Marxism's Legacy

Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology.
by Kenneth Minogue
St. Martin's. 255 pp. $27.50.

One does not lightly pick up a book whose subtitle is “The Pure Theory of Ideology,” even if the title proper suggests something by Arthur C. Clark. Indeed, Kenneth Minogue, a formidable academic follower in the skeptical ways of the English conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott, is occasionally given to drawing his doctoral gown close about him and talking as etiolated mind to etiolated mind. Such lapses into heaviness are a pity, for he has also written a deeply valuable work about the core of Marxist thought and the cast of mind, not necessarily Marxist itself, which has taken its vocabulary, its reflexes, and its priestly intolerance from the grim Master of Trier.

“Ideology” is of course a word which antedates Marx; it appears to have been invented by an obscure French zoologist, Antoine Destutt de Tracy, at the time of the French Revolution. It was Marx, however, who created the church, set the altar, and wrote the canon law of what tends to be seen, even by unbelievers, as the ideology. In an interview not cited by Minogue, Ernesto “Che” Guevara once observed that Marxism was as naturally true as the Newtonian system (omitting as he spoke certain developments in modern physics). And it was Marx, too, who gave this ideology its peculiar moral thrust. Minogue, quoting a passage from The Communist Manifesto (“Free-man and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word oppressor and oppressed . . .”), glosses it as follows:

We support the oppressed and hate the oppressors whenever we encounter bourgeois and proletarian, male and female, imperialist and native. There is thus a moral principle at work ordering the structuring of ideological analysis and determining its emphases.

At the heart of things there is Marx's short preface to the Critique of Political Economy:

In the social production of their life men enter into definitive relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces.

We are, in other words, the prisoners of a structure; the structure determines how we shall think, the development of the structure how our thinking will change. In this respect there are superficial, though deeply misleading, affinities between Marxism and self-confident 19th-century liberalism, which also hated oppression, though (with its supposedly defective consciousness) it regarded reform rather than revolution as inevitable.

Marx's concept of a structure within which the unknowing oppressed move about, waiting for their consciousness to be raised or for the midwives of history to induce birth, was harnessed to an economic theory, the notion of surplus value. Intelligent Marxists are notably embarrassed by this theory; the British economist Joan Robinson spoke of it as developing, in some contexts, “a kind of squint which leaves one deeply confused.” Faced with the conspicuous non-collapse of capitalism, and also with the propensity of Communism to establish itself either by conquest (as in Eastern Europe) or through the distress of peasant societies no more ready for this determinist conclusion than was England in the 13th century, Marxists have had to come up with some fast footwork. Thus, Claus Offe:

The self-destructive tendencies of the capitalist mode of production evolve in a historical process and their destructive and revolutionary potential can well be controlled and kept latent through various adaptive mechanisms of the system at least temporarily.

Fast footwork, that is, for a man imprisoned in moon boots.

The point might be made that the pure ideology of Marx—the determinism, the notion of consciousness, the cash nexus, and all—provides believers with a formidable psychological boost. Marxists are commonly armed with a winning-side psychology, a superiority complex. If you are equipped with scientific truth, even if it is only scientific by the broad and forgiving standards of the first half of the 19th century, all contrary views can be rejected either by vituperation, a habit passed down in the family from Marx's own foul-tempered and intolerant example, or by a lordly act of non-recognition. Inevitability has its uses.

In this connection Minogue puts much emphasis, and rightly, on the passion for quotation marks among Marxists and other ideologues who have learned Marxist ways. In a passage which deserves anthologizing for the elegance with which it transfixes its target, Minogue speaks of ideology's way of filling the page with

twitches, nudges, and winks indicated by quotation marks, which do not signify quotation but rather dissent from, and hostility to, the ordinary meaning of a term. The quotation mark is ideology scowling. . . . Often the specific intention is to disavow the approving content of words of approval so that terms like “neutral,” “benevolent,” “law and order,” “good,” and their like are hardly ever used without the escort of their regular flotilla of inverted commas.

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Kenneth Minogue acknowledges the ideological temptations of his own profession. There have always been, he tells us, love affairs between men of action and philosophers, exemplified by Machiavelli and Plato. “The history of ideology is, among other things, an oscillation between the attractions of power, for many philosophers have felt about the world as Marx did, that the point is to change it, and the speculative recoil which carries philosophers back to pure thought.” But in most cases the ideas have only been levers for immediate, specific political actions. Ideology is different in that it has pretensions to universality: “The ideologist monopolizes change by virtue of the assumption that he alone represents it, and everything else, including a competing ideologist, is, in one way or another, an instrument of reaction.” In this respect ideologists of all stripes have inherited from Marx a claim on “the structural drives which moved the world forward.” In our own day, any self-styled world system, however grotesque or intellectually contemptible, from radical feminism to Jonestown, is likely to see itself as an ideology.

Minogue skillfully lets such latter-day absolutists do themselves in. Thus Susan Brownmiller:

Police-blotter rapists in a very real sense perform a myrmidon function for all men in our society . . . they function as anonymous agents of terror. Although they are the ones who do the dirty work, the actual attentat, to the other men, their superiors in class or station, the lasting benefits of their simple-minded evil have always accrued.

This sort of thinking, if that is quite the word we want, is the detritus of ideology, a few tricky habits picked up from the rhetoric of Marx, a slippery way of commuting from the specific to the general, the voicing of the question cui bono so as to infer a class interest in an evil—by such means does Miss Brownmiller build her model. Rationally we know that acts of rape are committed, that some husbands also bully their wives, but that the majority do not so bully them and that the male sex is overwhelmingly disgusted by the act of rape. But no matter. Miss Brownmiller is into raising consciousness, whatever she may be doing to the truth and the statistical record; but she is also in the decayed line of Marx, arguing from an oppressive act to a universal condition of oppression.

Exactly the same contortion was worked long ago to explain how industrial workers, whose standard of living has risen steadily since the Manchester of 1840, are nevertheless still oppressed. Oppression is, after all, the family business, and trade must be kept up and new lines brought onto the market. Fascist ways of behaving have similarly been harnessed to the achievement of an end supposed to be ineluctable. As Minogue puts it: “Political rallies, consciousness-raising sessions, agitation and propaganda, are all ideological devices for attempting to make true what has already been declared to be true.” Phrases from the 1960's like “repressive tolerance” speak wonderfully of the way in which an unsatisfactory and relaxed reality can be snapped into line to conform with the drill of expectation.

But when the boot is on the other foot and stamping, the rules change with it. Georg Lukâcs, so often, so fatuously cited in the West as a liberal Marxist, put it clearly for all time in a sentence. “The question of legality and illegality reduces itself then for the Communist party to a mere question of tactics, even to a question to be resolved on the spur of the moment.” This was very much the practice of the invading Soviet tanks when in 1956 they swept away the government of Imre Nagy, in which Georg Lukács had served as Minister of Education. That government, created at the instance of a rebellious people objectively, subjectively, and every-which-way oppressed, was a coalition of liberals, social democrats, and Communists. Reality and ideology had their fingers around each others' throats in Budapest during November-December 1956. Fortunately for the Soviet Union, reality won.

I grumbled at the outset about the academic aspects of Alien Powers, but these are merely a reflection of its seriousness and depth. Minogue understands Marxism, and, holding a liberal-conservative point of view, is a model of scruple and rational argument. He has given us a guide to the exploitation of Marxism by its own boss class and shown us the effects upon contemporary faddists of a universalist theory with a strong theoretical grounding. This is a superb attempt to locate the ultimate charm of a once-formidable body of thought, patched and bandaided over the last 140 years by exegesis and flagrant intellectual opportunism.