ABSTRACT
Ideologies are connected with economic institutions. Ideology, especially bourgeois ideology when it is adopted by the working class, is often called "false consciousness". Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels consider ethical beliefs as ideological. Many readers of Marx and Engels have found the concept of ideology problematic. They have assumed that the materialism of Marx and Engels commits them to the view that all people living under given material conditions must adopt its ideology because "life determines consciousness". But since they also claimed to be doing science, which they distinguished from and opposed to ideology, they seem to have been caught in a contradiction. A strategy of ideological criticism is illustrated by Marx's discussion of "fetishism" in Capital. In modern societies the principal example of "fetishism", the subject of one of the early sections of Capital, is the treatment of commodities in economics.
