Ideology-Critique
To what extent are statements of policy or the findings of academic
research 'ideological'? We need to know, because we might want to
separate out the technical findings from any political values that are
bound up with them.
I have already implied that an ideology is some account or statement
that contains political values. This is the normal common-sense way of
recognising an ideology, of course. If the statement is sponsored by
the Labour Party, we would expect to find it also supporting Labour
policies and the claims of the Labour Party to be the best party for
Britain. We might expect policies also to express the interests of
other groups -- corporations and companies, specific quangos such as
Sport England or the Olympic Committee. We might be able to detect
these ideological bits in more or less the same ways that we can detect
persuasive or 'strategic' communication, which we discuss
elsewhere. We might find
explicit support, or we might find some
attempts to get us to agree on some general statement (such
as 'Sport is a good thing'), and then to move us on to the view
that a particular party or organisation also holds that view and should
therefore be supported.
However, once more, there is more technical academic work
available. We might start with the general sociological proposition
that people's ideas about the world are affected to some extent by the
social lives that they lead. They take their particular experience and
assume that their way of life is superior, privileged, natural or
universal. Feminist criticism tries out this argument by suggesting
that male perspectives and male ways of thinking about the world tend
to get generalised in academic work as the only or the best way to
pursue research or policy.
One influential sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, has argued that ways of
life get coded into our unconscious perceptions and beliefs, and that
these affect a whole range of activities. Some of them affect our
particular preferences in the fields of sport and leisure, for example.
Roughly, 'working class' groups tend to prefer sport and leisure
activities that guarantee immediate emotional involvement, while
'elite' groups tend to prefer sport and leisure activities that
emphasise forms, rules, and a certain detachment. Even when
'working class' groups gain more disposable income, or have
opportunities to participate extended to them, they still do not want
to watch or take part in highly technical activities with low emotional
contents. The classic example would be going to the opera, or to watch
obscure Continental films, but watching or playing polo, or going
sailing might be more relevant sporting examples. I have additional
files, on Bourdieu and taste here , and on Bourdieu and
sport here
These differences in taste become important when you consider that
these different groups have different powers, including the powers to
influence government to subsidise activities of which they approve, and
possibly even ban or regulate those which they dislike. The suspicion
is that government policy is therefore more likely to reflect the
interests of powerful groups, even though it appears that everyone has
been consulted, and 'the national interest' is being followed.
This would be another example of what Habermas has called
'distorted communication' (and we discuss this a bit more in another
file).
The main work in this field tends to be dominated by marxist analysis,
however. As with feminist analysis, you may need to take special
precautions to stay calm and objective and to resist ad hominem
tendencies -- not all people using a marxist approach would support
Eastern bloc or Chinese communism, not all are committed to
revolutionary overthrow of the British system, they do not all wear
beards and spend their time in committee meetings for some obscure
splinter group.
Marx himself provides a number of examples of the ways in which ideas
become contaminated with political interests. Some ways are pretty
clear and obvious. For example, Marx tells us that 'in every
epoch, the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class', (Marx and
Engels 1932 online here)
meaning
that groups that are already wealthy and powerful are in a very good
position to develop their particular ideas about society and how should
run, and to get these ideas publicised, discussed, and laid before
various governing bodies, including Parliament. Minority ideas, by
contrast, are really quite difficult to get publicised, and are liable
to be dealt with pretty roughly, as we have suggested in other files.
This view almost describes a conspiracy among the rich and powerful to
be able to lobby for laws and practices that suit their interests.
Marx's work is full of examples: if wealthy landowners and
industrialists ran short of labour, they would persuade the government
to permit slavery, and the Church to justify it as natural; if they
required labourers to work 16 hour days, they would persuade Parliament
to enforce these contracts, and find some tame intellectuals who would
suggest that people only needed 8 hours' sleep, so it was quite natural
that they should work for the other 16. Private interests enshrined
private property at the heart of the law of England: landowners were
permitted, for example, to fence off or enclose what had been common
land. The state either stood by, or actively helped, as enormous social
transformations swept through 18th and 19th century Britain, creating
cities, industrial plant, the whole apparatus of modern society. The
benefits were of course distributed pretty unequally -- substantial
private wealth on one hand, and the most appalling misery ill-health
and grinding poverty on the other.
There is another sense in which ideology can develop, however. It can
take a more 'scientific' form, so that it does not appear to be
based on the opening interests of anybody. What happens is that the
society that has been created and which produces substantial
inequalities and other practices that favour powerful groups is then
described in a pretty uncritical fashion by various social
scientists (especially economists) and philosophers. They do not
simply insist that everything is 'natural', God-given, reflecting
some evolutionary progress, or expressing the interests of everyone,
and do develop some critical purchase. However, they also take much for
granted and do not attempt a thorough critical analysis.
The famous examples in Marx turn on economics
and the emergence of the commodity, but that
can look rather technical.
