
Marx and Engels in a Parisian cafe. Photo: Midwestern Marx/File photo.
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Marx and Engels in a Parisian cafe. Photo: Midwestern Marx/File photo.
By Carlos L. Garrido – Feb 19, 2024
Historical materialist view of ideas
The collections of ideas we hold are historically conditioned by the mode of life we exist in. They reflect, in the realm of ideas, the limitations and possibilities of the mode of social life that dominates the era â of the forms of social intercourse which pervade our everyday lives. A feudal peasant cannot concern themselves with their social media profiles â with the likes their posts get, the shares it receives, and the subscribers or followers they have accumulated. These are, however, central concerns for most people today. We live in the era of profilicity as the dominant identity technology. As is evident, all the collections of ideas, concerns, aesthetic experiences, desires, beliefs, etc. which are tied to the profile-based mode of identity curation are dependent and grounded in the technological developments our era has achieved. In Marxist terms, these developments at the level of how we think (about ourselves and others) presuppose developments in the forces of production. Likewise, in most of the Western world, no youngsters would concern themselves with who their families will arrange them in marriage with. These preoccupations belong to an era that has passed â to a mode of social intercourse humanity has overcome.
This is a central component of historical materialism â the âlaw of development of human historyâ which Engelsâs eulogy tells us Marx discovers. It is pithily formulated in the famous 1859 preface to Marxâs A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, where he writes that:
“The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”[1]
Ideological institutions and false consciousness
The ideas that come to dominate a form of life do not exist in a transcendental realm. They are, instead, embodied materially through institutions and people. The influence these institutions hold varies. Their purpose, however, is the same: to sustain the consent of the masses (the subaltern) for the dominant order. They are tasked with ensuring the smooth reproduction of the current mode of life. In being the dominant institutions that pervade peopleâs everyday lives, they donât simply get us to consent (which implies a conscious act of acceptance) but shape our spontaneous and common-sense worldviews to such an extent that we are unable to recognize, with the exception of those grand moments of rupture called âeventsâ in the history of philosophy, the conditioned and implanted character of our thoughts.
Like the slaves in Platoâs allegory of the cave, we are deeply unaware of the structures which contain the horizon of how we view reality. Plato could not have been more correct in emphasizing the painful character of the hypothetical caveâs escapee. It is not easy to have our notions of reality so easily overturned â to have our desires, beliefs, aesthetic experiences, etc. demolished. Like the escaped slave, who painfully needs to readjust their eyes, the overcoming of bourgeois ideology is a painful process â not a spontaneous and immediate âmomentâ. When our conditions of life are so systematically pervaded by lies and manipulations, all aimed at preventing us from rocking the boat, truth is painful. Truth is dangerous. The quest for truth has always had, as W. E. B. Dubois notes, âan element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent, [but] nevertheless, men strive to know.â From the killing of Socrates to the killing of King, class society has shown its proclivity to fight back viciously when threatened by the truth tellers. This was, once again, already prophetically described by Platoâs allegory.
Capitalism “is a social order that necessitates the general acceptance of an inverted understanding of itself… Reality [needs to be] turned on its head. But this is not, as Vanessa Wills notes, a problem of âepistemic hygieneâ. The root of the âerrorâ is not in our minds, that is, in our reflection of the objective phenomena at hand. As Iâve argued previously, âit is much deeper than this; the inversion or âmistakeâ is in the world itself⌠This world reflects itself through an upside-down appearance, and it must necessarily do so to continuously reproduce itself.â
As Marx and Engels noted long ago,
âIf in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.â
Capitalist ideology is as capable of accepting truth as vampires are of consuming garlic. Truth, which almost always stands on the side of the masses, is its Achilles heel.
