Patterns and Marxist Ideology
Industrial-Strength Boilerplate
Marxist writing, infamously, is almost impenetrable. Crack open most books and you’re dropped straight into this bureaucratic postmodern nightmare of a rhetorical style.
Just as annoyingly, a lot of the old hard-core Marxist thinkers seemed to react to any criticism or opposing viewpoint with a couple of pages of boilerplate before they even got down to brass tacks.
This boilerplate went something like, “Comrade Capitalist Slimeball has failed to consider the totality of the system, and the internal contradictions resulting from the dialetical tensions that have built up over time. Only such a viewpoint, however, can correctly begin to apprehend why…”
This boilerplate conceals one of the best features of Marxist analysis, which is that they were systems thinkers. Really, systems thinking is the dialectical bit of dialectical materialism, at its best. My complaint is that they tended to retreat to fuzzy musings on the overall system, without addressing the piece under attack, but the systems thinking is still a good thing.
Systems Thinking and Patterns
By systems thinking, I mean more or less what Christopher Alexander was talking about in Notes on the Synthesis of Form and A Pattern Language, two wonderful books about design, urban planning, and architecture which have had more affect on programmers than on architects.
It isn’t enough just to improve all the pieces of your system. You also have to ask how all the patterns you’ve created fit together to create an overall pattern.
An example from Alexander: Traditional peoples’ sweaters or homes changed slowly enough over time that they could adjust the overall pattern and keep it all pretty nice for humans to use. Designing a nice-for-humans system from scratch is much harder, which is why a lot of modern fashion or modern suburban living isn’t very nice.
( That is as succinct a definition I can get of Alexander’s work. )
Ideology as a Nested Pattern
Understanding patterns and how they fit together unlocks the Marxist usage of the term “ideology.” Today we use ideology to mean a strong ethical belief system, or a cult-like political belief, but Marxists meant something else by it but of course are horrible at explaining what. Actually, let me start off explaining this Marxist term of art with Harari.
Yuval Harari argues that humans dominate all other animals because we organize better and more flexibly - with strangers, at different levels, in sophisticated manners. And we organize by means of stories, myths that are real because we all believe in them.
Corporations as Myths
The corporations Apple and Lexus exist, even though they can’t feel pain. And they exist because we all believe in the joint-stock corporation. Corporations are a social technology, a myth we’ve created, an “intersubjective reality.”
The joint-stock corporation is not objectve, or it would exist without humans, and it’s not subjective, or it would stop existing if I quit believing in it. A corporation is an intersubjective reality because it exists even if lots of us quit believing in it, or quit working for it.
Corporations fit into larger economic patterns, like free trade agreements, or the World Food Bank, or the International Monetary Fund, or international development efforts, which implement the Washington Consensus.
Take corporations together with free trade agreements and supporting institutions, and you have what Marxists call an ideology.
Human Rights as Patterned Myths
Here’s another example, starting with what Harari would call another myth: human rights. Human rights fit into patterns that range from local laws up to national constitutions to international human rights agreements such as the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights or the Geneva Convention. And they’re enforced with sanctions, or the “responsibility to protect.”
These humans rights in turn are related to normative political arrangements: democracy, in parliamentary or constitutional forms.
Most people have a sense that these patterns of human rights, laws, norms, democracy, fit together pretty well. And so we call it liberalism, or neo-liberalism, or modern developed countries, or the End of History.
Ideology Everywhere
Marxists call neo-liberalism an ideology. Marxists use the word ideology to mean neo-liberalism as a whole, as well as each of those pieces (human rights, economic liberalism, representative democracy) individually, causing a hell of a lot of confusion. Standard.
Because any set of economic policies and laws reflect some sort of belief about human nature, Marxists also sweep beliefs about the deepest patterns of human nature and what’s good for humans under the term ideology. For instance, neo-liberalism rests on the modern religions of humanism and individualism.
Thus, by ideology, Marxists mean the various social technologies that guide the humblest individual to the mightiest corporations and nation-states, how they fit together, and the assumptions they make about what humans can do and what is good for us.
The Uses of Ideology
Marxists say you can’t avoid ideology, and you’ve got to have ideology to make any sort of progress. They’re basically right about this - humans need myths and stories to cooperate. And until you trace the development of each story and see why and how it came to be the way it is, you’re can’t really imagine a different way of doing things.
Reformers of various sorts usually want to pass different laws guiding corporations and international property, among many other changes. If you came up with a more efficient (or at least different) way of coordinating lots of people around the world, then you would have a different ideology.