Some thoughts on Ideology
During the height of the Cold War, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) called hundreds of people before its panel. First led by Parnell Thomas, and then the infamous Joseph McCarthy, the committee interrogated those who had been identified as communists. Through these interrogations, it sought to pressure people into naming the names of other communists and communist sympathizers. Its aim, it claimed, was to purge all communists from American society. Along with damaging the professional lives of countless people, like the Hollywood Ten, the committee contributed to the hysterical notion that communism posed a genuine threat to the “American way of life.” The anti-communist anxiety it engendered had serious real-life implications for those labeled communist. Not only did people lose jobs and loved ones, but, as in the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, they also lost their lives. The Rosenbergs were executed on June 19, 1953, each at the age of 35, for allegedly passing American nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Many believed that they were innocent of some, if not all, of the charges against them. Nonetheless, they were executed, in large part, some say, because of what they believed in, rather than what they did.
But things have certainly changed, haven’t they? While shopping at a trendy clothing store recently, my friend Tiffany spied a copy of Marx’s Communist Manifesto leaning against a replica of Rodin’s Il Penser, on a table that contained this year’s most stylish jeans. To make sure that it wasn’t a fluke, some kind of joke played on the store by neighborhood radicals, she went back several times over the course of a few months. There it was every time. The text, whose call to arms – “WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE”– influenced revolutionaries around the world and contains some of the ideas for which many American communists were exiled, imprisoned, and executed, now sat as part of an advertising scheme in a space seemingly hostile to its declarations. Does this event signify an end to the communist threat in America? Is it a satirical gesture which represents corporate America’s gloating, if not ironic, sense of humor in the face of the Eastern Bloc collapse? Doubtful. It seems to me that it offers an example of how the ruling class appropriates those ideas which it finds most threatening. It commodifies them and mystifies their meaning, while also potentially taming the subversive behaviors that might result from them.
From this perspective, the Manifesto brings a number of useful qualities to the store’s display. On the aesthetic side, its bright red cover emphasizes the subtle burgundy tones deeply embedded in the fabric of the jeans (as Tiffany tells it). More importantly, of course, its place on the table links the low-cut jeans and the clothing store itself to ideas of revolution and radical change. It encourages consumers who purchase products from the store to imagine themselves as radically different from those who do not. Through the repeated consumption of these commodities, consumers acquire a kind of cultural language, however unconsciously, which provides them with the ability both to express and decode information specific to this mode of consumption. In the process, this “cultural capital,” as the French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu calls it, grants them a particular level of social distinction. In this case, consumers are encouraged to see themselves as fashion revolutionaries, bringing about radical change in fashion through their willingness to intervene in the hopelessly homogeneous dress of their day, as well as independent thinkers who take naughty pride in their rejection of the conformities of American capitalist culture.
Thus, the juxtaposition of the Manifesto and the jeans collapses vague notions of radical thought and consumer capitalism. Crumbled in this collapse are the actual ideas contained in the Manifesto. Marx argues, for example, that most workers of world are trapped in “wage slavery,” exploited by the ruling classes which benefit economically from paying low wages and maintaining deplorable working conditions. This compelling insight, which still holds true in many parts of the world, including America, is crucial to Marx’s critique of capitalism. It fuels his call to the working class to free itself from the chains of ruling class bondage. As the foundation of the philosophy of revolution (the overthrow of capitalist governments) which American big business and government has longed feared, it contains the ideas for which many capitalist societies dating back to the 19th century have punished radical thinkers and activists. But here it is absorbed by the act of consumption: buying the jeans may signify a rejection of the American status quo, but it does not suggest the recognition of the exploitation required to make them or inspire action against that exploitation. The laborer exploited to produce the jeans, which were made, no doubt, in some sweat shop, vanishes in the display that makes it cool to be communist.
While the retailer’s use of the Manifesto to mystify the revolutionary ideas contained in Marx’s polemic may seem insignificant, it is not an isolated example. Think about the multitude of Che Guevara t-shirts, key chains, and refrigerator magnets that people purchase in the U.S. Guevara, a Marxist revolutionary, who participated in the Cuban Revolution under Fidel Castro, was captured in a military operation organized by the CIA and the U.S. Special forces and executed by the Bolivian Army in 1967. He fought for the very socialist values that corporate America has attempted to repress and destroy. Yet his image adorns commodities produced by a variety of American corporations. What do we make of this contradiction? Some young people wear his image proudly, believing that they are voicing their disgust of the inequalities produced by the capitalism. But the commodification of Guevara’s legacy has left his convictions no more dangerous to capitalism than Fox’s resident radical, Bart Simpson. Guevara, like the Manifesto, has been assimilated into society as a commodity that offers consumer pleasure, usually, though not always, in the form of the expression of dissatisfaction or displeasure, a gesture that seems to be activism enough for most folks.
These examples demonstrate, in part, how the ruling class assumes hegemonic control of some of the ideas available to society. There are, of course, much more aggressive ways in which the ruling class accomplishes this. Consider the ownership and control of media organizations in the U.S. today, the way the news routinely, and incessantly, covers the stock market’s gains and losses: if the U.S. government accounting agencies report that wages across the country are up this quarter, what are you likely to see stock prices do tomorrow? Drop. Why? Well, because investors will see the rise in wages as a rise in production costs, and a likely cut into profit margins. Most of the time, the media will cover this story from the perspective of the stock owners, as a troubling development. But what is the irony here? Most people, and even most people watching the nightly news, are wage-earners, not stock owners, and hence the news of wages increasing would ostensibly be a good thing for people in their position. The reverse, of course, would also be the case. And indeed the reverse has been the case for at least the past two decades in the United States. When wages and benefits are being held down, productivity and profits for owners are all rising. This will be covered in the media as a universal and unqualified positive sign for all, even though it means that more people are working longer and harder for less pay, not only in absolute terms, but especially in relative terms. That is to say the workers, even if they are only getting slightly poorer in terms of how much food or consumer goods they can buy, are getting much poorer in comparison to the owners, and hence growing much less secure and less powerful in relationship to their de facto rulers.
