I was going to mention Marx’s reading of political economy as an example of the sort of ideology critique I like, too. But I’m not sure that the only thing we can get from that is an idea of the self-understanding of the enemy. I want to say something like, because these ideological texts are an aspect of particular material conditions, we can find out something about the material conditions by reading the texts in a certain way. Something like Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism - the autonomous character of the commodity, which shows up ideologically in political economy, is something that capitalism actually achieves materially by separating workers from the product of their labor.

Thanks for your commnets. Given our conversations while you were in Minneapolis and what else I know, I suspect we really disagree on very little, especially on what matters more. I think I often react to a certain charge in certain formulations, such that my impulse is to say “you don’t mean X-dodgy-thing, do you?” but it often comes out phrased more like “you’re wrong!” Sorry for when that’s the case.

Anyway, I do think that there’s a most important site and that it’s the workplace, but that’s a matter of political orientation rather than a theory of cultural/superstructural production. So, I’m not sure about the phrasing of “ideology as a reflection of material relations.” I hear this as positing a distinction between the ideological and the material, which would mean ideology is not material. I don’t know what to make of that. Aside from the distinction between the two, ‘reflects’ sounds very much to me like a directional metaphor, a la the old ‘base-superstructure’ model: I stand in front of a mirror and the causal power is in me, not the reflection in the mirror - the reflection moves because I move, not vice versa. Like I said, I think the workplace, the ‘base’, is most important, but I’m not convinced the rest is causally derived from this most important area, it might just be a non sequitur (which is not to say the ’superstructure’ never has an effect for good or for ill). I suspect none of this is what you mean, but I don’t know how else to take these terms. I am, of course, willing to have my mind changed.

One other thing, I am more sympathetic to something like ideology critique in terms of readings of things, like Marx’s readings of classical political economy (or good readings of Marx). There are texts or idioms or methods or whatever one wants to call them that systematically don’t admit of a certain thing explicitly (the superfluosness of the boss and the degrading nature of the workplace, say, in some hypothetical management literature) but must still deal with that thing in order to function well. So they develop ways - I’m tempted to say ‘coded’ but that’s not right - to talk about these things, which we can learn to read (like, when they say “productivity gains” we know it means layoffs and/or speedups, etc) in order to understand certain moves in the class struggle at least at a grand scale. It’s like… a vocabulary that let’s one simulate how the enemy might think or react in some situation, though not in any terms the enemy would ever admit to as an approximation of their self-understanding (they do this to us too, hence their successes in busting unions, rounding up dissidents, etc).