EDITORIAL PERSPECTIVES (continued)
This, then, was the moment of truth.
"It must have seemed rather strange to you to see these Soviet snow plows
sitting at the airport in Accra, Ghana. Did you ask anyone there about them?"
A small hesitation.
"Well, yes, I did. Someone at the airport told me that the snow plows were an
experimental shipment. The purpose was to see whether they could be reconfigured, for the Ghanaian climate, to serve as road-graders."
Here the reader should pause for a moment to let the implications sink in.
The professor and I parted amicably; he did not seem to have any sense of
disconnect — between the account I had extracted from him, and the use to which
he had put the story — minus the minor detail about Soviet aid to Ghana's road
construction program, which I would guess is still a pressing need in Ghana 25
years later — before his audience one hour previously. I have no way of knowing
whether this fellow ever consciously reflected upon his role in the perpetration of
what became a major ideological hoax.
The important point, however, concerns not one individual's moral culpability, but rather the way in which the existing cookies — the mindset of the audience
— enabled the obviously incomplete and impossible story to be received, and believed, and the way in which it in turn became a cookie, an ideal implant, shaping
the impact of information about the Soviet Union from that moment forward. With
sufficient ideological regulators in place, the free flow of information can enforce
and reproduce a political bias adequate to the task of maintaining ruling-class hegemony: in this case the Cold War mentality, safely implanted in popular
consciousness. The cookies, therefore, make it possible for the reproduction of
ideological hegemony to appear spontaneous and structural, and this contributes
to its legitimation. The "open society," with its "free marketplace of ideas," works
together with capitalist ideological control, hand in glove.4
The snow plow example, of course, is only one among many. Similar
instances could be drawn from many areas of social life and struggle. There are
many cases of selective misinformation by the press, as in the creation of false
news stories about demonstrations and mass movements that justify their repression. On some occasions the selection is of a purely negative kind. As this is written, in May 2004, I think of a recent historic event — perhaps the largest single
mass demonstration in the history of the United States, the March for Women's
Rights in Washington, D.C. on April 25 — and the almost total blackout of this
event in the print and electronic media. The reading and TV viewing public has no
means of countering the selective input, which is massive, and cumulative. This
involves not just control of the media from the top — an important part of the story
— but also, and mainly, the way distorted news stories become cookies — ideal
implants that then form the "field" through which additional information is
filtered.5
What are we to do about this? Well, that is an inquiry for our times, and I
cannot propose any simple answers. We can return to Gramsci for some clues.
Speaking somewhat elliptically, for the censors, he writes of the "specific necessities" that "can be deduced . . . for any cultural movement which aimed to replace
common sense and old conceptions of the world in general":
1. Never to tire of repeating its own arguments (though offering literary variation of form): repetition is the best didactic means for working on the popular mentality.
2. To work incessantly to raise the intellectual level of ever-growing
strata of the populace, in other words, to give a personality to the
amorphous mass element. This means working to produce elites of
intellectuals of a new type which arise directly out of the masses, but
remain in contact with them . . . (Prison Notebooks, 340.)
The "elites" are, of course, the "organic intellectuals" of the working class, a concept
developed in detail by Gramsci elsewhere. To this I would add, following up on the
"cookies" metaphor, two general conclusions. First, raising the popular
"intellectual level" should include a sense of the importance of organized thought,
or theory (see "Editorial Perspectives," Spring 2004). Theoretical understanding
may be the best antidote for ideological cookies. Second, we can expect, and
prepare for, sea changes in consciousness, once the veil of ideology is lifted and the
cumulative linkages among events and episodes come to be perceived in a new
light. To be genuine and "directional" (not easily reversible), a qualitative shift in
consciousness of this sort must be firmly grounded in practice, as people struggle
against the deleterious effects of ideology. This is, perhaps, what the rulers and
opinion-makers and spin-doctors fear most of all.
