In lieu of more substantive matter which I'm busy working on, and because I have so much else to do, I'm just posting up these possibly interesting reflections on ideology which I threw together this morning in a fit of ennui.

Where do you get those ideas from? There is an extremely high chance that most of them were produced by others for you, that you came by them in schools, your family, from the mass media, maybe a religious institution, from a political party, a trade union, the academia, think-tanks, PR firms or any one of a network of institutions or apparatuses which make it their business to produce ideas for you. (Yes, you - this is interpellation we are talking about here.)  This is how Goran Therborn in one of his early works, The Power of Ideology and the Ideology of Power, visualises the process:

I know this isn't a shock. You didn't really think you came up with those thoughts all by yourself. You are Marxists, and you know very well that ideologies (and sciences for that matter) are produced collectively, even if not in a collectivist mode.  Or, if you prefer, they are historically, socially produced.

But what do those who aren't Marxists think? Aren't they often inclined to believe that somehow their ideas are spontaneous, natural, or arise from a process of open-ended personal reflection? I was going to say it was a particularly petty bourgeois illusion, but it seems to be implicit in ideology as such, the belief that ideas are the result of some inner spark or inspiration: in theoretical language, that agents, rather than being constituted as subjects by ideology, are the constituting subjects of ideology.  "I decide what I think," the subject of ideology says, "I mean, yes, there are all sorts of ideas being presented to me every day, but as soon as I obtain adulthood I am in a position to critically evaluate those ideas.  I choose my ideology; it doesn't choose me."  In this sense, the concept of interpellation is an affront to common sense, for it says that ideology 'chooses' its subject, that it addresses the subject with who she really is, enabling her to become the 'bearer' (Trager) of the role assigned to her by the structure.

We won't spend too long inspecting the structure of this interpellation.  Althusser sets up a primordial 'scene' of interpellation, a fable in which the agent is 'hailed' by the law ("hey you!"), stops, turns, and in the act of turning is subjectivated, accepts that she really is the "you" addressed by law.  Crucially, this submission to ideology involves misrecognition: as with Lacan's 'mirror stage', the resulting identity is a false totalization of the fragments of experience.

Following Judith Butler, we could problematize this concept along the following lines.  Althusser relies on a complex set of theological figures to set up his notion of 'hailing'.  The very act of 'turning' and thus accepting subjectivation implies an act of conscience, an appropriation of guilt.  For Althusser, ideology is centred around an imaginary 'Absolute Subject' - redolent of Lacan's 'Big Other', the guarantor of the symbolic order - which is experienced by the subject as the source of 'law', guaranteeing that (so long as you are a good subject and 'behave') everything is just as it seems and will continue to be for eternity, and will be okay.  Religious ideology is thus treated as exemplary of ideology as such, the 'naming' in religious ritual typical of subjectivation.  There is no mystery about this - Althusser practised Catholicism long after he became a marxist, and seems never to have got out of the habit of performing some of its rituals.  But this process requires an addressee already predisposed to receiving such a message, already implicated in its terms; that is, it requires a subjection that already presupposes a subject. 

At first it seems as if we're saying that the narrative of the 'scene' of interpellation cannot be 'true'.  But, of course, as Butler also notes, this concept of interpellation is allegorical.  It stages a 'hailing' that never actually literally happens in this way; it narrativises a process or set of processes that is said to be resistant to narrativization.  As Butler has it, "the 'call' arrives severally and in implicit and unspoken ways", which a too literal reading of 'interpellation' might overlook.  There is a long process in which each agent in the division of labour is equipped with, for example, the sorts of linguistic skills appropriate to her location, which will enable her to carry out the tasks assigned to her by the structure: a boss learns to 'speak properly' (ie authoritatively, persuasively, dominatively) to her employees; a worker learns to 'speak properly' (ie deferentially, respectfully, warily) back.  Over time, the agent becomes a subject by internalising the rules and attitudes, materialised in actions, inserted into practices, governed by rituals, which constitute the subject.  The agent, just as she is mastering these skills, submits to the dominant ideology: is 'hailed', 'turns' to face the law, and is subjectivated. The fabular character of 'interpellation' is one reason why the many pointed criticisms of the 'scene' depicted by Althusser - for example, that it is is too dyadic, or is phallocentric - are thoroughly well-founded, yet far from adequate to finish off the concept of interpellation.  The scene could be re-staged in multiple thoughtful and creative ways without losing what is essential.

However, Butler's case is more complex.  It is not simply that the 'scene' belies the reality of ideology in many ways.  The problem lies in the prehistory of the subject alluded to above; the preconditions necessary for the reproduction of the dominant ideology.  'Interpellation' appears to require an anxious, knowing, 'guilty' agent anxious to acquit herself by conscientiously mastering the skills that will make her a subject.  Doesn't this, as Lacanian critics approvingly suggest, require another dimension to the subject, a materia prima, or rather an immateria prima, a psychic dimension that is radically distinct from any possible incarnation in material practices?  Doesn't it require the resuscitation of the Cartesian subject?  Doesn't Althusser's repudiation of the ontological dualism of the material and the ideal simply collapse into another dualism?  Butler's rejoinder to the Lacanians (in the person of Mladen Dolar) is that: i) it mistakes a grammatical requirement for a pre-existing subject, or psychic remainder, in the context of exposition for a logical requirement; and ii) its rejection of materialist monism relies on a reduction of the material to the phenomenal, or empirically given, so that the absences that punctuate a ritual can be seen as governed by a non-material symbolic order - in counterpoint, Butler deploys the althusserian materialism of articulation, in which these absences are not 'ideal' but are bound to the phenomenon as "its constitutive and absent necessity".

Nonetheless, the terms of Althusser's formulation, the theological figures deployed and particularly the restrictive role of conscience in subject-formation, leave unresolved the question of the failure of interpellation.  In Althusser's terms it is difficult to think how a 'bad subject' could exist, since the very condition of being a subject involves mastering the skills that subject one to the dominant ideology and make one therefore a 'good' subject.  

Now, Butler doesn't do any more than signpost possible ways out of this dilemma: hinting at forms of de-subjectivation which might allow one to oppose the 'law' without denying one's complicity in it.  But it's clear that without resolving this, the danger is either that one collapses into a mechanistic, functionalist account of ideology, or a voluntarism or decisionism predicated implicitly or explicitly on this theological remainder.  Althusser didn't solve this problem.  As Jameson points out, the ISA essay was "programmatic", a manifesto of sorts, an "agenda, still incompletely fulfilled".  And I will have occasion to talk about the politics of this in a future post.  However, I would say that this psychic remainder, this kernel of interiority irreducible to the social and material world, constantly recurs in marxist accounts of ideology, either explicitly or in the form of ambiguities or silences.

