Tag Archives: class

Marxism and Literature – Raymond Williams

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http://strongreading.blogspot.com/2011/08/raymond-williams-marxism-and-literature.html

Chapter 4: “Ideology”

Ideology for Williams is an inherently problematic concept, which he thinks requires radical revision. He outlines three meanings the concept has had in Marxist theory:

  • (i) a system of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group;
  • (ii) a system of illusory beliefs – false ideas or false consciousness – which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge;
  • (iii) the general process of the production of meanings and ideas.

In one variant of Marxism, senses (i) and (ii) can be effectively combined. (55)

Part 3: “Literary Theory”

Chapter 1: “The Multiplicity of Writing”

this identification of art with “imaginative” skill involves a reduction of art to a series of forms labeled the proper objects of aesthetic experience. In literature this has resulted in the reduction of “literature” to specialized forms that obscure the multiplicity in types of writing practices: literature is “fictional” and not “factual,” it is “imaginative” and not “practical,” and it is not “subjective” rather than “objective.” Literature’s association with these concepts is specific to the capitalist era, and a Marxist literary theory must attempt to recapture the multiplicity of forms of writing outside of the categories left to it by bourgeois critics.

The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology – Göran Therborn

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Citation:

Therborn, Göran, 1941. The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology. NLB, London, 1980.

Good Review and Background:

https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/periodicals/theoretical-review/tr-30-1.pdf

 

-To conceive a text or an utterance as ideology is to focus on the Waze operates in the formation and transformation of human subjectivity

-1) ideology is then seeing as the medium through which men make their history as conscious actors. 2) wrong concept is of opposition between Bourgois and proletarian ideology or science and ideology as such true and false consciousness

-poulantzas: classes must be defined at the political ideological as well as the economic level

-two althusser  fallacies: only scientific knowledge is true or real and that human beings are motivated as subjects only buy what they know by true or distorted knowledge

– fallacy of interst: interests by themselves do not explain anything it is a normative concept indicating the most rational course of action in a predefined game the problem is how members of different classes come to define the world and their situation and possibilities in it in a particular way.

 

  1. The ideological formation of human subjects

 

-subjection-qualification: New members become qualified to take up and perform the repertoire of rules given in society into which they are born.

The three fundamental modes of ideological interpellation:

1.what exists 2. What is good 3. What is possible.

  • The formation of subjects of class struggle involves the process of subject qualification such that the tasks of producing sir plus labor are performed in the existence of class royal is recognized together with it’s on just character and the possibility of resisting it. On the part of numbers of the exploding class, the formation of class struggle subjects requires a subjection qualification to performing the tasks of exploitation, a recognition that this is the right thing to do and they can be defended.

 

The universe of ideological interpolations

 

Subjectivities of in the world subjectivity of being
existential historical
inclusive 1 2
positional 3 4

 

  1. inclusive existential ideologies like what life is what is good and bad in life what is possible and human existence and weather is a life after death.
  2. Inclusive historical ideologies a US citizen a Catholic Italian number of the working class a resident of a particular neighborhood
  3. Positional exit stencil ideologies the self and others and the two genders and the lifecycle of childhood youth and old age
  4. Positional historical ideologies educational status positions of political power structures of difference
  • The ideological universe is never reducible to class ideologies. Even in the most class polarized and class conscious societies, the other fundamental forms of human subjectivity coexist with class subjectivities.
  • It is natural and not an aberration of underdeveloped class consciousness that class ideologies coexist with inclusive historical ideologies constituting the subjects of the contradictory totality of an exploitative mode of production

 

2) The historical materialism of ideologies

 

-The question of material determination is central to the corpus of historical materialistic Theory and has to be confronted directly

The structure of ideological systems

-proposition one: all ideologies exist only in historical forms in historical degrees of salience and modes of articulation with other ideologies

Proposition two: all ideologies operate in a material matrix of affirmations and sanctions, and this matrix determines their interrelationships.

Proposition three: all ideologies in class societies exist in historical forms of articulation with different classes in class ideologies.

Proposition four: the patterning of a given set of ideologies is within class societies overdetermined by class relations of strength and by the class struggle.

