Mapping Ideology (Mappings Series) by

Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2012-11-13T05:00:00+00:00

Ideology in Western Marxism

AHT indirectly admit that they had some difficulties in fitting Gramsci into their picture – difficulties avoided in other cases because of AHT’s option to remain silent. On the one hand, we are told that Gramsci ‘probably more than any other theorist [has] contributed to the contemporary dominant ideology thesis’, with his ‘conceptions of hegemony, and of ideology as cementing and unifying’ (p. 14). On the other hand, a few lines later on the same page, we learn that ‘Gramsci does not believe that the working class is completely subordinated any more than Marx did. He is no idealist. . . . Indeed, for Gramsci the economy is of prime importance.’3 Some readers will, no doubt, wonder why Gramsci is included in the DIT company ‘any more than Marx’. In fact, AHT proceed to give an answer. For Gramsci, ‘despite the fact that there is a working-class consciousness at some level, its incorporation within a dominant ideology tends to produce “moral and political passivity”’, which can be broken only ‘as a result of struggle encouraged by a mass political party’, the success of which ‘depends partly on the party’s intellectuals’ (p. 15). Still, AHT would be unwise to make too much of any distinction between class and party or workers and intellectuals. In Gramsci’s view, ‘parties are only the nomenclature for classes’, as the political organization of the latter: ‘all members of a political party should be regarded as intellectuals’, and between the ‘spontaneous feeling’ of the masses and the politically ‘conscious leadership’ there is but a ‘“quantitative” difference of degree, not one of quality’.4 We shall consider presently whether Gramsci’s view of the production of ‘moral and political passivity’ justifies AHT’s assimilation of it to the ‘empirically false and theoretically unwarranted’ DIT. Let us just note that AHT do not take Marx to task for having said that ‘the advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education, tradition, habit, looks upon the conditions of that mode of production as self-evident laws of nature’ (quoted on p. 166). If Marx escapes their indictment, there seems little reason to incorporate Gramsci into the construct definition of DIT.

It should be conceded that Habermas and Marcuse appear to qualify better for the ranks of the damned. But since that has more to do with their doubts about class struggle under contemporary capitalism than with any denial of ideological class struggle, it would seem preferable to consider them in relation to the stress definition of DIT. The case of Miliband is perhaps the simplest and most straightforward of all. If AHT had been less concerned with their image as cavaliers seuls, they could have enlisted Miliband in support of their more reasonable claims. Referring to The German Ideology and to ‘the Gramscian concept of “hegemony”’, or at least some interpretations of it, Miliband has written:

What is involved is an overstatement of the ideological predominance of the ‘ruling class’ or of the effectiveness of that predominance. . . .

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