Critical Sociology

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Marxist Theories of Ideologies: an Update

Terry Boswell and Hannah Hawkins
Crit Sociol 1999 25: 352
DOI: 10.1177/08969205990250022201

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 MARXIST THEORIES OF IDEOLOGIES: AN UPDATE

Terry Boswell
Emory University

with
Hannah Hawkins
Emory University

To introduce the reissue of “Recent Developments in Marxist Theories

of Ideology” (1986) for this special issue, the editors asked me to assess
the scholarly developments since its publication, including my own sub-
sequent research. Tall order. During the 1980s, the trend in Marxist
theory was away from the traditional understanding of ideology as func-
tioning to reproduce capitalist relations or as a re ection of class posi-
tions. To say that the trend has continued is an understatement. The
diversity of approaches has multiplied and some scholars discussed in
the article, if once Marxists, have ventured so far from class analysis
that their writings now seem to have little relevance for the topic (such
as Laclau and MouVe, 1987).
We can review here only select bits of the contemporary literature,
enough to point to the major debates and trends, including the direc-
tions of my work in this area. It has gone in two directions, one address-
ing the issue of racism versus class consciousness, the other involving
ideology as a worldview. The work on race and class has centered on
the question of when are workers divided along racial lines versus when
can they overcome racial divisions to achieve class solidarity (Boswell
1986, Brown and Boswell 1995, Brueggemann and Boswell 1998). While
ideology is important to this research, rather than review my own work,
I chose instead to update the literature beyond my purview by team-
ing with a colleague from comparative literature, Hannah Hawkins. We
trace debates over ideology and discourse with the goal of explaining
why the literature reviewed in “Recent Developments” evolved, or ex-
ploded, into postmodern theories of discourse. We end with a discus-
sion of the “end of ideology.”

Critical Sociology 25,2/3

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 marxist theories of ideologies: an update 353

Ideology and Discourse

Of the trends described in the “Recent Developments” article, the
most important continuing one has been explaining the materiality of
ideology, and especially its inverse, elucidating the cultural deŽ nition of
the material world. However, rather than Althusser or other Marxists,
the center of the debate has shifted to Foucault’s (1972) all-encompassing
concept of “discourse.” Explaining the centrality of discourse often starts
with questions of epistemology and is debated on philosophical grounds.
Basically, (very basically) when humans perceive things or objects, we
do not perceive them as things-in-themselves, in their essential reality,
but rather we construct them through cognition and language. As peo-
ple’s cognition and language are deŽ ned by their cultural context,
“objective reality” of social phenomena is always constructed in dis-
course. Discourse theory can be regarded as a way of looking at mean-
ing in which the objects that we ascribe meaning to and the meaning
itself are considered together, in one realm. This itself is not a prob-
lem, but Foucault’s framework explicitly rejects Marxist concerns of class
and exploitation in favor of his own conception of power. Knowledge,
language and power are inextricably linked in discourse: power vali-
dates certain speech and invalidates others, while knowledge supports
power.
In what has now become a common criticism, Said (1983) condemns
Foucault’s theory of power for being far too inclusive. Lacking class or
political analysis, power is simply assumed. Marxist literary critics Jameson
and Eagleton avoid this pitfall to produce what might be considered
the leading work in the Ž eld. Their focus is on the materiality of ide-
ology that can be found in the text and its relation to social context.
Eagleton emphasizes ideology as forming part of the complex relation-
ship between social base and textual superstructure. Ideology is discourse
in that it carries perceptions and distortions of the material world within
itself, and these concrete elements cannot be separated from the mean-
ings and valuations produced by ideology (see Wuthnow 1992). Both
Eagleton and Jameson follow Althusser in using Lacan’s conception of
“the real,” which is the extradiscursive world that can only be encoun-
tered through symbol-using thought processes. Discourse can be ration-
ally examined in order to discover how the real is experienced. For
Eagleton, ideology re ects a praxis of domination; “. . . it is in the inter-
ests of the system in question to forestall such accurate knowledge of
its workings, and that fetishism, mystiŽ cation and the rest are among
the devices by which it achieves those ends.” (1991, p. 17)

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354 terry boswell with hannah hawkins

For Jameson, ideology illuminates the rift between lived experience

and scientiŽ c knowledge. Its practice articulates the two dimensions, and
he ties this practice to historical and social context. His seminal critique
of the present, postmodern context is that the discursive space of “late
capitalism” has become so fragmented and all-encompassing that posi-
tive counter-ideologies that can orient instead of mystify the subject have
become increasingly diYcult to utilize. The growing penetration of late
capitalism into previously semi-autonomous realms of experience is dis-
turbing but presents new possibilities:

the dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture is rather to be imag-

ined in terms of an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture through-
out the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life—from
economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of
the psyche itself—can be said to have become ‘cultural’ in some original
and yet untheorized sense. (1983: 87)

Some cynical sociologists may see aspects of discourse theory as recy-

cled from The Social Construction of Reality (Berger and Luckman 1967).
Even if true, it is only partially so, and more important, does not explain
why it would get recycled now as postmodernism and it on such sweep-
ing importance in the humanities and cultural studies.