The ambiguity, or unresolved tension, in historical materialist approaches to ideology is basically this: is ideology materially determined, or is it a material substance in itself?  This is an ambiguity which persists in one of the greatest marxist writers on ideology, Volosinov who, asserting that his approach is monistic, nonetheless makes this statement: "Every ideological sign is not only a reflection, a shadow of reality, but is also a material segment of that very reality."  Not only, but also.  Not just shadow, but material too.  Does this seem like a detail?  Well, I can't be the only one to have encountered this sort of ambivalence repeatedly.  Goran Therborn, arguing from a post-althusserian perspective, tended to speak of the material determination of ideas, leaving the question of ideology's ideal or material status unresolved.  

Or one encounters more directly formulations which tell us that "mind is developed upon the basis of matter", but that "the human mind cannot simply be reduced to matter". And is this not simply a straightforward exposition of Marx's approach in The German Ideology?  For on the one hand, Marx says that "neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life", while on the other these manifestations are "phantoms formed in the human brain ... sublimates of their material life-process ... bound to material premises".  And so, the ambiguity seems to be resolved on the side of the material determination of ideas, which are but "phantoms".

If in fact the ambiguity is to be resolved in this way, that is if we accept that there is an order of reality that is separate from matter (a subjective reality, a 'consciousness' that is linked to the material world but not directly or wholly of it), then it is surely at the expense of monism.  To say that this is a consequence of such a stance is not necessarily to disprove it.  And it is clear why it is attractive: precisely because of the need to found emancipatory politics on the self-activity of the masses, and therefore the need to explain the bases of resistance.  Somehow, the working class is capable of being an agent of revolutionary change, despite the effects of the dominant ideology.

So when Althusser argued that ideology has no "ideal or spiritual existence" but only a material existence, that it exists only "in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices" - gamesomely suggesting that readers entertain the notion sympathetically on the grounds of materialism - surely he was expressing a conception that was deeply controversial to the majority of marxists.  At least, particularly  for those of a Lukacsian persuasion, such a conception must appear to be complicit in the objectification that is characteristic of ideology as such.  For if ideas themselves are material, then its bearers might well be nothing but objects; nothing but effects of a structure, bearers (Trager) of a role assigned to them by the structure.  There would seem to be no space for will or intention ('consciousness') in such a process.  So, it is this potentially mechanistic consequence of theoretical anti-humanism that is objectionable.

But, returning to Marx's formulation in The German Ideology, if ideas are "only manifestations of actual life", in what sense are they manifest?  To whom and in what they do they manifest themselves, if not in fact in the material practices and apparatuses?  In what sense are ideas other than "actual life"?  Is it not at least arguable that in such moments, Marx was using an old conception (the ideal-material dichotomy) to express an emerging one (the different levels of determination in a complex social whole, the relative autonomy and specific effectivity of ideology)?  Elsewhere in The German Ideology Marx says, in what I think is a satirical moment, that "thoughts and ideas acquire an independent existence" only when a certain division of labour creates agents who produce thoughts and ideas independently.  In other words, the ideological conception of thoughts and ideas having an ideal existence is an illusion that arises from the social practices of petty bourgeois producers of ideology.

Approaching this from another point of view, part of the argument hinges on the base-superstructure metaphor and how it is deployed.  It is difficult to miss the way in which, when some theorists talk about the 'material', they refer to the realm of production, productive relations, commodity circulation - indeed, all that which appears as 'the economy'.  The issue that is being addressed in the language of the 'material determination of ideology' is nothing other than the determination of ideology by productive relations, class struggle and all of the various attributes of the social formation apart from its ideologies.  And a very important reason why people don't want to 'reduce' ideology to matter is precisely because of the need to recognise the specific effectivity of ideology, its peculiar forms and instantiations.  

After all, the question of 'reduction' shouldn't really arise otherwise: it is not a question of saying that ideology is 'reducible' to matter; merely that it is itself a material process.  'Reduction' only comes into it because the ontological problem of the status of ideology (as matter, or ideal substance) has been interjected into the epistemological problem posed by the base-superstructure metaphor (of the relationship between economy, politics and ideology in marxist theory).  And if I'm right in suggesting this, then surely the ISAs essay opened up a potentially fruitful terrain of investigation in solving this latter problem, drawing attention to the various mediating levels particular to ideology (actions, practices, rituals, apparatuses), but also opening up the field of the specific institutional preconditions of ideology.  Not only that, but this demarche is conducted within a sophisticated and potentially dynamic account of the determination and overdetermination of ideologies by the whole complex structure which it is articulated to; that is, it allows us to shift the terms of the problem from the 'material determination of ideology' to that of the complex and mediated determination of ideology by the sub-structures with which it is articulated.  I just suggest we consider it - in the name of materialism, say.

But that still leaves us with the other dilemma.  So, we hypothesise that ideology has only a material and no spiritual or ideal existence; that the relationship between ideology and 'politics' or 'the economy' is not that between matter and the ideal.  Doesn't it still seem that, for the masses to be capable of conducting a revolutionary self-emancipation, we need some notion of resistant interiority, some equivalent to Chomsky's (obviously deliberately simplified) notion of an 'instinct for freedom'?  That is, a conception of 'human nature' as an active constituent in the process of subject-formation?  It will not be sufficient to clarify, as Marta Harnecker exhaustively does, what theoretical anti-humanism does and does not entail for the self-emancipation of the working class.  The point is that the problem is raised about how to understand the basis for resistance, including resistance to the dominant ideology.  And, as we have said, that problem wasn't satisfactorily dealt with in the terms of Althusser's original formulations.  

I don't propose, in this post, to articulate the solution that evaded both Althusser and Butler.  I merely want to reiterate that we can't fall back on any conception of 'interiority', which risks reifying socially, ideologically produced divisions (the interior-exterior division is nothing other than the mind-body problem in another idiom anyway).  Still less can we find salvation in 'human nature'.  Insofar as it goes beyond a simple description of biological needs (for food, warmth, sociality, orgasm) or needs derivative of those (eg, the need to appropriate knowledge which meets those primary needs), which by itself would be neither 'interior' nor an adequate explanation for social resistance, and proceeds into a theology of some 'natural' state of unity with our 'species-being', alienated since the Fall, it restores idealism.  What theories of 'human nature' must invariably do is eternize contingent and historically produced relations and situations.  Such solutions are worse than the problem they address.  If a theory of subjects capable of explaining resistance is available, it must be on the terms of the materialist approach to ideology; that is, of ideology's purely material and not spiritual or ideal existence.

What does it say when a police officer strangles a black man, and racially abuses him in the context of a 'stop and search'?  What does it say when on the same evening, his partner batters a fifteen year old boy in the police station later that evening?  And what does it say when the CPS declines to pursue charges in both cases?  

Just this.  We know that the rank and file of the police are racist.  This is not a judgment on every single officer, and nor is it simply an institutional analysis.  It is a question of their social role.  They are bearers of authority and social power delegated to them by the centralised unity of the state, and just as the role of supervisors and managers in the workplace is to secure the subordination of workers in the production process, so the role of the police is to secure the general subordination of workers and subaltern forces, to identify and control 'problem' populations, and thus resolve problems in the reproduction of the system.  It is a global supervisory function, but one obviously permeated with the state's monopoly on legitimate violence.

