In Raymond Williams’ “Ideology”  He states ideology as  forms of expressions or changes in  economic conditions. But they are  looked at  forms in which men become conscious  of the problems that comes  from conditions and changes of in the economic production. I really found this to be very hard to decipher with the idea of ideology as an illusion. The idea  of ideology as the set of ideas which come from a given set of material interests or more from a closely class or group,  that has been strongly used as the sense of ideology as illusion. If we think about it each  idea has been used, at times that be confusing in the Marxist tradition. There really is no sense of illusion or false consciousness in the text like the  Lenin: Socialism, as it is the ideology of struggle of the  class, that undergoes the general conditions of birth, development and consolidation of an ideology.  It is founded on all the material of  the knowledge of humans. It is also a high level of science that demands scientific work, In the class struggle  which develops fast, as an powerful force, on the ground of capitalism, and socialism One example of ideology can be looked at as correct and strong as against another ideology.  Williams goes on to day that “It is of course possible to add that the other ideology, representing the class enemy, is, while a true expression of their interests, false to any general human interest, and something of the earlier sense of illusion or false consciousness can then be loosely associated with what is primarily a description of the class character of certain ideas”. In my opinion this is a neutral idea of ideology that really  needs to be shown by something describing the class or  group that represents or  works, has in fact become common in many kinds of argument. At the same time, within Marxism but also elsewhere, there has been a standard distinction between ideology and in order to retain the sense of illusory or merely abstract thought. This develops the distinction suggested by Engels, in which ideology would end when men realized their real life-conditions and therefore their real motives, after which their consciousness would become genuinely scientific because they would then be in contact with reality. If we really think about it, ideology is really just used in the idea given by Napoleon himself.

Marx’s Capital lays bare the peculiar nature of commodity fetishism and the social constructions that go into ascribing inherent value to objects; simultaneously erasing the rich social relations that unconsciously accompany any product of labor. Like a first sip of coffee, it took some time before the impact of Marx’s words had fully made their way into my brain. Not to accuse a long dead philosopher of being willfully dense, but the man squeezes all the terms that he can get out of concepts about labor. Despite the short waiting period for comprehending the text , Marx does make an interesting point about how the constructions of bourgeois society have extended so far as to make actual value-less phrases like “Venmo me $12 for the chicken pad thai” or “This matcha latte is $8” become imbued with value.

Commodities, that is to say products of human labor with use-value, are not simply commodities rooted in some objective inherent value that always resides within the object. Objects have to pass through many hands before they become commodities. They are made by workers with varying degrees of effort and with varying labor-times, they undergo a number of manufacturing processes, they are then exchanged between producers but “the specific social character of each producer’s labor does not show itself except in the act of exchange.”(665). From my understanding, the end product in which the object of the producer’s labor is deemed useful to others therefore it has value, is all we see on the surface, when there were a number of social and human relations underneath that that are obscured by the object’s newfound value which can be equated to other ‘valuable’ objects, despite the fact that this value is assigned. When this happens objects then “act and re-act upon each other as quantities of value”, and a pound of gold and a pound of iron, as Marx exemplifies, can have equivalent value despite the fact that the two objects are extremely different and have different chemical make-up, different qualities, etc. (666). Apples to oranges becomes reconfigured as apples to apples within this Fetishism. Value based on labor-time and the human effort placed into these newfound commodities are rendered irrelevant. We lose the rich social context of the valuable objects we hold so dear and instead

Marx also utilizes one of his most reliable analogies, religion. In religion, we create “independent beings endowed with, and entering into relation with one another and the human race” (665). Plainly, these gods and archangels that essentially came from our brain are now imagined and understood as fully formed things that exist outside of ourselves, interact with each other, are weighed against each other and rule us from the heavens. If my Marxist lens isn’t fogged up too badly, at its core capitalism, like religion, mediates objects and ascribes meaning to them to create the sense of a rational world around us and perpetuate a particular system. If we stripped away the top layers of constructed meaning, we would find a whole lot of complex and rich human occurrences underneath.