Shift in the dominant ideological apparatuses
The institutions that disseminate and enculturate us into bourgeois ideology, however, donât all play an equal role. Some are far more influential than others. In the medieval world the church was, without a doubt, the âdominant Ideological State Apparatusâ (ISA). In the transition to the modern world, as Louis Althusser notes, âthe Ideological State Apparatus which has been installed in the dominant position in mature capitalist social formations as a result of a violent political and ideological class struggle against the old dominant Ideological State Apparatus, is the educational ideological apparatus.â Schools would come to replace the church as the institutional cornerstone of bourgeois ideology â the most dominant force for the reproduction of bourgeois hegemony.â
In some ways this is still the case. It is in the universities, for instance, where the ideas trafficked by popular culture are first developed in their utmost coherence. It is impossible to conceive of âwokeismâ, todayâs dominant form of liberal cultural intercourse, without the laying of its ideological foundations decades ago in the academy with the CIA manufactured compatible left. The âidentity politicsâ and âcancel cultureâ so popularly debated in TV late-night roundtable discussions is far from being rooted in the communist tradition. Quite the opposite, that which today is called communism by the rightist pundits was explicitly produced to challenge Marxism. They were tasked with the role of being âradical recuperators,â as Gabriel Rockhill calls them. Their job was (and is) to recuperate dissenting attitudes in the masses, especially young people, into the pro-imperialist anti-communist fold. As Michael Parenti correctly observed, these ABC (Anything But Class) theorists are tasked with developing âconceptual schemas that mute Marxismâs class analysis.â
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However, in the last decade a new ideological terrain has obtained the dominant position within bourgeois hegemony: social media. The average American today spends around two to three hours on social media. While for a select few it might just be filled with innocent pictures of cute cats, for the vast majority of people social media plays a role akin to a technological polis â a place where the battle of ideas, or better yet, the dissemination of the dominant ideas, occurs.
While schools might still create the ideological foundation people are enculturated into, they often find themselves unable to comment on pressing issues of the day (with the exception, of course, of universities). Through social media, on the other hand, one encounters nonstop active manipulation on on-going events, with its scope and consistency far outweighing the influence university discussions on political affairs might have. Its impact, however, cannot simply be understood through quantitative metrics. Qualitatively, these social medias have revolutionized how we create our identities. As I have previously written,
“We live in a time of profiles. Who we are, our identity, is deeply embedded in the curation of our profiles for general peers, those âusersâ who validate our content through various interactive means (likes, shares, retweets, etc.). Our future posts are influenced by the reaction of previous posts. Those which tend to do good are repeated, those which donât are not (often these are deleted outright). The dialectical interdependency of the individual and the social obtains a new form in the age of profilicity. Through these âsocial validation feedback loopsâ (termed as such by Facebook president Sean Parker) we adjust our content to the reception of the general peer. Our identity is crafted with an eye to how we are âseen as being seenâ. Second order observation becomes the norm; all judgement is subject to some degree of mediation by how the thing judged is seen by the general peer. These are some of the central insights of Hans Georg Moeller and Paul DâAmbrosioâs book, You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity. While it does have some blind spots (which I have hoped to bring light to in my work), it is without a doubt an essential text for understanding the dominant mode of identity technology in our day.”
Social media, profilicity, and ideological manipulation
The potential for ideological manipulation brought about by the emergence of profilicity is, in some ways, far more potent than ever before. Following the 2019 coup in Bolivia, when 68 thousand bot accounts were used to make the imperialist narrative viral on twitter, I did a case study of how social media manipulation was used to legitimize the coup. I wrote:
“The imperialist usage of bots and fake accounts engender an artificial general peer which functions as the condition for the possibility of imperialismâs control of a real one. This is because, at a certain nodal point, when the fake accounts and booster bots make something trend, the artificiality of the general peerâs reaction loses its artificial character, a real-people composed general peer picks up the baton from there and glazes the reaction with an âorganicâ and âspontaneousâ vestment. In the age of profilicity, imperialismâs ability to control general peers is an indispensable tool for the attainment of its ends.”
Censorship is an integral component working in conjunction with controlling what is seen through the usage of bots and other forms of boosting pro-establishment narratives. On all major social media platforms (yes, even on Elon Muskâs so-called free speech loving âXâ), those accounts with substantial following that challenge the imperialist narrative on key issues are often outright banned.[2] It is a very interestingly functioning tech-polis, where certain speakers are given a microphone to speak over others, others are muted or lowered to a virtually inaudible volume, while others are poof, disappeared completely. The Institute I work for is not unacquainted with these censorship tactics. Seven of our tiktok accounts, the platform we received hundreds of thousands of followers and millions of views in, have been outright banned. As Edward Smith, Noah Khrachvik, and myself have previously noted, “Those who keep our people misinformed and ignorant, who have made their lifeâs purpose to attack truth-tellers, do so under the insidiously categorized guise of âcombating misinformation.â In their topsy-turvy invented reality, as Michael Parenti called it, they posit themselves as the champions of truth and free speechâa paradox as laughable as a vegan butcher⌔[In the capitalist-imperialist mode of life], the freedom of speech and media is, therefore, actually the freedom of pro-capitalist speech and media. V. I. Leninâs description of the media in capitalist society rings truer than ever in the 2020s, it is dominated by an âatmosphere of lies and deception in the name of the âfreedom and equalityâ of capital, equality of the starved and the overfed.â Any absolute statements about the freedom of the press must be followed by the Leninist question: âfreedom of the press⌠for which class?â The capitalist mediaâs freedom to deceive the masses in their defense of the existing order is in contradiction to the massesâ interests in searching for and publicizing the truth. The power to control the flow of ideas through these various means makes social media, as the dominant (or, at least, one of the dominant) ideological terrains of our day, virtually (pun intended) unmatched.