We know that rank and file police officers routinely deploy violence not simply to resolve a bureaucratic impasse (non-cooperation, etc) but often to effect a symbolic reduction of the victim to a status befitting that assigned them in the dominant ideology.  This is part of the police's role in the moral regulation of society.  In carrying out this role, they exercise a relative autonomy, sufficient to define the situations in which they, as professional law enforcers, must harrass, restrain, beat and detain civilians.  And it isn't just their training, as some suggest, that inclines them to do this, to treat civilian populations as an enemy.  It is their actual experience of routine conflict in carrying out their mandate, which forms their habitus, that system of skills, dispositions and practices which constitutes the occupational culture of the police.  At any rate, this defining role allows them to formulate the information which is then fed back to superiors, the courts and prosecutors, media, politicians, law lords and the solicitor general, and which thus constructs social situations in the language of criminality, abnormality, crisis, etc.  As trained professionals, moreover, their word carries far more weight than that of any of their victims.

But there is more to it than that.  For this relative autonomy is not a relationship achieved by rank and file police officers through struggle.  The police chiefs will always try to rationalise the job, to achieve greater compliance form juniors, and to impose ideas and behaviours consistent with overarching policies.  And the state is, as I say, a centralised unity - the executive, or whatever apparatus is dominant at any given moment, can if it wills constrain the behaviour of rank and file officers in various ways.  It always does so, in fact.  But the limiting factor is that the state desires this relationship of relative autonomy.  It wants officers who are sufficiently empowered to act in ways that they see fit in order to effectively reproduce the social order.  The result is that there will be antagonisms - officers, for example, can resent having to suppress and contain the social turmoil produced by central state policies - but police chiefs and state executives will tend to protect the autonomy and authority of officers in conducting their role.  

Ultimately, moreover, because the police are so central to the state's routine 'intervention' into all aspects of social relations, they will tend to seek concord with officers and maintain their relative material privileges the better to cement their solidarity with the state and, as a corollary, their adversarial relationship with the majority of the population.  This is one reason why no police officer is jailed for beating or murdering civilians, and why the CPS would prefer not to charge officers found guilty of criminal conduct.  Importantly, when I refer to criminal conduct I am not just talking about repression that appears to go beyond their occupational role.  Corruption cases, such as that of Enfield crime squad officers up to their necks in criminal enterprise, disclose a similar pattern.  It is not that the police bosses are particularly happy with such corruption being routine, but rather that the premium on guarding the relative independence of officers in such circumstances, on allowing officers to define situations themselves, to act not above the law but in a space in which they themselves define legality, is more important than suppressing corruption.

And this structural relationship is crucial to explaining how and why the police continually 'get away with it', how and why change is so difficult to achieve.  Struggle can force the state to adapt its policy, to re-organise its modes of violence, and to lean more heavily on mediating forms (unions, social democracy, 'civil society' groups, and so on) to cope with social antagonisms.  But the sheer persistence of institutional brutality and racism in the police over a long period of time (actually, for as long as the police have existed) suggests that deaths in custody, severe beatings, the violent punishment of the mentally ill, the immigrant, the homeless, the poor and the vulnerable, are not supererogatory explosions of individual un-professionalism; rather they are part of what the police do, part of the professional vocation, the repertoire that makes policing what it is.

This is one of the reasons why I disagree with any position, such as that outlined by the activist Ellie Mae O'Hagan here, which argues for support for a Police Federation strike.  We know that the Tory cuts to the police budget, alongside the range of institutional reforms planned by the government, are unpopular with the rank and file.  Under both parties, the police have been used to generous budgets, higher than average pay and rising recruitment.  They have been culturally and politically safeguarded.  But the Tories are committed to the systematic down-sizing of the state, and are evidently convinced that the key repressive functions carried out by the police can be protected within a streamlined force.  As far as crime prevention goes, the Home Office has always known that more officers makes no difference to the rate of crime whatever.  So, there is tension.  The Police Federation are unhappy with the government's cuts, and particularly angry about the complacent way in which they have detonated social antagonisms and then simply shoved the blame onto the police when the conflagration duly occurred.  So yes, there is an antagonism.  It is even, dare we say it, a class antagonism: between the governing party of the ruling class and a force of middle class professionals who see their role as being downgraded.  Not that they always see it this way exactly: many officers will insist "we're public sector workers too".  Would it be too glib to reply that you rarely see an NHS worker or a teacher giving brain damage to a protester, punching children in the face, or charging at large groups of people on steeds while hurling baton blows?  

But even if the Police Federation were genuine in threatening to go on strike, and I beg leave to doubt it, the question is: what purpose would achieving their goals actually fulfil for striking workers, for protesting students, for women struggingly against rape and domestic violence, for black and Asian communities fighting oppression?  If the Police Federation did actually strike, did receive support from the Left, and did actually achieve pay increases, job protection and end to the cuts in the force, who would this serve?  It seems obvious to me that it would simply strengthen the police in their repressive role by protecting their numbers; that, far from strategically splitting the force, it would cement them behind the government by conserving their material privileges and morale; that it would strengthen their position within society as a whole by giving them unwarranted prestige in the left and labour movement; and that in the not-very-long-run it would redouble their ability to crush movements like Climate Camp, or like UK Uncut, to batter and prosecute protesters like Alfie Meadows, to corral striking workers within steel walls on the basis of 'total policing', to batter and murder young black men.  In a word, they would be empowered to disorganise the social forces now being organised with great difficulty to resist austerity.  I think this mistaken judgement, hoping to benefit strategically from a police strike, arises from supposing that the rank and file are just the hired muscle of the ruling class, rather than relatively autonomous bearers of social power in themselves.  It is not that one forecloses the concrete analysis of concrete situations, ruling any tactical manouevre in relation to the police a priori out of bounds.  One can imagine situations of such severity that there is the real prospect of splitting and disorganising the police force, and the careful handling of such situations might reap dividends.  But since such a situation remains incredibly remote, the strategic question of how the Left ought to relate to that doesn't even arise today.  Not only is it unlikely that there will be a strike, but the police aren't even asking for the support of the Left, much less bargaining over the conditions of such support.  There is the question of how we ought to relate to cuts in policing.  To this, some say that if we oppose cuts, then we oppose cuts, end of.  I say that's a complete misunderstanding.  Just as when pundits say, "surely you can't oppose every cut - even if they were to cut Trident, or arms spending, or even if they cut waste and inefficiency?"  The answer is that we oppose cuts in the aggregate; but we want the money to be spent better on things that benefit ordinary people.  Hospitals, schools, pensions and infrastructure, not more police and weapons.  And you can be damned sure that any increase in spending on police in these circumstances would come at the expense of one of the vital public services.  So, no, don't 'support' the Police Federation.  And don't think that brutality and racism are in some sense accidental or incidental to policing.  It's the job.

