Class consciousness

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Class consciousness is consciousness of one's social class or economic rank in society.[1] From the perspective of Marxist theory, it refers to the self-awareness, or lack thereof, of a particular class; its capacity to act in its own rational interests; or its awareness of the historical tasks implicit (given the precepts of Marxism) to it.[citation needed] Another Marxist approach is to consider the transition from a "class in itself", which is defined as a category of people having a common relation to the means of production, to a "class for itself", which is defined as a stratum organized in active pursuit of its own interests.[2] Members of "lower" classes are often more aware of their economic class than are members of the "upper" class. However, this may not necessarily be the case in societies where class hierarchy is a strict and deep tradition.[citation needed] In the United States, class consciousness is somewhat conflated with race consciousness. Because racial minority correlates with poverty in that country, members of racial minorities may focus more on racial identities than on identities arising from economic class. Defining a person's social class can be a determinant for his awareness of it. Marxists define classes on the basis of their relation to the means of production especially on whether they own capital. Non-Marxist social scientists distinguish various social strata on the basis of income, occupation, or status.[3] Early in the nineteenth century the labels "working classes" and "middle classes" were already coming into common usage. "The old hereditary aristocracy, reinforced by the new gentry who owed their success to commerce, industry, and the professions, evolved into an "upper class". Its consciousness was formed in part by public schools (in the British sense) and Universities. The upper class tenaciously maintained control over the political system, depriving not only the working classes but the middle classes of a voice in the political process."[4]

Contents

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1 Georg Lukcs' History and Class Consciousness (1923) 2 Criticism 3 See also 4 References

[edit] Georg Lukcs' History and Class Consciousness (1923)

Class consciousness, as described by Georg Lukcs's famous History and Class Consciousness (1923), is opposed to any psychological conception of consciousness, which forms the basis of individual or mass psychology (see Freud or, before him, Gustave Le Bon). According to Lukcs, each social class has a determined class consciousness which it can achieve. In effect, as opposed to the liberal conception of consciousness as the basis of individual freedom and of the social contract, Marxist class consciousness is not an origin, but an achievement (i.e. it must be "earned" or won). Hence, it is never assured: the proletariat's class consciousness is the result of a permanent struggle to understand the "concrete totality" of the historical process. According to Lukcs, the proletariat was the first class in history that may achieve true class consciousness, because of its specific position highlighted in the Communist Manifesto as the "living negation" of capitalism. All others classes, including the bourgeoisie, are limited to a "false consciousness" which impedes them from understanding the totality of history: instead of understanding each specific moment as a portion of a supposedly-deterministic historical process, they universalize it and believe it is everlasting. Hence, capitalism is not thought as a specific phase of history, but is naturalized and thought of as an eternal solidified part of history. Says Lukcs, this "false consciousness", which forms ideology itself, is not a simple error as in classical philosophy, but an illusion which can't be dispelled. Marx described it in his theory of commodity fetishism, which Lukcs completed with his concept of reification: alienation is what follows the worker's estrangement to the world following the new life acquired by the product of his work. The dominant bourgeois ideology thus leads the individual to see the achievement of his labour take a life of its own. Furthermore, specialization is also seen as a characteristic of the ideology of modern rationalism, which creates specific and independent domains (art, politics, science, etc.). Only a global perspective can point out how all these different domains interact, argues Lukcs. He also points out how Kant brought to its limit the classical opposition between the abstract form and the concrete, historical content, which is abstractly conceived as irrational and contingent. Thus, with Kant's rational system, history becomes totally contingent and is thus ignored. Only with Hegel's dialectic can a mediation be found between the abstract form and the abstract notion of a concrete content.[5] Even if the bourgeois loses his individual point of view in an attempt to grasp the reality of the totality of society and of the historical process, he is condemned to a form of false consciousness. As an individual, he will always see the collective result of individual actions as a form of "objective law" to which he must submit himself (liberalism has gone so far as seeing an invisible hand in this collective results, making capitalism the best of all possible

