Chapter Three The Concept of Imputed Class Consciousness

Chapter Three

The Concept of Imputed Class Consciousness

Copyright: Robert Lanning, 2009

One property of consciousness is that it is educable.

—Georg Lukács

It has been argued in the previous chapter that Marx and Engels’s concept of “historical necessity” should be understood as a material force in class struggle that emerges through the self-activity and consequent development of consciousness among members of the working class, a material force that is created only through deliberate choices to direct the class toward specific goals. As pointed out in that chapter, Mészáros has asserted that the concept of historical necessity as described in The Holy Family was the first instance in historical materialism where Marx and Engels ascribed to the working class the means of determining its future; that is, imputing the substance of consciousness to the working class as a tool of self-activity. From Marx and Engels’s original discussion (and from others as we will see) Lukács derived his concept of “imputed class consciousness.” As he put it in History and Class Consciousness (1971a, 7) and A Defence of History and Class Consciousness (2000, 74), imputed class consciousness is “the sense, become conscious, of the historical role of the class.” Historical necessity, therefore, is not fulfilled, but rather attained or realized through a conscious choice of action for a classless society and for socialism. As a practical social and political process, the initial function of imputed class consciousness is the weakening of the inward barrier of resistance to the working class’s historical role. Imputed class consciousness is not an autonomously

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operating social force. It is the substance or content of consciousness mediated by a social movement, a political organization or party, or the leading sector of a class. This chapter will introduce Lukács’s concept; the final chapter will develop the concept further.

The inward barrier of reification is fundamentally a social product and a problem of capitalism. It is manifested in an immediate sense as an individual, subjective problem. When assessed from outside, the reified mind becomes evident as an objective class-wide problem when the inward barriers of multiple individuals constitute a socially objective constraint against the relatively autonomous development of the class, its individual members, and their possible political action. The reification of reality requires no specifically deliberate coordination to be effective and to become an objective phenomenon, for its strength lies in the accumulated inward barriers operating in tacit synchronization to attenuate the conflict inherent in class relations. It is a perception of reality that identifies the immediate, pragmatic determination and satisfaction of needs with the perceived absence of potentiality in either the social environment as a whole or the individuals who populate it. The Westray miners are an example of this process. The result is the formation of an atmosphere in which opposition to existing hegemonic forces is either refused or engaged instrumentally to secure immediate goals. In the case of a mass of individuals in whom the inward barrier of reification is established, their subjectively grounded actions become a regressive social force.

All individual inward barriers arise within the context of social structural and institutional constraints on the access to and development of knowledge that hinders the political maturation of class consciousness, although modern society does not wholly close off the working class from the resources for improving formal and informal knowledge that can contribute to this maturation. Formally organized knowledge of society, economics, and politics exists in much greater volume and is more accessible than at any other time in modern history. It contracts and expands and contracts again under the influence of capitalist growth and retrenchment, and when organized working-class action is

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counterposed to capitalism’s self-interests expressed in economic and social policies. Even if they are marginal components of the curriculum or poorly taught, alternative and oppositional political and social movements are now legitimate subjects of learning in postsecondary institutions at least, and combined with the sources in communities and on the Internet provide a substantial body of knowledge of existing conditions and possible alternatives. Thus it cannot be argued that reification is a condition that is absolute and insurmountable.

The development and progressive dissemination of critical knowledge represents an objective mediating force through which a more independent course of action could take place. The formal development and propagation of knowledge, even in its predominantly hegemonic form, have opened possibilities for its seizure and use by subordinated social groups. At the same time, the historical experience of the organized working class has projected onto society its demands for change and led to the development of a generalizable critical knowledge. It was from this basis of actually existing knowledge and its potential development that Lukács formed his concept of imputed class consciousness, placing greater emphasis on individual responsibility for the quality and character of knowledge that would be capable of penetrating the enduring effects of capitalism’s domination. Imputed class consciousness is significant not merely for the historical expansion of relative freedom for the working class, but as an organizational principle in which imputing knowledge becomes a necessary objective factor in the struggle for human betterment.

For Lukács, imputed class consciousness is grounded in cognition of concrete reality, the rational evaluation of action through the analysis of objective social phenomena. However, the precondition for this concept lies in his statements on ethics in 1919, articulated as a contribution to the formation of political cadre, and to address his own and others’ apprehensions about the moral problem of “revolutionary terror.”1 Aspects of the essay, “Tactics and Ethics,” are considered among his most sectarian, but the essay also contains ethical premises that can be extended beyond the historical context of Lukács’s writing,² influenced as it

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was by his own messianic and sectarian politics of the years prior to this period. We have noted these in the introductory chapter: commitment to the goal of socialism, the inadmissibility of neutral positions in the pursuit of that goal, and the individual’s obligation to search for knowledge. Lukács’s ethical premises focus on the individual in relation to a practical organization of collective interest and action. From his perspective, ethics is grounded in conscience and responsibility deliberately adopted by the individual. These are judgments of value that require historical knowledge of immediate conditions and circumstances with a view to assessing the objective possibility for action toward the goal of socialism.

