By CELSO FREDERICO*

Author's introduction to newly published book

1.

Marxists, regardless of their heterogeneous orientations, have always stated that culture is not an autonomous sphere and that it, in one way or another, maintains links with the material basis of society. This consensus, however, ceases to exist when culture is related to ideology. There are so many conceptions of ideology that the links with culture and its multiple meanings remain an open topic and subject to the most diverse interpretations.

There are those who bring the two spheres together to the point of identifying them, either immediately (like the defenders of proletkult), or on a more mediated level (like Louis Althusser and his disciples). But there are also authors who refuse to dilute culture in the ideological sphere (like Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams).

Each formulation refers to one or another passage in which Karl Marx dealt with the subject, but these passages do not offer us a definitive solution. What is more, they are often ambiguous and contain meanings that point in opposite directions.

The same can be said of Friedrich Engels. In a famous letter to Franz Mehring dated July 14, 1893, two different conceptions of ideology are mixed together. One is negative: “ideology is a process which the so-called thinker carries out consciously – but with a false consciousness. The real driving forces which move it remain unknown to him – otherwise such a process would not be ideological.” Then a positive conception emerges: “since we deny an independent historical development to the different ideological spheres that play a role in history, they deduce that we also deny them any historical efficacy. This way of seeing is based on a vulgar and anti-dialectical representation of cause and effect as two rigidly opposed poles, with absolute ignorance of the interplay of actions and reactions. That a historical element, once clarified by other facts (which, in the final analysis, are economic facts), in turn has repercussions on its surroundings and even on its causes – this is what these gentlemen forget.”^[I]

In general, scholars focus on the book the german ideology, sometimes seeking to extract from it a general theory of ideology, an attempt to systematize and, at the same time, affirm the presence, in nuce, from the foundations of the materialist conception of history. Such a procedure, however, goes beyond the limits of a work focused exclusively on the critique of a special form of ideology – the German one (as, in fact, the title announces), present in the texts of the Young Hegelians who inverted the relationship between reality and thought.

Karl Marx was clear when he wrote in 1859 that he and Friedrich Engels abandoned the manuscript to the “gnawing criticism of rats”, because what they both aimed at, the clarification of their own ideas, had already been achieved.

Furthermore, the unfinished text underwent several arrangements, since the pioneering edition organized by Riazanov and used inappropriately by Stalinism to establish an interpretation in tune with Soviet Marxism and its “materialist conception of history”. Subsequent editions added a new order and included parts that had been suppressed from the text. the german ideology, from then on, began to deserve new interpretations.^[ii]

2.

Reflections on ideology in Karl Marx, however, are not restricted to this work. Marxist theorists have each sought, in their own way, to rely on the references that seemed most essential to them. Terry Eagleton states that there are at least three conceptions of ideology in Marx: an epistemological one, an ontological one, and a third political one.^[iii] The authors we will study next (Louis Althusser, Adorno and Antonio Gramsci) exemplarily represent these three conceptions.

Louis Althusser, from the german ideology, initially interpreted ideology as a distorted vision, as false consciousness. In a second moment, it ceases to be a phenomenon restricted to consciousness and begins to be understood as an instrument of domination in the service of social reproduction. It thus moves from consciousness to the ideological apparatuses of the State.

Louis Adorno, in turn, has as his support point The capital, especially the chapter on commodity fetishism: ideology thus moves from the subject (consciousness) to the object (social reality).

Antonio Gramsci draws on the 1857 preface to Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy to develop a political conception – ideology as the space in which men become aware of social conflicts and fight to impose their ideals.

In the following pages, we will focus on the relationships that these authors establish between ideology and culture. However, to do so, I needed to present the theoretical foundations of each author in order to better understand the general context that gives meaning to the relationships between these two spheres.

Each author studied had disciples who took up and transformed their original theories. We chose to present three of them: the Althusserian Pierre Macherey, the Adornian Fredric Jameson and the Gramscian Stuart Hall.

Finally, there is a chapter on the solitary trajectory of Raymond Williams, an “insular Marxist” who developed a heterodox theory from his experience as a literary critic.

The various chapters that follow were drafted provisionally and published as articles on the website the earth is round and in magazines New directions, Left margin e Matrices.

*Celso Frederico He is a retired full professor at ECA-USP. Author, among other books, of Essays on Marxism and Culture (Morula). [https://amzn.to/3rR8n82]

Reference

Celso Frederick. Ideology, culture, Marxism. São Paulo, Expressão Popular, 2025, 236 pages. [https://amzn.to/3TGAwZE]

The launch in São Paulo will be this Friday (June 27) from 18 pm at Livraria Expressão Popular [Alameda Nothmann, 806, Campos Elíseos, São Paulo – SP].

Notes

^[I] Marx, K.; Engels, F. Culture, art and literature. Selected texts. New York: Routledge, 2010, p. 109, 111.

^[ii] Cf. Musto, M. “Vicissitudes and new studies of The German Ideology”,  Antithesis, Marxism and Socialist Culture. Goiânia: n. 5, 2008; and Zanola, G. “Ideal inversion and real inversion: the critique of ideology in The German Ideology”, german philosophy notebooks. Sao Paulo, vs. 27, no. 2, 2022.

^[iii] Eagleton, Terry. Ideology. An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1977.

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