worlds). By contrast, the proletariat would be, according to Lukcs, the first class in history with the possibility to achieve a true form of class consciousness, granting it knowledge of the totality of the historical process. The proletariat takes the place of Hegel's Weltgeist ("World Spirit"), which achieves history through Volkgeist ("the spirit of the people"): the idealist conception of an abstract Spirit making history, which ends in the realm of Reason, is replaced by a materialist conception based not on mythical Spirits, but on a concrete "identical subject-object of history": the proletariat. The proletariat is both the "object" of history, created by the capitalist social formation; but it is also the "subject" of history, as it is its labour that shapes the world, and thus, knowledge of itself is also, necessarily, knowledge of the reality and of the totality of the historical process. The proletariat's class consciousness is not immediate; class consciousness musn't be mistaken either with the consciousness of one's future and collective interests, opposed to personal immediate interests. The possibility of class consciousness is given by the objective process of history, which transforms the proletariat into a commodity, hence objectifying it. Class consciousness is thus not a simple subjective act: "as consciousness here is not the consciousness of an object opposed to itself, but the object's consciousness, the act of being conscious of oneself disrupts the objectivity form of its object" (in "Reification and the Proletariat's Consciousness" 3, III "The proletariat's point of view"). In other words, instead of the bourgeois subject and its corresponding ideological concept of individual free will, the proletariat has been transformed into an object (a commodity) which, when it takes consciousness of itself, transforms the very structure of objectivity, that is of reality. This specific role of the proletariat is a consequence of its specific position; thus, for the first time, consciousness of itself (class consciousness) is also consciousness of the totality (knowledge of the entire social and historical process). Through dialectical materialism, the proletariat understands that what the individual bourgeois conceived as "laws" akin to the laws of nature, which may be only manipulated, as in Descartes's dream, but not changed, is in fact the result of a social and historical process, which can be controlled. Furthermore, only dialectical materialism links together all specialized domains, which modern rationalism can only think as separate instead of as forming a totality. Only the proletariat can understand that the so-called "eternal laws of economics" are in fact nothing more than the historical form taken by the social and economical process in a capitalist society. Since these "laws" are the result of the collective actions of individuals, and are thus created by society, Marx and Lukcs reasoned that this necessarily meant that they could be changed. Any attempt in transforming the so-called "laws" governing capitalism into universal principles, valid in all times and places, are criticized by Lukcs as a form of false consciousness. As the "expression of the revolutionary process itself", dialectical materialism, which is the only theory with an understanding of the totality of the historical process, is the theory which may help the proletariat in its "struggle for class consciousness". Although Lukcs does not contest the Marxist primacy of the economic infrastructure on the ideological superstructure (not to be mistaken with vulgar economic determinism), he considers that there is a place for autonomous struggle for class consciousness.

In order to achieve a unity of theory and praxis, theory must not only tend toward reality in an attempt to change it; reality must also tend towards theory. Otherwise, the historical process leads a life of its own, while theorists make their own little theories, desperately waiting for some kind of possible influence over the historical process. Henceforth, reality itself must tend toward the theory, making it the "expression of the revolutionary process itself". In turn, a theory which has as its goal helping the proletariat achieve class consciousness must first be an "objective theory of class consciousness". However, theory in itself is insufficient, and ultimately relies on the struggle of humankind and of the proletariat for consciousness: the "objective theory of class consciousness is only the theory of its objective possibility".

[edit] Criticism
Ernest Van Den Haag has argued:

One way is to say that "objectively" people have common class interests and should act according to the class struggle pattern- but that they are not always "class conscious". They suffer from "false consciousness". But this is (a) not true; nor would it help (b) much if it were. a) There often are conflicts among objective economic interests within a Marxian class- e.g. among workers. Conflicts occur over migration, international trade, religion or race. And workers often have objective interests in common with capitalists and in conflict with the interests of other groups of workers. Class membership is no more and possibly less decisive than say race membership in determining one's political views. If you insist on the importance of race, you may persuade people to act according to their "racial interests" for a while- as the Nazis did. If you convince people that they should act according to what you tell them are your class interests, they might. The prophecy becomes self-fulfilling. But the action comes from race or class propaganda- not from race or class as objective facts. b) Further if we assume that classes are as important as Marx thought but that people do not act accordingly, because not having read Marx, they are not class conscious- if "class consciousness" becomes independent of class membership- and if class membership is neither sufficient nor necessary to bring the expected class behaviour, then social classes become one of many groups that influence man's action on some occasions. This would be a correct theory. But the distinctive point of Marxian theory is that class membership is decisive in determining most and particularly political actions. This is patently wrong.[6]

