Capitalism's success is due to
popular support or ideological consent
Rather than using force to make
workers submit to degrading jobs,
corporations can call their wage-slaves
“associates” or give them prizes
for selling the most french fries
Milton Friedman's Oxymoron
A ruling class can train the future workforce
in seemingly benign social institutions
Schools, for example, teach us to be competitive,
to submit to authority, to stifle our creativity,
to put up with boring and pointless labor
Capitalism, Ideology & IndoctrinationThe United States is fundamentally a class society. A small minority of the population controls not only most of the wealth in the US, but most of the wealth of the world.
Right-wing propagandists use 'ideology' to describe 'islamofascism', communism, or 'authoritarian' regimes. These capitalist hacks infer that there is no such thing as an American ideology. As if capitalism weren't an ideology!
Those who benefit most from capitalism - the ruling class- feed the fears and ignorance that provide a foundation for the ideology.
As the mass media are part of the ideological structure [the 'ministry of truth'] the ideological word is easily spread.
Capitalism always provides a scapegoat. Capitalist propaganda encourages poor members of the dominant group (e.g. poor whites or poor Christians) to hate some other group, so that their real enemy will be safe. Poor people have good reason to hate rich people.
If Jews can stand in for rich people (as part of some international bankers’ conspiracy), then poor people will hate Jews, and Judaism, rather than hating rich people, and capitalism.
When this happens, the elite can smile and be at peace: they are safe from the anger of those they exploit.
It is rich white people, the capitalists and government elite, who become rich from slavery, immigrant labor, and other forms of exploitation, but it is the working-class whites who must play the role of police.
They get little material benefit, but fool themselves with psychological benefit, by pretending they are powerful and superior as members of some mythical white race.
The rich whites can laugh all the way to the bank that they have made so many working-class whites into their tools so easily, and so cheaply.
People who work and produce all the wealth, a majority of the population, are forced to sell their labor to those who own the factories and resources in exchange for a wage. On average, this wage is 1/185th of the CEO’s salary.
This puts the capitalist in quite a spot; most people, if asked, would prefer not to spend all their time working so that a CEO can buy another yacht. In fact, some people might feel entitled to reap the benefits of their labor and have their turn with the yacht, too.
They are prevented from doing so because the yacht-owner can always call the police, who will protect private property and enforce the law.
This will always work because the laws are written by politicians who are not only funded by corporate lobbyists, but who often have yachts of their own to look after.
The police, the law and, in fact, the state itself are tools used by the elite class to keep the working class in its place.
Accompanying the state is the claim that without police and laws we will have nothing but chaos.
This claim is not so much false as misleading; it appears to be reasonable while obscuring the class interests which are behind the operation of the state.
This is what Karl Marx and Frederick Engels described as ideology. Marx and Engels depicted ideology as a camera obscura which inverts the realities of class society, so that “men and their circumstances appear upside-down.”
Though this goes a long way toward explaining why police spend more time breaking up strikes than stock-market scams, it doesn’t explain why so many people who have never been bothered by the police still put up with class exploitation.
Furthermore, it seems to grossly oversimplify matters; surely a police officer removing a kitten from a tree is not acting out some nefarious bourgeois plot against the feline proletariat.
The Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci tried to overcome these problems by introducing the concept of “hegemony.”
Gramsci argued that “no social order could sustain itself over the long run primarily on a foundation of organized state power… on the contrary the inclination of a ruling class to rely upon repression and violence was a sign of weakness rather than strength.
What contributed to real political durability was the scope of popular support or ideological consent.”
Rather than using force to make workers submit to degrading jobs, corporations can call their wage-slaves “associates” or give them prizes for selling the most french fries.
Further, a ruling class can train the future workforce in seemingly benign social institutions; schools, for example, teach us to be competitive, to submit to authority, to stifle our creativity, to put up with boring and pointless labor.
Gramsci argued that these subtle modes of control created a cultural and ideological hegemony which “encompassed the whole range of values, attitudes, beliefs, cultural norms, legal precepts, etc., that to one degree or another permeated civil society, that solidified the class structure and the multiple forms of domination that pass through it."
So hegemony is executed not just in the government and the workplace, but also in schools, churches, families, the media, etc.
The French Marxist Louis Althusser described these institutions as “Ideological State Apparatuses,” as opposed to “Repressive State Apparatuses” which operate by force and coercion.
Althusser went on to explain the unconscious and emotional reasons that ideology holds such a great psychological sway.
He argued that ideology presents a system of “signs and social practices” which binds the individual to the social structure and provides a sense of “coherent purpose and identity.”
Through ideology the ceaselessly exploited laborer becomes the Proud American, or the Moral Christian, or any of a litany of symbolic identities which give the individual an illusory sense of agency.
The Ideological Role of Elections
The liberal orthodoxy on elections claims that people who don’t vote (40% of the population in 2004) are either ignorant or stupid, and that it is necessary to educate them so that the working class will turn out in droves to vote for its interests.
This is a delusion which obscures something vitally important: people do not fail to vote because they are ignorant, but because they understand something usually unacknowledged by mainstream liberals, namely that it is impossible to vote for the interests of the working class.
It should now be self-evident that both the Republican and Democratic parties represent the interests of the capitalist class in every imaginable way: their funding comes almost exclusively from corporations and they themselves are members of the wealthy elite.
There are differences, to be sure, which are not insignificant, but it is important to first tackle some major questions:
Why have two corporate parties dominated electoral politics for most of this century?
Why do liberals have so much trouble keeping up in electoral politics?
How has a system which works against the interests of nearly everyone subject to it stayed in place for so long?
These dilemmas come into sharper focus if we realize that many left-liberals and intellectuals are still under the sway of election ideology, even more so than “ordinary” Americans, and that it is necessary to abandon our view of elections as simply a political tool.
It is possible that elections be used as a means of representation in a democratic system, but means of representation and democratic systems are not relevant to American capitalism.
An election in American society is not a political tool but an Ideological State Apparatus.
Asad Haider @ ZNet