Systematic ideology is a study of
ideologiesAn ideology is a set of aims and ideas that directs one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a...
founded in the late 1930s in and around
London[]London is the capital of England and the United Kingdom. It has been a major settlement for two millennia, and the history of London goes back to its founding by the Romans, when it was named Londinium. London's core, the ancient City of London, the 'square mile', retains its medieval boundaries...
,
EnglandEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the North Sea to the east, with the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
by Harold Walsby, George Walford and others. It seeks to understand the origin and development of ideologies, how ideologies and ideological groups work together, and the possibilities of guiding the development of ideologies on a global scale. The basic premise of systematic ideology is that ideology is the central
motivatorMotivation is the activation or energization of goal-oriented behavior. Motivation may be internal or external. The term is generally used for humans but, theoretically, it can also be used to describe the causes for animal behavior as well. This article refers to human motivation...
in human affairs; that the characteristics that make up the major ideologies come in sets; that those sets of characteristics form a series; and that the ideological series forms a system.
History
The group that formed around Harold Walsby and his ideas was a breakaway from the
Socialist Party of Great BritainThe Socialist Party of Great Britain , is a small Marxist political party within the impossibilist tradition. It is best known for its advocacy of using the ballot box for revolutionary purposes; opposition to reformism; and its early adoption of the theory of state capitalism to describe the...
. During the Second World War this group developed a fascination with
perceived impediments to mass
socialist consciousnessClass consciousness is consciousness of one's social class or economic rank in society. From the perspective of Marxist theory, it refers to the self-awareness, or lack thereof, of a particular class; its capacity to act in its own rational interests; or its awareness of the historical tasks...
among the
working classWorking class is a term used in academic sociology and in ordinary conversation to describe, depending on context and speaker, those employed in lower tier jobs as measured by skill, education, and compensation....
. The theory they developed was expressed by Walsby himself in his 1947 book
The Domain of Ideologies and those involved in the group set up an organisation to propagate their views called the Social Science Association, which existed from 1944 until 1956, attracting a number of new recruits during the ‘
Turner ControversyThe Turner Controversy is a name given to a dispute within the Socialist Party of Great Britain regarding the nature of socialism instigated by Tony Turner...
’. It was later succeeded by the
Walsby Society and the journal which emerged from it called
Ideological Commentary.
From the 1980s onwards, George Walford, editor of
Ideological Commentary and former secretary of the SSA, watered down some of the theory’s more obviously elitist elements and even left the SPGB money at the time of his death. He did this on the grounds that although in his view the Party would never help achieve
socialismSocialism refers to various theories of economic organization advocating public or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources, and a society characterized by equal access to resources for all individuals with a method of compensation based on...
it did perform a valuable function by
demonstrating through its application of critical analysis, logical thought and theory the limitations of other political groups that valued these less highly (a perspective which had informed Harold Walsby’s decision in 1950 to surreptitiously rejoin the Party through its postal branch
and write articles for the
Socialist StandardThe Socialist Standard is a monthly socialist newspaper published without interruption since 1904 by the Socialist Party of Great Britain. The newspaper is written in a simple, direct style and focuses mainly on socialist advocacy and Marxian analysis of current events, particularly those...
under the pseudonym "H.W.S.Bee").
Ideological Commentary survived until the death of Walford in 1994. , barely a handful of systematic ideology's exponents remain.
Walsby, Walford and their group produced a large number of leaflets, pamphlets and other literature over time, a fair chunk of it dealing with the SPGB. The most readable expressions of systematic ideology are Walford’s book
Beyond Politics, published in 1990, and the pamphlet
Socialist Understanding, published ten years earlier.
Theory
The theory of the group developed over time and was re-christened ‘systematic ideology’ by Walford in 1976. Its basic premise was that people’s assumptions and identifications (the factors making up their ‘ideology’) are not explicable in terms of
material conditionsThe philosophy of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance. As a theory, materialism is a form of physicalism and belongs to the...
in general and their relationship to the
means of productionMeans of production , are things used byhuman labourers to create products. They include two broad categories of objects: instruments of labour and subjects of labour...
in particular—and are never likely to be. Instead, there are persistent and distinct ideological groups in society, cutting across
social classSocial classes are the hierarchical arrangements of people in society as economic or cultural groups. Class is an essential object of analysis for sociologists, political economists and social historians...
es and forming a series, with the largest groups being most typically guided in their thoughts and
actions by a preference for family, authority, familiarity and tradition. Politically, these preferences find predominant expression in the ideas of the large number of so-called
‘non-politicals’ in society, and in
ConservatismConservatism is the diverse political and social philosophy that supports tradition and the status quo, or that calls for a return to the values and society of an earlier age, the status quo ante. However, the term has been used by politicians and political commentators with a variety of meanings...
and then
LiberalismLiberalism is the belief in the importance of individual freedom. This belief is widely accepted today throughout the world, and was recognized as an important value by many philosophers throughout history...
(the strength of these preferences gradually weakening through the series).
