Ideology and Protagonism
(Section 6 of Ideology and Practice)
Marx and Ideology Revisited
In section 3 of this text we looked at the development of a “Marxist theory of ideology” in the period between Engels’ death and the Nazi dictatorship. While doing so I sharply distinguished the views of these Marx-ists of the “classical period” and Marx and Engels themselves, who were not only dead but also their key work ‘The German Ideology’ (TGI) was not available to the writers of the time. At the end of that section I mentioned briefly the work of Charles Mills on this question, but mainly in the context of dismissing Jan Rehmann’s attempt to construct a coherent Marxist ideology-theory, based on Marx’s original meaning but coherent with Lukács’s identification of ideology and fetishism. Here we are going to review Mills’ work on extracting a coherent meaning from Marx’s use of the term ideology in his writings. My position is that I take Mills’ reading to be correct, although it contrasts sharply with not only Rehman’s but the bulk of contemporary Marxists’ ideas about what ideology meant to Marx.
Charles Wade Mills is a US-based Jamaican-origin political philosophy professor at CUNY. His current primary research area is the critical investigation into the role of racism in Western liberal political philosophy. In other words, marxology is not these days his primary focus. However his 1985 Phd thesis title was ‘The Concept of Ideology in the Thought of Marx and Engels’ and a number of subsequent articles and papers drew on this work. For our purposes I’m going to focus on two later texts, a 1992 article ‘“Ideology” in Marx and Engels: Revisited and Revised’, and the opening chapter (of his 2010 book ‘Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality’), entitled simply ‘“Ideology” in Marx and Engels’ [1]. I think it’s fair to say that neither text, nor the Phd work they are based on, have exactly taken the world of either academic or militant marxology by storm. In my view this is a pity, because regardless of the broader political stakes, the question (as posed by Rehman and many others) of whether it is possible to formulate a coherent ideology-theory today, that is consistent with Marx and Engels in 1847 has to start with a clear-eyed re-examination of the latter, free from any preconceptions. And this is what Mills has already done for us.
The point of referencing two sources here, rather than one, is that the 1992 text carries more in the heavy lifting required in evidencing marxological positions, particularly “heretical” ones, that is the dull but necessary marshalling of quotations in dialogue with opposing readings. I’m not going to reinvent the wheel by rehearsing all that argumentation with cherry-picked Marx quotes, I’m just signalling to any readers wishing to pursue the matter from a marxological viewpoint, you should probably go to the 1992 article first. For our purposes here, which are not primarily marxological, I’m going to stick to the 2010 text as a more summary account of Mills’ new reading. But before we get to summarising that reading, I want to outline my purpose by starting, perhaps contrarily, with where I disagree with Mills (1992);
The main virtue of this radical new interpretation lies not in its intrinsic interest (which is largely antiquarian) but in its clearing of the conceptual ground so that a fresh start can be made. It implies that the conventional spectrum of opinion on what Marx and Engels meant by “ideology” is quite wrong, that their own notion of “ideology” is in fact of little use to a modern audience, and that a theoretical space is therefore opened up for the construction of a new Marxist conception of ideology that can largely ignore what Marx and Engels themselves said about “ideology.” To a certain extent, then, the consequence is a welcome emancipation from what in many ways (if truth be told) has always been a somewhat unhelpful text.
While I agree that the conventional spectrum of opinion on what Marx and Engels meant by “ideology” is quite wrong, where I depart from Mills is that in my opinion what they originally meant still remains potentially of great use to a modern audience. But first, let’s start with summarising Mills’ reading.
Mills (all references are to 2010, unless noted otherwise) opens by outlining the 3 main current readings
…I suggest that three main positions can be distinguished on the question of Marx and Engels’s conception of ideology. With some qualifications, all the writers can be fitted into one or the other of these three categories. They are:
(a) Marx and Engels used “ideology” in one basic sense, as a pejorative term generally denoting unscientific and distorted partisan class ideas.
(b) Marx and Engels or perhaps just Marx used “ideology” in one sense, as a neutral descriptive term referring generally to partisan class ideas, and making no commitment one way or another to their epistemic status.
(c) Marx and Engels used “ideology” in two senses, one pejorative and one neutral, so that it is necessary to be sensitive to different connotations, depending on the context of usage.
