Chapter Seven
Class Experience, “Substitution,”
and False Consciousness
Copyright 2009 and 2011 by Robert Lanning
These people who cannot pronounce the word “theoretician”without a sneer, who describe their genuflections to a
common lack of training and backwardness as a “sense for the realities of life,” reveal in practice a failure to understand
our most imperative practical tasks.
—V. I. Lenin
E. P. Thompson’s approach to class and class consciousness has been important for its emphasis on the cultural life of the working class as it was developed in the context of emerging capitalism. One of his primary concerns is to avoid a concept of class that is frozen into “structure” or “category”; in general, he rejects the characterization of social phenomena as static. Class defined as a “thing” invites its transformation into a mathematical construct, such as the operationalizing of socioeconomic status we have already noted (cf. Giddens 1987, 209). Mészáros’s rejection of class as an ideal type is important in this context as well; in this he is consistent with Thompson, who was concerned to avoid a sociological reification of class. However, some limitations imposed by Thompson on intervention from outside class boundaries need to be addressed.
The context of Thompson’s major study (1968) is the developing English working class from the late eighteenth century. That period was characterized by the expansion of industrial capitalism
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and migration of the populace from rural areas to growing urban centers. Birth into a class was the chief determinant of class location and of exclusion from other classes. The creation of the working class was a result of specific economic and technological relations “imposed, not upon raw material, but upon the freeborn Englishman” (1968, 213). The “free-born Englishman” was founded on bourgeois rights (85ff.) for which working people agitated from the late eighteenth century but which were increasingly understood to affect different classes in different ways. When class consciousness takes shape, it does so out of the experience of such framing of degrees of freedom and, consequently, the self-activity of the working class as it struggles to accommodate or command the effects of these new relations. For Thompson, class is not a “structure” or a “category” but “something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships” (1968, 8). Although Thompson does understand class in economic terms, his notion of class as a “happening” is problematic. If class is conceptualized in this way, “class consciousness and political action” (Mészáros, 1971, 101) would be arbitrary or spontaneous developments. Class as something that “happens” is a theme that is carried through Thompson’s work; it denotes processes of development of the class that are basically internal, although he considers class to be “largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born—or enter involuntarily” (Thompson 1968, 9). Class consciousness, too, appears to be an intra-class phenomenon centered on “the way these experiences [of production relations] are handled in cultural terms” (1968, 9). Class, in this view, is a set of relationships that people are part of because they have a familial or generational connection to specific sectors of economic production, or a set of relationships into which they have been economically coerced. In other words, one component of a proper definition of class, as we have noted, is that it is an expression of consciousness developed out of the awareness of the contradictions of capitalism and the interests of its bourgeois class which necessitate the creation of a subordinate class in the first instance. It is this inescapable relation of capitalism that establishes the ground upon which individuals and
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groups experience class. The internal cultural development of the class cannot separate it from that essential relation.
Reflecting Ollman’s fifth point, that class consciousness requires a “rational hostility toward opposing classes,” Thompson acknowledges that it is not possible to conceive of a class adequately without also accepting that another class exists whose interests are to some degree antagonistic to it (1968, 8–9). Class and class consciousness are developed, therefore, on some understanding of the structure of the system of production and of differences in economic and political resources possessed by members of divergent classes. People are members of a class because they are born into it or enter it through economic coercion. The development of knowledge of the relations that govern the whole system says much for the capacity of working people to observe, to analyze, and to clarify why they live and work as they do and, presumably, in what ways they might begin to ameliorate their life conditions. This is what Thompson means by considering people to be “creators” of their class, not “vectors,” or mere carriers of class characteristics (1978a, 46). Entry into a class by birth or economic coercion occurs because of the preexistence of determining economic relations. How strong these determining conditions are and how people respond to the experience of these relations—activism, indifference, or acquiescence—are important considerations. Productive relations are a precondition, not the point from which complete identification with a class is secured. Whatever the response to them, class cannot be reduced to productive relations alone, especially as we move forward from the eighteenth century with the development of a more complex division of labor and cultural systems that create more complex mediations between class and the formation of the conscious individual.
