Tom Atchison's Dissertation on False Consciousness

• Chapter 5 - Challenges to the Importance of False Consciousness

  • 5.1 They are not wrong

Chapter 5: Challenges to the Importance of False Consciousness

The third element of our schema of false consciousness says that false consciousness plays an important role in supporting or stabilizing an oppressive social order. This element is crucial to the idea of a critical social theory, because that sort of theory is supposed to contribute to emancipation by helping to change consciousness. And, it would seem, eliminating false consciousness can lead to social change only if false consciousness is blocking social change. Several recent writers, though, have challenged this assumption, arguing that members of subordinate groups are not really deceived or influenced by the official or dominant ideologies. I will examine their arguments and see what can be salvaged of the claim.

5.1 They are not wrong

In Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, James C. Scott argues that social theorists have been attracted to the notions of false consciousness and ideological hegemony largely because they have themselves been taken in by the deceptive surface of social life. In Scott's terminology, these theorists have been overly impressed by the "public transcript" ("the open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate" ) and have ignored or failed to dig up the "hidden transcript" (the "discourse that takes place 'offstage,' beyond direct observance by power holders").[1] In public, subordinates will tell the powerful what they want to hear. They will play along with whatever ideology the powerful use to rationalize their power, but these public performances will not be a reliable indication of their actual attitudes and beliefs. Out of earshot of their masters they will talk a very different line, one that typically expresses rage, resentment, and fantasies of revolt and revenge. The public transcript records a pseudo-conversation in which the voices of the powerless echo and mollify the powerful, while what they would like to say is pushed offstage, withheld until they are safe among their own kind. Consequently, "any analysis based exclusively on the public transcript is likely to conclude that subordinate groups endorse the terms of their subordination and are willing, even enthusiastic, partners in that subordination."[2]

It follows from these considerations, Scott says, that the evidence usually presented to support interpretations of false consciousness is insufficient. That evidence is found in the public transcript, which cannot be trusted. Moreover, "there are other good reasons for doubting this interpretation."[3] 1) Theories of false consciousness presume that accepting the dominant ideology will tend to make people passive and accepting. But the historical record shows that the dominant ideology often provides the frame of reference for a sharp critique of the existing order. Dominant ideologies represent their social systems as serving the interests of all, and revolutions generally begin with efforts to hold them to their promises. 2) Strong theories of hegemony make it "difficult to explain how social change could ever originate from below."[4] But the historical record is replete with slave revolts, peasant uprisings, protest and conflict. 3) What these protests indicate is that people do not tend to accept their domination just because they have never experienced any alternative to it. For one thing, even the weather gets cursed, and the inevitable need not be experienced as just. More importantly, even those whose horizons are most restricted can imagine the reversal of power relations, and "the millennial theme of a world turned upside down, a world in which the last shall be first and the first last, can be found in nearly every major cultural tradition in which the inequities of power, wealth, and status have been pronounced."[5] Equally ubiquitous are simple negations of the existing hierarchy, utopian ideas of a world without whatever distinctions are prominent in reality. The obstacles to revolt are not ideological, but practical: the oppressed are typically dispersed, disorganized, and under surveillance, and their oppressors wield economic and military power that make reprisals all too likely.[6]

Scott considers an objection to his view, based on the observation that protest is most often couched in terms acceptable to the dominant ideology: the peasants challenge, not the institution of monarchy, but the credentials of this king, or the policies carried out in his name by agents who are presumed to be acting without his knowledge. Such protest, in Barrington Moore's words, "leaves the basic functions of the dominant stratum inviolate."[7] Scott accepts the notion that protests may be placed on a gradient in this way, according to how fundamentally they challenge the social order, but he insists that we cannot infer that people whose protests conform to the dominant ideology are themselves captivated by it. Couching their protests in these forms may be seen, rather, as a rational strategy, one which maximizes their chances of getting a hearing, minimizes the chances of punishment, and provides a line of retreat if things don't go well. Further, he insists, there is very little price to be paid for confining one's protest to the terms of the dominant ideology, because these terms are quite flexible. "A dominant ideology of paternalistic lords and faithful retainers does not prevent social conflict but is simply an invitation to a structured argument. We may consider the dominant discourse as a plastic idiom or dialect that is capable of carrying an enormous variety of meanings, including those that are subversive of their use as intended by the dominant. The appeal to would-be hegemonic values sacrifices very little in the way of flexibility given how malleable the terms are and has the added advantage of appearing to disavow the most threatening goals."[8]

The final irony, in Scott's view, is that "the system may have most to fear from those subordinates among whom the institutions of hegemony have been most successful."[9] Cynicism breeds apathy, while those who take the values of the ruling ideology seriously develop expectations whose betrayal stirs up righteous anger and potential radicalism.

