Social consciousness contains human spirituality and is summarized in a few ideas, although all of them are universal. Social consciousness is not political in nature nor can it be politicized, it does not have a class character, it does not know geographical limits and it is not conditioned by time and, although it can be cultivated through education, preaching and good practices, no one has the power or authority to change it.
For the exposition of the subject, I assume the decalogue formed by the Ten Commandments, which constitute the oldest and most complete summary of humanistic thought and which, according to legend or the Word, engraved in stone, God placed in the hands of Moses. Seven of such precepts do not have a religious character, but constitute universal ethical and moral markers.
To this I add some principles of the Rule of Law such as freedom of speech and worship, due process, a set of which the ideals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity proclaimed by the French Revolution are part, and the prerogatives included in the Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations which, together with living in democracy, complete the first generation of human rights. Ideologies are something else.
Ideologies are also ideas, although less general, organized in systems so that they are functional to the interests of classes, factions, political parties, some institutions and, under certain premises, to the States. Some, like anarchism, can become extinct and others can even be outlawed, as happened with fascism at the end of World War II. The function of ideologies is to unite, mobilize and discipline the human conglomerates they allude to, as occurs with the bourgeoisie and the working class, the liberal, Marxist, social democratic and social Christian parties. In certain scenarios, ideologies are identified with scientific postulates with which they sometimes also disagree.
In 1845, when he was 27 years old, Karl Marx, assisted by Frederick Engels, wrote his second longest work after Capital, entitled The German Ideology, which he explained was written to “settle accounts with his conscience philosophy of yesteryear…” , that is, to subject Hegel’s philosophy to criticism, which he supported in his early youth.
What could have been a transcendental work for socialist thought had little relevance in the spread of Marxism because it was not published in the Soviet Union until 1932, which is why Vladimir I. Lenin did not know about it. The postponement of publication may have been influenced by Marx’s statement that: “Ideology provides a false knowledge of reality…”. It happens this way because, when perceiving reality from the point of view of the interests of classes and political parties, ideologies inevitably assume preconceived visions, sometimes prejudiced and not infrequently sectarian of reality that, in any case, is not product of the individual vision of the subject, but induced by a direction or a vanguard. Liberal or Marxist militants adopt the ideologies of their parties, not the other way around.
The working class, explained Lenin, generates trade union consciousness, political consciousness is imported from outside, in this way, I say, it is endowed with an ideology that will always be exotic and that sometimes does not prosper or be perceived. This is the case of the American working class that, absorbed by capitalism, did not develop a political creed.
The consolidation of capitalism and the advent of democracy, the basis for the political participation of the popular classes, associated with liberal doctrines, as well as the appearance of Marxism, the common trunk of socialist thought, and the increasingly relevant role of political parties , created the conditions for the expansion of the ideologies that dominated the political scene in the 20th century.
Hence, Francis Fukuyama believed that the remission of socialism and the decline of the Marxist parties determined a global de-ideologization. He was wrong. Ideologies are still valid, sometimes they have positive effects by uniting classes and parties and other negative ones by providing false readings of reality. I take charge of the complexity of the matter for which I will insist.