Critique as ideology critique in a neoliberal age

The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 ‘didn’t change much of anything’ (Mirowski, 2013, p. 1) and this should have been the proof that the pudding was not just held together by a bold pragmatism. There were also clues about neoliberalism's ideological agendas from some commentaries on neoliberal histories in Latin America. Enquiries into ‘post-neoliberal activism' in the Global South found that popular resistances have sometimes re-enacted features of neoliberal political rationality that they failed to adequately address. Emir Sader makes the point that the revolts against neoliberalism can inhabit the limited ideological space for collective self-representation that have been cleared by neoliberal attacks on democratic political life and its formal institutions. These performative rebellions have not undertaken to rebuild the relations between democratic institutions and agendasetting civil societies (2008). The question of how neoliberalism reproduces its political rationality and their required political forms need to be investigated.

Adam Kotsko is not convinced, though, that an enquiry into the strategies through which neoliberalism sustains and reproduces itself as ‘a discourse that aims to shape the world’ is appropriately diagnosed as an ideology. Kotsko is right that we don’t get much from a Marxist theory of ideology that ‘in its most simplistic form’ reduces ideology to an illusion that is ‘a secondary effect of the development of the economic mode of production’ and is to be ‘replaced by the true view of things, namely Marxist science’ (2018, p. 7). There is nothing to be gained by an attempt to resuscitate the old Althusserian ‘epistemological break' between ideologies and science. The vision of a pitched battle between science as a universalizing, fully self-transparent, cultural form that looms over and threatens to oust self-blind, accommodating ideological behaviours and mindsets is not to be revived. The philosophical laboratory must not be caught advancing the cause of authoritarian politics. By now, some version of critique has already been worked into the temper of the neoliberal world with society-wide dissatisfactions, disappointments and deeply felt betrayals, losses and damages mounting up. Ideology critique assumes a place here in excavating how ideologies work to block our capacity to reflect upon and elaborate the alternative measures of our historical development that are being thrown up. In doing so, ideology critique might make some practical claim to contribute to rationalizing, and even energizing, our critical impulses.

To explore how we might open up neoliberalism to ideology critique, it is first necessary to identify the tasks of ideology critique in general terms. To do this, I will mm to an old classic. Published in 1937, Max Horkheimer’s essay on ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ distinguishes a critical from an only sociological reception of ‘ideology’ by the interest of the former in measuring historical development against the needs and struggles of ‘real human beings’ (1972). This sets the challenge for an attempted rehabilitation of ‘ideology critique’ that must find a way of giving normative force to its blocked humanistic grounds without buying into a discredited philosophy of history and its authoritarian semantics.

The second section of this chapter finds that Wolfgang Streeck’s diagnosis of the rise of neoliberalism against the background of a blocked, not well-self-understood, social democratic project has some important clues in this regard (2014 and 2016). For Streeck, social democracy straddles two radically opposed diagnoses of the meaning of justice in capitalist democracies. His point is not that social democracy should take charge of the ideals of social justice and leave market justice to the neoliberals. Rather, the former is to be distinguished by its new recognition of the fraught divide between these ideals of justice and is called upon to challenge the distortions of neoliberalism’s bid to fuse them. We turn next to aspects of Michel Foucault’s prescient account of neoliberalism’s early efforts to fundamentally redesign and take over the normative space cleared by social democratic attempts to redress the limits of political liberalism. This turned out to have been neoliberalism’s ideological tour de force (of sorts) that effectively blunted and confused the self-understanding of a social democratic project. At the same time, Foucault’s own ambivalence towards neoliberalism guides us to where we might dig to uncover the normative grounds to be reoccupied by ideology critique. Drawn to neoliberalism as anti-humanism, Foucault incidentally betrays that a social democratic project needs to rethink itself as a democratized and historicized affirmation of a humanist tradition if it is to break through neoliberalism’s ideological blockade and offer itself as an alternative measure of our progress.

The final section of this chapter turns to Gyorgy Markus’s critical appreciation of the idea of ideology critique that is found in Marx. This is a refinement of indications about the tasks of ideology critique already identified by Horkheimer. I will harness this clarification to some insights into the ideological battle between neoliberalism and a social democratic project to demonstrate the contributions that the latter can make as the grounds of ideology critique in a neoliberal age.