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One of the most pernicious effects of the Marxist schema of base and superstructure is that it posits the economy and ideology as two separate and distinct levels. The base is where the economy does its work, silently and materially, and the superstructure does its work reproducing the relations of production by remaining entirely separate and distinct from the economy, by addressing morals, religion, the nation, everything but economic necessity. This rigid division makes it difficult to think of the ideological dimension of the economy and the economic dimension of ideology. I have written before on what I could call the ideological dimension of the economy, the way that work, wealth, and capital function not just as economic relations but are coded are moralized, made into statements of virtue and worth. I am not taking credit for this idea, it can be found in Hegel, and, more critically, in Marx's discussion of primitive accumulation. I have a whole book coming out which discusses the way that work does a "double shift" as both a fundamental aspect of economic life under capitalism and a central term in capitalist ideology. Beyond that, I think that it might be useful to think of similar double shifts, where the economy functions as ideology, and ideology works in the economy. First example, in analyzing the much discussed, and hopefully fiercely fought cuts at West Virginia University one point comes up repeatedly. Which is that humanities courses like languages and literature, generally bring in more money than they cost. Humanities professors are cheaper than faculty in other departments, such as business, and generally courses involve less costly technology than courses in STEM. There have also been suggestions that other aspects of the university, like its football team, are not only more expensive, with something like fourteen assistant coaches, but cost more than they bring in. I am not sure about that last point, however, and am honestly not going that deep into the matter. There are also larger points about the general decline in state funding for higher education. I am not suggesting that one make an argument defending education primarily in terms of costs and returns--far from it. My main point here is that eliminating language programs is not the result of a simple cost/benefit analysis, a comparison of revenue in and out, but from what could be considered the ideology of economic rationality. Languages, culture, and even puppetry just seem to be extravagant even if they are not. While an instrumental calculation tells us that courses in such departments bring in more revenue, more students, our idea of what is economically rational tells us that they are expensive and not essential to whatever we think a university is, increasingly a job training center. Economical is often a representation of calculation, an idea of what is worthwhile or expensive, rather than an actual calculation based on costs and revenue. Second example: and this comes from Adam Kotsko's post about streaming, streaming services, like other app based transformations such as Uber and Airbnb, seem to be the very model of market efficiency. They have effectively eliminated the middle man, the cable provider, television network, or video store, bringing more profits directly to the studio and more choice to the audience. I am not going to get into the failure of the latter (better reserved for another post), but the truth of the matter is that streaming has not been profitable with most services working at a loss for years. Nonetheless, streaming seems profitable and a model of what it means to be successful capitalist enterprise. So much so that when my university was cutting programs a few years ago a member of the board said that he wanted the university to be like Netflix not Blockbuster, by which I assume that he meant efficient, new. and online. It is the idea, or ideal of disruption, of change and obsolescence that, explains the interest in streaming services and not their actual profitability. Of course it is possible to say that part of the fetishization of apps has more to do with the long game, with the role they play in deskilling work and making working conditions more precarious in order to replace employees with workers with even less security and lower wages. The long game, the overall social effect, is something that capitalist from Adam Smith to Milton Freeman have argued companies are not supposed to not consider--their only concern should be immediate self-interest (or in Freeman's case shareholder interest). Third example, by now you have probably heard of the viral online hit "Rich Men North of Richmond" by Oliver Anthony. I am not going recommend the song as a song, but I have copied some of the lyrics below to discuss it as a cultural moment (albeit one probably forgotten by the time you read this). Livin' in the new worldWith an old soulThese rich men north of RichmondLord knows they all just wanna have total controlWanna know what you think, wanna know what you doAnd they don't think you know, but I know that you do'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end'Cause of rich men north of RichmondI wish politicians would look out for minersAnd not just minors on an island somewhereLord, we got folks in the street, ain't got nothin' to eatAnd the obese milkin' welfareWell, God, if you're 5-foot-3 and you're 300 poundsTaxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge roundsYoung men are puttin' themselves six feet in the ground'Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin' them downI am going to skip right over the Qanon part about islands of minors and go straight to the representation of the economy. First, we get the usual demon of the right, the welfare queen or king, the song doesn't give us gender just height and weight. That this fiction persists long after the end of "welfare as we know it" is a testament to its power as a myth. To quote Jeff Sharlet, "You can't fact check a myth." Along with this myth that welfare is an incredibly easy life we get one of the other persistent themes of the right, the strange obsession with exactly what poor people consume, in this case fudge rounds, the Little Debbie snackcake that retails for less than three bucks for a nine ounce package. A cheap vice, all things considered. The song seems to suggest that at some particular body mass ratio it would be acceptable for the state to provide these snack cakes, but it is unclear where the cut off is. If you ask me we would be better worrying about the consumption habits of the wealthy than the poor: the former are going to private jet the planet to death while we are drawing cut off lines for snack cake consumption, but I digress.The real line that strikes me in this passage is "Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end." This passage is often cited as the real working class pain that is at the heart of this song. It is hard to deny the first part, the past few years of inflation have driven the buying power of the dollar down. The second part, however, is more dubious. There is no tax increase that explains that decrease. Rates have gone down nationally, but that varies by income bracket, and Virginia (where I assume this is coming from) has remained in the middle range of state income tax with a top rate of 5.75%, West Virginia is slightly higher at 6.50%. However, I would argue that as much as taxes cannot be the true cause of the economic anger at the core of this song, they are its necessary false cause. (To cite Spinoza, "inadequate ideas follow from the same necessity as adequate ideas)To discuss inflation, wages, and so on as causes of the decline of the dollar, of working class conditions, is to criticize capitalism, albeit obliquely. Capitalism, the economy, is not something one can critique, not because it is beyond reproach, held sacred, but because it is seen as a fact of life, the way of the world. To criticize capitalism would be to acknowledge it as an institution, as a human creation. Instead the critical force is reserved for politicians, for those rich men North of Richmond, who have imposed taxes.  Of course it is unclear why they would do this, the profit motive is a fairly clear motivating force for exploitation, taking it off of the table often means coming up with even more baroque explanations as to why the rich men are doing what they are doing. To some up briefly, my point here is not that there is nothing like economic determination, or material conditions and causes, but just that even material causes cannot be separated from their representation, how we grasp or image them. The economy, the other scene of politics, has effects only in and through that scene, and vice versa. 