For Thompson culture is central to defining class. His discussion of working-class culture suggests it is independent of the culture created by and for service and support of capitalism as a social system. But since such a working-class culture is not and cannot be a socialist culture within capitalism, and since it contains no structures that in themselves create socialism, one must ask to what extent such a view of working-class culture includes
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a commitment to the dissolution of the class. G. M. Tamás (2005) has argued that Thompson’s view is derived from Rousseau rather than Marx, in part because Thompson, like Rousseau, elevates “the people” above society, giving to the people a quality of intuition that permitted them to assess their culture as superior to more sophisticated ones. Tamás argues that Rousseau’s conception of socialism, reflected in Thompson’s view of class, partially consisted of “unmask[ing] the high-falutin pretensions of ruling class doctrine” and in doing so Rousseau treated “the ‘demotic’ as ‘natural’” (4, 7). In other words, the culture of the people was one that reflected the internal logic of the masses, a culture not without development but doing so on its own terms.
But for others such as Mészáros, the cultural aspects of class are housed in capitalism’s “second order mediations,” the family and the state, for example (1995, 399ff.). This brings us back to the point of acknowledging that the working class is created out of necessity by the bourgeois class and that its consciousness develops within the social system in which its creator dominates, thereby conditioning the relations the working class has with other classes. The “objective reality of social existence,” Lukács argued, “is in its immediacy ‘the same’ for both proletariat and bourgeoisie” (1971a, 150). Immediacy is the key point, for it is in the context of capitalist relations that the working class exists as a subordinate class, but also where the relatively autonomous working-class opposition develops. The major distinction between Thompson’s view and Marx’s, suggests Tamás, is the latter’s insistence on the development of the working class toward its abolition, rather than its glorification (2005, 20).
A serious limitation of Thompson’s argument arises in his discussion of static models of class. Lenin’s concept of the vanguard party, of bringing consciousness from outside the working class, is placed in the category of static sociological approaches. Thompson writes, “In one common (usually Leninist) form this provides a ready ‘substitution’: i.e. the vanguard which knows better than the class itself what its true interests (and consciousness) ought to be” (1978b, 148). In other words, in the Leninist view according to Thompson, the working class possesses false
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consciousness, and its success in class formation and struggle lies in the party’s exclusive guidance of that class, and the party’s demand that the working class acquiesce to this outside force. For Thompson this is an unacceptable encroachment into the experience of the working class; experience is its motor of development. Seccombe and Livingstone take Thompson’s view a step further in simplistic analysis: “As it turned out,” they write, “Lenin’s conception of class political knowledge, disseminated by the party from outside the workers’ sphere, played a fateful role in the authoritarian development of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and around the world” (2000, 110).
But this is contrary to both Marx’s and Lenin’s views. Marx argued that a class can find the resources for revolution “directly in its own situation,” as he remarked about the French working class in 1848. However, the French working class made “no theoretical inquiries into its own task. The French working class had not attained this level; it was still incapable of accomplishing its own revolution” (Marx 1978, 56). Because there was no adequate development of a programmatic and organizational base for revolution, including a broadly based program for developing class consciousness centered in a workers’ party (arguably of the character of a Leninist organization), the actions of the French workers remained largely a matter of internally motivated spontaneous class action. Presumably in this situation as well, Thompson would argue against “imposition” of the theoretical guidelines and practical direction from outside that were deemed necessary for the class to possess in order to conceptualize its goals and to achieve them. In his opinion, a Leninist insistence on bringing consciousness to the working class from outside is not an intervention characterized by solidarity of purpose but something that serves the party’s authoritarian political agenda and is inconsistent with the internally defined, popular interests of the working class.
Thompson is attempting to avoid the problem of false consciousness. His elevation of the intuitiveness of the people is an attempt to cancel out the need for extra-class influence. Seccombe and Livingstone share this view, and it is worth briefly exploring this aspect of their argument before returning to Thompson’s. They
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explain false consciousness in a least two ways. First, they recognize that people may have “false ideas about their situation. But far from preventing them from recognizing and acting upon their true interests (as the standard notion of false consciousness implies), these barriers often make it easier to act in self-serving ways in so far as they permit them to believe that their actions are based on higher, more honourable, motives” (2000, 27). In other analyses, “true interests” might well be class-conscious interests, but to Seccombe and Livingstone these are revealed as “self-serving” interests. An attempt to explain this is their example of job competitions in which white applicants who are hired for a position tell themselves they have succeeded on their merits, rather than because of discrimination by the employer.
