Post class 10/21

I was not in class 10/21 so I will use this post-my response to class to respond to AK's post-class post about Marx and use it as a jump off for my own thoughts. The best quote I took from the reading acts as both a summation of past works making up the reading as well as setting the frame for contemporary ideology; page33: "When Marx and Engels were working on the foundational text The German Ideology in 1846 they were writing in a historical situation in which the control of ideas was relatively unimportant to the maintenance of the existing social order and the exerise of force by the ruling class was relatively overt and unashamed. Since then, with the development of mass education, forms of parliamentary democracy and, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the mass media, the social control of thought has become of major political importance and with it, the question of ideology." To any discussion of Marx I have ever taken part in its seems critical to mention his ideological notion that the rulers of material production are also the rulers of mental production. The quote I started this off with discusses this because it was pre-industrial revolution and globalized capitalism where those in power were the ones who owned the means of material prodution in its most basic sense - farms etc. TOday the shift to globalized capitalist economy has complicated this structure a to some degree however it is not as large a complication as one may think. The owners of the material means of production still due own the means of mental production just the parameters of each have changed. In our day the media conglomerates own the mental production through literally shaping the news that is released and consumed by the masses. As most evident with the spread of falsified reports before the War in Iraq, the media has an agenda and those who own it use it to accomplish their own ends or the ends of the highest bidder. That means that the chase of capital has allowed the owners of the material means of production and mental means of production to outsource their power to the highest bidder in pursuit of capital. This destabilizes the entire ideological paradigm as it puts it in on constant flux and leads to the idea of ideology as 'false consciousness' (pg. 34). Ideology in this day and age in contrast to Marx's time is a chase of capital and is in flux because of this so it is in a sense a false consciousness - we never know what we will get the next day or who will be distributing it.