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 . . .

The Mass Killings in Indonesia, 1965-6.

There are many great books but few about which I would say "You have to read this." Readers familiar with this blog will know that one such for me is Camus' 'The Fall'. I want to discuss a book which falls into this rare category as far as I'm concerned: I read it last year and it has had a large and permanent impact on my thinking. I wonder if any of you have come across it or read it - it's called 'The Jakarta Method' by Vincent Bevins, and its central point is about something I knew about but didn't realise the extent of, that is the mass killing of communists and people labelled communist in Indonesia in 1965-6. Are you aware of that ? 

Vincent Bevins

I finally read the book because one of the things I have been concentrating on for a while is the Cold War, which is in effect world history 1945-90. I've had my eye on 'The Jakarta Method' ever since it was published. The author has an interesting perspective, which I don't entirely agree with. He is not a crude anti-US Imperialism person in the mould of John Pilger or Oliver Stone, where whatever happens it is always the fault of the evil, conniving US government. [I wrote this before John Pilger's recent death.] To me, such people are the inverse of blind patriots, and wrong for the same reason: they have an existing, over-simplified schema of how the world works, to which every fact and occurrence must be fitted. This is not Bevins' position: he is fully aware of the crimes of the USSR and Mao. He is what I would call a third world-ist, or developing world-ist, or a non-aligned-ist; in that he is against the Big Powers, and for the developing world countries. This leads him to be pro-Castro and speak favourably of Che Guevara, a place I cannot follow him to. So I don't completely accept his perspective, but the central event he is highlighting is an undoubted fact, that is the murder of at a minimum 500 000 communists and people labelled communist in Indonesia at the end of 1965 and beginning of 1966; in which the precise extent of US government involvement is disputed, but the facts are not disputed that the US government approved of the killings, benefited from them, and backed the people who carried them out as the government of Indonesia for years afterward, with Suharto as their leader. Which makes the US government morally guilty. And the people killed were no threat to the US government or people, nobody thinks they were, they just didn't like them so they killed them. (The US government, UK government and Australian government were all involved in spreading black propaganda against the Communists.)

It's amazing to me that although I knew about the killings I did not know about the extent of them or the US government's involvement. I was already fully aware of the US government's practice in the Cold War of installing corrupt dictators to block - as they saw it - Communist advances: Mobutu, Ferdinand Marcos, the Shah. My point here is that I am fairly well informed about the US government's crimes during the Cold War and the extent of the killings in Indonesia was news to me. No one seriously disputes that the killings took place. Nobody knows how many were killed but the lowest figure of 500 000 is undisputed and the highest estimate is 2 000 000. 500 000 ! It unquestionably ranks with the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the killing fields of Pol Pot and the Rwandan genocide. This thing happened. Half a million people were deliberately killed. No one disputes this. So why isn't it common knowledge ? Why isn't it as rightly familiar as those other great crimes of the 20th century ?

It seems to me that the US government and people have done with the Indonesian mass killings what we have done with our brutal campaign against the Mau Mau in Kenya: it is not that the truth is suppressed, it's not that we have forgotten, it's that we never remembered in the first place, it was not worth remembering and we just didn't remember. We did it but didn't register that we did it. (I know that the UK government has officially acknowledged our crimes in Kenya, but if you said 'Mau Mau' or 'Kenyan Emergency' to virtually anyone in England, you'd get a blank stare.)

To find out more about UK government crimes during what we call the Kenyan Emergency, this is highly recommended

Over the years I've done a great deal of reading and watching about the Vietnam war. I've watched documentary series, individual documentaries and read memoirs of American participants. As part of the endless re-hashing of the late '60s (of which I am just as guilty as anyone else), people go on and on and on about the Vietnam war. I know terrible crimes were committed during that war, such as the heavy bombing of Laos. But I honestly think now that part of the obsession with the Vietnam war is a psychological phenomenon I don't the name of if it has one- perhaps a form of displacement activity: which is, you concentrate absolutely on a lesser thing to block out the awareness of a bigger thing. So, in all accounts of Vietnam from an American perspective I read or watch now, part of my reaction is - "You are aware that your government possibly organised and was unquestionably involved in the massacre of 500 000 innocent people slightly to the south in Indonesia in 1965-6 ?" I'll give you two analogies: imagine reading an account of Wehrmacht operations in Russia in 1942-3, and you gradually become more and more aware that the author does not mention and apparently has no idea that the Holocaust is taking place at the same time; imagine reading an account of Soviet economic development in the 1930s, its successes and failures, and the author does not mention and apparently has no idea of the existence of the Gulags, the Purges, or show trials. The account in short is partial and highly distorted. That's how I feel hearing about the Vietnam war now.

