Chapter Five
Being Determines Consciousness
Copyright: Robert Lanning, 2009
The “being” of any class is the comprehensive synthesis of all factors which are at work in society.
—Istvan Mészáros
Seccombe and Livingstone’s interpretation of the principle that being determines consciousness may fit well with the obec- tives of their research, but it fails to contribute to an analysis of class consciousness that is more than a functional reading of the manner in which capitalism manifests itself in the personal outlooks of its subjects. Their analysis fails because its claims lock us into a reception of workers’ views as valid simply because of their position in the relations of production and their relation to the sources of managerial and capitalist power, even while these authors note problems with their subjects’ thinking on some issues. In their view, the productive position of the steelworkers they interviewed provides in itself the basis of legitimacy for their worldviews. This interpretation fails more significantly in that the authors do not see the necessity of even alluding to an avenue through which a sense of collective interests as well as individual consciousness might be developed. There is little appreciation of the possibilities that might be developed given the resources available (including knowledge of the history of the organized working class) within the existing social environment.
As we have seen in the previous chapter, objections raised to imputing class consciousness are framed, in part, by the claim that false consciousness is a concept that impugns the subjectivities
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of the working class and is, therefore, unacceptable to social scientific analyses. That approach expresses the late-modern notion that class has ceased to have, or perhaps never had, the meaning attributed to it by Marx and the scholars and activists who developed the historical materialist perspective. Rather, rejecting the concepts of false and imputed class consciousness is an ideologically motivated dismissal of historical materialism not only as a theoretical perspective, but also its methodology as a pedagogical tool. At the heart of the rejection is the specific point of class consciousness defined in this study: the necessity for an organized political and ethical response to the injustices of capitalism. That is the sense in which we can state the indirect connection between the forms of analysis discussed in chapter 4 and the tragedies that have befallen the working class, such as Westray.
Left academics who take this position have a seemingly visceral reaction to the idea that working people can and should be educated, socialized, and pressured through awareness of social conditions and group interests to adopt a perspective that is fundamentally different than the commonsensical, pragmatic, market rationale promoted by that sector of academia. One of the obvious contradictions in taking such a negative attitude with regard to class is that quite the opposite response has been taken toward issues of injustice facing other social groups. For example, the history of the women’s movement from the late 1960s at least has, as much or more than anything else, been about raising women’s consciousness about their historically subordinated position. Women organized themselves to actively negate the cultural and political bases of that subordination. This has taken many forms and varied somewhat in women’s groups with different political orientations. The women’s movement has had its leadership and its rank and file, categories of participants that have often been defined by differences in socioeconomic status and ideological views. But some women, a progressive fragment of the population as a whole, organized groups and developed principles of a new social movement, planned strategy, and achieved many of their goals by deliberately educating other women about the sources of gender inequality and training them for activism designed to
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address these problems. For the success of their movement they insisted on the obligation of others to become conscious of historical injustices, to form collective organizations, and to explore possible solutions. Surely the idea of the subordinated housewife who is satisfied with bearing and raising children and supporting her husband unconditionally, who is uninterested in higher education, and who takes a job merely to provide extra financial support to the family is parallel to the false consciousness associated with class, notwithstanding basic differences between women as a social group and the working class. It is false consciousness in the sense that some women’s everyday practice legitimizes these activities as rationalizations of their subordination. Seccombe and Livingstone are aware of this phenomenon: “When feminists formed consciousness-raising groups in the 1970s, they found that many women were radicalized by the experience of confiding in one another, ‘breaking the silence’ and discussing the remarkable similarities in their intimate partnerships with men” (82). If imputing content for feminist consciousness is acceptable, then why not imputing the content of class consciousness?
Even completely uninformed or zealous racists would never argue that the comparatively few instances of revolt among African Americans prior to the 1950s was merely an expression of the common sense of the race as a whole calculating the chances for survival in a racist society. Would Dunk or Seccombe and Livingstone argue that the actions of leaders of the civil rights movement in the United States—Black and white alike—in organizing study groups, bus boycotts, and Freedom Schools were merely imposing on African Americans attitudes and actions in service to a distant ideology? Would Gorman be inclined to cease his analysis at the recording of racial attitudes that distinguished “them” from “us”?
