This is the third post of three on the illusion of liberal freedom in Canada. The first was on Canadian imperialism abroad and the wealth it brings back to Canada. The second was on direct forms of domestic control. The third is about how even thought is not free, it’s about some of the ways in which the structure of capitalism itself produces capitalist forms of consciousness.
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“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.” – Karl Marx
“This is not a time to commit sociology” – Stephen Harper (Canadian Prime Minister)
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Capitalist Philosophy
The central philosophy of capitalism is Liberalism. Liberalism contends that society is made up of individuals who are independent and have equal capacities. Everyone has the ability to create their own lives, interpret and create the world around them as they wish and all have a fair opportunity to be successful, whatever “success” may mean to each individual. If one does not create the life they want, that is because of their own individual limitations. Ideas are supposedly produced and interact freely in society. In this view, dominant ideas survive because of success in convincing society by argument. It ignores how classes and their struggles shape philosophical trends in Capitalism.
The reality is that capitalism is a socio-economic system divided into classes, divided around property forms, just as much as other class systems such as feudalism and slavery. The capitalist class (owners of businesses) is the dominant class and the wage-earning proletariat is the exploited class. No philosophy can be dominant in any society divided into class if it’s not suited to the possessing class. A class that controls property will control media, information and culture. A class that controls these then controls ideas. Liberalism has many surface expressions but it can always be reduced to its support for class relations of owners of individual private property in competition in the market place. Capitalism uses the liberal lie of free thought and a distorted individualism to dominate the thought of society.
The roots of liberalism’s focus on the individual are not actually in a belief in absolute freedom of possibilities of human thought and action, nor a desire to see full, free development of individuals in a society. Human thought does not come about from a pure abstraction, plucked out at a whim from an infinite pool of possibilities, especially in class society. It is rooted in the actual conditions of human life. One of the central conditions of modern life is that of capitalist property relations and the methods, both ideological and practical, that the capitalist class can use to maintain their power. The methods available within capitalist relations are not infinite. These are relations of individual owners competing against each other and paying individual wage-earners who also compete as individuals for their living (ie. employment, wages etc.). Liberalism is the philosophy that protects these individual property owners right to use their resources without social control. Individual property rights are its central, most protected expression of individualism.
Liberal philosophy is required to convince the masses to accept that the capitalist class deserves to maintain its property and to use that property as it desires. Because of the competitive nature of capitalism, business owners are not simply content to maintain their property rights, they must even put themselves against simple regulations of business activities. Capitalism does not offer a guarantee of continued property rights to any particular individual as feudalism did. The capitalists’ interest in profit is not solely about greed, they must maintain a higher profit rate than their competitors or they will eventually go out of business. Consequently, social regulations on business are a threat and must be crossed or removed. Whether they are regulations on environmental destruction, worker’s rights or a host of other issues, capitalism’s philosophy must fight for its monopoly not just against socialist forms of property, but even against ideas on social control which only limit property owners’ ability to use their property in ways they see fit to make a greater profit than their competitors. Privatisation and de-regulation are contrasted with public control and the common good as mere philosophical viewpoints or lifestyles of individuals, rather than as interests of the powerful.
The masses must be philosophically conquered to make a class structure stable. Intending to protect their interests, capitalists then search for ways to deceive the masses. Since capitalism requires individual property rights for the capitalists, liberal philosophy claims to uphold individual rights of all forms. Everyone has certain personal interests that are particular to them. Liberalism takes all these individual desires and interpretations of self and manipulatively puts them under the false umbrella term of “individualism” along with individualism in property rights. Claiming to serve the interests of individual expression, liberalism then uses this as a smokescreen to protect capitalist class interests and to attack the interests of the working class. For example, an individual’s artistic taste in a particular sphere may not necessarily clash with elite interests and may not be attacked, but such areas are not what are actually in contention. However, the interest of individual members of the working class in preventing environmental destruction is bound to go against the interests of business profits. So regulations and ideas against destructive activity will consistently be attacked. Thus the individualism of the capitalist class is intentionally connected with more benign, creative forms of individualism of the masses, with the intention of protecting the elite interest against the interests of the masses where there is a conflict, such as profits and the environment. Many join in, thinking it is their creative individuality that is being defended rather than individual property. Individual interest is protected in cases where it is neutral or in favor of individuals in the capitalist class but not when they conflict.
The Lie of Liberalism
The lie of liberalism is the putting forward of a facade ideology of complete freedom of thought which in reality rests on economic relations of necessity, or lack of freedom. This is a fundamental contradiction. The working class is told it lives in the domain of intellectual freedom. But the actually existing domain of property, and consequently power and ideology, is characterized by specific class interests and the restricted economic necessity produced by competition in the marketplace. If those in power must maintain their power in specific ways, they need specific forms of ideological justification that suit it. To dominate, even the ruling class is not free to use simply whatever ideology it wants.
No philosophy is independent of the class relations that constitute that society. Therefore, of the two domains, thought and objective class relations, restricted economic necessity (competition) of the capitalist dominates and proves the lie of the supposed liberal intellectual freedom in society. Consequently, capitalism’s very structure causes specific modes of thought and ideological beliefs. Because various ideas cover such an array of topics, they appear as produced in a liberal battle of ideas, where individual ideas are produced independently and some hold sway because of the strength of the argument or the charisma of those spreading the ideas. The class-structural basis is obscured, frequently even to elite comprehension. Then the connections between ideas on racism, bourgeois forms of feminism, consumerism or hyper-individualism become obscured as does the relation to their common base in conditions of life and class structure. A conception of a liberal battle of individual modes of thought is substituted in and a structural understanding of how dominant philosophies are produced by real material and social relations is lost. Ideas do not come out of nowhere. Even if wildly distorted, they are representations of sectors of society pursuing what they find to be in there interest, both good and bad, but especially of sectors that have the ability to mobilize communications resources.
