Chapter Two
Historical Necessity as Self-Activity
Copyright: Robert Lanning, 2009
In general . . . this alliance between interest and such an idea [of the dissolution of capitalist society] was absolutely
not doubted by Marx, or even seen as a problem; that it seems possible at all is obviously based on this:
that the human Will to happiness has not been completely corrupted, that the Will as revolutionary class interest is
morally already more easily defined, or at least becomes definable, through the simple fact of the commonality of
willing.
—Ernst Bloch
Marx’s basic division of capitalist society into two classes is based on the conditions and resources of each class: the bour-geois class as owners of the means of production, for whom such resources extract surplus value from the labor of others, and the working class that sells its labor power as a means of survival and under some circumstances as a means of prospering relative to those above them in the division of labor. The organization of modern capitalist societies may not be so clearly divided into these two class domains, and this has led to complications in the field of sociology in addressing class at both the level of structure and with respect to consciousness. A Marxist analysis of class is an analysis of the social order as a whole. Societies in which the resources of capitalism are diffused to some extent across social strata, or where portions of the working class tend toward upward social mobility, retain the essential characteristics of capitalist
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society discussed by Marx. As Ollman has pointed out, the eco-nomic and social conditions of a class also imply boundaries between itself and another class (1971, 121). Within and across those boundaries, social and economic conditions determine the likelihood of satisfying needs and the means by which this can be done, the content and arrangement of culture with respect to them interests of particular classes, and the general character of individuals within it.
Emphasizing the basic division helps to avoid the quagmire that engulfs much sociological research on class. There is no avoiding the objective reality that the working class did not create itself but that capitalism as a social system required a subordinate and exploitable class to sustain and develop itself, and that this necessity for the capitalist class has not altered fundamentally, although the character of the relationship has. In contrast to other classes, the working class, properly conceived, is “based exclusively on [its] role in the capitalist system of production” (Lukács 1971a, 59). Class is based on, but not limited to, this direct economic relation. Certainly it is evident that as nonowners of the means of production the working class exhibits a range of lifestyles and quality of living conditions from the very poorest to relatively well-off and secure. Although it is recognized that gradations of consciousness exist, like differences in conditions, it cannot be rationally argued that such gradations correspond to multiple demarcations of socioeconomic status. Such an approach would deter the Marxist trajectory of class consciousness from the discovery of its historical necessity and offer credibility to the calculative rationality that is claimed to govern class interests and actions. A study concerned with a complex system of stratification
that purports to be about multiple classes would be an empirical description of socioeconomic strata at these different levels and would diminish the substantive economic and political causes of class formation. Since our interest here is to demonstrate the inseparability of class from consciousness and from the struggle with the opposing class, a further division of society into additional classes is counterproductive. While recognizing intraclass differences, we will refrain from such sociological descriptions of
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the strata within the working class (or society as a whole) and the probabilities for the upward mobility of some of its members. In Lukács’s analysis, as in Marx’s, what is crucial is not the differences of status or position as such within a class, although these do carry a measure of analytical importance, but the ontological status of those differences “within the totality of the socio-historical process” (Lukács 1971a, 324).
Beyond its actuality as a class, the working class, properly conceived, remains most significant because of the historical efforts and concrete achievements of its organized sectors. Such achievements have become part of the objective knowledge of social life as it is, as it has been changed, and through which, for generations, a socialist future has been envisioned. Thus Marx held that any society founded on class differences, and on the assumption that those differences are antagonistic, requires an “oppressed class” as a “vital condition,” he further contended that, “The emancipation of the oppressed class thus implies necessarily the creation of a new society” (1976a, 211). If this basic orientation of Marx’s is not continually reaffirmed, the terms “class” and “working class” are only terms of sociological convenience.
Intraclass distinctions, class culture, and social mobility, among other possible considerations, indicate the broadening of a definition of class beyond the differences between owners and nonowners of the means of production, or levels of socioeconomic status in the division of labor. Marx’s comments on community, nation, and political organization (noted in the previous chapter) are indications of the possible development of a cultural analysis of class. However, if a conception of class is not firmly grounded in Marx’s basic criteria and in the historical achievements of politically organized working classes since Marx’s time, the other considerations may run too far afield, thus losing connection with the essence of capitalism itself.
It must be emphasized, however, that Marx’s concept of class is not a rigid base-superstructure model. Effectively, everything that may be conceived as “working class culture” is a product of its relation to a dominant class and the system of production relations. Such a culture is subject to change when economic
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conditions commanded by its opposing class are modified. More importantly in terms of an organized response to such power, such a conception of class culture is subject to radical change when the working class achieves consciousness of itself and pursues a path of deliberate self-destruction as a class of subordinate people. If the working class, in Marx’s conception, develops interests and consciousness essential to undoing itself as a class and sets the stage for the creation of a new society based on universal human interest, it speaks and acts simultaneously for its own sake and for others outside its class boundaries. In expressing this duality of interests it opens itself as a class to all those who share the interests that the working class develops on the basis of its comprehensive understanding of oppression, disadvantage, exploitation, and alienation in capitalist society, as well as its future vision for humanity as a whole. This is as relevant in the contemporary period as it was in Marx’s day.