The civil rights, women’s, and other social movements were organized from the roots within local communities in many cases. Others were developed by people outside the immediate environment and/or outside the group in whose interests the movement was directed; that is, by conscience constituents, as they have been termed by some theorists of social movements (cf. McCarthy and
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Zald 1977). Such movements developed principles of organization and standards of behavior, in fact often demanding the latter, and ascribed to their members and to the public at large guidelines for achieving what was deemed necessary to attempt to resolve the social injustices with which they were concerned, as well as the consequences that would likely result from action or passivity. That is, each of these social movements recognized what constituted the “maximum potential consciousness” of the social group in question and imputed a level of knowledge and content of consciousness to those they hoped would benefit and those who might also become part of the movement. Without question, people in these movements set out ideas and expectations for action, often not without challenges and later revisions, but always with specific, practical goals in mind. It is not hard to imagine what North American society would be like today without the partisan leadership of such social movements and the insistence on an appropriate level of consciousness as an essential tool in righting historic wrongs affecting women, and racial and ethnic minorities. The academics discussed in the previous chapter, I believe, would agree with this last statement. But again, if it is applicable to women’s and antiracist movements, then why not to class? The most ready answer is that the demands of women and racial minorities are compatible with left liberalism if such demands do not exceed the boundaries of that frame of analysis that appears to guide so many studies of class.
The differences in the views of class between the sociologists discussed in the previous chapter and Marx, Ollman, and others are ideological in character. Perhaps that difference is best and most simply distinguished by Mészáros’s characterization of ideology: “the imperative to become practically conscious of the fundamental social conflict” in capitalist society (1989, 13–15). He delineates three ideological positions from which that conflict is viewed. The first position gives uncritical support to the existing social order; those who take the second position are concerned with exposing the “irrationalities of the specific form of a rather anachronistic class society” without proposing significant social change. (In Goldmann’s terms, this may be the reception
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of information and the development of ideas that do not change the structure of the group and do not reach the maximum level of consciousness possible for any particular social group.) The third ideological position is more clearly Marxist in orientation; it questions the need for class society and anticipates “the supersession of all forms of class antagonism” (Mészáros 1989, 13–15). Of these three ideological positions, the first two are perspectives that avoid or ignore the fundamental intentionality of capitalist relations and are, therefore, expressions of false consciousness. I would argue that the sociological approaches discussed in the previous chapter are based on Mészáros’s second ideological position. As forms of false consciousness, they refuse to view the development of class consciousness as an ethical necessity, and they reject the view that the exploitative and dehumanizing effects of capitalism are changeable beyond liberal finessing; in other words, radical social change is not feasible but it is pragmatic.
The researchers discussed previously have taken a rather static approach toward one of the fundamental principles of historical materialism, i.e., that being determines consciousness, as if consciousness were fully and irrevocably shaped by the dominant economic and political forces of society, contrary to Mészáros’s third ideological position. The essential difference between the two perspectives is the attitude toward class division and class conflict as inherently problematic elements of capitalism and the necessity to transcend this condition permanently. The authors of these sociological studies might well have researched the statements of Marx, Engels, and others in order to accurately represent the meaning of “being determines consciousness” that is essential for such analyses.
The foundation of historical materialism
Since Seccombe and Livingstone are interested in amending Marxism, it might be helpful to return to the source they wish to revise. Even a cursory examination may reveal that it needs no revision at all. The key statement in The German Ideology is, “It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness” (Marx and Engels 1976, 37). Two more precise
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dialectical statements are relevant to this fundamental one. First, “Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence”; that is, when they discover or create the means by which to consciously mediate between the constraints of their natural existence and their need for social and human development (Marx and Engels 1976, 37). Secondly, “As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production” (Marx and Engels 1976, 31, my emphasis). Thus, patterns of existence, behavior, aspirations, and ideology are highly correlated with production; but because they are not absolutely determined by production relations, self-activity and mediation are the strongest implications of these statements. In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx wrote that when a being is conscious of owing “his existence to himself” then he may be considered “independent” (1975b, 304). His idea of independence is neither that of an isolated individual nor that of the voluntarist whose mere assertion of in dependence is sufficient to make it real. Through the combination of self-activity and the mediating action of collective organizations that bring about liberation from constraining or oppressive conditions, independent human beings discover that they can only become fully independent beings through their relations with other beings (Marx 1975b, 336–37).
This is taken up again in The German Ideology, where the concrete existence of human beings is grounded in the complex of their total relations. Hence, “We set out from real active men, and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life process” (Marx and Engels 1976, 36). “Life process” must be understood to include—as Seccombe and Livingstone would likely agree—the relations of production and cultural relations, the latter of which are distinguishable but not separable from production due to the direct and indirect influence exerted upon them by the relations of production. Starting out with real, active people is only the basis on which the historical materialist learns what people think, their
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attitudes, and their appropriation of ideologies; this is the source of Lukács’s “psychological” and Goldmann’s “real” consciousness. Further, it is the ground to which both theorists and activists return in anticipation that the people have engaged in reflective self-activity, have increased their awareness of the complex world in which they live, and have altered, or are preparing to alter, their living conditions as a result of their developing consciousness. To the extent that their self-activity includes deliberate organization in opposition to the constraints on their development, their being and consciousness will begin to develop in specific political and cultural directions that transcend the narrow boundaries of their immediate experience. Being is not static; if being determines consciousness, then a being transformed by changing conditions of existence can develop the consciousness and praxis that reflects on those altered conditions and defines a potential direction for further development of objective conditions.
This means workers’ views of their actions, their consciousness within the context of the steel plant, the coal mine, or the office, will be the initial empirical focus. But the Marxist view also requires that this ground on which consciousness may initially develop is understood as a dynamic component of a much broader and more complex totality. Setting out on an analysis grounded in real, active people can be misleading if: a) the location is constrained because the complexity of existing relations is reduced to production relations alone; b) the ideological reflexes are not adequately accounted for; and c) the statements and views of the subjects are not the object of an historical critique. It is essential to consider Marx and Engels’s real, active people in relation to other complexes of social life, a point Seccombe and Livingstone begin with but seem to abandon upon their “amending” of Marx’s premise. For in thinking about people in the complexity of their relations, one has to consider not only how they contribute to their own development and history, but how they may occasionally or continuously affirm bourgeois ideology and thereby find some immediately satisfying rationale for their reified relations, even if they are not aware that their social relations of being are reified. This is precisely Lenin’s concern about the tendency of the
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working class to be subjugated by bourgeois ideology if left to spontaneous actions (1961, 386).
Indeed, Marx and Engels qualify their statement about setting “out from real active men.” They write, “That is to say, not of setting out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh” (Marx and Engels 1976, 36). Historical materialism sets out on the course of analysis from basic premises in material relations, an analysis of concrete social and historical conditions. Marx and Engels do not reject “what men say, imagine, conceive” or conceptions of people “as narrated, thought of, imagined” in terms of the ideological constructs of “[m]orality, religion, metaphysics” (1976, 36). This is, rather, “the material of genuine historical analysis” (Lukács 1971a, 51). In fact, Marx and Engels reject a methodology that gives priority to these real or psychological expressions of consciousness because they understand that there is something very much obscured by the appearance of the world to human beings in the capitalist epoch. An implied historical-materialist principle is that we not be satisfied with “what men say, imagine, conceive.” Instead, priority must be given to the argument that reification (commodity fetishism in Marx’s terms) distorts what people think about their own lives as well as their subjective understanding of social and productive relations based in part on their immediate interests and pragmatic projections. This must be considered at some point in any comprehensive analysis that moves beyond common sense and immediate experience. If historical materialists begin with a method and a set of principles that include the “empirically perceptible process of development under definite conditions” (Marx and Engels 1976, 37), attention will be required to the factors that mediate the development beyond the group’s maximum potential consciousness as the springboard for later transformation. This can occur only by imputing to the class, knowledge that makes the transformation feasible. The process of imputing must facilitate the development of such knowledge from within the class itself, whether the imperative to discover it originates inside or outside the class.
