“That Feeling When” You Totally Thought You Were Doing That, But You Were Totally Doing Something Else! “OMG”! Frown Face!
If you and I ever meet, comrade, demand from me the reward of an awkward hug and a flute of socialist champagne. Frankly, you deserve both, having made it this far. You’ve pushed your way through an account of something with a ten-buck name like “historical materialism,” you now know a little of the fatal tendencies of capital accumulation and you didn’t even do it for work or school. Heck, you may have even paid for this book — and I’m sorry about that, but, like you, I am a worker coerced by the conditions of the market. “Girl’s gotta eat,” as Marx said in Theories of Surplus Value.
Okay. He doesn’t say this anywhere, precisely. But, I’m taking the opportunity to remind you again: the Marxist believes that the way our material needs are met largely informs the way our societies are organized and understood. Remember: the superstructure and the base. The idea and the material. They interweave. It’s NOT just bad ideas that produce bad lives. The opposite is even more true.
Seriously, though, comrade. Thanks. I know there are greater pleasures available to you than me and Marx, and I do understand that you have already endured quite a bit of pain. This Marxism stuff isn’t easy. So, I sincerely wish I could say that from this point our journey toward freedom, for each and for all, will be nothing but a cakewalk. But that would be a fib, as I am about to thwack you with one of the most potentially troubling Marxist ideas. Let’s say “Hey” to “ideology.”
In an intellectual sense, you probably won’t find the notion of ideology very troubling to understand at all — it’s pretty easy and I’ll happily bet you already get it, even before having it explained. Emotionally, however, you may find it very challenging, as I have myself. To accept the Marxist idea of ideology is, in part, to accept that we need to individually un-fuck ourselves from the inside. Ideology is the political unconscious. Undoing this can sometimes be a painful therapy.
The word ideology is not used by a Marxist in the way it generally is. Many people today use it to describe their conscious belief system. You might say, “I have a feminist ideology.” You won’t ever hear a Marxist, however feminist they are, say this. For us, “ideology” describes a set of unconscious beliefs; specifically those that exist to uphold the way in which we currently organize our political economies.
Ideology was used prior to Marx to mean a self-identified set of beliefs, and it is widely used that way today once more. I don’t want to make some purist case for language use here. But, given that Marx and Engels used it to mean a very specific thing, chiefly in The German Ideology, it’s just easier if I use it in that specific way, too. I don’t want other comrades laughing at you as you storm the Winter Palace screaming, “This is my ideology!” They’ll be all “lol wot!” Or, worse, they’ll confuse you for a capitalist.
Marx had this idea that capitalism dug its own defences deep into our minds. This is what he means by ideology. Now, this might sound crazy. What does he mean that I don’t know what I think? That the exchange of commodities influences my innermost thoughts?! But this is only until you remember that Sigmund Freud came up with a very similar idea just a few decades later, and that his is one that continues to powerfully inform Western thought. You probably don’t have much difficulty believing that you have certain emotional beliefs or urges that are somehow concealed from your conscious mind.
The Freudian “superego” describes that semi-conscious part of our minds that internalizes dominant morals, even those that may not have been directly communicated to us. We sometimes call this our conscience, and it’s the thing that shrieks, for example, “Masturbation is filthy and wrong!” even if we have never heard such a thing said to us in all our lives.
How did we learn that having a good old tug is considered sinful, even if no one has explicitly issued us with any kind of anti-fapping decree? How did some of us embed in our heads the idea that this kind of sexual pleasure is the darkest work of Satan? There are plenty of people who feel shame, even in the Western present, at the point of climax. And, jeez, I’m certain that Oprah has produced at least a dozen top-rating specials on the “benefits” of masturbation. Still, the idea persists in the hearts and pants of many, particularly older people, that pleasuring oneself is a vice. Clearly, it’s not — I personally consider it little more than a pleasant way to kill forty-five seconds. But the fact that coming can come for some with painful guilt is a proof of the fact that dumb ideas, often unspoken, can settle in our minds and afflict our bodies. They settled in so many bodies and minds so firmly once that they served to preserve the dominant sexual order — in this case, one which demanded that the seed of men be spilled only for the purposes of making babies and that women never get a hold of this whole self-pleasure idea lest they start enjoying themselves and decide to stop caring for babies and men.
It is, if you like, an ideology that masturbation is bad — not the capitalist ideology that Marx writes about, but an ideology all the same. We have had certain subtle ideological tools for communicating this masturbation fact — and, in one sense, it is a “fact,” as well as an ideology, that masturbation is bad. It was bad for the once socially desired relations between husband and wife — it was, as they say in Silicon Valley, a disruption. It is also a “fact” that masturbation can come to be good, while also remaining a destructive ideology. You know all those apparently feminist articles that say that it’s GREAT for women to masturbate? These are also ideological. Which is to say, in the Marxist sense, they are articles that serve the interests of the ruling class.
