What is Class Consciousness?

Political Affairs 86(3) March 2007 pp. 24-27

What is Class Consciousness?

Robert Lanning

If we ask the question, 'What is class consciousness?" we might also ask, "How do we get it?" and "What do we do once we have it?" The advantage of a Marxist answer to the first question is that also answers the other two. Furthermore, in answering the first question we get a better understanding of what Marxists mean by class.

Marx and Engels (in The German Ideology) wrote that language came about because people, had something to say to one another. Consciousness, too, can be explained in the same way: it comes about when people are aware of something worth communicating to like-minded others, such as making others aware of a common problem, or contesting someone's erroneous view of how capitalist society functions. Thus, Marx and Engels established a link between these two crucial capacities of human beings by describing language as “practical consciousness.” If language is more than merely speaking, consciousness is more than simply being awake.

Marx and Engels' view of class helps to explain this. A class is comprised of people in similar social circumstances, such as living conditions, the kinds of work they do, their

comparable position on the larger, social division of labor. But more importantly the founders of historical materialism wrote that "separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class." This is the centerpiece of the division between classes: those who own the means of production and those who sell their labor in order to survive. (Erwin Marquit explains this division more thoroughly in his article, "What's Wrong with Globalization?" in the September-October 2006 Political Affairs.)

Class consciousness, in the first instance, is recognizing that the key relationship between two classes is their different interests and conditions of living. According to Marx, this means that the working class is consciousness that another class (the bourgeois class) has created the conditions of labor and living for their own class (the proletariat). But for this to have any real impact on their lives, people who consider themselves working class need to become aware of their own, common struggle to change these conditions. For the bourgeois class, this means that the class they created (the working class) to serve their own interests becomes its enemy once working people are conscious of their common interests.

Thus, Marx's inescapable emphasis is that class consciousness is an object of communication and learning. A person might be born into poverty or riches; they might be born into a family whose neighborhood friends and work associates are wealthy and well-educated, or poor with fewer years of schooling. But from Marx's point of view, people cannot call themselves members of the working class until they become conscious of that "common battle" and begin to do something about it. In other words, being a member of a class is not a passive state, such as earning minimum wage or working in a factory. It is, rather, an active and continuous development of ourselves and our collective work.

If we are not referring to people who have developed consciousness in this sense, the use of the term "class" is not an accurate expression of Marx's meaning, but a term of convenience to describe people in similar occupations, or who have about the same income or education. While this is not fully in keeping with Marx's meaning, we might still use class in this descriptive manner in the hope of moving people to make connections with broader issues.

What we have said above is summed up in Bertell Ollman's first feature of class consciousness: the subjective and objective identity and interests of membership.in a class. “Subjective” refers to what people say or think about their class situation; while “objective” refers to what we can demonstrate has actually occurred in the historical development of classes and how capitalism actually works.

In his book, Dialectical Investigations, Oilman provides a checklist of six features of class consciousness. The remaining five are explained below.

The second feature of class consciousness is that people must have some knowledge of the dynamics of capitalism, “at least enough to grasp [the] objective interests” of capitalism, how it works to ensure maximum profit for the class that owns the means of production (and is conscious that it does) by exploiting the bodies and minds of those who labor to produce that profit. Understanding how and why people work more time than they are paid for, and how surplus value is created gives people a method for understanding that capitalism, whether in good times or bad, survives and thrives by extracting as much labor as possible from working people without full compensation.

Having a satisfying job, some savings in the bank, access to a variety of consumer goods, and a decent place to live are very real and practical benefits of living in this kind of economy. But without knowing something of the circulation of capital and the value excess labor produces, these benefits serve as an illusion of stability and progress, both socially and personally.

Thirdly, class consciousness consists of the "broad outlines of class struggle and where one fits into it." There is an interesting piece of working-class literature that explains this point well. The main character of Meridel Le Sueur's story, "I Was Marching," tells of her fear and reluctance to join a group of striking workers. She has never done so before but she has two advantages that will help her make a choice between getting involved or remaining on the sidelines.

Le Sueur's character has already grasped some knowledge of how capitalism works:

Our merchant society has been built upon a huge hypocrisy, a cut-throat competition which sets one man against another and at the same time an ideology mouthing such words as "Humanity," "Truth," the "Golden Rule," and such. Now in a crisis the word falls away and the skeleton of that action shows in terrific movement.