As the series progresses further, the next, progressively smaller, ideological groups seek to repress these identifications and preferences in favor of dynamism, social change, logical thought and the pursuit of theory as a guide to decision-making, these being expressed politically in Labourism, more overtly still in
CommunismCommunism is a socioeconomic structure and political ideology that promotes the establishment of an egalitarian, classless, stateless society based on common ownership and control of the means of production and property in general. Karl Marx posited that communism would be the final stage in human...
and then, in an ultimate and extreme form, in
AnarchismAnarchism is a political philosophy encompassing theories and attitudes which consider the state, as compulsory government, to be unnecessary, harmful, and/or undesirable, and favors the absence of the state ....
(or ‘
AnarchosocialismLibertarian socialism is a group of political philosophies that aspire to create a society without political, economic, or social hierarchies, i.e...
’, the purist variety of it allegedly expounded by the
Socialist Party of Great BritainThe Socialist Party of Great Britain , is a small Marxist political party within the impossibilist tradition. It is best known for its advocacy of using the ballot box for revolutionary purposes; opposition to reformism; and its early adoption of the theory of state capitalism to describe the...
). The more an ideology represses the preferences for family, tradition, etc. in favour of social change, dynamism and the pursuit of theory as a guide to action, the fewer in
number its adherents are likely to be, with anarchists (or ‘anarcho-socialists’) being the smallest of all. Those seeking radical social change, so the theory contends, will always be hampered and restrained by the enduring preferences of the largest ideological groups.
Walford
In his book,
Beyond Politics, George Walford seeks to analyse ideologies on the basis of its adherents' surface behaviors, their underlying sentiments and assumptions ("ethos"), and underlying cognitions ("eidos"). Of particular interest to him are a single group,
the non-politicals, and five major political ideologies,
conservatism, liberalism, socialism, communism, and anarchism, which can be listed as a series, with each seeking to "repress" its predecessor. He forms a series of hypotheses about the nature of those six ideologies, observing that they may be gauged upon different dimensions: according to
relative size and political influence of its adherents, their relative
reliance upon theory over practice, and the
degree to which they sought change. He postulates that the non-politicals have the greatest influence and least interest in theory, while anarchists exhibit the least influence and greatest interest in theory, with the rest having mixed degrees of those properties.
He also formulates that each is relative to certain ideological
ethos:
a) (short-term) expediency, b) (traditional) principles, c) precision, d) (fundamental) reform, e) revolution, and e) repudiation. By his formulations, historical change, development of technology, and development of more complicated social relations can be explained as occurring in stages along this series.
- For Walford, all societies historically begin in a state where a mass of individuals engage in expediency at the hunter-gatherer level. This state of affairs is characterized by short-term individual economic behavior and collective political action.
- Societies grow to have more advanced and secure political systems at the same time that they make better use of agricultural technology with more long-term goals in mind. In the process, economic behavior becomes more and more collectivistic. From then on, the societies engage in wars, and conquer. Empires grow, and create obedience with the mask of traditional principles.
- Finally, societies enter a stage where principles espoused actually begin to be followed, enacted, and made more precise. Similarly, economic production becomes more bureaucratic and rationally goal-oriented.
- The remaining three forms of ethos -- reform, revolution, and repudiation -- are, when taken together, seen to compose the envisioned fourth stage in historical development.
While some other philosophers have expressed the opinion that political liberalism is the peak or end-stage of historical development (see
Francis FukuyamaYoshihiro Francis Fukuyama is an American philosopher, political economist, and author.-Early life:Francis Fukuyama was born in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. His father, Yoshio Fukuyama, a second-generation Japanese-American, was trained as a minister in the Congregational Church and...
's "End of History" thesis), Walford claims the opposite. "More than ever before, our world is a boiling, bounding, bubbling ferment of ideological novelty, and the rate of change is accelerating. If the ideological system has reached completion it is only in the sense that a newborn child is complete." (Beyond Politics)
Criticism
Systematic ideology itself was rather hampered by the fact that even if the ideological series it posits is a historically accurate one (which is highly contentious in itself), it has always been unable to adequately explain why this should be so. More precisely, what it is that influences
some people and not others to gravitate through the series towards an ideology such as that supposedly represented by the Socialist Party? If some can do it but not others, systematic ideology has yet to coherently articulate why.
Walsby’s early version of the theory was clearly hierarchical (with those understanding the theory being the smallest group of all, metaphorically positioned at the apex of a pyramid, just above the SPGB) and it lent itself to criticism on the grounds that it was merely a particularly
convoluted type of ‘
human natureHuman nature is the concept that there are a set of characteristics, including ways of thinking, feeling and acting, that all 'normal' humans have in common. The branches of science associated with the study of human nature include sociology, sociobiology and psychology, particularly...
’ argument. This was essentially the response outlined in the
Socialist StandardThe Socialist Standard is a monthly socialist newspaper published without interruption since 1904 by the Socialist Party of Great Britain. The newspaper is written in a simple, direct style and focuses mainly on socialist advocacy and Marxian analysis of current events, particularly those...
’s April 1949 review of Walsby’s book, called
The Domain of Sterilities.
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