Chapter Eight
Consciousness in the Development
of the Individual
Copyright 2009 and 2011 by Robert Lanning
Even the most objective discovery is the product of great and original subjective endeavours, while subjectivity can
only become diverse and profound, full and productive, through the faithful discovery of objective reality.
—Georg Lukács
A principle that Ché Guevara derived from his reflections on the Cuban revolution was that individuals were the building blocks of revolutionary movements. He argued that the security of the revolution and its reproduction over generations could be mediated by “the masses [who] now make history as a conscious aggregate of individuals who struggle for the same cause” (1968, 393, 399). He stressed the importance of building revolutionary consciousness and doing so using the successes of committed individuals as a basis. By contrast, ignoring or diminishing the role of individuals in revolutionary planning suggests that a mass movement to carry social change forward is merely an objective condition that arrives on its own time, ready-made, and filled with an indistinguishable collective of men and women fully conscious of the same goals and the means to achieve them (cf. Lowy 1973, 20, 92).
This chapter is concerned with the place of the individual as a central feature of Lukács’s work in relation to developing class consciousness. We begin with a further review of the original problem posed at the beginning of this study.
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Considering the concepts of real or psychological consciousness, we can speculate on the structure of the group of miners at Westray using their testimony about that disaster. In reading the hundreds of pages of the Westray Public Inquiry, one senses a fatalism that is integrally related to the problem of reification. This fatalism is an experience drawn from the immediate experience of economic conditions generally and in particular the unmediated experience of working in the mine. Most certainly, the corporation that owned Westray exploited the miners’ need for employment and relied on the social atmosphere of competitive individualism and the retreat from political engagement to ensure that workers fulfilled that need regardless of the conditions of labor. It appears that for many miners this diminished the value of even the most basic, practical knowledge related to their personal survival and human dignity. It has been noted already that no trade union had been established at the mine; the United Mine Workers attempt had failed and the United Steelworkers had only begun a union drive after the explosion. Both unions had legal representatives at the Inquiry, but neither attempted to draw out a sense of workers’ solidarity or the need for it in their cross-examination of miners. Journalist Tom McDougall wrote that there was “a certain mystique about [mining]—a soldier-like pride in sticking with a job that would scare lesser folk witless. There is also a spirit of brotherhood—part old-time camaraderie and small-town solidarity” (qu. in Glasbeek and Tucker 1992, 19). In Goldmann’s terms, the group of miners was structured by conditions of production determined by the corporation, its neglect of safety and pursuit of profit, and the absence of any meaningful oversight by provincial politicians and safety inspectors. In a study commissioned by the Public Inquiry, Gerald Wilde outlined thirteen reasons why miners accepted the risks of remaining at Westray (Richard 1997, 170).1 These reasons included the need for work, the absence of alternative employment in the area and the anticipation of job security that the mine was supposed to offer. Perhaps such reasons were the main factors that encouraged miners to tolerate intimidation and reprisal, the feeling of powerlessness, and the groundless hope that things would eventually improve. But it is difficult to
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understand how “feeling loyal to colleagues working under dangerous conditions,” as Wilde (1997) reported, can be a reason for staying on at the mine without also taking action to ensure the well-being of one’s colleagues.
A few examples of miners’ attitudes are relevant. Electronic methane gas detectors have replaced the caged canary. Some of this technology is embedded in computerized monitoring systems, some are hand-held models, and others are built into machinery operating at the coal face. Westray miners testified that they notified supervisors but rarely recorded malfunctions of equipment in their safety reports. Miner Wayne Cheverie explained why his safety report of May 8, the day before the explosion, failed to mention that the continuous miner, the piece of machinery chewing away at the coal face, did not have a methane detector. “I believe I stated before,” he said, “that writing things about safety on reports would only bring undue hardships to you . . . I always reported things to my first line or second line supervisor, but I made a rule not to write safety concerns on my report” (Richard 1997, 77). Besides faulty methanometers, the use of open propane torches and non-fireproof machinery, such as ordinary farm tractors, containers of diesel fuel lying about the mine, the absence of adequate stone dusting to prevent the combustion of coal dust, and much else were worrisome features of working at Westray, but all were accepted by miners in order to avoid reprimand, suspension, or firing. Experienced miners, many of whom had worked in the comparatively safer hard-rock sector, were astonished by conditions at Westray, and many left the mine over safety concerns (Richard 1997, 96, 98 n. 23, 105, 109–10, 174; Jobb 1994, 9, 22, 40–41). Other conditions underground were equally dangerous, such as the absence of a tag-in/tag-out system on the surface to show which workers were in the mine and where they were working (Richard 1997, 106, 144–46).2 Some conditions were illegal.3 Still others were so ridiculous that tolerance of them should have been an embarrassment to workers, whether organized or not. No sanitary facilities were available underground, and a trip to the surface for such purposes was forbidden. Miners were told to defecate on a rag, roll it up, and toss it on the belt with coal going out of the
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mine. Miners accepted this practice, though somewhat reluctantly. Cap lamps that are standard equipment for underground workers were powered by a battery pack intended for use on 8-hour shifts, meaning that miners would sometimes work the last hours of their 12-hour shift with the aid of someone else’s lamp or the headlight of a piece of machinery. Judge Richard summarized the experience of miner Tom MacKay: “one was not always assured of receiving the same lamp each shift. There were times when MacKay would just make it underground and his light would go out” (Richard 1997, 166). Miners admitted not taking breaks or lunch periods on some shifts but “grab[bing] lunch whenever it was possible, that is, whenever it would not hold up production” (Richard 1997, 144). The sound of approaching footsteps would sometimes put an end to lunchtime or breaks out of fear that Roger Parry, one of the managers considered unreasonable and a bully, was coming into the area. Shaun Comish testified that lunching miners “would all just scramble like rats, go back to work,” to avoid being cursed at and threatened by Parry. It goes without saying that lunch and rest breaks are legislated entitlements for Canadian workers, coal miners included, whether unionized or not.