What then are “true interests”? It appears that these are the interests individuals have and want satisfied for their own purposes. One would expect Seccombe and Livingstone’s argument to proceed as a critique of that individualist notion. But they do not explore the reified thoughts that produce self-serving actions. Rather, while such self-serving interests “mean that more inclusive reasoning . . . is often difficult to sustain because it rubs against the grain of our own narrow and immediate interests in looking out for Number One,” the authors argue with regard to a component of their job competition example that such self-serving interests are “perfectly understandable” (2000, 27–28). Is not the false consciousness that Marxists refer to, among other things, the failure to see the critical value of that “inclusive reasoning” that consciousness of the commonality of interests among working people is the objectively favorable perspective for improving their condition? The true interests to which Seccombe and Livingstone refer seem to be those interests that are not interrupted by external influences contrary to self-serving, comfortable purposes. In another rather convoluted effort to dismiss Marxism, they argue that Marxists believe that a universal working-class consciousness exists, period, and that instances in which it can be shown to be absent prove the inadequacy of Marx’s theory! As their argument proceeds, another conception of true interests arises to dismiss the likelihood of a mass, progressive, collective consciousness.
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Here they cite Wilhelm Reich’s critique of authoritarian childrearing and Lenin’s concern over the absence of class consciousness among the labor aristocracy of the early twentieth century (2000, 28). But the Marxist position is not seriously considered, for what is dangerous in Marx’s approach is not the claim (never made by Marx) that class consciousness is an immanent quality of the working class, but that the capacity to discover and develop collective interests is a power residing in the class through its members.
The second way false consciousness is explained by Seccombe and Livingstone is in terms of the source of contradictory interests. As noted earlier, these lie in “conflicts [that] are objectively given; they do not stem from confusion, misperception or ambivalence” although such conflicts do “give rise to troubling states of mind” (Seccombe and Livingstone 2000, 36, my emphasis). While workers rationalize their relationship or degree of adaptation to objectively given conflicts, “they may simplify their position and distort the situation of others, rendering themselves susceptible to demagogic appeals and hostile projections upon vulnerable populations” (2000, 36–37). But this does not appear to be initiated by workers’ own underdevelopment; rather it is distorted and false ideas that are imposed upon workers by their positions in the system of production.
In sum, Seccombe and Livingstone see false consciousness as the Marxist claim of a “unilateral conception of self-interest, positing a true interest shared by people in a common condition. Members of the group in question who were not inclined to see it the same way were held to be victims of false consciousness” (2000, 27). The authors go beyond class, broadening social sites of the problems they suggest are associated with false consciousness, such as feminists’ characterizations of other women as “backward, male-identified” (27). The charge of false consciousness, then, could conceivably be used by any group that advocates a form of analysis and a course of action to others who are not yet convinced of a need for such a perspective. Thus, like Mayer (1997), the focus is on the presumed authoritarianism of any sector of a group, class, or movement that is advanced in theory and practice
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beyond the average of the group or class. Imputing knowledge deemed to be outside the immediate interests of members of the group is therefore viewed as authoritarian by nature. This suggests that the group cannot advance unless and until it does so as a whole, that it possesses a natural resistance to being pulled into a further stage of qualitative development via education or political socialization.
The rejection of false consciousness in this and other cases is an attempt to achieve two things indicative of the problems of descriptive sociological approaches and cultural orientations to class. First, the implication of this rejection is that no correct understanding and analysis is possible in social theory or a political program except as it is found ready-made in the social group under investigation. Secondly, the rejection of false consciousness protects the subjectivities of research participants because it implies that their attitudes and beliefs are, in the researchers’ perspective, a legitimate, unavoidable product of experience. Both of these positions exhibit a certain condescension that we have seen in all the sociological studies discussed in chapter 4.
What these authors fail to consider is an implicit link to the issue of false consciousness in a seemingly unrelated passage in Marx’s Capital. He writes, “By labour power or capacity for labour is to be understood the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description” (1967, 164). Skill, knowledge related to manufacturing processes, and effective interpersonal communication, among other things, are the objects of Marx’s statement. But one must also consider that among the most efficient skills useful for production and among the most socially stabilizing elements of capitalism is a diminished quality of consciousness in the individual and among the class as a whole, a consciousness that does not or chooses not to comprehend fully the character of capitalist relations, that is content with the immediate satisfactions provided by work and its remuneration, and which accepts that radical, long-term social change is not feasible. This diminished quality of consciousness is the essential meaning of false consciousness as it works in the
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interests of the opposing class. False consciousness, as a mental component of labor power, is as vital to capitalism as any muscle or brain power, or any specialized knowledge of machinery and technology. In this regard, false consciousness may be immediately expressed by workers, but is also implicit in the failure of apologists to acknowledge an ideological position that falls short of the necessary consciousness of the fundamentals of capitalist relations. Once again, it is worth noting that intellectuals are just as susceptible to false consciousness as working people are (cf. Eyerman 1981).
