Chapter One
Class Consciousness and Reification
Copyright: Robert Lanning 2009
To be scientific, sociologists must ask not merely what some member of a social group thinks today about refrigerators
and gadgets or about marriage and sexual life, but what is the field of consciousness within which some group can
vary its ways of thinking about all these problems.
—Lucien Goldmann
This study is concerned with class consciousness and is undertaken primarily through the work of Georg Lukács. Mention of Lukács generally brings to mind his major concept of reification. Reification is the antithesis of class consciousness, of consciousness able to engage in the making of a socialist revolution. Discussions of reification and class consciousness may be carried out with relative ease at some levels of academic exchange, but the conversation may alter course significantly with the introduction of another of Lukács’s concepts that is the mediating element between reification and class consciousness: imputed class consciousness. Without this mediating element, reification and class consciousness remain a comfortable dichotomy worthy of perpetual discussion that is unable to dissolve the distance between the two concepts and incapable of resolving the contradiction between given reality and future possibility.
The mediating of imputed class consciousness, however, carries with it the sense that the consciousness of people in a class, the working class, has undergone some organization through processes of socialization, education, or other forms of
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politicization of their interests, behaviors, and aspirations. This organization of consciousness as an intervention in the lives of people is seen to be antithetical to an ideological perspective satisfied that the discussion of this contradiction is an adequate means of addressing problems the two terms might suggest. This is relatively safe ground from which to sustain the dichotomy as a buttress against another problem raised by discussions of Lukács and his work: communism and its possible influence on the organization of social movements and on consciousness itself.
To argue, as Lukács did, that the development of class consciousness must begin before the working class can reasonably expect to attain power, means that this goal cannot be left to evolutionary development, or to the period of socialism itself, nor can it be developed by osmosis from mere descriptions of oppression nor from analyses of class cultures when the latter, for the most part, are formed from the demands and needs of capitalism. The post-Soviet period, especially, provides secure ground for some analysts of class to promote working-class consciousness as the mere awareness by workers of their subordination to a more powerful class while possessing sufficient common sense to survive a manageable tension and develop a culture distinguishable from the capitalist mainstream, while still existing in the concrete reality of capitalism. This approach is necessarily limited by its accompanying features: a significant measure of anticommunism; the “culturation” of Marxism that separates such analyses from the taint of the more committed, orthodox perspective; assessments of the deficiencies of working-class movements; and claims that working people have made similar judgments and found the old partisan politics wanting. Informing this cultural approach to the working class is a celebration of the quiet, calculative pragmatism that is claimed to be the sufficient common sense of the worker in the late-modern period.
Let us consider, however, the case of the 1992 methane gas explosion at the Westray Mine in Plymouth, Nova Scotia, in which twenty-six miners died. By their own account, the coal miners believed conditions of work in the Westray mine were abysmal and life threatening. They knew that neither the managers of the
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company nor the provincial mining inspectors and politicians in the government of Nova Scotia were concerned about adherence to the regulations set out in the Coal Mines Regulation Act of Canada and the provincial Health and Safety Act. Both of these acts were established, ostensibly, to protect the lives and livelihoods of workers. Neglecting the provisions of such legislation endangered the life of each member of the underground crews.
The conditions of work in the Westray mine are now a matter of public record. The public inquiry into the explosion at Westray heard testimony that miner Stephen Lilley refused one day to remain underground while acetylene torches were being used, a practice that, according to the testimony of several miners, was common (Westray 1995–96, 3948, 3967, 4623–24). The volatility of methane gas in the presence of a single spark is instantly and extensively destructive. Lilley’s mining knowledge made him an example of skill and responsibility among his fellow workers, but his refusal to work in unsafe conditions resulted in his suspension for several days. Lilley walked out of the mine knowing his co-workers were aware of such unsafe practices and apparently knowing that refusal of unsafe work was protected by provisions of the Nova Scotia’s Occupational Health and Safety Act. When he returned to work after his suspension, apparently neither he nor anyone else was prepared to take up a longer struggle over the unsafe conditions of the mine. Lilley’s suspension, however, was not lost on his co-workers, but the lesson the miners drew from it did not acknowledge the history of struggles to establish such state protection and the likelihood of safer conditions had the mine been organized by a trade union. Rather, according to miner Wayne Cheverie, the lesson learned was, “If you refused unsafe work, you were threatened with your job or intimidated into submission” (Richard 1997, 149). When Stephen Lilley was suspended, he left the mine alone, perhaps hoping to make a point or to rally others to collective action in exercising their right to protect themselves and others. When he returned to work, nothing had changed, and when he began that shift, it was also the last day of his life and that of twenty-five others who died in a methane explosion.
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The Westray tragedy is the late-modern archetype of reification. It has been analyzed in many ways: as another example of criminal disregard of workers’ lives and their families by corporations (Jobb 1994; McCormick 1999), as a problem of media reportage (McMullan 2005), and as a problem of family dynamics in literary representations (McKay 2003; O’Neill and Schwartz 2004). Glasbeek and Tucker (1992) come closest to the complexity of the problem in their brief analysis of it. I will not offer a complete analysis of the events at Westray here, but the focus on a specific theoretical and political perspective is relevant to understanding some factors in selected sociological analyses of class that contribute, if only indirectly, to the occurrence of such disasters and similar social problems: the condition of reification, the absence of class consciousness, and the enormous failure of a form of class analysis that rests on the sanctity of subjectivities, thereby avoiding the necessary relationship between reification and class consciousness and the indispensable mediating element in this relation.
Class as a quantitative measure, or as the “lived experience” of culture, has fairly recently become the antidote to what is seen as an imposition of politically motivated ideology on working people who are merely struggling to survive and who, when social resources are more equally distributed, will be able to achieve more comfort in their class milieu or move beyond it. But this approach and the accompanying claims of failed philosophical and political ideals, seem designed to suffocate exploration and discovery of meaningful alternatives to the present social system and its alienating effects.
