 229).

The ultimate consequence of bourgeoisie ideology is to produce contradictions between the ideology on the one hand, and real life on the other (Myers, 2003, p. 15). Of course, the ability to act on these contradictions is constrained or liberated based on considerations of time and place: the social, political, and economic relations that govern the society, which in turn determine levels of education, mobility, class relations, and how ripe the society might be for a revolutionary upheaval of one sort or another (p. 15).

In this observation, Marx’s theory of ideology comes full circle with a consideration of agency: agency is constrained or encouraged and promoted by the social, political, and economic conditions of any given society in terms of place and time. These circumstances are, again, determined by and modulated through ideas and ideologies, which in turn come from experiences with the social, political, and economic relations of societies, and other aspects of reality (technology and other material factors of production). All of this, in total, describes and defines the agency that the proletariat may have in successfully taking over from the bourgeoisie and bringing about the final stage in Marx’s historical materialism.

Though Marx’s work remains influential amongst Marxists, it has, to be sure, declined in influence in many respects since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Even amongst Marxists, Marx’s ideas have been subject to considerable revision, expansion, and critique, which has produced a wide variety of movements drawing from the works of Marx. Nonetheless, at least among Marxists, Marx’s theory of ideology has remained influential to a certain degree, for all that it has been refined, redefined, updated, and the like. Marx’s thesis that experiences of reality drove the formation of ideas, and thence of ideologies, and that these ideologies in turn served to bolster and reproduce social arrangements governing the means of production, has proven both an interesting one and, at least among certain academics, one that continues to command a certain influence. As seen, too, this theory can be brought full circle with a consideration of the agency that an individual or group may be said to have under the ideologically-reified social arrangements governing the ownership and use of the means of production in society.

Works Cited

Bailey, A., et al. (2008). The Broadview anthology of social and political thought: vol. I, 
from Plato to Nietzsche. 2 vols. Buffalo, NY: Broadview Press.

Marx, K. (n.d.). The German ideology. Retrieved from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/index.htm (Original work published 1845).

—. (n.d.). Wages of labour. Retrieved from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/wages.htm (Original work published 1844).

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (n.d.). The Communist Manifesto. Retrieved from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/index.htm (Original work published 1848).

Morrison, K. (2006). Marx, Durkheim, Weber: Formations of modern social thought (2^nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications Inc.

Myers, J. C. (2003). From stage-ist theories to a theory of the stage: The concept of ideology in Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire. Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture & Politics, 16(1), pp. 13-21. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/

Ollman, B. (1976). Alienation: Marx’s conception of man in a capitalist society (2^nd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Seliger, M. (1979). The Marxist conception of ideology: A critical essay. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Torrance, J. (1995). Karl Marx’s theory of ideas. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Wood, A. W. (1988). Ideology, false consciousness, and social illusion. In B. P. MacLaughlin (Ed.), Perspectives on self deception (pp. 345-363). Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.