The development of such knowledge, as we have seen in the previous chapter, culminates in the consciousness of “what the proletariat will be compelled to do” and, therefore, the ethics of such a level of consciousness allows for no neutrality with regard to the goal or its pursuit (Lukács, 1975b, 8–11). The conscience and responsibility that grounded Lukács’s ethical statements centered on the struggle against the reduction of the human personality to quantifiable relations between things, and against the subordination of the person to the bureaucratic manipulations that structure the immediate conditions of reified consciousness (1971a, 89–90, 99). Making a “socially correct decision in a meaningful alternative” (1980b, 93) would not result in the working class in general, or any sector of it, being catapulted out of its everyday existence of subordination and exploitation into a new status as unchallenged masters of their social world. Rather, such decisions potentially lead to knowledge of the historical circumstances determining their social existence as a first instrument against those conditions.

In order to fully consider Lukács’s work on consciousness, Max Weber’s concept of “objective possibility” will be discussed along with some aspects of Marx and Engels’s work relevant to the concept, followed by a brief examination of Lucien Goldmann’s perspective.

Sources of the concept in Weber, Marx, and Engels

Parkinson suggests that Lukács’s conception of class consciousness was formed as a Weberian ideal type (1977, 53), and Arato and Brienes suggest that Weber’s “objective possibility” was a basis for

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Lukács’s approach to class consciousness (1979, 87). Weber argued that the scientific study of history could be made available to the historian because of an a posteriori advantage, whether the historian’s appraisal “of the given external conditions corresponded in fact with the knowledge and expectation which the acting person developed” (1949, 165). He argued that both the historical personality and the historian have access to a certain quantity and quality of knowledge (although the aforementioned advantage of the historian exists) and that the historian’s work was to assess how well a historical figure used the knowledge available to make decisions. Implied in this was the extent to which the historical figure sought an appropriate level of knowledge about existing conditions and the possible decisions to be made on those conditions. Thus it was not only what the historical figure knew, but the logical connection between knowledge, action, and outcome.

Weber, as would Lukács, cited the roots of the concept of objective possibility in jurisprudence. The development of bourgeois legal theory was reflected in the law’s interest in the subjective factor of intent, particularly the “subjectively conditioned capacity of foresight into the effects” of an action which could alter the purely causal connection between act and effect (Weber 1949, 169). Thus there were two interrelated components to Weber’s view. One was what a social actor intended to do; the other was what the actor, at the time of his action, knew would or might occur as a result of the action. In this context, Weber was less concerned with the subjective intent of a social actor and more interested in the “consequences” of an act for “world history” (1949, 170). In a discussion of Weber’s method, Turner and Factor emphasize that “a judgment of intent depends in part on whether the actor did in fact foresee a particular consequence,” stressing the objective character of logical connections in this foresight (1981, 8). The historian, according to Weber, develops an analysis of the significance of an action in terms of the possibility of likely consequences resulting from it.

Much like Weber’s argument that “interests” are secured by the normative expectations of social actors, his historical method is limited by its logical structure, its attempt to recreate the methods of natural science in the social sciences. The method does articulate

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the interconnection of “economic, social, and psychological” knowledge, but it does so only in the form of rules of experience; that is, of what is already known and what can be logically inferred from that knowledge. Horkheimer remarked that Weber’s method is no advance on traditional theory due to its reliance on “conditional propositions”; the method does not rely “on the fullest possible enumeration of all pertinent circumstances but on the establishment of a connection between those elements of an event which are significant for historical continuity, and particular determinative actions” (1982, 193–94). The knowledge of possibilities is not confined to experience simply as past practice, but rather to the experience of the rules in action as knowledge of their logical, dependable relations. Thus it can be argued that what Weber uncovered was the significance of the “real” (Goldmann) or “psychological” (Lukács) level of consciousness that equates with his overall concern with understanding social phenomena that may lead to a useful knowledge of objectively possible but logical occurrences. Weber’s concept of understanding is a comparatively static appropriation of social phenomena that relies on the atomization of reality. The consideration and development of intervening, mediating factors in social life is not pursued. In other words, Weber’s sociological method, and those who later followed his direction, relied on the known or experienced outcome of normatively interconnecting phenomena while limiting the objectivity of such phenomena.

