This chapter begins by examining neglected passages from the Manuscripts of 1844 and The Holy Family to show how Marx first accuses philosophy of treating “actual problems of life” as purely theoretical questions, thereby anticipating a broader critique of its relation to practice. It then turns to the Theses on Feuerbach, arguing that Marx’s claims about practice as the locus of truth and the famous eleventh thesis already undermine the very idea of “practical philosophy” as a means of changing the world. Subsequently, the chapter analyses The German Ideology to reconstruct “practical materialism”, in which communist revolution and the practical movement itself generate new forms of consciousness, relegating philosophy to an otiose, merely interpretive role. It goes on to reframe the concept of ideology through two analytical steps—objective illusion and the division of manual and intellectual labour—thereby redefining ideology as a specifically anti-philosophical notion rather than a mere instrument of class legitimation. A further section connects this reframing to the camera obscura metaphor and to Young-Hegelian moral “postulates”, showing how normatively grounded critique in practical philosophy reproduces, in inverted and abstract form, the very “actual problems of life” it seeks to overcome. Finally, the chapter returns to the Young-Hegelian Marx of 1841–1843 to trace how and when his earlier praise of philosophy’s world-transforming vocation was transformed into a later diagnosis of philosophical critique as ideological.