Ideology, Legitimacy and the New State

Yugoslavia, Serbia and Croatia

Sinisa Malesevic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136341830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A comparative analysis of the dominant ideologies and modes of legitimization in communist Yugoslavia and post-Communist Serbia and Croatia. The aim of the book is to identify and explain dominant normative and operative ideologies and principal modes of legitimization in these three case studies.

Part I

Theoretical Framework

1

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Ideology

THEORIES OF IDEOLOGY

Man is an ideological animal by nature.

L. Althusser

Almost all important reviews on ideology start from one of the two following assumptions: either there is no single acceptable defin-ition of the phenomenon, or the phenomenon itself, as McLellan observes, is ‘the most elusive concept in the whole of social science.’¹ Of course, both are true, as they are of any significant social and political concept, for example, culture, class, ethnicity, state. To use Gallie’s phrase, ² ideology is yet another ‘essentially contested’ concept. However, while some concepts (culture, state, community) are present in social and political theory regardless of particular theoretical tradi-tions, ideology belongs to the group of highly contestable idioms. Part of the explanation for this lies in the fact that the term ‘ideology’ is of relatively recent origin (appearing first in 1797 in the work of Destutt de Tracy) and, until recently, almost synonymous with the Marxist tradition of thought. This explains why the term ‘ideology’ was previously contested or neglected by Weberian, Paretian and other non-Marxist traditions, and why it continues to elicit opposition in most post-modernist writings.

I will here, first, review in brief how the concept of ideology was used in classical sociological theory, and how ideology has subse-quently been treated in contemporary social and political theory. Second, I will propose a taxonomy that identifies the main differ-ences between various concepts of ideology while simultaneously developing my theoretical position. Finally, I will demonstrate how ideology will be conceptualised and operationally defined in this study.

Marxist tradition

Of three ‘founding fathers’ of sociology, Durkheim, Marx and Weber, Karl Marx was the only one who developed a relatively coherent theory of ideology.³ As McLellan⁴ has emphasised, there are signifi-cant differences between Marx’s concept of ideology in the early writ-ings, particularly The German Ideology, and in his later work. Thus, Markus⁵ identifies three different ways in which ideology is used in Marx’s work: polemical, functional and critical-philosophical. In The German Ideology, the concept itself has a predominantly negative meaning, applied by Marx to discredit his opponents–‘ideological’ was synonymous with idealist, particularly as understood within the Hegelian tradition of thought. Ideologies were treated as illusory world-views, as camera obscura; to criticise them meant to ‘unmask’ a position that emphasised ideas and spirit as the driving force of history. However, as Giddens⁶ points out, ideology was also regarded as necessarily connected to domination. This is clearly stated in the well-known phrase that ‘the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas’. As Marx demonstrated: ‘during the time that the aristocracy was dominant, the concepts of honour, loyalty, etc. were dominant, during the dominance of the bourgeoisie [those became] the concepts [of] freedom, equality, etc’.⁷

In the Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Marx further elaborated and proposed a functional argument for this central idea developed in The German Ideology. Here the notion of ideology is treated much more widely and all practical ideas are seen as ones that have an ideological dimension. Marx explicitly states:

a distinction should always be made between the material transforma-tion of the economic conditions of production, which can be deter-mined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophical–in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.⁸

Ideology is identified as originating in class structure where the modes of production are seen as determinants of ‘the social, political and intellectual processes of life’. As another well-known and often-quoted phrase of Marx tells us, ‘it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness’.⁹

In Capital¹⁰ the concept of ideology is related to Marx’s general theory of capitalist society. Here, ideology is analysed as the type of social relations that are determined by the relations of production. This is particularly evident in Marx’s analysis of the fetishism of commodities. According to Marx, social relations in capitalism are regulated by autonomous interactions of the commodities produced by human beings. As Eagleton nicely summarises Marx’s argument:

By virtue of this ‘commodity fetishism’, real human relations appear, mystifyingly, as relations between things; and this has several conse-quences of an ideological kind. First, the real workings of society are thereby veiled and occluded: the social character of labour is concealed behind the circulation of commodities, which are no longer recognisable as social products. Secondly … society is fragmented by this commodity logic: it is no longer easy to grasp it as a totality, given the atomising operations of the commodity, which transmutes the collective activity of social labour into relations between dead, discrete things. And by ceasing to appear as a totality, the capitalist order renders itself less vulnerable to political critique. Finally, the fact that social life is dominated by inanimate entities lends it a spurious air of naturalness and inevitability: society is no longer perceptible as a human construct, and therefore as humanly alterable.¹¹

Although different, these three distinct meanings of ideology in Marx have one idea in common. That idea comes from his general theory of society and can be stated as follows: those ideas are ideological which have as their function the justification of the unequal distribu-tion of economic and social resources in particular (capitalist) forms of societies.