Of course, some things people believe to be true are, in fact, not true; recognizing this is, at base, a matter of cognitive and social maturity. This is why Lukács argues that any notion of false consciousness must necessarily be investigated to find its origin in historical development. That social classes are major expressions of social development requires us to see erroneous, incomplete, and unsubstantiated views of social relations “as class-conditioned” (Lukács 1971a, 52). False consciousness is not a permanent state but a discoverable condition that can be altered. Alternatively, we may see aspects of social reality reflecting accurate and complete understanding of the organization of society, at least with respect to objective historical developments. Thus, to argue that a viewpoint is an expression of false consciousness is not simply a claim that another view is correct, but must include a demonstration of the error by an explicit and systematic method of analysis that can be repeatedly applied in different contexts to establish its veracity. In a letter to Franz Mehring, Engels argued against the judgments of certain ideologists who based their claims on thinking and reasoning alone, without an apparent willingness to comprehend in concrete reality the material source of their knowledge—a key reason for its falseness (Marx and Engels 1975b, 434). But he was not willing to simply exchange the theoretical for the concrete and experiential. Of necessity, the two remain dialectically related.
This is what is missed by Seccombe and Livingstone, and arguably by Thompson. If the origins of all consciousness, whether true or false, are grounded in the objective historical development of economic and other relations, then it is not an assault on the
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working class to say that a worker has an erroneous or incomplete understanding of reality. Rather, to make such an assertion should be an impetus for investigating why a person possesses certain beliefs and attitudes. Lukács did not wish to legitimize false ideas, but he did discuss the historical origin of some, noting how even false ideas did not, in particular historical situations, preclude the development of practice that might alter those ideas. The “stubborn linking of such concepts [generalizations of historical processes, etc.],” he wrote, “with magical and mythical ideas, which stretches far into historical time, shows how purposive and necessary action, its correct mental preparation and accomplishment, can mingle in human consciousness with false ideas of non-existent things as the true and final basis, yet still giving rise to higher forms of practice” (1980b, 51). But this can only be understood if premised on a future orientation inherent in the practice of labor and the capacity of such practice to expose the objective conditions of its relation to the historical subject, and to the capitalist system that manipulates, exploits, and demeans human practice. False consciousness, expressed in a historical context in which its opposite is available, is an assertion that the alternative perspective that better represents social reality has not been pursued or its possibility has been blindly or willfully ignored.
False consciousness is not just about having different or non-normative ideas, or ideas in opposition to a political platform. It is false in relation to some other conception of consciousness that can be shown to be necessary in a given sociohistorical context. From a historical materialist perspective false consciousness has to do specifically with a demonstration of the objective relations of capitalism. If one’s depth of understanding is limited due to systemic structural constraints, and/or limited access to the knowledge base of particular institutions, then the person may be said to possess false consciousness because of the immediate objective conditions she encounters. Under such circumstances, the focus should be on the identifiable structural barriers and obstacles within an individual’s thinking that restrict or prevent discovery of more comprehensive knowledge and development of a higher degree of consciousness. At first this might consist merely of speculation
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about how these barriers might be broken down or made more permeable in order to allow access to the requisite knowledge. This assumes, however, that a person is interested in doing so. That is, the individual factor must still be considered, specifically, the interest and willingness of the individual to develop knowledge in opposition to that which is prescribed as normative and pragmatic by dominant social forces. Reification must be recognized as an objective problem of society that is manifested concretely in the lives of individuals as false consciousness.
Thompson’s concern about a Leninist substitution of party for class is an attempt to avoid the unavoidable issue that confronts a class in the process of developing its consciousness and formulating the strategy and tactics of its struggle against conditions imposed by another class. At some point in the process some people begin to discover and organize what needs to be known about the conditions of the class and its possible future, recognizing that the people who would benefit from this consciousness may not have fully developed it through their own resources. Thompson is certainly aware of this process, although he seems to de-emphasize it when making the point about substitution. In discussing working-class activities and the institutions created out of those actions, he notes that one central achievement for the class was literacy and the ability to understand and engage in increasingly abstract and comprehensive argument. This ability—a political and organizational skill—“was by no means inborn; it had to be discovered against almost overwhelming difficulties” (1968, 783). This emerged within the working class, motivated by identified interests of the class when it reflected on its circumstances within a wider field of economic and other activities. That literacy was a normative bourgeois acquisition for purposes of economic and personal development, as well as a tool for the social control of others, did not make it any less valuable as a means of promoting greater autonomy and political organization for working people even though it was brought from outside the working class.
