Tag: Politics

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Domination and Indoctrination: the logic of ideological dictatorship

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If a state that is conceived internally as a democracy and also functions as such establishes an occupation regime, it can function externally, namely in relation to the occupied state, as a dictatorship. After 1945, for example, the Western Allied victorious powers (who were not legitimized by the German sovereign) exercised a dictatorship in the Western zones of Germany that was designed from the outset to eliminate a non-democratic regime and to create the conditions for the establishment of a democratic constitutional state. Insofar as the occupation regime operated by a democratic constitutional state observes its own political and constitutional principles and exercises its dictatorship, which is designed to transform a non-democratic predecessor system, exclusively for the purpose of establishing a democratic constitutional order, this is also a constitutional dictatorship. Of course, not every occupation regime must aim to transform the political or social system of the occupied country. The decisions and actions of a hegemonic power that exert influence on other states and their people without them being in a position to directly influence the hegemonic power’s decision-making constitute a special case. The United States of America currently possesses such a hegemonic power, which is present in many parts of the world. Insofar as the USA makes internationally significant decisions as an authoritarian ruler, it has also been described as a “world dictatorship”. Of course, it is essential that and how this form of imperial dictatorship is restrained by its internal democratic, constitutional and fundamental rights control mechanisms and for what purpose it is exercised.

By succeeding in influencing the will of those subject to domination in such a way that they submit to the influencing will in the awareness of voluntariness, a system of rule exercises “conditioned power”. While repressive power is based on the threat or execution of sanctions for non-conformist behaviour and compensatory power on the prospect and distribution of goods and positions for conformist behaviour, conditioned power is based on the ability to restructure the beliefs, the architecture of needs and interests as well as the judgement and will of those subject to domination in accordance with the predetermined system ideology or in the sense of their internalization. Ideally, conditioning through indoctrination is successful if allegiance is not paid because people want to avoid punishment or gain rewards, but because they agree with the content of the system ideology and the exercise of power by the leaders out of conviction.

Ideology-led dictatorships aim to implement a system ideology in practice and, to this end, aim to create a general belief in this ideology among the members of the community. An essential and constitutive characteristic of ideological dictatorships must therefore be the typical way in which the subjects of rule are influenced mentally and psychologically. This way of exercising power is a state-organized and monopolized indoctrination, a formation of convictions and consciousness in the sense of the system ideology.

However, hardly any ideological dictatorship is likely to get by without repression. Fundamental social transformations are very likely to meet with unwillingness and resistance. Moreover, the importance of a system of ideas that has yet to be communicated is not necessarily recognized from the outset, even by those who profit directly from it. Under these conditions, ideological dictatorships resort to violence and terror.
However, the exercise of terroristic rule is neither a necessary nor a sufficient characteristic of this type of dictatorship. This is true even though the two dictatorships that shaped the 20th century, the Communist-Bolshevik as well as the National Socialist, can be regarded as prototypical ideological dictatorships and these systems were characterized by an excessive use of violence and terror. Based on these experiences, the significance of mass terror has been overestimated in the debate on totalitarianism to date. In order to better understand what essentially characterizes these systems of rule, we should view them as members of a species for which terror is not constitutive.
It is true that those subjected to domination must be made to behave as desired – in conformity with the system or ideology – but terror is only one way of achieving this. Terror can be dispensed with if people behave of their own accord, i.e. subjectively voluntarily, in a way that is necessary to build the new society in accordance with the ideology. To this end, the ideas guiding the actions of those subject to rule must be adapted to the ideas of those in power. The members of the community must be influenced in such a way that they form the convictions and desires corresponding to the system ideology, which guide their behavior in accordance with the ideology.
The exercise of terror can therefore be dispensed with if the threat of terror itself generates behavior that conforms to the ideology, or if the indoctrination of those subject to rule in line with the system ideology is so effective that they unconditionally consent to the exercise of rule. Repression can become superfluous through a more effective exercise of power based on ideological conditioning. The aforementioned forms of power are mutually substitutable.