Call for Abstracts für a Special Issue of Industrielle Beziehungen – The German Journal of Industrial Relations. Deadline: June 1, 2023

In my first published peer-reviewed article, Peter Navarro and I argued that both economic special interests and candidate ideology separately could explain Congressional voting farm subsidies (we also applied the framework to domestic content legislation for automobiles), following Kalt and Zupan (AER 1984). In the ongoing discussions of how many members of the Republican caucus […]

What is it about liberalism that makes its
adherents go to the mattresses to preserve the infrastructure that allows minors
to have irreversible medical interventions performed on them that many children
later will regret, an attitude in sharp contrast with medical practice
worldwide outside the U.S.?

Currently, the fate of HB 648 from
the recently-concluded Louisiana Legislature regular session hangs in the
balance. The bill would disallow prescribing of drugs or surgery designed to
alter the physical sex of a minor.

The state of science at
present on the issue notes that of the small but growing proportion of all children
who begin medical interventions to alter their sex about 30 percent within a few
years want to stop, if not reverse, it. Unfortunately, the effects are irreversible,
causing major psychological trauma for those who want to stop the transition
and major physical trauma even for those who don't that has significant
psychological impacts as well.

Additionally, there is a significantly higher
proportion of mental disturbance among those wishing to transition that
suggests the desire to transition is an outgrowth of underlying mental states unrelated
to identification by sex, so interventions treat symptoms, not the disease.
Further, there is still much unknown about this phenomenon, and much of the
research that purports to support the view that any expressed uncomfortableness
with physical sex by children must initiate medical interventions to change this
has significant validity problems that severely limits its use.

Those are the scientific facts that lead objective
observers to support extreme caution in allowing humans lacking physical and
emotion maturity to have hormonal manipulations and radical surgery performed
on them. Yet leftist ideologues, as they are doing in Louisiana including Democrat
Gov. John Bel Edwards,
are putting up fierce political resistance to measures like HB 648.