Having “mining in the blood,” a common expression among communities of miners who can trace several generations back to the deeps, is clearly insufficient as a class outlook or an ethical code. Thus, an inescapable issue is how the apparent fatalism among the Westray miners is to be treated by trade unions, radical political parties, and by left academics.
These attitudes attest to the fact that the miners had not reached their maximum potential consciousness as a group. They were constrained by the conditions of employment and the poor representation of their interests and needs by their elected politicians. In Goldmann’s view, at both the psychological and collective levels there was resistance to information, to knowledge that could assist the group in attaining a superior level of awareness, although it would be insufficient to provoke a significant change in the structure of the group (1977a, 33–34). The miners’ attitudes are clearly manifestations of reification, especially given the existence of relevant legislation and the availability of information
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about safety, labor representation, and other matters. In effect, there was an absence of sufficient consciousness beyond immediate and limited needs to threaten the group’s essential function socially and economically. There had been no attempt to organize their consciousness and establish guidelines for action, no attempt to impute from inside or outside a level of consciousness of their circumstances as problems more or less generalized throughout the working class, and therefore no attempt to address those problems. Individuals such as Stephen Lilley, whose refusal we noted in chapter 1, had evidently transcended the psychological barriers sufficiently to understanding the need for a more substantive connection between the general structure of the group and the transformative social resources available to them, incomplete and constrained as these were.
The individual and class consciousness
The present is a unique period in the history of organizing class struggle against capitalism in that never before has such a high degree of individuation existed. Lukács regarded the “complex of the individual person . . . [as] an indissoluble minimal unity” within the social totality that contains all the determinants and alternatives of individual development (1975a, 135). But he also noted that this development does not occur in a linear fashion as a progressive accumulation of the elements of freedom. Rather, the unevenness of social development carries with it the possibility that the greater the development of humanization and humanity’s decreased dependence on nature will bring about greater inhumanity. Both the complex of social totality and the complex individual are only moments within their respective but interdependent processes of development (cf. Marx 1975b, 299).
The development of class consciousness involves lengthy and complex processes of personal and historical development. Exposure to specific social conditions, opportunities to explore alternatives, and decisions taken on the basis of ethical choices, among other things, combine to contribute to the conscious formation of a class perspective. The working class may well expand its knowledge within bourgeois institutions such as colleges and
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universities, or it may use the trade union as a source of formal or informal education. But neither the institutions of education—no matter how radical or comprehensive—nor trade unions can provide the appropriate practical and theoretical mediation if radical social change, the pursuit of socialism, is not taken to be a necessity. Historically, political parties have provided the organizational means, the forum for debate, and the development of a strategy for action. Essential to such development is the attitude taken toward the individual as a major contributor to socialist movements. Lukács did not argue that the actions of single individuals transform social conditions outright and move history forward independently of other forces or social groups; nor was his understanding of social change grounded in an evolutionary process. From his perspective, the individual who becomes a revolutionary, even a revolutionary leader, is not an exemplary person, not a leader in a voluntaristic sense, but an individual carrying out the expected development of his or her capacities as a human being in the interests of the class (1971a, 318).
Individuals who are not engaged in this process are more vulnerable to the forces of reification. The power of reification in capitalism is the essential cause of their acquiescence to the powers of capital, their lack of interest in conscious development, and their lack of exposure or access to knowledge about alternatives. To place emphasis on the individual is to illuminate both those who are involved in the process of conscious development and those who are not. Ollman cites a passage of Marx’s in which he argued that the loss of a few individuals to the genuine interests of the class “has little effect upon the class struggle” (Ollman 1971, 126). Class struggle is seen as a mass action, and consequently must be developed as thoroughly as possible through a mass movement, although modern revolutions have been initiated by fractions of the working class or the peasantry. The general tasks of every revolutionary organization are to expand its mass force, to achieve power, and to sustain that power and ensure the successful transformation of the entire society. But these two tasks are eventualities dependent, in part, on the long process of developing the quantity and quality of the mass force over time. Ollman
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argues that those individuals who do not comprise the revolutionary movement “are not the people it is most essential to know about in order to comprehend Marxism” (1971, 126). However, those who do not participate in class actions must also become known by those who take part in or lead the political movement, because it is the hesitation, the psychological barriers, and the lack of commitment of those outside the movement that provide evidence of the powers of reification to which any organization must attend. Lukács was clear that in order for the working-class party to avoid sectarianism and isolation from the masses, it must always concern itself with the thinking and action of the “most retrograde” sections of the class (1971a, 327). This is a restatement, I would suggest, of the problem of “what this or that proletarian thinks or does” that Marx and Engels referred to in The Holy Family.