The more appropriate response, I argue here, is that questions about the actions and development of the working class demand concentrated organization of consciousness that leads to effective resistance to capitalism and to explorations of alternatives to it. But such organization cannot be well founded without addressing the problem presented by the formation of what Lukács called the “inward barrier” that resists the development of consciousness. Questions not asked of the Westray miners, or of the participants in the studies of class discussed here, are those that take seriously
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the level of knowledge that members of a particular social groupsuch as a class possess, and the limitations of that knowledge given the structure of the group in question. This is what Lucien Goldmann referred to as the maximum potential consciousness of a social group which, when reached, establishes the basis for a possible transformation of the group in question. But the process of this transformation is mediated by Lukács’s concept of imputed class consciousness, which is intended to undermine the barrier created by reification. Of importance in what follows is the awareness that the inward barrier operates as much at the higher levels of socioeconomic status, for example, among academics who produce analyses of class, as it does among those at the lower end of the division of labor.
Workers’ solidarity built on the ground of class consciousness is the central means for addressing political questions such as those that emerge from the Westray tragedy. A further issue that must be dealt with if theoretical questions about class consciousness and reification are to have any meaning relevant to human betterment is whether the content of class consciousness can and should be imputed to people who do not at a particular moment possess it, but whose social relations and individual development might benefit from it. These issues require an exploration of class and class consciousness based on the view that Marx’s work contains orthodoxy worth preserving in the contemporary period (cf. Tumino 2001). Concrete changes in the structure of capitalist societies since Marx’s day require evaluation of his work and developments of it by others. But periodic evaluations need not result in the diminution of its central elements. The orthodox perspective begins with consciousness of the “forms of being, conditions of existence,” that are, according to Marx, the economic relations of human labor and the source of value, and through which development of the knowledge of totality is mediated. How this mediation takes place (through what agency) is a central issue here. An orthodox or classical use of class and class consciousness is a matter not only of attending to the complex of Marx’s original meaning and its development by others but also of asserting an essential element of that orthodoxy—political organization
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to achieve the specified goal of socialism. Perhaps the most problematic reevaluation of Marxism in this period seems to be the abandonment of this goal, legitimized through a predominantly nonrevolutionary view of class and consciousness.
Sociological studies of class and the integrally related issue of consciousness have come to occupy a significant portion of the mainstream of that discipline. Culturally oriented studies have broadened the range of interest in how “class” affects multiple aspects of everyday life, although much of this has discarded the essential economic relations through which classes are formed and sustained in capitalist societies. Class has become, instead, a term of convenience, somewhat expectedly and perhaps unavoidably in some respects, but its convenient use in academic studies has become excessive and unreflective. It has become a term that can be used to acknowledge experiences of inequality and oppression without any requirement to explore meaningful solutions to such problems. When referring to differences traceable to the social structure and the material resources possessed by or accessible to individuals, families, and communities, sociologists employ a depoliticized concept of class at the same time they use the concept of “socioeconomic status” to indicate the correlation of income, type of occupation, and level of education. In this sense, class instrumentally demarcates upper from lower, more from less, powerful from powerless, with a range of conditions between these extremes. We can confirm that jobs, income, education, and culture are important, as these all rest on the fundamental economic relations of capitalism, without reifying those relations and without requiring a dependence of superstructural phenomena on economic foundations alone. The difficulty is that sociologists tend to favor the political neutrality of socioeconomic status as an instrument of measurement, and they extend that sense of neutrality to the concept of class.
In discussions of class, culture has become important as an object of description and analysis for bringing increased visibility to speech, ideas, feelings, aspirations, and the symbolic or mater-ial manifestations of class in homes, schools, workplaces, and leisure activities. But, as Markels (2005) has noted, in many
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such studies class has been conceptualized as an “identity site” that purports to substitute subjective experience for a more politically charged conception of class and the collective consciousness of it. A description of experience, or a way of life depicted as a manifestation of oppression, is often accepted as an adequate re-presentation of class without a corresponding interest in the concrete possibilities that have been and continue to be available for reflection and opposition. Awareness of an identity largely drawn from socioeconomic locations is affirmed, even celebrated, as the product of rather static circumstances of subjective experiences.
Applying such meanings to class allows a concept as standard to Marx’s work as false consciousness to be rejected, as we will show in selected academic studies discussed here. Seccombe and Livingstone (2000), for example, consider the concept of false consciousness to be one of Marxism’s “more fundamental problems.” The sociological analyses discussed here give priority to subjective impressions and to common sense as adequate expressions of class identity and “resistance,” and to calculative rationality as a legitimation of workers’ self-restraint against the power of capitalism. The rejection of false consciousness is intended to discount the idea that people may have underdeveloped and erroneous knowledge of the world around them, not only because the availability of knowledge may be constrained but because pragmatic calculation deters them from a more comprehensive and critical assessment of the social order. Further, such deterrence by way of rational calculation is given a degree of legitimacy in terms of the perceived needs of the class itself. The rationale for this rejection seems to be that the allegation of false consciousness is an attack on the individual’s pattern of thinking, an assault on the individual’s subjectivity. In short, this perspective extends to a politically ineffective and protectionist view of workers’ experience as given. The rejection of the concept of false consciousness has made Marxism more academically palatable by effectively displacing the historical materialist meaning of class consciousness as specifically related to human development and politically motivated action, dislodging consciousness from the specific context of capitalism as the essential structure through which classes
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are formed, and rejecting any overt or indirectly partisan influence as the imposition of an authoritarian ideology.
