Theories of Ideology and Sciences of Belief Systems

Around the time that I left the SPUSA, I conceived a non-fiction writing project which I think I will be laying aside. Tentatively entitled "The American Ideology," the aim would have been to try to identify a set of ideological presuppositions that would be both peculiar to citizens of the United States and nearly universal among them. I still think it would be a worthwhile project, but not necessarily the best use of my individual efforts.

Theories of ideology play approximately the role in Marxism that epicycles did in Ptolemaic accounts of the solar system. While important, foundational hints were provided were provided in Marx's work--the first chapter of Capital on commodity fetishism, the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and of course The German Ideology, left to the gnawing criticism of the mice and published posthumously--it was never his top priority. Nor should it have been. As of his death, working-class political parties had been formed in all the countries in which advanced capitalism had taken hold (including Britain and even the United States), and these parties were growing and advancing in their theoretical and practical comprehension of capital. The proletarian revolution was on the march. Ideology--the ruling class's mechanisms of deception and self-deception--would no doubt be overcome. The future was bright.

The concept of ideology takes on an importance to Marxist thinkers in direct proportion to the apparent distance of the proletariat from fulfillment of its imputed historic role. Lenin wrote "Imperialism and the Split in Socialism" at a moment when he thought he would not live to see a revolution. Gramsci's notebooks were written in a Fascist prison. Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" functions as a postmortem of the 1968 French uprising and his own party's dubious role in bringing about its defeat. Theories of ideology derive sophistication from the depths of their authors' despair.

Theories of ideology are important and necessary if one aims through politics to hold onto a long-term hope for victory, and to trace a reasonable-seeming path from defeat to victory. The important phase here is "long term." If there is no long term, or at least no reliable promise of it, then theories of ideology no longer serve a purpose for political tactics. It may be nice to understand why people believe what they believe, and how it feels to believe the things they do, even if those beliefs are ultimately self-destructive--a radical extension of empathy--but unless one has a path forward for shifting those people from false consciousness to true, that knowledge is of limited utility. In a short-term perspective, it more useful to be able to assess whether, on the basis of a grouping's current set of beliefs, it is possible for them to be inspired to take beneficial action. Such a judgment may well be entirely independent of one's judgment of the truth value of those beliefs.

So I am setting aside the "American Ideology" project. One of the more useful things to come of it, however, was reading Towards a Science of Belief Systems by Edmund Griffiths. I say this even though I consider the book itself to be flawed, precisely insofar as the author holds to a notion of the scientificity of a certain form of Marxism. This blog post will not be comprehensive critical analysis of the book. But I will highlight some of what I regard as its strengths and weaknesses.

A strength is his definition of "belief systems": "a set of propositions held to be true, to which some emotional charge (affect) is attached and which gives more or less cogent expression to a general sense of how the world is." (§3) But this in turn reveals a weakness, namely his insistence upon the phrase "belief systems" in lieu of "ideology." For example, he writes, "Among Marxist writers, meanwhile, ’ideology’ is correctly used in a sense that is both broader and narrower than ‘belief system’: broader because it also includes, for instance, the arts, and narrower because it refers only to phenomena that are seen determined in some way by a mode of production." (§3) Both the narrowness and broadness that Griffiths imputes to "ideology" as compared "belief systems" seem dubious to me. The broadness because, by emphasizing the propositional content of belief systems, it downplays the importance of phenomena, such as the artistic works, from which it may be difficult to extrapolate a belief system's propositional content, but which may be essential for decoding its affective meaning for believers. And the narrowness because, if Marxism is taken seriously as a science, then in the final analysis every phenomenon is ultimately "determined in some way by a mode of production."

In general, Griffiths seems motivated by a kind of anxiety about the scientificity of Marxism. By electing the term "belief systems" he wishes to hold open the possibility of participation in his proposed new science by people who do not accept Marxism, and thus might be repelled by the term "ideology" and its associations. Yet he himself holds to the truth of a certain kind of Marxism, and devotes an entire chapter (Chapter 5) to articulating the possible relationships between "belief systems and the materialist conception of history."

(A secondary problem here is that "materialist conception of history" ought not to be treated as singular, or as identical with Marxism. The latter has already been shown by Plekhanov in his Development of the Monist View of History, which shows how Marxism borrows from and extends insights from earlier forms of historical materialism. That there can be other materialist conceptions of history is central to my emerging world view, i.e. one that would dispense with the dualism between "man" and "nature" implicit both in Marx and in his putatively "monist" predecessors, as can be found for example in this passage from "The Critique of the Gotha Program": "Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. the above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor.")