Thus the orthodox Marxist conceptualization of the working class includes its symbolic and factual history. While the future role ascribed to the working class is the “means by which humanity liberates itself” (Lukács 1975b, 6), the purpose ascribed to it theoretically must be a purpose it consciously ascribes to itself when its members are able and interested in doing so.
The discussion of consciousness should recognize the distinction but should avoid a false dichotomy between class and trade union consciousness. It has been rightly assumed in the history of Marxism (particularly Lenin’s position, discussed below) that trade-union consciousness is narrower and more instrumentally oriented to immediate goals, but it is a form of consciousness that taps into the spontaneous reaction of the working class to its conditions of existence. While trade-union consciousness has also been seen as a step in the direction of a more comprehensive stage of consciousness, it is not a step that is necessary to achieve the fully developed conception of class for itself.
Historical necessity and class consciousness
In The Holy Family, Marx and Engels conceived of the proletariat as a class capable of doing what “in accordance with [its]
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being, it will historically be compelled to do”: to revolutionize society and to establish conditions to abolish itself as a class (1975a, 37). Istvan Mészáros considers their statement alongside remarks by Antonio Gramsci, who emphasized the development of “social forces” (i.e., the working class in Gramsci’s cryptic language) as an objective development and as a “force of will” that is “permanently organized and pre-ordered over a long period, which can be advanced when one judges the situation is favourable (and it is favourable only to the extent to which such a force exists and is full of fighting ardour)” (Gramsci, qu. in Mészáros 1971, 85).1 Gramsci’s statement qualifies “historical necessity,” but not differently than Marx and Engels, who assert that the historical action of the proletariat is contingent on its “life situation,” and that the direction of the proletariat’s action and its consciousness is developed within specific historical and social conditions. The quality and character of the proletariat’s life situation is contingent not only on the resources found and developed within those material social conditions, but on the substance of consciousness developed within the working class itself.
It is crucial to point out the structure of Marx and Engels’s statement above. It is not what the proletariat is compelled to do, but what it will be compelled to do. The structure of the sentence is future oriented and contingent; something, it is implied, will occur to bring forward a realization that a specific course of action must be undertaken to achieve a particular goal. That something must be discovered, learned, and developed.
From his objective idealist perspective, Hegel argued that what actually exists contains an essential unity of necessity, contingency, and possibility. Discussing this position, Marcuse stated that “it is the essence of the actual to be more and other than what it is at any point” (1987, 96). Actuality, therefore, is always moving toward the realization of the potential of a social phenomenon and what is possible for the future becoming. From a historical materialist perspective, in other words, elements of the future condition are contained, undeveloped, in the concrete reality of the moment. Thus, necessity, the realization of possibility, comes about, in part, through the myriad of contingent relations encountered and how
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those relations are mediated. From a non-Marxist perspective, Brown (1988) points out that necessity should be understood in terms of available resources, conditions, and information. Putting the issue in terms of the individual’s cognitive processes, Brown writes, “the existence of a necessary tie between the available information and a rationally acceptable result allows us to understand why all rational individuals who start at the same point must arrive at the same conclusion” (1988, 14–15).
Contingency, possibility within actuality, and “available information,” are merely mechanical senses of necessity if two further conditions are not fully considered. First, if there were not a variety of possible contingent relations in reality, the movement of history would be rather unproblematic, a matter of mere description rather than of critical assessment of these factors and an emphasis—a relatively autonomous choice—on the value of one or some factors and alternatives over others. The second consideration is what mediates intentionality. While Brown’s logic is fundamentally correct, economic conditions, reification, and the existence of a viable political force are factors that explain, from a Marxist perspective, why all individuals do not proceed from the same starting position and why they may not arrive at the same conclusions. Thus the Hegelian concept of mediation is an essential consideration: “To this extent the means [mediation] is superior to the finite ends of external purposiveness: the plough is more honorable than are the immediate enjoyments procured by it and which are ends. The tool lasts while the immediate enjoyments pass away and are forgotten” (Hegel, qu. in Anderson 1995, 69; cf. Parkinson 1970, 127; erratum: the reference should be to Hegel’s Science of Logic, Miller trans.747). The mediating element, such as a political party, a social movement, or a conscious minority, may be the means by which people become aware of their unequal positions as well as the means by which the differences might be diminished.