One might say that from a Marxist viewpoint this is the quintessence of ideology, the representation of one particular group’s, or more specifically, one class’s outlook, values, and interests, as if they are “universal” to all, what Antonio Gramsci calls society’s “common sense” view of the world. This representation often mystifies or attempts to resolve social contradictions in the culture, in order to give the appearance of a unified and cohesive society. My point here, I suppose, is that American ruling class ideology continuously spins narratives that attempt to limit the working class’s ability to recognize and respond to its own subjugation. By allowing the masses to purchase their rebellion, for example, the ruling class provides an outlet for the frustrations that result from working in low-wage jobs (relatively speaking, of course), with few or no benefits, while it also profits in the process. Sporting events come to mind here. Think about how often working class people are targeted by professional sports advertising. At games, in bars, and even at home, they are given the opportunity to cheer “their” teams on, venting their frustrations, experiencing momentary exhilarations, and focusing much of their time and spending significant amounts of their money, all to what end? Corporate profit and a distracted populus. When the ruling class convinces working people that corporate profits are actually a good sign for all – all boats rise in the rising tide sort of thing – it encourages them to believe in the virtues of an economic system that does not have their best interest in mind. The more they follow this line of thinking, the more deeply mired they become in the very socio-cultural and political conditions that limit their ability to achieve economic success under capitalism. Hence, one function of ruling class ideology is to assure the complacency of the working classes, in order to also assure the power and dominance of the ruling class.
What, you may being asking, does any of this have to do with literature and Marxist literary theory? Well, in part, I want to argue that literature is ideological. That is not to say that all literary texts written under capitalism openly endorse the values and interests of the ruling class. Rather I want to suggest that this literature necessarily contains capitalist ideology and advances some of the priorities of the ruling class, however marginally or indirectly, regardless of the author’s intent. From this perspective, the experiences, class position, gender, and race of the author represent only one contributing factor to how the text expresses meaning. Traditional American reading practices, the kind taught in our public high schools, for example, tend to privilege the author. The text’s authority is assigned to the writer. Even if readers acknowledge a narrator or speaker, they focus inevitably on the author and the imaginary world s/he creates. There can be no denying that a writer’s work is informed by the conditions under which s/he lives. But texts have a logic all their own, whether consciously grasped by the author or not.
We believe that there are narratives that exist outside of the dominant ideology of society. Novels, for example, that confront or ignore ruling class values and interests are somehow separated from the ideology to which they are hostile or with which they are seemingly unconcerned. While these texts do identify important oppositional voices in the dominant society, they cannot escape the influence of the ideology they oppose. As Fredric Jameson observes, “for Marxism . . . the content of class ideology is relational, in the sense that its ‘values’ are always actively in situation with respect to the opposing class ideology, and defined against the latter” (Political Unconscious 84). That is to say that any given text necessarily contains both dominant ideology and those ideas which oppose it, even if those opposing ideas are not openly expressed. Consequently, those texts which seem radical departures from the dominant values of society are nonetheless engaged with those values, even when, and perhaps, especially when, they claim that they are not.
Conversely, literature that happily legitimates and naturalizes ruling class values and interests does so in contrast to those values and interests which it opposes. “Normally,” Jameson writes, “a ruling class ideology will explore various strategies of the legitimation (his emphasis) of its own power position (84). These “strategies of containment” (53), as Jameson calls them, limit a text’s ability to express both its dominant and oppositional voices simultaneously. In many cases, particularly with texts considered “masterworks” or “universal literature,” the text offers the “illusion or appearance of isolation or autonomy” (85). Its strategies of containment stifle, “reduce to silence,” or marginalize, the opposing voices within it. As a result, it appears to confirm the dominant values of the culture from which it comes as well as the dominant values of the culture which has sometimes appropriated it as its own.
Take Shakespeare, for example. His plays explore the complexities of humanity. They interrogate such canonized themes as love and hate, madness, sadness and joy, and good and evil. These aspects of his work are often emphasized in American public high schools. Students are taught that Shakespeare’s work comments on the essential or universal qualities of humanity, as though our experiences with love and sadness and goodness are not shaped by our class positions. But the body of his work also offers an arguably subversive political commentary on the troubling rise of capitalism taking place in early modern England. For a variety of reasons, this commentary is deeply embedded in the fabric of his plays. But by ignoring it, teachers instruct students to look beyond the aspects of Shakespeare’s work that might offer insight into some of the early developments of capitalism and illuminate the long history of class struggle that continues today.
Some Marxist literary critics attempt to access the antagonist class positions of texts like Shakespeare’s plays that appear to legitimate the values of the ruling class. They want to demonstrate how the oppositional voices contained in these texts identify evidence of class struggle. Through this critical process, they can show how the values and interests of the dominant class are not universal but repressive, intended to keep the power relations between the ruling and working classes one-sided. For most of us, learning to read texts this way helps us to see through the ever-present ruling class ideology that exists in everything from the literature we read to displays in trendy clothing stores to the nightly news. Hence, our ability to grasp and practice Marxist criticism provides us with the tools necessary both to understand literature from a class-based perspective and also to acknowledge the ideological forces that consistently attempt to shape our lives.
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