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Re: [xmca] ideology: easy access web page



Interesting. Good ol' Ralph Dumain comes up with the goods again!

There has been a lot of controversy about Engels's use of the term "false consciousness" and I take the consensus to be that even though Engels used the term a couple of times in personal letters in the last years of his life, it is not a concept which stands up to scrutiny, nor one used by Marx. It just happened that last night I was reading a manuscript by the German Marxist Thomas Metscher which cites the same passage we all go back to in the Preface to the Critique ... In reference to James Connolly's stance in relation to religion, he says:

   "He clearly shared Marx’s view that religion, along with the arts,
   the legal system, educational ideas, philosophy is an /ideological
   form/ (a form of institutionalised consciousness – not merely ‘false
   consciousness’) containing ‘true’ and ‘false’ components and
   performing different functions in different situations."

It was good to see that a German speaker read this passage the same way I have, because there are multiple translations of the passage. But if we take the line that ideology is institutionalised consciousness, or that institutionalisation is inherently an aspect of consciousness and each are inseparable from one another in general, then this problematic concept of "false consciousness" disappears. It is simply a matter of the practical critique of forms of social practice, of what deserves to be defended and what should be brought down.

Andy


mike cole wrote:
Once Lucas set me off looking at that interesting webpage of Teun van Dijk,
I realized that an inquiry
into people's uses of the term, ideology, could take us ANYWHERE. So,
thinking of anywhere, I thought in
particular of Raymond Williams' KEYWORD which is on my home bookshelf, and
sure enough, the entry there
on ideology was interesting.

Then I wondered if there was a web version so I could add that to the
discussion in an easy-to-access way and,
voila, as they say, I came up with the following;

http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/ideo8.html



mike
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--
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*Andy Blunden*
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Videos: http://vimeo.com/user3478333/videos
Book: http://www.brill.nl/scss


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