The latest developments arising from the Leveson Inquiry and related police investigations could be enough to sink The Sun.  That the arrest of several of its journalists has turned these thugs into champions of privacy, of civil liberties and of human rights, is no irony.  It is just the usual vulgar hypocrisy, with a delicious voltage of despair and fright coursing through it.  

Ostensibly, this is the paper's chief political correspondent 'going rogue', launching a 'fightback' in defiance of orders from the bosses at News Corp.  In thinly veiled language, it rails against the executives for its strategic decision to grudgingly cooperate with the police (after all the obstruction and attempts to destroy evidence, and bribery, and spying on victims' lawyers, and smears upon smears, and lies, have failed).  In typically hysterical Sun fashion, the editorial seeks to position the paper as a sort of Charter 77 or Solidarnosc, labouring under a Stalinist boot.  "Who polices the police?" cries Trevor Kavanagh, as if his newspaper and industry were not fully in bed with every top cop in the land until recently.  Everyone does it, he says of what is in fact bribery and corruption - it is "standard procedure ... nothing disreputable" - and it seems that a phalanx of Fleet Street hacks are lining up behind him to say, "yes, this is exactly true, we mustn't be punished for what is an industry standard, Kavanagh expresses how all of us hacks feel".  They can have no idea that they are simply underlining why everyone despises them.  Nothing like this has been done the bankers, he complains, as if his newspaper has not, in addition to being the favourite newspaper of traders and stockbrokers, been the greatest political alibi of those predators.  

We laugh, of course.  We'll be laughing like drains while they circle the drain, the chorus of mocking hilarity expanding in radiant waves of mirth over the flailing arms of hacks being sucked into the effluent, and thence into oblivion.  That hackneyed, smug saying, "it couldn't have happened to nicer people", will gain a new currency.  Yes, the Stars are not wanted now, put out every one; pack up the Express and dismantle The Sun.  Put away the Daily Mail, and flush away The Times.  Because I couldn't be happier if I'd just given birth to triplets.

Francis Fox Piven conceives of "disruptive power" as that form of usually implicit power that people have as a result of the interdependencies that social organization gives rise to:

"All societies organize social life through networks of specialized and interdependent activities, and the more complex the society, the more elaborate these interdependent relations. Networks of cooperation and interdependence inevitably give rise to contention, to conflict, as people bound together by social life try to use each other to further their often distinctive interests and outlooks. And the networks of interdependence that bind people together also generate widespread power capacities to act on these distinctive interests and outlooks. Agricultural workers depend on landowners, but landowners also depend on agricultural workers, just as industrial capitalists depend on workers, the prince depends in some measure on the urban crowd, merchants depend on customers, husbands depend on wives, masters depend on slaves, landlords depend on tenants, and governing elites in the modern state depend on the acquiescence if not the approval of enfranchised publics.

"Unlike wealth and force, which are concentrated at the top of social hierarchies, the leverage inherent in interdependencies is potentially widespread, especially in a densely interconnected society where the division of labor is far advanced. This leverage can in principle be activated by all parties to social relations, and it can also be activated from below, by the withdrawal of contributions to social cooperation by people at the lower end of hierarchical social relations. I call the activation of interdependent power disruption, and I think protest movements are significant because they mobilize disruptive power." (Frances Fox Piven, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America, Rowman & Littlefield, 2006, p. 20)

This analysis is consistent with many theoretical perspectives, and the concept of disruptive power certainly has an affinity with the marxist conception of class capacities, or more broadly, structural capacities.  It follows from this that disruptive power is not a particular tactic.  Disruptive power may be violent, depending on the context of the struggle that activates it, but it is not necessarily so.  It may be noisy, or carnivalesque - but again, not necessarily.  The presumption in social movement literature is, says Piven, against violence and in favour of spectacle; but this dual presumption is based on a misunderstanding of protest movements, conceiving them as essentially a form of communication intended to win the support of wider audiences, whereas this is not always the case.  In fact, the exercise of disruptive power is mainly about leverage.

We understand the sheepishness about speaking of violence in social movements.  It is not a comforting or politically sympathetic thought that popular violence has been productive; that without it, unjust systems would not have been overturned.  Yet, aside from the fact that the automatic assumption against violence is actually an assumption against popular violence, the intriguing thing is how easily it shades into an assumption against disruption as such.  For example, following a recent direct action at UC Berkeley, the Chancellor complained: "It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience."  In fact, linking arms and obstructing police is precisely an example of non-violent civil disobedience.  If there was a textbook, this would be in it.  The elite arbiters of protest ethics, who are always assuring us of our right to peaceful protest, conveniently forget what "civil disobedience" actually is.  At the same time, what is often truly regrettable about what is called violence (usually small scale property damage) is its tactical implications.  Sure, there is a moral case against anticapitalist protesters spraypainting graffiti or breaking windows.  One could certainly apply similar standards retrospectively to striking miners and steelworkers who made US history in frequently violent struggles that went well beyond property damage.  However, as someone once said, every morality presupposes a sociology, and in this case the moral argument implies the point of view of the ruling class.  The point of the exercise of disruptive power is not to empathise with the ruling class, but to gain leverage over the ruling class.  This brings us to the next point.

Disruptive power is distributed widely, but that doesn't mean it is easy to actualise.  Piven cites six difficulties that obstruct this: first is the problem of getting people to recognise the relation of interdependence that endows them with disruptive power; the second difficulty is that the exercise of disruptive power requires people to break rules, defying institutional mechanisms that enshrine the cooperative (if fundamentally exploitative and oppressive) relations that sustain daily life, with the resulting risk of repression; third, this disruptive power has to be coordinated across many different groups and individuals who contribute to the reproduction of the dominant social relations, in order to be effective - "the classical problem of solidarity"; fourth, the people exercising disruptive power are enmeshed in a network of relations with multiple others who may attempt to restrain this disruption (church, family, etc); fifth, those involved have to find ways to endure the suspension of the normal cooperative relations that allow them to effectively reproduce themselves in their normal condition - strikers need to eat, occupiers need tents, etc.; and finally, those engaging in disruption have to consider the threat of exit by those from whom they have withdrawn cooperation - the rich taking off with their capital, partners leaving relationships, etc.  The means to overcome these obstacles "are not solved anew with each challenge", but rather enter the "language of resistance", and "become a repertoire" (pp. 21-32)

This will do as an interpretive grid for understanding what the Occupy movements in the US are going through at this moment.  Their challenges are all comprehensible as those arising from the exercise of disruptive power: how to attack the dominant ideology, coordinate heterogenous groups, sustain their own 'rule-breaking' and support others in their 'rule-breaking', and resist repression.  It is through the prism of the latter question that I want to assess the current state of the Occupy movement in the US.  The recent wave of renewed police assaults, some of them apparently co-ordinated across eighteen cities by both Democratic and Republican administrations, has been severe.  From pepper-spraying the elderly to macing students, the intention has been to physically atomise these collective enterprises.  It is tempting to say that such an over-reaction indicates the degree of apprehension on the part of the ruling class.  In fact, however, apprehension has been far more apparent in their hesitations, retreats and fumbling attempts at co-optation, than in the resort to brutality.  The latter is their default: far from being a panic reaction, it is how the US ruling class does business.  As far as cops are concerned, it is "fairly standard police procedure".  Their reliance on such methods may in fact reflect an underlying lack of concern, an insouciance, a feeling that this movement is a nuisance, but ultimately a brittle, shallow affair.  To deviate from such methods would show that state planners are concerned that this is a movement which cannot be managed by escalating the costs of participation.

