This is a key term for Marxist thought and concerns the ways in which ideas are used to make sense of the world. One way to understand ideology is as what Marx calls false consciousness. This describes the ways in which people’s understanding of society is systematically distorted and misleading. For Marx, capitalism is an oppressive and exploitative system, so a belief that Western societies are free and fair would be an example of false consciousness. As Marxist critic Terry Eagleton writes, ideology concerns “the ways in which people may come to invest in their own unhappiness.” He means that ideology, at its most pernicious, causes people to believe in ideas that actually harm them.

In a different sense, ideology comprises someone’s ideas about how they would like the world to be. So a vegan ideology states that the world would be better if people stopped making nonhuman animals into products for human consumption. A major difference between the vegan and the person who thinks that society is free and fair is that the vegan is aware of their ideology, whereas ideology which supports the status quo may be unconscious. The less conscious of ideology that a person is, the more powerful the hold that it has over them.

Later Marxists like Louis Althusser see ideology as deeply embedded in social institutions like the family and the education system. Althusser goes on to argue that the very idea of the self as a subject is an ideological construction. In this sense, we are all made in and trapped by ideology. But if we are all affected by ideology, which prevents us from seeing reality properly, then how do Marxists manage to step outside of ideology in order to see the world as it really is? One significant challenge to Marxist thought is to justify why their ideology is the correct one.