Introduction.

I want to provide a pragmaticist Piercean consideration on Perry Anderson’s essay, Idees-Forces, featured in New Left Review 151, Jan-Feb 2025. In the article, Anderson provides a sweeping meditation on the historical power of ideas in shaping political events, with a particular focus on ideology.

He tarries with the needling question of historical materialism as to whether ideas are primary forces in history with their own transformative potency, or if they are merely epiphenomena of material conditions and relations. He notes that this question does not divide Left from Right in any simple way. Some conservatives (Meinecke, Croce, Popper) elevate the spiritual or cultural power of ideas, while others (Nietzsche, Namier, Becker) emphasize instincts or interests. As for socialists: Braudel dismisses ideas entirely; Tawney cherishes them; Thompson battles economic reductionism; Hobsbawm largely ignores ideology.

Even revolutionary leaders were split: Lenin was insistent that theory anticipated action, while Rosa Luxemburg argued the opposite. Elsewhere, Gramsci championed ideological hegemony, while Stalin emphasized productive forces.

Citing Goran Therborn and T.S. Eliot, Anderson argues that powerful ideologies function like hierarchical cultural systems: sophisticated at the top, crude at the bottom, but unified by symbols, language, and practices. Such systems are not mere sets of abstract beliefs; they structure cultural and political life, extending from elites to the masses.

While reading this piece, I began thinking about what cantankerous old C.S. Peirce, with his theory of signs, belief, inquiry, and ideas, could contribute to the understanding of how ideologies take hold, persist, and shift in collective consciousness.

The reader will have to pardon the scrappiness of this essay. It was written by a mind thinking thoughts faster than a brain that could structure them properly. I began with an initial response as a whole, then moved on to develop individual considerations on different parts of Anderson’s essay which I have added as appendices.

The Semiotics of Ideology.

Peircean semiotics can inform this discussion in five primary ways:

1. Peirce’s semiotics distinguishes between three kinds of signs: icon, index, and symbol. In Anderson’s account of ideology (especially drawing from T.S. Eliot’s cultural hierarchy) aligns with Peirce’s symbolic level: ideas that govern not through resemblance (icon) or causality (index), but through convention and habit. Peirce can deepen Anderson’s definition of ideology by insisting that belief and action are stabilized not simply by intellectual systems, but by habitual sign-relations. Ideologies don’t just convince, they habituate. A belief, for Peirce, is not a proposition in the head but a rule of action: it guides conduct. Thus, Anderson’s historical analysis of ideological impact could be supplemented by Peirce’s idea that ideologies form not when beliefs are merely affirmed, but when they become socially operative through shared semiotic habits.
2. In The Fixation of Belief (see online Popular Science Monthly 12, November 1877, p1-15) , Peirce outlines four methods people use to fix beliefs:
   – Tenacity (clinging to beliefs despite doubt)
   – Authority (beliefs dictated by institutions)
   – A priori (what seems agreeable to reason)
   – Science (belief fixed through inquiry and public verification)
   Where Anderson implicitly tracks the ideological dominance of belief systems established through authority (religions, nationalism), a priori reasoning (liberalism, Marxism), and at times tenacity (tradition, orthodoxy); Peirce provides a  vocabulary and logic for analyzing why certain ideologies resist change, even when they fail materially or ethically. For instance, neoliberalism, as Anderson argues, persists not because it is desirable but because of Thatcherite TINA (there is no alternative). Peirce might classify this under the method of authority or even tenacity, not inquiry. That indicates ideological closure, not progress.
3. The Peircean pragmatic maxim holds that the meaning of any concept lies in its practical effects. An ideology, from this standpoint, would not be assessed by its internal consistency or historical pedigree (as Anderson sometimes does), but by the conceivable outcomes of acting upon it. Here Peirce provides a criterion for distinguishing between live and dead ideologies – not by popularity or power, but by their real-world consequences. This offers a way to gauge whether today’s ideological formations are truly “forceful” in generating new habits of action.
4. For Peirce, inquiry begins in doubt, and ideologies die when they no longer work. That is,when experience contradicts belief and generates crisis. Anderson writes of revolutions erupting in times of systemic contradiction, but he doesn’t theorize how people come to doubt dominant ideologies. What Peirce offers is a theory of ideological failure, not just through political crisis, but as a semiotic rupture, where symbols fail to mediate meaning and people turn to new sign-systems. In Peircean terms, this is a breakdown of habit, opening the way for new belief-fixation processes (e.g., revolutionary ideologies). This also suggests that the Left, if it wishes to build new idees-forces, must produce symbols and meanings that reliably generate action and withstand doubt -not just intellectually but semiotically.
5. Anderson concludes by calling for a radical, systematic, shocking counter-ideology to neoliberalism. Peirce’s fallibilism, the idea that no belief is final, and all are subject to revision – demonstrates that no ideology, however radical can or should pretend to finality. The next system should not emulate the totalizing hubris of neoliberalism or Stalinism, but be flexible, inquiry-based, and rooted in living habits. That is, open to revision, yet firm in action.