Scott is not alone in making this kind of argument. Earlier we encountered a version of it from Stanley and Wise. In Chapter 3 we read them as disputing the propriety of saying that women were falsely conscious, when they said "listen to the women in any shop talking about how its a man's world. . .." But this could also be taken as an empirical objection. The line between these two complaints is a bit blurry. One (the one this chapter is about) says: as a matter of fact, these people are pretty well acquainted with their social world, both its surfaces and its underlying realities. If there are legitimating ideologies, they don't believe them. The other says: isn't it arrogant and offensive to suppose that you understand what is really going on in people's lives better than they do.

Adam Przeworski argues in Capitalism and Social Democracy that what keeps workers from pursuing socialism is not ideological hegemony but the material circumstances which make it more advantageous to pursue reform and personal advancement within capitalist society. Again the claim seems to be that false consciousness is not the problem, objective power relations are. (He doesn't seem to be saying that socialism is not a better social system or that workers would not in some sense be better off were socialism to arrive somehow. But, given the difficulties that stand in the way of pursuing socialism, it is not rational to pursue it here and now.) The same line is advanced by Abercrombie, Hill and Turner in their book The Dominant Ideology Thesis. That book argues that the working classes in both late feudalism and in early and contemporary capitalism show very few signs of accepting the legitimating ideologies offered them. Rather "the dull compulsion of economic life" (the phrase is Marx's) is what keeps the thing going. People have to go to work to live; to disrupt capitalism is to disrupt the source of their livelihood. And lately, that livelihood is generous enough that the real benefits of working within the system offer a better choice than the uncertain results of trying to change it. Still, working-class and even middle-class people in Britain express strong support for egalitarian principles and redistributive policies, and they have a clear perception of the business elite as unfairly privileged in law and in politics and as recipients of undeserved income. They just don't see what they can do about it. These arguments are similar enough, that I will focus my reply, for the most part,on Scott's version, which also has the more interesting analysis of the nature of resistance. That reply will come in several parts. First, I will point to some contrary evidence in another account of life in a peasant society. Second, I will point to an indication in Scott's account that there is a kind of ideological domination at work, one which might be fairly important in our society as well. Third, I will note some important differences between the extremely hierarchical societies he is describing and our own society. Fourth, I will remind the reader that Scott, and the other writers I have cited, do not challenge the role of false consciousness in bolstering the ruling groups, in fact they insist on it. Finally, and rather speculatively I will describe Andrea Dworkin's interpretation of the consciousness of 'right wing' women in the U.S. and raise the possibility that it may have something to teach us about the larger issue of this chapter.

One central argument of this case must surely be correct: We cannot infer from the deferential behavior of serfs, slaves, or employees that they harbor no resentment toward their lords, masters, or bosses, or even that the subordinate group is not on the brink of open rebellion. On the other hand, I don't think we can infer from backstage grumbling, fantasies of reversal, or even periodic rebellion, that the dominant ideology has had no important effects on subordinates. The phenomena collected under the heading "internalized racism" are surely as real as the grumbling, the fantasies, and the revolts, and they are not all artifacts of the public transcript. (Cf. the passages from James Baldwin quoted above in Chapter 4.2) Moreover, Scott's account is difficult to square with some of the first person accounts given by oppressed (or formerly oppressed) people. In Don't Be Afraid Gringo Elvia Alvarado describes the process by which she became involved in a struggle for land reform in her native Honduras. Her account includes, it seems to me, a retrospective attribution of false consciousness to her younger self.

In the social world of Alvarado's childhood and young adulthood, it was obvious enough that people were suffering, that they wanted things they had no way to get, and that others, better off than they, had plenty of those same things (food, clothing, shelter, education, health care, land, etc.). But it was not obvious that this was a condition to be struggled against. Rather it was seen as "the way it is." Only after she became involved in a church-based women's group, which encouraged her to think of herself as an agent rather than simply a sufferer, did she begin to think of these oppressive conditions as changeable. (The chapter is titled "The Church Opened Our Eyes.") "We learned that we had to stop being so passive and stick up for our rights."[10]

By her account there was an ideological component to her previous apathy: a way of thinking which included a 'naturalizing' of the social circumstances and a correlative view of oneself as possessing only a very limited capacity for taking action. It is not that there aren't very real material sanctions to discourage taking action. Alvarado was eventually arrested and tortured for her part in organizing peasant land takeovers. It is rather that suffering people are not thinking of themselves as (potential) agents of social change at all. They are not thinking, "We could do this but the price is too high." They are thinking "I am just a poor peasant, and this is how it is." Alvarado says about her discussions with other women in the church-sponsored group, "It was something completely new for us. We never really discussed all these community problems, and we surely never felt that we could do anything about them. But just talking about it together made us feel like yes, maybe we could do something to make our lives a little easier."[11] These few hints in this one text will not support any strong conclusions, and Scott certainly presents convincing examples of 'cultures of resistance' among peasant peoples, but it's enough to make me wonder what's really going on.[12]

One possible reinterpretation of Scott's account would go like this: Yes, the dominated groups he studied show signs that they are not buying the ruling ideologies. They do not accept that their subordination is just; they resent the injuries and insults they suffer; they harbor fantasies of violent revenge; they pilfer and malinger; they imagine turning the world upside down; and more often than we might think, they revolt (usually only to be crushed). But all this might be compatible with a kind of false consciousness: a failure to perceive oneself as a potential political agent. Scott's view seems to be that it is only force, fear, and a rational assessment of the likely outcomes which prevent the oppressed from rebelling. I wonder if it might also be the absence of a sense that there is a path out of one's situation that one could imagine oneself walking. (Of course, there may not be such a path. No action may be feasible.) The eruption of pent up rage and humiliation in a carnival of revolutionary violence (described by Scott as "a Saturnalia of Power" in a chapter of that name) may not amount to effective political action. One revealing turn in Scott's account of this eruption: He points out that normally subordinate people only share their "hidden transcript" within a limited social space -- a single plantation, a local hamlet, the neighborhood pub. "It is only when this hidden transcript is openly declared that subordinates can fully recognize the full extent to which their claims, their dreams, their anger is shared by other subordinates with whom they have not been in direct touch."[13] This suggests that there was an element of ignorance, if not illusion, in their previous understanding. (It also reminds me that one central element in feminist consciousness raising was the realization by women who had previously felt alone with their abuse or their anger that other women had the same experience.) From the point of view of a rational analysis of their options, they may have been seriously underestimating the extent of their potential allies.

This kind of false belief is crucial to Adam Przeworski's analysis in "Deliberation and Ideological Domination" of the way people who believe they have no allies can get "locked in" to sub-optimal equilibria in certain kinds of games. As I pointed out above, Przeworski is skeptical of the idea that the dominant groups succeed in deceiving the subordinate groups about how things work in society. There are too many alternative sources of information. But he finds it reasonable to think that business propaganda succeeds in convincing working people that public opinion is against them and that, if they pursued any militant action, they would have no allies. "Ideological domination is thus established in my story not by duping individuals about objective causal relations between an individual action and its consequences for one's own welfare but by manipulating mutual expectations, the theories isolated individuals have about the beliefs of others."[14] If this kind of 'ideological domination' is widespread in the societies Scott studied, then we would have a role for false consciousness in sustaining oppression after all.