In contrast to Thompson’s assertions about substitution, Lukács argued that the “organizational separation [of the Party] from the class does not mean . . . that it [the Party] wishes to do
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battle for its interests on its behalf and in its place” (1971a, 326). When the party does intervene “in the course of revolution,” it is “an attempt to advance or accelerate the development of class consciousness” (1971a, 326). This is done by ascribing to the condition of the working class a direction, a course of action. Marx and Lenin, for example, ascribed a course which they believed would ameliorate the circumstances and altogether negate the disadvantageous conditions of the working class. It is an unreservedly partisan position.
It is unclear, then, how Lenin’s position on class is assumed by Thompson to be static, unless Lenin’s approach of bringing class consciousness from the outside is seen to be simply replacing an organically driven class development with a bureaucratically frozen prescription. Arguably, the latter position was not Lenin’s. We have already noted the latter’s expectation that the differences between class origins could be dissolved within the movement. Taking Thompson’s perspective on substitution as valid could also be derived from or could lead to an erroneous assumption that ascribed or imputed consciousness is necessary from the point of view of the party because the working class is incapable of organizing its own development. And this is equally unsupportable if implied as a position of Lenin’s. Thompson’s argument seems to mean that class formation and the direction of development has been usurped by the Leninist party in the name of, instead of in conjunction with, the working class. His argument does not leave room for a more complex perspective that includes organized programmatic action beyond any conceivable organic interests; nor does it necessarily open the working class to the influence of contributions by other classes to its development and struggle.
Thompson ignores a rather crucial point in Lenin’s discussion in which he emphasizes the dialectical development within the working class. Lenin writes, “Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement, the only choice is—either bourgeois or socialist ideology.” But he adds a caveat by way of a footnote. “This does not mean, of course, that the workers have no part in creating such an ideology. They take part, however,
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not as workers, but as socialist theoreticians, as Proudhons and Weitlings; in other words, they take part only when they are able, and to the extent that they are able, more or less to acquire the knowledge of their age and develop that knowledge” (1961, 384). He was acknowledging the fact of workers’ subordination within capitalism’s division of labor, that the economic position of workers is a constraint on their development as human beings and as a class, but it is a position that nevertheless holds the potential for liberation if workers acquire the necessary knowledge available to them. This passage of Lenin’s may offend Thompson because of a presumed imposition of direction for class action. But such a perception is ill-founded and a poor reading of What is to be Done? Lenin’s remarks clearly relate to a process of conscious development, a new cognitive level from which workers participate and lead in the movement for social change. Perhaps more importantly, Lenin’s remarks point to the possibility of individual workers developing theoretical knowledge—“the knowledge of their age”—organized around a particular program of action. As will be discussed in the following chapter, Lenin is alluding to the development of the typical individual, which is defined, in part, by an extension of the concept of historical necessity.
We return to the issue of substitution. If class formation comes about through sociohistorical processes, then one such process must surely be action initiated by forces external to the class, or corresponding and compatible actions of sectors of the class with those who initiate actions from outside it. This is a dialectically logical question to which Thompson seems to provide only a negative response. In his own research on the English working class, its members are shown to have understood capitalist relations of production, the reason for their exploitation as laborers, and for the poor quality of their lives and prospects for the future. But a dominant implication is that such understanding occurred by way of internal mechanisms and experiences of the working class alone. Thompson, then, introduces his own element of stasis in his model of class formation; his internally driven model is carried across time and space to exclude strategic interactions with progressive sectors of other classes. This is especially important
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in light of the possibility Marx and Engels saw for that fragment of the bourgeoisie that breaks off from its own class to serve the interests of the proletariat, as cited in The Communist Manifesto. Thompson’s writing on this point concerned the English working class of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet, in discussing the formation of the working class in that historical period, he draws from Lenin’s communist arguments of the early twentieth century. Thompson consciously attempts to undermine the theoretical and organizational import of Lenin’s work for the period Thompson himself was studying, by rejecting the idea of imputed class consciousness. This is done despite the fact that the English working class, in the period Thompson was analyzing, was still in its formative stages and there had yet to develop the kind of philosophical and political approaches to capitalism and class conflict that Marx introduced in the mid-nineteenth century; nor had an organizational approach such as Lenin’s been developed. Although he does not fully explore the limitations of Thompson’s argument, Camfield (2004, 430–32, 437) notes the importance Gramsci placed on political parties in the formation of class which, given the latter’s view of the contribution of intellectuals, must be recognized as an influence from outside the immediate boundaries of the working class.