Belief as Habit: The Pragmatic Basis of Ideology

Central to Peirce’s conception of belief is the idea that it is not merely an intellectual assent but a habit of action. This pragmatic maxim, that the meaning of a concept lies in its practical consequences, gives us a new criterion for assessing ideology: an ideology has force not when it is asserted, but when it generates new and reproducible patterns of behavior. Thus, Peirce’s philosophy refocuses our attention from the doctrinal structure of ideologies (as detailed by Anderson) to their semiotic and behavioral efficacy. What distinguishes a live ideology from a dead one is not internal consistency or moral appeal, but its capacity to reorganize social conduct.

This approach supports, and refines, Anderson’s emphasis on ideologies as total systems that operate across plains (elite, intermediate, and popular, etc.) linked by a shared idiom and set of symbolic practices (a notion he draws from T.S. Eliot). Peirce would interpret this structure as a semiotic continuum in which symbols propagate through social space and fix habits across levels of interpretation. An idee-force in this sense is not merely a set of beliefs, but a network of signs that condition collective behavior across institutions and strata.

Authority, Tenacity, and Inquiry

According to Peirce, belief is fixed through four primary methods: tenacity (sheer obstinacy), authority (social imposition), a priori reasoning (logical or moral appeal), and the method of science (inquiry governed by the public testing of hypotheses). Each of these modes has analogues in the historical record Anderson surveys. The rise of world religions corresponds to authority and tenacity; Enlightenment and Marxist ideologies to a priori systems; neoliberalism to a hybrid form, masked as science but sustained by institutional authority.

What Peirce clarifies is the mechanism by which ideology becomes hegemonic: not simply through force or persuasion, but through the suppression of doubt. Ideologies persist to the degree that they insulate their symbolic systems from contradiction. Conversely, revolutions (whether of thought or action) begin with the irruption of doubt, the breakdown of symbolic certainty, and the re-opening of inquiry. Anderson charts these moments historically (e.g., the Enlightenment, Marxist voluntarism, the neoliberal turn) but Peirce offers a logic of their possibility: ideologies are overturned not merely by external crisis but by semiotic destabilization from within.

Ideological Crisis as Semiotic Crisis

Peirce’s theory of signs posits that every sign has an object (what it refers to), an interpretant (how it is understood), and is governed by habit (the rule linking sign and meaning). An ideological crisis, then, is a crisis in this triadic relation: the signs no longer refer to a stable object, interpretations diverge, and habitual responses break down. Consider Anderson’s discussion of the October Revolution or the collapse of the USSR: in each case, the symbolic structure of the ruling ideology failed to align with lived experience. The result was not just political instability but a collapse of interpretability: a semiotic rupture.

This has direct implications for Anderson’s concluding rallying call for the Left to produce a new system of ideas capable of shocking the world. Peirce would endorse the necessity of such a rupture but insist that the shock must be more than rhetorical. It must generate new habits of action, new ways of interpreting and engaging the world. Only then can a new idee-force take hold.

The Thinness of Neoliberalism

While Anderson characterizes neoliberalism as a thinner ideology than classical liberalism (less philosophically rich, less publicly avowed) Peirce permits a diagnosis of that thinness. It is not that neoliberalism lacks ideas, but that its symbolic structure is minimalist and its interpretants highly constrained. It functions not by persuading but by habituating. It does not require belief, only participation. As Peirce might say, neoliberalism has fixed belief not through inquiry but through authority and tenacity masked as reason.

Anderson argues that neoliberalism has succeeded despite, or because of, its ideological thinness. Peirce would suggest that this success is due to its efficacy as a symbolic machine: it translates complex moral and political questions into routinized habits (e.g., consumer choice, competitive individualism), thereby foreclosing inquiry. This is not ideological weakness but a particular kind of semiotic power.