Like Lukács and Goldmann, Ollman considers actual consciousness to be a reflection of what workers say in response to specific queries, but this is different from “analyzing their objective interests as a group of people” (1993, 157). And there is no avoiding the fact that such analysis results in outlining what are deemed to be necessary debates and actions in the future of a class, whether the experience of most members of the class leads in that direction or not. Not recognizing this difference is one of the significant failures of the sociological studies discussed earlier. But the distinction between degrees of consciousness must be made on more than what “an individual understands and does as a member of a class and not his private reflections and intimate behavior” (Ollman 1993, 156–57). However, while individuation as a characteristic of modern society is intended to secure the private and intimate aspects of life, it is precisely these subjective elements that may be given priority by the individual, and by the prevailing ideology of the society, thereby radically restricting individual and collective consciousness. It is not possible to consider the collective sense of class consciousness or of class-in-itself without consideration of how the individual’s knowledge begins to develop and progress over time, not toward class consciousness as an already established
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objectivity but as an integral part of the thought and action for its eventual attainment, as an accumulation of individual development, and a contribution to the class in its active opposition to another class. For example, in the middle of his history of Communist work in Depression-era Alabama, Robin D. G. Kelley discusses the way “a Marxist pedagogy . . . altered Black working people’s self-definition and pre-existing worldview” (1990, 93, emphasis added). In a social and historical context in which many working people, especially African Americans, were illiterate, without access to formal education and other sources of information such as radio, the Communist Party found ways to assist them in learning about Marxism, trade-union organizing, voting rights, and other crucial issues. Party and other newspapers, books, and pamphlets were the resources used in study groups and Party training schools. Travel also helped propagate the Party’s views and served as educational exposure to other regions, people, issues, and cultures. “Marxist education,” in these and other ways, writes Kelley, “taught poor Blacks to connect their own lives to struggles throughout the world” (94). It is not difficult to imagine how poor Black and white industrial workers and sharecroppers would have fared in this period without the intervention—from the outside—of the Communist Party. Throughout his study, Kelley shows how Party-affiliated organizations and local progressive institutions pushed the struggle forward for unionism, an end to discrimination, and related issues. As the Party did so, it helped to develop local leaders from both races. Allen (2000) and Solomon (1998) are also clear about the efforts of the Communist Party to educate workers to take leadership positions in the immediate struggles of their respective localities and beyond.
Harris (1993) has discussed the use of psychology in the curricula of alternative educational projects developed by the Left in the first half of the twentieth century. Gettleman’s study of the American Communist Party’s Jefferson School shows a curriculum developed around Marxist and other orientations that was intended to help students connect with social and political issues of the day as well as develop knowledge of art, literature, music, and the sciences (2002). Mishler’s (1999) study of Communist-organized
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summer camps illustrates the importance of a broader environment of collective relations and concrete knowledge relevant to political issues as these were experienced by children, youth, and their families. Many of the autobiographical reflections in Kaplan and Shapiro (1998) illustrate the influence of family choices and political socialization on life trajectories.
These are examples of purposeful and often successful attempts to develop class consciousness from below but with initiative and direction provided by a political organization, intellectual workers, and sympathizers from other classes. In contrast to Thompson, and in support of the perspective taken by Lenin, Lukács, and others, the history of class consciousness shows that some people, because of their partisan interests and their belief in the possibility of a better society, took it upon themselves to set out guidelines, provide reading material, and initiate discussions and debates; in short, they ascribed or imputed to others a character and quality of knowledge important for their immediate struggles and long-term goals and awakened a demand for further knowledge, education, and training. That they organized this intervention through an existing and developing political party was the dialectical extension of their partisanship and the search for the actualization of objective possibilities. Respect for local cultures is evident in these and other actions except where such conditions constituted a barrier to the development of the movement and the elimination of disadvantage. It is also evident that the attitude among Party members and leaders toward the individual as such and toward subjective beliefs and experiences was not to view them as something sacred and beyond criticism or to be protected from influence by or pressure from a partisan perspective. The kind of pedagogical and other actions described in these studies are clearly forms of political engagement, not only against the forces of capitalist oppression but in solidarity with working people themselves, with a view to transformation, not affirmation, of existing conditions and states of mind.
Nevertheless, such educational efforts cannot be described simply as instrumental measures to serve the Communist Party or other organizations, although such efforts clearly and intentionally
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did that. Given the living and working conditions, the racism and violence experienced by people described in some of these studies, any other position taken by the Communist Party or those outside of it would have been irresponsible and unethical. The workers discussed by these authors did not achieve socialism, but they did develop consciousness of trade-union organization, of race and class solidarity based on the orthodox Marxist meaning of class. The political content and the intention of the background organization in these struggles moved action, consciousness, and social conditions toward a particular goal. Of significance was the development, varied though it was, of individual as well as collective interests in these goals as means of addressing social problems.
Were the objective conditions better in Alabama in the 1930s compared with the provinces of Nova Scotia (Westray) and Ontario (Dunk, Seccombe and Livingstone) in the 1990s? Clearly the social conditions of economic depression, violence, and the disadvantages of being working class and/or African American were more obvious and problematic in the earlier period than at any other time in North American history. But, as has been noted earlier, the major difference was the existence of an organized mass movement of opposition, a political party, deliberately organizing ideas and actions and imputing to working people varied means by which to improve their immediate circumstances and develop class power. This difference is of enormous importance for the organization of consciousness in that it can contribute to the transcendence of the boundary between times of disadvantage and times of greater equality and justice.
The attention focused on the learning of class consciousness has already been alluded to, but it is worth noting further that Lenin, from the beginning of his writing on developing professional revolutionaries, stressed the importance of ordinary working-class individuals developing both the quality of their knowledge and the mastery of self required to take on that role. His emphasis centered on two elements. One was the necessity of training cadre and developing their immediate experiences on the principle that revolutionary practice and the skills of leadership
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can be learned by anyone. “Theoretical knowledge, political experience and organizing ability are things that can be acquired. If only the desire exists to study and acquire these qualities.” This pedagogical principle was augmented by an organizational principle, that capable revolutionary leaders teach others in study circles of workers, students, and peasants (Lenin 1961, 317; cf. 1961, 377–78, 422–23, 441–43, 450–51).