That's because of the core tenets of liberalism.
In the area of personal conduct, conservatism posits that over the epochs of
human existence there has become recognized an optimal set of values by which
to organize society and reflected in individual behavior. Conceptualized as a
set of universal truths often reflected in religious belief, government is to
codify these into law.

By contrast, liberalism declares all "truths" contingent
on individuals and their contexts in time or space, or that there are no
universal truths – an inherent self-contradiction since that very statement
itself articulates a universal truth. To use another social issue as an
example, conservativism believes the truism that life begins at conception and
so people cannot decide whether to abort an unborn human unnaturally as that
violates another universal truth, that the taking of life intentionally outside
of self-protection violates natural law. But liberalism believes whether abortion
is murder is up to the individual to decide, given her unique placement in the
universe.

Liberalism, then, is an exercise in denying fixed
realities. And, along with the other genetically-defined trait of human existence
of race/ethnicity, sex is as fixed and immutable as one can find in a human. Sexual
characteristics that stubbornly resist alteration mocks liberal faith that
truths are what people choose for themselves, not things that simply are that
we must adjust to.

Thus, in organizing human interactions, the left
insists we use "gender" rather than sex as one of its concepts, where physical
sex must bend to the will of the psychological gender. And, as a bonus, with children
this process attacks what the left sees as a retrograde and rival force in
preventing imposition of itself onto the polity: the family. No other
institution so effectively resists leftism's indoctrination attempts, so it
supports vigorously any sociological superstructure that cuts out the family
such as having
schools propagandize gender identity among youth to unmoor the fixed.

Therefore, despite the harm that too often results
from medical interventions to change a minor's sex that includes a significant
portion who regret it, involving people not emotionally developed enough to
give informed consent, the left is full steam ahead on facilitating this and
willing to go to fanatical lengths to support its continuance despite the
self-evident harm that occurs. After all, to the left human welfare always is secondary
to fulfilling its ideological imperatives.