Fallibilism and the Prospect of a New Ideology

Finally, Peirce’s commitment to fallibilism, the idea that no belief is immune to doubt, offers both caution and hope for the next idea. For Peirce, belief is never final; it is always subject to revision in light of new experience. This philosophical humility is a necessary check on ideological dogmatism, especially on the Left. At the same time, it affirms the possibility of ideological transformation. As Anderson notes, the most world-shaping ideologies (the Enlightenment rationalism, Marxism, neoliberalism, etc.) were born in marginal intellectual conditions and only took hold when history opened a rupture.

The discerning Peircean would interpret this not as a paradox but as a pattern: inquiry deepens in crisis; symbols fracture and recombine; new habits emerge. The task, then, is not to await the return of crisis, but to prepare a symbolic system capable of responding to it. That is, to fix belief anew, not through repression, but through inquiry.

Three Principles for a Revolutionary Semiotics

Drawing on Peirce, we can provisionally outline what the next big idea or grand emancipatory project, an Andersonian idee-force, must entail:

1. Symbolic Depth. It must have structure: a logic of society, history, and transformation that connects elite theory with popular understanding. The Enlightenment had reason and natural rights. Marxism had labor, class, and dialectics. Neoliberalism, thin as it is, has markets and liberty. A future Left must develop symbolic universals that link analysis to imagination.
2. Indexical Resonance. It must connect to lived experience. Ideas cannot float; they must point to the world with all its contradictions, its violences, its fractures. The signs of resistance must index conditions that people already feel but cannot yet name. Neoliberalism does this through debt and insecurity; the next big idea must do so through care, solidarity, dispossession, and joy.
3. Iconic Force. It must create recognizable forms (figures, stories, images) that resemble the world people desire. Not just texts or theories, but practices, gestures, and affects.

In short: the new semiotics of revolution must speak, point, and show. That is,symbolically organize, indexically ground, and iconically attract.

APPENDIX ONE

Peirce and the Historical Tests of Ideology

In Idees-Forces, Perry Anderson charts the decisive episodes in which ideas have not merely reflected but constituted epochal political transformation: the rise of world religions in the Axial Age; the Protestant Reformation and its ideological wars; the Enlightenment and its revolutionary eruptions; and the nineteenth-century ideological polarization between capitalism and socialism. Anderson reads these episodes from a dialectical materialist perspective of historical contradiction, but he remains open (indeed committed) to the proposition that ideas, at certain moments, acquire an autonomous force.

Here C.S. Peirce has something to add. His theory of signs: comprising icons (resemblance), indices (causal or existential connection), and symbols (rule-bound conventions)—enables us to trace how ideas become operative, mobilizing, and institutional forces. His conception of belief as a habit of action, and his understanding of inquiry as a process triggered by doubt and stabilized by interpretive communities, offers a powerful supplement to Anderson’s history.

The Axial Religions

The Axial Age belief systems (Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, etc.) are, for Anderson, the first test cases in which ideas appeared to reshape vast civilizational structures without proximate material crisis. Peirce would identify them as the emergence of full symbolic systems: hierarchical, totalized structures in which elite metaphysics, popular ritual, and ethical conduct were unified through a shared idiom and sacred narrative.

These religions operated at all three semiotic levels:

1. Iconically, they offered vivid imagery: the suffering Christ, the wheel of samsara, the Prophet’s hijra.
2. Indexically, they registered deep existential conditions: hunger, injustice, mortality, and empire. Their rituals were not merely symbolic—they created tangible transformations of experience: confession, pilgrimage, healing, law.
3. Symbolically, they codified cosmologies into linguistic and institutional systems—scripture, liturgy, canon law.

Yet, as Peirce would observe, their indexical force outstripped their symbolic origin. Their spread was not the outcome of philosophical persuasion but of existential resonance and institutional grafting. The Roman Empire did not fall because of Christianity, but Christianity endured because it indexed the failure of pagan meaning, and symbolized a new social order.

The Peircean would stress that these religions succeeded not because they were rationally deduced systems of theology, but because they became habitual practices of belief,  not through inquiry, but through authority and tenacity. In this way, the Axial religions became the first global ideologies to control signification at scale.