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Online war of positions
What is the best way to wage the war of positions online? Is condemning everyone we donât perfectly agree with as being whatever buzzword is popular the way to go? Clearly, this purity fetish mode of engagement, as I have argued before, leaves you surrounded only by those whom you already agree with. You reduce the pedagogic and recruiting tasks of the communist to someone who just sings to the choir. The battle of ideas, the war of positions, is fundamentally rooted in convincing. You cannot shame someone into agreeing with you. Talking down to working people with middle class patronizing attitudes is quite literally the opposite of what a successful war of positions looks like. You do not want the HR or DEI managerial departments to be the first thing someone thinks of when they speak to you. Quite the opposite.
Perhaps it is less of a question of ignorance on Tateâs part, and more one of an awareness of his class interests as a part of the (often mocked) new bourgeoisie. Either way, the result is the same, a stifled understanding of that phenomenon we have gravitated to as a âpoint of contact,â and an individualized formulation of âescaping the matrixâ through getting rich yourself (a gig that through âHustlers Universityâ he greatly profits from). Tate did not create this form of radical recuperation, and neither is he the only one that preaches it today. It is central to what Dubois called the American Assumption, the notion that through hard work one can lift themselves up and become rich. The difference is that in the 19th and 20th century this ideology occurred within the confines of a direct apologetics of US capitalism. Post-1848 capitalism enters a distinctly reactionary stage, where even the veneer of progressivism that dominated the previous period is undone. In this post-1848 world, As Georg LukĂĄcs long ago noted, the defense of capitalism has to, in one form or another, present itself as an âindirect apologeticsâ. The superficial and culturalist critique of an often misidentified âcapitalismâ (or matrix) has become an essential component for acquiescence to the system the critique takes as its object of critique.
What has occurred in the Tate commentary is precisely what Gramsci expects of us in the war of positions. We located the rational kernel and, on the basis of a superior understanding of the phenomenon, dislocated it from the Tateian worldview and towards a Marxist one. In the process we showed the role Tate plays as a radical recuperador for the âmatrixâ he, in a very sophist-like manner, charges people to help âescapeâ.
After this video came out hordes of the liberals who think a hammer and sickle in their social media bios makes them communists came after us for âplatformingâ Tate and lending credence to his ideas. This criticism, of course, is devoid of any semblance of the Marxist understanding of the war of positions. Neither the convincing of Tate himself, nor the sharing of his ideas, were the purpose of the video. What the video achieves (or at least attempts to), is quite literally the opposite â to be as efficient as possible in bringing people away from Tate and towards Marxism. One can argue that I failed in this enterprise, that a better job could have been done. But not deny, however, that this is the best route for combatting ideological opponents. It produces a double whammy, a removal of a follower to your opponent and an addition of a follower to your revolutionary project. This is the same double effect the black proletariatâs general strike during the Civil War had (removing the productive base of the Southern economy while adding soldiered, spies, and workers to the Northern forces), allowing them to win the battle for the forces of human liberation.
Tate is far from being the only individual we ought to be doing this with. At the Institute, every major pundit of the bourgeoisie, even those who present themselves as âanti-establishmentâ and âanti-Deep stateâ, receive this treatment. We have commented in like manner on figures all across the American bourgeois political spectrum, from David Packman to Ben Shapiro to Jordan Peterson. In each case we attempt, again, to find the point of contact (rational kernels) that can be dislocated from these worldviews and rearticulated towards Marxism. Engaging with these figures is also an excellent source for overcoming the algorithmic insularity that structures online spaces. People who wouldnât encounter Marxist positions in their algorithms are opened to the possibility of this encounter when we discuss the ideologues that denizen their algorithms.
Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE.