Ideology works by turning presence into absence: The workings of objective violence under capitalism
According to Slavoj Zizek, when we think we are outside ideology, we are the deepest within it. Ideological false consciousness works by “de-politicizing” the political, by framing subjective standpoints over power relations as normal, natural, neutral, objective, apolitical or ‘standard practice’.
To understand ideology, Zizek makes a distinction between subjective violence and objective violence:
“At the forefront of our minds, the obvious signals of violence are acts of crime and terror, civil unrest, international conflict. But we should learn to step back, to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible “subjective” violence, violence performed by a dearly identifiable agent. (…) Subjective violence is experienced as such against the background of a non-violent zero level. It is seen as a perturbation of the “normal,” peaceful state of things. However, objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this “normal” state of things. Objective violence is invisible since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent.”¹
Ideology primarily works through disguising violence as objective violence. This leads to my key point in this essay: the distinction between presence and absence. Subjective violence is perceived as a presence of force upon the subject. Objective violence, on the other hand, is the violence inherent in what seems like the absence of any particular force that acts upon the subject. To illustrate a more extreme example of this difference, I will make reference to a real case of rape that demonstrates the workings of objective violence:
The Amazon Review Killer² kidnapped a woman and told her “I don’t believe in rape, so if you don’t want to have sex with me, I will not force myself on you” and then later in that day told her “By the way, if you don’t want to have sex with me, just know that you would be useless to me so I would kill you”. The woman was indirectly coerced into ‘freely’ giving her explicit consent — this is worse than ‘regular’ rape, because not only was she forced into sexual activity, she was also forced to pretend to enjoy it, she wasn’t even allowed to complain. “You will do what I say out of your own free will”.
Isn’t this reflective of how consent is manufactured under capitalism through various ‘free’ contracts? When your boss at work says that you ‘freely’ chose to work for his firm, and if you don’t like how he treats you, you are always free to leave. The only problem is that for many people, leaving would entail either dying of starvation, or finding an even shittier boss. Thus, we not only have to obey, but we have to obey out of our own free will: you are free to refuse to engage in an action, but by not engaging in that action you have to suffer drastic, even fatal, consequences.
These are the underpinnings of false choices: by disguising coercion as the absence of any particular force instead of as a presence of an active imposition, the illusion of freedom of choice is created. Thus, ideology indirectly forces certain choices upon us by making every alternative worse. You are free to choose between A, B and C, no one forces you to choose A, but we just made sure that B and C are horrible before you made the choice. Jacques Lacan had a perfect example of such choices in his eleventh seminar: a robber puts a gun to your head and says ‘Your money or your life!’. If you choose your life, you lose your money, but if you choose money, you lose both your money and your life. This is how oppression functions under capitalism for the poor and disenfranchised: if you choose your master, you lose your freedom, if you choose your freedom, you die of hunger and lose both your master and your freedom.
Under capitalism, the imposition of active forces upon subjects are masked as the “default” or “neutral” state of affairs, where anything different from those forces is perceived as a deviation from the normal. This is why I said earlier that ideology turns presence into absence: absence here functions as the background standard upon which we perceive something as present or not.
An example will make this clearer: if the state increases taxes, a right-wing libertarian will be opposed to that, because it’s a government intervention in the economy, and they are against interventionism. But if the state chooses to decrease taxes, they will likely be in favor of it, because for some reason a tax cut is not a state intervention in the economy, but a sort of ‘cancelling out’ of a previous intervention. Such a logic, the idea that two state interventions can cancel each other out into nothingness, only makes sense if you first presuppose that a ‘default’ or ‘normal’ state of the economy exists in the first place that we can return to. In reality, there is no such natural, neutral or normal state of the economy, so a tax cut is just as much of a state intervention as is a tax increase. The idea that we can quantify or somehow measure ‘how much’ the state intervenes in the economy (with the aim of lowering it) is nonsense. Thus, we see here how ideology turns presence into absence: when a set of policies favors the working class, it’s a presence of intervention, when it favors the ruling class, it’s an absence of intervention.
By turning presence into absence, ideology masks coercion as the effect of “leaving things be” as they are. Another example can show this: a left-wing policy I support would be the gradual, incremental transformation of private companies into democratically-controlled worker cooperatives, thus gradually transforming our capitalist system into a market socialist one and achieving workplace democracy. A counter-argument I often hear is this one: worker coops can already exist under our current capitalist framework, so why should the state mandate that all companies become coops, why not give people the freedom to work under both coops and privately-owned firms, and let the coops out-compete the privately-owned firms on the free market?
But this argument is flawed, because with the same logic I can justify legalizing slavery. Why should not people have the ‘freedom to choose’ between being and not being a slave? Why not give people the freedom to choose to become someone’s slave ‘consensually’ in exchange for a sum of money? Obviously, this shouldn’t be the case as only the people in desperation will choose such a predicament, when the other alternatives are even worse. If we lived in a society which did not give you any opportunity to make money other than by being a slave, then clearly choosing to become a slave in exchange of money wouldn’t be such a free choice.
It is the same case with worker coops: in our present times worker coops are rare for multiple reasons, such as lack of funding at start-up, inability to outcompete the privately-owned firms which put profit-making above their worker’s well-being as well as the fact that even when they get big enough, they will be bought by privately-owned mega-corporations and stop being a coop. In a society in which most people do not have the opportunity to choose to work in a coop, the ‘free choice’ of working in an autocratically-ran firm with a top-down hierarchical management structure is merely the freedom of a slave to choose their master.
The exact same logic applies to the “freedom to work for less” laws that oppose minimum wage increases, or the privatization of the healthcare system in order to have the freedom to choose your insurance, a thing that inevitably leads to the underfunding of the state system and the creation of bad insurances for poor people and good but expensive insurances for rich people. In many cases, it is better to have one good choice imposed on you than to have the freedom to choose between five bad options. Our freedoms today become illusions: they are like the choice between Cola and Pepsi.
As wealth accumulates in the hands of a small elite, power itself concentrates in the hands of the few. The transition from feudalism to capitalism was the genesis of investment as what Lacan would’ve called the ‘master signifier’ of the present system. Everything revolves around the master signifier, other than the master signifier, which revolves around itself. In our case, feudalism had the “C-M-C’” structure (commodity -> money -> commodity): you sold goods in order to make money that you used to buy other goods. Everything revolves around the commodity. In capitalism, the structure became “M-C-M’”: you bought goods with money in order to sell them for more money — everything revolves around money other than money which revolves around itself. In this way, the truism that ‘money makes money’ becomes reality with the rise of the merchant class in the 18th century. The easiest way to make more money is to already have money to invest. The more money you have, the more money you make, and the more money you make, the more you have. The rich get richer and the poor stay poor. And in capitalism, wealth is economic power: if I have food and you’re starving then I have power over you. The more power you have, the more power you can gain.
This accumulation of power is different from the one under feudalism. In feudalism, you obeyed or you were killed, it was clear and obvious who was the wielder of power under such circumstances. In capitalism, you obey or you are bought by the wealthy: if your corporation gets successful enough, it will be bought by a rich person with your own consent. In capitalism, the subservient obey out of their own free will and are often not even aware of their own subservience. The more money you have, the more you can influence other people’s behavior with their own consent.
Will this ‘power bubble’ eventually burst under a worker’s revolution or are we doomed under these conditions forever? This, I cannot yet answer.
SOURCES:
1: Slavoj Zizek, “Violence”, p. 2