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Marx and Engels’s refusal to begin from particularistic and isolated points of view was a refusal to take superficial explanations of human conditions and action as their primary object. To do so would have indicated a passive acceptance of a fragmented and distorted view of reality and the periodic but momentary satisfaction of spontaneous, short-lived rebellions. Rather, theirs was a claim that a more organized approach was necessary for the development of knowledge about social relations of all kinds by which their vision could be realized. The reductionism of Seccombe and Livingstone comes from having missed or willfully excluded the essential purpose of historical materialism: the development of a form of analysis that will become a tool of mediated self-activity in the development of the working class, the object of which is socialist transformation and general human development. If any of these components are removed from Marxism, it becomes deceptive to argue for amendments to premises designed to achieve a goal that revisionists refuse to consider.
Discussing the matter of being in relation to consciousness in the introduction to his work on aesthetics, Lukács pointed out that the priority of being was only “the establishment of a fact;” namely, that being exists without consciousness but not consciousness without being. In asserting this clarification of the historical-materialist principle, Lukács argued most significantly that priority does not entail a value hierarchy of being and consciousness. “On the contrary, only this priority [the material priority of being] and its concrete theoretical and practical recognition by consciousness create the possibility of a real conquest of being through consciousness” (1979, 411; 1978, 31–32). That is, material conditions are the ground upon which social being arises and develops; no consciousness is possible, quite obviously, if being as a physiological entity does not exist. As material conditions develop, consciousness acquires an altered basis upon which to expand qualitatively. Lukács cites labor as the simplest example of this relationship: the use of material resources, the recognition of need, and the complex of thought and action that results in the actualization of the goal. A relation of priority between two phenomena does not require a stratification of value. Asserting
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priority of being does not limit consciousness to economic activity or location within the system of production. Rather, the relationship of activity and location is the place from which consciousness of totality develops, a phenomenon (consciousness) that in turn has an influence on being.
By extension, the meaning that Marx and Engels accorded to “being determines consciousness” must involve a concept of determination that reflects a dialectical understanding of reality, especially in the sense that determination of consciousness by being is by no means a natural relation or mechanical outcome of the experience of social life. Raymond Williams’s definition of “determine” seems appropriate here: to “set certain limits or exert certain pressures.” This may be what Seccombe and Livingstone have in mind, but their sense of being determining consciousness seems to work only one way, from top downward. Williams further qualifies the term in its Marxist usage: “a sense of certain determinants within which or in relation to which . . . men act to make their own history” (1976, 101). These are the “real life processes” of which Marx and Engels wrote.
Equally important is John Somerville’s discussion of determinism in contrast to fatalism, the latter term generally denoting the power of social structural forces not only to shape life but to undermine any relatively autonomous movement toward opposition to prevailing conditions. Somerville’s emphasis is consistent with the stress thus far on consciousness as a developmental process in the context of necessity. “This is determinism,” Somerville writes, “in the sense of a rationally understandable causation, in light of the fact that man has needs and capacities, the interaction of which makes it necessary for him to do certain predictable things when he is faced with certain situations” (1999, 101). The non-reified meaning of being determines consciousness implies the possibility of discovery and development of knowledge on the basis of a dialectical comprehension of the complex of relations. If necessary (and it is necessary in a world characterized by reification), some of that knowledge or the motivation to discover it may well have to be imputed by others, either within or from outside the working class.
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Part of the “real conquest of being,” to which Lukács refers, is the recognition, first, of its dynamic character, its transformation in relation to the movement of concrete social conditions. Secondly, it concerns the mental activities with which people “organize [the] actions and reactions of the external world . . . in some kind of way that will enable them to protect and develop their own existence” (Lukács 1975a, 14).
The trap lying at the core of pragmatic thinking is found in Seccombe and Livingstone’s remark, already quoted but worth repeating: “Workers have an interest in fighting capital to improve their wages and working conditions; they also have an interest in cooperating with their employers in order to protect their jobs” (2000, 28). Marx and Engels recognized that consciousness is initially located in “the immediate sensuous environment and . . . limited connection with other persons and things” (1976a, 44), but they were also cognizant that development from this basic level of consciousness required association with others in complexes of relations both inside and outside the immediate arena of production.