The point of Weber’s argument that Lukács apparently picked up and developed is the insistence that “possibility” is not an expression of chance occurrence, nor is it a loosely formed expectation of this or that event that depends on this or that vaguely understood factor. Rather, possibility, asserted by the historian, is a concept clearly expressing what can be known about a particular historical situation and “certain known empirical rules particularly those relating to the ways in which human beings are prone to react under given situations (‘nomological knowledge’)” (Weber 1949, 174). For Lukács, it was a matter of considering what mediating factors might be developed or imputed to break the instrumental logic of Weber’s method. From Weber’s statement that the “category of possibility signifies here the reference to a positive knowledge of the

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‘laws of events’ ” (1949, 173–74), Lukács made a leap to a standpoint that imputed responsibility of foresight to the social actor beyond the logical outcome discovered by Weber’s historian. The imperative to investigate and to exercise ethical premises is stronger in Lukács’s perspective and is consistent especially with his imperative that the individual is responsible for seeking the acquisition of further, concrete knowledge. The revolutionary aspect of this leap is Lukács’s ascription to workers, peasants, and others, of a range and substance of knowledge that can be acquired and developed for historical discontinuity. It is a theoretical leap of a different kind; it transforms the lessons of history, law, and knowledge into organizing criteria. Developing revolutionary cadre, transforming workers’ subjective and immediate experience into objective consciousness is the historical-materialist development of Weber’s method. Lukács could still argue for the ethical component of action in the sense that people can know, and should be held responsible for knowing, the possible types of action that could be taken in knowable sociohistorical circumstances. What is lacking in Weber’s view is a mediating element between the knowing actor and the knowable possibilities of objective reality.

One example of such a mediating influence can be found in Marx and Engels’s discussion in The German Ideology of the possibilities of social action and further development that emerge from active engagement with historical conditions. They discuss the development of commerce that occurs, in part, by the travel of merchants from sites of production to sites of trade. Increased trade and production developed as a component of the overall social division of labor—the “separation of production and intercourse” (1976a, 66). The existence of this separation results in the possibility of other developments, complementary or contradictory, historically continuous or discontinuous. This is not a natural or evolutionary sequence of events or, entirely, events and developments based on prior knowledge social actors have of the possibilities within “empirical rules” (Weber, 1949, 174). It is also based on the possibility of other events and processes occurring, such as the development of large-scale manufacturing that becomes possible with specific inventions: “The possibility,

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indeed the absolute necessity, of the invention lay in the empirical conditions” (Marx and Engels 1976a, 303). Again, this is not an evolutionary sequence of probabilities, but the deliberate development of known concrete conditions from the intention to increase production, trade, and profit, deliberately seeking out resources and other potential in existing concrete social relations, economic and otherwise, and the extent to which those might be stretched to explore or secure the projected goals.

The dialectical relation between empirical knowledge and the intention to develop it is decisive. For Marx and Engels, the intervention of objective class-based interests was focused on the development of capitalism, but specifically the system of production and class relations that emerged from capitalist economic activity. This perspective was a theoretical point of historical materialism that could be applied to the practice of developing knowledge of reality and the implications of that knowledge for the conscious development of revolutionary action.

In these empirically based discussions Lukács could find a point of development between Weber and historical materialism by making a connection with Marx and Engels’s own discussion of intentionality in economic and social development. Early in The German Ideology they initiated a discussion of the division of labor that would be elaborated later in the text. They argued that the division of labor “only becomes truly” a division of labor when a deliberate separation occurs, that between manual and mental labor. Increased production, profitability, exploitation, imperialism, etc., become possible because of this basic socially constructed division fundamental to capitalism. Equally important was the range of possible developments of consciousness, such as “theology, philosophy, morality, etc.,” that were freed from purely natural relations. The freeing of consciousness was the central point, because it was consciousness of objective conditions and the possibilities for action and development that opened these new conditions and relations, including the negation of bourgeois dominated consciousness (“theology, philosophy, morality, etc.”). The dialectical relation of intention and consciousness is heightened with the knowledge that the socially constructed “division

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of labour implies the possibility, nay, the fact, that intellectual and material activity, that enjoyment and labour, production and consumption, devolve on different individuals, and that the only possibility of their not coming into contradiction lies in negating in its turn the division of labour” (1976a, 45). The realization of objectively possible outcomes rests in the conscious search for and development of knowledge of existing objective conditions and the transformation of them.