The Reformation

If the Axial religions represent the fusion of symbol and ritual, the Protestant Reformation is Peirce’s logic of doubt made manifest. Here, belief was destabilized not by material catastrophe but by semiotic contradiction: the gap between the Catholic Church’s symbolic claims (grace, salvation, truth) and its institutional signs (indulgences, wealth, corruption). This rupture activated what Peirce would call the irritation of doubt. That is, the dissonance that makes new inquiry necessary.

Luther’s theses were not simply theological propositions; they were semiotic interventions. He challenged the indexical chain between ritual and grace, and replaced the symbolic authority of Church hierarchy with the iconicity of the text: sola scriptura. The Bible, printed and read, became the new icon, an image of direct access to divine truth. Peirce would read this as a semiotic reconfiguration: from a sacramental system governed by ecclesiastical signs, to a textual system governed by individual interpretation.

The Reformation thus became an ideological revolution not because it destroyed the Church’s material base (which remained immense) but because it reordered the interpretants of belief. Peirce’s framework clarifies that what was at stake was not just doctrine but semiotic sovereignty.The ensuing Counter-Reformation, with its resurgence of sacramental indexicality and baroque iconography, confirms Peirce’s law of sign proliferation: doubt produces not collapse, but semiotic multiplicity.

The Enlightenment and Its Revolutions

The Enlightenment, for Anderson, is the hinge-point at which secular ideologies began to supplant religious systems as the dominant idees-forces. Peirce would characterize this moment as a formalization of the symbol: the age in which ideas (rights, reason, sovereignty, etc.) began to function as abstract, general signs, detached from particular bodies or institutions.

1. The American Revolution was semiotically minimalist: documents (the Declaration, the Constitution) encoded principles, but the material motivations were, as Anderson notes, immediate and self-interested. Peirce would see this as a limited fixation of belief—stable within its class, but lacking universal interpretants.
2. The French Revolution, however, overcoded the world with signs. The Rights of Man, the National Assembly, the Cult of Reason, etc. – these were not only symbolic innovations but acts of semiotic saturation, attempting to create a new world through the authority of abstract signs.

The eminent Peircean would identify this as the moment when inquiry was nationalized: the rational, deliberative, experimental spirit of science became the semiotic model for politics. Yet the Terror, the guillotine, the Year II, were also moments of indexical contradiction: the symbolic signs of liberty were enacted as immediate violence.

The Enlightenment revolutions thus enacted Peirce’s dialectic of belief: doubt-inquiry-habit-crisis-new signs, and so on. Their ideals persisted because they installed durable habits of interpretation: constitutionalism, citizenship, secularism—even as their initial forms were violently unstable.

Capitalism and Marxism

Peirce’s categories culminate in a triadic ontology: firstness (quality), secondness (reaction, force), and thirdness (law, habit). Anderson’s fourth and most complex test case, those of capitalism and Marxism, can be productively mapped onto this schema.

1. Capitalism, though vast in impact, is semiotically poor in thirdness. It operates primarily through indices: price, competition, debt, wage. It refrains from articulating itself symbolically (indeed, capitalism was named by its critics). Its signs are concrete, recursive, and instrumental. In Peirce’s terms, it is a system of secondness: it compels through force and reaction, not through reasoned habit or coherent symbolism.
2. Marxism, by contrast, is a system of thirdness par excellence. It is a symbolic totality—rooted in dialectics, oriented by law, aspiring to transform habits. It was theorized before it was practiced, and it sought to reorder all social signs: labor, value, history, class, etc. For Peirce, Marxism is the rare ideology that aims not only to interpret the world but to regulate its semiosis.

The historical irony, which Anderson foregrounds, is that capitalism’s indexical power triumphed materially, while Marxism’s symbolic coherence prevailed politically (at least temporarily) in the global South and other underdeveloped polities. A Peircean understanding permits this to be seen not as contradiction, but as semiotic asymmetry: the system that lacked theory had facts on its side; the system that had theory was forced to act in places where the facts did not yet align.

This asymmetry also explains the eventual reversal: the revenge of productive forces that Anderson narrates is the triumph of indexical saturation over symbolic voluntarism. The Soviet project collapsed not because its ideas failed, but because its signs could no longer generate effective habits of action, and belief was no longer fixed.

Conclusion.