Being, consciousness, and objective conditions
Consciousness is developed out of the objective conditions in which the social being is grounded. In the sociological studies examined earlier, however, objective conditions constitute a permanent barrier to striving for a level of class consciousness that Marx and others viewed as historically necessary. Objective conditions are at base the forces and relations of capitalist production that underlie the complexities of everyday life. Institutional relations of politics, law, economics, etc., that are socially constructed to pursue specific goals that sustain capitalist society, are the kinds of concrete, material conditions upon which life is built and lived. Objective elements of everyday life include those that are symbolic such as language, ideas, and beliefs. Such elements are objectified and routinized in institutional settings, but they still possess the capacity to change the future.
The objective conditions of society at any moment are a present, often taken-for-granted backdrop to everyday life that shapes
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the course of social and individual action. At the same time it is to objective conditions that individuals and social groups must direct their affirmation or discontent in order to realize their interests and aspirations. Like all contradictions, those found within objective social conditions can be undeveloped, or volatile and antagonistic. Such contradictions can either be ignored or confronted. Once contradictions become apparent and subjected to scrutiny, they are revealed as sources of knowledge potentially of much greater import than its immediate appearance would suggest. Specific conditions are necessary for any historical dynamic to develop fully, but what conditions are sufficient to move toward the consciousness of what is historically necessary?
There is an assumption that the correct objective conditions are essential for the development and success of working-class movements that lead to the prospect of socialism. Seccombe and Livingstone, for example, proposed their pragmatic and culturalist orientation toward workers’ consciousness as a necessary measure at a time when, from their perspective, ideal objective conditions for attaining that end do not exist. This might be a supportable objection to the approach to class consciousness advocated here, but only under two conditions: 1) if correct objective conditions are seen to be a product of an inevitable, evolutionary development within society; and 2) under the assumption that the presence of the most favorable set of objective conditions for social change will immediately catapult the right people with correct political and ethical interests to their appropriate places in the movement. But neither of these conditions holds.
In contrast to this view, one of the major lessons of the Cuban revolution for Ernesto “Ché” Guevara (1998, 7) was the possibility of an insurrectionary movement creating favorable opportunities rather than waiting in “neo-Kautskian passivity” (Lowy 1973, 92) for more favorable conditions to evolve. Lenin’s periodic return in speeches and writings to the need to draw from the masses more and better revolutionaries to compose a vanguard of the class struggle is a touchstone of communist history. Further, objective conditions are not merely social locations in which development and consciousness occur. In their response to criticisms of
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the socialist movement in late nineteenth century Europe, Marx and Engels refused to defend inaction rationalized by the relativist claim that a person is only “a child of [one’s] time.” If so, they argued, “all controversy, all struggle on our part ceases; we accept quietly all the kicks our adversaries give us because we, who are so wise, know that these adversaries are [also] ‘only children of their time’ and cannot do otherwise” (1975b, 305). If they had written a hundred years after this (1879), they might have alluded to the subjectivist tendencies in some academic analyses that fit their analogy perfectly.
Lenin, like Ché Guevara, insisted on creating the conditions that would bring to the surface imperatives for revolutionary action or other social agitation to occur. Writing of the early efforts to produce a social-democratic newspaper in the mid-1890s, Lenin discussed the project’s failure owing to a police raid on the home of one of the revolutionaries, the seizure of the paper, and the arrest of at least one member of the group. The objective social conditions faced by these revolutionaries included the Czarist dictatorship, its repressive police and military power, and the absence of a mass-based political movement. Lenin did not suggest waiting for more favorable conditions, instead he noted which subjective and objective conditions might be changed, conditions over which a revolutionary organization could have some control. “The failure of the enterprise merely showed that the Social-Democrats of that period were unable to meet the immediate requirements of the time owing to their lack of revolutionary experience and practical training” (Lenin 1961, 377). He went on to commend his predecessors for attempting to seize a moment in which the objective conditions for revolution were not present but might be advanced by taking an action that appealed directly to the need to develop the subjective factor in revolution—revolutionaries themselves. Similarly, Lukács cites Marx’s criticisms of the working-class forces in England where “all the necessary material preconditions for social revolution” existed except for “a sense of generalisation and passion” (qu. in Lukács 2000, 67). The absence of the subjective passion of leaders and workers was itself an aspect of the objective problem faced by the First International, one into
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which workers’ political organizations would have to intervene in order to bring working-class consciousness forward to complete the complex of “material preconditions.”