From his definition, Griffiths identifies two topics of analysis that are essential to analysis of belief systems. One would be the affective dimension, and to this his book contributes far less than might be hoped. The other is the propositional content and how it hangs together through a combination of explicit and implicit beliefs. This hanging together is described through what he terms "descriptive logic," that is, analysis of how believers actually reason, rather than an attempt to impose prescriptive, formal logic onto the propositions of a belief system. The power of this methodology can be seen precisely in that it can be applied to Griffiths himself.

Let us take, for example, a statement of Griffiths that I find factually false, since these can often serve as entry-points to the implicit reasoning of a belief system:

"It may seem odd that no well-developed science of belief systems has yet to be put forward within Marxism, and that the most thoughtful and interesting Marxist writers have not typically devoted a great deal of their attention to belief systems – certainly much less than they have given, say, to the arts. There are book-length studies of artistic and aesthetic questions by such prominent Marxists as Plekhanov, Lukács, and Trotsky; and a number of brilliant Marxist thinkers have done their best work precisely on the arts (Caudwell, Max Raphael). Belief systems have not been so favoured. There is Kautsky’s stimulating book on early Christianity, there is some outstanding work by Marxist historians and other scholars (Rodinson, Christopher Hill, Peter Worsley)... but, in general, Marxism’s knowledge of aesthetics and the arts is considerably in advance of its grasp of belief systems." (§108)

I have already given a brief criticism of Griffiths' differentiation of "aesthetics and the arts" from "belief systems," but the factual errors of this passage go deeper. At best it represents an incomplete bibliography, at worst a blind-spot: One can use the author names given to reconstruct some of what a fuller bibliography of Marxist theories of belief systems would include. For example, Plekhanov’s Monist View contains much material in this vein; his oeuvre has been incompletely translated into English, but Griffiths’ fluency in Russian denies him this excuse. Lukács’ work includes not only History and Class Consciousness, but also Eclipse of Reason. From Trotsky: The Stalin School of Falsification, Their Morals and Ours, and In Defense of Marxism are all must-reads for examples of reconstructions of the belief systems of others and their articulation to class interests. Then there are the missing names (Gramsci being the most glaring omission).

A bit of "descriptive logic" goes a long way in reconstructing Griffiths’ apparent blind-spot. In the following reconstruction, I follow Griffiths' convention of italicizing those propositions which are directly quoted from the work of the believer, leaving the implicit steps in the reasoning process in plain text:

1. Marxism is true.
2. If Marxism were true, then we would be on the way to the proletarian overthrow of capitalism and creation of communism.
3. We appear to not be on such a path.
4. In the history of Marxism, apparent failures of the proletariat to fulfill its historic mission have been explained with reference to theories of ideology, which claim to account scientifically for belief systems.
5. None of those theories of ideology accounts well for the present world political situation.
6. Thus a well-developed science of belief systems has yet to be put forward within Marxism.

I would thus argue that Griffiths succeeds partially in his aim, in developing a theory of ideology (though he does not call it that) whose power is not dependent upon agreement with the author's Marxism, and that this power is demonstrated precisely insofar as the methodological insights of descriptive logic can be applied critically to Griffiths himself. Extension of this study can include the further elaboration (and formalization) of descriptive logic, but would also need to attend to the comparatively weaker portion of Griffiths' work, the study of affect. As with his gloss on Marxist theories of ideology, there are bibliographical gaps that provide a hint as to directions for future research. For example, there is a substantial Enlightenment and proto-Enlightenment literature on the relationship between reason and affect. Spinoza and Rousseau stand out to me as its pinnacles of achievement. Comparing this literature with the literature of modern experimental psychology to see how well it has held up would be a worthwhile endeavor for someone who wished to study the affective nature of belief systems (or ideologies--I am convinced that the terminological distinction is largely a matter of taste.)

There is far more of value to be found, in embryo, in Griffiths' slim little book, and I may return to my notes on it for other entries. But I would argue that, at this moment, the study of ideologies has more ethical and aesthetic import than political significance. And so for the time being, I hope to be able to turn such of my energies as are available for writing away from the essayistic and back toward the fictional.

Emancipatory Biopolitics

I have for some time (at minimum since November of last year) been saying that Marxism is past the point of provability, and thus no longer salvageable as an exemplar of "scientific socialism." In more short-hand forms I have taken to referring to myself as "post-Marxist," dissatisfied with that term, since it encompasses a wide range of political and philosophical manifestations, more than a few of which I dislike. What I have not had time to do, until now, is try to articulate what aspects of the Marxian edifice retain some plausible correspondence to the facts, and which have to be jettisoned as corollaries to negated premises. After I left the SPUSA last month, I have had time, and my thoughts have begun to cohere, for the first time in years, into something resembling a coherent world view. This post represents my first attempt to articulate that world view. Its weaknesses are, I hope, in the nature of a first draft.