Analyzed from this perspective, the working class ceases to possess a dialectical relation to either its own end or a goal beyond its existence, that is, a relation to its own historically and socially necessary dissolution. Approaches such as these suffer from the same problem Lukács noted with regard to the bourgeois class and left sects in the early twentieth century, that they separate the his-torical development of class, in this case primarily as socioeconomic status, from the development of consciousness (1971a, 321–22). Class consciousness, like the development of classes themselves, is a process, not a permanent state. Taking a point from Lukács’s discussion of Hegel’s dialectical logic, “just as repose is only a borderline case of movement,” a dialectical approach will understand that potentiality lies in both false consciousness as well as genuine class consciousness, the former indicating a need for systematic development of the potentiality that lies in the complex of social phenomena, while the latter indicates an effort to break through the inner barrier of reification (1975c, 442). But each should be understood as a process that acknowledges the mediated development of consciousness by forces internal and external to a particular individual and to the class of which he or she is a part, with the proviso that the root meaning of false consciousness, notwithstanding the possibility of development from it, is that intervention in reality is stalled or claimed to be unfeasible. Reification is both a cause and a manifestation of false consciousness; it has no meaning without its relation to false consciousness, for under conditions of reification the individual, and the class as a whole, fail in the face of objective possibility to pursue the available prospects for a more equitable, democratic, and socialist future.
The focus of this study is consistent with the quotation from
Goldmann that opened this chapter. The emphasis is on consciousness of the social conditions and relations in which people find themselves, and which they create and develop through their self-activity. Thus the Marxist understanding of class and class consciousness is that it exists in a complex of relations; it is not simply designation of place or position in economic production.
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This approach stipulates: a) that classes cannot be known dialectically without knowing their essential precondition: the needs of capitalism; b) that no lasting understanding of a class is possible without knowing that its coming into being, its meaning, and its purpose are integrally connected to contestations between classes founded on the need to create subordinate others to serve the purposes of the dominant class; c) that no meaningful discussion of class is possible unless consciousness is understood to be a decisive means by which class develops and by which it is defined through the self-activity of its members. This is essentially the condition Marx described as a class-in-itself (1976b, 211). But the dialectical completion of this process, becoming a class-for-itself, is that the stipulations above are not possible without some active, reflective, organized, and continuous assessment of what is needed to raise the consciousness of people in ways that advance the struggle for human betterment. This is imputed class consciousness. Inherent in its comprehension and development is the consideration of who or what does the imputing to whom or to what, and in what ways this brings into focus the choice for socialism.
In this discussion, two concepts will be continually evident. One is the necessity of organizing consciousness; that is, some consciously and rationally arranged premises by which a present condition of society can be thoroughly known, and from which deliberate planning for a future condition emerges. I explain this further below. A second background emphasis is on the individual as one of the major sources of social change. This seems increasingly important in a period of heightened individuation that at the same time is a period of relatively free accessibility of comprehensive knowledge of the social structure and the history and significance of collective struggle.
In undertaking to critique selected sociological analyses of the working class, the present study intends to show the way in which these effectively affirm and rationalize the less than complete development of class consciousness among some working people, and the ways in which these studies are essentially paternalistic and condescending toward the working class. These sociological studies explain away the Marxist view of class in at least two ways:
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1) that the orthodox Marxist perspective of class is outmoded, having been undermined by a determinist or functionalist grounding; and 2) that the experience of life within a particular socioeconomic frame of labor and culture is sufficient to engender adequate social knowledge at the level of class identity. In both ways this perspective denies or ignores the integral relation of class to consciousness and to the contradictions between classes understood through their economic and political characteristics and conflicts.
Why Lukács? Why now?
Georg Lukács provided an approach to Marxism that asserted its originality, its correctness as an analysis of capitalism, and its openness to advancement. Relevant to this study, his position can be summed up as follows. Orthodox Marxism is the employment of historical materialist dialectics as the means of developing consciousness; part of this process is the masses’ grasping of theory, as Marx noted, in a way that makes it a concrete force for shaping their development and for elevating theory and practice to comprehensive knowledge of what must become a matter of historical necessity for the working class: moving from immediate facts to the complex reality of historical development and future orientation (Lukács 1971a, 2; 2000, 92; Marx 1975a, 182).
The varied reception of Lukács’s work by intellectuals and activists poses a series of problems for applying it in the contemporary period. Morris Watnick articulated something of the dilemma of dealing with Lukács and aspects of his work, as well as what has been the source of attraction to him: “Those who see much of the pathos of history lodged in its ironies could hardly find a better personification of that dialectic than in the career of the Hungarian philosopher-critic, Georg Lukacs—nor one so symptomatic of the perplexities of intellectual commitment in the Communist world” (1962, 142).
Interrogating his political choices, his self-criticisms, and his compromises with Stalinism has often been the basis for calling into question the value of his theoretical work. These political choices were also ethical ones and included the self-criticism he regarded as his “entry-ticket” to continued involvement in the
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Communist movement, his Hegelian “accommodation to reality,” and his belief in the possibility of socialism in one country, the Soviet Union, a basic tenet of Stalin’s political and strategic perspective. It should not be forgotten that Lukács was, from practically the moment of his Marxist transformation through the period of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, not only a committed intellectual but a political activist and official within the Communist political structure—a position he assumed again in the mid-1950s—who sought to retain his membership in the Hungarian Communist Party. Toward the end of his life, Lukács summed up his essential choice: “I have always thought that the worst form of socialism was better to live in than the best form of capitalism” (1983, 181).
Indeed, some of his choices are problematic in light of our present historical knowledge and the unfolding of world events. Such statements, decisions, and official positions have been the sharp dividing line that for some creates an unavoidable dichotomy between intellectual and activist and in many cases a superficial distinction between correct and erroneous political decisions. The distinguishing point of attraction to Lukács’s work, or repulsion from it, has been his attempts to make his theoretical perspective a practical force, whether in politics or art. That he chose commitment to a political cause has for some negated any relevance or validity of his ethical perspective and tainted his literary criticism, however much it has been acclaimed by those who separate it from his politics.
