I don't believe there can be a debate over "what 'ideology' means"
-- it has been used in too many different ways. And often, perhaps usually) it has been used to name a real feature of the world -- it's just that the feature of the world (say A) which one person labels ideology is *not* the feature of the world (say B) which some other person labels B. In each case, the argument ought not to be over whether "ideology" is the *true* name of A or of B but whether A or B exists, regardless of how labelled. Like all labels it can be used merely to express the user's praise or indignation at someone or something. But such cases need to be handled case by case, and there is no imposable definition of the word which will preclude misuse.
I myself use the word in two senses, which are only remotely if at all related, and I usually indicate the usage. I call "ideology" any position which implicitly or explicitly assumes that ideas exist in abstraction from practice and (as the saying goes) have a history of their own. In this sense the entire academic movement called "History of Ideas" is ideological from the get-go. (I take this sense from Engels -- someplace in the Anti-Duhring or in the essay on classical german philosophy.) I wouldn't ask that anyone else use it in this sense, but I would be royally ticked off if someone turned a debate over History of Ideas into an endless quibble about what "ideology" *really, really* means.
My other use of it is to label a practice which Marx describes in the *Poverty of Philosophy* (he does not use the term of course), in the following passage:
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Thus *Providence* is the locomotive which makes the whole of M. Proudhon's economic baggage move better than his pure and volatilised reason. He has devoted to Providence a whole chapter, which follows the one on taxes.
Providence, providential aim, this is the great word used today to explain the movement of history. In fact, this word explains nothing. It is at most a rhetorical form, one of the various ways of paraphrasing facts.
It is a fact that in Scotland landed property acquired a new value by the development of English industry. This industry opened up new outlets for wool. In order to produce wool on a large scale, arable land had to be transformed into pasturage. To effect this transformation, the estates had to be concentrated. To concentrate the estates, small holdings had first to be abolished, thousands of tenants had to be driven from their native soil and a few shepherds in charge of millions of sheep to be installed in their place. Thus, by successive transformations, landed property in Scotland has resulted in the driving out of men by sheep. Now say that the providential aim of the institution of landed property in Scotland was to have men driven out by sheep, and you will have made providential history.
Of course, the tendency towards equality belongs to our century. To say now that all former centuries, with entirely different needs, means of production, etc., worked providentially for the realisation of equality is, firstly, to substitute the means and the men of our century for the men and the means of earlier centuries and to misunderstand the historical movement by which the successive generations transformed the results acquired by the generations that preceded them. Economists know very well that the very thing that was for the one a finished product was for the other but the raw material for new production.
Suppose, as M. Proudhon does, tht social genius produced, or rather improvised, the feudal lords with the providential aim of transforming the *settlers* into *responsible* and *equally-placed* workers: and you will have effected a substitution of aims and of persons worthy of the Providence that instituted landed property in Scotland, in order to give itself the malicious pleasure of driving out men by sheep.
But since M. Proudhon takes such a tender interest in Providence, we refer him to the *Histoire de l'economie politique* of M. de Villenneuve-Bargemont, who likewise goes in pursuit of a providential aim. This aim, however, is not equality, but catholicism.
*Pov. Phil* (Moscow, 1973), pp. 104-105
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What Marx identifies here is the problem of distinguishing explanations which in fact only name what is to be explained from explanations that do explain historically. In using "ideology" to describe this error I follow the usage of Barbara Fields in ""Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America," New Left Review, May/June 1990. (If one were to attempt to rewrite Fields's article without the use of "ideology" the nearest approximation to her usage would be "common sense." Common sense, like ideology in her sense, is "refuted" not by contrary arguments or propaganda but by creating conditions which no longer support it.
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This is perhaps a good moment to say a few words about what ideology is and what it is not; because without an understanding of what ideology is and does, how it arises and how it is sustained, there can be no genuinely historical understanding of race. Ideology is best understood as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence through which people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create from day to day. It is the language of consciousness that suits the particular way in which people deal with their fellows. It is the interpretation in thought of the social relations through which they constantly create and re-create their collective being, in all the varied forms their collective being may assume: family, clan, tribe, nation, class, party, business enterprise, church, army, club, and so on. As such, ideologies are not delusions but real, as real as the social relations for which they stand.