Of the 20 Marxist writers reviewed by Mills [2] three-quarters backed position a), two (McMurtry & McCarney) backed b) and the other three backed position c). Mills’ own reading is a modified form of c).
The first position a) is overwhelmingly the majority position, not just of the writers Mills selected, but the contemporary Marxist academic scene, and not unrelatedly, this (one single pejorative meaning) is actually the dominant usage in general, including non-Marxist usage also. We’ll get to why that is in a bit. In a Marxist context, this predominant view is closely linked to associating ideology with “false consciousness”.
Given the overwhelmingly pejorative sense in which Marx and Engels use the term “ideology” in TGI, McMurtry and McCarney’s heroic efforts to reinterpret and relativise this in defence of a “neutral” reading seems wilfully perverse. But we have to add in the context that Marxists of the classical period, including leading lights like Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao, interpreted “ideology” in this neutral sense (having themselves no access to TGI as previously mentioned). So for writers with a political commitment to the “doctrine of apostolic succession” linking any of the classical period luminaries back to Marx, the effort to square the circle has a strong motive, however ultimately impossible the task. That said, most Marxist writers with political commitment to traditions stemming from the classical era icons, accept the predominant Western Marxist “false consciousness” reading (a), without making a big song and dance about it. (In certain cases, implying by omission that this was the orthodox Marxist view all along, which is absolutely not the case).
The three writers (Therborn, Williams & Moskvichev) who back a dual usage agree that the first, “neutral” sense is the classical era view of partisan class ideas (or perspectives) as being shaped by material interests, but not necessarily false (crucially for the potential for an antagonist proletarian standpoint) and not necessarily anti-scientific. The second, pejorative sense, refers not to partisan class viewpoints in general, but specifically to the idealist cast to the view from the position of the superstructure. Mills concurs:
What I am now claiming is that the second sense in which Marx and Engels used the terms “ideology” and “ideological” was precisely to refer to such “superstructuralist” theories of social determination. Because, in Marx and Engels’s opinion, these theories were wrong, their usage of the term “ideology” in this connection is uniformly pejorative. “Ideology” here signifies a view that makes the superstructure rather than the base ultimately determinant; as such, it “inverts” the correct causal hierarchy and represents the true situation in an “upside-down” fashion. Thus whenever Marx and Engels used the term pejoratively, it was this restricted reference they had in mind, and not partisan class ideas in general.
further
The claim is, then, that the pejorative sense of “ideology” was never intended by Marx to have the general reference it has acquired in the century since his death. Correspondingly, Engels’s phrase “false consciousness” was not meant to refer to a class’s lack of awareness of its true interests, but merely to the tendency of intellectuals in class society to ignore the social determinants of their thought.
Mills accepts that this runs very contrary to the predominant view and goes on to present arguments (including context to key quotations like the ubiquitous “camera obscura” passage) to defend the new reading. I’m not going to rehearse them here.
But I do want to contextualise a little bit. As Mills notes, one of the mysteries of Marx and Engels’ usage of “ideology”, if it really is as central to their thought as later supporters and critics alike have made out, then why do they almost never use it after TGI? Why, for example, does Marx never accuse the many, many vulgar economists he takes to task, both in Capital and Theories of Surplus Value (and many other places) of being “ideologists”? Why does Marx never associate fetishism with ideology?
The answer, in my view (and Mills as well, AFAICS) is that the core task of The German Ideology is Marx and Engels settling accounts with their philosophical past, and above all, the Big Daddy of German ideologists himself, Hegel. In Hegel’s idealist philosophical schema, the state itself has the historical mission of the self-development of the Absolute Idea. In Hegel’s 3-class system…
§ 202
The classes are specifically determined in accordance with the concept as
(a) the substantial or immediate [or agricultural] class;
(b) the reflecting or formal [or business] class; and finally,
(c) the universal class [the class of civil servants].
