File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9706, message 143


From: "Karl Carlile" <joseph-AT-indigo.ie>
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 1997 21:51:05 +0000
Subject: Re: M-TH: chaos/Lukacs/class consc. pt. 3


KARL: Deb I find it difficult to work out what it is you are saying. 
Would you explain to me in a paragraph or two what it your are 
saying. I dont so much want your interpretation of somebody else's 
work. Just what it is you are saying.


Greetings,
Karl

---------------------------------------
The primary presupposition of the theory of sensationalism is that
sensation's source is the internal world of the body; the brute matter
of the body exists separate from the mode of production and its
processes foment sensation.

This is matterism, and as we have seen with Avenarius, empiricist
sensationalism slides quickly into idealism, that is, it is ultimately
commensurate with Mach's idealist sensationalism.

The ontological basis for both empiricist (-sensationalist)
epistemology and idealist-sensationalist epistemology is the
presupposition that the objective world is, above all, brute matter
that exists autonomously from the mode of production.  

This presupposition is, to historical materialism, insuperable. The
"matter" of the body does not produce sensations "freely," that is,
does not produce sensations that are not already organized towards
life-needs, towards the goal of reproducing the life of the
individual. The body, in short, has needs: clean water, food, shelter.
. . . Sensation is first and foremost a response to these fundamental
life- needs: thirst, hunger, shivering.  Any mode of production works
in relation to these needs.  I do not mean satisifies them, but rather
uses them as the basis for appropriating labor-power, incorporating
them into--and thereby shaping them to--the mode of production.  In
this way, the needs of the body are harnessed to a mode of production,
organized further by it.  "Sense" is therefore, in any society,
socially organized, whether or not need is met. 

Making meaning of that "sense" is the work of ideology, and
dominant ideology works to make the degree of satisfication of
those needs as well as the way they are (un)met appear to be
natural, socially unchangeable, simply "the way things are." 
Workers believe the dominant ideology. . .but only to a certain
extent precisely because they "sense" that their needs are not being
met.  This "sense" forms the basis for what Lenin calls "embryonic
consciousness," and again, I stress here that the "sense" I speak of
in this instance is no longer that "natural" "sense" of an individual,

cannot be theorized as separate or autonomous from the mode of
production, but is produced as an effect of workers' objective
position in the mode of production.  It is the basis of the 
objective
interest Lukacs theorizes.  This "sense," that is, has (as Kevin
Cabral put it) "a historical existence."    However, while it is not
class consciousness, neither is it "metaphysical," since the "sense"
that one's needs are not being met is not a free-floating "idea" but
one very much produced by one's actual life circumstances in any mode
of production.  Nor does this "sense" go unexpressed (as K. Cabral
implies); it is expressed in the habits and practices (to borrow from
Althusser) of the workers.  That they "agree" to sell their
labor-power "for a day" yet then seek to alter the terms of the
"agreement" (whether through bargaining, "revolting," . . . quitting
and changing employers, "theft". . .), or say that they need to,
expresses in habits and practices this "sense."   Indeed, that they
even "agree" to be exploited to begin with is a practice that
expresses this "sense": they act as the proletariat because of this
sense that tells them that they must do something or die.  That their
"choice" appears to them in large part to be limited to being
exploited or dying is an effect of knowledge being circumscribed by
bourgeois ideology, but they are nevertheless expressing this sense
that is the basis of class consciousness.

This is also why class consciousness is more than "a possibility," as
Cabral suggests; because it is based in need that is systemically
(un)met, it is, at the very least, a *systemic* "possibility." It is
not, that is, a possibility subject to chance apart from social
system, such as a pure accident; mutation. . .; or any such "chaotic"
event stemming from the interactions of elements of brute matter,
occurring perhaps in some systemic relationship, but one that is
regarded as not social. In terms of Marxism, the possibility of class
consciousness is more precisely understood not as a simple
possibility, but as an *historical necessity.*

Class consciousness emerges in embryonic form from this
historically produced "sense" of the workers, the critical moment
arising at the point when, as Lenin argues,  "The workers abandon. . .
their age-long faith in the permanence of the system which oppressed
them" (What Is To Be Done 32).  Their "sense" becomes embryonic
consciousness when they no longer have "faith" that the system is
immutable.  The Lukacsian theorization of "the knowledge yielded by
the standpoint of the proletariat" can be read as explaining why this
"faith" is "abandoned." Very broadly speaking, the standpoint of the
proletariat develops on the basis of the worker's understanding of
himself as a commodity:  "Inasmuch as he is incapable in practice of
raising himself above the role of object his consciousness is the
*self-consciousness of the commodity*" (as I read it, Lukacs' term for
what Lenin is calling embryonic consciousness; emphasis in original). 
This "self- consciousness of the commodity" emerges because the
worker's "sense" that needs are not being met requires him to go
"outside" of common (dominant) explanations; that is, necessity pushes
the worker outside of the dominant ideology and into an emergent class
consciousness:  "In every aspect of daily life in which the individual
worker imagines himself to be the subject of his own life he finds
this to be an illusion that is destroyed by the immediacy of his
existence". . . "The worker's consciousness is "force[d] out of . . .