One aspect of Marx and Engels’s polemic against Max Stirner concerned the control of desire by external forces, in Stirner’s case, Christianity. Here they referred to a dialectical relation of the subjective factor to objective possibility. “Whether a desire becomes fixed or not,” whether a subjective interest “obtains exclusive [power over us]” or the “totality of desires” as a material and emotional complex, depends on material circumstances that provide a range of possibilities for the “development of all our potentialities” (1976a, 255). They go beyond objective conditions external to the individual and allude to the way human beings can exercise control of the self, in part by contextualizing particular desires in a knowable context of possible desires and their likely effects or consequences on human development.

The problem Marx and Engels identified in Stirner’s thinking was his concentration on the individual’s capacity to reflect on his or her circumstances as a means of understanding and possibly transcending such circumstances. When such reflection is not connected with material conditions it will manifest itself as the one-sided development of the individual at the expense of other undeveloped and unanalyzed aspects of individuality that offer the potential for a different direction. The latter may occur because of the restricted development of social reality itself. Marx and Engels argue for a clear connection between the consciousness of an individual’s “empirical needs” which under “favourable circumstances” will allow the individual to transcend one-sided development and “local narrow-mindedness” (1976a, 258–64). This is an important development in the area of social psychology and self-formation as it acknowledges the capabilities of the individual’s imagination and powers of reflection. But Marx

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and Engels argue that these are meaningful to individual development only when these qualities are developed out of concrete social relations. In contrast to Stirner’s view, they require a conceptual shift of focus: the “fixation of interests through the division of labor and class relations is far more obvious than the fixation of ‘desires’ and ‘thoughts’” (1976a, 259). Thus, returning to points made above, the division of labor remains the empirical basis of individual and social development, containing as it does both the constraints on development and possibilities for it. But the existence of desire, the use of imagination in human cognition, suggests not only the possibility of conscious transcendence of the limits of immediate empirical relations and the potential contradiction between the point of production in the division of labor, but an imperative to explore the options available within that objective reality.

Weber argued for historical understanding and knowledge through the exploration of objectively logical occurrences and the consequences flowing from them. Lukács argued for a similar approach, although he wished to demonstrate how it could be possible to draw dialectical inferences from particular situations that could be connected to or made relevant for knowledge of the complex of social relations for the purposes of developing class consciousness and facilitating revolution. But it is also evident that Lukács’s perspective on objective possibility was partially drawn from Marx and Engels’s dialectical discussion of historical and economic development in The German Ideology, which is itself a development of their argument in The Holy Family concerning what the proletariat will be compelled to do—the first instance of the concept of imputed class consciousness.

Lukács’s concept of imputed class consciousness

Formulated when Lukács was writing History and Class Consciousness, the concept of imputed class consciousness does not appear again in explicit form after the point of Lukács’s political retreat at the end of the 1920s. In A Defence of History and Class Consciousness (2000), his response to critics of the earlier work (written in 1925 or 1926 but first published in Hungary in

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1996) explains imputed class consciousness differently. In part, Lukács demonstrates the significance of the concept by using its juridical meaning, as did Weber in his discussion of objective possibility. Thus Lukács’s use of the concept begins with the knowledge that is objectively available in society at any given historical moment and the consciousness capable of being developed from it. He explains it with an example of objective and logical events and their projected consequences. “For example, an object falls out of a window and kills a passerby on the street below. From a juristic perspective, who caused the death, and what did those concerned do wrong? In the first instance, what is important is not what the person concerned thought or intended, but whether he could or should have known that his action or failure to act in a normal way would have led to these consequences” (2000, 64). Thus to impute means, literally and practically in relation to this example, to be conscious of objective reality as having a specific knowability, a content of thought that has a consequence for action. That is, the circumstances of an event or condition can be shown to be historical in origin, outside and independent of the existence of the subject, but not beyond the subject’s comprehension, and not sequestered from influence by social agents.

It must at least be noted here that the availability of the necessary knowledge of society, its economic development, etc., is precisely the premise of Marx’s method of political economy developed in his economic manuscripts of 1857–58. Each step of the method, illustrated through his example of population, is both a guideline and imperative to discover the material of comprehensive historical knowledge. It is not discovered independently or as naturally occurring phenomena, but mediated through the historical-materialist method.

