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78 THE REDISCOVERY OF ‘IDEOLOGY’
immigration controls should be strengthened. The definition of the welfare state
as a ‘problem of the illegal claimant’ does considerable duty in a society which
needs convincing that ‘we cannot afford welfare’, that it ‘weakens the moral
fibre of the nation’, and therefore, that public welfare spending ought to be
drastically reduced. Other aspects of the same process—for example, the
establishment of the range of issues which demand public attention (or as it is
more commonly known, the question of ‘who sets the national agenda?’)—were
elaborated as part of the same concern with extending and filling out precisely
what we could mean by saying that signification was a site of social struggle.
The fact that one could not read off the ideological position of a social group or
individual from class position, but that one would have to take into account how
the struggle over meaning was conducted, meant that ideology ceased to be a
mere reflection of struggles taking place or determined elsewhere (for example,
at the level of the economic struggle). It gave to ideology a relative independence
or ‘relative autonomy’. Ideologies ceased to be simply the dependent variable in
social struggle: instead, ideological struggle acquired a specificity and a
pertinence of its own—needing to be analysed in its own terms, and with real
effects on the outcomes of particular struggles. This weakened, and finally
overthrew altogether, the classic conception of ideas as wholly determined by
other determining factors (e.g. class position). Ideology might provide sets of
representations and discourses through which we lived out, ‘in an imaginary way,
our relation to our real conditions of existence’ (Althusser, 1969, p. 233). But it
was every bit as ‘real’ or ‘material’, as so-called nonideological practices,
because it affected their outcome. It was ‘real’ because it was real in its effects.
It was determinate, because it depended on other conditions being fulfilled.
‘Black’ could not be converted into ‘black= beautiful’ simply by wishing it were
so. It had to become part of an organized practice of struggles requiring the
building up of collective forms of black resistance as well as the development of
new forms of black consciousness. But, at the same time, ideology was also
determining, because, depending on how the ideological struggle was conducted,
material outcomes would be positively or negatively affected. The traditional
role of the trade unions is to secure and improve the material conditions of their
members. But a trade-union movement which lost the ideological struggle, and
was successfully cast in the folk-devil role of the ‘enemy of the national
interest’, would be one which could be limited, checked and curtailed by legal
and political means: one, that is, in a weaker position relative to other forces on
the social stage; and thus less able to conduct a successful struggle in the defence
of working-class standards of living. In the very period in which the critical
paradigm was being advanced, this lesson had to be learned the hard way. The
limitations of a trade-union struggle which pursued economic goals exclusively
at the expense of the political and ideological dimensions of the struggle were
starkly revealed when obliged to come to terms with a political conjuncture
where the very balance of forces and the terms of struggle had been profoundly
altered by an intensive ideological campaign conducted with peculiar force,