Doublethink, the Ideological State Apparatus, and Hegemony
Orwell, Althusser, and Gramsci: Understanding ideology in the terminal path dependency of American neoliberalism
Orwell, Althusser, and Gramsci
three superbad muthafuckers of post-Marxist social theory
“Orwellian,” like “Kafkaesque,” is an adjective that occasionally suffers from overuse but only because no other words can substitute for it. The novel 1984 is such an enduring vision of dystopia because it foresees a world based on two key features: torture and violence, and the control of language. The former is easily understood. It has been a key feature of American life since Plymouth Rock, the essence of its continental expansion, inherent in its overseas colonization, and central to its foreign policy with vassal states abroad since World War II. It is still a key feature of the School of the Americas at Ft. Benning Georgia. Or, as it is known in Latin American military circles, "la Escuela de Golpes" - the School of Coups.
Since Abu Graib, torture has become a practice the United States employs in theaters of war or other regions of the world under its control, like Guantanamo Bay. The latter feature of control of language in 1984, however, is a narrative innovation. The word “Orwellian” has the power and economy it does because no other word can stand in so well for meaning one thing and saying the opposite in furtherance of political objectives. This process is called doublethink.
Orwell lays out the precise psychological operation of double think as such:
“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them…to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again the moment it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again…That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then…to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.”
Doublethink in 1984 was induced by trauma-based mind control. Doublethink for really multi-Olympiad gold medal level partisan whoring like that of Obama, silver medal level like that of Panetta, and bronze medal level like that of Morell is based on attraction not trauma. Its attractiveness, the path of least resistance to wealth, power, and prestige for the vaunted stars of a tyrannical meritocracy is obvious and within their grasp: to service the system and not attempt to change it or criticize it from sociological, aesthetic, or prophetical traditions. These budding technocrats and mature stars may bring different faces to higher places and they may even sincerely believe themselves to be enacting Bentham’s “fundamental axiom” that the “greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.” They may even believe the “occasional” lie they tell to be noble ones. In their minds earning fat hourly rates that get paid assiduously and hustling big money donations for their foundations and think tanks are just means to an end.
There seem to be a finite number of ways one party can impose their will on another. There is a continuum of violence: actual violence, the threat of violence or incarceration, begrudging consent, indifferent consent, and enthusiastic consent. Althusser calls the government, administration, military, police, judiciary, and prisons the “repressive state apparatus.” Since they “function by violence” and non-physical repression they are too obvious to need much elucidation for the purposes of this essay.
More conceptually complicated, however, is the ideological component, the information war, the disinformation governance regime. It matters profoundly whether one is a producer and re-producer of that ideology-war-regime or a consumer of it. Obama, Panetta, and Morell are high level re-producers. They willingly reproduce it out of an attraction to the wealth, power, and prestige it can provide even when they consider their lies noble one or perhaps they may occlude it a little bit as a lie to themselves through some level of doublespeak. The responsibilities inherent in its reproduction by such high-level operatives makes them and their ilk uniquely blind to the foibles, lacunae, suicidal impulses and - now – terminal state of the ideology. By buying into the system, they exclude any alternatives that the system has already foreclosed.
Althusser also identifies the ideological state apparatus: religion, education, the family, the legal system, the political system including parties, labor unions, communications en bloc (he included “press, radio and television, etc.” and probably would have included the internet and social media), and culture (“literature, the arts, sports, etc”). Althusser states that “what distinguishes the ideological state apparatus from the repressive state apparatus is…the repressive state apparatus functions by violence, whereas the ideological state apparatuses function by ideology.” His list of the different types of ideological state apparatus is as good a working list as any.
Another theorist of manufactured consent is Gramsci who devised the hugely influential notion of hegemony. This is the process by which the ruling class generalizes its class interest as the interest of society as a whole by providing for a least some of the needs of the subordinate classes in the process of their leadership. It resides in “the equilibrium between consent and coercion.”
That equilibrium is starkly laid out in 1984 with its key features of torture and violence, and the control of language. While 1984 has been getting all the attention lately since the phrase disinformation governance board was a joke writing its own punchline, no one should neglect that novel’s first cousin, Brave New World. Huxley’s dystopian classic probably describes a society motivating consent in ways much more like contemporary western consumer society than 1984: sex, drugs, amusements, and medicalized social engineering. In fact, the 1985 classic Amusing Ourselves to Death grew out of a talk Neil Postman gave arguing that Brave New World is a better description of modern American society than 1984. Although the specific references might be dated, the gist of it remains as relevant as ever. It really only lacks any discussion about the impact of the internet and social media.
