One important ideology (though not the most important ideology) structuring common perception of the political-economic order is that of the Social Contract.
Contrary to the notion of power that I have been using, Social Contract ideology treats power as something that is centralized in and wielded by the state, with the consent of its citizens, and is exercised primarily via direct force and/or the rule of law. The state, for its part, possesses discrete boundaries and is coincident with a "public realm." Wealth, in this view, derives from property (the protection of which is the primary function of the state) and its acquisition is atomistic rather than relational, such that wealth in itself begets further wealth.
Social Contract ideology is often combined with nationalist ideology, which presupposes that the human race is naturally divided into a number of discrete units (nations or ethnic groups), which should ideally form the basis of state-territorial boundaries.
Social Contract ideology legitimates the social order in a number of ways. Most significantly, it ignores social structures and forms of power other than the state and sovereignty, and thus conceals real sources and means of domination. The power of a state, in turn, is seen by the citizenry as deriving from their own consent, for their own benefit and protection (and in a democracy they may even believe they have ultimate power), obscuring the fact that the state is merely a tool employed by the capitalist class in the service of capitalist interests. The aims and interests of the capitalist class, moreover, are easily construed as "the public good," even as they disadvantage and endanger the majority of the population. As a corollary, whenever a state is perceived to act in a manner contrary to the public good, this is construed as an isolated abuse of power which can be rectified, and does not call into question the nature of the state in general.
Additionally, Social Contract ideology has enabled the construction of political spectra constituted by discrete "forms of government," often including oligarchies, monarchies, dictatorships, democracies, republics, and anarchy. This supposed range of options conceals the reality that there is only one type of rule (the rule of the few over the many: oligarchy), and that the only political difference is the way in which domination is exercised and maintained (which is, itself, merely a function of particular socio-economic circumstances). Thus, citizens of supposed "democracies" operate happily under the illusion that they live in the best and freest conditions possible, and are too complacent to really challenge the social order.
I get the distinct impression that most people are aware of that, particularly in the UK; while they probably aren't familiar with the reasons why capitalism is so tyrannical I find that most are at least dully aware that government is a tool used against them.
ReplyDeleteDemocracy is obfuscation. When you treat everybody as a minority they enter the mindset that their vote will never outweigh the sheer numbers who are against them if they're already under the illusion that democracy even works like that, which they usually are because we indoctrinate them with it from childhood.
Spreading the message and clarifying the realities of the economic and political system however, does not not have much impact on the average joe who just wants to make his living and live comfortably; politics is boring for most people because they don't really feel that they can do anything about it, so the question is two fold:
1. What can we do about it?
2. How do we go about it?
And perhaps the more difficult question that follows is:
3. How do we effectively disseminate this information to the populace in a way that holds their interest and cuts through the illusions and lies that have them deluded?
Anyone who tries to argue that the very foundations (capitalism) are rotten to the core and proposes that it be changed is almost universally written off as a loony/commie zealot; they think that it's too great an undertaking and could never work so they'd rather sit in the illusion of 'tactical voting' (another brainwashing idea that per-supposes we should just accept that we can't vote on particulars, only a whole package roughly equally unacceptable as the other in a (usually) two party system).
We have a difficult task, it would be easy to convince fresh minds, but to keep them from drinking out of the same poisoned well that begat the process of rationalizations and concessions to the 'inevitability' of the same unfair paradigms in the first place takes an enormous amount of education on logic, reasoning and their application across all disciplines whether it be science, religion or politics. Can we hold their attention for long enough to do that?
Communism never ends up as Marx intended it because, I believe, he failed to factor in adequate and workable safeguards against greed and power grabbing. Until we have an adequate improved communist system free of the pitfalls of its implementations then the populace are right, it would be disastrous to attempt to change the economic system?
Without answers I feel uneasy, I want to forget and ignore it all, and perhaps in time with enough disillusionment I might just end up burying my head in the sand and leaving it to future generations to sort out...
Thanks for your comments! I am totally with you on the difficulties of trying to spread an awareness of social reality to the masses. That is why I started this blog, but I don't know if I'm just preaching to the choir.
ReplyDeleteAbout communism never ending up as Marx intended.... I would say that statement actually cannot be proven, and there is more evidence against it. To start, if you confine your examination just to the last century, there are a number of reasons why it is problematic to say that communism failed, or that it inevitably ends in dictatorship. 1) Every attempt at communism or socialism was immediately undermined by external forces (the West). 2) The countries that attempted experimentation did so under conditions of poverty and devastation caused by war. Poverty and lack of infrastructure are conditions that often give rise to dictatorship (and not vice versa, as is popularly claimed). So called "democracy" is a privileged enjoyed by rich countries, only after they became rich. The threat of attack also lends itself to attacks on civil liberties and human rights (this has been demonstrated through all of history). Thus, both the conditions of being poor and being under constant threat from Western intervention that were faced by all modern socialist and communist states make it a bit difficult to draw any universal conclusions regarding these system. In that same vein it has also been argued that "democracies" are easier to topple and interfere with, and all instances of democratic socialist/communist governments were immediately overthrown by covert U.S. operations (Mossadegh, Allende, Sukarno, etc. etc.). Thus the dictatorships were the only cases of socialism/communism that survived. Furthermore, I would argue that the modern cases of socialism and communism were really forms of capitalism, as it is defined as a system based on wage labor and industrialization. So 20th century socialism/communism is not adequate to draw conclusions about socialism/communism more generally. Finally, if one therefore looks at human history more broadly, it is clear that countless numbers of relatively egalitarian societies have existed without falling prey to the Authority Problem. Power grabbing is only a problem when effective mechanisms of power are already in place.