Thus, one problem with Thompson’s view of class is the straw man argument he sets up by drawing from the future (Lenin’s work) to solidify the historical boundaries of English class formation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its internally driven development. A second problem is his trust in working class experience, which reinforces the historical boundaries against outside influence. Class, he argues, arises from the recognition of common interests and circumstances, from struggle, and from the impetus gained through shaping institutions to meet people’s needs and to entrench new levels of power derived from ongoing struggles for the development of consciousness. In his view of organic experience, class is something “men and women make out of their own experience,” a meaning intended to counter any historical or sociological conception of class as a “static category . . . of which men are not the makers but the
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vectors.” Further, “Class formations . . . arise at the intersection of determination and self-activity: the working class ‘made itself as much as it was made’” (1978a, 46). Class is not something a person merely carries through life. It is actively and continuously created and recreated; it is not static, but rather a process of “becoming over time” (1978a, 106). Thus, self-activity and consciousness of common interests are central to the meaning of class, and in this respect Thompson’s view is consistent with that of Marx and Engels, Lenin, and others. However, Anthony Giddens has pointed out that Thompson’s overemphasis on experience does not necessarily translate into knowledge of the reasons history happens as it does. Experience, as it affects class struggle, is based more on will than on reasoning (Giddens 1987, 210–11). While will, especially collective will as Gramsci saw it (1971, 170–71, 409–10; cf. Golding 1992, 68–87), and which we have emphasized in chapter 2, is crucial for initiating social movements, Thompson seems to presume that volition internal to the class is sufficient for class formation as well as a proper buttress against imposition of external ideas and direction. Giddens also argues that defining class as something “that happens” prevents class from being “defined in an objective fashion, such that it does not necessarily correspond to consciousness of class membership” (1987, 213). For Giddens, an objective conception of class is the only way variations in experience and purpose can be analyzed. An objective and presumably universalizable definition of class, such as that drawn from Ollman and Mészáros through Marx, would not obscure the particular contexts, conditions, and histories of confrontations; on the contrary, they are the concrete bases of experience upon which knowledge of class is developed, although the specifics of the development of particular classes vary with historical conditions and circumstances. Giddens was correct to argue for an objective definition of class, but such a definition is weakened if it does not include consciousness as both subjective appropriation of the concrete knowledge of capitalist relations and as an objective force developed out of the collective analysis that forms the core of the working class’s pursuit of its own progress toward dissolution.
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Thompson’s emphasis on class rested on uncovering and understanding the significance of self-activity that is crucial to Marx’s perspective. But Thompson’s emphasis sometimes excludes objective historical processes in his preferred definition of class: “Class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition” (1968, 10). Thompson’s method is heuristic, a discovery of the empirical evidence and the ways people identified problems such as exploitation, discovered similarities, and engaged in efforts to better their life conditions. His definition is ostensibly open-ended in that class arises “from processes which can only be studied as they work themselves out over a considerable historical period” (1968, 11).
But in some respects he treats the definition and analysis as a method that rests on the moment of class formation alone, rather than on the mediating factors that support and facilitate such formation and transitions. Two processes of this perspective for Thompson are a) that people must “have repeatedly behaved in class ways,” and out of such behavior class-based cultural institutions became identifiable, and b) that class struggle will have preceded the actual formation of a class (1978b, 147). Given particular historical circumstances, processes of class formation can occur over a considerable period of time, and once such processes are underway there will be various points at which one or another group of people can be said to have formed a class or some degree of consciousness of class. In Thompson’s notion that people in a class behave in “class ways,” we see a representation of Ollman’s first and fourth points—subjective and objective identity and interests of membership in a class, and some sense of solidarity with other class members, suggesting the importance of being similarly situated—but these criteria are implied more than explicitly articulated. Thompson’s notion that struggle precedes the formation of class offers a representation of Ollman’s fourth and fifth points (the latter being a “rational hostility” toward opposing classes). But Thompson’s formulation points to the very root of the problem in two ways. First, one would have to be cautious that “precedes” does not preclude class formation occurring concurrently with the struggle against another class and is not merely a
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result of such a struggle. Secondly, and more importantly, it seems that struggle occurs first, and then a class is formed. Since, like Rousseau, the people constitute a superior culture, Thompson’s theory of class formation alludes to the possible separation of the working class within capitalism. While Ollman’s sixth point—a vision of a more democratic and egalitarian society—is evident in Thompson’s work, it seems to suggest that these characteristics may be sufficient to the extent they are found in working-class culture.