The Production Of Ideology
The root of many ideas are in fact derived from the possible methods that a propertied class has at its disposal to pursue its interests and needs, even though they are portrayed as external to class. Problems from extreme nationalism, to consumerism, to the view of humanity as a grouping above or opposed to nature are just a few. For example, one of the central conditions shaping how the capitalist class can go about attaining its interests is that of competition. Capitalism’s greatest strength, its competitive impulse for production quickly becomes one of its fundamental flaws.
As businesses compete with each other they are required to increase their access to markets and to more and cheaper resources. When all the markets and resources within the national domestic sphere are already tapped, the inevitable impulse is to find them in foreign lands, or indigenous lands within domestic borders. But foreign lands have populations, borders and armies that protect those borders. If economic tricks and pressure don’t succeed in attaining the desired concessions then direct military confrontation will ensue. If a war is required, then both the imperialist and imperialized country require ideologies to move the masses into support. The real motives of elite interest and competitive necessity are unsurprisingly ineffective at gaining support for war. Therefore, to win support, appeals to nationalism and racism are made as they are two of the most effective war drums. In the struggle for energy, the Middle East has a central focus. In the west, support has effectively been drummed up by calls to national security and protection of our liberal “freedom.” The Islamophobia, anti-arab racism and hyper-nationalism of the recent decades are not expressions of specific ideas winning out in an open intellectual competition. They are ideologies of elite interest and are the natural and necessary productions of the imperialism inherent to capitalist class relations. The same goes for the recent crackdown on domestic freedoms and rapidly expanding secret powers and activities of secret intelligence services. Circle discussions, society wide appeals to conscience and spiritual rituals will never remove any of these destructive ideologies structured into capitalism.
Consumerism follows a similar pattern. Consumerism is also not produced in a cultural battle of ideas any more than it is an expression of a contaminated “spirit.” Competition between capitalists, both big and small, international and local, threatens the capitalists with the loss of their property if they can’t maintain the profit level of their competitors. The result is a battle for market share. This requires selling, selling, selling. Selling requires advertising, advertising, advertising. Advertising then takes over all space that it can, newspapers, sports jerseys, billboards, magazines, tv, the internet and just about anywhere one can think of. The natural consequence is consumerism in society. Vast social problems build up in a society that directs people to find happiness in consumerism. These problems themselves, from crime to eating disorders and many more, are then blamed purely on the individual as well. Social causes are frantically hidden and we get instructed by Stephen Harper not to “commit sociology.” Liberal individualism reaches full circle as moral justification for the problems it creates and moral reprimand against attempts to find a real solution.
One of the ultimate results of these structural forces is an atomized society which expands individualism well beyond its proper context. It leaves a broken social life where many are frequently incapable of relating to their fellow human beings as humans with their own desires and feelings, but instead as objects for individual personal gain or as commodities. Periodically, at the needs of the elite, communal sentiments natural to humans re-emerge but take on distorted forms. Instead of uniting the working class in common interest in constructing a classless society, we become united in harmful ways. United by color of skin against others, united by religion against others, united as the law-abiding middle-class in its contempt for the criminal poor, as men against women. All semblance of a healthy human balance of the interrelation of the individual to the communal is lost and replaced by antagonistic relations of the individual against individual, communal against communal and individual against communal. All at the desire of elite interest.
These are just a few illustrative examples of the production of ideology under capitalism. Different ideas can have differing roots. But the common factor to all dominant ideas is they are formed or distorted by the methods with which the elite class is capable of attaining its interests and maintaining itself as the elite class. Consequently capitalist class ideology is not the same as that of a slave-owning class. This is because they can’t maintain their power with the same methods. But just as elite classes produce ideologies based on how their position is maintained, the exploited class will develop ideas on how it can combat this form of domination.
Currently the ideas on solutions are as dominated by class thought as the problems themselves. The dominantly promoted solutions are individualized as well. As opposed to structural understanding and collective, class action towards structural overhaul and revolution, dominant theory on promoting change is thoroughly individual and liberal or sometimes “anarchist”. Society tells us change will come through actions such as personal lifestyle changes, consumer purchasing choices, small daily acts of kindness like hugs and compliments, all of which gradually add up to an abstract revolutionary change in consciousness. As this approach leads to unmitigated failure, more and more will be forced to reach the conclusions of the necessity for acting as a class. Uniting and coordinating actions together with the aim of raising class consciousness. Fighting together, failing and succeeding as a class teaches the working class about its own common interest and strength when it is effectively organized. It will also show the power of the capitalist class and how it will stop at nothing to hold its power when threatened. In building class-consciousness, collective actions provide the working class with the theoretical and direct practical experience needed to recognize our inherently antagonistic relations with the exploiting class. It will show that a ruling class never compromises when it comes to its vital interests and the only way to break through this barrier is the defeat of capitalism and the construction of a classless society based on bottom-up control and social property.
A Socialist Perspective 