Ollman's Toward Class Consciousness Next Time

[Dunk]

http://www.pipeline.com/~rougeforum/towardclassconsciousness.htm (http://www.pipeline.com/%7Erougeforum/towardclassconsciousness.htm)

Some highlights.



Class consciousness is a more complex phenomenon-and, hence, more fraught with possibilities for failure-than Marx and most other socialists have believed. With the extra hundred years of hindsight, one can see that what Marx treated as a relatively direct, if not easy, transition is neither. Progress from the workers' conditions to class consciousness involves not one but many steps, each of which constitutes a real problem of achievement for some section of the working class.


First, workers must recognize that they have interests. Second, they must be able to see their interests as individuals in their interests as members of a class. Third, they must be able to distinguish what Marx considers their main interests as workers from other less important economic interests. Fourth, they must believe that their class interests come prior to their interests as members of a particular nation, religion, race, etc. Fifth, they must truly hate their capitalist exploiters. Sixth, they must have an idea, however vague, that their situation could be qualitatively improved. Seventh, they must believe that they themselves, through some means or other, can help bring about this improvement. Eighth, they must believe that Marx's strategy, or that advocated by Marxist leaders, offers the best means for achieving their aims. And, ninth, having arrived at all the foregoing, they must not be afraid to act when the time comes.

...
From the foregoing account, it appears that class consciousness is an extraordinary achievement of which very few workers at any time have shown themselves capable, and that there is little reason to believe this will change. Indeed, with greater inter-class mobility, increasing stratification within the working class, and the absolute (not relative) improvement in the workers' material conditions in our century, some of the factors which have helped bring about class consciousness where it did exist have lost much of their influence.
...

The concrete aims of radical activity, on the basis of this analysis, are to get teen-age and even younger members of the working class to question the existing order along with all its symbols and leaders, to loosen generalized habits of respect and obedience, to oppose whatever doesn't make sense in terms of their needs as individuals and as members of a group, to conceive of the enemy as the capitalist system and the small group of men who control it, to articulate their hopes for a better life, to participate in successful protest actions no matter how small the immediate objective, and to create a sense of community and brotherhood of all those in revolt. The purpose is to overturn (or, more accurately, to undermine) the specific barriers that have kept past generations of workers from becoming class-conscious. Full class consciousness can only occur later on the basis of adult experiences, particularly in the mode of production. Making allowances for exceptions on both ends of the scale, what can be achieved now is essentially a predisposition to respond to the conditions of life in a rational manner, what might be called a state of preconsciousness. Capitalism willing, and capitalism is periodically willing, revolutionary effects will follow.

I thought it was interesting. There are some things I don't think I agree with, like the possible individual importance of sexual drive as it relates to class consciousness (which I thought was kind of odd), but there are also other things. I have this revulsion against anything that suggests that "individual class consciousness" is some kind of achievement. I think it's just ego stroking. Of course, I value it, but I don't think of myself as particularly special in any sense - that any kind of personal attribute other than my own luck is responsible for my "awareness." I also put that into quotations because I think that perceiving liberal workers as "unconscious" implies that we have special knowledge, when we absolutely do not. Class consciousness isn't a matter of intelligence - anyone is capable of understanding class struggle - students learn it every day in Sociology classes. But learning about theory (albeit often through a liberal filter, like Sociology) doesn't generate class consciousness.

What kind of power do you think revolutionary workers actually have to help consciousness spread in the wake of a crisis?

Ollman obviously thinks we all play a key part in it. He mentions what he thinks we need to do, which is to socialize our youth toward radical thought and action, but he also doesn't suggest how it might be done.

So, Communist Summer Camps? Or maybe just Summer Camps, where the kids form a council to decide what they should do at Camp? I'm half-joking.

[Die Neue Zeit]

The author somehow forgets generic political consciousness in between consciousness related to "less important economic interests," and also fails to distinguish genuine class consciousness from "socialist" consciousness.


From the foregoing account, it appears that class consciousness is an extraordinary achievement of which very few workers at any time have shown themselves capable, and that there is little reason to believe this will change.

He has obviously failed to consider the European worker movements before WWI, whereby way more that just "very few workers at any time have shown themselves capable."

[Dunk]

The author somehow forgets generic political consciousness in between consciousness related to "less important economic interests," and also fails to distinguish genuine class consciousness from "socialist" consciousness.