Bento and booksWith all of my writing and translating about Spinoza and Marx as of late I am embarrassed to admit that there is a moment of their encounter that I have overlooked. The passage in question is in Chapter Eleven of Volume One of Capital (and I am indebted to Nick Nesbitt for pointing it out). In that passage Marx writes, "Vulgar economics, which like the Bourbons 'has really learnt nothing,' relies here as mere semblance as opposed to the law which regulates and determines the phenomena. In anthesis to Spinoza, it believes that 'ignorance is a sufficient reason."In the original:"Die Vulgärökonomie, die 'wirklich auch nichts gelernt hat,' pocht hier, wie überall, auf den Schein gegen das Gesetz der Erscheinung. Sie glaubt im Gegensatz zu Spinoza, daß 'die Unwissenheit ein hinreichender Grund ist". The notes to the Penguin edition points towards the Appendix to Part One of the Ethics as the source to this reference. If we followed that recommendation, and that is and "if" we might look at the following passage. "Nor ought we here to pass over the fact that the followers of this doctrine, who have wanted to show off their cleverness in assigning the ends of things, have introduced-to prove this doctrine of theirs-a new way of arguing: by reducing things, not to the impossible, but to ignorance. This shows that no other way of defending their doctrine was open to them. For example, if a stone has fallen from a roof onto someone's head and killed him, they will show, in the following way, that the stone fell in order to kill the man. For if it did not fall to that end, God willing it, how could so many circumstances have concurred by chance (for often many circumstances do concur at once)? Perhaps you will answer that it happened because the wind was blowing hard and the man was walking that way. But they will persist: why was the wind blowing hard at that time? why was the man walking that way at that same time? If you answer again that the wind arose then because on the preceding day, while the weather was still calm, the sea began to toss, and that the man had been invited by a friend, they will press on-for there is no end to the questions which can be asked: but why was the sea tossing? why was the man invited at just that time? And so they will not stop asking for the causes of causes until you take refuge in the will of God, that is, the sanctuary of ignorance.Similarly, when they see the structure of the human body, they are struck by a foolish wonder, and because they do not know the causes of so great an art, they infer that it is constructed, not by mechanical, but by divine, or supernatural art, and constituted in such a way that one part does not injure another. Hence it happens that one who seeks the true causes of miracles, and is eager, like an educated man, to understand natural things, not to wonder at them, like a fool, is generally considered an impious heretic and denounced as such by those whom the people honor as interpreters of Nature and the gods. For they know that if ignorance is taken away, then foolish wonder, the only means they have of arguing and defending their authority, is also taken away."A great deal could be said about this connection of the critique of political economy and the appendix. One could connect this point to capitalism as religion, or the religion of daily life as André Tosel puts it, but it is also worth pointing out that Marx's emphasis on ignorance is very different than thinking of ideology as having some sort of epistemic content, even if it is a distorted one. I think that Althusser has probably gone the farthest in positing ideology not as a set of ideas, but as some sense a relation to those ideas through the subject, an idea which is of course indebted to Spinoza. I would like to suggest a different direction of this particular intersection of Marx and Spinoza, one oriented not towards a theory of ideology, but of agnotology, towards a study of ignorance. I realize that the division between ideology, often defined as a kind of false knowledge, and what agnotology studies, ignorance. Moreover agnotology is a relatively niche and undeveloped area of inquiry. Much of the work that does is exists is oriented towards empirical contributions to the sociology of knowledge, such as the work on the famous campaigns by tobacco companies and oil companies to foster doubt in the carcinogenic effects of cigarettes and the reality of global warming. Posing the problem of agnotology through Marx and Spinoza suggests a way to think the production of ignorance not through the campaigns of public relations, but the way in which social relations produce ignorance of their own conditions. Franck Fischbach's little book on Marx follows a suggestive examination in this direction.  As Fischbach argues, Marx and Engels' The German Ideology can be understood to be a text about the fragmentation of knowledge with the division of labor: the order and connection of ideas follows the order and connection of things. Framed in this way it is possible to see continuity from the concept ideology the theory of fetishism. Capitalist society is one in which there is increasing division between production and consumption. As Marx writes, "the taste of the porridge does not tell you who grew the oats, no more does this simple process tell you of itself what are the social conditions under which it is taking place, whether under the slave-owner's brutal lash, or the anxious eye of the capitalist, whether Cincinnatus carries it on in tilling his modest farm or a savage in killing wild animals with stones." This ignorance is not just a lack, thought as much as nature abhors a vacuum. The absence of knowledge of the real conditions becomes the basis for the projection of all kinds of qualities, from the commodity's value to its meaning and importance within the semiotics of consumer society. As Deleuze and Guattari write, elevating Marx's comments about porridge into a general epistemological thesis:"Let us remember once again one of Marx's caveats: we cannot tell from the mere taste of the wheat who grew it; the product gives us no hint as to the system and relations of production. The product appears to be all the more specific, incredibly specific and readily describable, the more closely the theoretician relates it to ideal forms of causation, comprehension, or expression, rather than to the real process of production on which it depends."Or, as Spinoza argued, our ignorance about the causes of things is refracted through our awareness of our own desires so much so that we "take our desires for reality," to twist an old May '68 slogan. Our own perceptions become the basis for truth. As Marx states above, appearance replaces reality. The danger of making such a direct connection between social division and epistemic fragmentation is that such theses often imply a restoration of some kind of wholeness, a dream of a society without divisions and fragmentation which would also be a restoration of knowledge. Such a society has not existed since some went to hunt and others went to gather, if ever. The passage about porridge from Marx even makes this clear, fetishism might have begun with the commodity form but ignorance of the conditions of production are much older. If there can be no return to wholeness, some restoration of our knowledge, ourselves, and society, then knowledge must be a construction. The question is how to structure society so that the divisions and diversity of tasks and productive activities necessary for human survival become the basis for an increase of our knowledge rather the condition for the production of stupidity. 

Wenn New York die Stadt ist, die niemals schläft, dann ist das Centre for Social Critique in Berlin… Auf jeden Fall: Es gibt wieder was. Bereits am 27. Juni richten die umtriebigen Kolleg:innen einen Workshop mit dem Titel "Ideology and Social Transformation" aus, in dessen Rahmen das wechselseitige Verhältnis von Ideologie, sozialer Praxis und deren […]

The president of the new University of Austin wants to reverse the decline of higher education in America.

Am heutigen Wissenschaftstag #4genderstudies 2020 veröffentlicht der blog interdisziplinäre geschlechterforschung den zweiten Teil des Gesprächs von Judith Butler und Dirk Schulz. Unter dem Titel...

