bavbavhaus.net/kritika_ideologije.md

---
title: "Kritika ideologije"
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## Strategija

::: {lang=en}
> Like any authentically revolutionary thought, Marx's is driven to destroy what
> already exists in order to build in its place something which does not yet
> prevail. So, Marx's thought has two sides which are distinct from one another
> yet also make up an organic whole. One is the 'ruthless criticism of all that
> exists: in Marx expressed as the discovery of the mystified procedure of
> bourgeois thought and thus as the theoretical demystification of capitalist
> ideologies. The other is the 'positive analysis of the present: which, with
> the maximum level of scientific understanding, brings the future alternative
> to our present. One is a *critique of bourgeois* ideology, the other is a
> scientific analysis of capitalism. These two moments in Marx's oeuvre can be
> understood as both logically divided and chronologically successive from the
> *Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right* to *Capital*. This does not at all
> mean that they always have to repeat this division and succession. When Marx
> himself looked at classical political economy and went back along the path
> which had already led him to discover certain general abstract relations
> through his analysis, he well knew that this path was not to be repeated.
> Rather, it was necessary to start out from these simple abstractions -- the
> division of labour, money, value -- in order again to reach the 'living
> whole': the population, the nation, the state, the world market. Thus, today,
> once we have reached the point of arrival of Marx's oeuvre -- that is, Capital
> -- we need to take it as our starting point; once we have arrived at the
> analysis of capitalism, it is this analysis from which we must build again.
> Now, research around certain determinate abstractions -- alienated labour, the
> modifications that have taken place in the organic composition of capital,
> value in oligopolistic capitalism -- should be the starting point for arriving
> at a new 'living whole': the people, democracy, the political state of
> neocapitalism, the international class struggle. Not by chance, this was also
> Lenin's path, from *The Development of Capitalism in Russia* to *The State and
> Revolution*. It is also not by chance that all bourgeois sociology and all
> reformist ideologies of the workers' movement follow the opposite path.
>
> But all this is still not enough: even if we grasp the specific character
> which *the analysis of capitalism* should today assume, we also simultaneously
> need to grasp the specific character that the *critique of ideology* should
> assume. And, here, it is useful to start out from a precise presupposition,
> deploying one of those tendentious exaggerations which are a positive
> characteristic of Marx's own *science*, stimulants to new thought and to
> active intervention in the practical struggle. This presupposition is that
> *any ideology is always bourgeois*, because it is always the *mystified
> reflection* of the class struggle on the terrain of capitalism.
>
> Marxism has been conceived as an "ideology" of the workers' movement. This is
> a fundamental error, since Marxism's starting point, its birth certificate,
> was always precisely the destruction of *all* ideology through the destructive
> critique of all *bourgeois* ideologies. A process of *ideological
> mystification* is only possible, indeed, on the basis of modern bourgeois
> society: it has always been and continues to be the *bourgeois* point of view
> regarding *bourgeois* society. And anyone who has looked at the opening pages
> of *Capital* even once can see that this is not a process of pure thought
> which the bourgeoisie consciously *chooses* in order to mask the *fact* of
> exploitation; rather, it is itself the real, objective process of
> exploitation. That is, it is itself the mechanism of capitalism's development,
> through all of its phases.
>
> For this reason, the working class does not need an 'ideology' of its own. For
> its existence *as a class* -- that is, its presence as a reality antagonistic
> to the entire system of capitalism, its *organisation* into a revolutionary
> class -- does not link it to the mechanism of this development but make it
> independent of and counterposed to it. Rather, the more that capitalist
> development advances, the more the working class can make itself *autonomous
> of* capitalism; the more accomplished the system becomes, the more *the
> working class must become the greatest contradiction within the system*, to
> the point of making this system's survival impossible and rendering *possible*
> and thus *necessary* the revolutionary rupture which liquidates and transcends
> it.
>
> Marx is not the *ideology* of the workers' movement but its *revolutionary
> theory*. This is a theory born as the critique of bourgeois ideologies and
> which must make this critique its daily bread -- it must continue to be the
> 'ruthless criticism of all that exists: A theory that came to constitute
> itself as the scientific analysis of capitalism and that must, at each moment,
> feed on this analysis, must at times identify with it when it needs to make up
> the lost ground and cover the gap, the distance, which has opened up between
> the development of things and the updating and verification of research and
> its tools. A theory which lives only in a function of the working class's
> revolutionary practice, one that provides weapons for its struggle, develops
> tools for its knowledge, and identifies and magnifies the objectives of its
> action. Marx has been and remains the *working-class* point of view regarding
> *bourgeois* society.
>
> But if Marx's thought is the working class's revolutionary theory, if Marx is
> the *science of the proletariat*, on what basis and by what paths has at least
> one part of *Marxism* become a populist ideology, an arsenal of banal
> commonplaces to justify all possible compromises in the course of the class
> struggle? Here, the historian's task becomes enormous. Yet it is obvious that,
> if ideology is a part, a specific, historically determinate articulation of
> the very mechanism of capitalism's development, then the acceptance of this
> 'ideological' dimension -- the construction of the ideology of the working
> class -- can only mean that the workers' movement has itself become, as such,
> a part, a *passive* articulation of capitalist development. That is, it has
> undergone a process of integration into the system. This integration process
> can have various phases and levels, but it nonetheless has one single
> consequence in provoking different phases and different levels -- that is,
> *different forms* -- of that *reformist* practice which ends up today seeming,
> *in appearance*, implicit in the very concept of the working class. If
> ideology in general is always *bourgeois*, an ideology of the working class is
> always *reformist*: that is, it is the *mystified* mode through which its
> revolutionary function is *expressed* and at the same time *inverted*.
> [@tronti2019workers, 5-7]
:::

