Andy,
One way to read that long exegesis I just sent was to see it as an effort to
make more concrete (concretize?) the abstracted analysis of class struggle
presented in Capital. Current historical conditions are very different from
those of the 19th century which inspired the original theory.
It's very tempting to maintain the analytical elegance of the original
theory and continue to discuss capitalist and proletarian class
consciousness as if these both remain undifferentiated social entities
within their range of geographic and historical distribution. This,
however, would be tantamount to elevating what was a scientific analysis to
the level of dogma and to a recapitulation, , of all the methological errors
that eventually led to the bent scientologies of orthodox theory and the
diamat.
What I was trying to put accross was a collection of observations concerning
the evolution of the proletariat and of the state of class conflict in the
the metropolis. Here both the properties of capital and the proletariat
and the relations between them have changed drastically to the point that we
can already see significant signs of developed proletarian control of
production and of enterprise. The advanced stage of the proletarian
revolution in the metropolis allows us to project the kind of society the
proletarian revolution will bring (not socialism in my current view) far
more effectively than did KM (who witnessed and helped to facilitate the
very beginnings of organized proletarian class struggle).
You wrote:
>While it would be tempting to deny the possibility of a single "agent of
history" to overthrow capital, it is capital, a single agency, which is
currently running the world. "Not capital" does not constitute a clear
ideal, so a movement "against capital" cannot itself form the basis for
the emergence of a new class consciousness.
We do not really disagree on this point. At least not in principle. At its
most abstract level all proletarian consciousness; of the high, middle, and
low proletariat, oppose the principle that "ownership of means of production
is the basis for control of the enterprise and of its surplus," but since
each group's relations to production are different, the concrete expression
of this opposition varies considerably between them and they are often as
not at ideological and political cross-purposes. This was very true of every
bourgeois-capitalist revolution (See Tawney, 1922, Religion and the Rise of
Capitalism and Norman Cohen, 1961, The Pursuit of the Millenium on the
capitalist struggle for dominance throughout the European Middle-ages and
into the Renaissance, and Barrington Moore, 1967, Social Origins of
Dicatorship and Democracy and Charles Tilly, 1964, The Vendee, on the French
Revolution and the conditions that engendered it) and it is and will be true
of the proletarian revolution.
>I think class consciousness will be more of an outcome than a starting
point.
Here I don't agree with you. Class consciousness has and will appear,
disappear and reappear throughout the class struggle; and it will, of
course, change as the composition and the long-term and more immediate aims
of the proletarians change. It's not likely to be monolithic and will
include internal conflicts between different sectors of the proletariat.
Also we should expect that in the course of their struggle sectors of the
proletariat may engage in temporary alliances with other classes, or sectors
of other classes. The high bourgeoisie of France, for example, allied
itself with the Feudal Kings of 16th and 17th century France when the latter
were engaged in "pacification" of the landed, military nobility (see Lionel
Rothkrug, 1965, The Opposition to Louis XIV), while middle and lower
bourgeois-capitalists had no qualms about making an alliance with the urban
proletariat during the militant phase of the French revolution (as they had
no qualms about betraying this alliance once their goals had been met).
These alliances will have echos in the ideologies of the allied classes -
read the early French proletarian ideologue, Prodhoun 1840, What is
Property, 1840 Letter to Blanqui, and Marx's critique on Prodhoun, 1847, The
Poverty of Philosophy - further complicating the expression of class
consciousness.
Regards,
Victor
.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Andy Blunden" <ablunden@mira.net>
To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Saturday, January 03, 2004 1:11 PM
Subject: Re: real and virtual worlds
> Victor, when I said that "I cannot but see a future in which class
> consciousness makes a comeback in some form, changed by the long period of
> identity and representation politics" then such a "class consciousness"
> would have to be something very different from what Lukacs my have been
> talking about in 1923; I am talking about a kind of "negation of
negation".
>
> I did not mention "class consciousness" in "For Ethical Politics" because
I
> thought it would only confuse matters, but that is not to say it does not
> exist, but it is facing such dramatic transformation!
>
> While it would be tempting to deny the possibility of a single "agent of
> history" to overthrow capital, it is capital, a single agency, which is
> currently running the world. "Not capital" does not constitute a clear
> ideal, so a movement "against capital" cannot itself form the basis for
the
> emergence of a new class consciousness. I think class consciousness will
be
> more of an outcome than a starting point.
>
> Andy
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