Marxist Moments

A CRISIS IN IDEOLOGY

          Marx wrote that the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class. He didn’t say that the ruling ideas are Truth, Beauty, Love and Justice or any of the entities that for so long have pre-occupied liberal arts faculties. For purposes of political and social analysis of our present society ruling ideas’ content is immaterial. What matters is that the ruling class holds them.  Thus ‘ruling ideas’ could be defined as those instrumentalities of consciousness (not always lucid or articulated as such and meant for both the ruling and the ruled if applied differently in each case) that ensure that the rulers continue to rule and the ruled continue to be ruled.

          ‘Ruling ideas’ thus has two interrelated meanings: (a) it means the dominant ideas in circulation, and (b) it means ideas that rule, since no society based ultimately on economic and/or political coercion of the many by the relatively few can be ruled wholly by force, at any rate not all the time. With ruling ideas in place and functioning physical coercive force as such may be kept well in the background. The extent to which force is brought into play in the open is the extent to which the ideas are no longer ‘ruling’ effectively.

          We call these ‘ruling ideas’, or the body of them, ideology. Ideology is a constantly varying bundle of ideas, educational and/or religious teachings, prejudices, ‘gut feelings’ and the instruments of the media, education, internet, rallies, elections and so on that circulate and explicate them. In coercive society ideology is a graphic portrayal in toto of what is not true: that there is an innately superior and exclusive group of beings – economic, religious, educational, legal, entertaining and diversionary – to whom it is our duty and necessity to give obedience (or indeed whom we can mock in a sneaky, schoolboy sort of way as at the humourless teacher at the front of the class). Ideology might not be presented as baldly as this – it is more effective if it is not – but such is the intention of those who circulate it whether even fully aware that this is what they are presenting.

          But if ideology is what is not true, it can also be what is not yet. In both cases the ontological basis is not concrete, if ‘real’ in the imagination. Thus Lenin could write of a Socialist ideology in opposition to a Bourgeois ideology (What Is To Be Done?) If bourgeois ideology is created and fomented on the grounds of making the false true, socialist ideology must make real and alive that which has not yet come about. It follows that socialist ideology must be consciously worked on to be articulated carefully, consistently and unambiguously if it is to gain a hearing in the mass, whereas bourgeois ideology may be fuzzy, inarticulate, self-contradictory or entirely inaccurate provided that it obfuscates, and in the process of obfuscating, rules. This is why, if circumstances allow, an economically and ethically bankrupt system can continue to render an effective ideology which is as asinine as the situation immediately calls for. (It can be rewritten the next day.)

          The ruling ideology by definition rules over all, including with the capitalist elements the social-democratic ones, since social democracy has never required that the ruled be any other than ruled, whatever its rhetoric from time to time (‘human rights’ and so on). Social democracy only seeks a humane arrangement whereby the ruled are not treated too badly – if, indeed, it even does this nowadays.  But now, whether perceived entirely, or partially, or not at all, our bourgeois ideological system taken as a whole is breaking up; it is in crisis.

          We see this in the internal fight for the control of the Labour Party and the febrile and somewhat demoralised state of Conservatism (down to about 130,000 members). What seems a purely political struggle is revealing an ideological crisis in the whole system of a depth not seen since perhaps the 19^th century.

          Of course internal faction disputes within the Labour Party are not new: there was the Gang of Four in the 1980s but even more spectacularly than that, the splitting apart between Labour and National Labour from 1931 in the depths of crisis and depression – when, indeed, the whole ideological order was also seemingly in peril, though not even then as fundamental a rupture as today’s. Labour had always been a Left-Right social-democratic coalition and apart from the above instances managed to hold together in its own way for more than a century – remembering that Tony Blair put the whole thing in a New Labour deepfreeze, whose only decisive effect was the mere loss of 4-5 million core Labour voters in the years between 1997 and 2015. In that last year the then Labour leader Ed Miliband was ready to settle for the vital ‘34%’ of the electorate if he could get it.

          Incidentally Jeremy Corbyn is not the first Labour leader to be branded ‘ineffectual' and ‘unelectable’ by his chafing and out-of-touch MP colleagues. Clement Attlee basked in these comradely epithets constantly from the late 1930s until 1945 when, a few weeks before Attlee’s triumphant landslide election victory over Churchill, the chairman of the Labour Party, Harold Laski, wrote a letter to Attlee demanding that he step down as leader. The mediocre weakling Clement Attlee was leader of the Labour Party from 1935 to 1955 and an effective coalition Deputy Prime Minister during World War II when Labour caught at least a taste of real power in government.  The Attlee-led Party won two major election victories in 1945 and 1950 and lost the election of 1951 though on that occasion achieving Labour’s highest electoral vote ever – and that in a country of 34 million instead of the 64 million of today, a far greater achievement than anything New Labour can boast of; but losing in 1951 because of boundary changes affecting Labour seats.  Attlee made little attempt to suppress internal differences amongst his subordinates either, whereas Blair smothered them.

