Confinement Through Escaping
Ideology in Contemporary Capitalism
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We live in an unprecedented era of politics. Today, every political faction needs to present itself as a radical alternative to the dominant order. Even the most “centrist” liberals are forced to construct an existential scenario where their “normality” has been highjacked by conservatives ushering in a “threat to democracy” they must radically challenge. Today the struggle to sustain the ruling class’s hegemony takes the form of an apparent loss of it; to sustain hegemony it is necessary to make hegemony seem counter hegemonic.
In the past I have ventured to call the forms this takes in Western “Marxism” “controlled counter hegemony.” However, what I have failed to note is how hegemony itself – not just one component of it – purports itself to be counter-hegemonic. The ruling ideas of our era enunciate themselves as contenders. It is like a boxing champion who sustains his title not through mandatory defenses, but as a mandatory challenger. The ideas upheld by dominant institutions of capital are simultaneously presented as a marginalized locus of subaltern thought.
This is, ultimately, a culmination of the purportedly “post-ideological” age the West enters into in the 1990s, with the so-called “end of history.” As Slavoj Žižek has noted, it is precisely when we think we have escaped or overcome ideology that we are the deepest within it. Is it not the case that, likewise, those who present themselves as the ultimate underdogs today – whether the liberals, the conservatives, or the leftists – are precisely in the same club of ideological frontrunners… all playing various essential roles for the ‘team’ as a whole?
The need to present all politics – even the politics which seeks to sustain the dominant political parameters – as revolutionary and radical, is often expressed through the metaphorical invocation of the film which captured and reproduced the paradoxical zeitgeist of the “post-ideological” age itself: The Matrix. Is not The Matrix a clear example of an ideological notion of how one could “escape” ideology? Taking the “red pill,” today, is precisely how we most efficiently receive the effect of the blue pill, that is, it is through the idea that taking a red pill will help us escape the world of the blue pill that we precisely anchor ourselves, knowingly or not, in the world of the blue pill.
The Tate brothers are perhaps one of the best examples of this. Their whole persona and brand (or profile) is centered around helping people “escape the matrix.” But how is that done, exactly? What is the path out of the matrix? The answer couldn’t be more rooted in “the matrix” itself: get together with your core group of friends and find ways to get rich. But is this ‘get rich’ mentality not precisely what the dominant ideology of the U.S. has been since its inception? Is it not precisely the stereotypical jargon about the “land of opportunities,” where, irrespective of background, hard work and discipline could make you rich? W. E. B. Du Bois would see nothing but a good ole return to the “American assumption” in this purported path to escape the matrix.
Today Plato’s cave can be rewritten as a labyrinth, where once one escapes and sees the sun, what one is actually in is another cave, one that is more complex and tangled. One stays in the cave precisely by thinking they have escaped. It is like that Peter Kay skit, "Max and Paddy Go to Prison,” where the prisoner is building a tunnel to escape his cell. The only small problem is that he’s digging into the cell next door. Today many of the attempts which purport themselves as pathways to leaving the ideological prison of the contemporary capitalist order, in reality simply lead us into the cell next door.
This does not mean, necessarily, that all hopes of escape are really – deep down – ways of remaining trapped. In fact, the abstract generalization of such false escapes into an ontological condition for our age its itself a form of controlled counter hegemony… what Keti Chuckrov called the “radicalization of the impossibility of exit.” It is archetypical of the postmodern condition to suspend oneself to the objective recognition of universal entrapment. It is its own form of epistemological escape which serves entrapment itself.
Escape is possible, but we must constantly reflect on whether we too fall into the escape routes which further entrap. While we should not be nihilists to the possibility of genuine escapes, we should be realists in the face of how ‘escaping the matrix’ has itself become an industry which serves to reinforce it further.
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Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy professor. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the Secretary of Education of the American Communist Party. He has authored many books, including The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming On Losurdo's Western Marxism (2025) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2025). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Carlos’ just made a public Instagram, which you can follow HERE.