Watch out for boo words.
This well-known termscomes from Karl Marx.
He has mentioned Marx
Marx is known as founder of communism
Therefore he must be a communist (and dangerous and I should ignore him)
Steady.
Marx was an economist and historian who said a great deal about how society works. He also had political beliefs. His influence was so wide reaching it is part of our general education to know at least the basis of one of his most important ideas about how society works. It is possible to agree with some and disagree with others – many people do. It is easy to accept some of his social analysis without sharing his political aims. But attacks on left wing ideas tend to use ‘Marxist’ like a general ‘boo’ word to scare the children and avoid serious attention to what is actually being said, and that is why we needed this prologue. Also, I am going to make this very, very simple, to save time.
Now, what makes society tick? We all go to work to make and buy and sell and use stuff and that makes an economy turnover. In the process, we form relationships – employer, assistant, trainee, owner, customer etc. This might be done in an agricultural society (all farmers and landowners) an industrial one (coal and steel and car makers) or whatever follows now we have lost much of our industry and rely on software engineers, special effects merchants and dress designers to keep us all afloat. But those relationships are the substructure. We fit into it at some point – top, bottom or middle – doing whatever we are trained to do in the way we are trained to do it, accepting our social position.
To keep all this activity in order we need a set of rules and values, laws and moral codes. They do not just appear as if by magic or at random. They are made to support and strengthen the substructure. To use his own words:
The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life processes in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. – A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)
That superstructure of laws, beliefs, political systems and moral codes will tell us what is normal and what is right. As it is created by the people in power, it will start by making it clear they deserve to be in power. It will present their being the owners and rulers as ‘normal’ and ‘right’. Superstructure is thus a:
complex structure of social perception which ensures that the situation in which one social class has power over the others is either seen by most members of society as ‘natural’, or not seen at all. – Marxism and Literary Criticism, Terry Eagleton (Routledge 1989)
You might consider in this context a now suppressed verse of an old hymn:
The rich man in his castle
The poor man at his gate
He made them high and lowly
He ordered their estate
Singing merry hymns in church was also a way to remind yourself you are in your proper place. It isn’t sung much now, but when it was nobody considered it odd. The whole point of defining something as normal is so that it doesn’t get questioned. The point of a superstructure is not to be noticed, just accepted.
It is in this context we can look at the word ‘ideology’. In simple everyday terms it means a set of ideas or principles on which we base our reasoning or plan of action. It is sometimes used in a negative sense to say that someone is so blinded by their ideology – a set of beliefs they hold fast to – they won’t compromise or adapt to new circumstances. An ‘ideologue’ is then a stubborn, unrealistic person.
But in the context of substructure it means a set of beliefs you and the people you know all share which is taken to be so obviously true you don’t need to question it. In fact, you don’t even call it a belief, but a fact. Once, it was a ‘fact’ that the world was flat, that women existed to get married and pregnant and that one class of people should rule in a castle while the others did what they were told, or else. And an ideology, wrapped up in or expressed through religion, songs, stories, jokes etc. is shared by everybody, including those at the bottom without power, who believe that is where they belong. It is ‘natural’. To object to the ‘natural’ order is to be unnatural, an extremist, unbalanced. So you don’t have to take their ideas seriously.
The whole point of Marx’s thought is to make people question what they think of as natural, and to see that what is believed in need not be true, and could be conditioned.
It is, or course, quite possible that Marx was wrong. But his influence is such that you cannot ignore him. You may well have agreed with Marxist arguments in the past without even knowing what they were. At least now you might recognise the source.
And speaking of sources – where do you go for your information?