A vision of a future society for Thompson will no doubt be found in those class ways and the mature formation of class-based institutions. However, it seems that if such a vision arises only by internal processes and is sufficient for an existence separate from capitalist culture, the working class will be stymied by its own underdevelopment, its marginal autonomy, and internal barriers erected by reification, unless there arises a significant fraction of the class that has elevated its consciousness sufficiently to lead the remainder of the class to a heightened opposition to and conflict with the opposing class. This fraction will have searched both inside and outside its class boundaries for modes of analysis and strategies of action.
Thus, there are limitations to applying Thompson’s perspective to other contexts, primarily because imposing Lenin on the eighteenth-century English working class-in-formation does not serve as a principal element of analysis, but as a warning for class development and action after the historical period of Thompson’s research. The problem is that experience must always be assessed over time in the increasingly complex social milieu and never assumed to be sufficient in itself as the basis for class development or its analysis. Given what has occurred since the initial formation of the English working class, it must be a principle of class analysis and political strategy that the development of any working class over a period in which capitalism has gradually encompassed the globe, will occur in relation to, and to a lesser or greater extent in conjunction with, working classes of other nations, each of which will carry its own experience of development as well as the knowledge gained from its interaction with other classes.
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Those who draw a model of working-class formation and struggle from Thompson must be cautious not to absorb what may be a reification of self-activity that restrains the creative and cognitive interests that have moved classes forward over time and through varied struggles. One of the inherent problems with developing a cultural analysis of class is that the level of analysis is concerned primarily with the local and the particular. These sites and analyses are important for understanding a specific national or class culture, but there is a certain relativist drive toward affirmation of the developmental influence of local histories and circumstances. As we have noted already, this is one way in which, as Markels has argued, class analysis has become an ethnography of location, an identity site (2003, 29; 2005).
The formation of the English working class through the initial period of industrialization and urbanization, along with the experiences of succeeding generations of English and European workers during the nineteenth century, created an international arena in which conditions of life and struggle were communicated in a far less speedy and efficient way than is the case today. Inspiration and practical guidance for working people throughout the Western world at this time proved significant for the development of trade unions and cultural institutions by workers across many borders and oceans. This, after all, is what Marx, Engels, and others wanted to foster with the formation of the First International. Hence, an overemphasis on class formation as an organic process is historically and politically limiting. What were the emerging organized peasantry and working classes of Africa, and the Americas to do with the knowledge of the organizing tactics and successes they derived from their direct or indirect contact with the English and European working classes? Such knowledge, increasingly communicated in more effective and technically sophisticated ways, must surely be seen as a form of influence from outside the experience of indigenous classes that does not negate but contributes to their own experiences. Thompson’s work exhibits the formation of the English working class “as they live their own history,” but the history of the English working class becomes relevant to, and therefore a source of knowledge for, the emerging working classes
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of other nations as they, too, live their own history, a history complicated by imperialist intrusions and technological development. No historical moment after the endpoint of Thompson’s history can be adequately understood without noticing the concrete impact—cultural, political, and otherwise—of the working- class movements growing in nations across Europe, just as no moment in international history after the Bolshevik Revolution is free from their influence, whether we consider the Cuban countryside or urban centers such as Toronto or New York City. After a certain point in the development of complex means of communication, external influences on class formation and class struggle are unavoidable. Therefore, class formation as people “live their own history” is not negated, but includes the influence, directly or indirectly, of other working classes, political movements, and progressive fractions from other classes.
It is worth returning to Goldmann’s stages of analysis, discussed in chapter 3, in which he defined nonsociological, peripheral, and genuinely sociological approaches. When referring to sections of a class or to the relations of classes across national borders, the following questions must be asked: Is there information and knowledge to be communicated? Are there constraints in the “psychic structures” of different classes that hinder communication? Is there active resistance to what is being communicated? Can communication and interaction among classes in different economic and cultural contexts assist each in reaching its maximum potential consciousness? Does the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and strategy lead a class to alter its structure and its function radically in relation to its opposing class?