One anomaly in Scott's argument has to do with its scope. At the outset he insists that his analysis applies primarily to those systems of subordination where we find "the most severe conditions of powerlessness and dependency . . . slavery, serfdom, and caste subordination," systems wherein the subordinates "have no political or civil rights, and their status is fixed by birth," and wherein domination takes the form of "personal rule providing great latitude for arbitrary and capricious behavior by the superior."[15] He repeats this restriction later in the book and acknowledges in a footnote that "My analysis is thus less relevant to forms of impersonal domination by say, 'scientific techniques', bureaucratic rules, or by market forces of supply and demand." But when he comes to his critique of the notion of false consciousness (in a chapter wonderfully titled "False Consciousness or Laying It On Thick"), he situates his discussion much more broadly. There his targets are mostly students of European and North American capitalist societies, including defenders of the "third face of power" like John Gaventa, and Western Marxists influenced by Gramsci. Yet his own analysis of the workings of domination suggests that modern societies may be more fertile fields for the development of false consciousness than the slave, serf, and caste societies he has studied most closely. The reasons for this have to do with the conditions, on his account, for the development of a resistant culture. As he explains it, a primary psychological element in the development of resistance is the resentment fueled by the frequent humiliations and insults subordinates experience. He cites experimental data from social psychologists, which is supposed to show that forced compliance produces a kind of attitudinal backlash. People knuckle under to threats, but they feel resentment and the induced behavior disappears as soon as the threat is removed. The other side of this coin, though, is that when people perceive themselves as complying voluntarily with a persuasive communication, they are then more likely to develop beliefs that rationalize their compliance. (For example, in the famous Milgram experiments on obedience to authority, wherein participants were asked to give increasingly severe electric shocks to victims as part of a fake learning experiment, the subjects who had volunteered for the experiment were paid at different rates for their participation. The less they were paid, the more they tended to produce reasons why the victims deserved to be shocked.) This phenomenon, sometimes called "collaborator consciousness, " might be expected to become more important as the directly coercive and humiliating sorts of domination are supplanted by the more impersonal and bureaucratic forms that prevail in advanced capitalism. Scott cites Sennett and Cobb's Hidden Injuries of Class to show that working class Americans resent most strongly those forms of work and those aspects of their jobs that involve being ordered around by supervisors. We might expect, then, that as management styles 'soften' and 'humanize,' and as the personal authority of individual bosses is displaced onto bureaucratic rules and procedures, 'collaborator consciousness' will grow. (This is a hypothesis that needs to be tested, of course. And some means would have to be found to try to separate the influence of relative privilege, material affluence, or the promise thereof, from ideology.)

The other condition Scott identifies for the development of a resistant culture among the oppressed is some social space where they can communicate freely with one another, spaces free from surveillance and control. But it turns out that the mere possibility of free discussion with peers is less effective than a social structure which puts people into cohesive groups (a mining camp, a merchant ship, the docks) where people who do the same sort of work are also isolated from others and kept together outside of working hours. Again, the reverse conditions would make the development of a resistant counter-culture less likely, so "a working class that lives in mixed neighborhoods, works at different jobs, is not highly interdependent, and takes its leisure in a variety of ways, has a social life that serves powerfully to disperse their class interest and hence their social focus."[16] So Scott himself provides us with several reasons to think that false consciousness might be more pervasive in a society like ours than in the extremely unequal societies he has studied most closely.

On some conceptions, critical theory is not always possible. If an oppressive social order is so stable (so successful in consolidating its domination of the oppressed) that there is no feasible action that the oppressed could take, then there is no role for critical theory. As Brian Fay puts it, a critical theory needs to have a theory of 'crisis' which will explain how the oppressive social order is breaking down sufficiently for criticism to get access to an audience (at least) and for the oppressed to have a feasible strategy of liberation. In some of the societies discussed by Scott, this criterion does not seem to have been met. As he puts it, slaves and serfs seem to revolt far more often than any rational assessment of their chances of success would call for. So another hypothesis we might test is that, when coercion is effective, successful indoctrination is not necessary, and not seriously pursued or accomplished, but that we will find such efforts in 'free' societies. Chomsky often says that when you are ruling with a club you don't need to care what people think. You need what he calls thought control in a society like ours, where people are free to speak and organize without fear of violent repression. (Of course, some of the other writers I mentioned above present data to show that the working classes in our society are do not buy into the dominant ideologies. So this hypothesis, and the others I have just been rehearsing about the differences between our society and the societies Scott studied, may be pretty well refuted already.)

Another dimension of Scott's account : while he is very critical of efforts to explain the compliance of subordinate groups in terms of false consciousness, he is happy to give ideology a powerful role in explaining the cohesion of dominant groups. Elites, he says, are in an important sense the consumer of or audience for their own public performances.[17] The subordinates may not be buying it, but the dominants are. They are reaping what Elster called "the benefits of bias." Moreover, their suspicion that the public performance of their subordinates may be less than fully sincere leads them to what might be regarded as a typical form of 'oppressor false consciousness': they develop a stereotype of the subordinate group as innately deceitful and untrustworthy. This plays into their more general need for ideological self-justification. By Scott's account, false consciousness is primarily a phenomenon found among the dominant.