pure immediacy". . . "he becomes aware of himself as a
commodity" [I don't have H&CC here, only a section of it in an
anthology, so I can't give page numbers].

  Reading this Lukacsian theorization through my explanation of
"sense", it is possible to say that this awareness would be present no
matter how many ideological layers were sedimented on top of it
because such "sense"  is necessarily and historically present, if
un(evenly)developed, in all whose labor is appropriated.   The
beginning of class consciousness, in short, is an objective fact.
"Sense" of need is not idealism.

However, while according to Lukacs, workers are forced beyond
"immediacy" because they are "denied the scope for . . . illusory
activity" [whereby "effects" are understood to "emanate from
(one)self"], we might instead say that they are forced beyond
immediacy by the "sense" that their needs are not being met, and
therefore give Lukacs' theory more historical accuracy (in my view,
workers are not "denied" "illusory activity"; such illusory activity
may be denied them in terms of making decisions reserved for the
employer, but it is encouraged elsewhere, for example, when the male
is deemed "head of the household" and therefore chief executor of
decisions in that realm--he then acts "as if" the effects he produces
"emanate from himself" rather than the hierarchization of differences
for the cheapest extraction of labor-power.  The possibility of
engaging in illusory activity in this realm--which appears to the
worker as natural, autonomous from the labor site-- provides a basis
for the worker to accept as natural the employer's engagements in
illusory activity.)

The knowledge that comprises both embryonic consciousness (ec)
and the worker's "self-consciousness as a commodity" (scc) is not
"partial" knowledge.  Partial knowledge presumes the movement of
matter, not social system, to comprise the objective world, and
therefore posits an objective world that is fundamentally unknowable
and largely immutable.   Ec and scc presume the laws of motion of
capital to comprise the objective world, and therefore theorize the
objective world as knowable and, consequently, changeable.  They are
the beginning of interested (not partial) knowledge.

However, according to complexity/chaos theory, as well as more
common sense forms of this dominant ideology, ec and scc are
simply partial knowledge, not the beginnings of interested
knowledge/class consciousness.    And because the dominant
ideology of partial knowledge asserts that only partial knowledge is
ever possible, it effectively encourages ec and scc to remain
undeveloped, remain at the level of "sense" or "felt need" only--
remain at the level, that is, of affect, where it finds many forms of
expression, to be sure. None of which, however, finds in itself the
level of organization necessary for systemic, transformative change.
This is why vanguard knowledge, as Kautsky argued and Lenin
approvingly quoted him, must come from "without."  By this is meant
both "outside" (outside capitalist relations of production/from
socialist theorization, itself produced by the forces of capitalism)
and "from need" (the "sense" of necessity pushes the worker out of the
immediacy of capitalist relations and into emerging class
consciousness).  (NOTE: As I hope this indicates, Marxism does indeed
have the conceptual framework to theorize not just the subject, but
subjectivity.)

Without vanguard knowledge, worker subjectivity is left to oscillate
between "senses" and from "senses" to whatever "knowledges" or
"meanings" are imparted through formal, everyday, and worksite
pedagogy.  The sense and knowledge of course may develop in the
direction of class consciousness to a certain extent.  But without
developing ec and scc into principled knowledge of systemic forces of
capitalism, the worker is, in the main, left to believe that there is
nothing to be done because, quite simply, shit just happens.  Why shit
happens to some people more than others, the matterist would respond,
is because some people's "sense" is "deficient."  

Here we have the core of *The Bell Curve*.  

Not to mention an alibi for more of the (bourgeois) pedagogy that
produces this ideology of incapacity to begin with.

As well as a scapegoat, in education, for the repeated "crises"
(necessary to capitalism, but which capitalism must also necessarily
suggest is "caused" by something other than capitalist relations of
production--).

Next, one more return to Lyotard.

Deb Kelsh
Red Theory Collective
The University at Albany, New York




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                          Yours etc.,
                                     Karl   


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