Lenin’s emphasis is consistent with Engels’s discussion of freedom and necessity, which draws from Hegel the principle of self- and scientific discovery of knowledge that, in Engels’s view, radually creates in human beings the consciousness that theirs is not an inalterably determined life. According to Engels, freedom of will is based on the search for knowledge and the subsequent decision to make use of that knowledge. In this he sustains the humanist foundation of historical materialism, that freedom is intended to apply a counterweight to the irrational, mystical power of idealism that diminishes the possibility of human agency. “Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on the knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development” (Engels 1987, 106).
Lukács adopted this perspective but with an emphasis intended to advance both Hegel’s and Engels’s duality of freedom and necessity. Parkinson summarizes Lukács’s concept of freedom as “power over things other than oneself, and power over oneself, i.e. self-mastery” (1977, 158). While these must be dialectically, not sequentially, developed forms of freedom, self-mastery is clearly necessary in some measure before external, objective relations can be fully addressed. More clearly related to political action, and therefore of organizational value, Lukács sees the fully developing person as one in pursuit of the knowledge necessary to understand existing conditions and historical precedents and to create alternatives to the prevailing social order. But progress toward self-mastery is a difficult passage; under conditions of reification and oppression it can place the individual in direct confrontation with the most violent reactions of capitalist domination. At the level of the consciousness of the necessity of undertaking this
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confrontation, as a single action or a sustained effort, individuals need to begin distancing themselves from the belief that existing social conditions represents the triumph of oppressive social forces (Lukács 1980b, 34). That is, individuals must first decide to know and to exercise their capacity for critical self-reflection, and then they can begin to comprehend the substance and possible consequences of their choices. Lukács emphasizes the point that struggle for self-mastery through elementary, progressive acts of freedom is a movement toward the general social condition of freedom; that is, the possibility of relatively free action as a subjective expression of opposition to the power of existing objective forces (1980b, 135).
Certainly an important point of distinction between Engels’s use of this meaning of freedom and its development by Lukács, is that the complexity of the constraints on and opportunities for freedom have increased over time. Engels was cognizant of the still-emerging processes of individuation in capitalist society. But while his emphasis remained on the struggle between classes as the primary site for the amelioration of those conditions and the realization of freedom, he also did much to bring forward the agenda of revolutionary activism by expanding the meaning of class struggle. For example, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels’s concept of class struggle includes such problems as unhealthy living and employment conditions and the lack of education. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, relations between men and women, parents and children were examined as manifestations and consequences of capitalist development. At the very least these were the initial steps of orthodox Marxism toward inclusion of cultural issues.
Engels emphasized the developing individuation in relation to the growth of capitalist society, stressing the multiple influences on the formation of the class struggle, “especially the reflections of all these real struggles in the brains of the participants.” His explanation of this in his letter to Joseph Bloch (1890) highlights the shaping of history through many conflicting individual wills. Engels stresses the innumerable “intersecting forces” that shape an “historical event” that may “be regarded as the product of a
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power which operates as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one intended.” The result “that no one intended,” however, must be taken to mean no one singular will. Engels places the individual will in the context of complex historical forces and collective action, but he does not negate it. That is why, in concluding the paragraph, he notes that all those individual wills should not be regarded, in sum, as “equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it.” This is the proper stressing of an important theoretical and organizational point. Engels recognized that individual contributions are constrained or enabled by the individual’s “physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general)” (Marx and Engels 1975b, 395–96).
Lukács stressed this duality as well (as discussed in chapter 2): the duality of the objective relationship of economic conditions and individual contributions and responses to them. He argued in History and Class Consciousness and clarified in the Defence that class consciousness and the class struggles that mediate its development must be understood as real and possible only with the guiding content proposed and advocated by individuals with a developed knowledge of objective revolutionary possibility, his “conscious minority.” This is not confined to a vanguard of either the working class or a group from outside it, although that may be its initial and most viable location for long-term class actions. Lukács makes this point in the Defence against the criticisms of Rudas and Deborin, but the principle is equally relevant in our own period. The task of a political party or other social movement is not simply to impute correct strategy or ideas, but to unearth actively and programmatically the appropriate resources from the existing social terrain, which includes educational institutions; alternative community resources; crises of poverty, racism, ecology; and so on. But a political party necessarily imputes those guidelines for action that transcend the limited focus of these resources. Class consciousness is not imposed on the working class or, for that matter, on party members, but is something that
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“takes place inside party members’ heads,” not passively, not by imposition, but by development and analysis of concrete possibilities (Lukács 2000, 74, 76–77). Quite obviously and unavoidably, this requires direction, pressure, critique of less viable perspectives, and rejection of regressive strategies; no doubt this produces tension between the immediate reality of experience and the expectations of learning. This is where the Alabama sharecroppers differ from, for example, Dunk’s Boys in Northern Ontario who resist an oppression they do not understand by asserting common sense as the sufficient content of knowledge.