Peirce does not offer a political theory in the Marxist sense, but his semiotics permits a specification of how ideologies function as world-shaping forces. Using his categories, it can be said that:

1. Axial religions forged symbolic universes from indexical trauma.
2. The Reformation redirected interpretants through iconic and textual signifiers.
3. The Enlightenment revolutions extended symbolic reason into the political real.
4. Marxism and capitalism contend not just as economic systems, but as rival semiotic regimes: one based on indexical force, the other on symbolic law.

APPENDIX TWO

Neoliberalism as a Semiotic Regime

If neoliberalism, as Perry Anderson contends in Idees-Forces, is the most globally successful ideology in modern history, its mode of success demands conceptual refinement. Neoliberalism lacks the philosophical richness of classical liberalism, the doctrinal depth of Marxism, or even the populist emotive resonance of nationalism. It has few great theorists, inspires little overt allegiance, and is frequently disavowed even by its practitioners. Yet it endures, hegemonic in policy, institution, and affect. To account for this paradoxical durability, one might supplement Anderson’s historical analysis with C.S. Peirce’s semiotic theory, and consider neoliberalism not simply as an ideology, but as a semiotic regime: a structure of signs that reproduces its power by shaping the interpretive and habitual life of subjects without requiring their ideological consent.

Ideology Without Belief

Peirce distinguished between different modes by which belief is fixed: tenacity, authority, a priori reason, and inquiry. Neoliberalism, notably, eschews any frontal claim to truth or even desirability. It operates not by public reasoning (a priori), nor by mass conviction (tenacity), but primarily through a modified method of authority, which has been displaced from the church or crown to the dispersed apparatuses of financial institutions, policy think tanks, media, and digital infrastructures, and so on.

Unlike Marxism, which sought to interpellate subjects into a total worldview, or classical liberalism, which justified itself in the idiom of natural rights and moral progress, neoliberalism does not aim to persuade. It is largely content to govern conduct by structuring the field of possible choices. It functions through what Peirce would term habits of action: not requiring affirmation, merely repetition. One need not believe in markets to live within them. The consumer, the gig worker, the debt-financed student – all act according to neoliberal imperatives, whether or not they articulate them. In this sense, neoliberalism is an ideology that has outgrown the need for belief.

The Symbolic Minimalism of Neoliberalism

Peirce’s semiotics differentiates between icon (a resemblance), index (a causal connection), and symbol (a conventional sign). The ideologies Anderson surveys (Christianity, Marxism, Enlightenment thought, and the like) operate through richly layered symbolic systems, full of allegory, genealogy, and teleology. Neoliberalism, by contrast, tends toward diagrammatic abstraction. It translates moral and political relations into flat schemas: supply and demand curves, risk matrices, human capital calculations.

These symbolic forms do not solicit belief so much as command optimization. They are not concerned with truth or justice, but with efficiency, competitiveness, and liquidity. In Peircean terms, this is a semiotic regime dominated not by interpretants (meaning) but by immediate application. The ideal neoliberal sign is an instruction, not a reflection. It reduces interpretation to choice, freedom to preference, ethics to utility.

Thus, Anderson’s claim that neoliberalism is thinner than classical liberalism can be refined: it is minimalist by design, a stripped-down symbolic order optimized for circulation rather than reflection. This is not a weakness but a strength, what might be called lean hegemony.

Speculation and Anxiety

While its symbolic structure is minimal, neoliberalism is affectively saturated. If classical liberalism was tethered to dignity and rights, neoliberalism is attuned to precarity and performance. Peirce understood belief as intimately connected to the resolution of doubt. But neoliberalism thrives not by resolving doubt, but by generalizing it. In a regime of perpetual speculation (financial, professional, personal) stability becomes failure, and the uncertain future is the only horizon of value.

This speculative temporality is enforced not only through markets but through affect: anxiety, restlessness, aspiration. Neoliberal subjects are not asked to believe in the system, only to bet on it. This makes neoliberalism peculiarly resistant to ideological disillusionment. Unlike prior ideologies that risked collapse when their promises failed, neoliberalism promises nothing but risk itself.

In Peircean terms, the interpretant of neoliberal signs is not conviction but further interpretation: one more adjustment, one more gig, one more gamble. The semiotic process becomes recursive and self-consuming. That is, a feedback loop of striving without closure.

A Crisis Without Alternatives

One of Anderson’s most urgent points is that neoliberalism has achieved not only dominance but exclusivity. TINA – There is no alternative, as Thatcher declared – not a triumphal claim, but affirmative statement of ontological enclosure. Peirce would regard this as a closing of the universe of discourse: a reduction of inquiry to repetition. Where doubt once catalyzed the formation of new beliefs, now it is absorbed into the infinite deferral of decision.