After History and Class Consciousness was published in German in 1968 (with a new preface by its author), and its subsequent publication in English, a number of studies of Lukács emerged, some of them appreciative, yet critical. In Lukács’s emphasis on consciousness and reification, Arato and Brienes (1979) found the origins of “Western Marxism,” distinguishing it and the work of some of his contemporaries and successors from the Soviet interpretation and use of Marx’s work. Michael Lowy’s 1979 study is among the most interesting for attempting to make sense of the continuities and discontinuities in Lukács’s work throughout his life. While a critical study, it is also premised on an
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appreciation of the complexities of history and Lukács’s sincerity in attempting to intervene politically and culturally. Many of Lukács’s political and philosophical positions were disagreeable to the literary critic George Steiner, but he considered Lukács’s moral courage and political commitment worthy of recognition. Some-what outside the context of Lukács’s life, but reflecting some of Steiner’s own experience as an intellectual during the Cold War period, he said of Lukács:
He felt surrounded by people whose civil courage was minus, minus zero infinite and who, because they might lose a job during the McCarthy period, . . . crawled, crawled, who would go around hysterically in fear of political correctness because they were afraid the Dean would call them in if they dared to teach the truth. No, thank you. This was a man, who with a small physique, with frequent grave illnesses, a Jew, a Jew around whom everybody had been gassed or massacred, this man lived his convictions, with which one need not agree, to know that he is what the Greek word ‘martyros’ originally means, which does not mean ‘martyr’but ‘witness.’ (Steiner, qu. in Corredor 1997, 70)
The approach Congdon assumed in The Young Lukács (1983) exemplifies the claim of a necessary dichotomy of intellectual and activist. His study ends at the moment of Lukács’s transformation from romantic anticapitalist to Communist intellectual and activist, the moment, according to Congdon, when Lukács began writing his “blueprint for tyranny,” History and Class Consciousness (1983, 186). Breuer (1982) discussed this turn in his study of Lukács’s and Weber’s use of rationalization but emphasized Lukács’s dialectical approach to historical contradictions and the development of the proletariat. Similar to Congdon’s dichotomous approach, though more malevolent in tone, is Vazsonyi’s (1997) argument that Lukács’s interpretation of Goethe became his self-justification for assenting to “indiscriminate murder” in the Stalin era. As we will see in a later chapter, Lukács’s onetime colleague, Istvan Mészáros (1995), who was critically supportive in earlier writings, has found Lukács’s emphasis on reification, alienation, and consciousness to be a general failure.
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Much criticism has been made of Lukács’s work, especially in the early period in which he produced, among other things, History and Class Consciousness. Aspects of that criticism include his placing the motive force of revolution into the hands and minds of class-conscious, messianic volunteerists. Lukács criticized himself on this account, but the problem he identified in his own work should not overshadow its intent: the concentration on the necessity of developing class consciousness that focused the attention of political organizations on the individual as precisely the means by which the movement toward socialism could be developed and sustained. Michael Lowy has pointed out that at the end of his life Lukács further developed his perspective on political organization and the individual, in part revivifying the enthusiasm he asserted at the beginning of his Communist period in his support, for example, of the “Communist Saturdays that consisted of selfactivity, freely chosen in service to the community” (Lowy 1979, 210), and his support for the “Workers’ Soviets of 1871, 1905 and 1917, as it once existed in the socialist countries, and in which form it must be re-animated” (Lukács, qu. in Lowy 1979, 211).
In The Process of Democratization, Lukács reemphasized the educability of consciousness as a “vital, new generative contradiction of the economic” (1991, 98). In these last efforts Lukács was restating his critique of the bureaucratization of the Stalin period and reasserting the focal point of his early writing as a Communist: the need to address the ideological issues that constrained the potential development of the individual’s consciousness and the contribution of those issues to the struggle for socialism. This individual component of the complex of revolutionary organizing and commitment may be the necessary buttress against a repeat of bureaucratization.
In short, the answer to the question, Why Lukács? is his con-sistent commitment to the full development of the human being that begins within the contradictions, exploitation, and alienation of capitalism, and the possibility of the full fruition of human development in socialism. Considering his intellectual devel-opment and transformation, the philosophical missteps and political quandaries that were part of the experience of many
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others as well, and his commitment to Marxism and socialism, his work has exhibited a complex of intellectual pursuit and self-consciousness combined with a sustained interest in the necessity of concrete organization and intervention in existing reality.
Lukács’s central concept: Reification
Central to Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, the concept of reification attempted to develop Marx’s analysis of capitalism, especially the characteristics of commodity fetishism as one of capitalism’s fundamental and alienating conditions (Marx 1967, 72; Lukács 1971a, 86). The concept of reification identified the gradual obscuring of the actual basis of productive and social relations: relations between people become relations between things which, in turn, fulfill a basic need of capitalism, to commodify all things and freeze all social relations to better serve the instrumentality of capitalist production. Lukács wrote that the “reified mind” accepted the immediately visible and experienced forms of economic relations and social activity to be those that genuinely represented human relations and human possibility (1971a, 93). The reified mind accepts the normative, surface perception of reality as a condition that, however problematic, cannot feasibly be transformed. The reified mind believes this even while it is aware of unequal relations and the diminished control over conditions of living. It is a backward-looking perspective. The reified individual is one whose ability and interest in conceiving a complex and meaningful future vision have been set aside, undeveloped; the absence of knowledge and critique legitimizes what exists at a given moment in its unanalyzed form and sets out the mental and practical conditions for its reproduction. All this gives the impression that reification is an unavoidable condition, akin to Max Weber’s iron cage of modern life. The reified mind might be aware of an alternative set of relations or way of life but considers these in terms of pragmatic probabilities, unattainable because of the degree to which its immediate desires and needs can be satisfied even while they may be little examined or largely misunderstood.
