Defining Ideology, Part 2

In this article, I will first reiterate some of the lessons learned from Louis Althusser, which I outlined at greater length in Part 1. I will then explain how his focus on material conditions has certain advantages over the purely discursive analysis of Michel Foucault that seems to have been adopted by certain people in the dissident right and sensible centre. Finally, I will turn to Althusser’s concept of ‘contradiction’ and ‘the weakest link’, derived from Lenin, to think about where the weakest links are today.

Let us start with some crib notes on Althusser:

·         Ideology has a material existence.

·         Ideology has no history.

·         Ideology interpellates the individual as subject.

·         There is no ‘outside’ of ideology.

·         In the ‘last instance’ every system must rely on force.

To take each of these in turn. Ideology must have a material existence since it is defined as ‘the representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.’ This is why you care when you see old statues pulled down and new statues of George Floyd et al erected in their place. This why it matters if an old church is turned into a leisure centre. Ideology has no history because where there is man, there is ideology. The goldfish bowl I mentioned in the last article is, in a sense, the entire condition of being human, which is to say there’s always a goldfish bowl. Since this is the case, one cannot accurately talk about ideology having a ‘history’ since it is a constant. For Althusser, this would be a little like talking about the history of the human breathing. To reconcile this with some basic elite theory we can say something like: ‘humans are a political animal, power generates ideology to justify itself, where there is politics there is ideology, therefore where there are humans there is ideology.’ Althusser’s concept of ‘interpellation’ essentially concerns itself with the mechanics of social conditioning or if you prefer ‘indoctrination’ or ‘brainwashing’. For him, this starts even before you are born. There is a four-fold mechanism by which the subject accepts himself in ideology and says ‘Amen’ – ‘so be it’. This is when you essentially accept your place in society. ‘I am a bus driver, I live in Kent, I vote Labour’, or whatever. So long as the majority of people say ‘Amen’ and never look for, let alone question, the boundaries of the goldfish bowl, everything functions as it should. The system does not need to use force most of the time, because individuals ‘work by themselves’. Perhaps an extreme version of this is the House Slave, think of the character played by Samuel L. Jackson in Django Unchained. In a sense, for Althusser, this is most people, most of the time. Given what we have said so far, it also stands to reason that there is no ‘outside’ of ideology. The best anyone can hope for is the replacement of one ideology with another. The situation of human life free from the goldfish bowl is rendered as a pipedream in Althusser’s analysis. Finally, and this is important, remember that in his system that as well as there being ISAs (Ideological State Apparatuses), there are also RSAs (Repressive State Apparatuses), and he insists that, even if the moment sometimes seems endlessly deferred, ‘in the last instance’, the RSAs will kick into gear. In other words, no matter how sophisticated and effective the ISAs, eventually a man with a truncheon or a gun is going to be there to tell you what to do. When I used to lecture on this, my example was always the 2011 London riots, in which I recall vividly the response time of the riot police was less than one-hour. Other examples are available, and the combination of Covid and January 6^th have furnished us with plenty more of them.

            It is worth lingering on this last point a little longer. As I mentioned, Althusser was once the mentor of Michel Foucault, whose work can in one respect be seen as a long response to Althusser. Where Althusser was a Marxist, Foucault was not. Where Althusser remained a materialist, Foucault did not. There are real consequences to the change. In America, and, to a lesser extent, in Britain, academics in the 1970s and 1980s, were excited by the ‘advances’ Foucault seemed to represent over Althusser. Althusser was very top-down, monolithic and state-centric in his thinking, Foucault’s thinking was decentralised, heterogenous and diffused among ‘discursive fields’ rather than ‘the state’. This is the sort of thing that excites academics, but who was more correct, Althusser or Foucault? Foucault’s model of Power/Knowledge refocuses from ‘ideology’ to ‘discourse’. He has a kind of magic triangle ‘where there is discourse, there is knowledge; where there is knowledge there is power’. In Foucault almost all power is soft power. In his most famous works such as Discipline and Punish, he is interested in the ways that even apparent shows of hard power – let us say the branding on the skin of a prisoner – are actually displays of soft power. In that same book, his most famous example of soft power was the idea of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. This is a prison tower shaped much like a doughnut, there are cells all around the outer rim and a watchtower with armed guard in it. The prisoners are told that the guard will shoot them if they attempt to speak to the man in the next cell. The kicker is that there is no guard in the tower, which is to say that for the prisoners the belief alone is enough to ensure their compliance with the prison rules. You might think of many examples of this in the real world. When you drive through a red light, you might not always be fined, or let’s say if you walk out of a supermarket through that scanner thing, will it always go off? For Foucault, it scarcely matters because the belief is enough to discipline you.

