[This is not a direct response to bitch here but a generalized comment using this paragraph as a peg to hang it on.]
Part of theorizing is is making distinctions. Between theory and practice, thought and action, for example, while retaining in mind that (a) they are never really separated and (2) theory is but a moment in practice and always grounded in practice. The 'categories' (I don't think that is the word I really want) which are primary in theoretical analysis are not necessarily primary in practice, and the categories (w?) primary in practice in one context are not necessarily primary in some other context. Crudely: Theory is not theory unless it (a) recognizes its subordination to practice and (b) theorizes itself. All of this, I think, is probably implicit in the Theses on Feurbach.
Another way to get at some of these separations is with a Chinese discovery (that most "Maoists" cover up by the very name they give themselves), a discovery perhaps first worked out to gain a margin of independence from Comintern supervision, but important in and of itself: the distinction implicit in the english (which corresponds to a distinction in Chinese) "MarxISM-LeninISM Mao THOUGHT. (I would, incidentally, emend that to Marxism / Lenin Thought: that was implicit in what I had to say about reading Lenin, as opposed to extracting principles from his works, in a response to bitch the other day.) Theory (in this usage: I'm not writing a dictionary definiton but making use of a particular concept, here called "theory") -- Social Theory aspires to a certain limited universality, a certain fixity over a given historical epoch (w?); in the case of Marxism over the historical epoch of capitalism. And within _this_ context, there is simply no doubt about it: class is is central to the understanding of history and the great transformations from one historical epoch to another. An understanding of the fundamental dynamic of historical transformation begins and ends with class. (By class, of course, I understand a historical relationship and process, not an empirical category for plunking the human jelly beans in different colored boxes.)
[A couple definitions: Dogmatism1 (BAD) = the assumption that theory can directly govern practice (or, somewhat flamboyantly, the assumption that general relativity should be sufficient to know the time and temperature for roast lamb). Dogmatism2 (GOOD) = rejection of radical skepticism and the insistence that relations are (a) real and (b) can be more or less known. (There is a Pen-L post by John Bellamy Foster detailing this) Some years ago Jim Blaut fell into positivist ideology when he, more or less, rejected what I'm here calling Dogmatism2. He suggested that if we knew "all" the facts we wouldn't have to study relations: I.e., he didn't see relations as _real_ in their own right.]
As we try to theorize capitalist social orders, we see them in terms of the class relation of capitalist and workers; that relation itself is material; though an unobservable, it is real, and we _know_ it. (Marx points out in the Grundrisse that relations, unlike the things related, need to be thought.) That is where our fundamental understanding of capitalist society and the abstract _possibility_ of socialism derives from. We can see that socialism is implicit in those social relations, though we cannot know whether that real (and knowable) potential will ever be realized in history. (Claiming that socialism is an empirical certainty on the basis of Marx's fundamental theory is one instance of Dogmatism1, reading practice directly off theory.)
If you start with empirical observations, or if you start with tyrannical governments, or if you start with male supremacy or racism you will never be able to understand the fundamental dynamic of capitalism
BUT:
BUT when we shift from theory to what the Chinese called thought, when we confront the immediate social and political conditions within which we are working, then this fundamental theoretical perspective (while remaining fundamental) may offer no usable buid whatever to our political practice. Probably, in the u.s., at the present time, as in the 1960s, the primary relationship _within_ left organizations that needs to be confronted continually is that of gender. In the wider community it is racism, anti-immigrant chauvinism, and islamophobia. Those last sentences are highly debatable, and I'm not interested in resolving such debates here. The point is only to recoghnize (a) that have moved from theory to thought and (b) that if we do not recognize this, if we think that in some fundamental way, gender (e.g.) has "trumped" class, than quite frankly we are fools and adrift in the sea without a compass.
I'm not prepared to develop this a lot further now. I do think, however, that going back to the arguments between Miles and me on the one hand, Jerry Monaco on the other, that we might be brought much closer together if we consciously brought together the perspective I am offering here. I think in that debate there may be a considerable squshing together of what I am here alling thought and theory, to the loss of both.
Carrol
P.S. Here are some paragraphs from Barbara Jeanne Fields that form the framework for some of what appears above and for my thoughts, in general on Ideology. (Understanding ideology belongs to the realm of fundamental theory. Understanding propaganda belongs to thought in a particular political context.)
"Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America," by Barbara Jeanne Fields. New Left Review, May/June 1990.
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 sense to those whose daily lives 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 experience with slaveowners, not least the slaveowners' hysterical equation 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.