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In my classes these terms are used interchangeably to signify a body of people in a society who share one common characteristic: the absence of “political consciousness” among them (which renders them incapable of distinguishing between their objective interests and their subjective interests and thereby making themselves available for ideological manipulation by means of the mass media, think tanks, and the like, owned and/or controlled by the ruling classes, the bourgeoisie).[1] It is important to note, therefore, that the term is used in a social structurally neutral sense. That is, members of the ignorantsia transcend the conventional boundaries of class, gender, nationality, ethnicity, race, religion, age, educational qualifications, and so on. In the West, this lack of political consciousness is attributable to the surrender of the critical intellect on the part of the ignorantsia in exchange for crumbs scattered by corporate capital from its (capital’s) table. A problem that W. E. B. Du Bois (1996: 642), for example, sagely described thusly:
If we are coming to recognize that the great modern problem is to correct maladjustment in the distribution of wealth… [then] in this crime white labor is particeps criminis with white capital. Unconsciously and consciously, carelessly and deliberately, the vast power of the white labor vote in modern democracies has been cajoled and flattered into imperialistic schemes to enslave and debauch black, brown and yellow labor, until with fatal retribution they are themselves today bound and gagged and rendered impotent by the resulting monopoly of the world’s raw material in the hands of a dominant, cruel and irresponsible few [the bourgeoisie].
Mesmerized by the ideology of capitalist consumerism, members of the ignorantsia are unwilling to question the domination of their lives by the dictates and demands of corporate capital. A classic example of this behavior in the economic arena is the rising popularity of bottled potable water among the ignorantsia today. There is an inability to see that it is the activities of corporate capital that are polluting water supplies, and, therefore, there is a concomitant inability to seek a political solution to this problem by means of legislative restraints on corporate capital. Instead, however, the ignorantsia simply goes along with the solution that corporate capital has devised: marketing to the consumers, the ignorantsia, bottled potable water (which itself has a negative impact on the environment because of the resources needed to mine, bottle, transport, and market the water)—needless to say this is a win, win situation all around, but only for corporate capital.
Note that, as an antonym of the word intelligentsia (defined for our purposes as those who navigate between the mediocrity of the ignorantsia and the decadence and hubris of the bourgeoisie), the term is suffused by a pejorative flavor; this is not accidental: it is an outcome of frustration and exasperation (but not hopelessness) with the behavior of the ignorantsia. Consider the deeply depressing spectacle, in this second decade of the twenty-first century, of the U.S. ignorantsia being led to the slaughter house like sheep by U.S. corporate capital and its acolytes—symptomatic of which is the former’s apparent indifference to deeply profound matters, ranging from the ever-widening politically engineered quality-of-life chasm between the super-rich and the rest, to the systematic attack on human and civil rights in the name of a mythical “national interest;” from the misuse of national resources on ill-fated imperial adventures to make the world “safe” for capital, to the acceleration of the journey toward the abyss of irreversible planetary environmental destruction; from the relentless unconscionable pursuit of wanton materialism on the backs of slave and semi-slave labor domiciled in the countries of the Afro-Asian and South American ecumene, to the unjustified and ever-widening local as well as global economic inequality; and so on.
[1] These terms are a polite version of the arithmetic result of this formula: masses minus m.
At the same time, the use of this term is an effort at steering away from the romanticization of the unwashed (the working classes) by the radical left—a pastime in which it often revels. However, the term also signifies a belief that there is sufficient room in Western capitalist societies, in terms of procedural democracy, for the ignorantsia to develop alternative ways of thinking and behaving in order to break the mental chains that binds it to capital. The term ignorantsia, therefore, must be seen to incorporate two implicit messages: despair and hope. (See also Political Consciousness)
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