Nor is "class consciousness" a synonym for "trade union consciousness" as Lenin seems to suggest in What Is To Be Done, where he ties together the "awakening of class consciousness" and the "beginning of trade union struggle."9 (http://www.pipeline.com/%7Erougeforum/towardclassconsciousness.htm#9) Despite this suggestion, an important distinction is made in this work between "trade union consciousness," or recognition of the need for unions and for struggle over union demands, and "socialist (or Social Democratic) consciousness," which is an awareness on the part of workers of the "irreconcilable antagonism of their interests to the whole of the modern political and social system."10 (http://www.pipeline.com/%7Erougeforum/towardclassconsciousness.htm#10) Class consciousness, as I have explained it, has more in common with Lenin's notion of socialist consciousness, and Lenin, on one occasion, even speaks of "genuine class consciousness" with this advanced state of understanding in mind.11 (http://www.pipeline.com/%7Erougeforum/towardclassconsciousness.htm#11)

I'm not sure how relevant generic political consciousness, or false consciousness is, since the piece is primarily about how Marx's perspective of the conditions of the working class serve as a catalyst for a rational, rapid progression of consciousness but are in reality a difficult barrier instead. In my opinion, that's really the worth of the piece he's written. It's a kind of "Yeah, well, didn't we already know this since we're still dominated by global capitalism?" But we don't act accordingly, I think, according to Ollman - even though most of us on the left understand this, we don't alter our strategies to fit with the reality. We just wait until "next time" - the next crisis - hoping that it does the thrust of work for us.

I can certainly see fitting it in there, ie from what Ollman considers the 3rd to 5th "stage," where a certain level of a false (generic) political consciousness takes it's place; for example, those who can't see their "main economic interests" - which I assume (perhaps incorrectly?) to mean higher wages, better conditions, benefits, etc would certainly carry over into a seriously inconsistent political perspective. The 4th-5th "stage" strike me as where most people are currently on Ollman's sliding scale, containing left and right-liberals who do not "truly hate their capitalist exploiters," whether because they believe they're not bad people or because they believe they're going to be a part of the capitalist class some day.



He has obviously failed to consider the European worker movements before WWI, whereby way more that just "very few workers at any time have shown themselves capable."

I think he meant relatively, in the historical or global sense. I mean, if we look in isolated regions and specific times, Ollman's criticism falls apart (and I think he mentions in there somewhere how it can sometimes develop rapidly, as well as decay rapidly) when we look at Russia or Germany in the early 20th century. Still, I think it's accurate to claim that relatively speaking, class (socialist) consciousness is something few workers have developed.

[Mr. Natural]

Dunk, Thanks much for the Ollman link. This essay and others are contained in Ollman's Social and Sexual Revolution: Essays on Marx and Reich (1972).

I am forever recommending Ollman, although in the area of the materialist dialectic. His scholarship, comprehensively presented in Dance of the Dialectic (2003), firmly establishes Marx's and the materialist dialectic's roots in Hegel's philosophy of internal relations with its abstraction process and dialectical "laws." Marx's encounter with Hegelian idealistic philosophy, which he brought to Earth and materialized, summoned the relations of life and society to life in his mind, and Marx came to see life and society as the organic, systemic processes that they are. The rather unusable, klunky "laws" of the dialectic then serve to show some of the movements and developments inherent in systemic processes.

The aforementioned philosophy of internal relations (world as internally related whole composed of internally related wholes), its abstraction process, and its dialectical "laws" have now been affirmed in general by the new sciences of organization that Marx and Engels would have loved and used to inform, develop, and organize Marxism. Current Marxists, though, universally ignore or disparage this science--a thoroughly un-Marxian stance.

But this thread is about Ollman's discussion of class consciousness, and I will engage it on that level tomorrow. I need to digest Ollman's essay for a day, for this is a most important topic. The historic failure of the proletariat to develop class consciousness is fact, and solving this riddle is critical to anarchist/socialist/communist revolution.

Dunk, before ending this post, I want to take issue with your dismissal of what I perceive to be your unusually open, radical mentality. You wrote, in reference to yourself, that achieving "individual class consciousness is not an achievement." Well, it is, and those who achieve it need to understand their accomplishment so they can spread it around. So rather than modestly dismiss your own special abilities, I would suggest you recognize them, pat yourself on the back, and develop them and offer them to others.

I have already developed a format for "Communist summer camps," which I have thought of as "weekend seminars."

Comrades might be interested in The Left Academy (1982), which Ollman co-edited with Edward Vernoff. There are chapters on Marxist economics, political science, philosphy, history, and anthropology. I haven't read this work, which I am now compelled to buy, prompted by the OP.

My red-green best.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I'm not sure how relevant generic political consciousness, or false consciousness is

They're not synonymous, either. :confused:

There's tred-iunion and other lower forms of consciousness. I don't like "false consciousness" or "ideology," but I do think greater attention should be paid to behavioural political economy.

There's also "socialist" consciousness (the left).

There's also generic political consciousness, a la Occupy.

Then there's genuine class consciousness, not the same as any of the above but an extension of generic political consciousness. Why? Because the "struggle for socialism" is economic and not political, and because every genuine class struggle is political and not economic.

[Mr. Natural]

Comrades, I can't say I am surprised--just disappointed once again--that an important thread related to developing viable revolutionary processes has been largely ignored by "revolutionaries." I read the Ollman essay twice yesterday and made the effort to think through a radical response, some of which I will post today, but I do want to note just how hard it is to engage a disengaged "left" these days. If I weren't "red hot" as well as red-green, I'd find such demoralizing realities to be politically paralytic.