When midcentury mothers referred to their daughters’ sex organs only by noting their dark absence — “down there” — they communicated that it was forbidden territory. When our mass-media mothers of the present day, like Oprah Winfrey, laugh at the olden times where our own vaginas appeared to us as the end of the flat world on an old map marked “There be dragons!” they communicate a new kind of ideological “fact.”
Old mothers said that pleasure was bad for the order of the world. They were right. New mothers say that pleasure is good for the order of the world. They are also right. The new ideology, the thing that holds up dominant order, often encourages women to masturbate. It’s good for your productivity, they say. It’s good for your happiness and your skin! It makes you feel good. What’s more important than feeling good? Well, I’m so glad you asked me that, Oprah. In my view, it is better, at times, to feel angry. After all, this anger may help me smash capitalism.
I have seen and read so many instructions to masturbate in recent years, I have largely given up masturbating. I do not wish to have my own physical desire pressed into the service of either good housekeeping or productive, happy female work. Whether I am being told to refrain from masturbation lest I disturb the dominant order or to embrace masturbation lest I disturb the dominant order, I resent the intrusion of ideology into my vagina.
For a while, I wondered what Freud would have thought of an age that wasn’t merely permissive about unleashing female desire, but positively oppressive and repressive in its attempts to make all of us masturbate a lot — on UK TV, one of the networks even has an annual Wank Week, much of whose content is specifically aimed at my abused clitoris.
What would Freud have said? The Freudian Marxist, Theodor Adorno, comes close to giving us an answer. He said that our age was one of “psychoanalysis in reverse.” I really love that description, and I think it helps us understand the nature of what Marx and other Marxists mean when they use the word ideology.
Ideology is a mystification, but not necessarily a lie. It conceals a truth about the dominant order inside itself. The reality, in the case of female masturbation, is that it is a thing some are able to do. The mystification of this reality has been that it is bad and is now, more commonly, that it is good.
Psychoanalysis, a study that has been hybridized by many Marxists including Adorno, Louis Althusser, and mutant brat Slavoj Žižek, seeks to get to the truth between consciousness and being. It might analyze people, or entire populations, with this goal in mind. It seeks a language for the way we conscious beings mystify our being. Through techniques like word association, dream analysis, or listening for our slips in speech, it looks for the code to what we have repressed.
Just as I can embed the message “masturbation is bad” deep within my mind, I can do the same with “masturbation is good.” Dr. Freud himself could have not imagined a time where women would be saying the latter nonstop on TV shows for aspirational working girls who crave that post-fap glow. Ideology continues its work of mystification and gets into our pants anyhow with the reverse of the old masturbation message. Ergo, I find that Oprah has really ruined one of my favorite hobbies with her “psychoanalysis in reverse.” Oprah’s is a false openness. It claims to open everything up but, in so doing, still suggests a prohibition: there’s something wrong with you if you don’t masturbate.
This is the thing about ideology. The message and the means of its conveyance can change. We only know it to be ideology when we can finally see that it makes us servants of the dominant order.
To continue with masturbation, an activity I clearly miss, let’s think about the ways in which it was otherwise controlled. We’ve covered the ideological methods of controlling it, where a girl would learn that “down there” lay dragons or a boy might hear that he’d be marked by blindness. In reading accounts of Victorian era anti-masturbation methods, we learn what happened to middle-class fappers when the soft power of ideology did not work. There were young boys who had anti-masturbatory devices applied to their genitals at night and adult men of the professional class were known to apply their own medically prescribed safeguards. You can even go and see some of these instruments of torture in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Although these apparatuses were inspired by ideology, we can’t call a metal thing on your cock pure ideology. That is not a mystification. When the mystification doesn’t work to control you, that’s when they bring in the serious hardware.
You can think about the control of certain groups of people in this way, too. Once, black people in the United States were held in chains and Aboriginal people in Australia were held in missions in order to steal, respectively, their labor and their land. Liberalism eventually removed these constraints, and replaced them with the invisible bonds of ideology, and these worked for a while to maintain the illusion of freedom — remember, Aboriginal land was never returned and black labor remains the cheapest in the United States. Racist ideology began to fail as a means of control and today again we see black people incarcerated and murdered by US police, and Aboriginal people subject to incarceration and programs of state control. These physical controls, such as the use of military and surveillance techniques — what Althusser would call “State Ideological Apparatuses” — are combined with softer forms of ideological control, such as the very common and peculiar insistence that black people are acting “like victims” when they point to the (very real and material) fact of their own victimhood.
I’d best be honest here and say that not all Marxists will hold fully with this description of ideology. If you’ve already done a little time with Karl, you may know that ideology was the preoccupation only of the younger man. You might even know that my decision to write an entire chapter on ideology would be, for some, quite questionable. Yeah, you’re right. There are important scholars who argue that Marx’s later and most important work Capital does away with the concept of ideology and replaces it with the mystified nature of the commodity — that three-dollar T-shirt from Dhaka that contains so many secrets. Who made it? Is she still alive? Who packed it, and who owned the cotton? Why do they own so much cotton when others have nothing? These are just some of the questions we rarely let the T-shirt ask us. If we did allow ourselves to be fully connected to the way the T-shirt was made, then profit may start to unravel.
