And good Marxists should know - he wasn’t a huge fan of ideology or respecting it as causal or desirable.

He was very practical, hence concrete historical materialism.

This is what happens when you don’t read Marx and just sort of assume what Marx said based on a literal interpretation of his ideological labels.

Marx was not, like liberals, laboring under the delusion that ideology is something that can simply be escaped. Paraphrasing Zizek (who I hate, but he has some good points), it is when you believe that you are free of ideology that you are most firmly under ideological control, because in such circumstances ideology is necessarily acting on you without your awareness of it. To be aware of your ideology allows you to engage with it and modify it and so on.

He also recognized, like anyone who spends a few seconds thinking about what would become sociology (it wasn’t really around in his time) that ideology does cause things. His distinction is that ideology is superstructural, it was an abstract product of the concrete base that is material conditions, but the two of them exist in a dialectical relationship with each other. Any base will produce a superstructure so long as that base has people who relate to each other, and this superstructure, in essence, is ideology.

What Marx hated with respect to ideology, and this is the closest you are to being even superficially right, is the idea that was and is popular among liberals (and others, such as utopian socialists) that ideology alone is enough to transform the world, that it acts independently of material circumstances and people will just freely be moved by what is “right” in a completely absolute sense irrespective of their historical or current conditions. Again, these things have a dialectical relationship, and the superstructure cannot fly freely, unbounded by the base, any more than the base can fly freely (by human hands) when the superstructure stays in place. They will only make progress in the context of each other.

Edit: For the sake of being more complete, I will say more explicitly that the base has primacy, which is why the superstructure comes from it – there can be no culture in out in space where no one is. It has primacy and its change – e.g. by scientific inventions – tends to drag the superstructure along with it, but those inventions are only created thanks to the superstructural elements of preserved and transmitted knowledge and the desire to, for example, develop production.

It’s very difficult to talk about dialectics because I often want to address both sides simultaneously even though it can’t really be done.

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