[edit] See also

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False consciousness
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Redirected from False Consciousness) Jump to: navigation, search For the existentialist treatment of the same concept, see Bad faith (existentialism).
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False consciousness is the Marxist thesis that material and institutional processes in capitalist society are misleading to the proletariat, and to other classes. These processes betray the true relations of forces between those classes, and the real state of affairs regarding the development of pre-socialist society (relative to the secular development of human society in general).

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Under Marxist theorizing, false consciousness is essentially a result of ideological control which the proletariat either do not know they are under or which they disregard with a view to their own POUM (probability/possibility of upward mobility)[1]. POUM (not to be confused with the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification, POUM) or something like it is required in economics with its presumption of rational agency; otherwise wage laborers would be the conscious supporters of social relations antithetical to their own interests, violating that presumption[2].

1 Theory 2 Engels 3 See also 4 Notes 5 External links

[edit] Theory
The concept flows from the theory of commodity fetishism that people experience social relationships as value relations between things, e.g., between the cash in their wage packet and the shirts they want. The cash and the shirt appear to conduct social relations independently of the humans involved, determining who gets what by their inherent values. This leaves the person who earned the cash and the people who made the shirt ignorant of and alienated from their social relationship with each other. So the individual "resolves" the experiences of alienation and oppression through a false conception based on a "natural law" argument that there is a fundamental need to compete with others for commodities.

In Marxist terms, not only is there no such objective need separate from the formulation of the general problem of production and distribution for a given society, moreover, Marx said each against all competition is antithetical to the very concept of society and therefore sets up a contradiction or historical dynamic which over time is resolved in favour of the class with the greatest ability to act in its own rational self interest. Ruling elites, traditional or otherwise, suffer from false consciousness to the extent that they see the social orders they command as predetermined or inevitable.

[edit] Engels
Although Marx frequently denounced ideology in general, there is no evidence that he ever actually used the phrase "false consciousness." It appears to have been used at least in print only by Friedrich Engels [3] Engels wrote [4] :

Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker. Consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. ... It is above all this appearance of an independent history of state constitutions, of systems of law, of ideological conceptions in every separate domain, which dazzles most people. If Luther and Calvin overcome the official Catholic religion, or Hegel overcomes Fichte and Kant, or if the constitutional Montesquieu is indirectly overcome by Rousseau with his Social Contract, each of these events remains within the sphere of theology, philosophy or political science, represents a stage in the history of these particular spheres of thought and never passes outside the sphere of thought. And since the bourgeois illusion of the eternity and the finality of capitalist production has been added as well, even the victory of the physiocrats and Adam Smith over the mercantilists is accounted as a sheer victory of thought; not as the reflection in thought of changed economic facts but as the finally achieved correct understanding of actual conditions subsisting always and everywhere ...

Here Engels expresses semantic baggage associated with the term Ideology, i.e. that it implies a lack of objectivity, which the term had at the time of its introduction from German (due in no small part to a reaction to Hegelianism). This has somewhat substantially been lost over the nearly two centuries since then as Ideology has come to be equivocated with World View or Philosophy. False consciousness is theoretically linked with the concepts of the dominant ideology and cultural hegemony. The idea of false consciousness has also been used by Marxist feminists and radical feminists in regard to women's studies.