Our consideration of working-class struggles that were developed and mediated by socialist and communist organizations, shows that people were encouraged, pushed, prodded, and pressured to take up political positions and to develop their capacities for action and growth. Such pressure and prodding has not been the exclusive province of leftist political parties, but given the injustices that social movements strive to overcome, what other process is viable for such purposes? Thus, it is not only a question of what knowledge is necessary or how it should be communicated; it is also important to promote the correct attitude toward the idea that knowledge essential to the goals of social change can be legitimately imputed to draw people toward a specific kind of development and type of action. Lukács’s basic outline of ethics, noted earlier, was evidently linked to his concept of imputed class consciousness, for it emphasized what individuals must know about their present and historical context as a means of determining a strategic direction and anticipating the consequences of their actions. In other words, Lukács clearly proposed an ethical basis for knowledge as a formative process of the individual concerned with and/or involved in political activity. His practical orientation to knowledge answered questions about what it could do and its relation to the individual’s subjective experience. “On the one hand, knowledge is by no means to be taken as total understanding of the actual political situation and all its possible consequences; nor, on the other hand, can it be regarded as the result of purely subjective deliberations, where, that is, the individual concerned acts ‘to the best of his ability and in good faith.’ If the former were
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the case, every human action would be impossible from the outset; if the latter, the way would be clear for extreme levity and frivolity and every moral standard would become illusory” (Lukács 1975b, 9). The category of objective possibility itself was a “historico-philosophical” matter made possible by those whose work toward socialism was a political and moral act. Imputation of class consciousness was to provide a systematic means of socializing and educating a specific type of person: a communist, an organizer, and a class-conscious worker.
The “typical” in imputed class consciousness
Lukács’s use of the terms type and typical is varied in his work, but my emphasis rests ultimately on a meaning consistent with the recognition of the transformative capacities, the potential of the individual inherent in Marx’s concept of species-being. For Lukács, the type or typical generally refers to the anticipated attitude, behavior, and world outlook of individual characters in literature, or the person in the system of production in a given historical and social context, which includes the economic system, the complexity of production, and the corresponding culture. The concept is grounded in a historical-materialist analysis of a given society. For example, as is evident in the discussion below, Lukács recognized the variety of types of productive activity in the capitalist economic structure, while in another context he referred to two essential types of individuals in the revolutionary movement in Russia, the tribune and the bureaucrat (1981, 199), and in another context he referred to the “multiplicity of typical phenomena” that are required in art and literature (1963, 124). His multiple and varied references to the type or the typical are not contradictions; they indicate distinctive moments or components of a system or social order. While each of these examples is important in terms of understanding the typical in Lukács’s work as a whole, my emphasis lies in the meaning associated with Marx’s concept of species being. The typical is a sociohistorical product that serves as a tool of historical-materialist analysis. In Ralph Fox’s interpretation of the concept, each person has “a dual history . . . a type, a man with a social history, and an individual . . . with a personal
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history” (1945, 27; cf. Lukács 1963, 43). I would not adopt a strict dichotomy drawn from this formulation, but the distinction is important as an expression of the way the relation between the individual as such and the social individual is normally posed. The task for historical materialism, for organizing consciousness, is to demonstrate the dialectical relation between the two, in which the personal history is retained as it is embellished and grounded in a longer, more complex, more comprehensive social history.
As discussed earlier, Lukács’s insistence in his Ontology (1980b) on the dialectical relation between objective conditions and individual human acts was concentrated on the relation between the individual and the productive system. The completion of the dialectic, it seems, is the intentionality that is discoverable in this relationship and its ongoing reciprocal actions. This is evident in his earlier writing: “By relating consciousness to the whole of society it becomes possible to infer the thoughts and feelings which men would have in particular situations if they were able to assess it and the interests arising from it in their impact on immediate action and on the whole structure of society” (1971a, 51). Thus, the lower level of consciousness, the “psychological,” is insufficient but is nevertheless a basis for its development. If psychological consciousness is an expression of reification, or what this or that proletarian thinks or does, it is not completely determined by particular circumstances. But the difficult tension remains. “Now class consciousness consists in fact of the appropriate and rational reactions ‘imputed’ to a typical position in the process of production. This consciousness is, therefore, neither the sum nor the average of what is thought or felt by the single individuals who make up the class. And yet the historically significant actions of the class as a whole are determined in the last resort by this consciousness and not by the thought of the individual—and these actions can be understood only by reference to this consciousness” (1971a, 51). At the same time and somewhat in contradiction to this basic position, reflecting Mannheim’s influence, Lukács argues that the character and quality of imputed consciousness, or what can be known of reality, is understood partially through those “whose characteristics
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are determined by the types of position available in the process of production” and which by implication afford greater or lesser access to knowledge because of their proximity to the economic motor of capitalism (1971a, 51). Notwithstanding this contradiction, from an organizational perspective the concentration should be on the “characteristics . . . determined by the types of position” that are components of the objective conditions that contribute to the shaping of the individual consciousness. The act of imputing knowledge and the content of consciousness of such positions as suggested in the first quotation illustrates the intention of the party or social movement to shape the consciousness of individuals in and outside of their labor, and in that way contribute to the shaping of the class as a whole in relation to social totality.
The problem lies with Lukács’s suggestion that “the appropriate and rational actions ‘imputed’ to a particular position” in itself is sufficient to indicate or produce the content or quality of consciousness (1971a, 51). This is especially problematic in the fragmented environment of capitalist production. Responsibility for knowledge and consciousness cannot be confined to sites of economic production, for this would imply that participation in the structure of labor itself spontaneously develops class consciousness. Nor does one’s position in the system of production need to be the predominant means by which knowledge about the total system is made possible. Mészáros argues that “class consciousness, according to Marx, is inseparable from the recognition—in the form of ‘true’ or ‘false’ consciousness—of class interest based on the objective social position of different classes in the established structure of society” (1971, 95). Thus, both true and false consciousness lies in these basic conditions and relations, the most fundamental of which is the relation of labor to capital, in which the latter purchases, objectively, all of a worker’s labor for a day and objectively pays for only part of it. Contrary to the Mannheimian perspective of Seccombe and Livingstone, the position at issue here is a position that belongs objectively to one or another class; it only belongs, however, as a result of historical-materialist analysis of the complex of productive and social relations. Although the individual’s position in the
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system of production is not rendered unimportant, a component of developing class consciousness is to become knowledgeable of positions in the system of production that must come to be understood as objective economic positions and as class relations.