Engels pointed to the same principle in The Condition of the Working Class in England, where he contrasted the existing legal determination of murder—“when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal”—with what ought to be included in the category of murder: the deliberate construction by ruling powers of conditions that lead members of the working class to “a too early and unnatural death” (1975, 393–94). As Lukács argues,

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such definitions “are meant to help reconstruct from the facts the objectively essential elements of a legal situation, in order to work out the objectively typical elements in such a case” (2000, 64). The basics here are from Weber’s argument. But Lukács’s definition is not locked into a logic as Weber’s was, but assumes some relatively free access to the knowledge necessary in more complex situations and some interpretation or explanation of it in the case of persons less familiar with the issues; in other words, some practical and theoretical mediation of the knowledge.

Thus, objective conditions that were not immediately conducive to political action need not serve as a barrier to a political party or social movement, or a constraint on the development of an individual committed to such action. “[A] mere analysis of the objective economic situation, even if theoretically correct, is not enough. The correct guidelines for action must be developed out of the analysis. If . . . the objective economic situation is not immediately apparent in its objective correctness, then the guidelines, and the slogans that follow from them, must be found deliberately” (Lukács 2000, 71). Immediate concrete reality is one source within which these “guidelines” can be found. Neither the attitude of reification nor the objective conditions were accepted as insurmountable barriers to correct analysis or the availability of sound guidelines. The other source was the conscious development of the class, and the self-development of its individual members, from inside and outside its immediate reality.

Lukács assumes quite rightly in his or any other historical context that workers will have to acquire specific knowledge as to what is possible in a given situation, or if they possess sufficient knowledge they will need to organize it to achieve results that will lead to class-wide consciousness and the basis for the dissolution of the class itself. Learning, therefore, will take place on their own initiative and through working-class institutions such as trade unions or political parties that are broader than the working class as traditionally defined. Imputed class consciousness consists of the ideas and knowledge that can be discovered or created by people “if they [are] able to assess” their particular historically produced circumstances “and the interests arising from [these

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circumstances] in their impact on the immediate action and the whole structure of society” (Lukács 1971a, 51). Dual emphases of the concept were its practical value in the preparation for class struggle and its substantive value in the general development of human capacity. Hence spontaneity, rejected as an unacceptable strategy by itself, was nevertheless understood to be logically anticipated in the struggles of the working class against oppressive conditions. What needed to be done was to capture spontaneous anger and organize it into a sustainable and successful strategy of change to the structure of society. From Lukács’s point of view, it was the workers’ party that could achieve the appropriate “interaction of spontaneity and conscious control” (1971a, 317) because the party and/or advanced sectors of the working class could derive from reality an objectively possible course of action. Lenin’s orientation to the limits of working-class consciousness and spontaneity are evident here. In both Lenin and Lukács, the organization of knowledge is intentional, purposeful, and discovered to be historically necessary.

Notwithstanding the importance of objective conditions facing workers, Lukács’s emphasis was on the available knowledge and social movements that were able to weaken or transcend the constraints of social structural and productive conditions. Because he was concerned with consciousness as a political necessity in the face of such conditions, he brought the issue back to the problem of reification, the acquiescence by workers and others to the inner “barrier imposed by immediacy” (1971a, 164). The context in which he makes this statement is a methodological and organizational one meant to negate bourgeois methodology that “arises directly from . . . social existence” such as Weber’s notion of interest directly governing action, as noted in the previous chapter. Such a methodological orientation adopted by the working class was a point of view suitable only to its immediate interests; if immediate interests remained dominant they would be antithetical to what the working class will historically be “compelled to do” upon attaining the appropriate level of class consciousness.

Thus historical subjects must first understand that the immediate moment is an historical product and that the multiple

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historical determinants it contains must be subjected to analysis as the means of fully developing the potential therein.

Lukács rejected the reductionist approach of Lazslo Rudas, critic of History and Class Consciousness, who asserted that imputed class consciousness was an indication of the “functional dependency” (2000, 63) of the working class on the Communist Party, which imputed or ascribed the knowledge or content of the consciousness of the proletariat. Such an interpretation suggests that the actions taken by the proletariat would be based on a prescription laid out by instrumental or self-serving interests of the party organizing the working class; “functional dependency” would, therefore, imply a degree of passivity, even lack of capability on the part of members of the working class. Such a mechanical relationship between party and class would produce the “substitution” Thompson and others attributed to Leninism, as we will discuss in chapter 7.

But Lukács did not give to imputed class consciousness such a meaning, although it is clear and unavoidable that he meant this concept to be sustained by the organized, programmatic guidance of leading sections of the working class and the party. While his immediate concrete reference in the Defence was to the Hungarian Communist Party and the failure of the 1919 revolution, the concept can be far more generalized to communist parties and to institutions and activities (education and literature, for example) that are involved in the development of consciousness and socialist politics.