Ideologies are real, but it does not follow that they are scientifically accurate, or that they provide an analysis of social relations that would make sense to anyone who does not take ritual part in those social relations. Some societies (including colonial New England) have explained troublesome relations between people as witchcraft and possession by the devil. The explanation makes no sense to those whose daily lives do not produce and reproduce witchcraft, nor can any amount of rational "evidence" disprove it. Witchcraft in such a society is as self-evident a natural fact as race is to Richard Cohen of the *Washington Post*. To someone looking in from outside, however, explaining a miscarriage, a crop failure, a sudden illness, or a death by invoking witchcraft would seem absurd, just as explaining slavery by invoking race must seem absurd to anyone who does not ritually produce race day in and day out as Americans do. Ideologies do not need to be plausible, let alone persuasive, to outsiders. They do their job when they help insiders make sense of the things they do and see -- ritually, repetitively -- on a daily basis.
So much ideology is. Here is what it is not. It is not a material entity, a thing of any sort, that you can hand down like an old garment, pass on like a germ, spread like a rumour, or impose like a code of dress or etiquette. Nor is it a collection of dissociated beliefs -- "attitudes" is the favoured jargon among American social scientists and historians they have mesmerized -- that you can extract from their context and measure by current or retrospective survey research. (Someday the reification of conduct and demeanour in "attitudes" will seem as quaint and archaic as their reification in bodily "humours" -- phlegmatic, choleric, melancholic, sanguine -- does now.) Nor is it a Frankenstein's monster that takes on a life of its own.
Ideology is not the same as *propaganda*. Someone who said, "Anti-slavery *ideology* infiltrated the slave quarters through illicit abolitionist newspapers," would be talking rather about propaganda than about ideology. The slaves' anti-slavery ideology could not be smuggled to them in alien newsprint. People deduce and verify their ideology in daily life. The slaves' anti-slavery ideology had to arise from their lives in slavery and from their daily relations with slaveholders and other members of slave society.[35] Frederick Douglass was not propounding a paradox but speaking the simple truth when he said that the first anti-slavery lecture he ever heard was delivered by his master in the course of explaining to his mistress why slaves must not be taught to read. By the same token, slaves who decided at the first shot of the Civil War -- or even earlier, with Lincoln's election -- that emancipation was finally on the nation's agenda were not responding to prevailing Northern propaganda (which, indeed, promised nothing of the kind at that time). It was their exprience with slaveowners, not least the slaveowners' hysterical equaation of the Republican Party with abolition, that made slaves see Lincoln as the emancipator before he saw himself that way. And, I might add, it was the slaves' acting on that foreknowledge that forced Lincoln to become the emancipator.
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35. The slaves' religion arose in the same way. In an astute and eloquent passage, Donald G. Mathews diagnoses the error of supposing that the slaves should or could have had a "correct" version of Christianity by an outside agency. To argue that way, Mathews correctly insists, presupposes that the slave could "slough off his enslavement, ancestry, traditional ways of viewing the world, and sense of selfhood in order to think the oppressor's thoughts after him. . . .The description of action in which the slave is expected to remain passive while receiving a discrete body of ideas and attitudes which exist apart from social and cultural conditions reveals one of the most mischievous and flawed assumptions which scholars make." *Religion in the Old South*, Chicago, 1967, p. 187.
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*Ideology, Propaganda and Dogma*
To insist that ideology and propaganda are not the same is not to suppose that they are unrelated. The most successful propagandist is one who thoroughly understands the ideology of those to be propagandized. When propagandists for secession before the American Civil War emphasized the danger that the Northerners might encroach upon Southerners' right of self-determination, they emphasized a theme that resonated as well with the world of non-slaveholders as with that of planters, even though the two worlds differed as night from day. "We will never be slaves" was good secessionist propaganda. "We must never let them take our slaves" would have been poor propaganda and the secessionists knew it; just as today "Strategic Defense Initiative" makes a good advertisement for a weapons programme, whereas "Strategic Offensive Initiative" or "First- Strike Initiative" would not.
Neither is ideology the same as *doctrine* or *dogma*. Pro-slavery *doctrine* might well hold, for example, that any white person's word must take precedence over any black person's. But the push-and-shove reality of any planter's business would tell him or her that some situations call for accepting a slave's word over an overseer's. [36] After all, overseers came and went, but slaves remained; and the object was to produce cotton or sugar or rice or tobacco, not to produce white supremacy. The perfect subordination of the slaves to the overseer, if coupled with poor production, would spell disaster for the planter. Thus, the ideology of a planter -- that is, the vocabulary of day-to- day action and experience -- must make room for contest and struggle (perhaps couched in paternalistic or racist language), even if doctrine specified an eternal hierarchy. Doctrine or dogma may be imposed, and they often are: dissenters can be excommunicated from a church or expelled from a party. But ideology is a distillate of experience. Where the experience is lacking, so is the ideology that only the missing experience could call into being. Planters in the Old South could have imposed their understanding of the world upon the non-slaveholders or the slaves only if they could have tranformed the lives of the non-slaveholders and slaves into a replica of their own.
