Ideology is the intellectual basis of class societies within the conflictual course of history. Ideological expressions have never been pure fictions; they represent a distorted consciousness of realities, and as such they have been real factors that have in turn produced real distorting effects. This interconnection is intensified with the advent of the spectacle—the materialization of ideology brought about by the concrete success of an autonomized system of economic production—which virtually identifies social reality with an ideology that has remolded all reality in its own image.

• consciousness
• history
• reality
• the spectacle
• ideology