DNZ, Why are you making a point of severing the dialectical relationship between politics and economics?

The critical quote from Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte is reproduced incorrectly in both link and book, and a critical omission makes it worthless. Here is what Marx actually wrote, the omission bolded: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past."

Among other things, I'm a [living] systems theorist, and in this quotation, Marx is saying people are born into systemic conditions within which they develop their consciousness. Marx was emphasizing the capitalist system, but other systems of which he was aware and from which people also develop consciousness are the nation, family, religion, etc. These latter systems all develop within capitalism relations, too, and transmit capitalist values.

So working class "consciousness" develops within capitalist institutions and values and reflects them, thus negating the development of a viable proletarian consciousness. This systemic capitalist envelopment and pollution of consciousness takes two forms: intellectual and physical. Workers are intellectually separated from real, human, living values and they are physically fragmented and separated from each other by capitalism's destruction of the various forms of human community. Workers thus tend to see themselves as isolated opponents, not class allies.

So capitalism is a system and will have systemic effects on its people-parts. This systemic control of people/workers has now become almost all-controlling with capitalism's globalization, and my posts frequently refer to capitalism's mental control of humanity. This mental control is manifested on the "left" by a pervasive, profound conservatism and the lack of any interest in revolutionary organizing theory.

In the first paragraph of the essay, Ollman writes: "Why haven't workers in the advanced capitalist countries become class conscious? Marx was wont to blame leadership, short memories, temporary bursts of prosperity, and, in the case of the English and German workers, national characteristics .... After Marx's death, [Engels] generally accounted for the disappointing performance of the working class, particularly in England, by claiming that they had been bought off with a share of their country's colonial spoils. The same reasoning is found in Lenin's theory of imperialism ..."

All of the conditions referred to above are systemic conditions. Capitalism, which acts as a cancer of all living/social systems, has metastasized life on Earth--natural life, human life. Capitalism has thus significantly formed working class "consciousness" and has separated workers from each other mentally and physically.

Capitalism rules. The System rules. Workers weren't able to develop the necessay revolutionary class consciousness in the heyday of capitalist contradictions, so how do we go about achieving this now? Or might the entire concept of class need reworking?

My strong belief is that we need to re-examine Marxism and re-revolutionize it, and I find the current concept of class to be particularly problematic. "Class" refers to one's relations to the means of production, and I find that the entire human species has been taken captive and works for The System. Yes, from the reserve army of the unemployed to the ruling class, we all work within and for The System, and all are humanly immiserated as well as threatened by a mutual, imminent extinction or a beyond-miserable existence in a New Stone Age on a devastated planet.

Ollman writes, "Becoming class conscious in this sense is obviously based on the recognition of belonging to a group which has similar grievances and aspirations, and a correct appreciation of the group's relevant life conditions." I now believe the entire human species best fits this description and that we need to develop the consciousness that our species is the "class" that must go to war against capitalism.

In other words, I believe the Marxist concept of the proletariat as a revolutionary force manufactured by capitalism has had its day. Capitalism as a systemic process has developed past this particular point of revolutionary contradiction, but has developed new, more radical and comprehensive areas for revolutionary praxis.

I don't care for Ollman's attempts to resolve this problem of class consciousness, though. His "nine steps" and schools for the young seem more like brave but artificial attempts to address the situation. How would such efforts be organized? Ollman has nothing to say on this.

I have much to say on getting organized: we must organize in the pattern by which nature's self-organized material systems (people are such systems) universally organize. Life (thus healthy societies) has a universal pattern of organization that engenders life's astounding diversity of forms.

I've been over this territory before in numerous posts, and this post is already too long. I'll wait now to see if there is any interest in continuing this discussion on developing class consciousness.

My red-green best.

[black magick hustla]

eh, more of the old bullshit really. most academics see themselves as waging a sort of cultural war so obviously they are obsessed with superstructural considerations. schools for the young? seriously? class consciousness is not "socialized", it emerges from struggle.

[Kronsteen]

I'll read Ollman's essay later but first...


class consciousness is not "socialized", it emerges from struggle.

Where does the struggle come from?

Perhaps you need a minimum of consciousness before the struggle can grow from individual grumblings to organised fightback, and once you've got a struggle you can develop your consciousness within it, which will hopefully push the struggle forward.

[Yuppie Grinder]

Cultural hegemony is the problem. Through their exclusive control of media and the education system, the bourgeoisie subject their own cultural and political sensibilities onto the proletarians. The working masses are artificially conditioned into the bourgeois mindset.
By holding private ownership of what we read, watch, eat, listen to, play, communicate with, use for transportation, and live inside of, the ruling class holds private ownership of our minds.

[Die Neue Zeit]

DNZ, Why are you making a point of severing the dialectical relationship between politics and economics?