Reification is an attitude that projects a barrier onto immediate conditions, and projects forward the relative permanency of that
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barrier in relation to social change, in effect negating the necessity and the value of a forward-looking consciousness. A reified out-look exists when there is no interest in an alternative way of thinking or alternative practice under the given set of conditions, including possibilities of social change that exist undeveloped in the reality of social life at any moment. This is the condition of which Lukács wrote: “the barrier imposed by immediacy has become an inward barrier” (1971a, 164). It can exist in the intellectual as well as the industrial worker; it is a social condition, manifested in the limited self- and social consciousness of the individual. It is that condition of one-dimensionality with which Herbert Marcuse (1964) characterized advanced industrial society in which the absence of opposition has become normative. But neither reification nor one-dimensionality should be viewed as permanent or inevitable conditions. From the viewpoint of historical materialism, alternatives to such perceptions and beliefs may not be obvious, but they can be discovered.
Any social order has a structural imperative, such as that in which the Westray miners lived, that human needs must be satisfied within a particular, limited framework of action. A person is not permitted to steal to satisfy the need for money, but he or she can be the victim, effectively, of theft, since the mining corporation executive and the owner of the local donut shop practice the most efficient, yet legitimate, exploitation of labor, time, and the economic security of their employees within the accepted framework of “free labor.” The experience of a competitive environment indicates to the subject the importance of satisfying immediate needs before one’s competitors (including fellow wage earners) make it more difficult or impossible to do. This is a basic condition of capitalism that “makes every man see in other men not the realization of his own freedom, but the barrier to it” (Marx 1975c, 163). The ideology that helps to sustain capitalism does not require individuals to be fully conscious of the relation between their actions and the concrete, objective possibilities of individual and social development. But it is of central importance to any set of propositions designed for the radical socialization of individuals that economic and cultural
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development should come to be known as a “synthesis of individual acts” that at once “determines the manner, direction, tempo, etc., of the social development” and exposes individuals to the revolutionary possibilities that the consciousness of such syntheses uncover (Lukács 1978, 81, 89, 149; 1975a, 76–77; 1991, 78). Notwithstanding the limits of individual action, it is a necessary precondition for collective action and organization that makes social change possible. The barrier established via reification excludes this consideration, or frames it as unrealistic and therefore not achievable.
Lukács defined reification in terms developed in part from Weber’s analysis of modern capitalism, the rationalization of work, technology, law, and the principle of rational calculation in the economy and by the individuals within it. “In consequence of the rationalization of the work-process,” Lukács wrote, “the human qualities and idiosyncrasies of the worker appear increasingly as mere sources of error when contrasted with these abstract special laws functioning according to rational predictions” (1971a, 89). The rationalization of production and of the individual’s function within the structure constitutes “a perfectly closed system” in which the subject becomes less active and more contemplative, thus transforming “the basic categories of man’s immediate attitude to the world” (1971a, 89). Before Weber, Marx demonstrated the essence of rational calculation “in which men are effaced by their labor; in which the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed of two locomotives” (1976a, 127). The individual worker is subsumed by the machinations of the capitalist’s timepiece governing the volume and rate of profit. Lukács cited this as an expression of reification (1971a, 89). But the equally problematic if not more dangerous aspect of reification is when individuals come to believe that they are the accurate measure not only of their own work within the system of production, but the accurate measure—in interests, abilities and desires—of the individual as such in capitalist society. This is the concrete manifestation of rational calculation within capitalism in two ways: first, in the sense that the “capitalist process of reification both over-individualizes man
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of capital in the identification of the individual’s place within the system as the competitive measure to be imposed on one’s own actions and those of others. In this way bourgeois individualism isheightened as the core of a way of thinking, and the possibility of meaningful collective action is diminished.
The present argument is intended to sustain Lukács’s solution to the problem of reification: imputed class consciousness. This will be more fully discussed later. This more comprehensive form of consciousness was intended to overcome the limits of what Lukács called “psychological consciousness” and what Lucien Goldmann referred to as “real consciousness.” Both of these are underdeveloped forms of consciousness; they are derived from and are satisfied with the immediate and momentary in the social environment and are oriented to a pragmatic interaction with the political and cultural forces encountered in everyday life. As we will see in the discussion that follows, these expressions of consciousness fit well with culturally oriented, sociological analyses of class. In such analyses “real” or “psychological” consciousness is what is observed and recorded and becomes the object of analysis. Narrow, pragmatic perspectives, as well as the claim of ethical neutrality, inhibit the sociologist from developing a program for raising consciousness that goes beyond the calculative immediacy that constrains human development.
Thus the problem of reification is not confined to working people exploited by and subordinated to the demands of the economic system; this is not a condition that finds fertile ground only in those at the lower end of the division of labor. Reification in capitalist society also affects those who claim some awareness of the structure and internal workings of capitalism through their relatively autonomous position in, for example, social research and communication. The sociological analyses discussed here have jettisoned the economic basis of class, discarded as deterministic or outdated the goal of radical change that is central to Marxism, and have reduced the significance of consciousness to calculative
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rationality. As a consequence, the disciplinary and institutional legitimation of affirmative, value-neutral, pragmatic approaches to class, even if indirect, serves to dissuade working people from the need to develop more critical and comprehensive knowledge of the functions and purpose of capitalism, and the possibility of alternatives to it.
In discussing Lukács’s work, I have been selective. I am concerned with those aspects of his work that provide theoretical support and further insight into the possibility of renewing the emphasis on consciousness as an essential means of developing an ethico-revolutionary approach to the part played by individuals in the progress of social movements, political activity, and their own development. In examining the work of Lukács and others, I emphasize what can be developed from his perspective to contribute to these purposes.
Neither Lukács nor Marx demanded such inflexible adherence to their theoretical positions or their practical, concrete strategies as to proscribe development in the face of new material conditions. At the same time, such openness to development has never required a negation of the fundamental theoretical or methodological foundations that initiated the organized political movement toward socialism.
