Marx, Ideology, and Counter-Culture

Rebelling against society isn't going to save our civilization

I recently wrote about the counter-cultural idea, and the role that its played in American culture over the last 60 years. My contention is that the counterculture’s ethos, sensibility, and politics have become the dominant force in mainstream American Culture.¹

Part of the way that this happened is through the mainstreaming of counterculture politics. Marx had this idea that in every society with a system of exploitation there existed something like story, or a body of doctrines, which was sued to justify the existence of the system and explain why the system wasn’t exploitative, or that people weren’t really being exploited. Marx called this “Ideology.” If people could be convinced to accept this Ideology, they would believe that the system was justified and would be unable to see that they were really being exploited.

By way of example, Marx thought that the capitalist class exploited the working class through stealing the surplus values of the workers. This is because the capitalist class owned all the factories and good land and would pay the worker who worked the land and ran the factories a subsistence wage while taking all the abundant largess of profit for themselves. Marx thought the solution to this was for the workers to seize “the means of production” and take ownership of the factories for themselves and then distribute the profits among themselves rather then letting the capitalists take all the profits. For Marx, the reason that the workers didn’t do this was because they had adopted the ideology of capitalism which claimed capitalism was good, produced the most wealth, was fair, and so on. Marx thought that in order to defeat capitalism workers needed to be shown that capitalist ideology was false so that the worker would reject it and come to see where their true interest lie. He thought that the workers realized their interest lie in over throwing the system, they would overthrow capitalism.

As such Marx thought that one of the most important things a revolutionary could do was to engage in the ruthless criticism of this ideology, making it visible and then criticizing it so people could see that they had adopted the ideology of the ruling class. The problem was that Marxists of various sorts went about criticizing capitalist ideology for decades and yet the workers never seemed to want to overthrow capitalism.

Rather then give up on the theory of ideology altogether, various neo-marxists (including Gramsci, The members of the Frankfurt school, and others) began to think that the ideology was far more pervasive and all encompassing then they had originally suspected. As such they began to theorize that ideology was not merely a set of ideas floating around in the culture, but rather that the entire culture itself just was an all-encompassing system of ideology. They thought that mass media, including publishing houses, radio, television, advertising, the entertainment industry, and every other culture producing structure or institutions was part of an apparatus of cultural reproduction that created a culture whose main function was to reproduce faith in the system. This was made possible by what Antonio Gramsci called a “cultural hegemony,” which is best thought of as a sort of cultural and institutional dominance. Gramsci thought the ruling class used its cultural dominance to embed its values, beliefs, and doctrines throughout the entire society and make ruling class ideology the default view for the whole society. On this view it is no longer the explicitly stated idea of capitalist economics or bourgeois values that need to be criticized, but rather the entire culture as whole that needs to be criticized and unmasked as the system of ideology that it really is.

One could use the movie The Matrix and a nice analogy. According to the counterculture analysis that I have laid out, attempting to engage in social and political change by reforming the system from within is the equivalent of trying to making life better by making changes to the condition inside The Matrix: you can do it, but your still trapped in the Matrix and you’re not really free. The solution then is to try to “take the redpill,” and escape the Matrix. This is why the counterculture rebels of the 60’s were always talking about the need to “free your mind.”

The theory of the entire society as an enormous system of repression is found in common lyrics. For example Sum 41 wrote:

“I don't wanna waste my time
Become another casualty of society
I'll never fall in line
Become another victim of your conformity and back down”²

Well, what is one supposed to do to avoid becoming a victim of society and being forced to fall in line with they system? The answer is not incremental political reform, changing the laws or the institutions is not going to fix the problem, you need to “free your mind.” Again you can see this counter-cultural sentiment in common lyrics. For example, the Beatles wrote:

“You say you'll change the constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it's the institution
Well, you know
You'd better free your mind instead”³

This way of thinking had the effect of producing wave after wave of various version of counter-cultural politics which had as their goal telling that to “wake up,” “take the red pill,” “free your mind,” and “escape the matrix,” was the most important sort of political action one could take. This sort of cultural politics became enormously influential. As John Searle wrote in 1993:

“During the 1960s a fairly sizable number of leftist intellectuals became convinced that the best arena of social change was culture-that high culture in general, and university departments of literature in particular, could become important weapons in the struggle to overcome racism, imperialism, etc. We are now witnessing some of the consequences of this migration. As someone-I think it was Irving Howe-remarked, it is characteristic of this generation of radicals that they don't want to take over the country; they want to take over the English department. But, I would add, they think taking over the English department is the first step toward taking over the country.”⁴

Having been convinced that the entire culture is a system of ideology, attempting to fix the system is simply to make improvements to the jail cell that one is trapped in. It is like putting a fresh coat of paint on the inside of a jail cell. As such any reform to the system is a hopeless endeavor and therefore any traditional avenue of social improvement (passing new laws, improving the education system, vocational training, etc) becomes futile. Searle saw this sentiment in action. In speaking about the politicization of an academic conference Searle wrote:

“My guess is that many of the participants at the Modern Language Association conferences have lost interest in doing what they are officially supposed to be doing, so they do something else, such as advance progressive political causes. My impression is that they do not believe that the scholarly study of modern languages and their literatures is worth devoting their lives to, so they devote themselves to activities that seem more worthwhile.”⁵

The reason that they think their scholarship is futile is because publishing great work in scholarly journals is to simply engage in work that still accepts the system as legitimate. Publishing in journals, trying to be a good teacher, getting tenure, and a host of other activities only serve to legitimize the University system which is, on the countercultural view, just another piece of the enormous and all-encompassing system of ideology. For the counterculture rebel the better move is the view the university as a place of political struggle, and to use ones position in that institution as position from which to launch critiques of the legitimacy of the entire system; including (and perhaps especially) the University itself.