More than just being in the middle of a strike where a person might have only an "individualistic attitude," she is conscious of broader social circumstances.

The second thing she has going for her is her knowledge of the similarities in the living and working conditions of the strikers and their families. She understands why they have committed themselves to striking instead of passively accepting what the boss offered.

Le Sueur's character is not on strike herself. "I stood aside not knowing if I would march. I couldn't see how they would organize it anyway. No one seemed to be doing much." She is learning what others have lived and learned before. Once it is clear to her what it all means - the solidarity of the strikers and their common needs, the brutality of the police acting for the employer- it is easier to choose to contribute in the kitchen or in the strikers' hospital, and finally in public protest. "I felt my legs straighten. I felt my feet join in that strange shuffle of thousands of bodies ... I was marching."

The fourth feature of class consciousness, according to Ollman, is some sense of solidarity with other class members, such as the marchers in Le Sueur's story. Perhaps a less positive example will help illustrate this point.

In May 1992, in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, 26 coal miners were killed when methane gas exploded underground; an entire shift of workers dead, all with families, each miner generally living in the same circumstances as the others. For the few years the Westray mine operated it was plagued with problems such as geological factors that made the rock unstable and produced large volumes of methane gas. The workers used unsafe equipment underground such as open torches for welding, vehicles with no spark arresters on the engines, cap lamps with batteries that would run down before the end of the shift, no sanitation facilities, and bosses who cursed at workers for taking a lunch break. An attempt to organize a union failed, in part, because above-ground workers generally voted against the union while underground workers were more inclined to vote for it.

Some workers complained, some quit or refused to work in unsafe conditions (which was their right under the law) but they did so individually. In the public inquiry that followed the explosion, miners testified that they knew the likelihood of a tragedy occurring under those conditions but felt powerless to do anything about it.

Sadly, this is a clear case of workers without a sense of solidarity, without a common commitment to their own security. These miners failed to be sufficiently knowledgeable of how capitalism works, and that even in a modem society with laws regulating the health and safety conditions of a workplace, workers are as expendable as a pile of broken picks and shovels.

The fifth feature of class consciousness is a "rational hostility toward" the opposing class. The case of immigrant workers might help to illustrate this. Capitalists demand cheap labor and find it among the young, the old and those with no legal status; they find it among workers who have little choice but to travel with the seasonal requirements of agricultural work, or take a waitress or a cleaning job. Workers without legal status have no protection from exploitation or deportation. Being conscious of these conditions should generate a hostile response. In fact, those of us committed to the working class should expect this kind of response. In other words, it is reasonable to see such exploitation as an affront to human decency and justice.

"Rational hostility" is not, however, a call to violence. Reasonable, ethical responses were those of the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets in the last two years in cities all around the US that showed outrage over the Bush administration's proposed treatment of immigrant workers. (See Emile Schepers' article in the June 2006 Political Affairs, and David Howard's commentary on the same problem in the September-October 2006 issue.)

Finally, Ollman says that being class conscious means having a "vision of a more democratic and egalitarian society that is not only possible but is a condition individuals can help bring about." Given a developed knowledge of how capitalism works, the need for solidarity, the expected anger over deplorable treatment of others, one could say, 'What else can I do but my part in planning a different future?" That, too, is a rational, reasonable response.

Marxists have always proposed some vision of a society in which work and its produce, leisure and enjoyment were fairly earned and equally distributed, from Robert Owen's socialist communities in 19th century England to the Bolsheviks' Soviet Union to the “red” trade unionists in the US who, in the 1930's and 1940's, created the most democratic labor organizations we have seen on this continent.

But Marx, wisely, never set out a precise plan for a socialist or communist future. The "plan" he developed was one to encourage people to learn what was necessary to develop their common aspirations for a better world and a consciousness of their mutual enemy.

Putting all this together we can see that class has no real meaning if it does not include the consciousness of all the features discussed above, and it has no real value for a better future if it does not include some actual struggle, not only with the opposing class, but with those still reluctant to engage in collective action in the workplace, the school, the neighborhood and beyond.