Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg
Unlike most social theorists of his era and since, Marx can actually write. His prose has a rhythm and urgency that feels more like a sermon than a scholarly text. Of course, he has the advantage that he’s writing a manifesto, so he isn’t bogged down by nuance, complexity or the admission of contradictory arguments.
As a good leftist secular humanist, I can practically recite the Communist Manifesto by heart. Let’s all say it together.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
But now there are only two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
Everything political can be boiled down to the bourgeouisie’s cynical economic exploitation of the proletariat. That’s an appalling oversimplification, but like I said, this is a manifesto. Gender, nationality, race and all the rest are epiphenomena of class. Keeping a political distinction between, say, poor white people and poor black people prevents them from rising up together against the rich white people. Marx believes that social change is caused by conflict–hard to argue with that–but that social cohesion is also caused by conflict.
Capitalism alienates us from our work, from nature, from each other, and from ourselves. This is just as true for the bourgeoisie as it is for the proletariat.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
There’s an element of truth here–I want my kids to have enough money to lead happy lives–but I’d like to think there’s a little more to my family relationships than this.
The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.
These are some broad strokes. But, okay. Marx acknowledges that aspects of communism are difficult to swallow, especially the idea of the state taking over the role of the family in raising children. But he thinks that the state is raising our kids already.
Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty. But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social. And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, &c.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.
For Learning of Culture purposes, that’s the punchline. Louis Althusser expands on the idea.
Capitalist ideology needs to reproduce itself, and not just financially and technologically. It also needs to sustain itself with a steady supply of skilled and obedient workers.
How is this reproduction of the (diversified) skills of labour power provided for in a capitalist regime? Here, unlike social formations characterized by slavery or serfdom this reproduction of the skills of labour power tends (this is a tendential law) decreasingly to be provided for ‘on the spot’ (apprenticeship within production itself), but is achieved more and more outside production: by the capitalist education system, and by other instances and institutions.
We impart knowledge to kids not for its own sake, but to prepare the kids for their eventual roles in the capitalist machine.
What do children learn at school? They go varying distances in their studies, but at any rate they learn to read, to write and to add – i.e. a number of techniques, and a number of other things as well, including elements (which may be rudimentary or on the contrary thoroughgoing) of ‘scientific’ or ‘literary culture’, which are directly useful in the different jobs in production (one instruction for manual workers, another for technicians, a third for engineers, a final one for higher management, etc.). Thus they learn know-how.
Making good workers is not just about skills and knowledge. The kids have to be socialized.
But besides these techniques and knowledges, and in learning them, children at school also learn the ‘rules’ of good behaviour, i.e. the attitude that should be observed by every agent in the division of labour, according to the job he is ‘destined’ for: rules of morality, civic and professional conscience, which actually means rules of respect for the socio-technical division of labour and ultimately the rules of the order established by class domination. They also learn to ‘speak proper French’, to ‘handle’ the workers correctly, i.e. actually (for the future capitalists and their servants) to ‘order them about’ properly, i.e. (ideally) to ‘speak to them’ in the right way, etc.
By teaching the labor class to submit to the ruling ideology, we reproduce the conditions that make the ruling ideology possible. In other words, good workers need to learn the proper habitus.
All the agents of production, exploitation and repression, not to speak of the ‘professionals of ideology’ (Marx), must in one way or another be ‘steeped’ in this ideology in order to perform their tasks ‘conscientiously’ – the tasks of the exploited (the proletarians), of the exploiters (the capitalists), of the exploiters’ auxiliaries (the managers), or of the high priests of the ruling ideology (its ‘functionaries’), etc.
Althusser locates state power not just in “state apparatus” like the armed forces and the criminal justice system, but also in “Ideological State Apparatuses.” These include religions, schools, the family, the law, political parties, trade unions, the media, the arts, and pop culture.
[W]hereas the unified – (Repressive) State Apparatus belongs entirely to the public domain, much the larger part of the Ideological State Apparatuses (in their apparent dispersion) are part, on the contrary, of the private domain. Churches, Parties, Trade Unions, families, some schools, most newspapers, cultural ventures, etc., etc., are private.
The public/private distinction is itself a function of ruling class power structures.
Private institutions can perfectly well ‘function’ as Ideological State Apparatuses.
State and ideological apparatus enact themselves through a mixture of (threatened) violence and ideology. The armed forces and police are not purely violent, any more than schools and churches are purely ideological. The violence/ideology divide is really a continuum.
Thus Schools and Churches use suitable methods of punishment, expulsion, selection, etc., to ‘discipline’ not only their shepherds, but also their flocks. The same is true of the Family…. The same is true of the cultural IS Apparatus (censorship, among other things), etc.
Is there any hope?
The class (or class alliance) in power cannot lay down the law in the ISAs as easily as it can in the (repressive) State apparatus, not only because the former ruling classes are able to retain strong positions there for a long time, but also because the resistance of the exploited classes is able to find means and occasions to express itself there, either by the utilization of their contradictions, or by conquering combat positions in them in struggle.
Althusser identifies education as the dominant ideological state apparatus of modern capitalism.
[W]hat the bourgeoisie has installed as its number-one, i.e. as its dominant Ideological State Apparatus, is the educational apparatus, which has in fact replaced in its functions the previously dominant Ideological State Apparatus, the Church. One might even add: the School-Family couple has replaced the Church-Family couple.
Althusser describes education as a metaphorical concert score, which
integrates into its music the great themes of the Humanism of the Great Forefathers, who produced the Greek Miracle even before Christianity, and afterwards the Glory of Rome, the Eternal City, and the themes of Interest, particular and general, etc. nationalism, moralism and economism.
Kids get indoctrinated at home, at church, through culture and various other vectors, but school is the most important, because school commands so much of our time during the key developmental years. No wonder we argue so much about school reform. When we argue about education policy, we’re really playing out the great class struggle that Marx predicted.