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36. Genovese, *Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made*, New York 1974, p. 16.
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An ideology must be constantly created and verified in social life; if it is not, it dies, even though it may seem to be safely embodied in a form that can be handed down. [37] Many Christians still think of kneeling with folded hands as the appropriate posture for prayer, but few now know why; and the few who do know cannot, even if they choose, mean the same thing by it as was meant by those to whom the posture was part of an ideology still real in everyday social life. The social relations that once gave explicit reality to that ritual gesture of the vassal's subordination to his lord are now as dead as a mackerel, and so, therefore, is the ideological vocabulary -- including the posture of prayer -- in which those social relations once lived.
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37. Some people imagine that ideology can indeed be handed down in the form of law. If that were so, then the law could do without courts, lawyers, judges and juries.
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The foregoing line of argument raises the question of how one group's understanding of reality, its ideology, appears to prevail over others when it comes to real and effective political power. Depending on who poses the question, it is the problem of social order, of converting power into authority, or of political hegemony. The most obvious answer -- force -- is not an answer. There is never ultimately enough force to go around, particularly since submission is hardly ever an end in itself. If the slaveowners had produced white supremacy without producing cotton, their class would have perished in short order. A colonial ruler does not just want the natives to bow down and render their obeisance to their new sovereign. The natives must also grow food, pay taxes, go to work in mines and estates, provide conscripts for the army, and help to hold the line against rival powers. For these activities to proceed, the natives must not just submit, they must cooperate. Even in those few cases in which submission *is* an end in itself, force is never enough in itself. Slaveholders, colonial rulers, prison guards and the Shah's police have all had occasion to discover that when nothing remains except force, nothing remains -- period. The rule of any group, the power of any state, rests on force in the final analysis. Anyone who gives the least though to the matter reaches that conclusion, and thinkers as different in other respects as Weber, Marx, Machiavelli and Madison would have no trouble agreeing on that. Rule always lasts on force in the last analysis. But a ruling group or state that must rely on force in the first analysis as well is one living in a state of seige, rebellion, war or revolution.
It will not do to suppose that a powerful group captures the hearts and minds of the less powerful, inducing them to "internalize" the ruling ideology (to borrow the spurious adjective-verb in which this artless evasion has so often been couched). To suppose that is to imagine ideology handed down like an old garment, passed on like a germ, spread like a rumour, or imposed like a dress code. Any of these would presuppose that an experience of social relations can be transmitted by the same means, which is impossible.
And yet, power does somehow become authority. A red light, or the upraised palm of a traffic policeman, brings people to stop (at least in places where people tend to obey them) not by the exercise of power -- neither a light nor a hand can stop a moving automobile -- but by the exercise of authority. Why? Not, surely, because everyone shares a belief, an "attiude," about the sanctity of the law, or holds the same conception of a citizen's duty. Many citizens who would unhesitatingly stop for a red light, even at a deserted intersection at 2:00 a.m., would painstakingly calculate the relative cost and benefit of breaking laws against environmental pollution, insider-trading of securities, or failing to report income to the Internal Revenue Service, and then obey or violate the law according to how the calculation worked out.
It is not an abstract belief or attitude that brings people to stop at a red light. Rather, people discover the advantage of being able to take for granted what eveyone else will do at a busy intersection. Or, to be more exact, they have grown up in a society that constantly ritualizes that discovery -- by making people stop again and again for red lights -- without each person having to make the discovery anew by ad hoc calculation at every intersection. Both parts are necessary: the demonstrable advantage of stopping and the constant re-enactment that removes the matter from the realm of calculation to that of routine. The ritual repetition of the appropriate social behaviour makes for the continuity of ideology, not the "handing down" of the appropriate "attitudes." There, too, lies the key to why people may suddenly appear to slough off an ideology to which they had appeared subservient. Ideology is not a set of attitudes that people can "have" as they have a cold, and throw off the same way. Human beings live in human societies by negotiating a certain social terrain, whose map they keep alive in their minds by the collective, ritual repetition of the activities they must carry out in order to negotiate the terrain. If the terrain changes, so must their activities, and therefore so must the map.
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Note, one could argue that in a given case Fields's own sense of ideology does not apply -- that is one could disagree with her about the *world* she is describing. But to say, "that isn't what ideology means" is neither wrong nor right but silly.
Carrol