The objective situations to which Lukács referred cover both individual circumstances and the sociohistorical position of the working class. In other words, his approach was to point out the significance of the particular thoughts and feelings that it was possible for individuals to hold in specific circumstances within the system of production. Those particulars were then used to develop a clearer understanding of what class consciousness would consist if this same dialectically logical inference were applied to the class as a whole and to the totality of society. While specific individuals will fill particular positions and take on their typical characteristics, the proviso that the number of types is limited suggests that Lukács did not excessively fragment the different categories of production or work, nor did he create an excessive number of ideal types. In other words, the assembler on the auto line is no different, in terms of type or position, than the person monitoring the computerized assembly of electronic equipment; but both are highly dissimilar to the teacher who labors in a primary classroom, and different still from the manager of a coal mine. But each of these positions, Lukács argues, can be a vantage point from which the totality of society can be known and intentionally discovered, and a platform for the organization of class action. He attempts to address the problem at the end of the essay, “Class Consciousness,” by recognizing its complexity beyond the point of production. He discusses the “gradations within the class consciousness of workers in the same strata” and while “a typology of the various strata” might be useful, such differences “can no longer be referred back to socio-economic causes” (1971a, 78–79). He at once points out the possible differences in individuals’ “psychological class consciousness” and rejects what amounts to an instrumental and descriptive sociology of these differences. Thus, the notion of “types of position . . . in the process of production” actually breaks down as a schema for determining the degree of consciousness that can be drawn from any such position
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or through any type associated with it. Lukács questions his own correspondence of knowledge and position in the relations of production when he asks, “ How far is it in fact possible to discern the whole economy of a society from inside it?” (1971a, 52). The answer is that it is not altogether possible to do so without a mediating element in the relation of individual labor to social totality. The meaning of “psychological” or “real” empirically evident consciousness is significant in this process, but it remains only superficial, although it is an important basis for further development. The psychological consciousness that Lukács—and Marx and Engels—rejected as an invalid theoretical perspective that is insufficient for class struggle is in fact the “sum” or the “average of what is thought and felt by the single individuals who make up the class” (Lukács 1971a, 51). Therefore, in relation to the concept of the typical, the sum or average actually references only the atypical individual. We may go further and suggest that psychological, i.e., real and immediate consciousness and this average of thought corresponds with Lenin’s principle that consciousness developed spontaneously and without further political development remains only at the level of trade-union consciousness.
Individuals remain important because class consciousness consists of imputing “appropriate and rational” reactions to “typical positions,” which are in practical terms occupied by particular individuals. The primary reference is not to particular individuals in specific positions, but to the class-relevant knowledge and its orientation to the struggle for socialism, which can be developed from each position, provided the individual worker becomes conscious of that position within the broader interrelations that form the system of production and the social system as a whole—totality. The imputing of criteria for class consciousness to these typical positions implies a mediating force that is political in character. That is, the individual does not acquire knowledge by osmosis through the position the person holds in the system of production (this would be more like Mannheim’s perspective); rather, the potentiality of the knowledge available in that position is developed by the individual along with a third force—organized political consciousness in the form of a political party, a social
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movement, or a conscious minority. Since it is “neither the sum nor the average of what is thought or felt,” the content of that which is imputed indicates that there is a strategy for overcoming the inhibiting effects of reification. One aspect of the analysis of the relation between position and totality is the requirement to assess the “practical significance of the different possible relations between the objective economic totality, the imputed class consciousness and the real psychological thoughts of men about their lives” (1971a, 51). It is, in other words, to explore the resources and make available important information to develop fully the possibilities within concrete reality.
Seccombe and Livingstone’s mere identification of location in the productive system with a specific content of consciousness is nullified by Lukács’s argument. It is his underlying emphasis on totality that disallows specific positions within the system of production from standing alone more than momentarily, in a dialectical sense, and which, therefore, begs the questions: To what is each position connected? To what is it related dialectically? To what mediating factor is it related? His point is that each position cannot be separated from the historical-materialist expectations of individuals’ capacities to see broader and deeper than the instrumental boundaries of their positions. Here again, conscious deliberation is the basis for and precursor to action, and the ethical component serves as the grounding orientation. The political organization provides the practical means of integrating these and moving toward the goal.
In the contemporary period especially, it is increasingly possible to generalize a level of consciousness that is based upon the growth of both institutionally based knowledge and knowledge derived through experience in social movements. Development of this level of consciousness is based on the masses’ access to both forms of knowledge. But there is no guarantee that such consciousness and action will come about even if proper, comprehensive knowledge is ascribed either from outside the working class or by the most advanced sector within the class. Lukács’s notion of the point of production is relevant only if understood as an expression of the consciousness possible in a particular location
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and its relation to the social totality. This means that the point of production is no longer a limited and isolated place; rather, it is a place known to hold determinants of generalizable conditions and tendencies. The phrase “if they were able,” in Lukács’s discussion of the concept, not only references actually existing barriers to that knowledge, it also illuminates the necessity for a decision of the historical subject to pursue the discovery and communication of such knowledge, whether barriers exist or not. As noted earlier, as an objective historical-materialist position, class consciousness is the means by which to move the proletariat toward the realization of socialist goals (what it “will be historically compelled to do”), but class consciousness develops through the proletariat’s self-active reflection on its capacity to explore and know its own potential, the realization of which always requires some form of mediation.