            Here’s how I put it all in my old book:

Foucault’s power is rooted in discourse and relations of discourse, not materiality – discourse is not only written, it can be spoken or even contained in a thought. This ensures the ubiquity of power even in the absence of ‘apparatus’. Whereas Althusser’s ISAs need institutions and other material objects in which to manifest, Foucault ‘power relations’ only need as a bare minimum two people. As Foucault argues in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1984): ‘there is no absolute outside where [power] is concerned’. In Althusser there is also no ‘absolute outside’ of ideology, but where power is necessarily repressive (in the sense that it is at the very least, to use Foucault’s phrase, ‘an extortion of truth’), ideology is simply the condition of sociality; where power depends only on the disembodied realm of discourse, ideology is tied to material conditions. These are key differences. In Althusser, and in Marxism more generally, there can be material objects without ideology, but in Foucault there can be no discourse without power. … For Althusser and his followers, power depends, ‘in the last instance’, on repression – that is, on physical violence, action – to maintain hegemony, not knowledge. The idea of the RSA (repressive state apparatus) is totally missing in Foucault because power, even external power (‘the sphere of force relations’) must always be internalized.107 Power in Foucault is almost always ‘soft power’, violence is not necessary: it is the power to compel people, without apparent coercion, to say and do things that are not necessarily in their own best interests but in the interests of the dominant power. … Both Poulantzas and Žižek criticize Foucault’s theory of power for being too diffuse and lacking materiality. Also, they both seem to imply that the move from Althusser’s homogenous state-centric model to Foucault’s more heterogeneous and decentralized model – typically seen as a good thing by literary critics – is in fact a mistake, presumably because in the real world there is such a thing as state power and it should not be overlooked. I am inclined to agree that this is a significant blind spot in Foucault’s concept of power. In my opinion, the chief cause of this unsatisfactory aspect of Foucault’s thought lies in his disregard for the traditional economic base. I agree with Althusser, that any rational theorization of power must maintain the prospect of violence, in the last instance. For example, we have seen in recent years outbreaks of violent rioting and looting across London and the United Kingdom, not to mention the extraordinary events of the Arab Spring; to pretend that there is no need for a ‘RSA’ or for state law to maintain law, order and power would be, among other things, supremely irresponsible.

It is interesting that something like a split between Althussurians and Foucauldians has emerged on the so-called ‘dissident right’, or as I prefer, ‘the sensible centre’ today. My own view of ideology as a set of ‘BS’ arguments that justify power which nonetheless serve to manufacture consent is perfectly in keeping with the Althusserian view, but it also insists as they would that power in the final analysis rests on violence. In fact, it is the monopoly on violence that allows power to keep shifting what the ‘ideology’ is. Only the conclusion, ‘therefore I rule’ matters, most of the rest is froth, albeit froth that has a very real effect on who gets hired and fired and what sort of crap is shown on television. In the ‘last instance’, it comes down to who has the bigger gun. As against my view, you have modern-day Foucauldians, who seem to think that the actual discourse matters, that the substance of the ideology needs to be addressed, that at some level this is a battle of ideas that can be won and lost on the plane of knowledge. Here, ‘in the last instance’, it comes down to who has the better set of deconstructionist tools. My view is that, with all the best will in the world, you can deconstruct the Boomer Truth Regime to within an inch of its life and it won’t matter so long as those with the power over the RSAs still subscribe to it, give or take a few containment moves. The other side of this is that, the ISAs matter. In Foucault’s world you have this ‘discourse’ shooting between disembodied ‘individuals’. In Althusser’s, you have these big institutions that wield significant cultural and political capital quite apart from any ‘individual’. Look at the world around us and tell me who is more correct.

