Probably my favorite quote from Marx,
and where Marxism begins
as a philosophy of its own,
goes like this:
“To call on them to give up their
illusions about their condition
is to call on them to give up a
condition that requires illusions."
Marx approaches this thought
in The German Ideology
and concisely and definitively
formulates it in his
critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
Why does Marxism begin
specifically from this phrase?
Because before this, Marx,
like the Young Hegelians,
considered an intellectual’s task
to be the unmasking of illusions,
the foggy fumes of the mind,
false thinking.
But in these books he suddenly
stops calling for his
intellectual coterie to do so
and says that in general
something's not right here,
that in and of itself
unmasking illusions
is not the first task for intellectuals
and doesn’t provide anything.
The next day people wake up
with the same old illusions
just with different name because
illusions are not just a mistake.
An illusion or a system of
illusions, an ideology, as Marx calls it
is something people objectively need.
In a crooked, absurd and
irrationally formed society,
we can’t manage without
certain false mirrors
and distorted explanatory models,
without those foggy fumes of the
mind and converted forms.
Only these allow us
to accept ourselves,
to piece together inner fissures,
and ideology as a whole allows
society to accept itself.
Here Marx says something
fundamentally new
from which Marxism begins as an
independent branch of thought.
He says that it is necessary
to create a society
that needs truth
rather than lies.
A society that will
be so rational
that it won’t demand from people
ideology and false thinking.
In his opinion, such a society could
only be without class and communist.
But one way or another
an intellectual’s task,
starting from Marx’s new call,
consists of getting ready for
and organizing a revolution,
of criticizing the system
and drawing up a roadmap for the
transition to a new system
and just unmasking the mistakes of others--
of the masses or the ruling class--
is not so important
in this case.