Thus, while the main point of the concept of imputed class consciousness is “the question of inner transformation of the proletariat, and of its development to the stage of its own objective historical mission” (Lukács 1971a, 79), it cannot be strategically useful without understanding that the concept requires a cognitive process and an organizational forum in order to be realized. Methodologically, this means going beyond “what men in fact thought, felt and wanted” as “merely the material of genuine historical analysis,” to a projection of the concept that “is supposed to aid the singling out of the objectively decisive, causal context from the confusion of superficial connections and subjective psychological conditions” (Lukács 2000, 63–64). This is not without potential problems; it requires consideration and caution regarding the tension between party and class on the one hand, and on the other, the need to avoid projecting voluntarism as the solution to the problem. Lukács does not provide a detailed discussion of the process a party might take in the development of consciousness. What he does say, implicitly more often than explicitly, is that this process is based on a cognitive element, exercised and developed in the context of the needs and goals of the class conscious of itself, specifically the tasks that need to be undertaken “in order to obtain and organize power” (1971a, 53). This approach is no
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different from what we have said about Lenin, Goldmann, and others: it is a process of learning. Lukács offers an example from Marx’s Wages, Prices and Profit on the illusion in capitalism that the price paid for labor equals its full value, and he responds with a methodological statement: “Now it requires the most painstaking historical analysis to use the category of objective possibility so as to isolate the conditions in which this illusion can be exposed and a real connection with the totality be established” (1971a, 52). Again, it is worth citing Marx’s basic method of political economy as a pedagogical guide for how such discoveries can be made.
In History and Class Consciousness the problem is not fully worked out. What is needed is a more precise conception of the individual—the type or the typical—that Lukács develops later in his literary work. However, this conception is not confined to literature, it exists as well in science (Parkinson 1977, 139), and, most importantly, these contexts take us beyond the typical where it is merely an expression of positions within the relations of production. It is possible and necessary to argue for a further extension of the type as a characterization that fits the class-conscious worker, the ethical human being, the communist. The type is the “central category and criterion of realist literature”; it is not an average of human beings, for the “ ‘average’ is a dead synthesis of the process of social development” (Lukács 1971b, 164). The typical is the completion of the dialectical relation between the individual and his or her specific sociohistorical location in which there is an active emphasis on its history as development. This is evident in politics—consider Lenin’s comment to the effect that “war is the typical product of imperialism” (qu. in Lukács 1963, 123)—in that the violence of imperialist states was a synthesis of all the features of that age of intense competition and conflict over exploitable resources and labor.
A typical character in literature or in concrete reality is one who consciously recognizes that his or her “innermost being is determined by objective forces at work in society” (Lukács 1963, 122). The notion that a character’s innermost being is determined is qualified by the insistence that the type in realist literature exhibits a synthesis of character and the particular historical situation
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in which he or she acts; in other words, the situation in which the character becomes progressively conscious of his or her place in the social totality. In this respect, the typical is someone who has gone beyond the lower, psychological level of consciousness. The type is generalized beyond literature to represent a dialectical relation of the general and the particular of historical development (Lukács 1964, 6; Parkinson, 1970, 133; 1977, 137–39). Goldmann’s perspective also includes such an essential, indeed necessary, relationship between society, history, and literature (cf. Goldmann 1980, 60; Boelhower 1980, 8; Evans 1981, 42).
For the individual, the communist, the organizer, or the class conscious worker, the synthesis of person and historical situation does not produce an exceptional individual as the singular person who stands above others in his or her social category, as Foley interprets the typical (1993, 297–98, 321). Lukács’s focus was not on “extraordinary individuals” (1971a, 79). Rather, he considered the development of knowledge and self-activity in determining the appropriate direction of the movement to be a task for the whole class. Like Lenin, Lukács assumed that it is possible for each individual within the class to achieve the necessary level of consciousness. It is the knowledge by which the typical proletarian becomes a leader, advanced in thinking and organization at both the individual and the collective levels. It is this knowledge that will at some future time become the knowledge, the ethical orientation, and the course of action of the class as a whole. Thus, in understanding Lukács’s meaning it is more helpful to employ the word exemplar, a synonym of type, so long as the chosen connotation of this term is that of an example of a species. The typical, then, represents the essential qualities of a species. In this way, the particular social location of the individual is retained, but so too is the generalizable reference to the whole of the social category (class) and species (humanity). As with the literary type as exemplary character, individuals in concrete reality can be typical in a way that implies that their ideas and actions are not singularly different from those that other individuals may also develop through a proper analysis of the same circumstances. This is what should be understood as a bridge between the literary
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representation of reality and the concrete conditions in which the potential for revolution lies, although it is not, I would argue, a substitution of the literary for the revolutionary as suggested by Feher (cf. Livingstone 1981).
In taking this approach, we extend the concept of the typical to one who is conscious of the forces that determine the individual’s life, one who exhibits a relative mastery over the complex of social conditions, personality, and the structure of choice; one who is, therefore, typical of the human species under conditions in which progress toward full development and freedom is underway. This approach takes us directly back to Marx’s conception of the proletariat as a class that will be compelled to take its role in history, but only because the compulsion is grounded in the very consciousness developed with and from self-activity. Lukács argued that this form of consciousness was essential to portray in the literary type that comprised the “conscious minority [who are] the precondition of the mass movement” (1975a, 68); and Marx argued that this self-activity was the way revolutionaries learned to take their place in history. The development of such individuals in literature or in the politics outside it rests on the searching out of objective possibilities for transformation. It is this conception of the typical that is the central point in understanding imputed class consciousness.