Organizing consciousness
Inherent in the development of Marxism and the pursuit of socialism is the principle that a sound theoretical perspective results in, and also requires, an organized means of simultaneously overcoming reification and developing class consciousness. By this is meant something concrete and intentional. Counterexamples to the tragedy at Westray may be useful here. Long before that mine was developed, and during a period of social and economic conditions far less favorable to working people, miners in Nova Scotia built a reputation for militant trade unionism, class solidarity, and radical political action (Foner 1991, 230–44; Frank 1999). Miners in the Cape Breton region of the province were among the earliest to organize a trade union and proved to be the most militant among the United Mine Workers in the early decades of the twentieth century.
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Between 1917 and 1926, for example, there were sixty-four strikes in the Cape Breton mines. Dangerous working conditions, wages (which in the early 1920s were 70 percent lower than for miners in Western Canada), and arbitrary dismissal of workers were among the issues that led to work stoppages. In 1924, for example, one part of the Princess mine was struck because two miners did not receive lamps prior to going underground. Such shortcomings in safety provisions were common at Westray but never challenged. The number of work stoppages, slowdowns, and generally successful efforts to overcome inter-union rivalry prior to 1920 speaks to the solidarity of workers in the Cape Breton mines in recognizing themselves as part of a class. But so too does their effort to conceptualize the problems they faced in the deeps as more than workplace issues. Public ownership of the collieries, an analysis in 1922 of the overcapacity of North American coal mining and its likely effect on jobs and income, direct confrontation with government militia, a declaration to “overthrow the capitalist system and the capitalist state,” and the open membership of key leaders in the Workers’ Party (the forerunner of the Communist Party of Canada) attest to workers’ strength and their knowledge of the importance of the potential power collective interests could have beyond the coalface and surface work.
Similarly, Robin D. G. Kelley’s (1990) history of the Share Croppers’ Union and industrial labor in Alabama in the 1930s and James S. Allen’s (2000) memoir of the same period in Alabama and elsewhere in the American South discuss racism and the extreme exploitation of working people in the United States during this period. These studies show that neither the struggles against racist oppression and the arbitrary use of corporate or police powers, nor the development of trade unions benefited from a structure of law or government legislation comparable to the late twentieth century. Unions were built a few members at a time and at considerable risk to many who joined. When the unions were beaten back, their members arrested or run out of state, homes burned, and unionists and their supporters murdered, people once again organized from what remained.
A host of other examples could be cited. But at least one decisive difference that exists between Westray and these examples
20 LUKÁCS & ORGANIZING CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS
is the effort to organize consciousness. To organize the working class can include the formal grouping of workers into a trade union or a political party, both referring to different levels of political motivation underlying the organization and different meanings given to what would seem to be the essential purpose—putting class issues in the forefront of any such effort. The immediacy of economic issues and, as we will see, subjective, cultural orientations often interfere with larger goals. However, in the historical events cited above, organization stands out as the means by which diverse sectors of the working class recognized their common interests, made significant efforts to overcome traditional attitudes regarding race and social authority, and set goals that would substantially improve the lives of working people. Of necessity this meant that trade union and political party leaderships had to ascribe courses of action and a body of knowledge with which to ensure the success of these struggles. In other words, they had to organize the consciousness of members of unions, political parties, and interested others. Sharecroppers, miners, and other workers achieved some of what they set out to do, but if they were less successful than they had hoped, they nevertheless demonstrated a critical awareness of their existing circumstances and future possibilities. The political form of organization that set them on this route was developed in part from the people most immediately victimized by exploitation and racism. But in each case, other motivations, new ideas, and different people came from outside the immediate experience of life in these conditions, with the intention of developing these organizations under the assumption that, despite the difficulties, people would be more interested in the possibility of change than the high probability of long-term entrenchment in their current problems. It is in this sense that one begins to understand the viability of one of Lukács’s basic premises: “Organization is the form of mediation between theory and practice” (1971a, 299).
The specific form and content of political organizations is important. The Communist parties in both Canada and the United States were major catalysts for class and social achievements in a variety of areas. Any discussion of class, class consciousness,
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and class struggle risks remaining abstract and fundamentally meaningless without a grounding in the objective history of the Communist movement and without attempting some practical connection between working-class struggles and their mediation by partisan political organizations. That history should be re-cognized as residual in the objective conditions of the present moment.
Organizing consciousness is one component of deliberate action on the part of formal or quasi-formal organizations. Thus, to regard the problem of class consciousness as an organizational problem refers to two interrelated meanings. First, there is the practical, instrumental organization of people into trade unions, social movements, and political parties that deliberately and continually develop premises by which their projected goals can be conceptualized and eventually attained. In the present discussion, organization does not exclusively refer to a particular form of political party or social movement, although my preference, strongly implied here, is for a democratic, relatively open political organization grounded in Leninist principles. Lukács regarded the “organizational forms of the proletariat, in first rank the party, [as the] real forms of mediation in which and through which develops and is developed the consciousness that corresponds to the social being of the proletariat” (2000, 78).
Secondly, while the first meaning above gives priority to the political form of organization, wider cultural and historical meanings are consistent with the deliberateness and intentionality relevant to the practical forms of organization. If the party is in “the first rank,” then other senses of organization also serve as forms of mediation with which to organize consciousness. This permits, as Lukács’s work demonstrated, an indirect contribution to the development of consciousness and active participation of working people that should include such things as progressive and oppositional forms of literature as well as political organizations as such (cf. Lanning 2002). Raymond Williams, for example, wrote of art as an “organizing principle,” a conscious organization of experience out of which emerges a comprehensive view of the historical transformation of society and the individual orientation
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of its members (1961, 9, 31). In a different context, the purposefulness inherent in the concept of the organization of consciousness comes through in Primo Levi’s experience of the concentration camps in which “to organize” the scraps of a meal or a pair of shoes was a conscious form of resistance and of the intention to survive (Levi 1965, 27, 157; 2000, 293–94). We could provide a number of different examples, but at its basis the organization of consciousness is the cognition of reality and the intentional mediation of concrete action.