The civil servants, the agents of the state — that Marx and Engels generalise and re-baptise as the ideological superstructure — are the universal class. Even before TGI, Marx had declared that the real universal class was the proletariat. But notice that this is not a simple inversion of Hegel’s schema, but an inversion followed by a partial deconstruction and reconstruction. It’s not the agricultural class that is, contra Hegel, the universal class. But first the idealist division between agriculture and business that Hegel makes is deconstructed into a materialist division between social production, in both primary (agriculture) and secondary and tertiary (manufacturing, services) sectors, in which the corresponding class division is between wage labour (rural and urban proletariat) and capital owners (landowners, industrial, merchant and financial capitalists). In the process of this decomposition of Hegel’s idealist categories and the subsequent materialist recomposition, the State is re-conceptualised as the ideological superstructure. A structure that emerges out of the base or infrastructure of social production, and erects itself upon that foundation in order to limit and contain its contradictions through its own apparatuses of domination.
It is clear that when Marx and Engels refer to the state as (part of) the ideological superstructure, they have in mind Hegel’s view of it as the Absolute Idea according to his idealistic logic. Insisting on the homophony and punning resonances like this may seem crude or heavy-handed, but I believe it is germane, in context. Regardless, the key here is that they view the superstructure as a material social location, including employments as diverse as not only “politicians, judges, priests”, but also soldiers, jailors, doctors, etc. — people whose role in the social division of labour has nothing to do with ideas or ideation. Mills makes the point that similarly, when Marx talks about unproductive labour, he includes the “ideological classes” in that category, which includes state employees who do not (unlike priests or philosophers, for e.g.) serve the state by producing ideas (or “ideology” in our modern usage) but by pen or sword, like bureaucrats, soldiers and cops.
In volume one of Capital, in an analysis Of productive and unproductive labor, he talks about “all who are too old or too young for work, all unproductive women, young persons and children, the ‘ideological’ classes, such as government officials, priests, lawyers, soldiers, etc.”
This explains why the vulgar economists that Marx writes volumes of penetrating criticism of, without stinting on sarcastic, caustic or pejorative abuse where appropriate, are never castigated as being “ideologists”. They are not part of the state machine, or superstructure more generally. It also explains why the term disappears, relatively speaking, once their debts to philosophy are settled and the rupture with Hegel is finally consummated and the manuscript of The German Ideology, it’s work done, is “abandoned to the gnawing criticism of the mice”.
So what are we left with?
For Marx and Engels, then, “ideology” has in fact nothing to do with “…a body of normative ideas about the nature of man and society as well as the organization and purposes of society […] a view of how the world is and should be”[3]. Maybe a quick way to show that Marx and Engels’ version has nothing to do with norms is, as a thought-experiment, to imagine a hypothetical psychopath. This hypothetical psychopath, protective camouflage aside, has no genuine attachment to any normative values about the fate of society or other human beings, aside from seeking their own advantage. In today’s conventional sense, then, we can say that our psychopath’s pretence to have any active ideological commitment is simply that, a pretence. There’s no such thing as a genuinely ideological psychopath, in the conventional sense. They may on occasion advocate a particular ideology for instrumental reasons, but the attachment is opportunistic and insincere.
However, in Marx and Engels’s sense, there’s nothing stopping a well-organised and functional psychopath joining the civil service or a political party and rising to a position of high rank or leadership (and we know this happens in the real, non-hypothetical world). In that case our hypothetical psychopath would most likely hold the view that state power is the real social power in society and controlling and manipulating that power is the key to making social change happen (or prevent it). And that is a social-ontological viewpoint from someone shaped by the positionality of exercising power in the “ideological superstructure”, in the Marx and Engels sense.
The second, and possibly most important distinction to be made between the Marx and Engels meaning of “ideology” — as something both specific and unique to the superstructure — is the confusion this creates vis a vis the use of “ideology” in the contemporary ideational sense. Specifically when we talk about the role of ideology in class struggles within the “base” of social production. For example, the hold of working class norms against grassing or scabbing play a key role in the outcome of strikes and other class conflicts. But although these are ideological factors in our modern usage, the idea that ideology is a factor in the class struggle within the base is alien to the meaning given to that term in The German Ideology. This can lead to confusion in the work of later Marxists who try to conflate these two incompatible concepts into a single “Marxist theory of ideology” when they get to the relation between base and superstructure in a historical materialist ontology[4].
The most important take away here, is that there is no longer an exclusive relationship between ideology and the superstructure, still less a functionalist one, in our contemporary sense of ideology. Further that any attempt to form a coherent unitary conception between the Marx-ian (as in from Marx himself) and Marx-ist senses of ideology is impossible. Here I am in agreement with Mills’ pessimistic but realistic assessment.