Recent climate negotiations have been heated, to say the least. Beyond the usual recriminations over financing, the choice of Sultan Al Jaber—chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company—as the president of the upcoming United ...

 Sometime awhile ago I came up with the idea of doing a trilogy of posts on conspiracy theory, or modern conspiracy thought, read through Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx. I am not exactly sure why the idea appealed to me, in part because I increasingly consider Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx to be the cornerstones of my philosophical thought, even if these cornerstones come through the mediations of Tosel, Jameson, and Althusser (to name a few), but in this case, more specifically it seemed worth asking what would three critics of the mystifications of their day make of our modern mystifications.After writing the pieces on Spinoza and Hegel it took me a long time to even consider writing a piece on Marx. The intersection of Marx and conspiracy theory just seems too big to take on in a blogpost. This is  in part because for many in the US, Marxism is both the name of an actual conspiracy and a conspiracy theory. It has become increasingly so in terms of the former, the right has dealt with decline of the Soviet Union not by giving up on red scares, but by making the object of such ghost stories more and more diffuse and conspiratorial.  Marxism, or communism, are not to just to be found in open appeals to revolution, or organizing workers instead everything from Critical Race Theory to the casting of a Disney film can now be seen to be the work of Marxism in its more diffuse cultural form, a plot that becomes more insidious the more indirect its connection discernible political goals become. At the same time that Marxism is seen as conspiracy it is argued that its understanding of history and politics which sees the interest of the ruling class behind everything is fundamentally a conspiracy theory, if not the fundamental conspiracy theory. As is often the case, I would argue that this idea that Marxism is a conspiracy theory gets things wrong and upside down. To gesture to a much larger argument, I would argue that Marx's fundamental theoretical innovation is to present an understanding of economic, social, and political relations that breaks with every conspiracy theory in that its primary mode of explanation is not individual intentions, or collective strategies, but the economic and social conditions that exceed any intention or conspiracy. The actions of capitalist with respect to wages and working conditions are, to use the parlance of our times, dictated by the demands of the market, by the demand to be competitive, etc., what Marx would perhaps more simply call the extraction of surplus value. Marx stresses that this structure is absolutely indifferent to the conscious intentions of not only the workers, who must conform to it in selling their labor or risk losing their jobs, but to the capitalist as well. As Marx puts it, in the mouth of the worker addressing the capitalist,  "You may be a model citizen, perhaps a member of the R.S.P.C.A. [Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals], and you may be in the odour of sanctity as well; but the thing you represent when you come face to face with me has no heart in its breast." As I argued with respect to Spinoza (see the link above), if the defining characteristic of most conspiracy theories is understanding the world in terms of ends, of deducing the conspiracy from effects, (if talking about race makes white people feel bad that must be the reason behind such teaching, and so on, Marx's fundamental argument is how little ends and intentions mean in understanding social and political life. Marx's criticism is not one of "capitalist greed" as a moral failing, but of the structural conditions that cause capitalists to seek cheaper workers, to demand more of workers, and so on regardless of their moral character. This is the real meaning of Marx's invocation of vampires and werewolves, not to call the capitalist a monster, but to claim that there is something monstrous in capital that exceeds intentions and is found not in the hearts of human beings but in the social relations that produce and reproduce them. As something of an aside, I will suggest that part of Marx's legacy on critical theory, for lack of a better term, is this demand to think in terms of structures that exceed and situate consciousness, this, as I have argued awhile ago, is partly what is at stake in the concept of the mode of production. This legacy goes beyond those who are explicitly Marxist. What Foucault called a dispositif, or apparatus, what Deleuze and Guattari referred to as assemblages or machines, were also an attempt to think the structural over and above the intentional. They are in some sense an attempt to articulate a concept that could displace the mode of production understood as the articulation of material practices and ideas, what Marx called base and superstructure. In Foucault this becomes the relation of power and knowledge, while in Deleuze and Guattari it becomes that of machinic assemblages of bodies and collective assemblages of enunciation. Both of which could be understood as an attempt to expand the explanatory framework beyond the putatively economic to encompass the production of knowledge and desire.  