The concrete actions of the European working class were evidence of contingent events and conditions mediating the recognition and realization of historical necessity. Following their fundamental passage quoted above, Marx and Engels write, “There is no need here to show that a large part of the English
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and French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and is consciously working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity” (1975a, 37). This is evidence that “historical necessity” is not predetermined, that it does not simply emerge from the agglomeration or evolution of historical events, but must be actively developed by historical subjects. Bertell Ollman remarks that the development of class consciousness is a potential “rooted in a situation unfolding before our eyes, long before the understanding of real people catches up with it” (1993, 157). This does not refer to history operating by itself, as its own motive force, but refers to the existence of resources available by which consciousness can be developed, and these are resources previously developed by human beings in their various forms of social interaction. Historical necessity acquires its status as a historical law only through this kind of conscious action developed as it is in the context of objective social conditions. One such objective condition, as Gramsci argued, is economic crisis, which “can only create a more favorable ground for the propagation of certain ways of thinking, of posing and solving questions” (Mészáros 1971, 85).2 Conscious action, i.e., the development of consciousness, is as much an element of orthodox Marxism as the formation of classes through economic relations. Historical necessity is immanent in the complex of social and historical conditions in which the proletariat finds itself, so long as it becomes conscious of itself and the necessary mediation of the potential within that complex.
Mészáros uses the passages from Gramsci and from Marx and Engels to illustrate the distinction and dialectical relationship between contingent and necessary class consciousness. Contingent class consciousness, Mészáros argues, is more limited; it is concerned with contradictions of the system but at a local or immediate level relevant to the particular conditions of a specific class. But such local or immediate conditions are the springboards that serve to motivate a positive orientation toward understanding necessary consciousness. Necessary class consciousness is an expression of the development of consciousness based on knowledge of the “objective contradictions of the socio-economic system” (Mészáros 1971, 120). This level of consciousness is more
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than an awareness of problems inherent in this kind of society; necessary consciousness comes about only upon an awareness of the possibility of an alternative and the deliberate pursuit of that alternative. This form of consciousness denotes a process of development with visible resources and programmatic organization, and as such is a choice between alternatives. There is no genetically driven development of it in the brain, no supernatural power that discloses essential knowledge on its own terms, no historical process that guarantees its development. Thus Mészáros argues that the idea of “imputed class consciousness,” which is central to Lukács’s Marxism, is already contained in Marx and Engels’s early formulation of the proletariat’s historical necessity. What the proletariat will be “compelled” to do will develop through a progressively more comprehensive consciousness and an expanding range of self-activity; these constitute the dialectical completion of historical necessity. A key point here is that necessary class consciousness is at once a cognitive and ethical development; it may be influenced by, but is not entirely subject to, what develops out of contingent class consciousness.
The historically necessary goals of the proletariat (its pursuit of socialism and the negation of itself as a class) require mediating
elements integral to other historically appropriate concrete conditions for emergence. The working class does not know intuitively what it will be compelled to do, for intuition contains no mediating element (Lukács 1980b, 34). Rather, the knowledge of the working class comes about through its intentional self-activity in working through and reasoning about the contradictions of capitalist relations of production and the historical development of itself as a class in capitalism and in engagement with mediating elements in the struggle. This is the class-specific form of the generalized self-activity that, even from Hegel’s objective idealist perspective, produces and has the potential to fully develop human beings (Lukács 1975c, 432, 538). Marx and Engels emphasize the potential that can be developed by the class as a collective and driving force for social change; but that is a force of an actively developing class consciousness focused primarily on the necessity of class struggle. Thus attention should be drawn to the dialectical
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foundation of their statement, comparable to Marx’s discussion of labor time in the Grundrisse; that is, evidence of mediation as a rational, objective activity diffused throughout social reality (1986–87, 107–9).
The proletariat’s compulsion, to which Marx and Engels refer, is relevant, first, in the context of their argument that the proletariat as a class is “the abstraction of all humanity,” in the sense that “the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form,” and that consciousness of these conditions requires overcoming them in an organized effort that will culminate in the negation of the class itself as well as the economic and social order responsible for the creation of that class. The proletariat advances only by becoming conscious of itself and the necessity of its own negation. Its termination as a class is the height of its consciousness in bourgeois society. Marx and Engels argued that this principle holds regardless of “what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim.” But once the idea of historical necessity, understood as a choice between alternatives, becomes a fact of consciousness and a value judgment on capitalist society, it takes the status of a material force of self-activity for at least some portion of the class. At that juncture, what “this or that proletarian” thinks or does with objective historical conditions, in conjunction with other proletarians, acquires a dialectical and organizational priority. In the face of poverty, exploitation, or racism, it is precisely the decisions “this or that proletarian” will take that contribute to making the difference for developing and sustaining a social movement to ameliorate those social conditions (Marx and Engels 1975a, 36–37).