A schema of the organization of consciousness would include the following, not necessarily in order of priority. There must be some recognition of the necessity of increasing knowledge, raising consciousness of the immediate and distant problems of everyday life, and the conviction that this effort is one of the essential means by which a resolution of such problems can be achieved, while accepting that such resolution will be partial at different stages or steps of the process. Further, there must be some guiding principles for developing consciousness on the levels of theory, politics, and ethics. As to the latter, earlier in his career as a Marxist, Lukács formulated a basic ethical perspective: a) that people must decide to take action for the cause of socialism or for reaction; b) that there is no space for neutrality or impartiality; and c) that the individual in conjunction with others must seek to learn what can be known about immediate and historical circumstances in order to evaluate the possible achievements and consequences of their actions (1975b, 8–11). Historical materialism provides the theoretical basis for the organization of consciousness because, as noted above, it necessitates mediation with practice that, in the first instance, is organization itself, as a deliberate and purposeful activity, the chief means to move consciousness from an elementary to a higher level. As Lukács argued, this was the “novel” element in the formation of the Communist parties, “between spontaneous action and conscious, theoretical foresight” that gave an entirely new meaning to the immediate conditions experienced by the working class (1971a, 317, emphasis added). Dialectically, “imputed class consciousness” is the key aspect of this “novel” element and is the
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most historically effective means by which the here and now of experience becomes revolutionary foresight.
In contrast to this approach to developing consciousness are the counterproductive, regressive analyses (explored later) that effectively disorganize the consciousness of the working class and the means by which class consciousness is developed.
Sociological concepts of class
Sociological analyses of class that purport to expose the oppressive conditions of capitalist society refuse, partly in the name of ethical neutrality, to take the next, dialectically logical step. Exposure of oppressive conditions is crucial to developing knowledge about them and for moving people toward the discovery of alternatives. The former is readily evident in sociological studies of class; the latter is a direction not often posed or suggested by academic researchers. Lukács’s controversial statement at the beginning of his critique of irrationalism in bourgeois philosophy applies to the social sciences as well: “In philosophy as outside of it, votes are not cast for attitudes but for deeds—for the objective expression of ideas and for its historically necessary influence. In this sense, every thinker is responsible to history for the objective substance of his philosophizing” (1980a, 4). It is in this way that we need to acknowledge the indirect relationship, at least, between a reductionist view of class and class consciousness and tragedies such as that at Westray, just as it needs to be repeatedly affirmed that the view of class and politics that motivated earlier miners in Nova Scotia, sharecroppers in Alabama, and people in a multitude of other situations has had both direct and indirect consequences for improving the lives of working people.
In The Destruction of Reason, a significant aspect of Lukács’s critique of Weber, Simmel, and Mannheim was their rejection of class struggle and by extension their rejection of any meaningful revolutionary conception of class and class consciousness (1980a, 603). This is evident in much of Weber’s work, which has been the dominant approach to analyses of class and social stratification, especially in North America. From this perspective, class
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is something to be understood through the operationalizing of oc-cupation, income, and education, as has been previously noted. Although he did not define class precisely in this way, Weber in-itiated this orientation in his discussion of “class situation” and “class types,” essentially concepts denoting probabilities in terms of life chances (1978, 302–7). Weber offered sociologists a way of using class in their analyses without the economic fundamentals upon which Marx based his approach, namely, surplus labor and surplus value. Contrary to Weber’s intentions, including these fundamentals in studies of class would make capitalist society as a whole the object of analysis. In his view, understanding class required only a descriptive approach, one concerned with tracing the probabilities for social mobility or elevated status without drawing the sociologist into the economic antagonisms that Marx cited as the genesis of classes. Weber argued that differences between classes need not result in open struggle or a change in the structure of the economic system, and that classes of substantial property and status differences could coexist without conflict, especially if, together, they constituted a united front against an oppressed class.
In the few pages of Economy and Society cited above, Weber does offer a perspective on class consciousness. It succeeds most easily, he argues, where “large numbers of persons are in the same class situation,” where it is “technically easy to organize them,” where the object of their struggle is immediate rather than distant, and “if they are led toward readily understood goals, which are imposed and interpreted by men outside their class (intelligentsia)” (1978, 305). The last point alludes to the space Weber acknowledges for the development of potential consciousness. But given his orientation toward academic and political neutrality, Weber could not develop this idea beyond its relevance as an encyclopedia description; nor could he develop it beyond the ideal type that restricted analysis to immediately calculable conditions—the time and space of social action—although this might have been affirmative of his point about the immediacy of the object of class struggle. Instrumentally, if income, occupation, and education are operationalized, a tightly defined ideal type as a measure of
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socioeconomic status is created. In doing so, researchers become aware of what kinds of people are doing what kinds of work, for how much remuneration, with what credentials, and so on according to specific criteria established for a particular research project. A variety of measures, correlations, and comparisons may follow, but these are measures of socioeconomic status, not class as a site of consciousness and struggle.
As we will see in the discussion of objective possibility in chapter 3, Weber presented a concept that could be taken in two distinct directions—one direction heavily weighted toward description and probability, which he developed only logically through the category of objective possibility. Descriptive methods, however, have a tendency to remove or reduce the historical element. The second direction involved searching for the options made available through a dialectical development of objective possibility. What Lukács found in Weber’s work, and differently in Marx and Engels’s early historical materialism, moved him toward the recognition of the potential to be developed in the synthesizing of “individual movement and the overall [social and economic] process that they constitute,” recognizing that these syntheses had causal value for social action (Lukács 1978, 89). Weber’s “readily understood goals . . . imposed and interpreted” (Weber 1978, 305) may have shaped the alternative approach taken by Lukács, Goldmann, and other Marxists.
