Reification Critique vs Ideology Critique
Discussion
Anthromodernism:
"One of the most promising developments in recent and contemporary Marxism (I’m thinking Wright, Fisher and Chibber in particular) is a tendency to emphasise ‘reification-critique’ over ‘ideology-critique’. In the 1920s, Georg Lukács used the word ‘reification’ to provide a more rigorous philosophical finish to Marx’s idea of ‘commodity fetishism’. Marx used commodity fetishism to describe the way in which, due to the ubiquitous experience of commodity exchange under capitalism, humans come to imbue commodities (including money and labour power) with qualities that really belong to themselves, and which in fact express social relations between human beings. Lukács used the word reification in a broader sense, to describe an epistemological condition in which the experience of class society, its atomised, ‘contractual’ social relations and the character of private property itself, renders human beings unable to perceive the totality of that edifice, the way the whole social order emerges from the real structure of social relations between people.
Here’s the rub of reification: when any capacity for holistic perception is stolen from people by the atomised poverty of their experience, what is left is a social order which appears impervious to human intervention. The appearance of solidity of the social order correlates with the degree to which it appears as something other than the product of human social relations.
Now, the other major Marxist theory of how capitalism solidifies its rule (in the absence of massive and permanent violence, anyway) is based on ideology, finding its most extreme and influential form in Althusser, whom Mason detests. In ‘ideology critique’, human beings are led, through the process of ‘interpellation’ or ‘hailing’, to identify themselves with the dominant order i.e. to endorse the meanings and values generated by institutions which disseminate ruling-class ideology; people thus become ‘subjects’ (more or less willing adherents) of the social order. ‘Reification critique’, by contrast, does not require explicit belief in or endorsement of the values of the social order by people; it is enough that they do not believe another world is possible, having had any sense of the human basis of the social order expunged by daily experience of its patent and seemingly intractable inhumanity. One is subjected whether or not one is a ‘subject’. Mason’s analysis of how neoliberalism held sway until its present crisis is interesting in that it contains elements of both approaches; experience of daily life is the root cause of political passivity, but there is also a kind of ‘interpellation’ going on, with the enforced creation of a ‘neoliberal self’.
Mason describes what we might conventionally think of as components of ‘neoliberal ideology’ as a series of five lessons or mantras imparted, not by direct or indirect propaganda, but by experience of everyday life and political outcomes under late capitalism. These lessons are less like pedagogy and more like those learned after walking through a field of nettles in shorts. Below are Mason’s lessons and their corresponding experiences:
Lesson 1: In economic policy humans no longer matter (experience: destruction of whole industrial sectors and the working-class communities that sustained and were sustained by them)
Lesson 2: Left-wing alternatives to neoliberalism will always fail, because the financial markets will always sabotage them (experience: the cowing of the Mitterrand government in France by international financial markets)
Lesson 3: Privatisation is good for everyone, even if it destroys your world (experience: share offerings of privatised public services and Thatcher’s ‘right to buy’)
Lesson 4: Economic sovereignty is impossible (experience: austerity forced on debt-laden countries like Mexico (in our own era: Greece))
Lesson 5: Even countries committed to the welfare state [will] have to deliver it using neoliberal methods (experience: neoliberal pillars of the European Community, replicated in those of ‘Third Way’ social democratic parties)
These five lessons may well be pithily summed up in an ideological phrase like Thatcher’s ‘there is no alternative’, but that is superfluous. If this is what reality looks like, you do not need it explained to you by politicians. What the lessons of neoliberalism teach you is not that neoliberalism is ‘good’ (example three above notwithstanding), but that it is inevitable. This requires you not to internalise the ‘ideals’ of neoliberalism (though these are readily discernible in the discourse of its ideologues, and some will incorporate them as a way of avoiding psychological conflict), but to internalise the specific boundaries that it asserts are intrinsic to social reality. The important thing here is that, for the neoliberal lesson-machine, social reality isnot social; it is itself a kind of machine, like the Hayekian free market or the algorithms spawned by ‘big data’. Reification dictates that human beings not architect the spaces they inhabit. If they could, they might play the role of designers, and neoliberalism is not supposed to be a designed system but a ‘natural’ one.
Anyone who has ever worked in a pub will confirm that this is how late capitalism creates a relatively pliant (i.e. not permanently in revolt) workforce. If it occurred to you to ask the defeated-looking call-centre worker across the bar why she submits to an oppressive system, she would simply say: ‘It is what it is. Bills don’t pay themselves’ (the more you think about it, the stupider the question sounds). She would not say: ‘Well, the free market ensures the most efficient distribution of scarce resources while maintaining my individual liberty!’ Conscious acknowledgement that the system is unjust, and that what one is really doing is acquiescing to an undesirable state of affairs outside of one’s control, is what characterises the ‘reified self’, the reason being that, as bad as things are, you have no obvious means of realising something better.
Now, the foregoing may be more my sense of things than Mason’s. For Mason, the lessons of neoliberalism, despite being claims about the boundaries of reality rather than normative beliefs, did hold something like an ideological hold over people until quite recently."