The Communist Party, in Lukács’s argument, was a historically specific reference to the primary working-class political organization of the period of the Russian and Hungarian revolutions. While this need not be taken to mean that the Communist Party was or is the only vehicle for the development of class consciousness, he was nevertheless accurate with regard to the organizational ability and commitment of the communist parties in question to develop and pursue a specific course of action with respect to the working class. On the other hand, the importance of communist parties is not confined to these particular historical moments of significant achievement. The contribution

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of communist parties, for Lukács, was the development of a “new relation between spontaneous action and conscious theoretical foresight. . . . This altered relationship has its origin in the objective possibility available to the class consciousness of the proletariat.” Most importantly, and contrary to the role Weber asserted, the working class was no longer positioned simply to see its situation as “post festum in character” but to see it as something objectively posited, possible, and achievable (Lukács 1971a, 317). One is drawn repeatedly to examples of communist party activity such as that discussed by Kelley (1990), noted in chapter 1, in which the organization of desire and objective social conditions was centered on the deliberate search for guidelines to action.

Notwithstanding his emphasis on the role of the party, Lukács’s argument was and should continue to be focused on the development of the individual capacity for consciousness in the context of the class situation as a whole in its coexistence with political parties and social movements. This implies a cognitive (individual) effort as well as an organized (collective) program. After all, if Lukács is correct that, “The objective theory of class consciousness is the theory of its objective possibility” (1971a, 79), then once such a discovery is made it becomes a matter of choosing between alternative courses of action and is placed squarely at the point of understanding the significance of what “this or that individual proletarian” does with the knowledge acquired to help bring about the appropriate objective conditions for success in the class struggle. The strongest element of Lukács’s early discussion is the objective possibility derived from the proletariat’s attainable knowledge and the knowledge obtained from other classes that contribute to the struggles and development of the working

class. In both cases the strategy, tactics, and philosophical outlook may indeed be developed from within the working class, or else brought to it in part by those better able to access and understand the total social circumstances of a particular period. But mediation of the development of knowledge and consciousness may take varied forms depending on the state of a movement’s development and the conditions and potential of the historical period. The “guidelines for action” may be brought forward and further

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developed by a political party or trade union and may even be found in the potentiality contained within bourgeois institutions.

Goldmann’s sociological contribution

As we will note in the following chapter, some sociologists focus on communication as a vehicle for increasing awareness of class, particularly referring to “horizontal communication,” presumably within the class itself. Notwithstanding the importance of that form of communication among similarly situated people, the choice of this term is implicitly a rejection of knowledge imputed to the class from elsewhere than within the group itself. It is useful to point out an approach to communication and analysis of social groups that provides both a theoretical and methodological correction to the focus on horizontal communication that at the same time provides support for Lukács’s concept of imputed class consciousness.

The place of History and Class Consciousness in the work of Lucien Goldmann has been acknowledged by many, especially by Goldmann himself. His disagreements with Lukács’s later work in literary criticism and politics aside, Goldmann was deeply committed to the ideas and motivation of Lukács’s early writing (including that from his pre-Communist period), using it to develop the methodology of his own sociological approach to issues of class and consciousness. In part, Goldmann sought a way of conceptualizing the development of consciousness in different conditions of communication on the premise that social groups are structured by the way people react to their social world and the problems that arise from their actions or participation. The problems that arise for a social group, arise due to its “function within a larger social structure” (Goldmann 1969, 14). Social groups will express and receive communication, will develop and propagate knowledge on the basis of this complex of structure and function. The group carries out this process as collective subjects (“transindividual subjects”) by which the “historical world at a given moment is materially and intellectually constituted” (1977b, 35). Whereas the actions of a social group are performed collectively, the group acts through its individual members, who must be construed not as isolated individuals, but with the recognition that the “group is not above the individuals

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who constitute it by their actions, common or otherwise” (1977b, 85; cf. Goldmann 1974, 1). None of this, however, constitutes fixed, permanent relations, for a different response to social problems or a different response to the group’s awareness of its function can result in the transformation of its structure.

Goldmann began his discussion of this relationship with the passage from Marx and Engels’s The Holy Family, already discussed in chapter 2, concerning the limits of what this or that proletarian thinks. His concern was to show that the highest, most sociological level of “information transmission” cannot be reduced to “horizontal communication between peers.” Every social group, Goldmann argues, “tends to have an adequate knowledge of reality; but its knowledge can extend only to a maximum horizon compatible with its existence” as a particular group formed out of specific sociohistorical conditions and based on its “nature,” its given structure, its “intellectual categories, the specific aspect of the concepts of space, time, good, evil, history, causality, and so forth which structure its consciousness.” The group’s knowledge of itself, its future prospects, and the limits to its consciousness are shaped by these characteristics, although neither the development of consciousness within the group, nor the structure of the group itself is permanently fixed by these conditions. These elements are the proper subject matter for sociologists, according to Goldmann (1977a, 34–35).

