Class consciousness

[the Left™]

It seems as though capitalism's ideology has permeated essentialy all of western culture and civilization. How can people ever hope to identify with revolutionary struggle if the sum of their societal exposure is ideologically driven?

[Manic Impressive]

That's a strange way of looking at it. How did "capitalism's ideology" come into existence? Answer that and you'll have your answer.

just a clue it has nothing to do with ideology

[hetz]

Base, superstructure, etc...
Besides, is the "Eastern culture" more revolutionary or something?

[Grenzer]

It does have something to do with ideology, actually. It's vulgar materialism to say otherwise. Ideas are given material force when they are taken up by the masses. Of course the ideological dominance of the bourgeoisie is a mere consequence of their economic dominance and control over the institutions of capitalist society; still, it's erroneous to say that false consciousness is a non-factor.

[Rafiq]

It seems as though capitalism's ideology has permeated essentialy all of western culture and civilization. How can people ever hope to identify with revolutionary struggle if the sum of their societal exposure is ideologically driven?

This was a question I raised two years ago, just when I had been recently exposed to Marxist thought. The truth lies with Marx's understanding of capitalism itself: Just as capitalism carries systemic contradictions, the ideological superstructures of capitalism do as well. When Marx spoke of how the embryo of communism was within capitalism, this is what he meant (just as the embryo of liberalism was within feudalism. It was not simply capitalist ideology, it is capitalist social relations. The point is, due to capitalism's class contradictions, and it's systemic contradictions, it is not socially powerful enough to enrich society with it's ideological manifestations indefinitely and harmoniously because it cannot even do so for it's systemic base. Thus, Communism is not some abstract, creative formula that is among several different possible solutions, it is a direct reflection of existing capitalist social relations and it is the only solution. In this process of being constrained by bourgeois ideology, the seeds for capitalism's destruction are being laid. Class struggle, and contradiction, exists just as much of a component of the capitalist mode of production as capital accumulation does. Communism is nothing more than the ideological manifestation of the interests of the proletarian class.

[Rafiq]

It does have something to do with ideology, actually. It's vulgar materialism to say otherwise. Ideas are given material force when they are taken up by the masses. Of course the ideological dominance of the bourgeoisie is a mere consequence of their economic dominance and control over the institutions of capitalist society; still, it's erroneous to say that false consciousness is a non-factor.

Indeed. The vulgarists fail to understand that the materialist conception of history simply does not theoretically function without understanding false consciousness. But we should remember, as I'm sure you'd agree, that these ideas do nothing more than reinforce existing material forces, in this case, ideas like Liberalism reinforcing capitalist social relations.

[Comrade Jandar]

It seems as though capitalism's ideology has permeated essentialy all of western culture and civilization. How can people ever hope to identify with revolutionary struggle if the sum of their societal exposure is ideologically driven?


I have no idea. The good news is, is that we don't need the majority of the proletariat to have class consciousness in order to carry out a social revolution.