Conclusion

Conclusion

Organizing consciousness has been a chief concern in examining the work of Lukács and others, and in the critique of selected contemporary studies of the working class. From that examination a central point of the argument as a whole can be taken, that intervention in reality is a political and ethical necessity. What stands in the way of this intervention?

Especially during the post–World War II period in North America, the relatively stable dominance of capitalism has allowed the politics of gradualism to obtain a solid hold on the underdeveloped consciousness of significant proportions of working people and intellectuals alike. In terms of making fundamental choices regarding class politics, Raymond Williams pointed out the significance of the gradualist perspective as a problem in the late modern period. He characterized gradualism as an ideological position that acts as a barrier to the pursuit of a resolution to the fundamental contradictions of capitalism. Williams’s essay, “You’re a Marxist Aren’t You?” argued that the politics of gradualism “really assumed . . . there was not an enemy, there was only something out of date,” such as policies or legislation or perhaps attitudes that at some point would be modernized, thereby reducing the impact of capitalist hegemony (1989, 69). He was calling attention to the absence of consciousness, the absence of knowledge about the class character of capitalist society, the failure to know capitalism as a social order founded on an inherent opposition between two social classes. The social system that this produces, he argued, included more than an accidental disjuncture between work and sufficient remuneration, and more than

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a rational power arrangement understood simply as two social groups appropriately served by differences in the will and merit of their respective members. The proof of the imperative to recognize the existence of a class enemy in capitalism lay in the efforts of the system itself and its ruling class to resist comprehensive changes. If one doubts the existence of a tangible enemy, Williams advised, try organizing for extensive and lasting social change, and the enemy will reveal itself quite readily (1989, 71–72). Hence the importance of building a collective, organized perspective on the conditions of capitalist society and the prospects of change by developing the meaning and practical import of class is an imperative that emerges from recognizing the actuality of class conflict.

Acquiescence to this gradualist approach is mediated by immediate economic interests as well as by fearful attitudes toward class action itself. There is an increasingly broad awareness of the many injustices worldwide in the contemporary period, an awareness that is the result of voluminous academic research, journalistic investigation, and political activism. Nevertheless, meaningful, radical, and sustainable social change is suffocated by the refusal to develop and organize that knowledge by ascribing to the mass of human beings guidelines for action that can transform them from objects of repressive social forces to historical agents of change. Where class is seen to be simply a site of identity rather than a source of agency, where the attribution of false consciousness is seen to be an assault on the subjectivity of working-class individuals, and where imputing the knowability of socially and personally transforming knowledge is seen to be an imposition, the possibility of social change becomes a matter of pragmatic calculation, the result of which will always be negative. In that case, the values of revolutionary experience are rejected because accepting them means discarding the notion that socioeconomic status as well as the attitudes, language, and thought processes of particular social groups, can no longer be simply objects of sociological observation. One consequence of such pragmatic calculation is that consciousness organized and developed around partisan positions with expectations for participants, principles of human betterment, and objectives of self-development must be set

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aside or rejected outright as intrusions into the protected space of the subjective. Sociological analyses that exemplify this approach adopt a paternalistic attitude toward the working class, demeaning the objective possibility of its development and its capacity to transform the conditions of capitalist society, despite the increasingly well-documented historical evidence of the efforts and successes of working-class parties that have advocated for people’s control of the economy, culture, and politics.

The sociological studies of the working class discussed here do not regard reification as a central problem. To do so, the authors of these studies suggest, would require a critical assessment of working-class experience from which, it is argued, adequate knowledge of reality emerges from its own common sense. In doing so, such approaches expunge the tension and contradictions inherent in class-based societies through their concentration on the self-legitimating culture of the class. These studies reject the main elements of a Marxist analysis and the historical practice of communist and socialist movements.

The argument made here, by contrast, has been to emphasize the significance of class development and action that attends to the problems of reification imposed by the structure and relations of capitalism, and to critique the subjectivist acquiescence to those forces at the level of the individual and academic analyses. This argument has been premised on the idea that the class-conscious individual can systematically discover the objective possibilities in social reality, and this premise is in turn based on the belief in the general accessibility of knowledge for the development of that consciousness. This approach is fundamentally an affirmation of the self-activity and future orientation of which human beings are capable. But self-activity cannot be taken as a capability that is, by itself, sufficient for developing consciousness. Rather, self-activity and the consciousness developed from it must be organized deliberately.

While it is possible to organize consciousness outside the framework of a political organization—and here the capability of individuals must again be acknowledged—the beginnings of mass movements historically have been initiated by an organized,

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conscious minority. At the juncture of potentiality that exists in the transformative capacity of human beings intersecting with the objective possibilities in the social and historical context of their development, a political movement must recognize not only its stated goal for the future—socialism—but also practical guidelines such as Lukács’s ethical conduct, which is a major foundation of the consciousness and responsibility of the individual who is in turn the irreducible unit of collective political activity. It is upon such development of consciousness that the success of a political organization rests.