Although Obama, Panetta, and Morell, and company might be reproducing ideology at a very high and influential level, in consuming ideology we plebians also reproduce it. If I were to say whether the general population in America is giving a begrudging, indifferent, or enthusiastic consent to the social, cultural, and material conditions of their lives, I would call it indifferent at best. The late 19th century had its robber barons. The immediate post WW II era had Mills’ power elite. Today has its the 1% and Davos Man. This young imperial republic has always had its rich and powerful and they have long used the government to get richer and more powerful. The populists, anarchists, socialists, communists, social movements, and labor unions gave us some respite from the Robber Barons and the political pressure necessary to enact the New Deal. Social movements ended Jim Crow with the Civil Rights Act, recast the New Deal as the Great Society, and hinted at amazing new worlds with the counterculture.
The counterrevolution began in 1971 with the Powell memo. It laid out a clear and actionable blueprint for the corporate takeover of democracy and offered an outline of political neoliberalism. Its author was rewarded with a seat on the Supreme Court and the red team was the first to put this plan into action. The genius of neoliberalism since Regan has been to steadily withdraw from the life from the people all of the good and necessary things that usually cultivate a happier than indifferent consent from the governed.
Although the blue team was tardy in catching up by the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Democratic Leadership Council’s agenda of achieving fundraising parity with Republicans by serving the same corporate interests provided a road map for political neoliberalism for their side as well. Both strands shared a common imperative of maximizing profits by reducing labor costs and creating globe-spanning “just in time” supply lines, offshoring productive capacity, and hollowing out the manufacturing base in favor of the finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) sector, and turning the labor force into a grossly underpaid clerical-service precariot, 36% of whom are in the gig economy.
There are numerous centers of power above and behind nation-states, and the political class, Big Media, Big Tech, and the bloviating punditocracy as their playthings. At the highest levels of those sectors they know this to be true and who they exist to serve. Western oligarchs have gained complete and total control over the national governments of the classic “core states of global capitalism” and subordinated the interests of the people in “representative democracies” beneath those of the nation-state which they use as tools to serve themselves.
Neoliberal international finance capital in a supra-national corporate kleptocracy privatizes the benefits, socializes the costs, encloses the commons, gives spondulicks aplenty to the well-connected, and privatizes the cost of living (food, shelter, transportation, education, etc) in a fashion as aggressive and unrelenting as possible. They say we get the political leadership we deserve, a sentiment akin to Benjamin Franklin’s famous quip after the Constitutional Convention. When asked what kind of nation young America would have he answered “A republic, if you can keep it.”
The average American could probably intuit or list dozens of things that need to change drastically and soon if America is to avoid ruin in the very near future. Unfortunately, there are a few interrelated prerequisite steps that need to be taken first before that process can begin. Even these seem well-nigh impossible. Citizens United, the Supreme Court precedent allowing unlimited amounts of corporate cash to flood into the political process, must be overturned. The high cost of elections has to end by instituting publicly financed elections. Ranked choice voting and other electoral reforms must break the duopoly’s stranglehold on power and give other parties a chance to win races. Corporate lobbying has to be dramatically curtailed and it is imperative that the revolving door between Congress and K Street be bolted shut.
Short of widespread labor militancy or sustained mass direct action, there is no conceivable scenario under which these basic reforms could possibly take place and remove the obscene amounts of money in American politics out of the system. What makes Biden uniquely appropriate for the times is that he has spent four decades trying to satisfy his ambition to become president of a system whose sole purpose over that same period has been to extract as much surplus value as possible without resorting to coercion on a grand scale or precipitating revolution.
As sublimely successful as the system has been at it over all these years, now, like Joe Biden’s mind reeling from rapid onset dementia, it is singularly blank and utterly without ideas, resilience, or the ability to forestall its own self-devastation, in a trap of its own making at the end of the line of terminal path dependency. Indeed, the monetary authorities have dispensed with the previously slow and complicated processes of extracting surplus value from the people. Now, they simply give trillions of dollars to the big banks and hedge funds while assuring the useless eaters that they cannot aspire to nice things ever. Biden serves as the mediating buffer between the oligarchs and a citizenry almost entirely too ill-educated, amused to death, exhausted, and atomized to even begin to imagine a better world. How incomparably atrocious Biden is as a person or politician, or how instrumentally responsible he is for much of the legislation that keeps us all incarcerated or in debt peonage does not seem to matter to anyone, least of all to the corporatist DNC Democrats.