It's similar to traditional minimum programs' separation into into political and economic components. Without this separation, we've always gotten economism, slippery slopes to economism, and so on.

[Hit The North]

So working class "consciousness" develops within capitalist institutions and values and reflects them, thus negating the development of a viable proletarian consciousness. This systemic capitalist envelopment and pollution of consciousness takes two forms: intellectual and physical. Workers are intellectually separated from real, human, living values and they are physically fragmented and separated from each other by capitalism's destruction of the various forms of human community. Workers thus tend to see themselves as isolated opponents, not class allies.

So capitalism is a system and will have systemic effects on its people-parts. This systemic control of people/workers has now become almost all-controlling with capitalism's globalization, and my posts frequently refer to capitalism's mental control of humanity. This mental control is manifested on the "left" by a pervasive, profound conservatism and the lack of any interest in revolutionary organizing theory.


The above is indicative of what I find wrong in your theorising: a bedrock picture of systems as contained and self-regulating. A more dialectical approach would emphasise the contingent, tentative and unstable elements of the social system of capitalism. Your approach veers close to the picture of an all encompassing, monolithic social control beloved of dystopian fiction.

But on the contrary, because consciousness is tied to material existence and because that material existence is largely determined by antagonistic social relations of production - and precisely because capitalism is not an all powerful and stable force (in fact the very opposite of stable) - the rulers are not always able to rule as the leading intellectual force and the workers are not always obliged to obey them.

If you don't understand the issue of class consciousness from the point of view of the unfolding class struggle, then you don't understand consciousness as a Marxist.


I now believe the entire human species best fits this description and that we need to develop the consciousness that our species is the "class" that must go to war against capitalism.

In other words, I believe the Marxist concept of the proletariat as a revolutionary force manufactured by capitalism has had its day. Capitalism as a systemic process has developed past this particular point of revolutionary contradiction, but has developed new, more radical and comprehensive areas for revolutionary praxis.I don't think it helps to conflate class with species. The bourgeoisie are part of the species but they are not part of the proletariat. What is required, perhaps, is a reminder that Marxism has always conceived of the proletariat being the special representative of all of humanity - the only universal class.

The other reason Marxism views the proletariat as the revolutionary class is its position in the mode of production, its absolute centrality to the reproduction of capital. Has that changed? Does the cycle of capitalist reproduction now take a detour around the necessity for the extraction of surplus value? I'd like to see your evidence that capitalism has developed past this "particular point of revolutionary contradiction".

Meanwhile, I think this:
I have much to say on getting organized: we must organize in the pattern by which nature's self-organized material systems (people are such systems) universally organize. Life (thus healthy societies) has a universal pattern of organization that engenders life's astounding diversity of forms. says quite a lot less than you hope it does.

My good advice to you, Mr Natural, is to take a look at classical Functionalist social systems theory (Spencer, Durkheim, Parsons) and figure out how your picture of society differs. I think you'll find you have a lot in common with these approaches. Certainly, your latest attempt to vanish the proletariat as the revolutionary class of capitalism will set you shoulder to shoulder with these gentlemen in a political sense.

[Mr. Natural]

Comrades, I'll respond to several short posts here before I move on to reply to Prole Art Threat's meatier, more challenging post.

Kronsteen, Drat your snide hide! You made exactly the response to bmh that I was going to make. bmh wrote, "class consciousness is not 'socialized', it emerges from struggle," to which you responded, "Where does the struggle come from?"

Kronsteen, if we're getting on the same page, we might both be in deep doodoo.

Amadeo Brodiga wrote, "Cultural hegemony is the problem." So, where does cultural hegemony come from? We're back to capitalism's systemic control of society.

DNZ wrote, in response to my "Why are you severing the dialectical relations between politics and economics?" that "It's similar to traditional minimum programs' separation into political and economic components. Without this separation, we've always gotten economism, slippery slopes to economism, and so on."

Well, DNZ, doesn't "economism" essentially mean that economic considerations are emphasized and considered separately from social relations? Marx's historical materialism doesn't separate politics, social relations, and economics, but establishes their dialectical relationship.

Now I'll move on to battle with Prole Art Threat, who is opposing my Marxian heresies with Marxist fuddyduddyism.

My red-green best.

[Mr. Natural]

Prole Art Threat, Your continued engagement and thoughtful, challenging posts are much appreciated, although I continue to struggle to determine the nature of our fundamental impasse.

I believe the source of our radical differences lies in my insistence that, as natural beings, we must organize "naturally" in the pattern of life. Life has a universal pattern organization that all self-organizing material systems must follow and have followed for 4 billion years. Learning to see and employ life's universal pattern of organization would entail a re-revolutionizing of Marxism, but would not replace it, for Marx and Engels and the materialist dialectic are essentially correct in their apprehension of the organization of life and communism. For that matter, how could a rational person reject historical materialism and Marx's accurate analysis--even today--of capitalism?