Since ideology-led dictatorships seek legitimacy through consent, they must produce methods of rule that can fulfill this function. As a rule, however, they at best achieve consent on the basis of irrational convictions. Dictatorships based on ideology – this should only be mentioned here in conclusion – regularly turn into dictatorships of education, conviction and mobilization.

Worldview or ideological dictatorships (“Weltanschauungsdiktaturen”) organize consent to their rule and exercise of power through consent to the system ideology. The most important means of achieving this is indoctrination. However, ideology-led dictatorships are not only interested in acting in accordance with the ideology – i.e. ensuring that the members of the community comply and follow the applicable rules. In the interest of permanently stabilizing their rule, they aim to form convictions that conform to their ideology. Accordingly, they are interested in community members who have internalized the system ideology and are openly and honestly committed to it. At the same time, however, the leaders of such dictatorships are not solely interested in community members who have internalized the system ideology. One can also be convinced of the content of the system ideology through one’s own reflection or research.
For this reason, someone who is convinced in accordance with the ideology can remain intellectually autonomous and recognize errors at any time. Moreover, an intellectually autonomous and rational actor will not agree to an exercise of power based on indoctrination. For these reasons, ideology-led dictatorships insist not only on conformity in external behavior and not only on an inner conviction of the truth and correctness of the system ideology, but also try to use means of mental manipulation to create a member of society whose thinking and feeling conform to the ideology and who accepts both the rule and the way in which the rule is exercised.
Worldview dictatorships are geared towards replacing repressive and compensatory power with conditioned power. They are therefore interested in people who do not behave in accordance with the system for private gain, but because they are convinced of the content of the system ideology without reservation or criticism. The purpose of indoctrination is to create people with narrow-minded convictions – people who are absolutely sure of their convictions and can therefore be controlled. Opportunists, on the other hand, who are recognizable as such, undermine the credibility of the leaders’ claim that people follow them on the basis of voluntary consent. However, ideological dictatorships must also rely on people who are able to think and act independently within the boundaries set by the system ideology. Therefore, indoctrination should also pursue the goal of generating dispositions to form convictions that conform to ideology. Since ideology-led dictatorships pursue projects of political and social transformation and are therefore already confronted with unforeseen problems, they cannot set out to completely destroy human autonomy. Rather, they are dependent on people who think within the framework of the system ideology and develop their own initiative, but do not question the established ideological certainties. In this inner contradiction of their project lies the seed of their self-destruction.

From Herrschaft und Indoktrination: Zur Logik der Weltanschauungsdiktatur II; Lothar Fritze

Herrschaft und Indoktination: Zur Logik der Weltanschauungsdiktatur II
Posted in Marx On the Jewish Question

The Christian State

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The so-called Christian state is the Christian negation of the state, but by no means the political realization of Christianity. The state which still professes Christianity in the form of religion, does not yet profess it in the form appropriate to the state, for it still has a religious attitude towards religion – that is to say, it is not the true implementation of the human basis of religion, because it still relies on the unreal, imaginary form of this human core. The so-called Christian state is the imperfect state, and the Christian religion is regarded by it as the supplementation and sanctification of its imperfection. For the Christian state, therefore, religion necessarily becomes a means; hence, it is a hypocritical state. It makes a great difference whether the complete state, because of the defect inherent in the general nature of the state, counts religion among its presuppositions, or whether the incomplete state, because of the defect inherent in its particular existence as a defective state, declares that religion is its basis. In the latter case, religion becomes imperfect politics. In the former case, the imperfection even of consummate politics becomes evident in religion. The so-called Christian state needs the Christian religion in order to complete itself as a state. The democratic state, the real state, does not need religion for its political completion. On the contrary, it can disregard religion because in it the human basis of religion is realized in a secular manner. The so-called Christian state, on the other hand, has a political attitude to religion and a religious attitude to politics. By degrading the forms of the state to mere semblance, it equally degrades religion to mere semblance.

