Class and Consciousness

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Marxism has an ambiguous attitude towards the working class, and its ideas.

On the one hand, marxism is supposed to be a theory of society and economics, history and the future, life as it is and as it should be, from the point of view of the working class. It could be characterised as codified and systematised working class consciousness.

On the other hand, we're told the working class doesn't actually have working class consciousness. Instead, workers have in their heads the muck of ages - the assorted contradictory ideologies and propagandas which served the ruling class at one point or another.

Class consciousness then is a matter of authenticity - only highly authentic people have much of it, and almost no one has much authenticity. And so long as there have been classes, people have been inauthentic. Which means, supposedly, we won't know what people are 'supposed' to be like until decades after the revolution. Obviously there's some residual essentialism in our materialism.

Class consciousness is what the working class would have if it could stand outside itself, seeing itself from an ahistorical gods-eye viewpoint.

The image of the marxist party as the 'memory' or 'soul' of the working class, or as the 'vanguard' or a container for the 'best' workers involves a blend of substitutionism (where the party is conscious on behalf of the unconscious workers) and a kind of messianism, where the chosen few keep the sacred flame which would disappear forever if they didn't tend it.

In "What is to be Done", Lenin wrote quite plainly that the workers are incapable of creating the insights of marxism from their own experience - even though the insights supposedly come from this experience. Rather, they need to be educated in what they should already know by people who haven't had such experience - forward looking bourgeois intellectuals.

This is at the least a condescending attitude - portraying the workers as children who lack the maturity to understand their own circumstance, and have been led astray by bigger children. Marxists then are the grownups who have to guide them back to the right path.

It also raises the question of how the marxists came to be the few grownups. Were they born qualitatively superior? Was their indoctrination into mainstream culture faulty at some crucial point in their lives? Are they just smarter and more principled by natural variation? All these answers are given - implicitly, of course, because they are very un-marxist notions - in hagiographies of marxist great figures.

The usual explicitly given answer is that they grew into marxists as a result of participating in struggles and resistance. Which doesn't explain where these struggles came from, or why the marxists were among to few to get involved. Presumably before they were marxists they were born proto-marxists.

There's another implication in Lenin's statement. If the workers can't create marxism, and people can only become marxists by reading Marx (plus maybe a handful of other towering figures) and engaging in struggles...then where did Marx come from? He seems to be at the start of one of Hegel's bad infinities, much as Freud supposedly was.

Just as Freud alone was special enough to psychoanalyse himself, so Marx alone was special enough to take Feuerbach, Ricardo, Hegel etc. and spin them around onto their feet.

Regarding the founder as unique, and justifying your beliefs by reading them into his words - these are traits of a cult, not the sole hope of humanity. But then, cults often do believe themselves to be the sole hope of humanity.

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