ABSTRACT
That one cannot find agreement about the marxist concept of ideology is hardly surprising or news anymore. The disagreements affect almost every aspect of the concept: its content, its effectivity and its epistemological status which is manifest in a range of questions. Is ideology subjective and ideal (created by and existing in the minds of individuals) or objective and material (existing in material apparatuses and its practices)? Is ideology a determined and epiphenomenal superstructure or an autonomous discourse with its own effectivity capable of constituting subjects? Is ideology negative and critical (a distortion or inversion) or neutral (the articulated discourse of a class, fraction or party)? Do ideological elements possess an inherent class character or are they neutral and capable of being articulated to various classes? These questions continue to haunt theoretical discussion and have hardly received a unanimous answer. I do not think this lack of theoretical agreement, confusing as it may be, should be considered so intolerable as to prompt a desperate search for the marxist concept of ideology. Even if one wanted to do that one would find it impossible, simply because one has to accept the fact that there are several major traditions within marxism which construct different concepts of ideology. However, it is important critically to analyse and confront these different approaches and their particular claims to explaining aspects of social reality, not only with a view to showing which is most adequate but also to explore whether they are complementary in any way.
