Class solidarity, not individual self-interest, structures ideological thinking

Evidence

Yet it would be less erroneous to claim that Marxism is a theory of collective or class self-interest. For while it is not at all surprising or paradoxical to find a man willing to sacrifice his immediate personal interests for some greater ideal or cause, the very passionate adherence to such a cause, its binding force, is almost certain to derive from its collective basis, from its structure as a defense mechanism of the group or class with which the individual feels himself at one. The member of a given class therefore defends not so much his own individual existence and privileges, as the very preconditions of those privileges in general: and in the realm of thought also he is willing to venture only to the point at which those preconditions begin to be called into question. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 375

Categorization

• XREF: This account of ideological limits — thought ventures only as far as class preconditions permit — prefigures Jameson’s later political unconscious and connects to Lukács’s restriction of bourgeois thought within the limits of reification. — connects to: Working-class racism resists analysis under homogeneous conceptions of ideology — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 142; Ideology maps the individual subject onto total class structures. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 890; Ideological change happens through class struggle, not through ideas alone (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Working-class racism resists analysis under homogeneous conceptions of ideology #complicates (0.85) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 142
• Ideology maps the individual subject onto total class structures. #corroborates (0.82) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 890
• Ideological change happens through class struggle, not through ideas alone #corroborates (0.78)
• People label themselves ideologically via differing symbolic attachments, not a shared spectrum #contradicts (0.75)