These three different meanings of ideology had an impact on the development of different Marxist theories of ideology. While Engels adheres to a narrower and more negative concept of ideology, that of ‘false consciousness’, which was later to become the hallmark of the Marxist approach to the phenomenon, thereby giving it a hard mate-rialist interpretation, Bernstein¹² revises the whole concept, empha-sising its more neutral dimension. For Bernstein, ideologies are all socially motivated sets of ideas, and Marxism was not an exception. A third position within Marxism is the one that gave ideology a more functional and positive meaning. In Lenin’s works we can see that there were only two competing ideologies: bourgeois and socialist. Since the workers cannot fully develop class consciousness, in Lenin’s view, socialist ideology has to be brought to them by ‘a body of profes-sional revolutionaries’. Lukacs continued this line of thought but developed a more sophisticated and idealist concept of ideology. For Lukacs¹³ the degree of class consciousness inherent in the working class was an indicator of its ideological maturity. The principal differ-ence between the two was that while Lenin relied more on Marx’s functional definition of ideology, identifying bourgeois ideology with the control over the institutions needed to disseminate bourgeois views, Lukacs derived his position from Marx’s general theory of capitalist society. Thus, Lukacs locates the ideological subjection of the working class in the socio-political and economic organisation of capitalism.

A much more sociological notion of ideology can be seen in Gram-sci’s work. Gramsci makes a distinction between organic and arbitrary ideologies. Organic ideologies are related to particular social struc-tures and are powerful mechanisms of social change. They provide ‘a unity of faith between a conception of the world and a corresponding norm of conduct’.¹⁴ Arbitrary ideologies are only ‘arbitrary elucubra-tions of particular individuals’. Gramsci’s work is exclusively concerned with organic ideologies which are defined as ‘conception [s] of the world that [are] implicitly manifest in art, in law, in economic activity and in all manifestations of individual and collective life’.¹⁵

While this emphasis on the ‘activist’ dimension of ideology, which corresponds to Marx’s notion of class consciousness, brings Gramsci closer to Lenin’s ideas of the necessity of socialist ideology, the concept of hegemony is Gramsci’s original contribution to the debate. Gramsci defines hegemony as the ability of a dominant class to assure the consent of a dominated population by ‘preserving the ideological unity of the entire social bloc which that ideology serves to cement and to unify’.¹⁶

Since this cultural hegemony secured by capitalist ideology is regarded by Gramsci as a powerful tool, he proposes the same strategy for the proletariat by recommending that it uses its ideology in order to achieve proletarian hegemony. To do that it is necessary to rely on the intellectuals that every class ‘creates within itself organically’. These organic intellectuals have to spread and socialise (proletarian) ideol-ogy not only through philosophy, but also through more practical and applicable means, including religion, common sense and folklore. Gramsci also underlines the importance of institutional frameworks for the dissemination of ruling class ideology. These include the educa-tional system, the media, publishing networks and religious organisa-tions. To achieve its own hegemony, the proletariat would need to use these institutional means of dissemination, with the Party, in particu-lar, concentrating on gaining influence and control over these insti-tutions. Despite Gramsci’s strong emphasis on the so-called ‘super-structure’ and his detailed analysis of ideology, he always held to the traditional Marxist notion of the primacy of matter over idea. In his words, ‘it is not ideology that changes the structures but vice versa’.¹⁷

Drawing on some of Gramsci’s ideas, Althusser developed his own original concept of ideology. He concentrated primarily on its func-tional dimension, where ideology is defined in relation to the State. In Althusser’s writings the State is the principal agent of action. As in classical Marxism, the State is perceived as a repressive apparatus consisting, among other institutions, of the army, police, judicial system and the civil administration. However, the emphasis in his work is neither on the State power nor on the repressive state apparatus, but primarily on what he describes as ‘ideological state apparatuses’ (ISA). According to Althusser, ‘no class can hold State power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the State Ideological Apparatuses’.¹⁸ ISA include a set of different and specialised institutions: the religious ISA, the educational ISA, the family ISA, the legal ISA, the political ISA (political parties and the political system in general), the trade union ISA, the communication ISA (mass media) and the cultural ISA (literature, arts, sports). While the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) is a single, organised and centralised whole, the ISA consists of ‘multiple, distinct, relatively autonomous’ fields which ‘express, the effects of the clashes between the capitalist class struggle and the proletarian class struggle’.¹⁹ The key difference between the RSA and ISA is that the RSA belongs completely to the public domain, whereas the ISA is almost exclu-sively in the private domain. This division leads to the different ways in which these two apparatuses function. As Althusser explains, the RSA functions ‘by violence’, while the ISA functions by ideology.²⁰ Ideology is here used as a way in which a person relates to society as whole. As Eagleton points out:

Ideology for Althusser is a particular organisation of signifying prac-tices which goes to constitute human beings as social subjects, and which produces the live...