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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What You Fail to Understand Comrade....

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A common idea among proselytisers is: "If you disagree, it's because you don't understand", with the corollary that "If we can make you understand, you will believe".

This is obviously rubbish. The church which persecuted Galileo understood heliocentrism perfectly well - they were just committed to not accepting it. Indeed, as the Marquis de Sade pointed out, the same church could easily believe its own doctrines without understanding them.

The opposite idea, however, can be true. If you believe in crystal healing, acupuncture, or transcendental meditation, it may be because you don't know enough about them to know why they're junk. If you study enough of them to see the vacuum at the center and still believe, it's because your faith means more to you than your reason.

But it's still a commonly asserted notion that statement of a truth necessarily entails persuasion, even among those who ought to know better. Marx himself in a letter to Engels wrote that Pierre Tremaux's sort-of-Darwinism only had to be explained to be persuasive. The irony is that Engels trashed Tremaux's incorrect thesis based on a misreading, and Marx supported it due to a different misreading.

Bertoll Ollman writes: "A correct understanding of Marxism (as indeed of any body of scientific truths) leads automatically to its acceptance". He of course inserts the weasel get-out clause that one needs a "correct" understanding - an incorrect understanding doesn't guarantee belief, so if there's no belief, the understanding must be incorrect. Which means each individual student must adjust their understanding until they believe - and that's how we determine when they have the 'correct' understanding.

Lenin noted that Bukharin didn't understand the dialectic. Rosa Luxembourg said the same about Karl Liebknecht. The truth was that Liebknect and Bukharin understood the idea perfectly well, and wrote clearly about why they rejected it. Lenin and Luxembourg also wrote about the dialectic, but never clearly stated why they believed it.

Modern marxists have a habit of patiently explaining to doubters the very thesis the doubters doubt. It might be more helpful if they respected the doubter's intellect, and presented some evidence instead.

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The Secret

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One of the defining characteristics of cults is their insistence that they - and only they - have access to some Great Truth.

Sometimes they differentiate themselves from the outside world by making the Truth a secret - forbidding their members to tell outsiders about it. The cult of Pythagoras supposedly did this with the irrational value of Pi, though in their case it was a Truth they feared as well as revered. In this case the Truth was also true, though that isn't the important thing historically.

The Great Truth is of course usually a falsehood, and not actually the secret the cult tell themselves is it. The notions from scientology of Xenu and thetans are obviously not factual, and are common knowledge. Only members have to pay to be told.

There's another possibility: that the Great Truth is indeed true, but a commonplace triviality, dressed up in obscuring new words and the constantly repeated insistence that outsiders can't see it, or refuse to see it. Indeed, they claim the political structure of the world outside the cult is designed to obscure it.

Alfred Lawson dressed up the easier notions of relativity - the relation between motion and frame of reference - as "zig-zag and swirl". He also wrote impenetrable books on how "scientists" were too stupid to understand "his" insight into how things move.

Marxists have the same attitude.

In an article called On Teaching Marxism, Bertell Ollman writes:

"The dialectic is the only adequate means of thinking (and therefore, too, of examining and presenting) the changes and interactions that make up so large a part of the real world."

A few paragraphs later:

"Unlike bourgeois social scientists, who try to relate and put into motion what they conceive of as logically independent and essentially static factors, Marx assumes movement and interconnectedness and sets out to examine why some social forms appear to be fixed and independent."

The same tired old strawman - "we have the special knowledge, no one else does, and it consists in recognising something screamingly obvious, which no one else can see". Ollman paints mainstream academia as incapable of comprehending that different disciplines overlap because the distinctions between them are matters of convenience, not eternally fixed and inevitable.

Everyone knows that chemistry and biology blur into each other, with organic chemistry, molecular biology, enzymology and other subfields differentiating the overlap - and obviously overlapping with each other also. No one would deny that some philosophical works tend to be read as works of literature (eg. Hobbs' Leviathan, Rousseau's Confessions), and vice versa (eg. Alice in Wonderland, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence).

Leviathan is also part of political science, and Alice in Wonderland is used by linguists - who would be very surprised to be informed otherwise by a marxist colleague.

If marxist academics can't combat the mainstream without caricaturing it, then the problem is either in academia, or marxism.

Darwinism, for instance, is the only theory of its kind to have any credibility, not just because of the mountain of evidence, but because almost every single attack on Darwinism is a strawman - failing to get to grips with the real theory. If marxists can produce nothing but strawmen, then they should join the creationists and inventors of perpetual motion machines.

Note that I say "marxists", not "marxism". I'm sure marxists can produce rigorous, engaged critiques of every aspect of bourgeois society. Occasionally they do so, but too few, and too rarely.

When a cult has a secret Great Truth, the content of the secret is irrelevant. It doesn't affect the running of the cult - though it's probably used to justify the way the cult is run. It doesn't serve to enlighten members, though it does make them feel enlightened.

It's there to be the thing which marks the boundary between insiders and outsiders - cult members and the enemies outside the group. Marxism has long become too much like a cult.

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Patchwork Retrotheorisation

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Karl Marx didn't have a theory of art. That didn't stop Mikhail Lifshitz writing a book on it.

It's not a difficult trick. If you want to find "the islamic theory of childhood", you trawl through the Q'uran and your favoured hadiths, picking out any passages that refer to children, put them in a list and treat them as notes for a book which the author(s) planned but never got around to writing.

If you want "the marxist theory of aesthetics", you assume as a matter of faith that
(1) there is such a theory,
(2) it's contained implicitly in available works on other subjects,
(3) it can be extracted from them, and
(4) it's well worked-out and coherent.

Four highly questionable assumptions. In effect, you assume the great marxists did unwittingly collaborate on a worthwhile theory of aesthetics...but they wrote it out of sequence, scattering it in fragments across works covering tangentially related topics.

If you're a scrupulous researcher, you'll remember the context the fragments came from and take that into account when interpreting them - and if you're not, well, that makes it easier to write the book.

None of this is to say such a work must be worthless, or that Marx, Lenin etc. had nothing interesting to say about art. But any project like "Buddha on family", "Hume on linguistics" or indeed "Lenin on music" should be regarded with great skepticism.

If I want to know something about geology, I ask a geologist. I don't ask a dozen haematologists, or read a dozen books by one astronomer.

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