While Karl Marx never directly uses the term “ideology” in either of these two essays, the concept of ideology is prevalent throughout both and is a key idea that he and many later Marx-inspired thinkers would pick up and develop further. Broadly speaking, ideology in Marxist analysis refers to the worldview that an individual unconsciously acquires from the world around them: It is the beliefs, values, attitudes, and even habits of feeling that a given society inculcates to preserve and reproduce its structures of power and social organization. This means that ideology is inherently biased toward a particular understanding of reality and may not always reflect the truth. Despite not using the term ideology, Marx frequently uses words like “appears” and “illusion” when describing aspects of the capitalist mode of production, and even refers to economists as “mouthpieces of the middle class” (VPaP, 25). Marx therefore sets out to explore the nature of bourgeois ideology and its relationship to the capitalist economic system.

One of the first instances of ideology at work is the wage system, which obscures the fact that workers perform unpaid labor as part of their agreement with the capitalist. Since wages are paid after the labor has been performed, it gives the appearance that what is being exchanged for the wages is this performed labor.