However, this unique and particular Marx-ian conception is far from “antiquarian” or obsolete, in my opinion, because I propose it has continuing relevance today and is therefore a very useful concept to capture. But we absolutely need a new word to avoid confusion, because the sense of the Marx/Engels concept is so specific and so unconnected from our conventional, normative and ideational sense of “ideology”. So, for lack of anything better, I propose “protagonism” for this concept, definitely worth rescuing from “the gnawing criticism of the mice”.
Protagonism and Antagonism
Protagonism in the narrow sense is the presumption that the state (or more precisely, the ideological superstructure) is where social change happens. In other words protagonism is an upside-down view of historical agency (“upside-down” from the historical materialist perspective). Protagonism in the wider sense, is the (idealistic) delusion that the ideas of the ideological classes, the ideas which they fool themselves are the motives for the decisions they make, are the decisive force in historical agency.
Given that our now current use of ideology refers primarily to ideas, it’s important to recognise that for Marx and Engels that the primary category is the social position of the ideological classes, their indirect relation to social production (all ideological classes or strata are “unproductive labourers” in the Marxist sense, of not being directly involved in the surplus-value producing process, but paid for their service out of the revenue of either the state or individual capitalist enterprises[5]). That is, for Marx and Engels, the ideological position is primary, and the ideological ideas, doctrines, doxa, etc, are secondary. These latter ideas are produced in the first instance by agents in the ideological superstructure, and their characteristic distortion (protagonism in our sense) is peculiar to them, and them alone. That is, that the protagonistic ideological distortions are not universal to all participants in bourgeois society, with its generalised commodity production, in the way that the commodity fetishism is. This is why Lukács’s mis-identification of ideology with the universal distortion of consciousness attributed to commodity fetishism is such a terminal error. And everything that follows on from that error in the Western Marxist tradition (Frankfurt School, Critical Theory, etc) is thereby trapped in an insoluble conundrum as a consequence.
When Destutt de Tracy devised the neologism of “ideology” he had in mind the study of ideas in general. But in an Enlightenment classical liberal framework, where ideas could be viewed in the idealistic version of the sphere of circulation, or exchange, separated from the conditions of their actual production —i.e. who had produced these ideas, for what motive and under what circumstances — where the only concern was to apply scientific methods of assessing them to determine their validity or invalidity in an absolute, positivist way. For Tracy then, “ideology” was the primary concept, and “ideological” was the derivative, adjectival form, a mere shadow of the primary concept. But for Marx and Engels, penetrating beneath the surface of social appearance, the sphere of circulation, into the obscured depths of the sphere of production, the conditions of production, the viewpoint of the agent of the ideological superstructure is primary. The ideological ideas produced by such puppet-agents, necessarily distorted as they are to preserve the self-delusion of genuine agency, are the secondary, derivative category.
It’s worth rehearsing this at length, because our current usage has returned to that of Tracy’s, so if we did not focus on the exceptional way Marx and Engels temporarily repurposed the term (and only for a relatively brief period in their own development, lest we forget), we could easily presume an unbroken continuity of meaning in the primary/derivative inner precedence relation between “ideology” and “ideological”.
Let’s take a historical example from within living memory. The Poll Tax in the UK. It is a matter of indisputable historical fact that John Major’s government repealed the acts of parliament that instituted the Poll Tax (by replacing it with the far-from ideal Council Tax). But does that mean that John Major abolished the Poll Tax? The protagonist view would be yes — only a government in power can pass new laws to repeal unpopular old laws.
But from a historical materialist perspective and the more commonly accepted view (in this particular case), John Major did not get rid of the Poll Tax. His government simply enacted the laws that consigned it to the dustbin of history. The historical agency that forced the abandonment of Margaret Thatcher’s flagship policy (and ended her premiership and political career) was the working class resistance of mass non-payment and physical defeat of attempts at police repression expressed in the large-scale riots during the anti-Poll Tax campaign.
This is the contrary, antagonist perspective. In summary, the protagonistic view is that enaction is agency. In the contrary antagonistic view, enaction is simply the final, (superstructural) surface appearance of a change that has already been determined within the base, by victory or loss within the class struggle. That is, for antagonism the origin of social change is distinct from and elsewhere to its eventual point of appearance.