[edit] See also

Class consciousness Character mask Consciousness raising

Introspection illusion Political consciousness Subconscious (the primary quote and Freud's work

Critical Ethnography

were contemporary). System justification

[edit] Notes
1. ^ Marshall I. Pomer (1984-11). "Upward Mobility of Low-Paid Workers: A Multivariate Model for Occupational Changers". Sociological Perspectives 27 (4): 427442. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=07311214(198410)27%3A4%3C427%3AUMOLWA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-W. 2. ^ This phenomenon is most accentuated in the United States, and has given rise to what European Marxists refer to as "class transference"[1]. 3. ^ Eagleton, Terry (1991). Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso. pp. 89. ISBN 8449317975. 4. ^ "Letter to Mehring". 1893. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93_07_14.htm.

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Ideology and False Consciousness Joseph McCarney

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Reification (Marxism)
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Reification (German: Verdinglichung, literally: "making [some idea] into a thing" (from Latin "res" meaning "thing") or Versachlichung, literally "objectification" or regarding something as a separate business matter) is the consideration of an abstraction, relation or object as if they had human (pathetic fallacy) or living (reification fallacy) existence and abilities, when in reality they do not. At the same time it implies the thingification of social relations to the extent that the nature of social relationships is expressed by the relationships between traded objects (see commodity fetishism and value-form). Typically it involves separating out something from the original context in which it occurs, and placing it in another context, in which it lacks some or all of its original connections yet seems to have powers or attributes which in truth it does not have. Thus reification involves a distortion of consciousness, ranging from the rather innocent, to the grotesque.[citation needed] Reification in thought occurs when an abstract concept describing a relationship or context is treated as a concrete "thing", or if something is treated as if it were a separate object when this is inappropriate because it is not an object or because it does not truly exist in separation. Marx argues that reification is an inherent and necessary characteristic of economic value such as it manifests itself in market trade, i.e. the inversion in thought between object and subject, or between means and ends, reflects a real practice where attributes (properties, characteristics, features, powers) which exist only by virtue of a social relationship between people are treated as if they are the inherent, natural characteristics of things, or vice versa, attributes of inanimate things are treated as if they are attributes of human subjects. This implies that objects are transformed into subjects and subjects are turned into objects, with the result that subjects are rendered passive or determined, while objects are rendered as the active, determining factor. Hypostatization refers to an effect of reification which results from supposing that whatever can be named, or conceived abstractly, must actually exist, an ontological and epistemological fallacy. The concept is related to, but is distinct from, Marx's theories of alienation and commodity fetishism. Alienation is the general condition of human estrangement. Reification is a specific form of alienation. Commodity fetishism is a specific form of reification.

Contents
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1 Five quotations from Marx showing the use of the concept 2 Development and significance of the concept

3 Criticism 4 See also 5 References 6 Further reading

[edit] Five quotations from Marx showing the use of the concept

Here a financial institution reifies its services as tangible merchandise-like packages. "Commodities, which exist as use-values, must first of all assume a form in which they appear to one another nominally as exchange-values, as definite quantities of materialised universal labour-time. The first necessary move in this process is, as we have seen, that the commodities set apart a specific commodity, say, gold, which becomes the direct reification of universal labour-time or the universal equivalent." [3] "Capital employs labour. The means of production are not means by which he can produce products, whether in the form of direct means of subsistence, or as means of exchange, as commodities. He is rather a means for them, partly to preserve their value, partly to valorise it, i.e. to increase it, to absorb surplus labour. Even this relation in its simplicity is an inversion, a personification of the thing and a reification of the person, for what distinguishes this form from all previous ones is that the capitalist does not rule the worker in any kind of personal capacity, but only in so far as he is "capital"; his rule is only that of objectified labour over living labour; the rule of the worker's product over the worker himself." [4] "[B]ecause as a result of their alienation as use-values all commodities are converted into linen, linen becomes the converted form of all other commodities, and only as a result of this transformation of all other commodities into linen does it become the direct reification of universal labour-time, i.e., the product of universal alienation and of the supersession of all individual labour." [5]

