Marx distinguished scientific determination of material production from ideological forms of consciousness

Evidence

The exact quotation, from Marx’ Preface to The Critique of Political Economy , is: “a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict [i.e. that between the material productive forces of society and the existing relations of production] and fight it out”. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2104

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Distinguishes the base/superstructure vocabulary Gramsci works from — the ideological forms are where conflict becomes conscious and is fought out.
• XREF: This is the exact Marx citation Gramsci’s whole superstructure/hegemony project glosses; connects forward into how ideology is understood in Islamophobia discourse.

Related

• Marx distinguishes material economic transformation from ideological forms of consciousness (similarity 0.84)
• Conflicts are first consciously grasped only at the level of ideology. (similarity 0.83)
• Gramsci distinguishes Marx’s rational dialectic from a merely materialist inversion of Hegel (similarity 0.83)
• Not every ideological shift directly mirrors the economic base. (similarity 0.82)
• Reducing all ideology to immediate structural causes is primitive infantilism (similarity 0.81)
• Social being determines consciousness, not the reverse (similarity 0.81)
• Gramsci rejected the deterministic Marxism that forbid revolution before capitalism developed. (similarity 0.81)
• Marxism historicizes the Hegelian idea across both structure and superstructure. (similarity 0.80)
• Modes of determination allow ideological superstructures more than a residual role (similarity 0.80)
• Marxism’s core innovation is rejecting transcendence, not asserting materialism (similarity 0.80)
• Social orders only die after their productive forces have fully developed (similarity 0.80)
• Moving from mode of production to concrete analysis requires new concepts and added determinations. (similarity 0.80)
• The objective level of productive forces grounds which ideologies are practicable in a society (similarity 0.79)
• Marxist theory itself is a product of historical contradictions and will disappear with them (similarity 0.79)
• Political and intellectual action is the true expression of economic necessity (similarity 0.79)