The generation of ideologies and material change

–proposition one: the generation of ideologies in human societies is always from the point of view of social science and history agra fee process of change of pre-existing ideologies.

Proposition two: Ideological change in the generation of ideologies is always dependent upon nan ideological material change.

Proposition three: the most important material change is constituted by the internal social dynamics of societies and of their mode of production.

Proposition for: every mode of production requires specific economic positional ideologies and every exploitative mode of production specific class ideologies.

Proposition five: every new mode of production will generate new economic positional ideologies.

Proposition six: all human societies exhibit X extensional and historical inclusive as well as his Storico positional ideologies

.

Proposition seven: the concrete form of accidental historical inclusive and historical positional ideologies other than the economic or not directly determined by the mode of production but changes in the former or over determined by the latter.

Proposition eight: new mode of production and new classes will generate forms of accidental historical inclusive and other historical positional ideologies that are capable of supporting and reinforcing the new predominate class ideologies if the former do not already exist.

 

3) The ideological constitution of classes

Dash we cannot talk of class struggle, of the struggle of classes as an analytic concept for structuring the myriad of social conflicts without assuming an ideological constitution of classes by specific class ideologies.

– The actual ideological ensemble of the members of a given class is a complex totality of different elements that can be not be reduced to one another.

– The critical aspect of the altar ideology is in the case of exporting classes the rationale for the domination of other classes; in the case of exploded classes it is the basis for their resistance to the exporters.

– The altar as well as the ego ideologies develop with the mode of production itself in social processes of ideological interpellation and through a learning process governed by various forms of affirmations and sanctions.

– Socialist ideology is not implicit in  working class existence (Lenin). There is a strong selective affinity but not a dubious utilitarian notion of interest.

-while feudalism helped by Catholicism no theory of feudalism can explain the core of prevailing religious doctrine of the church.

-Nationalism became linked to the Bouge wall revolution by providing an ideology of struggle that counterposed to the dynastic and/or colonial power a state of legally free and equal citizens encompassing a certain territory.

– Inclusive historical ideologies are not simply invented as formulate of ruling class legitimization. Like the state itself, they express their Storico outcome of struggles within and of the state.

– Bo nationalism became linked to the Bouge wall revolution by providing an ideology of struggle that counterposed to the dynastic and/or colonial power a state of legally free and equal citizens encompassing a certain territory.

– Inclusive historical ideologies or not simply invented as formulate of ruling class legitimization. Like the state itself, express the Storico outcome of struggles within and of the state.

– since nationalism played a crucial role in the Bouge why Z’s rise to power it is quite natural that nationalism as an inclusive ideology irreducible to class should be articulated within the rule of the bourgeoisie.

– starting from the ideology of a subordinate class one can either join the cause of the victors, embracing and subordinating oneself to the nationalist cause, or relate to the tradition of struggle, linking up with the national popular Tradition.

-Working class ideology in order to assert itself must confront and absorb occupational ideologies the particular work orientation and solidarity of particular occupations and crafts. Given a multi ethnic labor force ethnicity becomes a positional ideology competing with working class ideology.

– The ideological universe is irreducible to class ideologies, but the ideological ensemble of the class society is class patterned and ideological changes over determined by class struggle. The thesis concerning the class patterning of ideologies is not dependent on any notion of representation. Class ideologies like class politics do not represent anything other than themselves such as class interests.

– Class ideologies are not doctrines or elaborated forms of discourse. They are rather class specific core themes of discourse that very anonymously and concrete form and degree of elaboration.

 

4) The social order of ideologies

 

  • ideologies actually operate in a state of this order. They are not possessions or text but an ongoing social process.
  • – As he or she is the target of constant conflicting interpolations, the receiver is not necessarily consistent in his or her receptions and responding acts and interpolations.
  • – The sudden shifts between acquiescence and revolt our collective processes not merely a series of individual changes.
  • Big chart of neighborhoods schools jobs and mass media to show that forms are ideologies page 86.

