Legitimation
But alienation cannot be achieved by state force or coercion alone. Social institutions must be built which justify and support force or coercive power so that the need for armed force is not always immediately present. Legitimation is the set of superstructural institutions and processes used by those in power to induce those in submissive positions to comprehend their submission as being (a) necessary (rather than questionable); (b) socially beneficial to all, including themselves (rather than exploitive); (c) as part of a cosmic order (as opposed to a social arrangement); (d) as inevitable (rather than changeable); and (e) as eternal (rather than historical).
Ideology
I use the term "Ideology" to mean an integrated system of political and economic ideas that emerges in stratified societies among competing castes or classes to explain and justify each's struggle for power. Ideology overlaps all meaning-making systems in the superstructure but is not identical with them. For instance, art in a given society can either support the status quo or undermine it. Sacred beliefs can justify the rulership of a king, or they can-through the efforts a cult or sect-threaten the power of the elite. Ideologies have at least six dimensions: they provide knowledge and beliefs about the past, present and future political and economic world; they appeal to emotions; they provide norms and values; they promote goals and plans; they are enacted in rituals; and they have a social base among various sectors of the population.
Ideology limits the ability of any caste or class to see the world with any absolute objectivity. Thus, the way any given group sees the world cannot be completely separated from the political and economic struggles between various stratified groups.
While ideology is a body of ideas, legitimation requires material processes and institutions by which ruling-class ideology is transmitted. Certainly, the lower classes can house ideologies of resistance in their own counter-institutions, but this would not be a legitimizing process, but a "counter-legitimation."
Social conscious and social unconscious
With state coercion and legitimation in place, most alienated people retreat from public life and from technological, economic, and political decision-making processes. Most people in stratified societies are aware of having needs and desires, possessing a skill, receiving a wage, satisfying a need, raising a family, and believing in deities. In order to satisfy their needs, people are aware that they need to go to work. But most are only dimly aware that their labor has collective, macro-social consequences which go far beyond their personal and domestic agenda.
In the process of working, we also reproduce the institutions of our society, indirectly partici pate in the reproduction of other societies around the world, and impact our biophysical ecology. And doing this day after day, we are shaping society and history.
People are conscious of:
- needs/desires
- biological reproduction (raising a family)
- choice of labor (this is not very relevant in ancient rank and stratified societies)
- playing roles as given
- wages or salaries received
- satisfaction/dissatisfaction with needs
- identification with superstructural sacred traditions,
while the following are relegated to the realm of "social amnesia":
- the fact that roles are changeable
- the reification of society
- alienation from society
- inadvertent reproduction of local social institutions (externalization, objectification, internalization)
- reproduction of international societies (through trade)
- social impact on biophysical ecology
Example of alienation
Suppose I get a cup of coffee from a vending machine on my morning break. That cup of coffee I'm drinking has the labor of thousands of people contained in it-including people on the coffee and sugar plantations, and all the workers who ship and deliver the coffee to our country. That is collective-creative activity. They are shaping world history by their labor. But how can that work be creative? Those people on the sugar and coffee plantations don't sit down with other people and coordinate their efforts. They just do what they are told. As for creativity, harvesting sugar cane is hardly creative. Furthermore, those people usually don't give a damn about the rest of the workers who are responsible for getting the coffee to the U.S., nor do they care about who is going to drink it, or the quality of the coffee itself.
What most workers care about is not getting in trouble, not losing their job, increasing their wages, and bettering their working conditions. Whatever creativ ity they express relates either to finding ways to f*ck off on the job or to picking faster (if they are paid piecemeal). Real creativity is expressed negatively in avoiding the requirements on the job; it is expressed positively when they get off work. As Marx said, the majority of human beings feel most human when they are not working and more like animals when they are working.
Of course, the cooperation and creativity of workers on coffee and sugar plantations is limited in scope, given that we live in a stratified society, and they are working-class and have to take orders. Other members of the society-artists, writers, musicians, and architects, for example-are able to exercise much more creativity; while still others-such as entrepreneurs and athletes-tend to be much more competitive than factory or agricultural workers are. But even if all of the people in the system as a whole were competing with each other or being creative to the same degree, the social process instituted by the human species taken as a whole would still have to be considered essentially cooperative and creative. The very fact that a species can harness the fertility of the soil to meet its needs is a major achievement which distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom. We coordinate our efforts through occupational special ization, and the product can ultimately be transported across oceans. That's an enormous feat, and we would be shortsighted to take it for granted.
Summary
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