Thus, the proper conception of the typical asserts a more general development of Lukács’s discussion of imputed class consciousness in History and Class Consciousness. The typical relates to the essence of the human being in terms of its capacities to be developed. It is self-mastery of the processes of development of the typical that is at once both the human essence and the outcome of development, so that the fundamental character of the human being becomes the total personality of the individual.
This meaning of the typical is essentially the same as Marx’s concept of species-being, which was introduced in his 1844 Paris manuscripts. There Marx argued that humanity, as a species, is capable of taking itself and all other species as its object, and that this occurs as human beings produce and develop themselves in relation to nature. His concept of alienation refers to the
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conditions under which this capacity is diminished or removed from human beings, thus rendering them less than genuine representatives of the species-being with which they are inherently endowed (1975b, 275–77). Marx’s concept of alienation is often deemed the concept that most adequately describes human beings amidst capitalist social and economic relations. True enough; but it is important to note that the concept that was given priority in his discussion of alienation is species-being, or in terms used above, individuals who exhibit the qualities of being typical in the sense of possessing the essential capabilities of human beings as a universalizing species. Being typical is a self-conscious act, an act of a self-conscious species; such acts are based on capacities inherent in human beings but which must be recognized first for their potentiality and then consciously developed. Marcuse makes a point of this by emphasizing Marx’s comment on human capacities. The human being “can exploit, alter mould, treat and take further (‘pro-duce’) any being according to its ‘inherent standard’,” thus emphasizing the Latin root of the term: producere—to bring out or bring forward the potential inherent in a thing (Marcuse 1972, 16; cf. Marx 1975b, 275).
The immediate conditions and relations of labor produce skills and knowledge in the worker that are reified by the acquiescence to the demands of that part of the productive process in which the worker is employed, and of the worker’s everyday life and development. Reification occurs as long as the worker sees this fragment as the adequate representation of the whole or does not recognize its necessary relation to social totality. The alternative to this is ontological and dialectical; it is driven by the inescapable fact of human potentiality. Lukács notes, for example, that the interrelation of speech and conceptual thought mediated by labor becomes a source of development of each component. Related to particular and interconnected acts of labor, what is learned is developmental and cumulative in a way that establishes the potential ground for ever-increasing comprehensiveness in the combined acts of labor that lend themselves, as a complex, not only to knowledge of the system as a whole, but alternatives to it. This process contains a future, oppositional orientation. “Since experience gained in one
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concrete labor can be used in another, this experience gradually becomes relatively autonomous, i.e., certain observations are generalized and fixed so that they are no longer exclusively related directly to one particular performance, but acquire a certain universal character as observations about natural process in general” (Lukács 1980b, 51). Lukács relates this to the sciences, which at their inception contain the elements of their future development, regardless of whether people are immediately conscious of that fact. The same applies to individual development, for it “shows how consciousness of tasks, of the world, and of the subject itself grows out of the reproduction of his own existence . . . as its indispensable instrument” (Lukács 1980b, 51). Working at conscious development reveals the necessary relation of existing resources to the make-up of the social world and to subjects themselves; it is a cognitive act, an act of will embedded in objective, concrete reality, an act that is framed by a commitment to radical social change and human betterment.
While false consciousness and reification are ideological problems that the working-class movement must address, they are often mixed with genuine consciousness or the seed of its development, and it is such a tension that can lead to the appropriate questions and the relevant answers to social problems (cf. Lukács 1971a, 70; 1981, 204–6). With every connection between acts of labor in a particular position in the field of production, the worker has an increasing potential to see the totality of the system. As the individual becomes increasingly aware of the complexes revealed through these interconnections, he or she edges consciously closer to being typical. Thus, the other side of “if they were able” is “if they are willing” to fully comprehend reality and explore options in order to make choices that may lead toward an alternative to capitalism. This is not a voluntaristic argument. Rather, the argument recognizes the concrete pressure of objective conditions as a constraint on willingness and ability. It also recognizes, however, that the argument that individual will and action are negated by the apparent reasonableness of adopting a market rationale is, in fact, an argument that claims that the choice to take an oppositional course of action is unnecessary. On the other hand, while it is not a
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voluntaristic argument, the task of making the necessary connections, becoming able to comprehend fully reality indeed requires interest and will on the part of the individual. But it also requires access to that precondition of Lukács’s that we have referred to more than once here: a conscious minority prepared, as a means of changing the world, to impute to others the range and substance of knowledge required for the full comprehension of reality, a conscious minority as the mediating factor in human advancement.
In History and Class Consciousness, Lukács used imputed class consciousness as an organizational principle for the development of political cadre. The concept remains as important now as then because of the implications it has for the attitude required to assert a strategy of human progress. Attitude, in this instance, refers to both an organizational and individual recognition and commitment to specific social and political ends. The Communist Party was the form of the “class consciousness of the proletariat” (Lukács 1971a, 41). The class consciousness that it “ascribed” to the working class was the party’s active stressing of its rational political knowledge and the strategy developed from it, grounded in an understanding of a deliberately plotted historical direction that could be known and understood by anyone. It is the programmatic organization of that knowledge out of what was grasped as objectively possible.
NOTES
1. These are excerpted from Wilde (1997).
2. Jobb noted that several wives were awakened by telephone calls immediately after the explosion, with an unidentified voice asking if their husbands were at home. With no tag board, mine managers had no accurate list of who was on shift (1994, 45–48).
3. For example, the 12-hour shifts violated Section 128 (1) of the Coal Mines Regulation Act; see Richard 1997, 143–44.