Life has a universal pattern of organization--a communal organization--that revolutionaries must learn and apply. We are separating humanity from nature and natural relations, otherwise.

PAT, You have referred to what I'm attempting to present as a variety of functionalism on several occasions. In your last post, you wrote of my "Functionalist social systems theory." I believe I can be explicit on this: living systems theory and my red-green theory of life, community, and revolution are structuralist/functionalist theories. All of the living systems of life seamlessly merge structure and function. They are all in a network pattern that is inseparably merged with what they do (how they engage their environment and "make their living"). Their being is their doing. Thus an aphid's materiality (structure) is merged with the way it makes its living (function). Life has a universal pattern of organization, and this is it.

The preceding observations are gleaned from the work of others, but I don't know how a more profoundly radical, revolutionary paragraph could be written. However, I have just described the outcome of organizing in life's pattern. How might workers/revolutionaries/regular people organize in this manner? Answer: Capra's triangle, which offers us all a model of the organization of life and community that we can employ to survey our various situations and design revolutionary forms of "aware community" that oppose capitalism and begin to move into a human future.

Capra's triangle and the new sciences affirm the materialist dialectic as understood by Marx and Engels and developed from the Hegelian philosophy of internal relations. The triangle embodies and "completes" the dialectic and makes its usable. The triangle potentially brings class consciousness and the old/new proletariat to life.

I want to leave this post with the simple, accurate statement that life has an organization by which humanity must organize. The "things" of life have an organization that must also be the organization of the many forms of human community.

Marx and Engels, were they living, would have jumped all over these new sciences of organization decades ago and class consciousness and revolutionary processes would be prospering.

You made other comments to which I will respond in my next post, PAT. I just wanted to emphasize that we are natural beings who must learn to think and organize naturally in this post.

My red-green, living-structure-and-function-are-inseparable best.

[Hit The North]

Mr Natural, it is not Marxist fuddyduddyism to insist on the primacy of class struggles as the motor of human history and therefore to affirm the continuing role of class struggles in determining the future as long as class society exists. It is a cornerstone of historical materialism.

Seemingly, you wish to deny this in favour of an appeal to the species adopting "natural relations". So you can count that as a fundamental element of the nature of our disagreement.

Another is in your picture of the world being composed of self-regulating, natural relations and presenting them as some metaphysical template that all things need to adapt to. So, for instance, you are wont to make statements as follows:


I believe the source of our radical differences lies in my insistence that, as natural beings, we must organize "naturally" in the pattern of life. Life has a universal pattern organization that all self-organizing material systems must follow and have followed for 4 billion years.
But this is so vague as to be meaningless. What are these universal patterns and how do they relate to all living systems? A yeast culture, a flock of starlings, a troop of baboons, a 15th century harem and a 21st century corporation could all be described as "living systems" but we would be hard-pressed to say what is universal in the way the various collectives organise themselves. So, to say that communists and humanity in general should organise themselves in the manner of a yeast culture or a flock of starlings is, in the end, meaningless.


Learning to see and employ life's universal pattern of organization would entail a re-revolutionizing of Marxism, but would not replace it, for Marx and Engels and the materialist dialectic are essentially correct in their apprehension of the organization of life and communism.
Marx and Engels did not have, or profess to have, an "apprehension of the organization of life and communism." According to Engels, Marx's main contribution was to finally solve the riddle of capitalism and, therefore, arrive at the solution for its overthrow. This had to do with the relations of production and the class struggle that issued necessarily from it. It had nothing to do with apprehending a universal pattern of organisation.


For that matter, how could a rational person reject historical materialism and Marx's accurate analysis--even today--of capitalism?
In your attempt to go beyond the class struggle, you are rejecting it.

[Mr. Natural]

Prole Art Threat, You posted again before I could respond to the points you made that I didn't answer in my last post. I'll respond to your most recent post here, and clean up any points still ignored from your initial post tomorrow.

I'm in a poor mood. My dog and I habitually cross the street each morning to play "dogball" in a vacant lot next to a school. The gardener complained that a tennis ball was occasionally hitting his shed, and so Mac's and my daily game, which the kids enjoyed, is now over. I'm already a very angry guy, and if this gardener were not a milquetoast, we'd have had a fight. I just can't stand living in this fucked up capitalist society surrounded by its victim-stooges.

Perhaps the problem with the working class is not that it lacks consciousness, but class.

On to your post. You wrote, "It is not Marxist fuddyduddyism to insist on the primacy of class struggles as the motor of human history." First of all, please note that I referred to myself as a "Marxian heretic" before I tagged you a "Marxist fuddyduddy." This tongue-in-cheek remark pointed to what I see as the increasing "fuddyduddyism" of Marxism, though. I really do see you and Marxism as being stuck in a past that Marx and Engels would have transcended as capitalism developed. I really, really see current Marxists as taking the revolutionary life out of Marxism, and the "class problem" is but one example.