5) ideology and political power

 

Mode of  interpellation alternative regime conceivable? yes no
what is Accommodation sense of inevitability
what is good sense of representation deference
what is possible fear resignation

 

  • So far no great modern social revolution has ever been made by a unified class subject demanding a completely new social order.
  • Rather the process has gained momentum in a situation where the sustaining matrix of the regime in existence is crumbling three specific limited and often quite reformist demands often arising out of the new acute crisis situation itself.
  • – it seems that the most important dimensions of ideological change in this process are those concerning what exists and what is possible .
  • Generally speaking the more qualified the ruled at the point where they’re subjugation can no longer be sustained, the more they can achieve
  • 6) social change and the power of ideology
  • consciousnessIdeological mobilization involves selling a common agenda for a massive people. That is to say summing up the dominant aspect of the crisis I didn’t find the crucial target and defining what is possible.
  • – Ideological mobilization implies the fusion and condensation of several ideological discourses into a single major threat, usually expressed in a simple slogan.

 

The Ticklish Subject – Slavoj Zizek

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Citation

 

Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Verso, New York;London;, 1999.

 

Contents

 

Author

 

Zizek, duh

Context

 

Engaging with the Cartesian Subject

 

Thesis

 

This book  Endeavors to reassert the Cartesian subject whose rejection forms the silent pact of all struggling parties of today’s Academia. The point is not to return to the cogito in the guise  in which this notion has dominated modern thought what to bring to light it’s forgotten obverse, the excessive, unacknowledged kernal of the cogito, Which is far from the pacifying image of the transparent self.

Part I – confront Heidegger’s attempt to transcend the horizon of modern Cartesian subjectivity. He does not account for the excess of subjectivity (diabolical evil in Kant, ‘night of the world’ in Hegel). Imagination is really anti-synthetic

Part II – four descendants of Althusser

Laclau – theory of Hegemony

Balibar – theory of egaliberte

Ranciere- theory of mesentente

Badiou – theory of subjectivity as fidelity to the truth event

How do each tackle the predominant ‘post-political’ liberal-democratic stance

Part III – tendencies of post-modern thought to assert the liberating proliferation of multiple forms of subjectivity, where cultural recognition more important than socioeconomic struggle

How are we to reformulate a leftist, anti-capitalist political project in the era of global capitalism.

Methodology

Key Terms

Criticisms and Questions

Notes

 

  1.  The politics of Truth, Alain Badiou as a reader of St.Paul

 

– the subject emerges interpolated from the truth event.

– budgie provides an elaborated analysis of being. At the bottom is the presentation of pure multiple, the not yet symbolically structured multitude of experience, that which is given. This multitude is not a multitude of ones since counting has not yet taken place. Glad you called any particular consistent multitude a situation, a situation is structured and it is its structure that allows us to count as one. However for us to count as one 3 duplication proper to the symbolization of a situation must be at work that is in order for a situation to be counted as one its structure must always already be a med estructura that designated as 1.

– the truth is always the truth of a specific situation, its repressed truth.

“This symptomal torsion of being which is a truth in the always total texture of knowledge”

– whereas post-modernism says there is no event and that nothing really happens, Badiou insists that miracles do happen.

whereas Kant celebrates the sublime effect on passive Observers Badiou says that the truth event is truth in itself for its agents themselves not for external Observers.

-Subjectivity engages the individual in some cause

-Badiou’s opposition of knowledge and Truth seems to turn exactly around Althusser’s opposition of ideologies and science:Non authentic knowledge is limited to the positive order of being, blinds to its structural void, to its Symtomal torsion; while the engaged truth that subjectivizes provides authentic insight into a situation.

Two  divisions of the subjects: 1)  conscious ego who adhere’s to the law and decentered desire which works against its conscious will 2) Law / desire versus A New Beginning breaking out of the deadlock of Law and its transgression AKA Christian love.

-”ne pas ceder sur son desir” = “do your duty”

– 4 marks the emergence of working-class subjectivity is strictly co-dependent on the fact that the worker is compelled to sell the very substance of his being as a commodity on the market, that is to reduce the treasure the precious core of his being to an object that can be bought for money.  there is no subjectivity without the reduction of the subjects positive substantial being to a disposable piece of s***.

 

The Lacanian Subject:  the subject is strictly correlative with the ontological gap between the universal and the particular.  the subject is an act, the decision by means of which we passed from the positivity of the given multitude to the truth event.  subject is not a name for the gap of freedom and contingency what is the contingency that grounds the very positive ontological order the vanishing mediator whose self-effacing gesture transforms the pre ontological chaotic multitude into the semblance of A+ objective order of reality.