Peirce’s fallibilism posits that all belief is provisional, all signs are subject to reinterpretation. But this openness requires what he called a community of inquiry. That is,a space where beliefs can be tested and revised. Neoliberalism has not only narrowed that space but commodified it. Inquiry becomes investment strategy; critique becomes personal branding. The conditions for belief revision (shared evidence, collective reason) are eroded.

Thus, while Anderson documents neoliberalism’s historical ascent, Peirce reveals the epistemological foreclosure it enacts: the loss of semiotic and social conditions for meaningful ideological change.

Sign Systems and Liberation

If a future Left is to produce an idee-force adequate to the present, it must confront not only the material architecture of neoliberal capitalism but its semiotic logic. It is not enough to assert new content; one must alter the form of signification itself. This means inventing new symbolic grammars, new affective registers, and new practical habits: modes of living and interpreting that resist the optimization imperative and reintroduce doubt, reflection, and solidarity.

Peirce teaches that signs are not passive carriers of meaning but active agents of orientation. To contest neoliberalism is to contest its signs: to disrupt the diagrams of efficiency, to decode the indices of precarity, to refuse the symbols of merit and debt. This is not merely a task of critique, but of semiotic reconstitution.

Conclusion

Perry Anderson’s Idées-Forces rightly identifies neoliberalism as the latest, and perhaps most insidious, world-straddling ideology. But its power lies not simply in its policy reach or global diffusion, but in its semiotic architecture. That is, its ability to shape conduct without commanding belief, to dominate interpretation without offering coherence. The politically-minded Peircean will deem neoliberalism not as a failure of ideology but as its minimalist perfection: a regime of signs that functions through habit, diagram, and perpetual deferral. To contest it, the thinker of the next big ideas must consider not only counter-theories but counter-signs. These being: modes of life, meaning, and inquiry that reopen the space of possibility that neoliberalism has so expertly sealed.

APPENDIX THREE

 On the Strange Triumph of Marxism

Scanning again over his essay Idees-Forces, Perry Anderson offers a suggestive paradox: that the most comprehensive and materially grounded ideology of the modern age, that great specter Marxism, failed to ignite revolution in the industrial centers for which it was theoretically designed, yet succeeded spectacularly in the least probable sites: Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba. This historical inversion. Thus, refuting its theoretical presuppositions.

Once again, Peirce’s categories offer a way of conceptualizing not only how ideologies become embedded in life, but how their meanings mutate when translated across different material and semiotic environments. Marxism’s migration from theory to practice, from West to East, from proletarian revolution to peasant insurrection, may be seen as a case of semiotic refunctioning – a radical shift in how the signs of Marxism were interpreted, embodied, and enacted. Peirce gives us a vocabulary to track this transmutation.

Marxism as Symbolic Ideal and Practical Index

In Peirce’s semiotics, a symbol is a sign that operates by convention and law, it gains meaning through its relation to a broader system of rules. Classical Marxism functions symbolically in this sense: it is a structured theoretical system, grounded in dialectical materialism, the critique of political economy, and the historical centrality of the wage-laboring proletariat.

But Peirce distinguishes symbols from indices, which are signs grounded in physical or existential connection. An index does not denote by abstraction but by contiguity. In this framework, one can say that Marxism was adopted in the periphery not primarily as a symbol, but as an index. That is, a sign of revolt, rupture, and modernity. It pointed not to the abstract logic of capital but to the concrete possibility of emancipation from imperial domination, landlordism, and feudal constraint.

In other words, while the symbolic content of Marxism—its laws, categories, and dialectics—was oriented toward Western industrial capitalism, its indexical force—its existential promise—was more legible, more urgent, and more actionable in the periphery. The concept of “dictatorship of the proletariat” became, in practice, the mobilization of the peasantry under a proletarian sign. Lenin and Mao did not misread Marx, they reinterpreted the symbol through local indices, reshaping doctrine through pragmatic necessity.

The Community of Inquiry and Its Collapse

Peirce’s notion of a community of inquiry presumes a public, continuous, self-correcting dialogue in which signs are revised through shared experience. Western Marxism, from its inception, struggled to become such a community. Deeply embedded in industrial societies with robust liberal institutions, socialist movements in Britain, France, and Germany encountered not a crisis of interpretation, but a saturation of signs: parliaments, trade unions, gradual reforms, and suffrage provided sufficient mediations to absorb class struggle without rupture.