In order to make this contradiction clearer, let us consider Bauer’s projection of the Christian state, a projection based on his observation of the Christian-German state.

“Recently,” says Bauer, “in order to prove the impossibility or non-existence of a Christian state, reference has frequently been made to those sayings in the Gospel with which the [present-day] state not only does not comply, but cannot possibly comply, if it does not want to dissolve itself completely [as a state].” “But the matter cannot be disposed of so easily. What do these Gospel sayings demand? Supernatural renunciation of self, submission to the authority of revelation, a turning-away from the state, the abolition of secular conditions. Well, the Christian state demands and accomplishes all that. It has assimilated the spirit of the Gospel, and if it does not reproduce this spirit in the same terms as the Gospel, that occurs only because it expresses this spirit in political forms, i.e., in forms which, it is true, are taken from the political system in this world, but which in the religious rebirth that they have to undergo become degraded to a mere semblance. This is a turning-away from the state while making use of political forms for its realization.” (p. 55)

Bauer then explains that

the people of a Christian state is only a non-people, no longer having a will of its own, but whose true existence lies in the leader to whom it is subjected, although this leader by his origin and nature is alien to it – i.e., given by God and imposed on the people without any co-operation on its part.

From Karl Marx – On the Jewish Question

Posted in Marx On the Jewish Question

Political Emancipation

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The political emancipation of the Jew, the Christian, and, in general, of religious man, is the emancipation of the state from Judaism, from Christianity, from religion in general. In its own form, in the manner characteristic of its nature, the state as a state emancipates itself from religion by emancipating itself from the state religion – that is to say, by the state as a state not professing any religion, but, on the contrary, asserting itself as a state. The political emancipation from religion is not a religious emancipation that has been carried through to completion and is free from contradiction, because political emancipation is not a form of human emancipation which has been carried through to completion and is free from contradiction.

The limits of political emancipation are evident at once from the fact that the state can free itself from a restriction without man being really free from this restriction, that the state can be a free state [pun on word Freistaat, which also means republic] without man being a free man.

Bauer himself tacitly admits this when he lays down the following condition for political emancipation:

“Every religious privilege, and therefore also the monopoly of a privileged church, would have been abolished altogether, and if some or many persons, or even the overwhelming majority, still believed themselves bound to fulfil religious duties, this fulfilment ought to be left to them as a purely private matter.” [The Jewish Question, p. 65]

It is possible, therefore, for the state to have emancipated itself from religion even if the overwhelming majority is still religious. And the overwhelming majority does not cease to be religious through being religious in private.

But, the attitude of the state, and of the republic [free state] in particular, to religion is, after all, only the attitude to religion of the men who compose the state.

It follows from this that man frees himself through the medium of the state, that he frees himself politically from a limitation when, in contradiction with himself, he raises himself above this limitation in an abstract, limited, and partial way. It follows further that, by freeing himself politically, man frees himself in a roundabout way, through an intermediary, although an essential intermediary. It follows, finally, that man, even if he proclaims himself an atheist through the medium of the state – that is, if he proclaims the state to be atheist – still remains in the grip of religion, precisely because he acknowledges himself only by a roundabout route, only through an intermediary. Religion is precisely the recognition of man in a roundabout way, through an intermediary. The state is the intermediary between man and man’s freedom. Just as Christ is the intermediary to whom man transfers the burden of all his divinity, all his religious constraint, so the state is the intermediary to whom man transfers all his non-divinity and all his human unconstraint.