Henry Giroux make this point explicitly when he says “So it seems to me that what Bloom and E.D. Hirsch Jr. did—along with Dianne Ravitch, John Silber, Chester Finn Jr., and William Bennett—was really to help us rethink schooling as a form of cultural politics—as opposed to simply thinking of it as a form of cultural domination. They certainly forced me, among others, to rethink how we were going to redefine schools as sites of struggle, where power is productive and where the axis isn't simply between reproduction and resistance.”⁶

The prevalence of this view has some profound consequences.

First off, the idea that culture is an all-encompassing system of ideology ahs as its result, as Ben Lockhard wrote, that “Suddenly about five years ago, the whole academy seemed to have accepted as axiomatic the assertion that "Everything is Political." This self-evident universal truth came to be uttered frequently in response to complaints from a few recalcitrant professors who objected when other professors used their scholarly publications and their courses to promote their political views. The response was that, since everything is political, all scholarship and all teaching inevitably promote political views.”⁷ This view follows as a direct consequence from the view that the entire culture is an enormous system of ideology. Everything become intensely political because everything is seen as either complicit with, or in opposition to, “the system.”

The second is that it creates a situation in which valorizes transgression for it’s own sake. If you begin to think that the entire culture is a system of repression, then anything that violates the rules, norms, etiquette, values, beliefs, taboos, and laws of the existing culture comes to been seen as an act of justifiable rebellion. This is why we end of up books like “A Defense of Looting.” If the system is unjust then violating its laws comes to be seen as an example of taking a sledgehammer to the machine of oppression. Transgressive behavior comes to be valorized for its own sake and all taboos are seen as nothing more than repressive mechanisms of social control. This results in the weakening of taboos against anti-social and evil ideas. For example, social taboos and norms against having oversexualized drag queens showing up in elementary schools or the expounding of antisemitic conspiracy theories are transgressed by people who insist that prohibitions against such things are merely attempts to control other people.

A third consequence of this is that people no longer discuss issues on the merits of the issue, but rather seek to analyze a given issue, event situation, or idea on the basis of whatever political valence it has. This emerges as a sort of “tell me the politics and I’ll tell you which side I’m on.” Rarely do we have authentic disagreements mediated by discussion of first principles, but rather we devolve into meta-level discussion in which participants seeks to use the issue of the day to fight a battle for position in the culture. What matters is not what is true, but rather which politics are legitimized by a particular “discourse” gaining prominence. This is why we see a proliferation of criticism which proceeds by pointing out which political agenda might be empowered by stipulating to the truth of some claim or other. So what comes to matter is not whether the claim is true, but rather which politics are legitimated by the acceptance of a claim.

The last consequence that I’ll mention here is elevation of the importance of purely symbolic politics. When the culture is seen as an all-encompassing system of ideology the most important thing is to get out counter-cultural messaging that wakes people up and gets social traction. As such, symbolic politics that accomplish nothing in a material sense, but which none the less create discourse and gain social traction become extremely important. The best example of this is when during COVID Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez showed up to one of the most exclusive and culturally elite events in America, The Met Gala, wearing a $10,000 dress that said “tax the rich.” Never mind the fact that she was a wealthy and famous person who was allowed to walk around wearing a $10,000 dress while remaining unmasked as the waitstaff who could never afford such a dress had to stand in the background of her photos with their masks on. That hypocrisy was galling, but it made no difference. What mattered is that she got out the message in a way which validated the political discourse of her supporters. This was seen as a tremendously important symbolic victory and an important act of activism in certain quarters. None of the impoverished mask wearing waitstaff saw any improvement in their lives because of this, but AOC did get lots of attention and generated a lot of discourse. When the whole world is stuck in the Matrix then Red Pilling them with a $10,000 dress is viewed as an act of bravery.

I’m not a cultural nihilist, and I do not think that culture does not matter; I have no illusions about cultural power. What I do think is that there is no reason to think the culture has the sort of power over thought that the counter-cultural rebels attribute to it, and it is useless to spend all ones social capital trying to fight for ownership of a system of cultural control that simply does not exist. What we really need is not to fight for control of the system, we need to provide a vision that can act as a moral compass to orient the values of our social and cultural institutions so that they can function for the better of our civilization. This means that we don’t need to fight over they system, or generate new idea about how the system is even more insidious and subtle than we thought.

Rather, what we need to do is realize that we are already “outside the Matrix.” Everyone is aware of the influence of culture, the problem is to figure out what we are going to use as the point of reference by which out civilization will be oriented. We are not stuck in the Matrix, we are a ship lost at sea, and we need to figure out how to find our way.

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance.

1. This entire essay, as with the previous essay, is influenced by the work of Joseph Heath which I cited extensively in the last essay. For this essay I will simply note his influence here rather then citing all the ideas I cited in the last essay, but for those who want to know the resources here are:

Joseph Heath, When does Critical Theory Become Conspiracy Theory? https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6024-4371 p.14

Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell, Harper Perennial (Kindle edition)

Joseph Heath, Cooperation and Social Justice, University of Toronto Press (2022)

2. Sum 41 - Fat Lip

3. The Beatles - Revolution

4. John R. Searle: Is There a Crisis in American Higher Education? Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , Jan., 1993, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Jan., 1993), p. 35-36

5. John R. Searle: Is There a Crisis in American Higher Education? Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , Jan., 1993, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Jan., 1993), p. 43

6. Henry A. Giroux, Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education 2nd ed. Routledge (2005) . P. 127

7. Ben Lockerd, Everything is Political, Grand Valley Review, Vol.1, Issue 10. p.9