In Peirce’s terms, the interpretants of Marxist signs in the West became habitual and deflationary: socialism as reform, as parliamentary participation, as adjustment. There was no genuine doubt, no precipitating crisis to destabilize the sign system and require its radical re-elaboration.

In contrast, in Russia or China, the sign of socialism confronted raw historical contradiction. Tsarism, colonial occupation, famine, and war generated existential doubt at every level of social life. These were not mere interpretive ambiguities but semiotic blackholes, in which the symbolic structure of the ancien regime had collapsed. Into this breach, Marxism entered not as a theory to be tested, but as a sign system that could be lived.

Thus, paradoxically, the lack of capitalist development in these societies created the very crisis conditions under which Peirce believed inquiry could begin in earnest. It was in the failure of the material preconditions that the symbolic ideal of Marxism could be reanimated as a revolutionary force.

Icons and the Myth of Modernity

Peirce’s third mode of signification is the icon, a sign that represents its object by resemblance. In the periphery, Marxism was often taken up iconically: not as a rigorous system of political economy, but as the image of historical agency, of rational mastery, of scientific revolution.

Lenin, in the revolutionary imaginary, looked like modernity. The Bolsheviks resembled the Jacobins. The five-year plan resembled the Enlightenment dream of rational order. Mao’s guerrilla war resembled the heroic narrative of emancipation. These iconographic dimensions mattered immensely: they rendered Marxism legible in contexts where its conceptual infrastructure was alien. The aesthetic, symbolic, and performative dimensions of revolution were as central to its uptake as its economic propositions.

The perceptive Peircean understands that icons are powerful not because they explain, but because they call forth recognition. The revolutionary movements of the global South did not adopt Marxism after a critical reading of Capital, but because its iconography resonated with pre-existing narratives of suffering, redemption, and collective deliverance.

Semiotic Voluntarism and the Cost of Substitution

If, as Anderson suggests, the triumph of Marxism in underdeveloped societies contradicts its theoretical premises, then Peirce opens a perspective where what occurred was not simply a misapplication, but a semiotic substitution. The relations of production did not dictate revolution; rather, revolutionary ideology redefined those relations., with the sign overpowering the referent.

This substitution had immense force, but it also exacted a cost. The idealism, voluntarism, and abstraction that enabled revolution in the absence of capitalism also led to ideological ossification. Once in power, this symbol hardened. That is, into dogma, into censorship, into the erasure of the very fallibilism that Peirce saw as the precondition of inquiry. In the USSR and elsewhere, Marxism ceased to be a mode of thought and became a self-sealing system of signs that were unrevisable, unshakable, and ultimately unsustainable.

Peirce’s philosophy, always allergic to finality, would diagnose this as a perversion of sign-growth: the replacement of dynamic semiosis with static repetition. The same ideological transposition that enabled revolution also planted the seeds of decay.

Toward a Theory of Ideological Migration

What Peirce enables, in sum, is a semiotic theory of ideological migration. Ideas do not move unchanged from one context to another; they are re-signified. That is, transformed in their function, their form, and their field of relevance. Marxism triumphed in the periphery not despite its Western origins but because its signs were re-coded to meet a different semiotic ecology: less saturated with liberal institutions, more open to rupture; less dependent on economic categories, more driven by existential signs of injustice and hope, and so on.

This does not falsify Marxism – it demonstrates its plasticity. But it also demands that ideology be viewed not as a fixed system, but as a living chain of signs, shaped by the habits, crises, and interpretive communities through which it passes.

Conclusion

Peirce was no political radical, a conservative liberal at best, but his thought provides a theory of how ideologies become potent: not merely through logical deduction or historical inevitability, but through the mutable life of signs. The strange victory of Marxism in unlikely places is not simply a historical irony but a case study in semiotic transformation. It shows that the force of an idea depends not only on its content or context, but on its capacity to be reinterpreted, reindexed, and iconized in conditions of radical doubt.

In this light, the revolutionary potency of Marxism in the periphery was not a betrayal of theory, but a confirmation of some deeper Peircean truth. That being, when belief becomes unmoored, and old signs lose their hold, new signs (no matter how improbable) can reorganize the world.