-Truth is condemned to remain a fiction precisely insofar as the innomable real eludes its grasp.

 

  1. Political Subjectivization and its Vicissitudes

 

-”single unemployed mother” is a synthome: a knot at which all the lines of the predominant ideological argumentation meet.

-The middle class is the very form of the disavowal of the fact that Society doesn’t exist, in it Society does exist.  this constant displacement and falsification of the line of class division is the class struggle. Laclau class antagonism would thereby be fully symbolized it would no longer be impossible / real but a simple differential structural feature.

-Antagonism is inherent to universality itself, split into the false concrete universality that legitimizes the existing division of the whole into functional parts, and the impossible/ real demand of abstract universality.

-The proletariat stands for Universal Humanity not because it is the lowest exploded class but because it’s very existence is a living contradiction, it exposes the fundamental imbalance and inconsistency of the capitalist social hole.  criticism of the possible Iggy logical functioning of the notion of hybridity should in no way advicate the return to substantially identities. The point is precisely to assert hybridity as the site of the universal.

– leftists must equate universalism with a militant divisive position of 1 engaged in a struggle. True universalists are not those who preach Global tolerance but those who engage in a passionate fight for the assertion of the truth that enthuses them.

– the line that separates two opposing sides in class struggle is not objective, it is not the line separating two positive social groups, But ultimately radically subjective. it runs diagonally to the social division in the order of being, between those who recognize themselves in the call of the truth event and those who deny or ignore it.

The Debate on Classes – Erik Olin Wright

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Citation

Wright, Erik O. The Debate on Classes. Verso, New York;London;, 1989.

Contents

Author

Context

 

In the late 1980s in the United States trying to figure out how to incorporate the reality of the Middle class into a Marxist understanding of class.

Thesis

 

Methodology

 

A use of statistics and a questionnaire to try to map out mediary class positions. The book is a series of articles which debate back and forth the basic premise presented in the first article.

 

Key Terms

Criticisms and Questions

Lots of the interesting responses in this book of essays to Wright’s theory show just how tricky and difficult the question of class is. How does the relationship between empiricism and Marxism, Weberianism vs. Marxism (does it all have to lead back to the main antagonistic division between bourgeois and proletariat), how much do other forms of exploitation and oppresion like gender and race fit in to the schematic, etc.  couldn’t you use gender and race as other axis in the forms of exploitation? (the category of status exploitation)

 

In this equation (the commonality of material interests helps to explain the inherent tendency towards conflict between classes; the commonality of lived experience is how they develop common identities.) wouldn’t the first part, the tendencies, not be captured within the realm of consciousness at all? Isn’t it beyond individual consciousness, but something structural to a class?

Notes

 

A general framework for the analysis of class structure – Erik Olin Wright

-main sticking point of class analysis is the “embarrassment” of the middle class.

-how to restore exploitation at center of class analysis to accommodate the empirical complexities of the middle class.

-in state bureaucratic socialism, exploitation is based on burueacratic power: control over organizational assets.

-so two things to add in along with ownership of the means of production: skills and organizational assets.

Bourgeoisie Expert manager Semicredentialed manager Uncredentialed manager
Small employer Expert supervisor Semicredentialied supervisor Uncredentialed supervisor
Petty bourgeois Expert nonmanager Semicredentialed worker proletarian

 

X access is organization assets, Y is skill assets

-class alliances can take place among classes, but there are only certain combinations that are plausible. The more skilled and managerial, the more likely to support existing class relations.

 

Concept of class structure:

1) class structure imposes limits on class formation, class consciousness, and class struggle.

2) class structures constitute the essential qualitative lines of social demarcation in the historical trajectory of social change.

3) the concept of class is relational.

4) social relations which define class are intrinsically antagonistic rather than symmetrical.

5) the objective basis of these antagonistic interests is exploitation.

