Economic conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into workers. The combination of capital has created for this mass a common situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle, of which we have noted only a few phases, this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But the struggle of class against class is a political struggle.
—Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847)
Free your mind and your ass will follow.
—George Clinton, Parliament/Funkadelic (1970)
Breath in, breath out.
I sit on a zafu cushion and attempt to watch my breathing. I can barely pay attention for five minutes let alone achieve kenshō, let alone attain satori or some higher level of Zen Buddhist enlightenment. I’m disappointed I can’t practice mindfulness for more than a few moments without my attention wandering. I blame the ‘60s and the instant enlightenment promised by psychedelics. Taking LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, or any of the dozen psychedelic drugs available in those days allowed the user to experience an “altered state of consciousness” within minutes of taking their drug of choice, as opposed to the days, months, or years of practice sitting and meditating required to realize just twenty minutes of mindfulness. That immediate enlightenment appealed to Americans like me whose “fast food culture” promised instant gratification but which also gave us obesity, clogged arteries, and type-two diabetes. For every one Baba Ram Dass née Richard Alpert who extolled psychedelics as a first step toward the nirvana promised by Eastern mysticism, there were scores of Ken Keseys who acknowledged that “[t]here’ve been smokin’ holes where my memory used to be” from prolonged LSD use.
With all due respect to George Clinton, freeing your mind nearly always requires working your ass off first. There are very few “road to Damascus” moments where enlightenment is immediate and comes unbidden. Saul/Paul never wrote about his conversion experience, and biblical descriptions of the event were written decades after he died. Garry Wills’ Catholic defense of this foundational moment for Christianity in What Paul Meant notwithstanding, Don Wycliff wrote that “the dramatic story of Paul’s conversion while on the road to Damascus may have been a contrivance of Luke, the writer of the gospel and of The Acts of the Apostles.” I’ve always found such subjective “conversion experiences” suspect.
I’ve frequently extolled the power of social revolution to skip past years, even decades of class struggle, to achieve socialism. Such spontaneous, immediate revolutionary moments were credited with sudden insights that radically changed the participants’ beliefs and behaviors. This was one basis for the much-touted concept of “class consciousness” as understood by Rosa Luxemburg and old-school Left Communism. But Marx talked only about “a class as against capital” versus “a class for itself.” The working class was first an economic category for Marx, defined by its relationship to the means of production, its struggle against the capitalist class, and the process by which it becomes the majority class in society. Workers owned only their own labor power, sold that labor to capitalists for a wage, and came to dominate society numerically. But the working class was also in the process of becoming a political subject with revolutionary agency. It was how “the working class” became “the proletariat.” Marx never used the phrase “class consciousness.” It was Marx’s followers[1] who misappropriated Marx to argue that what he meant was “a class in itself” versus “a class for itself” which they then used to underpin various concepts of class consciousness—of unconscious potentiality becoming conscious actuality.
The idea of “being-in-itself” becoming “being-for-itself” originated with Hegel who described the World Spirit’s movement from potentially to actuality. Inspired by the Levellers of England’s Glorious Revolution, EP Thompson took this common Marxist misconception to describe the formation of the English working class between 1790 and 1830 first as “a class in itself” and ultimately as “a class for itself:”
This is revealed, first, in the growth of class-consciousness: the consciousness of an identity of interests as between all these diverse groups of working people and as against the interests of other classes. And, second, in the growth of corresponding forms of political and industrial organizations. By 1832 there were strongly-based and self-conscious working-class institutions—trade unions, friendly societies, educational and religious movements, political organizations, periodicals—working-class intellectual traditions, working-class community-patterns, and a working-class structure of feeling.
Thompson’s iteration of class consciousness—as the culmination of working class self-activity and organization—was profoundly cultural, highly romantic, and ultimately archetypal. Class consciousness as a cultural phenomena resisted reductionism, promoted rational consideration, and defined an integrative process that emphasized social continuity. But it was also gradualist, progressivist, largely idealist, and thus thoroughly cerebral. To argue that the working class needed to achieve class consciousness before becoming the revolutionary proletariat—“a class for itself”—was to insist that subjective consciousness must precede any material social revolution. Revolutionary struggle was thus seen as the effect of consciousness while revolutionary organization, let alone social revolution, simply embodied that consciousness. Definitely a “free your mind and your ass will follow” emphasis. If class consciousness failed to materialize, it must be because of the dense convolutions of “false consciousness.”
Lenin infamously argued that the working class was only capable of trade union consciousness and that true class consciousness needed to be imparted to the immature proletariat from the outside by the vanguard party. To cut the Gordian knot posed by Thompson’s idealism, Leninist vanguardism, and Luxemburgist/Left Communist revolutionary spontaneity in how to attain working class self-emancipation, Italian workerism (autonomia or operaismo)[2] in the 1970s proposed the rigorously materialist solution of class composition. The working class was an economic category under capitalism comprised of waged and unwaged labor, people on state assistance, peasants, even slaves that were constituted as a class by their place in the process of production. But the proletariat was also a revolutionary class with the capacity to overthrow capitalism and usher in a communist society through the refusal of work. The working class underwent continual processes of composition, decomposition and recomposition in which consciousness and culture played ambivalent roles.