Nothing in the present argument suggests the inability of working people to comprehend their collective position in capitalist society; but, as Giddens argues in his discussion of agency and class, “purposive collective action which seeks to actively alter existing social relationships . . . [is] associated with modernity, with the idea that understanding history is the basis for controlling it” (1987, 210). It may be important, therefore, to the development of class consciousness and class struggle to preserve an opening for external interests to interact with indigenous class interests in
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the process of class formation. This is why we have noted the importance of learning, the development of practical knowledge as inseparable from class consciousness. Knowledge is coexistent with consciousness, and the activist’s search for knowledge presumes an intentionality behind the effort to discover the how and why of particular circumstances and forms of existence of a social group.
Mészáros considers it a task of the proletariat to bridge the gap between the immediate level of consciousness and experience of groups of workers and the “global consciousness of their social being” (1971, 101). That is, the gap can be bridged with the development of knowledge about this and other contradictions. The only way that one can move between these two levels of consciousness is by grasping, for example, the contradiction between the being and existence of labor “constitutive of the structural antagonism of capitalism . . . (i.e. the contradiction inherent in labour existing as wage-labour)” (Mészáros 1971, 100). It is the pursuit, comprehension, and resolution of contradictions of which people become aware that produces knowledge. This is the basis upon which revolution grows, not spontaneously, but “through the workers becoming conscious of the social and historical preconditions of their activity, the objective tendencies of economic development” (Lukács 2000, 129). But the acquisition of such knowledge by individual class members makes all the difference, not only to the struggle and its end result, but also regarding the reasons why class as a category of being should have meaning for social change.
The way “theory . . . becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses” (Marx 1975a, 182) can hardly be repeated enough, but it grips the masses after it has taken root in a conscious minority of the class. The empirical actuality and the theoretical value of Marx’s assertion can be found in hundreds of examples. Since the following chapter will be concerned with the place of the individual, it may be useful to conclude this chapter with an allusion to one who developed the material force of theory out of concrete experience, his own and that of the class as a whole.
Local 600 of the United Auto Workers at Ford’s River Rouge Plant was the largest trade-union local in the world in the 1940s,
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with some 87,000 members in 1941 (Stephan-Norris and Zeitlin 2003, 95–96). Among this mass of industrial laborers were many who devoted their time and energy to organizing a democratic union led by rank and file members. One of these key organizers was Bill McKie, who emigrated from England and began working at Ford in 1927. From 1935 he was also a member of the Communist Party. McKie seemed never to take for granted the “inevitability” of socialism and certainly not the success of unionism at Ford. Nor did he, as a self-educated man, take for granted that his personal experience provided sufficient knowledge for his work as an organizer. Mark Twain might have been casual reading for McKie, but his reading of socialist economics, trade-union histories, the Webbs’ study of the Soviet Union, and Labriola’s essays on historical materialism were conscious efforts to go beyond the immediate, daily requirements of trade-union organizing (Bonosky 2000, 41–42).
McKie and thousands like him should remain a constant backdrop to theoretical discussions, but so too should another reality of the working class in the contemporary period. Notwithstanding the continuous efforts of trade unions and politically driven social movements, the working class is in a large measure reluctant to accept and perhaps does not understand the theoretical premises and the practical possibilities of the arguments cited here. The opportunities that capitalism offers for wide-ranging consumption, necessary and frivolous, have laid a basis for the integration of the working class into the dominant ideology of capitalism. The extent to which such an integration has occurred is perhaps less important than recognizing the social and economic environment that encourages it. The illusion of security and the distractions of capitalist culture are means of insulating people from its conflictual character. If we recognize the existence of passivity or apathy in the working class, do we necessarily take this to be its natural level of consciousness or a satisfactory expression of its interests? Herbert Marcuse, who supposedly jettisoned the working class as a revolutionary force, was quite clear that the working class has retained its historical position as the agent of revolution at the same time that it has acquiesced to the stabilizing function of
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contemporary capitalism (1969, 16, 54–55). But because of the environment of heightened opportunities, constrained though they are, and the availability of consumer goods, “the driving revolutionary force” may not be generated by poverty and misery but precisely by the higher expectations that come with better living conditions, and by the developed consciousness of highly qualified and educated workers: precursors of a new working class or a new part of the old working class” (Marcuse 1970, 96). In other words, the driving revolutionary force of the future will be built on the ground established by the likes of Bill McKie, the Alabama sharecroppers, and others.