Page 43 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

THE PROBLEM OF IDEOLOGY: MARXISM WITHOUT GUARANTEES 31

the categories of a distorted ideology—cannot recognize that it is distorted,
while we, with our superior wisdom, or armed with properly formed
concepts, can. Are the ‘distortions’ simply falsehoods? Are they deliberately
sponsored falsifications? If so, by whom? Does ideology really function like
conscious class propaganda? And if ideology is the product or function of
‘the structure’ rather than of a group of conspirators, how does an
economic structure generate a guaranteed set of ideological effects? The
terms are, clearly, unhelpful as they stand. They make both the masses and
the capitalists look like judgemental dopes. They also entail a peculiar view
of the formation of alternative forms of consciousness. Presumably, they
arise as scales fall from people’s eyes or as they wake up, as if from a
dream, and, all at once, see the light, glance directly through the
transparency of things immediately to their essential truth, their concealed
structural processes. This is an account of the development of working
class consciousness founded on the rather suprising model of St Paul and
the Damascus Road.
Let us undertake a little excavation work of our own. Marx did not
assume that, because Hegel was the summit of speculative bourgeois
thought, and because the ‘Hegelians’ vulgarized and etherealized his
thought, that Hegel was therefore not a thinker to be reckoned with, a
figure worth learning from. More so with classical political economy, from
Smith to Ricardo, where again the distinctions between different levels of
an ideological formation are important. There is classical political economy
which Marx calls ‘scientific’; its vulgarizers engaged in ‘mere apologetics’;
and the ‘everyday consciousness’ in which practical bourgeois
entrepreneurs calculate their odds informed by, but utterly unconscious
(until Thatcherism appeared) of, Ricardo’s or Adam Smith’s advanced
thoughts on the subject. Even more instructive is Marx’s insistence that (a)
classical political economy was a powerful, substantial scientific body of
work, which (b) nevertheless, contained an essential ideological limit, a
distortion. This distortion was not, according to Marx, anything directly to
do with technical errors or absences in their argument, but with a broader
prohibition. Specifically, the distorted or ideological features arose from
the fact that they assumed the categories of bourgeois political economy as
the foundations of all economic calculation, refusing to see the historical
determinacy of their starting-points and premisses; and, at the other end,
from the assumption that, with capitalist production, economic
development had achieved, not simply its highest point to date (Marx
agreed with that), but its final conclusion and apogee. There could be no
new forms of economic relations after it. Its forms and relations would go
on forever. The distortions, to be precise, within bourgeois theoretical
ideology at its more ‘scientific’ were, nevertheless, real and substantial.
They did not destroy many aspects of its validity—hence it was not ‘false’
simply because it was confined within the limits and horizon of bourgeois