"The production of capitalists and wage-laborers is therefore a major product of the process by which capital turns itself into values. Ordinary political economy, which concentrates only on the objects produced, forgets this entirely. Inasmuch as this process establishes reified labor as what is simultaneously the non-reification of the laborer, as the reification of a subjectivity opposed to the laborer, as the property of someone else's will, capital is necessarily also a capitalist. The idea of some socialists, that we need capital but not capitalists, is completely false. The concept of capital implies that the objective conditions of laborand these are its own productacquire a personality as against labor, or what amounts to the same thing, that they are established as the property of a personality other than the worker's. The concept of capital implies the capitalist. However, this error is certainly no greater than that of, e.g., all philologists who speak of the existence of capital in classical antiquity, and of Roman or Greek capitalists. This is merely another way of saying that in Rome and Greece labor was free, an assertion which these gentlemen would hardly make. If we now talk of plantation-owners in America as capitalists, if they are capitalists, this is due to the fact that they exist as anomalies within a world market based upon free labor. Were the term capital to be applicable to classical antiquitythough the word does not actually occur among the ancients (but among the Greeks the word arkhais is used for what the Romans called the principalis summa reicreditae, the principal of a loan)then the nomadic hordes with their flocks on the steppes of Central Asia would be the greatest capitalists, for the original meaning of the word capital is cattle." [6] "Capital employs labour. Even this relation in its simplicity is a personification of things and a reification of persons. But the relation becomes still more complexand apparently more mysteriousin that, with the development of the specifically capitalist mode of production, not only do these thingsthese products of labour, both as use values and as exchange valuesstand on their hind legs vis--vis the worker and confront him as "capital"but also the social forms of labour appear as forms of the development of capital, and therefore the productive powers of social labour, thus developed, appear as productive powers of capital. As such social forces they are "capitalised" vis--vis labour. In fact, communal unity in cooperation, combination in the division of labour, the application of the forces of nature and science, as well as the products of labour in the shape of machinery, are all things which confront the individual workers as alien, objective, and present in advance, without their assistance, and often against them, independent of them, as mere forms of existence of the means of labour which are independent of them and rule over them, in so far as they are objective; while the intelligence and volition of the total workshop, incarnated in the capitalist or his understrappers (representatives), in so far as the workshop is formed by the combination of the means of labour, confront the workers as functions of capital, which lives in the person of the capitalist. The social forms of their own labourthe subjective as well as the objective formsor the form of their own social labour, are relations constituted quite independently of the individual workers; the workers as subsumed under capital become elements of these social constructions, but these social constructions do not belong to them. They therefore confront the workers as shapes of capital itself, as combinations which, unlike their isolated labour capacities, belong to capital, originate from it and are incorporated within it. And this assumes a form which is the more real the more, on the one hand, their labour capacity is itself modified by these forms, so that it becomes powerless when it stands alone, i.e. outside this context of capitalism, and its capacity for independent production is destroyed, while on the other hand the development of machinery causes the conditions of labour to appear as ruling labour technologically too, and at the same time to replace it, suppress it, and render it superfluous in its independent forms. In this process, in which the social characteristics of their labour confront them as capitalised, to a certain extentin the

way that e.g. in machinery the visible products of labour appear as ruling over labourthe same thing of course takes place for the forces of nature and science, the product of general historical development in its abstract quintessence: they confront the workers as powers of capital." [7]

[edit] Development and significance of the concept

After Marx, the concept was developed in extense by Georg Lukcs in "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat", part of his book History and Class Consciousness. The concept of reification has also been present in the works of the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, for example in Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, and in the works of Herbert Marcuse. Others who have written about this point include Gajo Petrovi, Raya Dunayevskaya, Raymond Williams, Axel Honneth and Slavoj iek. Petrovi, in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, defines reification as: The act (or result of the act) of transforming human properties, relations and actions into properties, relations and actions of man-produced things which have become independent (and which are imagined as originally independent) of man and govern his life. Also transformation of human beings into thing-like beings which do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing-world. Reification is a special case of ALIENATION, its most radical and widespread form characteristic of modern capitalist society.[1] Reification occurs when specifically human creations are misconceived as "facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will".[2] Examples include the creation of false desires by the real labor of advertising.[clarification needed] This is the construction of nouns naming parts of reality as intrinsically desirable "products", where the legal system of the capitalist country provides "fit for use" presumptions,[citation needed] and legislation allows the entrepreneur to create, for example, a reified and indeed fetishised noun, from intellectual property to Hula Hoop and Windows Vista.[clarification
needed]

