Fragmentary Critical Notes Towards a Preliminary Investigation of Althusser’s Concept of Ideology

For Lenin, ideologies have a class character depending upon the real class interests of the classes engaged in political and economic struggle. The proletarian ideology is a scientific ideology because the interests of the proletariat lies with revealing the reality, obliterating the fetishistic character of the social relations in the bourgeois society and exposing petty secret of capitalist exploitation. Its interests coincide with truth, equality and justice. On the other hand, the bourgeois ideology stems from the interests of bourgeoisie in struggle with the proletariat to maintain its domination and exploitative system. Therefore, bourgeois ideology has a fetishistic character, even if individual members of the bourgeoisie are as unaware of this fetishistic character as individual members of the working class who have not internalized the dialectical materialist world-view and methodology and the science of historical materialism. Therefore, for Lenin, ideologies could be proletarian or bourgeois.