In other words, what the proletariat will be compelled to do out of historical necessity becomes meaningful and possible if some proletarians deliberately develop a level of consciousness beyond that which is instrumentally useful in their immediate circumstances and instead take a course of action designed systematically to address the problems of which they have become conscious. The knowledge and consciousness of the working class contribute to the formation of the objective possibilities in society
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and to the class struggle of the proletariat. Thus what the individual proletarian thinks or does is relevant dialectically in the sense of the universality of historical necessity and the particular individual determinants of conscious action. Historical necessity cannot be realized through this process alone; it becomes meaningful through the development of individual consciousness and the “maturation of . . . objective conditions,” a process that can only take place by way of political organization, institutional arrangements, and social movements that mediate what the individual thinks or does in the objective social conditions (Mészáros 1971, 93).
A worker’s thoughts are subjective when they are oriented only toward their immediate needs. Thoughts exist as such until they take an objective form in which they are expressed externally and organized, when they are mediated through some element of objective reality in a way that extends thought and consequent action beyond the thinker or speaker. The process of mediation is not merely to draw out the subjective and situate it in a more collaborative environment, but to subject it to the influence of objective reality as history, as a programmatic political movement, and as self-conscious reflection. The comment regarding what “this or that proletarian” thinks or does serves to acknowledge that the immediate level of consciousness of individual workers may be underdeveloped and conflicted by the nature of their class existence. This is what Goldmann referred to as “real consciousness,” i.e., what people actually think at a given point in time in a specific set of circumstances (1977a, 32). The concept corresponds with Lukács’s “psychological consciousness”; both are expressions of limited, underdeveloped consciousness.
Arato and Brienes (1979, 132–33) point out that Lukács’s apparent working out of his different solutions to the problem of the self-abolition of the proletariat occurred much earlier in his career, in two chapters of History and Class Consciousness written two years apart. In the essay, “Class Consciousness,” Lukács stresses objective historical laws of social and revolutionary development. In “Reification and Class Consciousness” the emphasis on the dissolution of the class lies in the self-consciousness of
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the proletariat itself (see, especially, Lukács 1971a, 180–81). But in other contexts (1980b, 120–23), he addressed the problem of necessity by developing a materialist principle from Hegel. Necessity is a causal process that is open to mastery once the objectivity of “lawfulness” becomes conscious in human beings and cognitive intervention is consciously undertaken. As Somerville (1974, 277–78) argued, when Marx implied or suggested inevitability, the goal he asserted could be realized only if a specified program of preparation and action was followed. From a dialectical perspective, historical necessity has an element of an “if . . . then” philosophical relation. As we will see below, this requires a certain orientation to “objective possibility” and, more specifically, the action implied in Lukács’s concept of imputed class consciousness, an idea already contained in Marx’s comments on the Communards’ conscious action and development. However, as discussed in the following section, Lukács further developed an understanding of the revolutionary import of tensions and contradictions between the individual and the economic system.
Another example from Marx’s writings helps to clarify the concept of historical necessity. He wrote about what “the workers know” regarding the importance for their struggle of the ascent to power of the bourgeoisie over feudal monarchies (1976b, 332–33). Although revolutionary interest was stirring in 1847 when Marx first wrote about this, the statement was largely theoretical; that is, it anticipated the development of proletarian consciousness based upon his assessment of its objective possibility. When he returned to a discussion of “what the workers know” in 1871, while writing the first draft of The Civil War in France, it was in reference to what the Parisian proletariat had come to know concretely through their struggles to establish the Commune; namely, that they could “not expect miracles from the Commune,” that the struggle would necessarily take place over a period of time “through a series of historical processes . . . against capital and landed property,” and through the “development of new conditions.” At that historical juncture the workers knew both concretely and theoretically “that great strides may be taken at once through the Communal form of political organization and that the time has come to begin that
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movement for themselves and mankind.” The action of the working class of Paris did not emerge as a compulsion of unknown origins, but as a political and ethical choice of which the proletariat had become conscious through their experience of capitalism, their struggle with an opposing class, and their exposure to and appropriation of a different way of comprehending and addressing their problems as a class (Marx 1986, 335, 491–92).
This meaning of the individual component of working class organization was taken up by Lenin in one of his earliest polemics, “What the ‘Friends of the People’ Are and How They Fight the Social Democrats” ([1894] 1960). He dealt with the issue of the individual in history and more immediately in the organization of the social-democratic movement. His primary target in this polemic was the Narodnik, N. K. Mikailovsky, who argued for the recognition of historical necessity as an immanent driving force that subordinates, and even negates, the significance of individual action. The idea that individuals are activated and manipulated by historical necessity undermines the notion of an idealistic voluntarism of the individual as the great shaper of social transformation. Individual will and historical necessity, in Mikailovsky’s view, appeared to be two extreme points of a worldview that avoided the more important discussion of the relationship between individual action and the historical laws of movement and change. Lenin, substituting “determinist” for historical necessity, argued that it is “only the determinist view [that] makes a strict and correct appraisal possible instead of attributing everything you please to free will” ([1894] 1961, 59). He was referring to the necessity of discovering the conditions under which historical events occur, a meaning that heightens the feasibility of individual action in this discovery and the range of options available while acting on them. “Similarly the idea of historical necessity does not in the least undermine the role of the individual in history: all history is made up of the actions of individuals, who are undoubtedly active figures. The real question that arises in appraising the social activity of an individual is: what conditions ensure the success of his actions, what guarantee is there that these actions will not remain an isolated act lost in a welter of contradictory acts?”
