Kolakowski: Marx on Ideology

 

Leszek Kolakowski

Leszek Kolakowski wrote a three-volume classic called 'The Main Currents of Marxism'. The first volume, 'The Founders', was originally drafted in 1968, & first published in English in 1978, translated by P.S.Falla. I want to share with you a long quote from it in which Kolakowski summarises Marx' and Engels' understanding of the concept of ideology, sparked by his discussing 'The German Ideology'. 

"In the work of Marx and Engels 'ideology' is used in a peculiar sense which was later generalized: they do not define it expressly, but it is clear that they give it the meaning later expounded by Engels in Ludwig Feuerbach (1888) and in a letter to Mehring dated 14 July 1893. 'Ideology' in this sense is a false consciousness or an obfuscated mental process in which men do not understand the forces that actually guide their thinking, but imagine it to be wholly governed by logic and intellectual influences. When thus deluded, the thinker is unaware that all thought, and particularly his own, is subject in its course and outcome to extra-intellectual social conditions, which it expresses in a form distorted by the interests and preferences of some collectivity or other. Ideology is the sum total of ideas (views, convictions, partis pris) relating, first and foremost, to social life —opinions on philosophy, religion, economics, history, law, utopias of all kinds, political and economic programmes— which appear to exist in their own right in the minds of those who hold them. These ideas are in fact governed by laws of their own; they are characterized by the subject’s unawareness of their origin in social conditions and of the part they play in maintaining or altering those conditions. The fact that human thought is determined by the conflicts of material life is not consciously reflected in ideological constructions, or they would not truly deserve the name of ideology. The ideologist is the intellectual exponent of a certain situation of social conflict; he is unaware of this fact and of the genetic and functional relationship between the situation and his ideas. All philosophers are ideologists in this sense; so are religious thinkers and reformers, jurists, the creators of political programmes, etc. It was not until much later, in Stalin’s time, that Marxists came to use 'ideology' to denote all forms of social consciousness, including those that were supposed to present a scientific account of the world, free from mystification and distortion. In this sense it was possible to speak of 'scientific', of 'Marxist' ideology, which Marx and Engels, given their use of the term, could never have done."

- ch. 8, p.154

Friedrich Engels

Karl Marx

For Marx and Engels therefore the term Ideology is always pejorative, never neutral or positive.

I think this passage is extremely powerful. It is a warning and a test always to be borne in mind when presented with any given system of ideas, or the ideological justification for a given system of power or economic system - 'ideological' here in the commonly used modern sense. But this test must be used with caution. I do not actually agree that all systems of ideas originate in social conditions. I think it is an over-simplification. As so often with explanations, it is a thing which is sometimes true wrongly expanded to be always true. The genuine power of the ideas in this passage lies in applying them where they really do apply.

Pierre Bourdieu

Doesn't this passage anticipate all of Bourdieu's main ideas ? at least as far as I understand them from his followers. For instance, "These ideas ... are characterized by the subject’s unawareness of their origin in social conditions and of the part they play in maintaining or altering those conditions" is surely Bourdieu's concept of misrecognition.

Sigmund Freud

Isn't this also an example of Marxism paralleling Freudianism ? The ideologist presents their apparent content, but they are unaware of the latent content, which the Marxist interpreter is aware of and can point out to the ideologist - the unstated content being the significant part, which alters and rectifies the meaning of the apparent or surface content.

Obviously, if used crudely or dishonestly these ideas are capable of being abused. For instance, if it is always someone else and never you who is the ideologist, someone else and never you who has false consciousness. They can also be misused as a bid for power on the part of the interpreter, the critic. A Marxist or Freudian critic can say to me, "You say x, but I know you really mean y" when in fact I intend, mean and have expressed x. This is the tedious, unproductive game of critics who use deconstruction. They always know better, though what exactly or why it matters are never clear. 

Jacques Derrida

It is curious to note that Plato in the 370s BCE, although he did not use the term, understood perfectly well that an ideology could function as means of social control; in fact he has Socrates propose to manufacture an origin story for his imaginary community for precisely this purpose. This is in 'The Republic' 414b-415, where Socrates talks about deliberately creating various myths to: a) create social solidarity between the guardians, their auxiliaries and the rest of the community; b) get everyone to accept and internalise their place in the social hierarchy; c) get the guardians to accept that their children do not automatically inherit their status, they have to be capable of filling the position, and similarly that children of lower social grades who have the right aptitude can and indeed must be promoted. (How capability or aptitude will be judged in practice is something Plato is vague about, a recurring weakness in 'The Republic'. His answer is - it will be judged by the right people in the right way, which is as much as to say, "Don't bother me about details.")

Plato, depicted generically. Nobody knows what he really looked like.

A sample from the section of 'The Republic' referred to above to illustrate:

"'Now,' I said, 'can we devise one of those lies - the kind which crop up as occasion demands ... - so that with a single noble lie we can indoctrinate the rulers themselves, preferably, but at least the rest of the community ?'

'What sort of lie ?' [Glaucon] said.

'Nothing too outlandish,' I replied. (414b-c) . . .

. .  . I said, 'All the same, do please listen to the rest of the story as well. "Although all of you citizens are brothers," we'll continue the tale by telling them, "nevertheless, during the kneading phase, God included gold in the mixture when he was forming those of you who have what it takes to be rulers (which is why the rulers have the greatest privileges), silver when he was forming the auxiliaries, and iron and copper when he was forming the farmers and other workers."" (415a)

And I thought propaganda began with Edward Bernays . . .