The antagonist perspective contained within Marx and Engels historical materialist rejection of Hegelian idealism was summed up in the Communist Manifesto’s famous maxim “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”.
In the case of the resistance to the Poll Tax, this took the form of “direct action”, the non-payment campaign. It is said that history is written by the winners. It’s certainly frequently re-written by people that prefer the record to show that the winning ideas were their ideas. In the case of the Poll Tax, the trotskyist Militant Tendency (as was) would like the historical record to show that non-payment was their advocated strategy from the outset. This is not actually true. Because the Poll Tax was due to be “piloted” in Scotland, a year before England and Wales (Northern Ireland was exempted from the outset), the crucial arguments over strategy took place in Glasgow and Edinburgh from 1988–89. Militant’s original strategy was the classically “protagonist” strategy of standing “Independent Labour” anti-Poll Tax candidates in the local elections (they had been expelled from the Labour Party at this stage). It was the small number of anarchist comrades in Glasgow and Edinburgh, who argued for the “antagonist” strategy of non-payment, against Militant’s electoralist designs. Their position being based on the long-standing anarchist ideological conviction that “direct action” is superior to “indirect action”[6] in winning broad class struggles. Thankfully their arguments prevailed in the eyes of the majority of the people who joined the APT campaign in Scotland without prior commitment to either anarchist or Militant ideologies.
Sectarian point scoring aside (although combatting historical revisionism is a worthwhile pursuit in itself), the motive for choosing the particular example of the Poll Tax is that it’s an example that makes the protagonist perspective look counter-intuitive, even silly, and the antagonist perspective look uncontroversial and just plain common sense. If this was the case more generally for protagonist vs antagonist viewpoints, there wouldn’t be much use for the distinction at all. Because one would be unremarkable and the other would be hypothetical to the point of irrelevance.
So the stakes are, for the protagonist versus antagonist viewpoints to make sense, I need to show a number of things — 1) (salience) that the distinction appears widely across a large range or majority of areas of knowledge and historical events, 2) — (predominance) that the predominant or common sense view in nearly all cases is the protagonist one, not the antagonist one, 3) (validity) and that the protagonist view is more misleading or mystifying than the antagonist one 4) (causation) the beginnings of a plausible explanation why this might be so.
Before even getting to the question of salience, we need to lay down a minimal grid of characteristic contrasts that we can use as a framework to distinguish protagonist and antagonist viewpoints.
The grid
Tendentially, the invisibility of social struggles in general and the class struggle in particular, is a key characteristic of protagonism. Three linked characteristics (leaving aside the causative relation between these three characteristics) are individualism, historical subjectivism and the unipolarity of power.
Conversely, the characteristics of the antagonistic viewpoint is the primacy of mass struggle over the terms and relations of exploitation in historical agency. And the corollaries of collectivism, historical materialism and the asymmetric duality of power and counterpower.
The question of the historical agency, or not, of the class struggle is familiar enough to not need further expansion at this stage. “Individualism” is a feature because certainly all the formal organs of the state (and most of the more informal structures in the extended superstructure) are organised hierarchically. So in a hierarchy the person at the top ultimately says yes or no and then historians can write about crucial junctures in moments of social change in terms of speculating why such and such an individual made that particular decision. But even prior to the later role of historians, the differing factions within the superstructure struggling over how to force the hierarchy to one side or another, conceive their own roles in terms of the ideas they have, but also the ability of their factions leaders to win the day.
“Historical subjectivism” is the view by actors in a particular facet of the superstructure, as reflected in the academic fields that study them and write their history, that the history of their domain is the cockpit of human history. Politicians believe that politics is what makes history. Generals believe that military conflicts and geopolitics makes history. Philosophers and academics (especially economists) believe that their ideas, when turned into policy, make history. And so on. That is, that each believe that their particular domain is the real “subject of history”. And, by extension, that is they themselves can rise to dominate their domain, they can become a “historical figure” and personally “make history”.
The “unipolarity of power” is really just an extension of the general idea that the superstructure is the true agent of history, that it’s power is the power that both proposes and disposes. The contrary, antagonist view, is that the real power of society lies in the social struggle within the infrastructure of society and insofar as that struggle is not purely one-sided, then the counterpower of those excluded not only from the formal constituted power of the state and superstructure, but also from the ruling exploiter class, can also effect change through its own, autonomous constituent power.