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(159; emphasis added). Thus the subjective factor is already a feature of Lenin’s revolutionary theory and is sustained dialectically by the form of organization he developed.
The tension between the objective and subjective at both the theoretical and the rhetorical levels is a continuous presence and problem in Marxist theory. This is evident in Lukács’s early and late writings. His identification of subject and object in the proletariat was in part grounded in the belief that in liberating itself the proletariat would liberate humanity because it was the only class not interested in its own continuation, but this implied an inherent relationship between the proletariat’s liberation and human freedom. Goldmann referred to this “exceptional perspective” of the proletariat as “the weakest part of the Lukácsian analysis” (1977b, 61). In this sense, Marx’s statements on historical necessity are sometimes taken up, or appear to be so rhetorically, in an undialectical manner that sets up the historical subject, the proletariat, for a role without agency in a context of action without mediation.
In summary, what the proletariat “will be compelled to do” rests on a consciousness of the contradictions of capitalism and the consciousness of a possible alternative; that is, when the working class possesses a consciousness of itself within a complex of the immediate conditions of society and production relations, and a consciousness of the historical development of these conditions. This consciousness is the dialectical completion of the knowledge of historical necessity that develops from self-activity and therefore requires mediation. Commenting on the development of characters in literature—but equally relevant to other aspects of reality—Lukács recognized that so much of that development has to do with a “decision which has altered the direction of [an individual’s] life” (1963, 23).
Knowledge, value, and consciousness
Ollman’s approach to class can be seen as a development of Marx and Engels’s original propositions. He proposes an orientation to class that requires inclusion of consciousness and class struggle and is, therefore, essentially political. He argues that class consciousness is a process of becoming, the development
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of potential or “future class consciousness.” He writes, “studying workers’ class consciousness . . . is looking for what is not there, not yet present in the thinking of real workers, as well as for what is” (1993, 155, 160). What is there is some evidence of what Goldmann and Lukács, respectively, say is “real” or “psychological” consciousness. But while class consciousness is something “waiting to happen,” as Ollman says, it is, in effect, actually awaiting mediated development.
He suggests six points for developing and assessing the existence of class consciousness: 1) subjective and objective identity and interests of membership in a class; 2) some knowledge of the dynamics of capitalism, “at least enough to grasp [its] objective interests”; 3) the “broad outlines of class struggle and where one fits into it”; 4) some sense of solidarity with other class members, suggesting the importance of being similarly situated; 5) a “rational hostility toward opposition classes” which he states is distinguished from “feelings of mutual indifference and inner-class competition that accompany alienation”; and 6) a “vision of a more democratic and egalitarian society that is not only possible but is a condition individuals can help bring about.” The last point should include something of how such a vision may be generated and what sort of people is needed to do so, a vision that retains the necessary connection between the present and the future so that such a perspective avoids utopianism (155).
With regard to interests (Ollman’s first point), no group of people can begin to cohere if there are no recognized common interests among them. Marx’s basic statement on what constitutes a class (in The Eighteenth Brumaire, already quoted) includes common interests as well as antagonistic relations with another class. The conditions of which he wrote were the objective consequences of capitalist production relations. From the point of view of the working class, these are interests generated and further developed from a consciousness of common conditions: interest in common human conditions, the possibility of realizing individual and collective aspirations, and the possibility of a common response to them. For Marx and Engels, collective interests of the class are those that will be generally represented in the society
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they control if the class succeeds to power (1976, 47). The common interests of everyday life include, among other things; a sense of security of person (health and psychological well-being); decent housing and food; provision for educational opportunities; and meaningful, nonexploitative, nonalienating work. But there are also political interests developed initially, at least by a minority of the class whose consciousness provides a basis for classwide knowledge of capitalism; that is, an understanding of the relation of people to the system as a whole, who are not deterred from feelings of hostility toward the opposing class, and who possess a vision of a future society. In other words, some degree of each of Ollman’s six points must be evident in the maturation of class consciousness as a means of developing the class itself. Some interests of this more advanced fragment of the class will include a greater degree of relative autonomy of the individual, sufficient consciousness to make ethical choices, and some understanding of the need for collective organization.
