Nowa Krytyka

The work tries to analyze how ideology, understood in agreement with the marxist tradition, inhibits any structural social change. The first part of the work is devoted to a description of the capitalist reality in which the well known ideology has been created. In the next chapter, aiming at systematization of the notion of ideology, the Karl Mannheim’s theory of ideology is presented. The main goal of the remaining part of the work is to show how the rise of the modern universal capitalist subject has erased from the view the class resistance against impersonal forces of the global market. To better present this, in the following chapters invoked are the works of the Frankfurt school of Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, of the french structuralists Luis Althusser and Jacques Lacane as well as works of Slavoj Zizek and Peter Sloeterdijk, which concentrate on the modern cynic attitude. For the historic example of this phenomenon taken is the described by Czesław Miłosz reality of the stalinist regime, in which the conformist attitude does not significantly differ from the known attitude widespread in the capitalist reality. Pointing out this similarity is the main idea of the present work.