::: {lang=en}
> Today's situation returns us continually to this attempt, in ai1 ever-harsher
> way. For now we face not the great abstract syntheses of bourgeois thought,
> but the cult of the most vulgar empirical trivia that has become capital's
> praxis. No longer the logical system of knowledge, the principles of science,
> but an orderless mass of historical facts, of fragmented experiences, of great
> *faits accomplis* that no one has ever thought about. Science and ideology
> again merge with and contradict one another, but no longer in a
> systematisation of ideas meant for eternity, but rather in the day-to-day
> happenings of the class struggle. And this struggle is now dominated by a new
> reality that would have been inconceivable in Marx's time. Capital has placed
> the whole functional apparatus of bourgeois ideology into the hands of the
> officially recognised workers' movement. Capital no longer manages its own
> ideology but has the workers' movement manage it in its stead. This 'workers'
> movement' thus functions as an ideological mediation internal to capital;
> through the historical exercises of this function, the entire mystified world
> of appearances that contradict reality is attached to the working class. That
> is why we say that today the critique of ideology is a task internal to the
> workingclass point of view, and has only in the second instance to do with
> capital. The political task of a working-class auto-critique must question the
> entire past historical course of the workers' class struggle and do so
> starting from the current state of organisation. In the present, the working
> class does not have to criticise anyone outside of itself, its own history,
> its own experiences and that corpus of ideas that has been gathered together
> by others around it. [@tronti2019workers, 163-164]
:::


## Teorija

::: {lang=en}
> With [the concept of ideology] intellectual forms are drawn into the dynamic
> of society by relating them to the contexts that motivated them. In this way
> the concept of ideology critically penetrates their immutable semblance of
> existing in themselves, as well as their claims to truth. In the name of
> ideology, the autonomy of intellectual products, indeed the very conditions
> under which they themselves become autonomous, is thought together with the
> real historical movement of society. These intellectual products originate
> within this movement, and they perform their functions within it, too. They
> may stand in the service of particular interests, whether intentionally or
> not. Indeed, their very isolation, through the constitution of an intellectual
> sphere and its transcendence, is, at the same time, identified as a social
> consequence of the division of labor. [@adorno2022contribution, 19]
:::

::: {lang=en}
> With the dynamization of the contents of the mind through the critique of
> ideology, one tends to forget that the theory of ideology is itself subject to
> the same historical movement; that, if not in substance, then nonetheless in
> function, the concept of ideology transforms through history, and the same
> dynamic governs this. What is called ideology -- and what ideology is -- can
> only be perceived insofar as one does justice to the movement of the concept;
> this movement is at the same time one of its objects.
> [@adorno2022contribution, 20]
:::

## Tehnologija





---
lang: sl
references:
- type: book
  id: tronti2019workers
  author:
  - family: Tronti
    given: Mario
  title: "Workers and capital"
  translator:
  - family: Broder
    given: David
  publisher-place: London
  publisher: Verso
  issued: 2019
  language: en
- type: article-journal
  id: adorno2022contribution
  author:
  - family: Adorno
    given: Theodor
  title: "Contribution to the theory of ideology"
  translator:
  - family: Bard-Rosenberd
    given: Jacob
  container-title: "Selva: a journal of the history of art"
  issue: 4
  issued:
    season: 3
    year: 2024
  page: 19-33
  language: en
# vim: spelllang=sl,en
...