Robert Kennedy as a senator drew exactly the same parallels as me when as a solitary voice he publicly condemned the Indonesian killings in January 1966. He said: "We have spoken out against the inhuman slaughters perpetrated by the Nazis and the Communists. But will we speak out also against the inhuman slaughter in Indonesia, where over 100 000 alleged Communists have not been perpetrators but victims ?" (This was his phase after JFK's assassination: before that he was as you may well know a determined and ruthless Cold Warrior.)

I was recently reading a jolly account by a man who was a US diplomat at the time of why they were defeated in Vietnam, called 'The Key to Failure: Laos and the Vietnam War' by Norman Hannah. His theory was a perfectly good one, and really could be summarised in a couple of pages, which another man who wrote the introduction actually did do. But looking back on reading it now, between every line is "You're so cheerful and reasonable. But you don't seem to be aware and certainly don't mention that the government for which you worked at the very least approved of, certainly knew about and did nothing to prevent the killing of 500 000 people for no good reason slightly to the south of where you are talking about - former Indochina - at exactly the time you are talking about." It must have slipped his mind. I've just checked in the index: there is no reference to Indonesia, Sukarno or Suharto. Hannah as a diplomat had an overview of south-east Asia. He must have known about the mass killings in Indonesia. They weren't secret.

Final thought: there's a video on YouTube of Tobias Wolff interviewing Tim O'Brien, both writers, both veterans of Vietnam. During the questions at the end, a very nice and concerned woman asks Tim O'Brien if he thinks treatment for veterans with PTSD has improved over the years, if they are doing enough about it. His response is approx. "It seems to me that we talk a lot about the trauma we've suffered, but we don't talk much about the trauma we've inflicted." The audience response is not anger, and they're not really even stunned: it just takes them a few seconds to process a thought which is obviously right but they'd never heard before and had never crossed their minds before.

Two Incidents Involving Cats

 One cold, raw afternoon in November, I was walking home through the back streets when I saw a black cat cross from right to left in front of me. Inevitably at such a time I think of Jeff Beck's version of 'I Ain't Superstitious'. The cat went through the thin metal bars of a tall gate into an alley, & I hurried to see if I could get a closer look at it, to check it was completely black; because if it isn't completely black, it doesn't count. I got to the gate, and the cat was standing still in the alley looking at me. It was black all over except for a small downward-pointing triangle of white hair at the top of its chest, as if it was wearing a shirt which was open at the neck. I interpreted this to mean either no bad luck at all, or if it was bad luck, to be tinged with hope. That is the first incident.

The second incident happened another afternoon when I was at home. I heard that sudden, short mixture of yowls which means two cats are fighting. I looked out of my bedroom window into the back garden and saw the following scene play out: one cat, older and heavier, was sat upright on the right, vibing out a younger rival, not directly but by seeming to be oblivious of its existence. It was as if he was saying in cat to the other "This garden isn't big enough for both of us, and I'm not leaving, so draw your own conclusions." As far as the older cat was concerned, he had already won; it was just a case of the younger confirming this by withdrawing, of rectifying the incorrect fact of his presence. They didn't seem to have made physical contact, so I assumed the yowling had just been them threatening each other. The younger cat did indeed withdraw, but in a way so slow that it is difficult to describe. There is a hole in the hedge frequented by cats and some foxes; they have worn a little path in the grass. The younger cat was heading for this hole. But it didn't just walk very slowly; it advanced one paw, then looked round at the older cat - who ignored it - then waited 30 seconds or a minute; then advanced the next paw, looked round at the older cat, then waited, and so on. I watched, fascinated to see how it would end.  The older cat continued to ignore its rival as if it wasn't there. You can imagine with four paws, and a noticeable wait every time it moved one, the younger cat took a considerable time finally to cover the few yards to the hole in the hedge and disappear. I was puzzled how to account for this behaviour. I could understand it retreating slowly to stop the other cat chasing it, but this was far slower than needed for that.  Was the defeated cat trying to preserve some dignity in its own eyes ? I thought, "It doesn't matter how slowly you retreat, you're still retreating."