It was quick shorthand, which I usually avoid. But I think my use of it can be defended in more flexible form. To begin with, I equate ideology, at least much of it, with the common sense which is forced on members of any society by the social relations in which they are embedded. And I believe the act of abstract free choice lies at the heart of daily experience in capitalist society. Here's a couple paragraphs from an essay I wrote on Milton which provide a pointer at least:
*****Milton consistently introduces his characters from nowhere, in isolation from all social relations. By the choices they make they then create new social relations within which their action can take on meaning not inherent in the action itself. The characters, rather, create that meaning through grounding their motive in a principle which operates in abstraction from the visible actuality which it explains or controls. This freedom of characters from prior social relations is the material content of the freedom to choose which the poem endlessly reiterates. This separation (freedom) of an act's meaning from its visible consequences is the precondition for such freedom, and whenever in Paradise Lost characters ascribe meaning (including analogical meaning) to an act's visible consequences or to the act itself, they fall, cutting themselves off from all possible social relations. But when they base their choice on correct principle, in abstraction from all visible or analogical meaning, then their free choice enacts a society in which the coherence of motive and act and of act and result is guaranteed by the Providence to which they have freely submitted themselves.
The compulsion here lies not in the submission of the will to Providence (which is the condition of their freedom) but in the total freedom of choice itself, in the freedom inherent in the separation of action from result which compels the individual to choose freely the action which will embody her motive. In Paradise Lost we can see this compulsory freedom most simply in the episode of Uriel and the cherub, particularly if we view the latter (as Uriel must) as a cherub rather than as Satan in disguise, for the whole dialogue makes clear that there was nothing in the direct "cherubic" experience of the cherub or in his hierarchical place to initiate his action. This cherub has received from most critics the cruelest possible treatment, that of ignoring his very existence. Seeing him only as Satan in the guise of a cherub, they seldom explore the fact that for Uriel he is only a cherub. Milton is as explicit as possible on this point: So spake the false dissembler unperceived; For neither man nor angel can discern Hypocrisy . . . (III. 681-83)7 If Satan's hypocrisy is perceivable only to God, then the overt narrative, a meeting of two angels, merits consideration in its own right, uncolored by the knowledge that it is Satan who speaks. So considered the scene introduces us to social relations in Milton's heaven, the poem's one example of the everyday life of the unfallen angels. The premise of Satan's ruse, the possibility that all might be as it seems to be, reveals the most radical distinction between Milton's heaven and Dante's to be that in Milton's anything can happen, including an angel on a solitary sight-seeing tour. Both Uriel and the cherub exhibit what Marx called the "dot-like isolation" of the agent in capitalist society, and no sooner does Uriel appear than he is confronted with an imposed free choice under conditions which, in themselves, give no indication of the meaning of that choice.***** (_Milton Studies_ 23 [1987], p. 168)
Tully first put forth the concept of "freedom of choice" in a post under the subject heading "Re:... the Green Nazi platform" (Sat, 26 Mar 2005 12:52)
Here is the key section:
>
> To say that the working class doesn't support as much environmental
> pollution as do the capitalists is to miss an important point. The
> destruction is done to create a product and if no market exists for
> that product, the destruction can't continue for long. The working
> class always has the choice to avoid working for and purchasing from
> markets that promote great destruction and instead support less
> destructive markets. But since lowest price is usually given the
> greater weight over ethics in such choices, the most destructive of
> all markets will continue to be supported. [clip]
That is what set my teeth on edge. In what way am I wrong to call this ascrption of abstract free choice to "the working class" in commodity purchases bourgeois ideology?
Carrol