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IN THIS ISSUE
In the ongoing quest for the roots and role of consciousness, and the sources
of its transformation ("sea changes"), no figure has been more influential than the
British historian E. P. Thompson. Science & Society readers will be familiar with
his seminal study, The Making of the English Working Class, and his contributions
to the work of the British Marxist Historians' circle. They may, however, be less
familiar with his literary studies, especially his work on the 17th century poet, William Blake; and even less so with Thompson's own poetic output. Martin Bidney's
rich exegesis ("Neo-Blakean Vision in the Verse of Historian E. P. Thompson: The
'Abstraction' of Labor and Cultural Capital") brings to light the connection between
Thompson and his mentor Blake — in particular, their apprehension that abstraction as such carries within it the seeds of alienation, objectification and exploitation. Thompson's reading of Blake reveals the latter to be a trenchant social critic
as well as an important literary figure; Bidney's study of Thompson, in turn, shows
that the poet/historian's moral sensibilities are not separate from his contributions
to social and historical theory — especially his critique of determinism in progressive and Marxist thought. It remains, perhaps, to be seen whether the critique of
determinism as such can itself become an "abstract rope," if it does not engage the
need to find common threads in human experience; to distinguish determinism
from determination.
David Camfield, in "Re-Orienting Class Analysis: Working Classes as Historical Formations," tackles the ongoing task of refining and developing the concept of
social class, by embedding clsss strongly within historical and cultural realities.
Rather than seeing the rich variety of social relations, including those of race and
gender, as external to class and opposed to it, these and other social categories and
practices are the rich source of the historical situation that constitutes working
classes. Mining a variety of sources in the Marxist tradition for insights, Camfield
brings into special focus those working within the perspective of autonomist Marxism; his paper provides a useful introduction to that perspective. One can imagine
some proponents of views based more centrally on gender, or national identity,
arguing for bringing social class into the rich determination of, e.g., "genders as
historical formations," but Camfield provides much material for a general Marxist
position: class provides the most secure and fruitful foundation for study of, and
struggle against, the range of oppressions and distortions in human life — provided that class is understood and appropriated in a non-reductionist manner.
Is there an efficiency imperative? Does the quest for rising output-to-input
ratios drive the productive forces, and consequently social evolution? How can
affirmative answers to these questions be squared with anthropological and historical evidence to the contrary? These and related matters are the focus of Edward F.
Tverdek's study, "The Efficiency Imperative: Five Questions." The association of
"efficiency" with "capitalism" in capitalist ideology results in a counter move among
environmentalists and some Marxists to reject efficiency and growth as such, as
suitable objects of policy or features of a humane society. Tverdek proposes instead
that we "unpack" the presumed link between efficiency and "the market"; in so
doing he sets the table for a much more nuanced approach to the ways in which
efficiency enters as a dynamic in historical evolution, and its possible place in our
vision of post-capitalist economy and society.
We are pleased to present the Communication by David H. Price, "Theoretical Dangers: The FBI Investigation of Science & Society." Based on continuing
exploration of the FBI files via the Freedom of Information Act, Price's research
highlights the continuing threat to civil liberties coming from the institutions of
political "law enforcement" in the United States; it also contributes in a welcome
manner to our own long-standing project of excavating and preserving the journal's
history.
Finally, we present a review article by Steven Pressman, of Hilary Putnam's
The Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays. Putnam is a major figure in the rising tide of anti- and post-positivism in the social sciences, with major implications
for the challenge to the neoclassical hegemony in economics. Pressman's review
not only describes Putnam's contributions, in relation to the work of other prominent figures such as Amartya Sen; it also serves as an excellent introduction to this
development, especially for readers who are looking for its Marxist linkages and
implications.
D. L.
________________
4. It should not be necessary — but it is and I therefore proceed — to state that
this example of ideologizing consciousness is consistent with a wide variety
of serious interpretations of the Soviet experience, including its role in
foreign trade. With the snow plow nonsense at one extreme, and the failure
of the Soviet Union to conform to the equations of general competitive
equilibrium in the pure theory of trade at the other, there is a useful spectrum
of criteria, involving examination of the foreign-trade monopoly and the
excessive bureaucratization of the trade organizations, licensing procedures,
etc., with which to critically evaluate Soviet performance in this area as in all
other areas of the USSR's economic and social life. Experts, for example,
would have to determine whether local environmental testing of snow plows
in Ghana was a first-order contribution to that country's road construction
program, or an inferior alternative to simply supplying best-practice road
graders. In general, I believe a case can be made that the effort to develop a
critical understanding the 20th century experience of post-capitalist
construction is far from complete, and that essential elements for left
revitalization and development hang in the balance.
5. This is a clear application of a general insight from the realist critique of the
empiricist, or positivist, tradition in epistemology. There are no "pristine"
sense data, or facts; all perception is relative — to context, practice, and existing
theoretical structures.