Marx and Engels and the materialist dialectic understand life and society as systemic processes. Marx dialectically perceived the capitalist process generated two inherently opposed classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat that were destined to clash. Well, they have, and capitalism (the bourgeoisie) won, at least in the sense that the founders of Marxism perceived this conflict. Capitalism as a systemic process has moved on to new, more powerful institutions of domination and exploitation, although its basic organization remains the same.

This domination is mental as well as physical. Capitalism is the now The System, and "class consciousness" is smothered by systemic capitalist consciousness. Current unions are an excellent example of this.

So I'm looking for ways to address the consequences of capitalism's globalization--its invasion and envelopment of life on Earth and the human mind.

PAT, there is nothing "vague" about the organizational relations of life I'm advancing as the means of organizing working class actions and consciousness. Capra's triangle models these relations and makes them intelligible to the ordinary human mind, although the very idea of life having an organization seems to be some sort of insidious mental barrier that people must transcend.

Again: people see life's things but are blind to their critical organization. Living systems are self-organized material systems, and life is a systemic process, just as Marx and Engels understood it. And what is the organization of the living systems and process of life? See Capra's triangle.

I realize that Capra's triangle is not understood by others. I offered a very accurate and simple portrait of it in my earlier post: life consists of self-organized material systems whose network pattern of material organization is seamlessly interconnected with what they do--their life activity. So the matter of a falcon is network-patterned with what a falcon does: how it earns its living. A falcon's material components are arranged so that it can stoop on prey at high speeds and whack its victims with its talons.

Human workers need to arrange themselves and their factories (matter) in the network pattern that produces the goods, too, as does the falcon. But human workers must accomplish this consciously, while life's organizational relations come automatically to the bird. The falcon has "ecological mind," while the proletariat can employ Capra's triangle.

And Marx and Engels did have an "apprehension of organization": they had the materialist dialectic that understands life as a systemic process and whose problematic dialectical laws do manage to reflect life's dynamism and some of its relations and processes.

Yes, I'm rejecting the class struggle as envisioned by Marx and Engels a century-and-a-half ago. Time and the capitalist process have moved on, and revolutionary theory must adjust to these developments. I do not see a traditional working class anymore. I do, however, see a human species that now universally works for capitalism, and I definitely see capitalism as the enemy of life on Earth. I then see a potential for a "new working class" that is the imprisoned, exploited human species to develop a consciousness of its dire situation and to begin to organize revolutionary processes in various ways in various places.

The gist of all these remarks is that life has an organization that humans must consciously employ. That organization if popularly modeled by Capra's triangle.

My red-green, revolutionary but revisionist/deviationist best

[u.s.red]

I thought the article was interesting until I came to the Nine Step Program.

[Dunk]

class consciousness is not "socialized", it emerges from struggle.

I think something we sometimes forget on the left is that even though capital exerts it's will on us, we create it. That while conditions shape our consciousness, our conscious actions shape our conditions. So while class struggle is something that everyone will experience, it isn't experienced by an individual in vacuum. The first times you were young and experienced being disciplined for being late and subsequently tried to avoid the discipline, that is an example of both struggle and socialization. Maybe when you got fired, laid off, told you were a dumbass by your boss, or worked to avoid these things or organize against them, these are all examples of both struggle and socialization.

My point is that these things aren't divorced from one another.

That maybe instead of being trained to be good little cogs in the machine we actually should be focusing more effort than just parent-child socialization and training our young to be radically egalitarian or democratic. What's the worst that could happen? Educate our communities with teach ins and fun camps for kids even though it might not have an effect on consciousness, capitalism continues to exist? Well, it still continues to exist despite everything class conscious revolutionaries have done in the past. I think the worst thing to do might be to look to these recent social movements as some kind of abstract "training" for the working class, continuing to hope for consciousness during the next crisis

Here I am talking about this shit and I still don't know what to think about it. I'd also like to mention that I'm not really suggesting communist summer camps are what we're looking for like some kind of missing ingredient, I feel stupid for mentioning it again, I'm just trying to say that whatever it is class conscious revolutionaries have been doing it is not good enough, the same goes for the working class as a whole

Then again this is all based on a premise that consciousness is something that can be engendered or planted before a period of crisis, or that speaking of class conscious revolutionaries in periods of prosperity or recovery is pretty much pointless since we could be incapable of doing anything to engender or accelerate the spread of class consciousness

[Mr. Natural]

U.S.Red, I thought the "nine-step program" was a rather desperate attempt to get some organization, too. It's worth noting that this essay was written forty years ago in the Viet Nam era when young American men were universally threatened by the draft. I had just gotten out of the Air Force then and there was great cultural as well as political ferment. Not so today.

But what did you think of Ollman's main point, which was that Marx and Marxism had simplified class consciousness and assumed that achieving it would almost automatically arise from conditions? This despite Marx noting in many important passages that we are born into conditions and think within them before we begin to change them.