Though the subsequent development of Marxism tends to make us forget it, this was Marx's view, too. It was the bourgeoisie who were the main sources of and believers in bourgeois ideology. And Marx's claim that the ideas of the ruling class were the ruling ideas of the age did not necessarily imply that they would permeate every mind equally. This point is taken up by Abercrombie, Hill and Turner, who see themselves as applying an essentially Marxist insight when they argue that "the dull compulsion of the economic" is the key to class collaboration. They too see the principle function of the dominant ideology as one of providing class unity for the dominant. "We argued that the function of ideology was to produce an integrated dominant class, rather than to produce a subordinated working class."[18] But they rejected much of Marx's theory of ideology, insisting that capitalism has no necessary connection with the individualistic ideology of liberalism which accompanied its rise. In their view dominant class unity could come from a variety of ideologies, and they cited Japan's accommodation to capitalism as a case in point. This is a useful reminder that even if we do have evidence that an ideological formation serves a function, that is not evidence that no other could serve it equally well.

Finally, let's notice what Andrea Dworkin says in her book Right Wing Women. She gives an account of conservative women which lays a good deal of stress on the truth of the beliefs which lead those women to oppose feminism. "Right wing women are not wrong," she writes, when they "see that [paid] work subjects them to more danger from more men; [that it] increases the danger of sexual exploitation. . . . They see that traditional marriage means selling to one man, not hundreds: the better deal. They see that the streets are cold, and that the women on them are tired, sick, and bruised. They see that the money they can earn will not make them independent of men and that they will still have to play the sex games of their kind: at home and at work too. . . . They fear that the Left, in stressing impersonal sex and promiscuity as values, will make them more vulnerable to male sexual aggression, and that they will be despised for not liking it. They are not wrong. . . . They know that they are valued for their sex -- their sex organs and their reproductive capacity -- and so they try to up their value . . .. . . . They see the world they live in and they are not wrong."[19] Even their opposition to decriminalizing abortion is based on a "real, tough, unsentimental knowledge of men and intercourse,"[20] a knowledge that legal abortion deprives women of their "best way of saying no" to sex, since "the consequences of pregnancy to him may stop him, as the consequences of pregnancy to her never will,"[21] and on a tacit understanding that sex under the conditions of male domination, even married sex, is always forced, always a violation. Seeing all this, and seeing that feminism is opposed (lip-service aside) by men of all political persuasions and supported only by women, who are relatively powerless in the reigning sex-class system, right wing women make the not-unreasonable judgement that their best hope for safety lies in playing along with male power, male sexuality, and male definitions of women. They oppose feminism not only because they think it is futile, but also because they see (again correctly) that it threatens to unmask their own accommodation to the male status quo: feminism suggests to men that their women are insincere in their enthusiasm for the sexual status quo, that their consent is forced. Right wing women see this clearly as dangerous to them.

Nonetheless, despite all these ways that right wing women see the nature of the sex class system more clearly than their naively trusting, "progressive" sisters, there are still things that they do not see, cannot see, because they could not bear them. Right wing women do not see (cannot allow themselves to see) that the promise of security through accommodation is a false promise, that however thoroughly they play their assigned part, they are still not safe from male violence. Nor do they see that "they have been robbed of volition and choice, without which life can have no meaning." Theirs is a "self-hating loyalty to those who are committed to their destruction."[22]

Dworkin does not see right-wing women as dupes, in any simple sense. If we applied Scott's distinction between the public and hidden transcripts to Dworkin's account, we could say that these women, because of the intimacy of their association with their oppressors, have had to take the hidden transcript even farther underground. But they do know that they face male violence and domination (and, I suppose, it would be clear enough in the advice they would give to their daughters). But Dworkin does not say, as I think Scott would, that they have chosen, rationally, to collaborate and to hide their knowledge of what is really going on. She says they have been deprived of volition and choice. Scott's account emphasizes the extent to which dominated people find ways to resist without directly challenging their domination. (Pilferage, insults veiled in a joke or folk tale.) Is Dworkin denying the similar elements of resistance in women's culture?

Or is she noticing that the "arts of resistance" described by Scott can be practiced very skillfully at one level, while at another level one is in the grip of a profound subjection?

Does this provide an answer to Scott and to the other writers I cited? Not entirely. They may be exaggerating the extent of the lucidity of subordinates, but if they are even mostly right it would change the picture I painted at the beginning of this thesis quite a bit. The false consciousness of the oppressed would be much less a matter of accepting legitimating ideologies and much more a matter of feeling isolated. The false consciousness of oppressors would be much the more important phenomenon. But I am not prepared to say that these writers are right. Too much in my own experience as a teacher of mainly working class adult students doesn't square with these accounts. I will be looking for further data on this, basically empirical, question.

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