These interests are framed overall by discoverable knowledge in historically necessary actions. This conception of interests differs considerably from Weber’s standard sociological perspective that reduces the potential of collective interests to reified relations between purely economic actors. One focus of Lukács’s critique of Weber was the latter’s “ascribing to ideological phenomena an ‘immanent’ development arising out of the phenomena themselves” (Lukács 1980a, 604) by which could be understood that “interests . . . directly govern the actions of men” (Weber qu. in Lukács 1980a, 605, emphasis added). Weber’s concern to define action predominantly within the framework of normative interests and social expectation (1978, 30–31; 1375–80) centered on instrumentally rational actions governed, moreover, by self-interest with socially normative expectations. Custom and behavior that has been designated as normative is based “entirely on the fact that the corresponding type of social action is . . . best adapted to the normal interests of the actors as they themselves are aware of them.” Further, that interests are seen by Weber to directly govern actions is indicated by the anticipation that the conditions of people’s interests are the basis for treating “the corresponding typical
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expectations as to the prospective behavior of others” (Weber 1978, 30; cf. 1375–80).3
Individual and group interests are significant influences on choices and courses of action, but Lukács’s point is that Weber’s conception of normative interests obscures the contradictions of historical relations in capitalist production. Bourgeois class interests condition capitalist production more or less directly on the terrain on which profit is made. Labor power is bought and sold and individual actions are shaped, but the bourgeoisie do not govern absolutely. The logic of Weber’s conception of interests produces a reified view of reality. That is, working people expressing their self-interests in the marketplace may perceive their interests as governing their own and others’ actions. However, as we will see below in the critique of Seccombe and Livingstone’s study, such an orientation merely supports the ideological perspective that the best interests of working people are served when they exercise an appropriate level of calculative rationality.
Knowing something of how capitalism works requires some basic knowledge of the meaning of value. From Lukács’s perspective, such knowledge must bridge the objective interests of production and profit-making on the one hand and ethics on the other. Lukács addresses the relationship between objective social conditions, individual and class interests, and the possible initiatives emerging from this complex in which social being develops. In a discussion of economic values, he makes a connection between social being and value judgments current in specific social contexts that are relevant to Ollman’s second criterion for class consciousness: some knowledge of the dynamics of capitalism; namely, consciousness of such relationships and processes that effect the value of the producer and those who are supported through the producer’s labor power (1978, 75ff.; 1975a, 75–77). The essence of Lukács’s argument, derived from Marx, lies in his “resolution” of the problem of objective structures (conditions) and subjective or individual intentions. As the quantity of values produced in society increases, socially necessary labor time decreases; the exchange value of the labor of individuals and social classes diminishes under this basic principle of capitalist
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production. Individuals produce economic value by working inside the system of production. But the structure of the relations of production operates independently of the people who produce those values. However, because it is they who expend the labor power to produce commodities and who engage in consumption in the marketplace, this is a relative rather than absolute independence. This fundamental contradiction of capitalism denotes a concrete set of circumstances more easily recognized in times of economic downturn—that the economic and social value of the individuals who produce less diminishes more. There is an objective reduction in labor time to produce the same volume of products and, therefore, a diminished amount of labor power required. This in turn diminishes the value of each individual sum of labor power, and by extension reduces the number of workers engaged in productive, remunerative work. The social and economic value of each worker is generally subject to diminution in this way. Workers might be shifted to another sector of production, but such shifting or jettisoning of labor, along with the possible reduction of living standards, is itself an expression of the variable value of the laborers as a human quantity of productive power. All this is less obvious in periods of relative economic stability or growth. But the fact that it is less obvious during such times is attributable to the power of reification, the belief that a period of relatively good times diminishes the existence of the fundamental and enduring contradictions of capitalism that devalue human life in good and bad times alike.
Lukács argues that “all these objective relationships, process, etc., although they maintain themselves and operate independent of the intentions of the individual human acts in which they are embodied, nevertheless only arise as the realization of these [individual] intentions, and can only develop further [i.e. the objective relationships, process, etc.] by way of their reaction back on further individual human acts” (1978, 76). He insists on the relationship that continually illuminates the interaction between the individual and the social structure. The distinguishing feature of his discussion is its emphasis on the subjective factor in initiating an intentional reasoning about such relationships, and the way in
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which this leads to a weakening of the barriers formed by reification. This passage also emphasizes the embodiment of objective economic relations in the actions of individuals, indicating the integral connection between objective conditions and individual human actions. This is intended to draw attention to the importance of knowing this relationship as a means of diminishing the distance between the relations of production experienced in everyday life as work and the potential impact on those productive relations that can be brought about by a developed consciousness of them and action against them.
The reified mind sees objective relations such as those of production as merely a normative characteristic of economic relations as such. The Marxist perspective understands this, from the point of view of capitalism, as an intentional and necessary devaluation of human capacities and interests, shaping them to serve the most banal interests of profitable commodity production. As Lukács points out, the objectivity of the economic system in producing economic values nevertheless exists alongside a subjective factor, the value “judgments that men make of it from the most varied standpoints and the most varied motives” (1978, 75). Thus, it is a value judgment on the part of those who own the means of production and manage the economy to treat people, via the exploitation of their labor power, as more or less valuable commodities, an evaluation that can fluctuate throughout the economic cycle. The active or passive acceptance of that value judgment is an expression of the consensual element in hegemony.