This "class consciousness" and "revolutionary organizing consciousness" impasse has never been resolved, although I believe I see the way out: learn to organize and live in life's universal pattern of organization as revealed by the new science(s) of organization and modeled by Capra's triangle. The key will be praxis, not talk, though. Hands as well as heads need to engage life's universal pattern of organization for it to "come alive."

Dunk, I like the way you work on getting something going. Communist summer camps are an old lefty tradition that has disappeared along with the left. That fascist butcher in Norway attacked a Labor Party summer camp for youth.

Bringing people together for maximum effect is an old human tradition. We are social beings and naturally live, learn, and produce best in community. So I would find any form of community--camps to brainstorming sessions--that enable people to come together to develop consciousness and praxis would be a great idea.

Those "weekend seminars" to which I referred earlier would involve groups of people spending a weekend at some natural retreat at which they would learn the organization of life and engage Capra's triangle that models life's organization. At the end of the weekend, a consciously upgraded and empowered group would brainstorm a radical project and then bring it to life in the real world.

Did comrades engage the Ollman passage in which he noted that Marx had no revolutionary organizing theory? Here is some of it. "Marx felt he was in not position to offer detailed advice, and, despite the reams written on Marx's theory of revolution, there is none [emph mine]....Nor did Marx ever speculate on what is the proper kind of political party or movement to make the revolution .... When enough workers became class conscious, they would know what to do and how to do it."

So Marx had no revolutionary organizing theory and the proletariat is growing farther and farther away from developing a revolutionary class consciousness. I insist that the missing link here is the new science of organization so conspicuously ignored by a left that cannot organize, and that Marx and Engels would have devoured this science and brought it to life in class consciousness and praxis.

Don't doubt that Marx had no revolutionary organizing theory. Just remember the First International.

My red-green, let's-get-conscious-and-organized best.

[Mr. Natural]

Prole Art Threat, Now I'll address the remaining points you made. Before starting, I want to state that I don't believe I distort Marxism at all, but attempt to update it along the lines that Marx and Engels and classic Marxism would pursue. For that matter, no one has made a valid criticism of the new sciences of organization I attempt to present in the year I have been at Revleft. Comrades simply do not/can not/ will not see organizational science. But it's science and scientifically verifiable!! Will the Flat Earth Society rule science, society, and class consciousness forever?

You wrote, "Your approach veers close to the picture of an all-encompassing, monolithic social control beloved of dystopian fiction."

I do, and this is happening. Capitalism is a systemic process that is at the end of its road, and with globalization, its institutions and values rule humanity. But systems taking mental control of their people-parts happens all the time. I just heard a tape of the kidnapped Patty Hearst speaking as Tonye West in rousing defense of her SLA captors and robbing banks and killing as necessary. Patty was quite sincere and was exhibiting the Stockholm syndrome. Then there are cults. In both instances--cults and Stockholm syndrome--we see people becoming integral parts of even hostile, inhuman systems when those systems are all there is.

Capitalism is now all we have. With globalization, The System has become entropic: a closed system. There is no negation of the negation. People are living caplives and thinking capthoughts. Human educational and informational systems are now capitalist systems, as is government, work, recreation, etc., etc. Capitalism has triumphed systemically.

You wrote, "If you don't understand the issue of class consciousness from the point of view of the unfolding class struggle, then you don't understand consciousness as a Marxist." Well, PAT, I believe I understand class consciousness quite well in the sense that Marx understood it, and I also understand what has happened to this consciousness since Marx's time. I don't see an "unfolding class struggle," though, but a "folded-up class struggle," and we gotta change this. To do so, we must engage capitalism's systemic mental effects on the consciousness of the classic proletariat and the rest of humanity.

You wrote, "Does the cycle of capitalist reproduction now take a detour around the necessity for the extraction of surplus value?" No. Capitalism is a systemic process that "lives" by extracting surplus value. That's what it does. However, hasn't capitalism reached the end of its process? Capitalism can no longer extract "legitimate" profit. It must resort to ever-increasing forms of outright theft and cut-to-the-bone extortions such as sub-prime mortgages and carbon cap-and-trades, and capitalism now professes permanent war. We have little time left to develop some class consciousness, for The System is collapsing and will take us with it.

You wrote, "Marxism has always conceived of the proletariat being the special representative of all of humanity." True. But now capitalism has globalized, and is it that much of a stretch to think of all of humanity as being "proletarianized" within The System? Might the human species be the "new class" that needs to develop a class consciousness of its situation? Might such an approach to revolutionary organizing have many potential points for engagement?

My red-green best.

[u.s.red]

Don't doubt that Marx had no revolutionary organizing theory. Just remember the First International.

My red-green, let's-get-conscious-and-organized best.