The positive struggles and victories of workers against capitalism composed, or recomposed, the working class as a class. In turn the triumphs of the capitalist class against workers decomposed the working class. Workers could use the practice of “reading the struggles” to gain crucial knowledge about their technical, social, and political composition[3] to further the composition/recomposition of their class as a whole. Workers’ inquiry[4] was a meticulous methodology pioneered by the Johnson-Forest Tendency (USA) and Socialisme ou Barbarie (France). There was a close relationship between forms of production (how the class was materially constituted) and the forms of struggle (how the class composed itself) which replaced the entire class-in-itself/class-for-itself schema and rejected the notion of class consciousness altogether.
The Italian workerist movement insisted on the historical specificity of its revolutionary project for communism. Different material compositions of productive processes under capitalism meant different compositions of the working class and its material struggles. “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself,” Marx wrote in The German Ideology. “We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”
The unrelenting materialism of workerism had a number of problems. Always looking for moments of rupture or discontinuity in the history of class struggle, workerism haphazardly periodized the capitalist mode of production or simplistically categorized the working class through a sequence of paradigmatic proletarian figures (professional worker to mass worker to social worker). The part was invariably taken for the whole. The working class’s leading sectors were presumed to represent the proletariat as a whole, central factory struggles for the whole class struggle in its plurality, immediate processes of production for the capitalist mode of production generally, technical composition for all class composition, discrete decomposition for absolute social disintegration, etc. This tendency to overgeneralize produced dubious causal links as when a particular mode of capitalist exploitation was tied to a particular form of struggle, or technical composition was argued to organically lead to political composition. Indeed, the problematics of class consciousness and culture within workerist struggles were never resolved. Ultimately, it was assumed that class composition would inexorably produce communist revolution much as class consciousness before would produce revolution.
I started out embracing class consciousness before commending class composition. Now I ask whether the class consciousness model and the class composition model can be synthesized into a model that transcends both? I don’t have the theoretical chops for that task. Instead I may take up a discussion, posed by André Gorz in A Farewell to the Working Class, of whether the working class has become obsolete.
SOURCES:
Personal recollections
The Poverty of Philosophy, The German Ideology, Capital v. 1-3, and Grundrisse by Karl Marx
What is to be Done? by VI Lenin
The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions by Rosa Luxemburg
History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics by György Lukács
The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson
Reading Capital Politically by Harry Cleaver
Autonomia: Post-Political Politics by Sylvere Lotringer and Christian Marazzi (Semiotext(e))
“Class in Itself and Class Against Capital: Karl Marx and His Classifiers” by Edward Andrew
Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism by Steve Wright
What Paul Meant by Garry Wills
“A brilliant but unsatisfying defense of St. Paul” by Don Wycliff (Baltimore Sun, 1-7-2007)
“Class Consciousness or Class Composition?” by Salar Mohandesi
“What is the Working Class” by Kevin Van Meter
FOOTNOTES
[1] Dos Santos, Przesworski, Eisenstein, Lenin, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Korsch, Zeitlin, Tucker, Poulantzas, Kołakowski, Draper, Cohen, Lukács, Gramsci, Thompson, Hobsbawm, Marcuse, Sartre, et al.
[2] Organizations like Lotta Continua, Prima Linea, Potere Operaio, Autonomia Operaia, Indiani Metropolitani and theorists like Mario Tronti, Raniero Panzieri, Sergio Bologna, Sandro Mezzadra, Silvia Frederici, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri
[3] Quoted from notesfrombelow.org:
Technical: We understand ‘technical composition’ to be the knowledge of how workers are organised, that is to say ‘technically arranged’ within any given work; how our time is managed or dictated, what we must produce and in what conditions, what talents or skills we must use and what managerial or technological mechanisms mediate our work. By extension ‘technical composition’ also explains where workers may sit in a larger ‘production cycle’ or ‘distribution circuit’. These arrangements are in part informed by the ‘social’ composition of workers and the political power we are able to exert over these conditions.
Social: We understand ‘social composition’ to be the knowledge of how workers are composed in society; where we live and in what conditions, what familial relationships we hold, what our cultures are like, what access to support (such as the welfare state or citizenship) we are afforded and how these factors impact upon our technical and political composition.
Political: We understand ‘political composition’ to be the knowledge of how workers are organised politically; what forms of political organisation we engage with, create or attempt to influence in order to exert demands drawing from our own knowledge of our technical and social compositions.
[4] Quoted from notesfrombelow.org:
Workers’ inquiry is an approach that combines knowledge production with organising. It attempts to create useful knowledge about work, exploitation, class relations, and capitalism from the perspective of workers themselves. There are two forms of workers’ inquiry. The first is inquiry ‘from above,’ involving the use of traditional research methods to gain access to the workplace. The second is inquiry ‘from below,’ a method that involves ‘co-research,’ in which workers themselves are involved in leading the production of knowledge. If the conditions exist, the inquiry ‘from below’ is clearly favourable. The knowledge that is produced from either of these forms of inquiry is useful for understanding capitalism, but also for organising against it.
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