But such consensus is established often with the recognition that the problem rests in a known, albeit underdeveloped and unanalyzed relation between capital and labor. Consequently, alternative value judgments are in order. Marcuse argued that “any critical theory of society . . . confronted with the problem of historical objectivity” must address two central points that imply value judgments: “the judgment that human life is worth living, or rather can be and ought to be made worth living” and “the judgment that, in a given society, specific possibilities exist for the amelioration of human life and specific ways and means of realizing these possibilities” (1964, x).
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To return to the point of inevitability noted above, many working people accept their life-trajectory simply as an aspect of the system working as it is intended. This is implied in the studies discussed in chapter 4. They are aware of their subordination but are either not knowledgeable of its specific origins and processes or uncertain of considering an alternative set of relations; but they are aware, at the level of appearance at least, of subordination as an expression of their value as individual producers in capitalist society. Do they understand this value to be diminished with respect to the independent action of the structure of economic relations or with respect to society as a whole? Do they understand that it is possible and necessary to make an alternative value judgment as a result of their awareness?
In terms of the way economic and social value is created, the mechanics of capitalism indicates something of, in Ollman’s terms, the “broad outlines of class struggle and where one fits into it.” The workings of the system are subject to change through their integral relation with liberal democratic political structures, by the variable probabilities of social mobility, and by periodic advancement or setbacks in contractual relations. Immediate conflicts between labor and capital (strikes, repressive labor legislation, etc.) may not be understood by some workers as class-relevant knowledge indicating systemic contradictions. Thus it is important to consider whether such conflicts are expected by individuals to be fundamentally based on the exploitation of themselves and like-situated others; that is, that the historical basis of the conflict between classes is the power to either improve or further devalue their labor, their production, and their social being.
The problem must be seen as economic, political, and ethical, and therefore awareness of it may of necessity be generated from outside the class as much or more than from within the class. One object of open and immediate conflict between labor and capital is that knowledge of the conditions of production and exploitation is based on the exposure of contradictions within the socioeconomic system as a whole. Without this, the contradiction itself will not be developed nor will the significance of the contradiction serve as a springboard for organized action. Lack of such knowledge is
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one of the conditions that allow the “inward barrier” to develop against consciousness.
Given the impact of reifying influences, “rational hostility” toward the property-owning class, as an organized, comprehensive response to common conditions, is not inherent in the relations of production, although a spontaneous and momentary hostility might be. Rather, a rational hostility, if it is to mean anything, must develop and endure over some period of time and through changing circumstances. Such a rational and sustained reaction needs to be based at minimum on an awareness of the deliberate intention underlying the exploitative character of capitalist relations, and awareness that the relative inflexibility of capital in the face of challenges from below is sustained by a range of institutionally based powers. This is the only way Ollman’s distinction between “feelings of mutual indifference and inner-class competition” makes sense.
Ollman addresses the last issue in his study of alienation, which includes an important chapter on class as a value relation (1971, 205–14). Mutual indifference and intraclass competition reflect social values people adopt in part because of their awareness of how capitalism works—its need for a competitive environment in which the exploited compete to be exploited regardless of the similarity of their circumstances.
Mészáros’s conception of class supports Ollman’s. Mészáros argues a) that a forward looking conception of class cannot exist without class consciousness; b) that class consciousness cannot exist without an understanding of the necessary struggle with another class; and c) that an intentional effort to locate and develop the kind of knowledge that will produce a consciousness of class is an intentional process that distinguishes class consciousness as a higher level of existence. Despite his later criticism of Lukács’s view of consciousness (discussed here in chapter 6) Mészáros writes: “Proletarian class consciousness is, therefore, the worker’s consciousness of his social being as embedded in the necessary structural antagonism of capitalist society, in contrast to the contingency of group consciousness which perceives only a more or less limited part of the global confrontation” (1971, 101).
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There is a simple, common element in the discussion of class thus far: learning. None of the scholars noted, beginning with Marx and Engels, take either class or class consciousness for granted. Class and class consciousness are developed through exposure to aspects of reality, such as work, poverty, and exploitation, but also to a frame of reference through which such experiences can be reasoned into concrete analysis. This cannot come about simply as an act of will on the part of the individual, but rather as an act of collective effort, notwithstanding the fact that initial interest may be attributed to the individual. The process requires concrete elements including information, objective knowledge, and a clearly defined theoretical perspective.