For the sake of argument, anyway, let me assume that the police actions in Portland, Seattle, Oakland, New York, UC Davis, and elsewhere, all reflect a consensus among ruling elites that a sufficient show of force will produce a collapse in confidence among the occupiers, deter their supporters, disorganise their alliances and leave them reduced to a hardcore of easily contained and potentially vilified activists.  The timing would support this, as city managers would expect winter to start thinning the numbers anyway.  A disorienting attack, a forcible shutdown, before the occupiers have had the chance to fully conceive and implement strategies for managing the cold months ahead, would be tactically intelligible in this context.  Yet, although the police offensives have had some of the sought effects, forcing the occupiers onto the back foot, depriving many of them of their secured bedrock, they have nonetheless failed to thwart the momentum.  The scale of the mobilisation in New York last Thursday, where an estimated 32,000 people took part in a day of action to shut down parts of the city, followed an ostensible victory on the part of city authorities three days earlier.  This was when the police attacked the camp at 2am, and the mayor obtained a court ruling denying occupiers the right to camp in Liberty Square - though the city could not stop protesters from actually gathering there.  The evictions demanded a bigger response from the occupiers and their periphery of active support, and Thursday provided it.  Liberty Square is still occupied every day; it is still a meeting place, a pedagogical forum, and a launch pad for further action.  So, the initiative remains in the hands of the protesters; not the state.

There are a number of reasons for this.  First, this is a movement that is still in its upswing.  A full-frontal attack on a movement which is still growing, and still popular, can be a dangerous mistake to make.  The problem for the authorities is that such an assault isn't a technical operation but a political wager.  As technically proficient as a repressive manouevre may be, the political effects aren't easily calculable: the same tactic that kills a movement today may consolidate it tomorrow.  Second,  as the statement from Occupy Wall Street following the eviction notes, the movement is serious.  This seems nebulous, moralising even, but it has a precise political meaning: most of those joining the movement fully expected repression, and were mentally prepared for it.  There are arguments that the police are just blue collar workers who should be on the side of the 99% - though, when former NYPD police capitain Ray Lewis asserts that his ex-colleagues are "workers for the 1%" and "mercenaries for Wall Street", one can safely say that such arguments are losing traction.  But the occupation in Wall Street came to national prominence following a particularly brutal NYPD assault.  It is a simple but reasonable inference that those who joined OWS and embarked on similar projects after this, knew that repression was a risk.  So, the movement is far less brittle in this respect than its opponents perhaps estimated.

Third, as a former head of the CBI has pointed out, the ideology of free market capitalism has lost a significant part of its material basis: it cannot as easily claim to be more efficient than rival forms of organisation, or delivery greater prosperity for the majority over the long run.  The increasing sympathy for socialism and communism among Americans has something to do with this disintegration of capitalist ideology.  There is enormous sympathy for this left-populist movement, and those deemed complicit in its repression run the risk of being publicly shamed and of losing allies rapidly.  Fourth, and relatedly, the repressive response from the ruling class may be coordinated and bipartisan, but it is far from unanimous.  Some elements of the ruling class have preferred to try and co-opt the movement rather than simply attack it.  This is most visible in the liberal segments of the capitalist media.  From the very early days, it was obvious that the New York Times and perhaps also MSNBC favoured co-option rather than simple coercion.  The fear of the banking industry, as their professional lobbyists have summarised it, is that this strategic fracturing of US ruling class opinion may be disadvantageous to their position.  As they are not their own best advocates, they require public advocates - and the fear is that politicians under pressure to respond to such a movement will consider it imprudent to publicly defend financial capital.  But the more the repressive option fails, the more the emphasis will fall on co-option.  Finally, the occupiers have worked hard to build alliances with groups who already know how to wield disruptive power and have their own sets of repertoires.  The response to the first attempted assault on Occupy Wall Street was based on an alliance with unions; the response to the first assault on Occupy Oakland, a city-wide 'general strike', was based on an alliance with the unions too.  Of course, one must be wary of what Glenn Greenwald detects is an effort by pro-Obama union leaders to direct the movement into the Democratic fold.  And solidarity work has taken other forms, such as the attempt to obstruct foreclosures.  But there is a genuine convergence of interests between organised labor and the heterogenous groups assembled at OWS - whether debt-shackled students, workers, the unemployed, or dissident former soldiers.  The union leadership knows it, especially after the defeat of the union-bashers in Ohio.  The alliance between these groups has to be negotiated and constructed.  But the material basis for it, which the slogan 'we are the 99%' communicates, is a shared class interest.  This shared interest, at a time of sharpening class antagonisms, is making solidarity easier to achieve, and is laying the basis for a new Left.

You've probably heard it said a dozen times today: "It's like 28 Days Later out there."  Every thirty seconds, there's a new riot zone.  I've rarely known the capital to be this wound up.  It's kicked off in East Ham, then Whitechapel, then Ealing Broadway (really?), then Waltham Forest...  It's kicked off in Croydon, then Birmingham, then (just a rumour so far) Bradford...  The banlieues of Britain are erupting in mass civil unrest.  Until now, the claim has been that this is merely a criminal enterprise.  At a stretch, it was orchestrated criminality, using Twitter and Blackberry messenger.  If you're following what's happening in the UK, that's an impossible position to sustain.  A few looters here and there might be evidence of little more than opportunism.  But clashes with police in several major cities, including the two largest cities, doesn't look like mere entrepreneurialism to me.  And as it spreads to hitherto unexpected places, it certainly doesn't look orchestrated. 

Part of the reason for the spread is probably that the aura of invincibility on the part of UK riot police has been seriously damaged by these riots.  Protesters in the UK are used to being contained and out-manouevered by police.  That makes it seem as if the police are omnipotent.  This situation has underlined very clearly that law and order is generally maintained by consent, not coercion.  The police are not all powerful, despite their technological and organizational advantages, which is why they rely on good 'community relations'.  In those areas where there are long-standing grievances and sources of resentment, it seems, that consent has been withdrawn.  As a result of the unpredictable way in which this unrest has unfolded, the police have ended up being out-played, and sometimes out-numbered. 