But, ARGH, this is some heavy shit that takes us right to one of the old guy’s most challenging concepts. The older Marx explains to us how the commodity, the thing made by labor, comes to deaden our relationship with ourselves and each other and our world. The space between being and consciousness is mystified by the things that we can buy, the things many of us must buy in order to survive. Frankly, Section 4 of Chapter 1 of Volume 1 of Capital is a total mind fuck. Read it and reread it, but know it will screw with you intellectually and emotionally. I have promised to fuck with you only emotionally right now, so I intend to honor only that cruel vow.
Ideology, like Freud’s superego, remains a really useful way of understanding things. If you become a studious Marxist, you might soon decide to abandon this relatively simple concept of a political unconscious in favor of a more complex understanding. Even so, you’ll retain the belief that people can be very deeply deluded about capitalism, or that they can, after some effort and experience, become what you youngsters call “woke,” or what we old Marxists call “class conscious.”
Before we can seize the means of production, transform the mode of production and then enjoy hours of freedom filled with both meaningful and mindless human activity — this may include authoring an open-source gardening almanac or having a fap — we must be conscious of our class. Each Marxist must identify her place within a political economy to have the hope of transforming it for all.
If you are a progressive person, you might not be altogether unfamiliar with the process of an internal political audit. You might have previously found that you have carried racist, sexist, or homophobic ideas inside you. You might have, very honorably, addressed these and told yourself to remain vigilant in case you ever start thinking of brown people as “deeply spiritual,” women as “very nurturing,” or queer people as “great fun.” You recognize that even an upbeat form of bigotry can act to enforce the behavior of others. And, what sort of shithead wants to do that?
We can call all these forms of bigotry “ideological.” Which is to say, they each, if unexamined, function very efficiently to reinforce dominant power structures. The experience of bearing such ideology is individual and unconscious. The effect of it is often collective — lots of white people think brown people are “deeply spiritual” or somehow stuck in an ancestral past — and often experienced very consciously by those to whom it is unconsciously applied. If you have been on the wrong end of someone’s unconscious bigotry, you often fucking know about it, even if it’s tricky to explain.
Say you’re a transperson having a chat with a cisperson and you can tell by their language and gestures that they think you are not trans, just “confused.” This is their perspective, and it informs their attitude to you utterly. Even if you’re not talking about anything to do with gender or sexuality at all — not that you are confused by these things because as a transperson, you’ve thought about them way more than most — they still think you’re “confused.” They may speak to you slowly, or display a visible exertion when required to use the pronoun you have said that you prefer. They might just treat you like a child, because they couldn’t possibly think that a rational adult would transition. They’re not asking you rude questions about your genitals or calling you a freak, but their concealed assumptions present themselves quite nakedly to you. It’s a vibe. Which is a very difficult thing to wrestle with, or to point out to others.
There’s some correspondence I like very much, written by Martin Luther King Jr. to his fellow black clergymen while he was behind bars in 1963. In Letter from a Birmingham Jail, he describes the frustrations of ideology well:
I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not … the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice … who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
It’s interesting to note here that King was treated very badly on this occasion in jail and had been arrested for protesting — ostensibly, his inalienable right. Even amid all this crude KKK-style brutality, he still found the words to say what needed to be said: it’s the power you cannot easily identify that’s the most devastating. The hardware or the weapons can crush you. The police can beat you. But, yes, even for a Marxist, the idea, not the material reality, can be the most brutal. I am making the case again here that there is more unity between thought and being, or the superstructure and the base, in Marxist thought than is commonly understood.
Ideology, which is often expressed in a naive spirit of generosity, brings with it particular frustration. Out-and-out hatred is tough to confront, of course. But I have wondered at times whether I find it more tolerable to be called, as I sometimes am on the internet, a “rabid fat commie whore” than the more frequent and more ideological “insensitive.” I know that the latter is actually a quite sexist and capitalist thing to say, and that people mean that it is unfeminine to talk about economics rather than feelings. This feels to me like psychoanalysis in reverse. How dare you try to open me up falsely with your ideological half-truth! How dare you expect that a woman should talk only about the hard time she had, rather than the hard time everyone is having?
“Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.” It’s a great thing for white people to be told, right? The next time you, if white, are tempted to join in an afternoon of shaming an unabashed racist on the internet, reflect that “the white moderate who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom” might be a more formidable enemy to justice than the racist.
I know there is one word white people can utter to diminish a black or a brown person in an instant. I know that I will be likely to act when I hear it. As a Marxist, though, I believe in the relative futility of my act. I am not being brave or useful — especially if I offer my protest before giving the person who bore the terrible insult a chance to respond. If I’m honest, my protest serves me in this case. Oh, Helen, you’re just so compassionate and you’re saving the world, one brown person at a time! This is, in fact, ideology. To believe that I can act alone to achieve significant historical change is some grade-A liberal bullshit. I am calling “call out” culture ideological.
