ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to indicate in greater detail the way that ideology functions; and to outline certain conditions whereby ideology necessarily projects and presents distortions and misrepresentations, and disguises the real nature of the existing state of affairs. Our stepping-off point shall be Marx's classic statement from his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: 1
the 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 and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must rather be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social forces of production and the relations of production.
