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This article aims to analyze and compare the categories of alienation, ideology and fetishism insofar as they refer to objective illusion in Marx’s writings, in order to test the hypothesis that the critique of illusion is a unifying element in his theoretical development. The aim is to highlight the similar structures in the three categories, but also their fundamental differences. They share the duality between a representational instance and a real instance, each defined by inversions between subject and object, so that the relationship between these instances can be measured by the relationship between the inversions that each of them contains. Consequently, the notion of objectivity also changes, particularly with regard to alienation and ideology on the one hand, and fetishism on the other.