Let us take another example: many political philosophers insist that
our system is best described as a democracy. The practice to which they
point in particular is the voting system. Regardless of rank,
wealth, age, or any other social status, each citizen gets one vote and
they use it to elect the government. Marx's objection to this
description reveals a lot about his particular method of critical
analysis . He agrees that on election day, all citizens are equal, and
all have an equal say in deciding who should govern them. However, the
elected government then rules for a period of up to five years, and
that is a period of considerable inequality. Of course, an ordinary
citizen is permitted to write to the Prime Minister, or but someone who
can meet him on a regular base, help him raise funds, offer him holiday
accommodation, they agree to do business in a deprived region, and
support his policies in the newspapers that our 'someone' controls, is
likely to have far more power and influence.
So the real system is fully equal on one day, and then completely
unequal for the rest of the five-year cycle. To use the one moment of
equality to describe the whole system is to engage in a rather dubious
abstraction, stressing the equality and ignoring or minimizing the
inequality. The political scientists who claim that Britain is a
democracy on this basis are not exactly simply wrong, but they are
using unreliable methods offer abstraction and limited critical
analysis to arrive at their conclusions. They are not deliberately
propping up the political system, but their conclusions do help
legitimate and justify it, even though they may see themselves as
objective analysts.
To get to one implication for policy, Marx discussed the proposal in
Austria to give Jewish citizens the vote. Much political discussion
ensued, and advocates argued that giving all citizens to vote was
clearly the best and most democratic thing to do. Marx's argument was
that it was almost irrelevant, that Jews would still occupy an inferior
but essential status, and still face anti-Semitism, even though they
were permitted their vote every five years (Marx 1844
-- online
here).
Marx's work has been much developed, and I have a list which summarises
some of the classic pieces about marxist analysis of the modern state
-- here. Marxist
analyses (of various kinds) of the education system have also been
influential -- click here
for an American classic. Marxism has also developed ( and been
substantially modified) by two writers who have had considerable
influence -- Gramsci and Althusser
But in general, how might we apply these
arguments
from Marx to current policy?
Let us take the analysis of democratic voting, for example. There are
clearly moves in sport and leisure policy to give people equal rights
to participate. How extensive will this equality be, and do any
inequalities remain? It seems obvious to say that substantial
inequalities will not be affected by such policies of equal
participation. For example, we know that income, wealth, power and
status will be as unequal as ever in our society as a whole -- indeed,
some forms of economic inequality seem to be growing. Will the limited
amount of equality overcome these inequalities? When people from
different social and economic backgrounds all enter the same sports
facility, will they become equal? I suggest that a marxist would reply
both yes and no, but will probably insist that inequality is much more
pervasive and much more powerful a force. It would certainly be
misleading to imagine that we had full equality simply because people
were equally entitled to participate: that would be a false
abstraction, and one that carried political implications since it would
appear to justify existing policies and minimise or ignore existing
inequalities.
In general, contradictions between tendencies that equalise and
processes that produce inequality will be found throughout society,
according to marxists. We would expect to find them in the structure of
sport itself, for example -- football teams would be expected to play
on an equal playing field, but some would have far more resources to
buy better players than others. Sport has its own governing bodies, but
we would expect to find that powerful and wealthy owners of clubs would
be exerting undue influence over their activities. We would expect to
find some sports heavily dominated by commercial interests, to such an
extent that even the rules of the game would be changed if they got in
the way of television coverage, sponsorship, or advertising. We would
expect to find tensions between managing clubs and teams in the
interests of members or spectators on the one hand, and commercial
interests on the other. We would expect to find sports persons or
athletes treated as free individuals in some ways, and as commodities
in others. For an influentialanalysisof leisure in marxist terms see
Clarke and Critcher (my reading guide is here)
Perhaps the best example of all has been cited in work on social
inequality. In the 100 metres sprint, as all the athletes line
up,
they are completely equal. Everything depends on the performance of the
individual runner on the day. No-one can really predict who is going to
win. Everyone has a reasonable chance. It all looks completely fair.
Only the best person on the day will win. Indeed the athletics
competition is supposed to show our societies working at their best.
But just as we did with voting, let us get the whole picture. What
happens in the months and years before the race? This is a zone of
considerable inequality, of course -- some athletes will have been much
better prepared, some will have been financially supported and
sponsored, some will have had a head start and others held back by
their upbringing. All that inequality is forgotten or suppressed and
the one moment, just before the actual race, is abstracted from the
whole cycle of events and processes and used to define the whole
apparatus of athletics or sport.
It would be fairly easy to label analyses and policies that did not
pursue these contradictions as ideologies. They would be pursuing
dubious methods and limited forms of analysis that would not permit
them to grasp the whole picture in all its contradictory glory.
Instead, they would focus on their particular neck of the woods and
their particular descriptions of their activities, ignoring the wider
social context. They might become ideological in a more explicit way as
well, using their activities to support a particular political and
economic system and lend it some credibility.
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