            There is, however, I think another, and hidden reason, behind these disagreements. Those on what I’m calling the ‘Foucauldian’ side have their own ideology to peddle, be it ‘third-positionism’, Christian fundamentalism, or whatever else. An ideology-peddler is never going to be fully comfortable with a position that points out that ideology is downstream of power and that power ultimately rests on violence. In fact, it’s never been quite clear to me how Althusser himself reconciled his arguments with his Marxism – which is to say, how did he justify the proposed replacement of ‘Capitalist ideology’ with ‘Communist ideology’? The interesting fact is that, across all his works, he never seems to bother. He had fully internalised the idea that his own cause was just and that the particulars of why it was so did not really matter. His entire work was devoted to outlining how ideology and power work and to how difficult a genuine revolution would be to enact. Interestingly, during the May 1968 student riots, which engulfed Paris and campuses in America too, which were partly inspired by Althusser, he sided against the students and told them they were being juvenile and playing into the hands of power. Later, in his memoirs, he admitted that he hadn’t even read most of Marx – which is probably why he’s one of the more interesting Marxist thinkers. My own commitment to ‘The Negative Vision’ is much derided by ideology-peddlers, but I maintain it is the only honest position. Why? Because whatever new regime replaced The Regime will not have an ideology even slightly resembling what I set down on paper today. It will need to act in the real world. The real world requires actions and decisions now and justification later. No regime ever has consulted the sacred scrolls before it acted, rather it acted and then updated the sacred scrolls. Why do I keep pointing these things out? Because I want people on our side to start thinking like winners rather than losers.

            Incidentally, Althusser was aware of what I’ve outlined here and has a concept devoted to the fact that no regime is consistent with its own ideology: he calls this contradiction. Interestingly, he takes this not from Marx, but from Lenin. It is the idea of the weakest link. This is essentially when the BS of an ideology is exposed such that it is nearly impossible to cover-up. Discussing the Russian Revolution, he writes, in his usual italics-laden and hectoring style:

But here we should pay careful attention: if it is obvious that the theory of the weakest link guided Lenin in his theory of the revolutionary party (it was to be faultlessly united in consciousness and organisation to avoid adverse exposure and to destroy the enemy), it was also the inspiration for his reflections on the revolution itself. How was this revolution possible in Russia, why was it victorious there? It was possible in Russia for a reason that went beyond Russia: because with the unleashing of imperialist war humanity entered into an objectively revolutionary situation. Imperialism tore off the ‘peaceful’ mask of the old capitalism. The concentration of industrial monopolies, their subordination to financial monopolies, had increased the exploitation of the workers and of the colonies. Competition between the monopolies made war inevitable. But this same war, which dragged vast masses, even colonial peoples from whom troops were drawn, into limitless suffering, drove its cannon-fodder not only into massacres, but also into history. Everywhere the experience, the horrors of war, were a revelation and confirmation of a whole century’s protest against capitalist exploitation; a focusing-point, too, for hand in hand with this shattering exposure went the effective means of action. But though this effect was felt throughout the greater part of the popular masses of Europe (revolution in Germany and Hungary, mutinies and mass strikes in France and Italy, the Turin soviets), only in Russia, precisely the ‘most backward’ country in Europe, did it produce a triumphant revolution. Why this paradoxical exception? For this basic reason: in the ‘system of imperialist states’ Russia represented the weakest point. The Great War had, of course, precipitated and aggravated this weakness, but it had not by itself created it. Already, even in defeat, the 1905 Revolution had demonstrated and measured the weakness of Tsarist Russia. This weakness was the product of this special feature: the accumulation and exacerbation of all the historical contradictions then possible in a single State. Contradictions of a regime of feudal exploitation at the dawn of the twentieth century, attempting ever more ferociously amidst mounting threats to rule, with the aid of a deceitful priesthood, over an enormous mass of ‘ignorant’ peasants (circumstances which dictated a singular association of the peasants’ revolt with the workers’ revolution). Contradictions of large-scale capitalist and imperialist exploitation in the major cities and their suburbs, in the mining regions, oil-fields, etc. Contradictions of colonial exploitation and wars imposed on whole peoples. A gigantic contradiction between the stage of development of capitalist methods of production (particularly in respect to proletarian concentration: the largest factory in the world at the time was the Putilov works at Petrograd, with 40,000 workers and auxiliaries) and the medieval state of the countryside. The exacerbation of class struggles throughout the country, not only between exploiter and exploited, but even within the ruling classes themselves (the great feudal proprietors supporting autocratic, militaristic police Tsarism; the lesser nobility involved in constant conspiracy; the big bourgeoisie and the liberal bourgeoisie opposed to the Tsar; the petty bourgeoisie oscillating between conformism and anarchistic ‘leftism’). The detailed course of events added other ‘exceptional’ circumstances, incomprehensible outside the ‘tangle’ of Russia’s internal and external contradictions. For example, the ‘advanced’ character of the Russian revolutionary elite, exiled by Tsarist repression; in exile it became ‘cultivated’, it absorbed the whole heritage of the political experience of the Western European working classes (above all, Marxism); this was particularly true of the formation of the Bolshevik Party, far ahead of any Western ‘socialist’ party in consciousness and organisation; the ‘dress rehearsal’ for the Revolution in 1905, which, in common with most serious crises, set class relations sharply into relief, crystallised them and made possible the ‘discovery’ of a new form of mass political organisation: the soviets. Last, but not the least remarkable, the unexpected ‘respite’ the exhausted imperialist nations allowed the Bolsheviks for them to make their ‘opening’ in history, the involuntary but effective support of the Anglo-French bourgeoisie, who, at the decisive moment, wishing to be rid of the Tsar, did everything to help the Revolution. In short, as precisely these details show, the privileged situation of Russia with respect to the possible revolution was a matter of an accumulation and exacerbation of historical contradictions that would have been incomprehensible in any country which was not, as Russia was, simultaneously at least a century behind the imperialist world, and at the peak of its development.