Ideology and Globalization

One answer is provided by the Marxist geographer David Harvey.
Harvey (1989, p. 147) explains that over the last 20–30 years, changes in
capitalist production now commonly associated with the term ‘global-
ization’—a rapid increase in global economic integration, in the  exibility
of production, and in the pace of innovation, along with a precipitous
fall of transportation and communications costs—have generated a rel-
ative “time-space compression,” which has profound consequences for
the cultural context of world capitalism. A time-space compression
throws together cultural artifacts of past and present, local and exotic,
or traditional and modern, in constant juxtaposition. Frequent juxtapo-
sition of cultures contrasts with the linear developments of modernism,
especially temporal juxtaposition, such as borrowing architectural styles
from various eras or the mixing of high tech convenience with retro
appearance. Separating text from context, juxtaposition makes one self-
conscious of both. This applies to a person’s cultural text, their nation-
ality, gender and other inalienable characteristics, what is often referred
to as their identity. Cultural juxtaposition makes one highly aware of

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 marxist theories of ideologies: an update 355

their identity in contrast to others at the same time that it separates

one’s identity from its usual context (a source of the rise in identity pol-
itics). Rapid change makes juxtaposition of time, place and manners
only a temporary cultural Ž x. Instability in the cultural context that
deŽ nes language and cognition makes the discursive construction of real-
ity highly contentious. This is the source of the postmodern condition.
At least, this is one view of postmodernism looking backward at what
became relevant now and setting aside its dead ends, such as endless
relativism or using impenetrable elitist jargon to explain how language
is a source of subordination! This view accepts Smart’s retrospective
conclusion that globalization is really what it meant all along (1994, pp.
151-2). As such, it leads us to consider ideology as it is used in popu-
lar discourse, as a worldview or secular belief system, where the death
of ideology has been prematurely proclaimed.

Ideology and Utopia

Ideology ends when there is no debate among alternative worldviews.
According to Fukayama (1992), liberal capitalism has become the sole
meaningful worldview because the world revolution that swept aside
communist regimes in the Soviet Bloc left no foreseeable alternative. As
we described in “Recent Developments,” a worldview is deŽ ned by the
answers to the following three questions: “What exists?” “What is good?”
and “What is possible?” (Therborn 1980). DeŽ ning “what is possible”
is an ideology’s ultimate defense, as existential or value debates can go
on endlessly if no alternative is possible. While few thought the Soviet
model desirable, it proved an alternative was possible and it held the
utopian promise of democratic reform, at least until Gorbachev’s attempt
failed. Now, the possibility of a socialist alternative is unclear, made
murkier by globalization and the inadequacies of societal models for an
increasingly global economy. The lack of any “utopian” goal against
which to organize criticism and more importantly, to direct progress,
has led many erstwhile leftist intellectuals into the nihilist side of post-
modernism taken to its logical extremes ( Jameson 1991). Getting past
this impasse requires an ideological worldview that encompasses a real-
istic alternative to global capitalism.
In a treatise that proclaims the end of liberalism, Wallerstein pro-
claims the prime challenge for progressive forces is “the creation of a
new Left ideology” (1995, p. 247). Liberalism, which appears at its apex,
is already in decline. Liberalism always contained within it a funda-
mental contradiction in that it deŽ ned individual rights as universal, but

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356 terry boswell with hannah hawkins

established them only for citizens of particular states. Citizenship deŽ nes
a group—starting with propertied white European males—with rights
denied to non-citizens. Granting rights required denying rights. This is
not new, but what has changed of late is that liberation movements
struck down state power to deny rights based on race, ethnicity or sex,
while globalization reduced state power to grant rights to only citizens.
With increased world migration, liberal rights become increasingly arbi-
trary, such as granting a 6 year-old immigrant boy citizenship rights,
but denying parental rights to his father. The solution to the contra-
diction is world citizenship, which is obvious at Ž rst, but not in full, as
world citizenship and rights entails constructing a world state and global
culture. Most of the Left is attacking the WTO, and so they should as
it now works, but ultimate success requires a vision of alternate forms
of democratic global governance that would oVer means for controlling
transnational capital. Utopian visions pose new answers to the ideolog-
ical question of “what is possible?” and they proliferate about every Ž fty
years during periods of economic upheaval (Kiser and Drass 1987).
Wallerstein calls the creative process of envisioning possible futures,
“utopistics.” In a short book of that title (1998), he oVers a hellish future
scenario where the continued decline of national states leads to ram-
pant crime, piracy, and war, stopped only by transforming the capital-
ist logic of the world-system. He brie y hints, without elaboration, that
a world market of nonproŽ t companies would be a viable alternative
(see also Wagar’s 1992 world-system utopian novel).
Fortunately, detailed proposals, and critiques, of market socialism have
proliferated since the collapse of the soviet model. We cannot review
them here, but two of the best are found in Roemer (1994) and
Schweikhart (1996). What is missing from these models, and even from
Wallerstein, is an explanation of how they would work at the world level.
We will end by noting that this is the task taken up in my most recent
work (Boswell and Chase-Dunn 2000). It focuses on the question of
agency in world-system analysis, addressing how social movements and
revolutions from below have changed the world order and world cul-
ture over time, why the state socialists failed, and what kinds of progress
has been made. Future progress, we contend, comes from transforming
social democracy into global democracy. Others may contest this view,
and we hope they do. The goal is to enjoin a new debate over “what
is possible” in the ideological construction of a Marxist worldview.

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 marxist theories of ideologies: an update 357

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