It is, of course, very useful for me, and any Marxist, to be able to observe the “fact” behind the mystification of ideology. We call it out in ourselves, and we may do so in good faith to our comrades. But we don’t think that going clear, Scientology style, is an end in itself. We never think we have the individual power to transform history.
We also think about where and when to rip off the veil of mystification so that others may see it. There are plenty of people committed to social justice who enthusiastically rip off veils that have long been thrown by history to the ground. There’s little point in me attacking something that has already been widely revealed as a mystification. If I scream at a Pentecostal, “NO! Female masturbation is wonderful. In fact, I’m doing it now!” I simply uphold the newer ideology. Frankly, as a Marxist, I am more tempted to scream at Oprah. In fact, the next time she tells me that masturbation makes me a better worker bee, I think I will.
But were I to do so, in negating an idea already shown to be dead I would be reviving it. Not only would I breathe new life into the corpse of ideology, I would show myself to be what I have become: a politically correct adherent to empowering daytime TV. I would offer similar advice to any person considering protesting Milo Yiannopoulos. This overt racist, the kind Martin Luther King Jr. would prefer to the concealed one, grows richer and more influential with every disavowal from those white moderates he calls “cucks.” In any case, Yiannopoulos, that hothouse weed, was largely transformed from a shit-posting nobody into a star because of the era’s material conditions. You want people like Milo to go away? Sure, so do I. But what we must both work towards is a world that would not embrace him as a sassy guest at all. Jerks like Milo only become significant during an economic downturn. So, what are you waiting for, comrade? Let’s stand together to change the mode of production. If only to shut Milo up.
(I am aware that Milo has shut up. But this was not due to the failure of capitalism, unfortunately. Instead, it was down to good old homophobia. Ideology allowed many people to tolerate him saying dreadful things about other people. When video surfaced of him talking about his own sexual preferences, though, that was, apparently, too much.)
There’s naked glittery feral Milo-hate, and then there is the more formally attired ideological communication of it. Neither expression is desirable, of course. But there is a case to be made that bad views clad in good manners, or presented by noble institutions, contain a deeper power.
This is not to say, for a minute, that the outright racial slur does not have a terrible force. I have Aboriginal comrades who have been injured, sometimes deeply, by explicit racism. A Noongar dude I know was asked by staff to strip his own bed after a night in a South Australian motel to save the white housekeeper from unnecessary contact with his “black germs.” That such brutal ugliness can ever be thought is shameful. That it can be heard is almost unthinkable.
But the mass, unconscious ideology that otherwise shaped this Noongar man’s life was far more brutal. He was stolen from his mother by a caring government with the best intentions. It’s so much harder to fight the very naturalized, often very rational-sounding ideas about Aboriginal people held by white policy-makers than the crazed talk of a country motel manager. Yes, the declarations of that turd are to be condemned — and they were, by the Noongar man who countered with, “No need to change the sheets. I wore a hazmat suit to bed, because we all know your dive is as clean as a Coachella toilet.” But, those politely expressed false sympathies of the political class — poor Aboriginal people can’t handle their grog, poor Aboriginal people are welfare dependent, poor Aboriginal people aren’t helping their case by being so angry — can’t so easily be met with a Noongar zinger.
Which is to say, the undressed ideology of racist slurs is awful, but the concealed ideology, which still permits the theft of Aboriginal children and land, commits a polite violence on a monumental scale. In recent years, many Aboriginal people in Northern Territory communities were subjected, by government policy, to joining a particular queue at the supermarket. Their incomes were controlled “for their own good” and spending cards they were issued with only worked at a particular machine. The effect of all this was a daily experience of segregation. The “compassionate” government ideology delivers a message about your “black germs” every time you go to buy milk. I’m sure I don’t need to explain why this ideology, expressed as policy, is far more of an outrage than the naked hatred from a single motel manager.
You can and must fix your own racism, transphobia, et cetera. You must not suppose that this individually noble act will be magically upscaled. It does not all start with you. It’s not “all connected” in the easy way some might suppose. To believe that your personal purity and great compassion serves anyone so well as you is mystification.
Professor of Aboriginal History Gary Foley makes the case that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology to the Stolen Generation was ideological. To the Melbourne Historical Journal, this scholar said that the show stitched up Aboriginal history into the service of the dominant white ideology. Rudd did not offer compensation to Aboriginal people of any kind, or any meaningful material plan to repair their awful circumstances for which successive Australian governments can be held responsible. He made no reference whatsoever to the Intervention in the Northern Territory, which at the time of writing quietly continues, now in its tenth year of brutal control over the lives of Aboriginal citizens. But, hey, Kevin said sorry. As far as Foley, whom I and many others consider a formidable thinker, was concerned, the “event will be a part of future white Australian mythology about how wonderfully they have always treated the Aboriginal people.”
