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| Ideology affects the way we view the world [or] reality! |
In continuation of our discussion on capitalist ideology, let’s now look at the strategies by which capitalist ideology indoctrinates and conditions our societies!
Well, any capitalist ideology is made up of three
postulates –
They are –
First and foremost, it’s made up of exploitation!
Secondly, it’s made up of exploitation!
Thirdly, it’s made up of exploitation!
Indeed these three are the conditioning
postulates of any Capitalist ideology! ;-)
And why does the Capitalist ideology
revel in exploitation?
Quite simple! It’s again for the sake of
three salient reasons –
They are –
First and foremost, for profit!
Secondly, for profit!
Thirdly, for profit!
Wherever we have goods and products that are
produced and sold for the sake of making a profit, without a doubt, and quite
obviously, Capitalism would be there! And wherever there is capitalism, there
is her twin sister, exploitation!
And wherever there is exploitation, there
is suffering!
In this case, the working class were
exploited and so they suffered untold hardships! In short, they did not have a
voice for themelves! Or even if they had, their voices weren’t heard!
This is exactly the issue that Engels
discusses with such intrinsic detail in his first ever book titled, The Condition of the Working Class in
England, which was published in German in 1844 and translated into English
in 1887.
Karl Marx met up with Engels for the
first time in 1844, and highly appreciated him for having dealt with the issues
and the conditions of the working class, the proletariat in the book! The book
assumes added significance because it was written between the years 1842 and 1844,
when Friedrich Engels was in Manchester, a city that was the hotbed of the Industrial
Revolution!
Detailing on the living conditions of the
working classes in the cities of Liverpool and Manchester, Engels pointed out
that, the working conditions of the working class were inhumane, inhospitable
and far worse than it could possibly be!
Through this analysis of the condition of
the working class in England, Engels brings out the hard and bitter truth that,
for one social class to benefit from the profits of a capitalist ideology, another
class has to live in abject poverty, sickness, squalor and misery.
How on earth could someone justify such an
exploitative system?
Well, the best way to justify something, is to
be silent about it! To hush it up under the carpet! Never ever raise an issue out of
it! Thus it becomes naturalised, normalised and legalised over the course of time!
So do you mean to say that, all of our discourses are biased and
prejudiced?
In fact, the right phrase would be, they
misrepresent reality!
Certainly yes! All of our discourses are certainly biased and prejudiced, no doubt about it, but they all together aid in misrepresenting our reality for us!
All our discourses that have been handed
down to us, from TV news, to videos, cinema, literature, etc, have strategically and quite carefully
take it upon themselves to be 'silent' about this exploitation of the working
class, and hence falsify and misrepresent the reality of the social conditions, the economic
conditions in which we all dwell!
Therefore, this politically-motivated, deliberately distorted, misrepresentation of
reality is what we call, ‘ideology’!
to be continued...
For further reading
Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction. New York: Verso, 2007
image: amazondotcom, rdillmandotcom
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