In the case of socially subordinated groups such as a class, race, or gender, this must include their structure or pattern of relations as formed or conditioned by more powerful groups. Goldmann does not mean that women, racial minorities, and workers are only capable of a limited quantity or quality of knowledge, but that their knowledge is constrained by the group’s structure and substance rounded in its particular sociohistorical relations. The group and its members reach their “maximum potential consciousness” only in the context of such limiting conditions. His remarks on the limitations of consciousness focused on consciousness structured by the historical conditions in which a social group develops. Members of a social group can discover the maximum level of consciousness of their group and, therefore, their corresponding

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individual maximum level of consciousness as conditioned, but not finalized, by relations within the group as well as the group’s location in the social structure.

Given the strength of these elements in a social group, receiving new information, by which Goldmann means qualitatively new knowledge, will be effective for that group if its members treat it in a way that requires the deliberate disappearance of the group or its transformation “to the point of losing its essential social characteristics” (1977a, 34). By “essential social characteristics” Goldmann meant those that constitute its function in society but constrain or obscure the group’s potential development of necessary knowledge of reality; in the case of the working class, its subordination to the interests of another class.

That is, its members must become conscious of the characteristics that make the group what it is to another social group: dominant or subordinate, exploiter or exploited. For a subordinate group, its members must and can become sufficiently dissatisfied at the individual and group level with those characteristics that make it subordinate to another group and exploited by it. That includes becoming dissatisfied—personally, socially—with the “maximum potential consciousness” obtainable as a subordinate and exploited group. The group’s transformation and that of its members take place when, in the case of the working class, it comes to know something about capitalist economic and social relations, when the class has developed, among other things, a “rational hostility” to the class that is exploiting it, and has developed a “vision of a more democratic and egalitarian society” (Ollman 1993, 155). But it must also come to know that its own “common sense,” the sense of immediacy, negates further development of its potential if the class and its members are satisfied with their existing level of consciousness and their place in the scheme of capitalist relations of production. But once oppositional knowledge and consciousness are acquired by way of what is developed or imputed by its own most advanced section and a political organization, the working class (or any other group) theoretically and practically is no longer the same subordinated and exploited class. Rather, its subordination and exploitation

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are mediated by the more comprehensive knowledge held by an advanced fragment of the class. Subordination and exploitation are then experienced in a context of more intense and self-active struggle against its oppressor and also against itself, to the extent that the group retains its once-essential characteristics of subordination and exploitation. It is this stage of the development of consciousness that Goldmann considers to be the object of genuine sociological analysis.

The “essential social characteristics” of the working class are the conditions of its place in the system of capitalist relations of production: labor, its subjection to exploitation and subordinate status within the social whole, and its alienation from the liberating self-activity that can make its members fully human. These are features of the lives of members of the working class that are knowable when they fully and critically assess the reality of capitalist society. For Goldmann, these essential characteristics are what must be transformed to the extent that the class itself disappears at a future point in history once the conditions of the nature of class existence have been overcome.

Two points should be noted. First, Goldmann does not argue that the social group disappears merely because of its heightened consciousness of problematic conditions of existence. Rather, the implication is that each of the essential conditions of its existence becomes an object of knowledge and a site of struggle. As the contradictions are transformed, the social group and its members become something else: more autonomous, more self-active, more human. With regard to class, it becomes something other than the working class was intended to be in relation to its creator, the capitalist class. Second, Goldmann notes conditions under which such transformation will not take place; that is, what he considered the nonsociological stages of conscious development. The first stage Goldmann notes is one in which the communication of possible alternatives to a specific level of consciousness is not viable due to a problem of “reception” because the group has no prior information with which to assess new knowledge about its circumstances. A second stage of analysis focuses on the individual members of a group, namely problems found in individual biographies

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(personality problems) that disallow or discourage consideration of new knowledge. Neither of these stages is sociological from Goldmann’s point of view (1977a, 33–34).