[edit] Criticism
French philosopher Louis Althusser criticized in his 1965 article Marxism and Humanism, what he called "An ideology of reification that sees 'things' everywhere in human relations"[3] . Althusser's critique derives from his theory of the epistemological break, which finds that Marx underwent significant theoretical and methodological change between his early writings and his mature ones. The concept of reification is used in Das Kapital, Marx's most mature[citation needed] work; however, Althusser finds in it an important influence from the similar concept of alienation developed in The German Ideology and in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Frankfurt School philosopher Axel Honneth reformulates this key "Western Marxist" concept in terms of intersubjective relations of recognition and power in his recent work Reification (Oxford, 2008). Instead of being an effect of the structural character of social systems such as

capitalism, as Karl Marx and Gyrgy Lukcs argued, Honneth contends that all forms of reification are due to pathologies of intersubjectively based struggles for recognition.

[edit] See also

The Secret of Hegel Character mask

[edit] References
1. Gajo Petrovi, A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, edited by Tom Bottomore, Laurence Harris, V.G. Kiernan, Ralph Miliband (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 411-413; [1] 2. Berger, Peter, & Luckmann, Thomas. (1966). The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge. New York: Anchor/Doubleday. 3. Althusser, Louis; "Marxism and Humanism" in For Marx, p. 230 - endnote 7, [2]

[edit] Further reading

Althusser, Louis: "Humanism and Marxism" in For Marx, The Penguin Press, 1969. Arato, Andrew: Lukcss Theory of Reification, Telos, 1972. Bewes, Timothy 2002: Reification, or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism, Verso, 2002, ISBN 1859846858. Burris, Val: "Reification: A marxist perspective", California Sociologist, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1988, pp. 2243. Dahms, Harry: "Beyond the Carousel of Reification: Critical Social Theory after Lukcs, Adorno, and Habermas." Current Perspectives in Social Theory 18 (1998): 362. (See Harry Dahms) Dunayevskaya, Raya: "Reification of People and the Fetishism of Commodities", in The Raya Dunayevskaya Collection, pp. 167191. Floyd, Kevin: "Introduction: On Capital, Sexuality, and the Situations of Knowledge," in The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism. Minneapolis, MN.: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Gabel, Joseph : False consciousness : an essay on reification. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Goldmann, Lucien 1959: "Rification", in Recherches dialectiques, Gallimard, 1959, Paris. Honneth, Axel: "Reification: A Recognition-Theoretical View", The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at University of California-Berkeley, March 1416, 2005. Honneth, Axel. Reification: A New Look. Oxford University Press, 2008. Honneth on reification with responses by Judith Butler, Raymond Geuss, and Jonathan Lear. Kangrga, Milan 1968: Was ist Verdinglichung? Lwith, Karl 1932 (1982): Max Weber and Karl Marx. Lukcs, Georg 1923: "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat" in History & Class Consciousness, Merlin Press, 1967.

Petrovi, Gajo:"Reification" in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, edited by Tom Bottomore, Laurence Harris, V.G. Kiernan, Ralph Miliband (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 411413. Rubin, I. I. 1928 (1972): Essays on Marxs Theory of Value. Schaff, Adam 1980: Alienation as a Social Phenomenon. Tadi, Ljubomir 1969: BureaucracyReified Organization. In M. Markovi and G. Petrovi eds. Praxis. Vandenberghe, Frederic: A Philosophical History of German Sociology. London: Routledge, 2009.