Salience and Predominance
In order not to overly prolong the demonstration, we will pick only four domains: international relations, politics, sociology and philosophy.
International Relations (IR) is the study that covers the foreign policy of states and their interactions. There are a number of different doctrinal tendencies, realism (and neo-realism), liberalism, constructivism being the main ones. But they all take the object of their study — the sovereign state — to be the subject of history. The class or social struggles of the humanity contained within these reified subject-objects, the sovereign states, are entirely erased and invisible. There is only one dimension to power, the relative powers of the states. The only dimension in which IR is not the ideal poster boy for the protagonist worldview, is the debate between the relative role of the decision-making of individual state leaders and the objective forces playing on states in their inter-state struggle for power and resources.
The foreign policy establishments of the great imperialist powers, in Washington, London, Brussels, Moscow, Beijing, etc, tend to view “statecraft” through the lens of IR. Subsequently when reactionary populists like Trump ascend power in Washington, there is much pearl-clutching about the new buffoon’s ignorance of where countries are or what they’re called, from their elite view of geopolitical chess play as the ultimate Boss level of the politics game. However, as a field, most capital-p “Politics” views IR as only a sub-component of the art of ruling. Politics, at least in the liberal democratic world where attaining power means winning periodic electoral mandates, is viewed primarily as the art of maintaining sufficient support in the nation-state constituency to stay in office. (It goes without saying that protagonism equates being in office with being “in power”, and views the condition of being in office without being in power as an abnormal, exceptional circumstance). Politics generally views the art of winning popular support and staying in power as the art of not alienating the paradigmatic “centre ground” of politics. We’re going to defer a full discussion of “centrism” to after this section, but let’s just say that generally centrism dictates that the majority of politics considers the ontological reality of the class struggle as being an ideological chimera of the far left. Politics as a discipline, generally relegates social struggles in general to being “noises off” in the manner of the stage direction. A bit like the English army storming Dunsinane Castle in the last act of the Scottish play, we are aware that “events” are happening in the wings, but the duel between Macduff and Macbeth is centre-stage. Political history is almost always written in the dramatic narrative sense of individual heroes and villains gathering support or alienating their peers and leading their factions to triumph or defeat. Individualism is intrinsic to politics as both profession and field of study. Similarly, the unipolarity of power — what politicians fight for control over — and that the history of politics is the history of social change tout court, is taken for granted. Where politics diverges from the almost pure protagonism of IR is not so much in the recognition of the role of social struggles between classes or oppressed and oppressors, but in the internal intra-class struggles between competing factions of the ruling class. To the extent that these intra-class struggles to some extent reflect the external pressures of inter-class struggles, we can say that politics is less abstracted from social reality than the glorious isolation of the sovereign state in IR.
Sociology is a different beast. For starters, sociologists are part of the extended superstructure outside of the formal power apparatuses of the state. That is, it doesn’t exhibit the division between practitioners and scholars that we find with politicians and political studies, for e.g. Sociologists are part of the intellectual wing of the superstructure, the academy, and shift the direction of executive power only indirectly via influence over policy formation. Also, whether there is any connection or not, there is a far greater degree of pluralism when it comes to protagonistic or antagonistic views in the various sociological doctrines in play. In fact we could even wager that sociology is perhaps the social science discipline with the largest prevalence of openly antagonistic doctrines that are not castigated as heretical by the academy. Certainly, there is far less tolerance for notions of social struggle playing a significant role in society in economics, for example. Similarly for the binaries of individualism vs collectivism or allowances for historical materialist perspectives. Given the institutional orientation towards servicing the policy formation requirements of the state, however, its perhaps not surprising that a counterpower perspective against the unipolarity of power is less in evidence. None of which to say that solidly protagonistic doctrines are not also alive and well in sociology, or that antagonistic doctrines have the kind of hegemony that right-wing fever-dreams about the academy being a hotbed of communist subversion might imagine. But if sociology was representative of the social sciences as a whole, then the predominance of the protagonistic view might be more in question.