Clearly, the blubbering Rudd felt that he was doing something marvelous. Even as he cried real tears, the real lives of people in the Territory were subject to legal intimidation, surveillance, and tight control over income spending and even, bizarrely, internet use. And all of this was based on the lie — it was found to be baseless — that Aboriginal men were enthusiastic pedophiles. This particularly vicious falsehood was first aired in the media not by the hard Right. It wasn’t Andrew Bolt first calling “these people” rapists. It was lovely, liberal Tony Jones on the anti-racist ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).
Bolt, an artless polemicist, is unabashed in his motel manager–style loathing. Many, many people who consider themselves “left wing” attack him openly. But the true obscenity, surely, is not his. Bolt did not cry while he wrote inflammatory garbage. Bolt has never been such a vulgar hypocrite that he’d pretend to give a shit about anything but his own class interests. Rudd and Jones, on the other hand, claim, through the powers of ideological mystification, to care.
Rudd and Jones mean well. I am certain they see themselves as actively opposed to racism. I am quite sure they would be shocked to see their actions described as being in the service of a racist, and capitalist, order. I am not entirely convinced, though, that we can say that these powerful men, so instrumental in the Intervention, were completely mystified. These guys must have had half a demystified clue.
Rudd knew what was going on in the Territory even as he cried for lost Aboriginal childhoods. The program of violence and control, which still permits police to enter private properties without a warrant, was authorized by him. Jones, surely, must have realized that he and the ABC played a role in bringing about the program that was later to be renamed, softly and ideologically, “Stronger Futures.”
In 2012, the now-defunct Aboriginal affairs publication Tracker showed that Lateline focused on stories of child sexual abuse in Territory communities. Lateline’s own web archive records the broadcast of eleven stories of sexual abuse in the Territory in eight days. These included a particularly sensational report headlined “Sexual Slavery,” which claimed that in the community of Mutitjulu, children were being held against their will then passed around Aboriginal men who would pacify them with rags soaked in gasoline. Huge if true, right? But the story turned out to be untrue.
The chief witness, shot in shadows to protect his identity and described as a Mutitjulu youth worker, turned out to be public servant Gregory Andrews, an assistant secretary in the Office of Indigenous Policy Coordination. A guy whose work it was to “coordinate” Aboriginal citizens, with a high level of influence, was portrayed only as a humble social worker, brought to tears by sexual abuse that the Territory police and the Australian Crime Commission later said lacked any credible evidence.
But the morning after the story went to air, before Andrews’s allegations could be investigated and subsequently dismissed by these two agencies, a report was commissioned that would be called “Little Children Are Sacred.” The report was widely praised. It recommended consultation with Aboriginal people and did not make allegations of widespread, organized pedophilia. But instead, it became the pretext for the Intervention begun by Prime Minister John Howard and continued under Rudd.
Chris Graham of Tracker was watching Tony Jones hosting Q&A on TV in 2012 as the Intervention was discussed. On the show, Aboriginal leader Rosalie Kunoth-Monks said that the chief work of the Intervention had been to “hunt us like dogs” — by many accounts, including those of Amnesty and many Christian churches, a fair assessment. Jones asked the conservative politician Dave Tollner to respond. As Tollner’s naked ideology came up against Jones’s more politely dressed form, there was a moment of demystification. Tracker recorded the exchange:
“Let’s put some things into context here Tony, and I do acknowledge your role in the intervention …” said Tollner.
A clearly pissed off Jones interrupted. “I had no role in the intervention; that was done by a government.”
“No, no, no, but it was your show that lifted the lid on many of the problems that occur in remote communities and I acknowledge that,” replied Tollner. “That led to the major inquiry that resulted in the Little Children Are Sacred report, so I do acknowledge your interest in this area.”
Tollner is not the kind of guy I’d like to have over for scones. But, his vulgar manner did demystify the act of which Jones had been a part. Tollner is the kind of white guy that Martin Luther King Jr. would have preferred, here. Better the outrageous conservative than the white moderate who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.
Jones’s claim that the Intervention was solely due to the government and that his program had no role was some elaborate mystification. Here, we have another case of what Marx describes as the interweaving of the material with the idea.
There have been times where I have been ideological. I’m not claiming to be a class-conscious angel. I have had shitty mystified thoughts. These have included, “She only got that job because she’s a Millennial,” and — I can’t believe I’m telling you this — “Nobody would think that guy was such an interesting writer if he were not brown.” These thoughts serve ageism and racism, but they chiefly served my faith in capitalism.