There have, within movements purporting to be Marxist, been two distinguishable visions of the communist aim. One can find traces of both in the first section of the Gotha Program. One is the notion that workers get more and more, until the workers have it all. This Marx stigmatizes as Lasallean, even as he concedes that, with some modifications, it describes a necessary but temporary stage. The second is that the workers cease to be workers as distinct from society at large, that the self-emancipation of the proletariat corresponds to its self-abolition as a class. The contradiction, insofar as it is Marx's own contradiction, is a contradiction in the Hegelian sense, one that resolves itself through its own immanent development. More concretely, Marx argued that the partial (trade union and legislative) struggles waged by the working class to lessen its exploitation at the expense of capitalist profit, while they would not end that exploitation, would enable the working class to develop the collective confidence and self-concept necessary to take over from the capitalists--and thus to put itself out of existence. One finds the two visions in different proportions in different areas of Marx's work--more of the aggrandization of the proletariat in "Value, Price, and Profit," more of its self-abolition in the "Communist Manifesto"--but both are there.

Varying admixtures are found in later Marxist writers as well. For example, Trotsky articulates the former vision when he writes (in his 1939 essay "Marxism in Our Time," that is, on the eve of the bloodiest war in history) that "The class struggle is nothing else than the struggle for surplus-product." Its traces are all over the Transitional Program as well. The notion that the class struggle is "nothing else" than the struggle over surplus-product does not mesh well with Marx's dictum from the Manifesto that "every class struggle is a political struggle." The point is not to pick on Trotsky: He was intelligent and well-read, and quite familiar with self-abolition as an aim of the proletarian class struggle. For example, it figures in the arguments of his book on Literature and Revolution. That the economistic notion of the class struggle as the struggle for the surplus figures so strongly in his more overtly political writings may help account for the political weaknesses of subsequent organizations claiming to be Trotskyist, but does not necessarily cast doubt on Trotsky's quality as an interpreter of Marx. Certainly not in comparison to some of the alternatives.

How do these two visions fare in the face of climate crisis, in which Marxism's "fundamental positive hypothesis has been invalidated, not as a moment of a self-devouring dialectic of negativity but as an inexorable consequence of physical processes triggered by humanity but escaping its control"? Neither fares well. For the moment, we need to examine each in turn before comparing their bruises and wounds.

"The struggle over the surplus-product" can be summarized more concisely in the slogan of someone who was never a Marxist, the American trade unionist Samuel Gompers: "More." One hesitates, at a moment when the inequality of wealth and income in the U.S. is the greatest it has been in nearly a century, to abjure the need for workers to demand more. Most such struggles, in fact, can and must be joined without hesitation. To fight for a shortening of the working day and working week, for more leisure and freedom, is a fight to lessen subordination to capitalist production and its destructive outcomes. To fight for better health and safety on the job is to insist that some things have value that cannot be reduced to the universal equivalent of money. To decouple the basic preconditions of social life--health, food, water, shelter, education--from employment and the wage is essential.

But what of fights for higher wages? At the basic level, among the layers of the working class who now are not paid enough to meet their basic needs (on a global scale--the majority), this is an urgent demand. But if posed more generally, we must ask, to what end? What does more money get us? Greater claim to a mass of commodities, most of which meet no need at all, but whose production serves to accelerate our social death.

Or fights for more jobs? We must ask: Doing what? Creating what? And most importantly at the moment, creating what waste products?

The struggle over the surplus-product is a struggle over the conditions of our hastened collective demise. A political struggle would be a struggle for human survival, against heedless destruction, and thus, against the very conditions for the existence of the surplus-product.

Does this mean that we forego the struggle for "more" entirely, in favor of a direct struggle for proletarian self-abolition? This would not be an unprecedented conclusion, and has been articulated repeatedly by representatives of the "communization" current. Where I would differ from most representatives of such thinking is that they present the unilateral preference for self-abolition as compared to economic struggles as belonging to Marx; I consider this a misreading, but such philological questions pale in comparison to magnitude of the tasks we now face, and are thus tangential. A more important difference, that makes it impossible for me to embrace the notion of immediate communization that might, somehow, outrun the coming decline of capitalist rule is that this vision underrates the necessity of class-consciousness as a precondition to class self-abolition. (I've linked to a post from 2013 even though I now regard that post to have been too flippant in its approach to the underlying question. I still hold to the conclusion, if not to the style of argument.) Based on tracking atmospheric carbon concentration, the probable links of current weather phenomena to climate change, and some of the second-order effects in the literature, I estimate we have perhaps twenty more years until climate effects begin to erode the social wealth created in the twentieth century. If the preconditions for communism are both material and within mass consciousness (with mass consciousness being understood not as an ideal phenomenon, but as something conditioned by and forming part of the material conditions), then those preconditions are slipping away rather than strengthening.