Finally, lets look at philosophy. Does philosophy project itself as the real subject of history? Absolutely, and not just in a few places. Obviously the undisputed king of philosophy as protagonism is the original inspiration for Marx and Engels critical rupture — Hegel. All philosophers begin their work by writing a history of philosophy. And in philosophy the subject of the philosophy of history is a well-worn trope. Hegel realised he could plug the tail of the snake into its mouth and declare that the history of philosophy was the philosophy of history and the history of god and man and everything. Apart from failing to show how this all added up to 42, Hegel pretty much tied the whole lot up in a knot. To such an extent that the energies of the next generation of German philosophers — the so-called Young Hegelians — were taken up with how to unpick or untie the knot, or at least extricate the more conservative and reactionary positions that the master had carelessly entangled in it. Hegel aside, philosophy as a discipline is clearly protagonist by the given grid. Marx and Engels decided to adopt the approach Alexander used to address the Gordian knot, and just sever it with a clean rupture with the whole problematic of contemplative philosophy in favour of a materialist praxeology. But we don’t want to get too diverted into matters philosophical here, because it’s time to move on.
Validity and Causality
In the interests of moving on to the next topic of this section, I’m not going to cover arguments for validity and causality in any depth here. I opened with the Poll Tax example, not as any proof of validity (although the idea that its demise was Major’s work is palpably absurd), but to demonstrate the necessity of making the argument for the salience of the protagonist/antagonist distinction and that the former is generally more prevalent in the predominant discourse. Hopefully the above has at least begun that argument, if maybe not settled it conclusively. Further examples of why the predominant protagonistic viewpoint may be less valid than the alternative will hopefully come in the following topic and the further sections of this text.
In terms of causality, I can’t do it justice here, but I do want to point very briefly to certain historical and class aspects. Historically, the protagonistic viewpoint begins to evolve in the European early modern period in the discourse that emerges around “sovereignty” in the absolutist regimes. It’s tempting to say that “sovereigntist” could be a near-synonym for the protagonist view of the state, but sovereignty is a massively overloaded term in political philosophy, so would be a terrible choice for re-labelling the “superstructuralist” view from Marx. But if in the era of absolutism, sovereignty resides in the monarch (indeed in the physical body of the monarch in some cases), after the transition of the bourgeois revolutions, the state itself takes on the mantle of sovereignty. Schematically, the absolutist state is superseded by the protagonist state. Because the ascendant bourgeoisie cannot rule absolutely, through its own power — requiring the support of the lower orders against the landlord aristocracy, and vice versa — the protagonist state exercises sovereignty not directly in the name of the bourgeoisie, but in the name of “the People” or “the Nation”, “la Patrie”.
In a similar vein, while the “ideological classes” that staff the state bureaucracy and repressive apparatus (army, police, judiciary, jailors) may have specific material interests of their own, again they do not have sufficient power to govern according to their narrow material interests against the opposition of the landlord, bourgeois and proletarian class forces. Consequently, the decision-makers within the superstructure cannot think in terms of material interests, but must imagine “interests” through the mediation of idealistic worldviews that present interests in a universalistic garb, for “the good of the nation”. This is why protagonistic ideology is always idealistic rather than materialistic, a feature of the particular balance of class forces in bourgeois society. In addition to the influence of class composition, there is also the more psychologistic drivers, already mentioned above, of decision-makers needing to believe in their own autonomy — to maintain the illusion of their own free will and agency, and to obscure the fact that mostly the decisions they end up making are forced on them from the outside, by forces and pressures outside their control. Together these factors go some way to explaining why, as Engels put it in that famous 1893 letter to Franz Mehring
Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all.
It’s worth re-stating that idealism and principles govern the thought and action of even the most apparently cynical and centrist of politicians and other state actors, military chiefs included. Worth it, because there is a tendency in the populist and antagonist left to ascribe an extreme cynicism to the motivations and beliefs of actors in the superstructure. That is, to ascribe a kind of “rational expectations” model of their thought and actions that liquidates any ideological factors and sees all invocations of “matters of principle” in decision-making as pure cant or hypocrisy. But in fact, close examination of the detailed history of politicians, generals, other state actors, shows — not in every case, obviously — repeated instances of actors making choices that damage or end their careers or otherwise go against “rational agent” principles, in the name of principle. This is counter-intuitive from our common assumption that idealism and principle and centrism are mutually exclusive categories. So now is a good time to grasp the nettle and try and come to some useable working definition of centrism.
