ABSTRACT
The chapters by Soborski and by Wolfson and Funke both center on the dilemmas of contemporary social movements, focusing on the nexus of their decentralized praxis and their ideology. Wolfson and Funke trace the shifts of organizational form generated as social movements respond to hegemonic power. They step around the term “ideology,” referring instead to the “meta-logic of movement politics.” They identify the Zapatista movement from 1995 as the crystallization of a “nomadic” political logic – involving various sorts of “flattening” of movement structures and practices – and argue that such ideology became dominant among resistance movements of the 21st century. Soborski begins with the “fall from grace” of neoliberalism in the 2008 credit crunch – and then its quick recovery – to argue that social movements, vulnerable to neoliberal ideology, must construct more coherent ideology to build movement unity. Soborski gives an explicit definition of ideology, detailing it as a system of political beliefs. Thus, despite the many parallels in the two chapters, Soborski emphasizes the agency of leaders in succeeding or failing to develop effective movement ideology, while Wolfson and Funke emphasize the structural shaping of movement praxis and meta-logic, so that meta-logic is an integral part of the movement as a whole rather than a distinctive ideology. In this brief effort at dialogue, I suggest that attention to ideology in broad
historical context may help sort out the debates and decisions in which Soborski and Wolfson and Funke partake. My own chapter, on the democratization movements of 1989-1992, left implicit the ideological dimension of social movements, but I draw out my underlying ideological argument in this commentary. In the discussion I include Immanuel Wallerstein’s keynote address to the conference from which this book arose: there he set forth a two-century review of evolving social movements and their shifting ideology.1 Combining them, we may ask
about the complex role of ideology in social movements of the modern age. How does counter-hegemonic ideology evolve and interact with hegemonic outlook? How does ideology shift in the rise, decline, and interconnection of social movements? This brief commentary compares and extends the arguments of these three studies. The chapters of Soborski and Wolfson and Funke step into an ongoing process
of social and ideological turmoil and trace steps of experimentation and evolution in the ideology and practice articulating the vision of social movements. Wallerstein, in his longer-term review, locates the historical origins of ideological debate in the French Revolution and especially the rise of conservative ideology in the revolution’s aftermath – and carries that discussion forward to the present. Wallerstein’s narrative displays the long-term ideological debates, showing how they have shaped our understanding of recent and current ideology. But I would start the narrative at an earlier time and, for that reason, offer a somewhat different characterization of the path of ideological change and the role of ideology in the formation and the fate of social movements. That is, I see ideology as having emerged earlier and more broadly – during the 18th century, as a sort of public debate on social priorities – though I agree that debate accelerated in significance during the 19th century. In this view, ideology depends on the expansion of a public sphere, in which contending interests articulate their views in layman’s language rather than at the level of high specialization. Why should a public sphere expand from the 18th century? A long-term process of expanding literacy was certainly at work in Europe, the Islamic world, and South and East Asia. More immediately, the chaotic expansion in global interaction from the 13th century forward had the effect, basically everywhere, of raising big questions of social priorities and drawing larger proportions of people into commentary on those priorities. How to define ideology – its constituents, social location, and dynamics? It
strikes me that, in societies of increasing literacy, an ideological sphere grew to increasing importance. In it, speakers seeking to represent many social interests and strata struggled in speech and text to make themselves heard. They focused especially on social theory but in multiple arenas: they included not only politics but society’s demographic, economic, social, cultural, and of course religious dimensions, plus the interaction of human society and the natural world. All of these were worth debating. As such, ideology arose as rhetorical representation of the social system, in which contesting participants in the sphere of public discourse argued over different visions of how the social system functioned, what changes it was undergoing, and what priorities should be emphasized in reproducing or transforming society. To this concise assertion of the nature of ideology I add another element: the
range of registers in ideological debate. Ideological debate ranges from the intellectualized and theorized, at one pole, to the symbolic and emotive, at another pole. An effective ideology conveys a representation of the world with
consistency among its intellectual, social, and cultural registers. Change in any one of these areas – new scientific results about biological evolution or shifting social values about the treatment of children – could reverberate through an ideology and transform it to greater or lesser degree. Ideological propositions and concerns, to be effective, needed to resonate at multiple registers, from that of theoretical logic to that of social mobilization and to that of emotive sensibility. Ideology – both hegemonic and antisystemic – thus ranges across underlying values of hierarchy or democracy, theories of political economy, principles for alliances among people of varying identities and interests, programs for gaining and maintaining power, and shared cultural practices. Ideologies can be coherent but only up to a limit: varying dimensions of ideology become prominent according to the twists and turns of social struggle. The social function of ideology, in this framework, is to serve as arena of
struggle among competing social interests. In a society dominated by hegemonic interests, social movements arise as contending interests challenge the hegemonic power. Specific ideologies become the tools sharpened by those on each side in order to combat their opponents: anti-hegemonic ideologies make the case for reform or radical change; hegemonic ideologies make the case for reproduction of the established order. Of particular interest, I think, are the dynamics of ideological evolution and
interaction. My focus has been to trace the waves of social contestation that result from alliances of multiple social movements with each other, in search of social transformation that would be of benefit to each of them.2 The role of ideology, in this case, becomes that of the discourse of alliance among social movements seeking to build a common, anti-hegemonic program. The simplifications of ideological formulations (e.g., “democracy,” “the 99 percent,” “civil society”), while frustratingly vague at times, may have the advantage of enabling more social movements to ally with each other at a moment of crisis. The pressures for ideological change are manifold, and they come at once from
within the semi-autonomous arena of ideology and from other elements of the social system that it works to represent. Within the world of ideology there is the struggle among the proponents of a given ideology for ensuring logic and consistency in their thinking and their program. More obvious is the dynamic of contestation among competing ideologies, which leads to tactical and even strategic shifts on each side. Further pressures for ideological change come from elements of the underlying social system (as with changing demography or political economy), change in scientific knowledge (as with biological evolution), change in technology (as with atomic energy or the internet), and change in humannatural interactions (as with climate change). The hierarchies present and evolving in the 19th century created distinctions by class, race, gender, religion, ethnicity, and other factors. Ideology and the outcome of ideological struggle, in turn, can turn the tide of social change and bring transformations in the social system.