In both cases, I was lamenting my own lack of income and, like some kind of toilet Trumpist, I reached for an identity group to blame. To be honest, she was a good writer, and he was, and is, a fantastic one. I corrected these thoughts immediately and would never permit them to be uttered as fact — I’m only telling you about them now to make the case that I don’t suppose for a minute that I’m purer than Tony Jones. In fact, I’m worse, as I’ve thought about how ideology takes hold in me for years, and I’m betting that Tony only thinks of ideology as something other people suffer. Also, I wasn’t even trying to save entirely fictional children from made-up sexual abuse allegations. I was just being a brutal ideological asshole silently to myself.
For an instant, I served the master’s ideas. “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas,” says Marx. Read that again. It’s awesome. So is this: “The class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”
The hope for the Marxist is that they will be able to identify and so divest themselves of these ruling-class ideas. This Marxist has no hope that she will ever be able to convince Kevin and Tony that their actions were ideological, and served both racism and capitalism (as we’ve discussed, the idea of a hopeless class of people, such as in the racist USA, is very handy for maintaining concentrated material wealth). But I do know that in certain cases we can expose the way in which ideology is either cynically or naively used by the ruling class.
The strategy of cynically concealing one’s power isn’t exactly new. You have likely heard of Machiavelli, whose sixteenth-century treatise on effective dominance, The Prince, is still read by diplomats and businesspeople today. Old Mack is bang into the effective strategy of seeming nice. “A prince ought to take care that he never lets anything slip from his lips that is not replete with the … qualities, that he may appear to everyone who sees and hears him as a paragon of mercy, loyalty, humanity, integrity, and scrupulousness.” In other words, never try to win by force what can be gained by the appearance of kindness. Of course, if the appearance of kindness doesn’t work, set your armed men on the fuckers.
What The Prince offered was not so much ideology as a handbook for realist cynics. So, it’s not for the crying Kevin Rudd. Rudd is unlikely to make the admission, even to himself, that he was in the business of deluding the people; of knowingly having a sook about Aboriginal pain but actually causing Aboriginal pain. I’m sure he was far more genuine in his confusion than Machiavelli. Ideology and its applications change over time.
This is where one of Marx’s ideas shows its age. Ideology is, as I have said, a strong and useful concept, but it is not a method of thinking, unlike historical materialism, that can survive the years intact. It’s more of a description of a thing than a method of thinking, and later Marxists can be very valuable in expanding or updating that description. Before I describe the problem with the purely Marxist idea of ideology and offer solutions, here are some other Marxists’ takes: Antonio Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony is marvelous, and you can read that in his Prison Notebooks. György Lukács is beloved by many Marxists for his History and Class Consciousness, which is an excellent self-help guide for the working class that wants to get woke. Personally, I think Louis Althusser, in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, goes on with a lot of French crap, but this could be due to my own stupidity. Although he is shunned by classical Marxists, for me Slavoj Žižek makes invaluable and entertaining updates to the concept of ideology. You can read his book, The Sublime Object of Ideology, or watch his bonkers film, “The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology,” on YouTube. Žižek makes the case that ideology has become more complex and self-deluded since the nineteenth century. For Marx and Engels, ideology was a thing often deliberately prepared to mystify the working class. When those two guys met in a bar as young men to write The German Ideology, literacy rates were lower and mass media were not yet in existence. So, powerful people could circulate documents that described the maintenance of power among themselves with high confidence that Julian Assange wouldn’t leak them.
The Prince predates the liberal era that Marx criticizes so well. You’re not going to get advice to leaders like, “Pretend you’re nice before you fuck them up,” from Kant, Locke, or that jerk Voltaire. These Enlightenment guys on whom we base our current Western capitalist morals spoke a little more euphemistically about rights and reason, a bit more Jefferson style, with all that “Equality for everyone … by which I mean guys like me!” stuff. These thinkers had become more ideological themselves and had also learned to mystify their blueprints for domination for the rising bourgeois class.
Nonetheless, you get some more blunt statements than you would from the powerful today. Check out this dazzler: “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is, in reality, instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor.” This comes to us from the granddaddy of capitalism, Adam Smith. His work, The Wealth of Nations, was influential, and one which Marx was particularly eager to debunk. He charged Smith with great intellectual naivete, but he could not accuse Smith of mystifying his underlying assumptions. Which were that we need a government, and unfortunately must pay them a little tax, so that they can buy the stuff to defend us against the poor.
The ideas contained in The Wealth of Nations, from which the neoliberal economic policies we have today are essentially indistinct, became, and remain, the ideas of the ruling class. Although, it should be said that Smith — a guy who wrote so long ago — proposed a more progressive system of taxation of the rich than we see today.
As Engels wrote on ideology in a letter to a comrade in 1893, “It is above all this appearance of an independent history of state constitutions, of systems of law, of ideological conceptions in every separate domain, which dazzles most people.” This “false consciousness” among the working poor was of an equal democracy that promised opportunity to the people. The ruling class knew, per Smith, that the state and the capitalists were in league to defend their riches. The working class were encouraged not to know this, and to believe the dazzling lie of the independent modern state. You know, that modern state built, in great part, by the ideas of Adam Smith.