Incidentally, this was part of Althusser’s project to ‘de-Hegelise’ Marx or, if you prefer to ‘invert Hegel’. We do not need to inherit the entire Marxist apparatus to borrow some of the core concepts here. It does make me wonder though, from our point of view as enemies of The Regime: what is the ‘weakest link’ today? Althusser argues that ‘Russia was the weakest link in the chain of imperialist states. It had accumulated the largest sum of historical contradictions then possible; for it was at the same time the most backward and the most advanced nation, a gigantic contradiction which its divided ruling classes could neither avoid nor solve.’ I find it difficult not to conclude that the nation which occupies this position today is, paradoxically, the epicentre and capital of the GAE: the USA itself. There, more than in any Western nation, the contradictions between the stories the ISAs of that country has told itself and the lived realities on the ground have been reaching breaking point for some time. Its ruling class are nakedly corrupt, in Europe – at least in Northern Europe – our politicians still have the decency at least to pretend otherwise. The official ideology screeches the loudest in the USA and, paradoxically, there it seems the most out-of-sync with the general public who are more Christian, more ‘freedom-loving’ and so on than most in Europe are. This is not to say that a revolution in the USA is inevitable, but only that it is ‘the weakest link’. The elites know this which is why every attempt is made to demonise the South, white men, MAGA and so on – these people represent the weakest link and may rebel in a way that suited-lesbians in Brussels never would. In fact, we have already seen the RSAs kick into action when they surrounded the Capitol Building in barbed-wire fence in 2021. The USA is the place where change is most likely to happen first. This also makes sense when one considers that the other nations of The West are effectively now vassal states to the USA, which is to say that even if some regime change were threatened in a nation, the USA itself would quickly be able to quell it using its military might.

            Hopefully, with these two articles, I have defined ideology in a way that explains why I have the view of it I do. It should be clear that I am not saying, and have never said, that it ‘does not matter’; what I have said is that it is ‘BS that justifies power’. This material from Althusser, much of which I agree with, should make it clear that far from being unimportant, I see ideology as all-encompassing, much like the relationship between the water in a goldfish bowl and the goldfish and – more importantly – inescapable. But it should also be clear that it is only a function of power and relies in the last analysis on the monopoly of violence. Since we are not in power, in a sense, we cannot know what our ideology will be yet. Note that although Lenin deviated wildly from official Marxist doctrine, the likes of Althusser still supported him – Althusser even low-key supported Stalin. Althusser always believed, whatever their bureaucratic distortions, that the USSR and China were socialist. This is the correct view. You must judge any system after the fact not before it. This is why I say ‘fascism was whatever Mussolini wanted it to be’. This is reality, all else is ‘student politics’.