| The attempt to construct a marxist theory of ideology is bound up with the question of whether marxism may lay claim to a privileged perspective (i.e., value free or non-ideological) from which a critique of ideology can proceed. A source for the construction of such a theory has of course been Marx's texts themselves; a central issue in the widely varying interpretations of these texts concerns what sort of distinction Marx maintained between science (in particular, marxist theory) and ideology. Lying beyond the textual exposition of the uses to which Marx put the term "ideology" and what sort of distinction between science and ideology he was working with, is of course the question of the plausibility and coherency of his analysis of ideology its supposed contradistinction to science. I argue that a number of commentators, who sought to establish a distinction between science and ideology by identifying science with "truth" and ideology with the "false" or "false consciousness", rely on a selective and inadequate reading of Marx's texts. Further, I claim that a variety of recent marxist-oriented commentators, apparent critics of this close identification of science with truth and ideology with falsity, in fact carry over the true/false opposition of this earlier true consciousness/false consciousness view which they originally sought to distance themselves from. The truth/falsity opposition which they work back into a theory of ideology undialectically opposes science to ideology and springs from a similarly inadequate reading of Marx's texts (specifically his sustained analysis of classical political economy in Theories of Surplus Value) and a parallel misrecognition of the ways in which science and ideology are inseparable. |