6) the fundamental basis of exploitation

 

-To save sociology from the sins of bourgeois thought and to save Marxism from the sins of dogmatism: the joining of statistical methods with conceptual rigour is the most effective way to accomplish this. Hard to suss out empiricism sing we can only see experiences (facts) in this causal chain:

mechanisms ====> Events ========> experiences (facts)

class consciousness (mechanisms) ====> attitudes (Events) ========> responses to questionnaire (experiences (facts))

 

competing models of consciousness formation:

 

initial model:

class structure =========> patterns of ideological class formation

alternative model:

ideologies of class =======> party strategies =========> ideological class formation

 

slight debate between Wright and michael Buraway about dogmatism and scepticism between marxism and empiricism.

impossible to view mechanisms or know if they really exist in the Real. Wright clarifies that there is an inherent tension between the psychological states required for revolutionary practice and scientific activity.

-class consciousness is not static and measurable by a questionaire. both structures and ideologies need to be seen in their historical and conjunctural specificity. May be contradictory. Many social phenomenon go into an individual’s consciousness. Not only determined by individual ideas about capital, but also by attitudes toward unions, women, migrants, blacks, gays etc.

-politics and ideology are only relatively autonomous from conjunctural class interests, but her it is just this autonomy that makes conjunctural class interests deviate from true class interests.

LaClau and Mouffe: concepts like objective class interests lack “any theoretical base whatsoever” and the search for the working class is a “false problem.” the social is open and made through discourse, class is just one identity, and not even priveleged.

-objective class interests tied up with teleology, has become one of the bad “-isms”

-capitalists have objective interest in capitalism, new middle classes have interest in statism, and proletariat in full communism.

-analysis of class structure can not be used to find “take off areas” of teleological historical processes or for rational objective interests. There are other dimensions at play.

-Weberian analysis of classes does not need the basic class schism behind it between who own the means of production.

-Middle class are exploited in terms of capitalist mechanisms of exploitation, and exploiters in terms of the one of the secondary mechanisms of exploitation. with hegemony of bourgeoisie middle class tie their class interests to them.

-the commonality of material interests helps to explain the inherent tendency towards conflict between classes; the commonality of lived experience is how they develop common identities.

-Lived experience and Habitus help to explain the source of variation within a class rather than a criterion for class as such.

-the relationship between class structure (exploitation and interests) and class experience (workplace practices and identity formation) which then can be treated as a theoretical problem in its own right.

imagine a triangle:

capitalist mode of production                           simple commodity production

bourgeoisie

small employers

 

managers and supervisors                              petty bourgeoisie

 

semiautonomous employees

 

proletariat

 

state mode of production (and the class position of the bureaucracy) has been notoriously undertheorized.

 

Rescuing Class from the Cultural Turn – Vivek Chibber

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Citation

Contents

Author

context:

 

class theory has been deeply influenced by what is known as the “cultural turn.” the idea that social practice cannot be understood outside of the ideological and cultural frames that actors carry with them—their subjective understandings of their place in the world

some central arguments for cultural mediation are undoubtedly correct, and potentially devastating to an economic theory of class. Any response to the cultural turn, then, has to take account of these worries and show that, whatever arguments there are in favor of materialism, they have to acknowledge the ubiquity of culture.

Thesis:

 

In the classical account, the class structure is taken to generate class consciousness, which in turn induces workers to build class organizations. I have tried to argue that, in fact, class consciousness is the consequence of class organization. Since the latter is an arduous process, highly vulnerable to disruption and precarious at its foundation, so is the formation of class identity.

Methodology

 

focus on workplace organizing experience to show the actual difficulties of organizing, and how it should not be taken as a given.

Key Terms

 

class consciousness

Criticisms and Questions

 

Notes:

Challenged to Materialism:

-class action does NOT take place outside of meaning and values like any other social practice

-once a class structure does not generate a particular set of subjective identities — of belonging to a certain class and of wishing to pursue a political agenda prioritizing that identity.

Sewell – for structures to become causally efficacious, they have to be interpreted by agents

-but two different questions a)social structures must be interpreted to take effect b) but are there some structures that radically reduce, or even extinguish, the contingency in meaning construction ie. class

-class is different than other social roles because it is tied economic viability ie they set the rules for what actors have to do to reproduce themselves. they force proletarians and bourgeois to accept their class positions. contingent culture accepted as long as it doesn’t get in the way of structure.