These and other examples demonstrate the viability of Lenin’s concentrated efforts to promote a core of professional revolutionaries. This centered on two elements. One was the necessity of training cadre and developing their experience based on the principle that revolutionary practice and the skills of leadership can be learned by anyone. “Theoretical knowledge, political experience and organizational ability are things that can be acquired. If only the desire exists to study and acquire these qualities” (Lenin 1961, 317; cf. 377–78, 422). This pedagogical principle was augmented by an organizational principle, that capable revolutionary leaders teach new cadre who in turn are expected to teach others in study circles of workers and students (Lenin 1961, 422–23, 441–43, 450–51). In less difficult circumstances of contemporary North American liberal democracy, one might expect the same from trade-union leaders and leaders of other social movements. Lukács thus noted Lenin’s approval of “conscious intervention into reality” when it was not ready-made for economic development after 1917, but could be made so by the introduction of certain economic policies (1991, 100).
The requirement of correct objective conditions for political action is an important concern, but it should always be considered a constraint with malleable boundaries. An initial question, of course, concerns the objective conditions faced by the working class movement, including the economy and institutional structures of the state and government such as the legal, military, and political systems. Each of these components must be considered and confronted in the formation of oppositional movements. The durability of capitalism may be partially accounted for by the power of the objective social structures and institutional arrangements that attempt to sustain the productive power of capitalism and regulate multiple aspects of people’s lives. Seeking out the correct objective conditions for the success of a workers’ movement necessitates appropriate interventions into objective reality in order to make it more receptive to change. But if objective
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conditions are a manifestation of historical reality, the history of oppositional interventions must be considered to comprise one crucial component of objective historical conditions. The objective historical condition of the Bolshevik revolution shaped emergent oppositions elsewhere in the world. The development of radical, democratic, Communist-led trade unions in North America was an objective condition that fueled the progress of working-class action. These were also objective facts faced by the capitalist state in its continued effort to legitimize a secure and profitable environment for capitalist enterprise. Thus, beyond the basic problem of identifying the objective social conditions faced by the working class and the socialist movement is the issue of how these affect the individuals who develop social movements and engage in revolutionary action. The objective reality of such movements includes not only conflicts with the state and employers, but confrontations with ideologies that constrain efforts toward social change, including the “reified mind” found among less class-conscious members of the working class.
Lukács understood that the social structure and the arrangement of institutional power were meaningless without the recognition of the part played by human intervention in the formation of these objective conditions. In his early writings as a Communist, he sought to give rightful place to objective forces; that is, in dialectical relation to the desire for freedom “as one of the driving forces” in the transition to socialism (1972, 66). The demand for freedom is initially a subjective recognition, a need; only “through the faithful discovery of” its relation to “objective reality” could the need be satisfied (1972, 55; 1979, 415). Freedom is an objective necessity for human society; the demand for freedom becomes an objective condition when the demand becomes a component of the political force of a mass movement. The other side of this is that reification also becomes an objective problem, an inhibiting and regressive force, when it becomes a mass experience within the class.
Thus, the objective conditions of the economy and of various aspects of culture determine the ideas, language, morality, etc., of members of particular societies. They also determine
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those who make up both loosely organized and coherent political movements, thus shaping the social being. Once objectified on the terrain of political activity through the efforts to organize it, consciousness acts not only in dialectical relation to the objective conditions of being, it also acts relatively autonomously with regard to the subjective conditions of being. This is the point of efforts such as Lenin’s, Ché Guevara’s, and others.
It may be useful to return to a point made in the first chapter, i.e., Marx’s assertion that specific contexts of the social environment already contain not only its historical determinants but resources for its future development as well. Social being, because of the necessary relation to totality, also contains such determinants. This is the basis of the lesson Guevara learned in Cuba. The way this becomes problematic for some is when, as noted earlier, objective conditions are seen to be fully determining of both being and consciousness. Perhaps the sociologists discussed earlier rest their understanding of Marx’s dictum that humankind only sets itself tasks that it can solve on the material conditions “already present or at least in the course of formation” (Marx 1970, 21). But they do not accept that one component of those material conditions is the level of consciousness that can be developed, and that can intervene in the very conditions that are “in the course of formation.” In other words, the resources necessary for solving the problem of consciousness and reification are ready to be developed from existing conditions. I return to this point in the following chapter.