I think Ollman has a too narrow understanding of class consciousness. It seems to me that Marx would have insisted that class consciousness could arise only through real class struggle; i.e., struggle between workers and capitalists, of struggle by employees and local communities against gigantic monopolistic corporations. Real struggles involving strikes, boycotts, demonstrations, etc.

The most intense struggle is war and violent revolution. In 1917 Russian workers made the world's first successful socialist revolution. What does Ollman say about the consciousness this struggle created? The consciousness may have been only temporary, and possibly deformed, using Trotsky's word, but was it not a class consciousness?

The same question for the Chinese Revolution. What kind of class consciousness was developed, how long did it last, what were its characteristics.

You mentioned Viet Nam. Did a class consciousness develop in that war? Or was simply a national, cultural, post-colonial consciousness? Even if it was, it was a consciounsnss different from 1945 Viet Nam.

Same question about Cuba, Algeria, Venezuela, etc. Why no analysis of any consciousness development in these cases? What is class consciousness anyway?

Sorry for rambling.

[Mr. Natural]

U.S.Red, Let's ramble about a working class rumble. You wrote, "I think Ollman has a too narrow uncderstanding of class consciousness. It seems to me that Marx would have insisted that real class consciousness could arise only through real class struggle, i.e., between workers and capital ..."

Well, as I see it, an unending, undeclared, unacknowledged war between workers and capital already exists. "Class consciousness" would entail the workers becoming aware of their condition and making a revolutionary response. The workers would, in effect, be acting on behalf of all of humanity as anarchism/socialism/communism is established and exploitive, class relations eliminated. The human species would become a diverse unity of people living in community, realizing their human nature.

My "intervention" in customary class politics would be to recognize that the human species is a diverse unity that has been trapped within a moribund capitalist system that will take us as it goes. I believe that understanding the human species as the "new class" that works for capitalism would open up more paths to revolutionary consciousness and action than relying on a "classic proletariat" that has mostly disappeared, at least in the West. However, the "classic proletariat" would still organize on that basis where it exists.

Global capitalism is definitely well down the path toward an inevitable destruction of the human species as its profitmongering process reaches its end. Surely there are many opportunities for developing revolutionary consciousnesses and organization on this basis.

Global capitalism has enveloped life on Earth and we all work for the system in our various ways. A left that cannot adjust as conditions change and that has developed a rigor mortis of the intellect and theory is working within and for capitalism.

"Class consciousness" arises when workers become aware of the exploitive conditions within which they work and live.

I'm not aware of anything Ollman has published on class consciousness during the Russian Revolution. My understanding is that class consciousness in the small Russian working class was quite high initially, but as the revolution became a brutal struggle for bare survival and "war communism" became the reality, the Russian proletariat and its class consciousness degenerated, too.

I know little on Maoism and the Chinese Revolution. Perhaps comrades can recommend a "best" book or two.

There was little class consciousness during Viet Nam. In fact, there was a lot of "workers versus the students/hippies" going on. Long hair was a major controversy in that era, and the more militant student radicals felt obliged to go into the factories to "educate the workers" or simply decided to kick some ass (the Weatherpeople). No workers were educated and little ass was kicked, other than the asses of the "asskickers."

I was very active in the Viet Nam era, and I can assure you that the political theories advanced by the student movement (there was no other) were universally worthless.

As for Cuba, Algeria, Venezuela, I still have fondness for Cuba, especially in light of the United State's powerful, unrelenting attempts to destroy it and any advances toward socialism. Cuba, too, has had to try to exist with a "war communism." I have no time for Venezuela under Chavez, who I see as a sort of eccentric, populist demagogue, although it has been fun at times when he got under Uncle Sam's skin. As for Algeria, I can't find a trace of socialism there. Indeed, the Algerian "revolution" was an extraordinarily bloody affair in which extreme internecine warfare between the Algerian "revolutionaries" was even bloodier than the mass torture and murder of the French. The film, "The Battle of Algiers," doesn't show this.

So what is traditional class consciousness? It is when workers become aware of the exploitive conditions within which they labor and begin to organize against capitalism. This class consciousness then develops into revolutionary processes in which the proletariat is aware of its role as the liberator of humanity from classes and exploitation. "We shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." (Manifesto)

My red-green best.

[Dunk]

I will have more to say after I read Nihilist Communism

Until then I found this thread on libcom interesting

http://libcom.org/forums/theory/critiques-nihilist-communism-29042012?page=3

[citizen of industry]

So, Communist Summer Camps? Or maybe just Summer Camps, where the kids form a council to decide what they should do at Camp? I'm half-joking.

This is why I'm not into Gramsci or western marxism, etc. all that much. You read volumes about how the traditional org's like parties and unions don't work, how class consciousness needs to be elevated, etc. Then they come up empty when it comes time for concrete, material solutions and you are left with communist summer camps and proletarian libraries. It all sounds very convincing until you get to the part where you have to put it into practice.

[Dunk]

At this point it's few and far between when I read something that I discover I agreed with before I read it at all.

I need time to digest it