If we want to understand the way a man of the present like Rudd thinks, Marx and Engels aren’t quite so useful to us as Žižek. Žižek sees a new duality in the way ideology operates for the policy and ruling classes. In short, they have become a lot more convinced by their own bullshit. And we, the working class, have become less convinced by it.
Žižek formulates the structure of a classical Marxist ideology this way: “They do not know it, but they are doing it.” In some cases, this can still hold true. My working-class relatives, for example, still believe that you can make it in Australia if you try, and do not, I suspect, believe that my failure to own a residence has much to do with prevailing economic conditions. To them, I am simply a lazy fucker. Their agemates in the press certainly have this opinion about Millennials. However, the Millennial working class, whom we so often accuse of achieving nothing but Tinder brunch dates, have begun educating themselves on house commodity prices. They have quit blaming themselves and, in some encouraging cases, have come to blame specific policies (remember, a Marxist doesn’t blame people). There are many Millennials of my professional and personal acquaintance who will spout sentences like, “Of course, when the Treasurer applied the capital gains tax concession in 1999, this widened the gap between the investor and non-investor class already made possible by the longstanding state attachment to negative gearing.” This is class consciousness, you guys, and it makes me so happy to see your ideology wither.
But what I see in our ruling classes is some ideological shuffling. When they write their shit about how young people aren’t buying homes because they’re too busy stuffing themselves with brunch and Tinder cock, there are two things going on. There is some of the, “They do not know it, but they are doing it,” once the province of the working class, and also a dose of, as Žižek puts it, “They know it, but they are doing it anyway.”
They are naive and cynical in their ideology at once. The ruling class don’t know it and they do know it. And, they are still doing it.
If you dare, you can think of the Obama administration in this way.
Has there ever been another president who spoke so well and with such genuine compassion? Has there ever been a liberal nation with such a militarized police force, such widespread surveillance, such harsh penalties for whistleblowers, and such restrictions on press freedom?
We think Donald Trump is mean to the press and, sure, he openly derides them. But the gentler Obama really curtailed the ability of the press to do its job. In 2016, the Associated Press reported that President Obama’s administration had “set a record for the number of times its federal employees told disappointed citizens, journalists, and others that despite searching they couldn’t find a single page requested under the Freedom of Information Act.”
Barack Obama may have adopted a kinder language to describe those who resided in the United States unofficially — calling them “undocumented” instead of “illegal” — but he also deported more of them than any previous president. Estimates of those deported range between 2.5 and 3 million people, and the Independent newspaper made the case that Obama “removed more undocumented migrants than the total sum of presidents in the twentieth century.” Still, he was super nice about it, and while he was quietly perfecting the efficient deportation infrastructure that Donald Trump would later openly use, we were all so glad that here, finally, was a truly compassionate president. One who finished off his final year by dropping 26,171 bombs, and maintaining a military presence in 138 countries, “a staggering jump of 130 percent since the days of the Bush administration,” observed the Guardian, in one of its less popular pieces. Liberal ideologues do not enjoy reading negative things about Obama.
Obama went in for a big compassionate finish, too. In his last days in office, he authorized the deployment of 4,000 US troops to the Russian border, largely based on the suspicion of a few intelligence community personnel that Russia had “hacked” the 2016 election. Russia did this, allegedly, by offering WikiLeaks documents and emails held by Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff.
If you read these “Podesta” files, you’ll find, inter alia, that President Obama accepted a Citigroup executive’s advice on appointments to his cabinet. You’ll find that Hillary Clinton told a group of immensely wealthy Goldman Sachs executives, in a speech for which she received a six-figure sum, that there were certain stories she would tell them, the elite, confidentially, and others she would tell the American people, who simply didn’t understand confusing things like massive wealth accumulation.
If you can ever be bothered, read some of these Podesta emails. They are, at once, both cynical and naive. The document Citigroup sent for Obama’s perusal is kind of amazing. It is clearly offering up a list of names that will act in the interests of that firm, but it does so very nicely. It even includes a list of choices for the president to make and has handy symbols so that he can see which appointments qualify as “diverse.” So even though Michael Froman and Obama, who later appointed him as a US trade representative, were engaged in a financial conspiracy that makes what Martha Stewart did look like borrowing an envelope from the office stationery room, they were clearly very committed to equality for all ethnicities. At least, committed to equality for all ethnicities with nice jobs on Wall Street.
I mean COME ON. This is shocking, right? Obama took the suggestions of a money man whom he would later award a cushy, influential government post. This revelation was barely mentioned in the press, who had now begun to think of anything that might damage Clinton’s election chances as unethical. They knew what they were doing, but they also didn’t know. They lost sight of what truly occurred, which was, in any assessment, evidence that the White House was not doing anything but defending the rich against the poor.