[…]

Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from the sphere of public law to that of private law. Religion is no longer the spirit of the state, in which man behaves – although in a limited way, in a particular form, and in a particular sphere – as a species-being, in community with other men. Religion has become the spirit of civil society, of the sphere of egoism, of bellum omnium contra omnes. It is no longer the essence of community, but the essence of difference. It has become the expression of man’s separation from his community, from himself and from other men – as it was originally. It is only the abstract avowal of specific perversity, private whimsy, and arbitrariness. The endless fragmentation of religion in North America, for example, gives it even externally the form of a purely individual affair. It has been thrust among the multitude of private interests and ejected from the community as such. But one should be under no illusion about the limits of political emancipation. The division of the human being into a public man and a private man, the displacement of religion from the state into civil society, this is not a stage of political emancipation but its completion; this emancipation, therefore, neither abolished the real religiousness of man, nor strives to do so.

From Karl Marx – On the Jewish Question

Posted in Marx On the Jewish Question

Christian state and Jews

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By its very nature, the Christian state is incapable of emancipating the Jew; but, adds Bauer, by his very nature the Jew cannot be emancipated. So long as the state is Christian and the Jew is Jewish, the one is as incapable of granting emancipation as the other is of receiving it.

The Christian state can behave towards the Jew only in the way characteristic of the Christian state – that is, by granting privileges, by permitting the separation of the Jew from the other subjects, but making him feel the pressure of all the other separate spheres of society, and feel it all the more intensely because he is in religious opposition to the dominant religion. But the Jew, too, can behave towards the state only in a Jewish way – that is, by treating it as something alien to him, by counterposing his imaginary nationality to the real nationality, by counterposing his illusory law to the real law, by deeming himself justified in separating himself from mankind, by abstaining on principle from taking part in the historical movement, by putting his trust in a future which has nothing in common with the future of mankind in general, and by seeing himself as a member of the Jewish people, and the Jewish people as the chosen people.

[…]

The most rigid form of the opposition between the Jew and the Christian is the religious opposition. How is an opposition resolved? By making it impossible. How is religious opposition made impossible? By abolishing religion. As soon as Jew and Christian recognize that their respective religions are no more than different stages in the development of the human mind, different snake skins cast off by history, and that man is the snake who sloughed them, the relation of Jew and Christian is no longer religious but is only a critical, scientific, and human relation. Science, then, constitutes their unity. But, contradictions in science are resolved by science itself.

From Karl Marx – On the Jewish Question

Posted in Marx On the Jewish Question

Charter of the Christian state

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The separation of the “spirit of the Gospel” from the “letter of the Gospel” is an irreligious act. A state which makes the Gospel speak in the language of politics – that is, in another language than that of the Holy Ghost – commits sacrilege, if not in human eyes, then in the eyes of its own religion. The state which acknowledges Christianity as its supreme criterion, and the Bible as its Charter, must be confronted with the words of Holy Scripture, for every word of Scripture is holy. This state, as well as the human rubbish on which it is based, is caught in a painful contradiction that is insoluble from the standpoint of religious consciousness when it is referred to those sayings of the Gospel with which it “not only does not comply, but cannot possibly comply, if it does not want to dissolve itself completely as a state.” And why does it not want to dissolve itself completely? The state itself cannot give an answer either to itself or to others. In its own consciousness, the official Christian state is an imperative, the realization of which is unattainable, the state can assert the reality of its existence only by lying to itself, and therefore always remains in its own eyes an object of doubt, an unreliable, problematic object. Criticism is, therefore, fully justified in forcing the state that relies on the Bible into a mental derangement in which it no longer knows whether it is an illusion or a reality, and in which the infamy of its secular aims, for which religion serves as a cloak, comes into insoluble conflict with the sincerity of its religious consciousness, for which religion appears as the aim of the world. This state can only save itself from its inner torment if it becomes the police agent of the Catholic Church. In relation to the church, which declares the secular power to be its servant, the state is powerless, the secular power which claims to be the rule of the religious spirit is powerless.

It is, indeed, estrangement which matters in the so-called Christian state, but not man.

The only man who counts, the king, is a being specifically different from other men, and is, moreover, a religious being, directly linked with heaven, with God.

The relationships which prevail here are still relationships dependent of faith. The religious spirit, therefore, is still not really secularized.

From Karl Marx – On the Jewish Question