Yet, as important, there is also an underlying crisis of ideology and political leadership for the police.  Amid the Hackgate scandal, which has shattered their credibility, and following the killing of a suspect under circumstances that were only ineffectually and temporarily concealed, they are [potentially facing a complete collapse in relations with black British communities.  Cameron and the police leadership will be evacuating themselves over this prospect.  The painstaking attempts to overcome the complete mutual hatred and distrust that characterised such relations in the 1980s made some headway.  Of course, police harrassment, brutality, killing in custody, and so on, did not come to an end.  Institutional racism proved durable.  But there was definitely an amelioration between Broadwater Farm and the Lawrence Inquiry.  And that  is one advance which, I believe, they don't want to put through the historical shredder. 

So, despite politicians like the Liberal Simon Hughes ranting and demanding that the police use the water cannon, and despite the ritual denunciations and tough talk about the law from (another Liberal) Lynne Featherstone, I suspect the police are quite unsure as to how they're supposed to be handling this.  The fact that Cameron has, with remarkable arrogance, hitherto refused to shift from his Tuscany villa and arouse parliament from its recess, cannot have helped here.  (Boris Johnson's absence has merely allowed Ken Livingstone to start his re-election campaign early.)  One doesn't expect this disorientation, if that's what it is, to last long.  The police and the executive will coordinate some sort of policy response that seeks to isolate the 'troublemakers' while making reassuring noises about 'understanding' that 'people have many valid questions' etc.  But for now, the crisis is sufficient to allow these openings and, as a result, riots are breaking out in new places with stunning frequency.  (Just as I write, I've learned that Woolwich has joined the riot zones).

Though the media is putting a lot of labour into the effort of racialising this issue, the underlying class dimension is just as obvious.  The US press seems to get it.  The New York Times' report ascribes the riots to a combination of spending cuts and anti-police sentiment amid a generalised ideological crisis for the cops:

They also quote a rioter saying they're taking on "the ruling class".  And of course, the ruling class press is deeply attuned to this sort of scenario.  Only a month ago, the Wall Street Journal wrote of how the global rich fear the coming violence of the poor:

So, even if politicians are in denial, the rich aren't.  You may well say, "bollocks, they're not taking on the ruling class, they're just destroying their own nest, hurting working class people and small businesses".  I can hear this, just as I can hear the sanctimony in its enunciation.  The truth is that riots almost always hurt poor, working class people.  There's no riot that embodies a pure struggle for justice, that is not also partly a self-inflicted wound.  There is no riot without looting, without anti-social behaviour, without a mixture of bad motives and bad politics.  That still doesn't mean that the riot doesn't have a certain political focus; that it doesn't have consequences for the ability of the ruling class to keep control; that the contest with the police is somehow taking place outside of its usual context of suspicion borne of institutional racism and brutality.  The rioters here, whenever they've been asked, have made it more than abundantly clear what their motives are - most basically, repaying years of police mistreatment.

Somewhat less on your high horse, you may go on: "but even if there is some sort of mediated logic of political class struggle unfolding here, the rich have nothing to fear as this sort of destruction is at best counterproductive".  That may be correct, though it's the sort of thing people tend to assume rather than argue for.  Major riots in the twentieth century included Soweto, in South Africa, and in US inner cities in the 1960s up to and including the Watts rebellion.  Major riots in recent British history have included those in Brixton in 1981, and Broadwater Farm in 1986, as well as the poll tax riots in 1990.  It would be foolish to claim that these made no contribution to achieving the objectives of their participants.  The fact is that whatever problems riots bring to the communities affected by them - and they're real, no question - it can't just be assumed that they're stupid.  The participants may not be glibly articulate, and some of them may be engaging in indefensible behaviour, but they shouldn't just be written off as mindless, apolitical thugs. 

A more sensible assumption, perhaps, is that you have a lot of young people with complex motives - avarice and adventure, sure, but also anger and defiance - some of whom are educated in certain traditions of resistance.  For example, The Guardian reporter Paul Lewis (who is worth following on Twitter, by the way) was surprised that Tottenham residents all knew of the IPCC and were very critical of it.  This surprise was misplaced.  Those who are most likely to suffer police repression, and thus have to make use of complaints procedures, are of course going to be in possession of certain repertoires of knowledge concerning policing and the criminal justice system.  They would make it their business to be informed, out of self-defence.  I don't buy the idea that these kids are just clueless about the political background of their oppression.  And I think they're most likely on a learning curve now, as yet undecided as to what wider political conclusions they will draw from all of this.  Like it or not, they are now part of the wider ideological crisis, now a key ingredient in the slow-motion collapse of the political leadership.  How they see their involvement here, and how their perception changes, long after the smoke has cleared and the empty rhetoric has stopped, should be of some interest.

Well, since you ask, the ruling class in the UK has been estimated to comprise about 0.1% of the adult population - at the time of this estimate (1991), this would have been 43,500 people.  That is the number of people who would both form part of the capitalist class, and rule politically.  Today, if the same proportions held, the ruling class would comprise about 50,000 people.  However, a caveat.  Quantifying the ruling class in this way can be useful for social imaging, but such figures should be taken with a pinch of salt. The ruling class should be understood not first as a quantity, but as a relation. And since those relations are in constant flux, constantly needing to be produced and reproduced, and since capital (and political power) tends to be progressively concentrated among smaller numbers of people, there will be a tendency for the ruling class to shrink relative to the population.  At any rate, no such quantity is stable.  

Further, in addition to the capitalist class itself, there is a bourgeois penumbra, a set of institutions and agents who rule alongside and on behalf of the capitalist class and whose social power is derivative of the capitalist class - these elites are particularly concentrated in the state.  Which brings us back to the point I left you with yesterday, namely that a ruling class is such when it commandeers the state - it must not merely hold wealth but rule politically by virtue of that wealth, and the most important strategic space within which political antagonisms are resolved is in the national state.  In the historic development of capitalist social relations, the emergence of a distinctly capitalist ruling class results in a distinctly capitalist form of state power.  Robin Blackburn, in the discussion of Hanoverian Britain in The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, describes how after the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688 the new political arrangements favoured the direct rule of capital, inasmuch as a monarch with weak legitimacy allowed the propertied oligarchy to be assertive of its interests in parliament, while dominating most state posts at a local as well as national level - as County Commissioners, Lords Lieutenant, or Justices of the Peace, as well as MPs.  Highly lucrative public offices - such as the Bank of England and chartered companies - were held as private property.  As statesmen, they established corporations; as corporate members, they profited from the enterprise.  As MPs they legislated; as Justices of the Peace they interpreted the law.  Blackburn points out that this system, with its narrow franchise and rotten boroughs, represented bourgeois rule at an immature stage.  As a result of this immaturity, the British capitalist state then had to proceed through centuries of struggle and adaptation, incorporating a franchise for the middle class, then working class men, then women, while also incorporating some popular demands in the form of social democracy.  But the major offices of the state, its laws, its apparatus and its division of labour (social as well as technical) were elaborated under bourgeois domination, thus giving us a concrete example of how a state becomes 'impregnated' (in Therborn's phrase) with the drives of a particular social class, the capitalist class, allowing that class to rule politically.