Closer to home, the insistence on the term "structural" in "structural racism," as well as similar attempts to think patriarchy as a social and political structure, are all attempts to theorize racism, sexism, or misogyny without reducing it to individual prejudices, biases, or attitudes. I would then say, summing this up all too quickly, not only is Marx's thought not a conspiracy theory, Marx's fundamental move of thinking relations, structures, and institution in excess of intentions and understandings is the antechamber or all theories that want to be more than conspiracy theories that want to understand the structural conditions and not the individual attitudes as the basis for exploitation and domination. Such a point is beyond the focus of a blogpost, and, moreover, it was not what I intend to get at here. My question is what does Marx offer for thinking the conspiratorial turn in contemporary politics. The first point, which I have already more or less uttered, is that a great deal of what we call conspiracy theories are really just anti-communism, and that these theories have become more baroque and oblique as communism as a political force retreats into historical memory. They are in some sense a kind of anti-communism without communism, as Seymour argues. It is the decline of Marxism as a political force that leads to the demand to find it everywhere; everything that challenges the existing order, not just the economic order but its racial and gender aspects as well, from teaching about the history of slavery to non-binary gender identity can be labelled "Marxist." (The irony of this is that actually existing Marxism, especially in its more official state varieties, has had a spotty at best record when it comes to understanding race and gender as sites of domination and exploitation. Many Marxists of an old school variety are perhaps surprised to learn that anti-racist education is secretly Marxist and that Marxists are behind the demand to respect individual's choice of pronouns). Second, Marxism is integral to understanding the real conditions of social and political life which are in some sense experienced as a vast conspiracy. As I have alluded to above, Marx explains, better than any conspiracy theory the way in which prevailing economic and political relations produce the feeling of helplessness and lack of control that is, as Marcus Gilroy-Ware argues, the raw material for most conspiracy theories. Of course the fundamental question is if it is in some sense the relations of capitalism that create the conditions of alienation and powerlessness which in turn create the condition for conspiracy theorizing, why do such theories name everything but capital, or the ruling class, as the agent of this conspiracy. This is part because the demands of capital are too open, too disclosed to be the object of a conspiracy theory. There is no riddle to solve in saying that capital is driven by the extraction of surplus value, or, as they say, the pursuit of profit. It is openly declared in every newspaper, website, and news broadcast. Without a secret, without the ability to be in the know, there is no affective appeal to a conspiracy theory. We are stuck in a kind of perpetual purloined letter situation in which it is because the existing goals of the ruling class are so out in the open that there is a need to create a kind of bizarro world inversion of this world in order to believe in the conspiracy that must exist. While it is fairly clear to anyone paying attention that the established position on COVID for example is to declare it over again and again in order to be able to get people back to work and to end any state spending on aid, testing, or vaccines, such a goal is too open to muster any theorizing, too public to generate any critique, so we get a bizarro inversion where the powers want to keep the pandemic going, want lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccines for some vague reason of control. At the same time, it could be argued that the fact that conspiracy theories generally leave capitalism untouched, approaching it only obliquely through the antisemitic fear of global elites, demonstrates to what extent the demands of capitalism have become, as Marx writes, self-evident natural laws, wage labor as a mode of existence and commodification as the realization of pleasures remain unexamined by conspiracy theories. Thus to butcher a phrase, is easier to imagine the world controlled by lizard people than it is to question the existence of wage labor and the commodity form. 

Misogynist ideology, beyond individual criminal behaviour, has fuelled violence against women worldwide. Predominantly English-language, open-source data suggests that these attacks may have led to or been associated with 58 deaths—63 deaths if attacker suicides are ...

1. Ideology Silicon Valley's ideology is this: Libertarianism for me. Feudalism for thee. In more detail: • Surveillance, manipulation and coercion; at first, just for profit, later by necessity, and ultimately for the hell of it • Disruption and capture, not competition; monopoly or at least duopoly in each industry it envelops. • Oligarchy to […]

As I've previously argued on this forum, conceptions of the virtues of a historically China-centric regional order are deeply ingrained in Chinese society, including among a new generation taught from infancy to resist external threats ...

A senior analyst with ASPI's International Cyber Policy Centre, Fergus Ryan took part in today's hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media. This is his contribution to ASPI's submission to ...