But ultimately, Marxists have concentrated on what is considered necessary to be learned in order to develop consciousness and to act upon it. This seems to have been more or less continually criticized as an inappropriate vehicle of class development. Other aspects of this issue will be discussed later, but Robert Mayer’s (1997) concern over the “obvious authoritarian implications” of Lenin’s bringing of socialist ideas to the working class from outside, and Thompson’s concern (discussed in chapter 7) about the “substitution” of party for class, are examples of this view. At issue is Lenin’s central principle of the development of proletarian consciousness: “that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness” (1961, 375). Marx asserted essentially the same in The Eighteenth Brumaire, as noted above. But Lenin advocated an approach quite the opposite of either authoritarianism or of mere substitution. One aspect of his argument was that those who would bring this knowledge to workers from outside their immediate class boundaries were “educated representatives of the propertied classes” (1961, 375). Educated is the key word here; he does not say that these representatives are inherently knowledgeable about socialism, Marxism, or anything else. The reference is to members of a class with more resources, privileges, and opportunities who are exposed to philosophical, scientific, socialist, and other knowledge generally not available to a large portion of the working class, except through the vehicle Lenin proposes: study circles of
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students and workers alike. He further distinguishes his argument from one that assumes a capacity for knowledge that is inherent in one class but not the other by advocating that Marxism must be brought to all classes. “The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships of all classes and strata to the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between all classes” (1961, 422). The issue is not, for Lenin, simply knowledge of one class brought to another class; rather, he anticipates that the distinctions between classes engaged in preparing revolutionary activity will be overcome in the revolutionary organization itself, in the equalization of knowledge among previously separated “workers and intellectuals” (1961, 452, 464). We will return to these points below.
There is a basic question that needs to be addressed: Who comprises the working class? Marx’s basic division, noted earlier in this chapter, can be stated essentially as a difference between those who must sell their labor power to survive and those who need not do so. This complicates a clear political division of society into classes. If, as is argued here, class is not defined by education, occupation, or income, then membership in a class cannot be categorically obvious using these criteria. If, on the other hand, class is conceptualized in terms of the recognition of the problems of capitalism and an awareness of the necessity for social change, then membership in the working class is broadened beyond specific, limiting kinds of work and wages to include people engaged in labor possessing a cognitive element that is the underlying capacity to develop interests and, therefore, consciousness. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels alluded to this opening of the occupational boundaries of the working class when they wrote of the possibility of a fraction of the ruling class breaking off to join the ranks of the working class. This did not refer to downward mobility but to the expansion of consciousness in relation to the proletariat’s interest in developing itself into a universal class. Thus, since Marx’s conception of class was intended to encompass more than the industrial production of material goods, class consciousness is not a probability limited to particular categories of labor activity.
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“Postindustrial” capitalism is the context in which this has been most clearly manifested.
Two elements of labor are common to both industrial and postindustrial capitalism: abstract labor and the sale of labor power. Regarding the first, as Sayers (2007) has shown, there is no necessary, exclusionary difference in production in either of these historical contexts. The production of information, communicative activity, and so on, as objectified phenomena, are products of human labor. Creation of a separate category of labor dubbed “bio-power” (Foucault 1980; Hardt and Negri 2000) is counterproductive to Marx’s more comprehensive, single category of labor production. His basic argument regarding abstract labor illustrates this comprehensiveness in that labor of different kinds, producing different types of objects, nevertheless produces value. Equally, labor power contained in all objects of production, is bought and sold in the market regardless of the worker’s location in the system of production, whether at the secretary’s desk, the auto production line, or behind the lectern. While Marx and others after him gave priority to industrial workers, this does not preclude inclusion of nonindustrial workers in the class of those who understand the problems experienced by producers of knowledge, information, syntheses of physical and chemical interactions, and so on. These factors, theoretically, make the boundaries of class permeable and illuminate the potentially unbounded nature of consciousness. We return to this point later.
To summarize, the actions of the working class are not evolutionary or in any way automatic simply because the class can possess the theoretical key for unlocking the forces of social change and the eventual realization of socialist society. Nothing compels this but the self-activity of the class itself and the mediating influences it finds or creates within the environment of capitalist society and class conflict. Neither Ollman’s paradigm of class consciousness nor that of Mészáros can be understood outside of this conscious, deliberate activity. It is developed by a fragment of the working class, and it is bolstered, challenged, and revised by the class itself and by interested others from outside its immediate boundaries. It is a process of collective, tension-filled
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human action that has rarely traveled along a smooth trajectory. The development of class consciousness is a jerky, discontinuous journey with many successes to propel it forward and setbacks that generate rethinking and reorganization.
NOTES
1. Cf. Gramsci (1971, 185), for a slightly different translation.
2. Cf. Gramsci (1971, 184), for a slightly different translation.
3. It is evident that Weber’s approach to interests carries with it something of his methodological interest in “objective possibility.” One can see, however, that this approach is limited by Weber’s logic in contrast to a dialectical perspective. This is discussed in the next chapter.