More on Consciousness

The theoretical split of the Second International extended even to the Marxist
theory of education. For the orthodox wing the problem of education was inextricably
bound with the development of class consciousness which had been temporarily ignored
in favor of economic analysis. Yet, although economics is ultimately determining in any
given situation,1 the very notion of "economics" has to be understood in a broad sense so
that it is not separate (although distinct) from politics, education, etc. For, to do so, would
amount to falling into the very error of opportunism and revisionism.2 The class character
of bourgeois society makes all consciousness into class consciousness rooted in the
economic functions of any given class. As already indicated, the proletariat becomes
revolutionary because it works and it is deprived of its products to the point that it
becomes totally objectified as a commodity. It is at this point that it becomes the subject1 In a letter to Bloch dated September 21-22, 1890, Engels wrote that "According to
the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the
production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever
asserted. Hence, if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only
determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless
phrase." Cf. Marx and Engels, Selected Works, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 488. What is interesting
in this passage is that, although Engels is trying to deny the interpretation of economics
as a mechanistic factor, his language encourages precisely the opposite. It is not
surprising that Bernstein and his followers ignored such an ill-phrased warning and
implicitly accepted a static and reified concept of economics typical of bourgeois
ideology. For a criticism of the reductionist conception of economics, see Karel Kosik,
"Dialectic of the Concrete Totality," in Telos, vol. 1, no. 2 (Fall 1968), pp. 34ff. This issue
is not solely of historical interest for, recently, Althusser has revived it in his
overdetermination theory of revolution. According to his account, reality is constituted by
a cluster of relatively autonomous structures co-existing within a mechanistic totality.
Revolution occurs when a number of these structures enter into a crisis and they
collectively overload the societal circuit which, as a result, fails. It is only in a condition
of overloading that the economic factor becomes determining (and this is the
interpretation that Althusser gives to the phrase "on the ultimate analysis"). Cf. Louis
Althusser, "Contradiction et Surdtermination," in Pour Marx (Paris, 1965), pp. 87-128.
It is not possible here to indicate the numerous difficulties inherent in such an account.
For some detailed criticisms, see articles by Glaerman, Piccone, Tomich, and Calvert in
the September 1969 issue of Radical America, vol. III, no. 5.
2 Lukcs has dealt with the problem in relation to the continuity of violence and
economics in Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, op. cit., pp. 247ff. He writes: "The
sharp and mechanical conceptual separation between violence and economics has,
generally speaking, arisen only because the fetishistic appearance of pure thinghood
(Sachlichkeit) in economic relationships occludes their character of relationships among
men by transforming them in a second nature surrounding men with its own fatalistic
law." This is central for it is only by "underestimating the importance of violence in
history, by overlooking the function that it has had in the history of the past, that vulgar
materialism prepares the theoretical terrain for the opportunistic tactic." Ibid., p. 252.

object identity and thus acquires consciousness of itself as a commodity:3 this initial act
of self-consciousness can be completed only by concretely abolishing the conditions that
reduce men to commodities thus making the workersand all the members of society
into concrete human beings. Hence, according to orthodox Marxism, the attainment of
class consciousness is a process spontaneously generated by the capitalist mode of
production. However, when the proletariat ceases to be the working class par excellence
in the newly totalized imperialist context, this process is halted and we begin to witness
the reification of the proletariatnot in the progressive Lukcsian sense whereby the
gradual and increasing objectification leads to the subject-object identity and to class
consciousnessbut in the opposite sense whereby, through the activity of labor unions
and of reformist political parties, the process of increasing objectification is prevented
from reaching its logical revolutionary consequences thus leaving the proletariat in a
political limbo without any qualitative outlets.4
It was precisely the embourgeoisization of the proletariat that generated the two
complementary tendencies in the Second International: voluntarism and economism. The
orthodox Marxists sought to remedy the lack of class consciousness in the proletariat by
means of Lenin's theory of the party which, allegedly, was to inject revolutionary
consciousness into the working classes from outside, while the revisionists fell back on a
deterministic theory whereby socialism was considered historically inevitable so that it
was simply a matter of waiting for it by, at best, only seeking piecemeal reforms. In either
case education qua self-development of the proletariat becomes impossible: in the first
case the party eventually took over all decision-making power after the success of the
Russian revolution (thus leaving the masses in a state of passive obedience), while in the
second case the entire notion of education was recast in bourgeois terms and it
degenerated to mere training. By the middle of the 1920s Marxism had broken off into
two equally abstract ideological fragments typified by the crude metaphysics of Stalinist
Diamat, or the scientism of positivist philosophy.
With the advent of Imperialism, classical Marxism as developed by Marx became
obsolete and no longer in accord with social realities. This is understandable: Marxism is
not an eternal theory of reality, but an account of the concrete becoming of that reality
such that were it to change as it did from capitalism to imperialism, so would the theory.
Leninism can be seen as precisely an attempt to reconstitute Marxist theoryan attempt
3 The subject-object identity is able to obtain class consciousness since the process of
objectification on the part of the worker in capitalist society does not enrich the worker,
but produces alien commodities. In as far as the object becomes separate from the
subject, the latter gradually ceases to be a subject and turns into its opposite. But when
this happens, the dialectical tension between subject and object fails, and the subject
collapses into the object, thus regaining its consciousness as an object. For Lukcs, who
first clearly outlined this process in Geshichte und Klassenbewusstsein, false
consciousness obtains precisely because in a bourgeois society, the object is separated
from the subject, thus preventing him from developing, since this development can occur
only when, in radical activity, both the object and the subject change.
4 Interestingly enough, Lukcs was fully ware of these developments which he discussed
at length in the closing chapter of his work. In as far as he considered them as temporary
and passing phenomena, he did not bother to offer an explanation of them in terms of
historical materialism.