Note that I am not postulating an eternity of capitalism. That is frankly an impossibility. With the drive to accumulate being so fundamental to capital as a social phenomenon, it is incompatible with human survival over the long term. Either we all die, or human self-preservation intervenes to replace capitalism not with communism, but with some form of as yet unheralded class society (because there will be scarcity, and with scarcity, "to each according to their needs" is impossible).

There is thus no longer a singular class struggle (if there ever was), but struggles on two fronts. The first, indispensable struggle--because without it the second struggle is impossible--is the struggle for human survival. It is the struggle against anything that threatens to accelerate climate transformation to a point where adaptation and survival are rendered impossible. The second struggle is over the shape of the new society that emerges among surviving humanity. It is the struggle to preserve and expand human freedom despite the damage we have done to ourselves, to defend every gain made by oppressed people in spite of capitalist rule and to ensure that those who consigned us to such straitened circumstances are not allowed to set terms for their own continued dominance.

The ugly not-quite-neologism I have come up with for this double struggle is "emancipatory biopolitics". (A quick Google search tells me that over the last 10 years, a few people who write about people like Foucault, Negri, and Agamben have used the phrase. Whether it is used in precisely the same sense as I intend, I do not know, nor do I particularly care at the moment.) The important point to make is that this struggle is not (just) a class struggle. It opens up a struggle within the ranks of what Marxism would term the working class. A pipeline welder, and a nurse volunteering as a medic in a water protectors' encampment, are both workers in a sense that Marx and most Marxists would understand. But they have taken opposite sides in the fundamental struggle for survival. It is only by regarding the former as a complete dupe of the capitalists that one can excuse his actions--and I have met enough workers who do destructive jobs to know that they are not mere dupes, that they are thinking beings as capable of rationalizing their actions as I am capable of rationalizing mine. And lest you decide that I have conveniently chosen an extreme case, consider more such dyads: A wall-builder, and a migrant attempting to climb a wall. A coal truck driver, and a child (maybe even his own) suffering asthma. There are two sides. One can change sides in this struggle--we must try to get more people to change sides--but ultimately one must take sides.

This is because the site of the struggle is not production, which under capitalism is necessarily capitalist production, that is, production for profit. It is a struggle over (social) reproduction, that is, the ways in which human beings collectively create the social conditions and material necessities for one generation to replace another. To the extent that capitalist production has either crowded out or taken parasitic control over other modes of social reproduction, it has become ever more the production of waste products (CO2 and leaked methane, of course, but also pollution in air, land and water, food waste, and human beings consigned to being treated as waste). The struggle against capitalist production over the conditions of social reproduction is the struggle over how much shit we will allow capital to choke us with.

I do not anticipate founding a "Party for Emancipatory Biopolitics." Not only is the phrase a barbarism, but the formation of a party would be beside the point. We have to ask ourselves, what type of knowledge, and what type of power, do we need to organize and build, in order to wage the double fight for survival and freedom? With no false modesty, I can honestly say that the point is not to have read Marx, Camatte, Foucault, or Negri. Such erudition pales in comparison with knowing where the water-treatment plants are, when the oil trains are scheduled to pass through town, the production and storage of food, or how to find and use stockpiled weaponry. For a negative example, of what can go wrong when the the forces of death are the ones who know and act on such matters, consider Jamie Allinson's account of ISIS in his essay "Disaster Islamism". But also comparatively unimportant (though sometimes tactically necessary) is knowledge of the names and personalities of local elected officials or the mechanisms of constitutional government. The types of knowledge created and mobilized by a party are at best of secondary importance. A "collective" instead, perhaps?

I make no strong claim to originality in this. My path to this outlook may be rare or unique, but the outlook itself is, I hope, not. Nor are the names especially important, either. But since my skills are primarily as a reader and a writer, let me end this on a comparatively optimistic note. Whatever the phrase "Collective for Emancipatory Biopolitics" lacks for stirring euphony, perhaps can be compensated for with a summary slogan: "Long live life! Death to death!"