          But much of Attlee’s success was due to a fundamental ideological coalition binding all three mainstream parties that functioned through the wartime and postwar periods, and even up to and beyond the time of Thatcher. Until the mid-1970s at any rate, capitalism was prospering despite downward movements in the rate of profit. With economic downturn came the gospel of perfect-market neoliberalism which had not seen the light of day since the 1920s though it was not called that back then. The fallout from neoliberal policies enacted by all three parties when in power has not only resulted in an overall poor economic performance, except for the rich; it has led to a mass disenchantment with mainsteam politics also witnessed recently in the United States and in several European countries, not to speak of North African.

          The ideological pact between Left and Right, underpinning the basic system of what Marcuse called ‘repressive tolerance’, is broken. And the Labour Party, for years an avatar of that pact, has become the epicentre of the bigger ideological earthquake, for the simple reason that masses of persons in their hundreds of thousands now support a serious Labour left wing that had previously enjoyed comparatively little grassroots support at all except in mining communities and some others, including Islington. If the Party as a whole has lost ‘the will to win’, to the disgust of political commentators, it is because the rejoinder: ‘win for what reason?’ provides the fundamental answer. It is so unusual a feeling that it alone points to a crisis in basic bourgeois ideology which was to the effect that one should win votes for seats and not for principle.

          Politics as many have observed has become alarmingly nasty since 2015. Quite apart from the Brexit row, scandal involving an intern’s suicide still moulders under the Tory Party carpet, not by any means the only Tory scandal either – in terms of election funding, for example. These days also we have anonymous Labour Party bureaucrats arbitrarily deciding who should have a vote in the leadership contest (results known on September 23, 2016) and who, indeed, should be allowed to remain in the Party. There appears to be no court of appeal against these secretively Stalinistic bureaucratic dicta within the Party itself, and the real Court of Appeal was too Blair-friendly to oppose this Tammany-stroke-Stalinist repression on legal grounds. The immediate plan is to run the Labour Party into the ground so that when it is defeated by the Conservatives Jeremy Corbyn as leader can be kicked out. It is also possible that the object of the plan is to get the present Deputy Leader Tom Watson elected as leader. But the ultimate plan is for the Party to retain neoliberalism as its economic programme, along with the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.

          Labour Party officials may eject members either from voting or from membership or both on the grounds that they do not embody Labour’s ‘aims and values’. (i ‘Corbyn protests at vote ban on his supporters’ 27.8.16).

          ‘Aims’ – okay. The aims of the Party should be possible to spell out in an election manifesto and even on the back of a Party card. But ‘values’? What ‘values’ is a Labour member expected to conform to? Freedom and democracy, no doubt; but it is rather difficult to prove that one or another member is or is not in favour of either. Likewise rejection of violence and terrorism, both of which are unlikely to be manifested in the sorts of people the Labour Party is actually throwing out (they never give reasons for their decisions on who stays in and who is cashiered). Otherwise, are not a person’s ‘values’ his or her own business? What is this ‘values’ business? What kind of Big Brother test could be applied to ascertain, approve of or reject someone’s ‘values’? Does the member of any other political party not an esoteric sect have to swear to certain ‘values’ in his or her private life along with the political life?

          Whatever the unstated ‘values’ are, they apparently include a proclivity for one to fund political parties other than the Labour Party while retaining Labour Party membership because one also funds Labour. It is, after all, common practice both in the UK and in the States for large corporations to donate funds to mainstream parties on both sides in hopes of establishing some leverage over whichever party gets into power. So perhaps it is incumbent upon individual Labour members to do this (so long as they don’t fund the Communist or Socialist Workers Parties as well!) In sanctioning the continuing membership of generous and ecumenical donor Lord Sainsbury the Labour bureaucracy is evidently struggling to keep the old ideology intact by the funding of likeminded centre-Rightists in other parties as well, specifically – it seems – the Liberal Democrats. This may be – I’m not joking - the first intimation of party realignment in the face of the ideological crisis that all the present mainstream parties face.