So, this brings us to the role of the police, whose relationship to News International becomes all the more understandable once the former's role is better understood.  This relationship included not merely the bribing of junior to middle rank police officers, and not merely wining and dining of senior officers, but the constant circulation of personnel between News International and the Met.  There was a confluence of interests and a concert of actions.  For example, when the police murdered Jean Charles de Menezes, it was the newspapers, particularly News International that they turned to to vilify the dead man.  Lo and behold, we discover that News International was hacking the phone belonging to Menezes' cousin.  And the favours were returned.  The police not only failed to properly investigate News International's phone hacking when it was revealed, but actively applied pressure on the competition not to pursue the case.  To say that this relationship facilitated a criminal conspiracy may be an understatement - when all the facts are out, it may prove more accurate to say that it was a criminal conspiracy.

But why should the police force be so available for corruption in tandem with the reactionary press?  To answer this, it is important not to start with too much of a 'police' conception of the police.  They are not merely a repressive apparatus.  Nicos Poulantzas points out (State, Power, Socialism) that even ‘mainly’ repressive apparatuses such as the army, police, courts, prisons etc., all produce the ideological bases of capitalism. The distinction between the repressive and ideological apparatuses can thus only function at a purely indicative level.  To insist on a strict division of labour along these lines leads to a mistaken conception of the state, in which it secures acquiescence either by means of coercion or through 'false consciousness', ignoring the fact that the state must produce a material substratum for consensus, organising aspects of productive relations in such a way as to generate consent.  There is a tendency to see the state's role as extrinsic to the economy, as merely the guarantor of an autonomous, self-sufficient capitalist economy.  This depends on a certain mechanistic 'base-superstructure' model of the relation of political structures to the economy.  It would be more accurate to say that the state constitutes the economy in various ways, in that it condenses, concentrates, organizes and materializes the politico-ideological relations that are already inherent in the relations of production.  The police, by upholding the system's political and legal relations, assist in the reproduction of its productive relations; at the same time, by punishing transgressions (and normally issuing statements explaining the normative basis for such punishment), they assist in the moralization and legitimation of the same productive relations.

Let's take a concrete example.  The police are aware of a protest that is due to take place in Whitehall.  They anticipate what they would term serious violence and disorder.  Part of the reason is that this protest is organised by people who challenge the existing social-property relations, and the police consider any attempt to seriously realise such a challenge, however peaceable and democratic, an affront to their authority.  Anyway, they coordinate a set of responses intended to bring the protest under tight spatial and physical control, until it can be dispersed.  But those responses are not merely technological and technocratic.  They proceed in a very ideologically sensitive manner, careful to produce the political-ideological pretext for each move they make.  Even if this involves nothing more than arresting many people on trumped up charges, the very fact of people having been arrested will certainly be presented in the media as evidence of serious disorder and violence, because the media automatically accept the legitimacy and validity of police claims until such time as they are rendered ridiculous - and sometimes not even then.  That is, the police don't merely exercise a part of the state's monopoly of legitimate violence; they are the authoritative moral arbiter.  And it is only because they are such that their highly ideological, politicised action is treated as neutral.  

We proceed with the example.  The police use a repertoire of violence to coerce and contain the protesters - punches, slaps, baton strikes, mounted charges - and finish the day by isolating a manageable number of protesters and kettling them in a space so confined as to be physically dangerous for a prolonged period of time.  The explicit reasoning is that they are being held to prevent a breach of the peace, and that their detention will last no longer than is necessary to assure a peaceful dispersal.  But this, of course, is an intensely ideological depiction of affairs, and requires a great deal of ideological preparation and foregrounding for its conduct to be coherent.  Certain things must be automatically airbrushed or discounted for.  Hence, the media, and especially the most right-wing and authoritarian tabloids, will be a natural ally in this process, particularly in the subsequent witch hunts.  At every step here, the police have conducted a series of movements along various dimensions - political, ideological, legal, economic, etc - which isn't reducible to the forms of repression deployed.  Even in its repressive moment, the state is enacting ideology - because ideology is not just a field of representation, but precisely a set of material practises, customs, lifestyle etc.  When the police punish individuals (and, relevantly, fail to punish others), they contribute to these practises.

So, what is left that is mysterious about the relationship between the police and the media?  Yesterday, I said that the capitalist media operates in a specific vector of class power concerned with the reproduction of ideas and images and that its relationship with politicians was thus very natural as the latter also play a key role in the reproduction of ideology.  The capitalist media's ability to reproduce the dominant ideas and images in society is expressive of the dominance of capital in and over society.  If the state, as we have also said, concretises social relations, then the police in a capitalist state concretise the political and ideological dominance of the capitalist class.  Nothing is more logical than an alliance of mutual dependence between a sector of capitalist class power that is ideologically dominant, and a sector of state power that materializes that ideological domination in its day to day practises.  Such an alliance, even a corrupt or criminal one, merely formalizes the implicit systemic co-dependence of the two.  The fact that it took the form of this kind of criminal conspiracy owes itself to more concrete determinations than we have discussed here - the specific history of the Metropolitan Police, the evolution of the Murdoch empire, the accumulated outcomes of past struggles, the politics of the modern Conservative and Labour parties, and so on.  But those will have to be followed up tomorrow.

The big story of the parliamentary inquiries, I suspect, will not be the Murdochs squirming.  It will be the appearance of senior police officers and News International employees who are much more directly exposed in all this.  There is something symmetrical and appropriate about the criminal relationship between the police and the corporate media.  Is it that both are so innately venal and reactionary from top to bottom that it's hard to tell who is corrupting whom?  Is it that the power of both has been sharply enhanced in the era since 1979?  Or is it just that they complement one another in the respective forms of politicised class power that they wield?  Could it be that, as an ideological power, the Murdoch press took it upon itself to engage in moralised coercion?  Or that, as a coercive power, the police and criminal justice system have a clear moral and ideological function - think of the student protests, or 'black on black violence', the Islamophobic crackdowns, and all the way back to the suffragettes, etc.?  Is it that when the police wanted to target someone their evidence can't touch, they turn to the tabloids (remember News of the World's claims about the Koyair brothers); and when News International wanted to get an enemy (Sheridan) they turned to the police?  At any rate, as the scandal rolls on menacingly toward the Prime Minister, claiming scalps along the way, there is an opportunity to look into the usually opaque and secretive world of the ruling class, its forms of cohesion and coordination and, particularly, its ability to impregnate the state with its imperatives and priorities.  So, that's what we'll be doing all week at the Tomb.  Stay tuned.