The problem discussed later in the critique of studies of class may have arisen around Weber’s initial sociological definitions, but it has been sustained in the operationalized use of “socioeconomic status” as a synonym for class. The descriptive features and probabilities within the concept of socioeconomic status have been reified and have taken on a life of their own. The fact of a class-status position in this sense only becomes significant when it is understood as a value relation to other status positions, whether simply comparative or an antagonistic relation between the interests of clusters of status positions as different classes. Any attempt to discuss or designate class fails without recognition of the intentionality of these relations, for it provides us with only a fragmented and instrumental application of a sociological category,
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but is of little significance in political organization and concrete class struggle. Probabilities are relative positions within the social system. Treatment of occupational or class locations on this basis is theoretically and practically limited.
Weber’s approach to class and to social action led to the sociological reduction of class to social stratification. Perhaps the standard approach to stratification was the structural-functionalism of Davis and Moore (1945). While the criticism directed at these sociologists was justified (cf. Tumin 1953), their portrayal of stratification was nevertheless an accurate description of the division of society under capitalist conditions and the negative effects of differences encountered on the various levels of the division of labor. Description for Davis and Moore, who did not see it as problematic, was the beginning and end of their sociological task. Their analysis provided a picture of the structure of probabilities of social mobility and achievement, and the social valuing of the time and resources required to attain status of greater value in the upper levels of the occupational structure. Their typology of stratification reflected the needs of a system that became more successful the more its inequalities and limitations were presented as stabilizing needs of the system, something easily rationalized and marketed in the postwar period as a significant buttress to reification as an equally relevant need of the social system.
Discussion of the division of labor remains important, as does the articulation of distinctions in socioeconomic status; however, the central elements of Marx’s understanding of class seem to be overshadowed by such techniques. Aspects of E. O. Wright’s initial examination of class (1978) were relevant to Marx’s own, such as the issue of labor power and exploitation. Wright arrived at three basic classes and several contradictory class locations. His later work (1985) was more concerned with understanding the complexities of exploitation in a system of stratification, and attempted to measure the probabilities more efficiently with a social division of far more than the basic number of classes. The central meaning of class—its reasons for existence in capitalism—are lost on such excessive distinctions and fragmentation in the categorization of
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what is, again, socioeconomic status, not class as it is dialectically completed in an organized consciousness and action.
Much has changed in sociology since these analyses, including a widespread interest in class issues within the discipline and a more comprehensive recognition of the forces and relations of production in social life. But much of the descriptive analysis governed by probabilities and locations remains. In both written material and the classroom lecture, class as a term of convenience in the mainstream of the discipline has also become a façade for radical discourse, and in many cases, an example of the commodification of critique.1 One of the major differences in class analysis in the contemporary period is the shift away from the priority of industrial production to a so-called “postindustrial” phase of capitalism. We will return to this point at the end of chapter 2, but it does lead us to ask two essential questions: who comprises the contemporary working class, and to what extent is the “postindustrial” change relevant to class as conceived by Marx and propagated by others?
A summary view of the problem can be stated at this point using one of Marx’s basic definitions of class found in his discussion of class and the peasantry in The Eighteenth Brumaire:
Insofar as millions of families live under economic con- itions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond and no political organization among them, they do not form a class. (1979, 187)
Thus there are two categories of class: first, “economic conditions of existence,” and, secondly, the combination of “community,” “national bond,” and “political organization.” The first category represents the objective basis for Marx’s view of the necessity of the creation of separate classes. In the hands of some sociological investigators, it is the rational basis for the analysis of class. But the second category has become an equally
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instrumental framework for analysis in sociological and cultural studies of class. Marx clearly intended community, national bond, and political organization to extend the meaning of class beyond instrumental or rationally calculated measures. But the last of the three elements in the second category, political organization, is least developed, even dismissed, by such studies. What is often left out is Marx’s proviso that without political organization, working people would remain “incapable of enforcing their class interests in their own name” (1979, 187).
Addressing this comprehensively requires a clear understanding of class interests as well as a reasonably firm idea of the quality and character of working-class organizations that are necessary to represent and develop those interests and the class as a whole for those interests. Arguably many sociological studies do not go beyond the instrumental integration of Marx’s two categories. In such cases, analyses are only adequate representations of the “real,” “psychological” consciousness of those who are said to be working class. This approach is sustained by reifying the class as such and erecting a barrier between the class and the necessity of political organization that develops class interests and experiences toward a specific goal.
The central place of class struggle is one continuing absence in studies that purport to be studies of class. In the studies discussed in chapter 4, it is evident that attenuation of conflict is a dominant focus, a kind of sociological apologetics. Of course we get a much different understanding of class when the revolutionary or partisan interests are clear and developed with an intention to direct conscious action toward a specific end, whether it is fully achieved or not. Appropriate definitions and accurate reading are important for indicating how one approaches the classics of Marxism and their later development, but so, too, is the attitude toward the goal: a commitment to social change, human development, and socialism. Lukács, Goldmann, and others’ perspectives take us beyond the immediacy of everyday conditions of class and direct us toward political organization. Their perspectives affirm the importance of not limiting the question of class to the types of persons, occupations, etc., that purport to make up the class, but
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going beyond those operational concepts to consciousness of the complexity of those relations. It is this matter of consciousness that permits, and in the contemporary context of economic changes necessitates, consideration of groups beyond instrumentally defined class.
A discussion of Marx’s conception of class and historical necessity is taken up in the following chapter. Chapter 3 introduces the concept of “imputed class consciousness” and discusses aspects of its roots in Max Weber’s view of “objective possibility.” Chapter 4 is a critique of three sociological studies of class, followed in chapter 5 by a discussion of Marx’s key concept, “being determines consciousness,” which I regard as incompletely understood by the sociologists discussed in chapter 4. Chapter 6 examines Istvan Mészáros’s criticisms of Lukács’s early work and chapter 7, aspects of E. P. Thompson’s view of the working class that are in opposition to the perspective taken in this study. Chapter 8 offers a more complete discussion of Lukács’s concept of imputed class consciousness.
NOTE
1. This is a seemingly bottomless field of academic production occupied by many, but Peter McLaren (e.g. 1995, 2000) and Henry Giroux (e.g. 2001, 2004) are two who have sustained this approach in North America.