Reviews for The imperial animal

The average rating for The imperial animal based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-02-04 00:00:00 Arthur Greebler "Ideology" has in common with "neoliberal" and "shoegaze" that careless overuse has eroded the term's meaning to the point of uselessness. Is it worth salvaging? Therborn makes that case in just 120 clear-headed, sophisticated pages, and granted me the pleasure of awarding my first 5-star review of 2021. Within the marxist analytical framework, nothing can ever be perceived pure and simple -- it is always mediated by the worldview through which individuals understand the world, itself informed by its historical epoch, their practical doings and class position. "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living" applies to history itself, but just as much to the structure of our consciousness. That mediating layer is "ideology". So far, so good. Even within "non-ideological" works such as Capital a lot can be gleaned from observing Marx's comments on Smith, Sismondi, etc, and their respective ideological biases. Somewhere down the line a vile man by the name of Nicos Poulantzas and his henchman Louis Althusser got their hands on ideology and turned it into a structuralist nightmare. Ideology is everywhere, there's state apparatuses beaming it out into our brains, abstractions self-replicate and outgrow their material roots. Althusser in particular (if I recall correctly) made a big show of modes of production needing to reproduce themselves ideologically to justify their existence towards those it rewards and oppresses. It's an intentionalist reading, but with the agency not residing within actors but within the abstraction of the social relations between them. Good luck combating that. Therborn cuts through half a century of analytical hypertrophy and goes back to basics. Luckily, this doesn't entail reinterpreting any specific original marxist luminary, but by restoring proper historical-materialist causality. Ideology plays at many levels: class determines the occupations and hence living conditions and aspirations available to its members; those occupations set the coordinates for consciousness and behaviour that will be either rewarded or sanctioned. These rewards and sanctions are themselves pre-ideological: there's no ideological state apparatus casting brain waves into entrepreneurs heads making them believe in self-sufficiency and cut-throat competition; that's the lesson they're taught by day-to-day successes and failures in their businesses. People don't need to be brainwashed into believing capitalism works: they believe it to the extent that it does work, and because any alternative is unimaginable not just in theory but because no practical pathway to it is evident. Better to hone your survival skills (=ideology) in an unpleasant but real world than to risk everything for a dream. This materialist reading of ideology (which Therborn develops much more in the book than I can share here) is so refreshing because it is always pointing towards the plight of marxists (organize the classes to make class consciousness make sense) rather than wallowing in structuralist despair (I guess everything conspired against the Good Ideology until people strayed from it and now we're stuck in Capitalist Realism). There are for sure conspiratorial aspects to ideology, especially if we consider mass media. However, mass culture is still an epiphenomenon that can only potentially latch onto the bedrock of the ideology of everyday life, and the arena of wage labour and social distribution of goods and services is its achilles' heel. Socialist organisations can, by winning victories within this arena, make socialism make sense, through practice and material affirmation. Everything is downstream from there. Academics, one could say, are ideologically predisposed towards turning this all upside down by making the conscious production and study of ideas the cause of change. For some reason, Göran Therborn betrayed his intellectual environment and restored ideology to its proper position. Aspects of an ideology will only survive to the degree that material processes allow it, but material processes themselves can easily displace disagreeing ideologies by sapping their practical basis. A marvelous book that I will probably return to a lot more.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-01-23 00:00:00 William Estes Clear, concise, and insightful overview and reworking of the Marxist problematic of ideology.