There is a critique of capitalism, popularised by Joel Bakan, which says that it is psychopathic. That is, if corporations were judged as personalities (which in legal terms they are), they would be found to have all the traits of the psychopath. There is a similar critique of the capitalist media, which begins with an institutional analysis of media corporations as necessarily large profit-seeking enterprises that subsist chiefly through advertising revenue (companies selling rich audiences to other companies), and concludes that this media is a propaganda system that contributes to industries of death - imperialism, environmental destruction, capitalist predation, etc. That is, very crudely paraphrased, the Chomsky/Herman critique. One might, as a marxist, have legitimate qualms with 'institutionalist' analyses, especially if they lose sight of the antagonisms within the institutions they're describing, and the wider structuring role of such antagonisms in society as a whole. Nonetheless, these accounts have the advantage of a basic realism about the fact that predatory behaviour is not incidental to capitalism, but immanent to it.

On the face of it, this isn't the worst example of such behaviour. Compare with the torrent of lies that took us into Iraq, abetted by the civilised broadsheets. Compare with the routine publication of racist pulp fiction as news, or the endless propaganda about Haiti, or the Pravdaesque capitalist realism about the urgent need for social devastation in the form of austerity. Perhaps, one might conclude, this is exactly the sort of tale of a tabloid behaving badly story that the more respectable papers like because it makes them appear in a good light. And, however appalling it is, you might say, it's fairly trivial compared to the usual performance of the press. You may even observe that one person who would have good reason to breathe a sigh of relief over this is Johann Hari, whose petty bullshitting now looks sweet by comparison. I don't quite see it that way myself. I consider this story sinister down to the last detail. Not just the hacking of Milly Dowler's voicemails; not just listening in to every word spoken by a distressed relative; not just deleting messages when the inbox was full, to make space for more messages; but actually profiting from the brief moment of false hope when people thought that Milly Dowler must have deleted the messages herself and thus be alive, by sending hacks round to conduct an exclusive interview with the unaware family about their hopes. In a depraved way, they circled around the vulnerable, knowingly, cynically awaiting a moment of weakness, brazenly bleeding them dry when the opportunity presented itself, creating some of the torment that they then exploited.

And Surrey police allowed them to do it. They say they had other priorities, that there was a lot of dirty stuff going on. They couldn't even trust their own mobile phones for fear of being hacked, had evidence of News of the World openly breaking the law, and refused to move a muscle against them. As anyone who has followed the 'hacking' scandal knows, there is a long history of evidence of illegal behaviour by the News of the World which the police have refused to act over - doubtless unrelated to the cosy relationship enjoyed by Newscorps executives with senior police officers. The Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service both declined to take up the extensive evidence of criminality. Not only that, but the politicians backed off from any parliamentary inquiry for fear that Murdoch's hacks would delve into their private lives. As a result, this vile organisation continues to be at liberty to not merely pump out toxic propaganda, which would not distinguish it, or defile the senses with endless vulgarisation and degradation, but actually wreck lives in quite a direct way. And the Murdoch empire continues to expand for as long as he doesn't run out of political allies.

It will never stop until there is a comprehensive popular rejection of the Murdoch press, and particularly its two staple tabloids. It will not stop until something like the post-Hillsborough boycott of The Sun in Liverpool is rolled out nationwide. This relevation ought to be the occasion for that.

"The class character of an ideological discourse is revealed in what we could call its specific articulating principle. Let us take an example: nationalism. Is it a feudal, bourgeois or proletarian ideology? Considered in itself it has no class connotation. The latter only derives from its specific articulation with other ideological elements. A feudal class, for example, can link nationalism to the maintenance of a hierarchical-authoritarian system of a traditional type - we need only think of Bismarck’s Germany. A bourgeois class may link nationalism to the development of a centralised nation-state in fighting against feudal particularism, and at the same time appeal to national unity as a means of neutralising class conflicts - think of the case of France. Finally, a communist movement can denounce the betrayal by capitalist classes of a nationalist cause and articulate nationalism and socialism in a single ideological discourse - think of Mao, for example. One could say that we understand by nationalism something distinct in the three cases. This is true, but our aim is precisely to determine where this difference lies. Is it the case that nationalism refers to such diverse contents that it is not possible to find a common element of meaning in them all? Or rather is it that certain common nuclei of meaning are connotatively linked to diverse ideological-articulatory domains? If the first solution were accepted, we would have to conclude that ideological struggle as such is impossible, since classes can only compete at the ideological level if there exists a common framework of meaning shared by all forces in struggle. It is precisely this background of shared meanings that enables antagonistic discourses to establish their difference. The political discourses of various classes, for example, will consist of antagonistic efforts of articulation in which each class presents itself as the authentic representative of ‘the people’, of ‘the national interest’, and so on. If, therefore, the second solution - which we consider to be the correct answer - is accepted, it is necessary to conclude that classes exist at the ideological and political level in a process of ar ticulation and not of reduction.

"Articulation requires, therefore, the existence of nonclass contents - interpellations and contradictions - which constitute the raw material on which class ideological practices operate. These ideological practices are determined not only by a view of the world consistent with the insertion of a given class in the process of production, but also by its relations with other classes and by the actual level of class struggle. The ideology of a dominant class does not merely consist of a Weltanschaung which ideologically expresses its essence, but is a functioning part of the system of rule of that class. The ideology of the dominant class, precisely because it is dominant, interpellates not only the members of that class but also members of the dominated classes. The concrete form in which the interpellation of the latter takes place is a partial absorption and neutralisation of those ideological contents through which resistance to the domination of the former is expressed.

"The characteristic method of securing this objective is to eliminate antagonism and transform it into a simple difference. A class is hegemonic not so much to the extent that it is able to impose a uniform conception of the world on the rest of society, but to the extent that it can articulate different visions of the world in such a way that their potential antagonism is neutralised. The English bourgeoisie of the 19th century was transformed into a hegemonic class not through the imposition of a uniform ideology upon other classes, but to the extent that it succeeded in articulating different ideologies to its hegemonic project by an elimination of their antagonistic character: the aristocracy was not abolished, in the jacobin style, but was reduced to an increasingly subordinate and decorative role, while the demands of the working class were partially absorbed - which resulted in reformism and trade-unionism. The particularism and ad hoc nature of dominant institutions and ideology in Great Britain does not, therefore, reflect an inadequate bourgeois development but exactly the opposite: the supreme articulating power of the bourgeoisie’s. Similarly, ideologies of dominated classes consist of articulating projects which try to develop the potential antagonisms constituting a determinate social formation. What is important here is that the dominant class exerts its hegemony in two ways: (1) through the articulation into its class discourse of non-class contradictions and interpellations; (2) through the absorption of contents forming part of the ideological and political discourses of the dominated classes. The presence of working class demands in a discourse - the eight-hour day, for example is insufficient to determine the class nature of that discourse. The political discourse of the bourgeoisie also came to accept the eight-hour day as a ‘just’ demand, and to adopt advanced social legislation. This is a clear proof that it is not in the presence of determinate contents of a discourse but in the articulating principle which unifies them that we must seek the class character of politics and ideology."