5 - Unacknowledged and acknowledged modification

Summary

Lenin's de facto breakaway

The setting

Whether or not a movement seeks total structural change, once it enters the political arena and prospects for mass support its leaders will not handicap themselves by raising doubts about the adequacy of conscious will and action. Quite early, therefore, the original pejorative connotation of ‘ideology’ had to be relegated into the background, or dropped altogether, by the leaders of Marxist social-democratic parties. If, like Lassalle, Kautsky, Bernstein and Lenin, one stressed the importance of politics, one had to restore the importance of ‘the conscious element’, since it would have been self-defeating to go on insisting that as a matter of principle all consciousness is false consciousness, as Marx and Engels's dogmatic conception of ideology required. Indeed, in the course of pressing for centrally organized and professionally guided revolutionary action, Lenin in What Is to Be Done? made a clean sweep of the restrictive use of ‘ideology’ and its unexceptional derogatory meaning.

The change in the Marxist attitude towards the role of consciousness has been widely noticed. The same cannot be said of the corollary of that change, the departure from Marx and Engels's use of ‘ideology’. None too often mentioned, its significance has never been explored.