Notes
[1] Mills, Charles Wade. 1992. “Ideology” in Marx and Engels: Revisited and Revised. The Philosophical Forum, 23 no 4. Wiley. (Reprinted in Mill, C.W. 2003. From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism. New York: Rowman & Littlefield); ____ 2010. . “Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality: Race, Class and Social Domination. Jamaica: University of West Indies Press.
[2] 1. [From Mills 2010] In alphabetical order (of authors), they are: Acton (1955); Althusser (1996); Barth (1976); Cohen (2001); Keat and Urry (1982); Kellner (1978); Lichtheim (1965); Mannheim (1936); McCarney (1980); McMurtry (1978); Mepham (1979); Miller (1972); Moskvichov (1974); Plamenatz (1971); Poulantzas (1987); Rader (1988); Seliger (1977); Shaw (1978); Therborn (1999); Williams (1985).
Acton, H.B. 1955. The Illusion of the Epoch: Marxism-Leninism as a Philosophical Creed. London: Cohen and West.
Althusser, Louis. [1969] 1996. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. Reprint, New York: Verso.
Barth, Hans. 1976. Truth and Ideology. 2nd ed. Orig. ed. 1945. Trans. Frederic Lilge. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Cohen, G.A. 2001. Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. Exp. ed. Orig. ed. 1978. Princeton: Princeton University
Keat, Russell, and John Urry. 1982. Social Theory as Science. 2nd ed. Orig. ed. 1975. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Kellner, Douglas. 1978. “Ideology, Marxism, and Advanced Capitalism”. Socialist Review 8, no. 6 (November December): 37–65.
Lichtheim, George. 1965. “The Concept of Ideology”. In Studies in the Philosophy of History: Selected Essays from History and Theory, ed. George H. Nadel. New York: Harper Torchbooks.
Mannheim, Karl. 1936. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. Trans. Louis Wirth
McCarney, Joe. 1980. The Real World of Ideology. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
McMurtry, John. 1978. The Structure of Marx’s World-View. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Mepham, John. 1979. “The Theory of in Capital’. In Issues in Marxist Philosophy, vol. 3: Epistemology, Science, Ideology, ed. John Mepham and David-Hillel Ruben. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
Miller, David. 1972. “Ideology and the Problem of False Consciousness”. Political Studies 20, no. 4 (December): 432–47.
Moskvichev, L.N. 1974. The End of Ideology Theory: Illusions and Reality. Trans. Jim Riordan. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Plamenatz, John. 1971. Ideology. London: Macmillan.
Poulantzas, Nicos. [1975] 1987. Political Power and Social Classes. Trans. Timothy O’Hagan. Reprint, New York: Verso.
Rader, Melvin. [1979] 1988. Marx’s Interpretation of History. Reprint, New York: Oxford University Press.
Seliger, Martin. 1977. The Marxist Conception of Ideology: A Critical Essay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shaw, William. 1978. Marx’s Theory of History. Stanford, CA: Standford University Press.
Therborn, Göran. [1980] 1999. The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology. Reprint, New York: Verso.
Williams, Raymond. [1977] 1985. Marxism and Literature. Reprint, New York: Oxford University Press.
[3] Mudde, Cas; Rovira Kaltwasser, Cristóbal. 2017.“Populism: a very short introduction”.
[4] This is particularly a problem with Althusser, for example, as outlined by Lillian Cicerchia in the initial podcast in the series “What’s Left of Philosophy”. Cicerchia makes the point that Althusser is left with the only relationship he is able to draw between ideology and struggles in the base is a functionalist one, which is a mistake (and theoretically untenable for all the problems of circularity in functionalist arguments re ideology, as discussed in previous sections of this text).
[5] NB that this means that the standpoint of the “ideological classes” of the superstructure is distinct from that of either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. Because Marx’s manuscript for Capital breaks off at precisely the point at which he’s about to tell us about what he really thinks about class, there is a tradition in Marx-ism to extrapolate the Manifesto’s “two great hostile camps” image into an exclusively binary class model, which is not congruent with evidence in Marx’s journalistic or historic texts, and above all, is not compatible with the view of The German Ideology or even Capital 1 regarding “…the “ideological” classes, such as government officials, priests, lawyers, soldiers, &c.”.
[6] “Direct action” and “indirect action” are terms of art in anarchist ideology and theory, which we’re not going to go into here. There’s plenty of texts on these terms on the internet for the curious.