which, however, has itself remained incomplete. Although Lenin did try to come to grips
with the new realities of imperialism by recognizing that, e.g., given the new
international economic relationships, the western proletariat would never, by itself, attain
class consciousness without the conscious catalytic effort of an external agency (the
party), he failed to integrate his concrete insights into a totalizing account. As such, for
the reified western proletariat Marxism could only be introduced as an ideology wholly
disscociated from their concrete life-situation. The dismal fate of Marxism in Europe
toward the end of the 1920s can be directly traced to its being precisely an ideology.
Whereas Lenin failed to see some of the consequences of his theory of the party
in terms of the self-education of the proletariat, Lukcs sought to concretely re-vitalize
the Marxist account of class consciousness. Unlike Marx, however, he did not undertake
a concrete analysis of the existing state of affairs, and proceeded to simply articulate
those categories that Marx had derived from his existing situation, without noticing that
they no longer fully applied to the new context.
This fundamental flaw became critical when Lukcs tried to reconcile the theory
of the development of class consciousness that he gave in "The Reification and the
Consciousness of the Proletariat," and the practical programs or activities that he
suggested in the three closing essays of History and Class Consciousness. Whereas in the
theoretical essay he worked with the very same categories found in Marx's own writings
and, as such, it turned out that the proletariat spontaneously attains class consciousness
because of its objective conditions of existence, without the help of any mediating
agencies such as "the party," in the practical and programmatic essays we find Leninist
categories at work which are not consistent with the earlier set. What happened? Along
with the rest of his contemporaries, Lukcs did not integrate his theory of the
spontaneous development of class consciousness with the new economic totalization
brought about by the recent imperialist expansion. As a result, he could not reconcile his
theoretical results with the obvious fact that, if the proletariat was to become
revolutionary through class consciousness, he would have had to do it with the help of
some other mediating class (e.g., the intellectuals) which was in a better position to attain
it. Rather than undertaking a concrete analysis of the totalityas he himself continually
stressedhe found himself unable to resolve the problem and, eventually, gave up his
earlier theory of class consciousness derived directly from Marx in favor of the Leninist
analysis that led straight to the Marxism of the Third International.5 Notwithstanding
vigorous disclaimers to the contrary, Lukcs was unable to ground in social reality his
highly articulate brand of Marxism: he was all along dealing with mere categories which,
in the ultimate analysis, were not categories of their concrete socio-historical otherness
(having an ontic primacy over them) but categories of a reality that was not approached
in its natural givenness, but as another cluster of abstract categories. It is interesting to
examine Lukcs's own examination of his early work and the explanation that he gives
for his ambivalence. Obviously, he rejects his earlier theory of class consciousness as
subjectivistic for, according to it, revolution appeared as something that the proletariat
should have done rather than something that it had to do because of the nature of the
5 Lichtheim, in his account of Lukcs, fails to notice this fundamental duality and tries to
derive a unitary theory of class consciousness from the book. As a consequence, the
reconstructed theory that he arrives at makes no sense whatsoever. Cf. his The Concept of
Ideology (New York, 1967), pp. 37-39.

historical situation that obtained at a certain level of development in capitalist society. He

altogether fails to recognize that the reason why the whole theory appears subjectivistic is
due to the fact that he had mechanically juxtaposed categories that applied concretely in
the years 18501870 before the full bloom of imperialism and at the time that Marx
developed them to the post-World War One context where they could only distort reality
and produce an ideological understanding thereof. Dissociated from objective social
reality, the dialectic of the totality becomes the dialectic of the totality of abstract
categories and, as such, a new and more sophisticated kind of reification.6
When Marxist ideology in the 1920s became the official ideology of the Soviet
Union and all further attempts to restructure Marxism that did no agree with it became
automatically "revisionist" (thus, to be systematically discouraged if not outrightly
repressed), Marxism ceased to be a critical theory of reality and degenerated to the set of
irrelevant slogans that we have inherited as the only "Marxism" in our generation.
Wolpe's despair is not unjustified: in fact today we have no meaningful theory of class
consciousness applicable to advanced industrial society. What is most urgently needed is
precisely the development of such a theory by not only full analyzing the exiting state of
affairs, but also by explaining dialectically their genesis and the history of our own
theoretical outlook.

6 This account partly explains why Heidegger's Sein und Zeit has been seen by some
scholars (e.g., Kosik) as an underground polemic against Lukcsand one that has
succeeded in drawing to phenomenology many former followers of Lukcs. If Lukcs
ultimately gave but a highly sophisticated metacategorical account, then it becomes
understandable why even a pseudo-appeal to concreteness, such as Heidegger's, found
such a receptive audience even among very perceptive scholars such as Herbert Marcuse.