A third stage that Goldmann regards as peripheral to proper sociological analysis is an active resistance to new knowledge because of the “real consciousness” of a particular group, the problem of reification. They may become aware of new, transformative knowledge and even adopt possible alternatives for their group. But because of the superficiality of their consciousness, whatever transformation may occur will “not place the group’s existence in question” (1977a, 34). That is, the group will still see as legitimate or insurmountable the subordination of its own consciousness and its concrete relations as these have been structured by another social group. Such a level of consciousness will be sustained as long as the group does not fully understand that its present structure is a product of its function required by the larger structure of the society of which it is a part. In terms of the working class, this lower level of consciousness will be sustained if members of the class do not consider their function to be an expression of class conflict and the reification that characterizes class relations of domination and subordination. Thus the working class can alter its conditions of existence only if its members engage in collective self-assessment of their conditions of subordination.

Considering these different levels of reception—the conditions of communicative interaction, and his belief that Lukács’s orientation to consciousness required the direct connection of thought to action—illuminates Goldmann’s contention that there can be no distinction between a conservative or a dialectical sociology except as a false dichotomy. For Goldmann, sociology can only be legitimately developed as a “consciousness of class” or of particular social groups in terms of both their structured limitations and the possibilities of their transformation (1969, 44). The concern with class transformation, which is also a concern for potential consciousness, is in Goldmann’s view “the fundamental concept in the historical and social sciences” (1969, 112). Further, the maximum potential consciousness of a social group possesses an additional and crucial quality, that of mediation. According to

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Goldmann, there are two levels of knowledge in the natural sciences: the applicability of the theoretical to the empirical, and the actual level of learning (the state of knowledge) in existence at the moment of research (1969, 118). In history and sociology there is a third, mediating level of knowledge—maximum potential consciousness itself. The unavoidable question is who—what group, by what means, etc.—inside or outside the social group or class, will develop this mediating element in order to raise the level of consciousness and knowledge?

Goldmann’s sociological perspective on the development of class consciousness is clearly different from the views we will encounter in the following chapter. His perspective can be connected to Marx’s historical necessity, Lenin’s solution to the constraints on conscious development faced by the working class, and Lukács’s concept of imputed class consciousness. Together these constitute a systematic theoretical perspective and the basis of an organizational program. It is also evident that Goldmann does not accept the claim that Marx and Engels’s assertion about what the proletariat will be compelled to do is anything like historical inevitability.

Finally, notwithstanding differences between “social group” and “class” in Goldmann’s work (Evans 1981, 29), his use of the term “social group” is significant for the argument here although Goldmann acknowledges the “privileged” position of class—the proletariat—in Lukács’s work and in his own (Goldmann 1969, 101, 128; 1974, 4; 1977b, 49, 61). However, his insights into the structuring of behavior, ideas, and action in social groups other than classes do at least two things. First, they affirm that class formation is a dynamic process, shaped initially by the dominant economic, political, and cultural forces in society, but the transformation of classes occurs through a variety of internal and external influences, reactions, and counterpressures. Second, in social groups other than classes, we see many of the same forces at work, but we see them as affirmations of the first point. We also see the potential within a greater variety of groups to discover the same determinants that are so crucial to forming a specific class to serve the interests of capitalism. Such determinants of exploitation, subordination, alienation, and so on, are manifested and reacted to differently with more or

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less intensity and over greater or lesser amounts of time. The task for advocates of working-class action cannot be to dismiss the importance of these other components of history; it is to combine with them as a means of developing a level of consciousness that affirms that in creating and reproducing the working class, capitalism has created the collective body that cuts across the boundaries of all other social groups—gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.—and gives notice to those groups of the power evident in capital’s most important object of reification.

In the following chapter we will examine three sociological studies that assign to the working class a more pragmatic, less developed, less autonomous, and less confrontational role. These analyses offer working people the opportunity of sheltering their subjectivities from the historical influence of working-class achievements and prospects. These perspectives expect less from the contemporary worker and justify diminished expectations as empathy for the conditions under which they live and labor.

Working-class organizers, whether trade unionists or members of radical political parties, expect difficulties as a result of the integrative pressures in capitalist society. What makes this work more difficult is not the introduction of partisan political arguments into workers’ everyday lives and cultural institutions, but the academic legitimation of a less than historically necessary attitude among working people toward their own experience and its future possibilities.

NOTES

1. Lukács’s use of the term terror is in no way related to the contemporary phenomena of airline sabotage and suicide bombing. In 1940 Lukács offered a clarification in reference to a passage from Lenin: terror is a spontaneous manifestation of “the passionate indignation of intellectuals, who lack the ability or opportunity to connect the revolutionary struggle and the working class movement into an integral whole” (1981, 207).

2. It is worth noting that Lukács never rejected these ethical principles, although he regretted their bureaucratic, “cynical degeneration” (156–57).