– challenge for  materialist theory: how how possible for workers’ class location to converge around a strategy of collective resistance, but also a strategy of individual accommodation. Class consciousness is a product of some very particular conditions that might have to be produced and sustained, rather than assumed to fall into place through the internal logic of class structure.

-past accounts of class consciousness fail to describe those aspects of the class structure that mitigate against collective course of action.

– Class consciousness can then be understood as a product of some very particular conditions that might have to be produced and sustained, rather than assumed to fall into place through the internal logic of class structure.

-two main obstacles:

1) workers’ baseline vulnerability against the power of employers

– common for class orientation in which one’s welfare is secured by non-class forms of association.

2) generic problems that arise in collective action.

– interest aggregation (from Claus Offe and Helmut Wiesenthal, “The Two Logics of Collective Action”)

-workers must seek agreement although their welfare effected in various, uneven ways

-some workers would have to subordinate their immediate welfare to the larger agenda

– free-riding

all three of these factors reinforce the atomizing effect of the labor market and dilute the impulse toward collective action and class consciousness.

class structure underwrites its own stability by making individual reproduction more appealing than organized contestation.

there is no easy road from Marx’s class in-itself to a class for-itself, but cultureal phenomena play crucial role in building working-class associational power

-By cultural, what is meant is the construction of a solidaristic ethos

– working-class identity is an act of social intervention, it is not a social construction.

-Because of great risks, workers can rationally chose not to be organized. (blamed in the past as  false consciousness)

-It is possible to accept the premise that all social action is filtered through culture while resisting the conclusion that class structure is therefore fundamentally shaped by it.

Workers on the Nile 1882–1954 Joel Beinin Zachary Lockman

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Citation

 

Beinin, Joel, 1948, and Zachary Lockman. Workers on the Nile: Nationalism, Communism, Islam, and the Egyptian Working Class, 1882-1954. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J, 1987.

Contents

Author

Context

Thesis

 

“the dialectic of class and nation [and] the formation of a new class of wage workers as Egypt experienced a particular kind of capitalist development … and these workers’ adoption of various forms of consciousness, organization, and collective action in a political and economic context structured by the realities of foreign domination and the struggle for national independence.”

 

Methodology

Key Terms

Criticisms and Questions

Notes

 

From the amazing and self-sufficient conclusion:

 

-two factors defined matrix within which working class was formed: the structure of Egyptian capitalism itself, and Egypt’s domination by British colonialism.

Egyptian Capitalism: influx of foreign capital concentrated primarily in agricultural sector, after WWI power of foreign and mutamassir capital ultimately compelled nascent industrial bourgeoisie to abandon independence. Formed a class alliance. Textile sector grew in 1930s and 40s, but growing parasitical class of large landoweners linked to foreign cotton market. Locally produced industrial good market collapsed after WWII exposed weakness of industry, and overdependence on textile market.

Working class: uneven development of Egyptian capitalism. Majority urban workers employed in small under-capitalized shops with pre-capitalist production and social relations. Working class but not trade unionists. Large scale workers in transport, public utilities and public enterprises, all to support cotton extraction.

-even with rise of industrial proletariat, still seen through lens of nationalist sturggle.

-Wafd was bourgeois nationalism which saw labor as only one part.

-Egyptian communist organizations greatest influence during jan-june 1946 and 10/51-1/52. Biggest day was February 21, 1946.

-Post war led to labor rivalry between MB and communists.

-Strikes in Mahalla al-kubra in 1947 and Kafir al-Dawwar in 1952 showed workers’ rejection of paternalism. Made “labor question” pressing issue.

-Working class, although growing in power, gave up to military regime in March 1954

-Orthodox Marxists emphasize betrayal of this deal

-March 1954 was a compromise where regime granted many economic demands so that trade union leadership would accept regime’s tutelage.

-Arab socialism rejected the concept of class struggle, but accepted it as a valid social and political category.

-Nasserism’s international political success also made labor quiescent.

-severe repression of communists and other groups that didn’t accept tutelage

-Nasserism’s economic strategy based on development of industry, economic planning, and economic redistribution, failed after 1965 because government could not sustain consumption and investment.

-New door policy abandonment of March 1954 compromise.