No one in the Democratic Party has ever claimed that these documents were not genuine. As far as they were concerned, the real crime here, which would be avenged by moving tanks into Polish towns, was that someone, possibly not even the Russians, had told the truth. It wasn’t that the president and his appointed successor were shown to be directly serving the interests of the finance sector. Who cares about that stuff, because, hell, Obama is so nice, and Clinton is an inspiring role model for our daughters. And they both defend the rich against the poor.
Again. This is NOT to make a case for Donald Trump, who is a broken toilet. Rather, it is to explain the mechanism of ideology.
Sometimes, we sniff out ideology when we are subject to its power, and it can present itself to us only as a feeling. I am really no fan of liberal feminism, but there is true value in the way that one of its most formative modern thinkers describes “the problem that has no name.”
In the 1960s, Betty Friedan and others eventually gave that problem a name, and “sexism” became something we could identify. That Friedan initially characterized sexism as a malaise mysteriously contracted by women of the white middle class helps us understand the process of what Marx and other Marxists mean by “ideology.” It is buried inside us. It can be as present in the people it diminishes as it is in those it benefits. It is upheld by the conditions of our labor — which, for this group of women, was often unpaid and largely domestic — and it can be reinforced by the state, as it can be by apparently inoffensive gestures, such as a man who tries to soothe an upset woman by patting her bum. (Pro tip: NEVER DO THIS, UNLESS ASKED.)
Oh, shit. Now I’ve gone and mentioned feminism, which has had such a long and troubled relationship with Marx. This is such a famously on-again off-again pair, they will receive an entire chapter of couples counselling to themselves. But let me say for now: gender relations cannot be comprehensively explained by Marx. Marx can’t repair everything that is rotten in the world, and he never claimed that he could. But the liberal feminist description of sexist ideology, with which you are likely to be familiar, helps us understand the form of capitalist ideology, which you may not have thought about very much before.
Sexist ideology is always easier to see as its expressions age. We can look at old women’s magazines that describe how to time a slow-cook casserole so that you have a spare hour to pop on a girdle and do your hair for hubby. People used to read this and find it unsurprising. This, we would have said back then, was just the natural way of things. It was women behaving as they might in a state of nature, which, as reliable paleontologists report, involved a lot of fussing with hot-rollers fashioned from the bones of Stone-Age cucks who had been eaten by ancient beasts.
It took a forthright liberal like Betty Friedan to point this out as hogwash. But, boy, did people give her a hard time. Just as people will give you a hard time today if you insist that a lot of women’s media continues to be fixated on devouring women’s time in the service of high-cost individuality.
Gwyneth Paltrow’s newsletter, GOOP — which happened to launch the very month the Global Financial Crisis was officially declared — deluded women into feeling “empowered” by spending lots of money on exotic smoothies. Gwyneth compels her gender to increase their crippling personal debt and spend their time doing sex-slave bullshit so abject it makes a hot-roller look like a violent act of feminist revolution.
Gwyneth tells us gals to pop something called “Moon Juice Sex Dust” into our organic kale juice. Give the GOOP store thirty US dollars, and receive, “a lusty edible formula alchemized to ignite and excite sexy energy in and out of the bedroom.” Gwyneth has written in praise of the expensive vaginal steam clean — presumably, an act of hygiene urgently required after a heavy dose of Sex Dust. Anyhow. You try telling a liberal feminist that Gwynnie is a douche-selling douche. They will, quite perversely, tell you that you are being sexist and undermining a strong woman’s success. They’ll keep saying that until this era’s respected Betty Friedan reveals to us all that Gwyneth has been quietly working for our misogynist capitalist overlords. I mean, I tried to tell my sisters, but they all think I’m a “brocialist” and therefore not to be trusted.
I’ll wait, though. Ideology reveals itself over time. I would prefer it revealed itself instantly. But, in the Gwyneth case, at least I know I got in early and will one day be able to claim, like Marx, that “I told you so.”
On the matter of the ideological defence of capitalism, Marx told us so more than 150 years ago. Across his many works, he engages with the economic thinkers of the Enlightenment age and powerfully illustrates their rich GOOP-level shit.
Ideology is not always visible to us. The Marxist holds that the least visible kinds of power are also the most effective. Accordingly, the Marxist, in my view, must defy these power structures by making her own beliefs as plain to herself as she will to others. The Marxist must get into the habit of seeing and telling the truth about capitalism.
There are Marxists who try to persuade others of the power their doctrine by what they think are subtle means — if you’ve ever been to an LGBTI protest, you’ll find a Trotskyist there saying, “Same-sex marriage is wonderful, isn’t it? I just love the written approval of the state! Let me read you some relevant literature.” I do not go in for any of that and, really, if we’re honest, Marx didn’t either.
In the last paragraph of The Communist Manifesto, Marx is unambiguous about the need for communists to be frank.
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution.
Pretty clear on the honesty front, if you ask me. Find the capitalist ideology within yourself so you can openly declare your forcible overthrow of it to others.
Telling the “truth” from within capitalism isn’t easy, even to yourself. It’s certainly no fun. It must, however, have an upside. Please let me know when you find it.