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Since the time of Karl Marx's writing, a variety of theories have emerged that bear the Marxian legacy, although in many different

ways. Economic Determinism Although it is often said that Marx was an economic determinist, or, rather, that he focused narrowly on how the economic dimension of society determined the shape of the rest of society, this view overlooks Marx's dialectical inclinations. A number of the so-called revisionist Marxists, including Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), Karl Kautsky (1850-1938), and Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932), espoused an economically deterministic brand of Marxism, influenced primarily by the boom and busts that characterized this period of capitalism. Hegelian Marxism One reaction to the growth of economic determinism was a renewed focus on Marx's philosophical writings, particularly their Hegelian roots. Although a number of Marx's early writings, which were primarily philosophical in their orientation, were unpublished and therefore unavailable to scholars at the time, Georg Lukcs (1885-1971) managed to anticipate much of what was to be revealed of Marx's philosophical perspective. In particular, Lukcs focused on two major concepts - reification and class consciousness. With reification he extended Marx's notion of the fetishism of commodities to include the process by which any portion of social life could be made a "thing," rather than just commodities. Lukcs also developed the notion of class consciousness, or the belief systems shared by those who occupy the same class position within society. Conversely, those who occupy the same class position may be unaware of their common lot, and may possess a false consciousness. Although classes are a part of every historical epoch, to Lukcs it was only under capitalism that a class could achieve true class consciousness and be a truly revolutionary force. Lukcs discussed the ways in which the nature of the capitalist system is obscured. He thought that once these were revealed, society would become a battleground in the conflict between those who wished to conceal the class character of society and those who wished to expose it. Another important Hegelian Marxist is Antonio Gramsci (18911937). Gramsci rejected deterministic Marxist formulations, focusing instead on how revolution was contingent on action on the part of the masses, assuming they became conscious of the nature of capitalism and their role in it. This they could do only by using the analysis provided to them by intellectuals. Perhaps the most important contribution Gramsci made to Neo-Marxian theory has been the concept of hegemony, which he referred to as the cultural leadership exercised by the ruling class. Thus, revolutionary forces must not only change the material bases of

society, but they must also wrest from its oppressors the cultural leadership of society. Critical Theory Critical theory grew up around a group of German neo-Marxists who were unhappy with the economic determinism of turn-of-thecentury Marxism. Rather than focusing on the material dimensions of society, the critical school focused primarily on culture. As its name suggests, critical theory is predominantly known for offering critiques of various dimensions of society. Central to this were its critiques of positivism (it leads to passivity), sociology (for its scientism), modern society (rationalization and the absence of reasonableness, as in the rationality), and culture (the pacifying and repressive effects of mass culture disseminated by the culture industry). The critical school has been credited with refocusing attention on subjective phenomena, despite Marx's materialist tendencies. For example, the critical school also had an interest in ideology and its role in domination. They were also dialecticians who attempted to relate the parts of society to its whole, or its totality. Critical theory has been criticized for its lack of historical focus, its weak treatment of economic factors, and its lack of faith in the working class as a revolutionary force. A slightly different variant found within the critical school tradition is the work of Jurgen Habermas(1929- ). Habermas believes that Marx oversimplified the social component of species-being. Habermas takes as his starting point the necessity of communicative action in the realization of species-being, which emerges from the distinction between purposive-rational action (work) and communicative action (interaction). While Marx's central problematic was the alienation of workers, Habermas's is the alienation of communication, or the "distortion" of communication. Habermas is concerned with the technological dominance of life through the rationalization of purposive-action. However, unlike other theorists, Habermas argues that rationalization can have a positive effect if it rationalizes communication, which would lead to a communication free from domination, creating a form of emancipatory communication. Habermas's idea of a rational society is a society constructed of free communication, where ideas are weighed on their merits and unaltered by ideology. Neo-Marxian Economic Sociology Noting that the period in which Marx formulated his critique of capitalism was a specific period in the development of capitalism, a number of theorists have attempted to develop work that more accurately portrays the workings of the capitalist system as it

exists today. This can be seen as a shift away from focusing on the era of competitive capitalism and towards looking at what has been called monopoly capitalism. Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy are the major contributors to this line of work, particularly in their book Monopoly Capitalism. Monopoly capitalism involves a transformation in the ways in which companies operate. Under monopoly capitalism, firms compete on the basis of advertising and marketing rather than price. Further, markets are dominated by a small number of very large firms. Lastly, there are many owners, in the form of stockholders, and managers play a much larger role in the operation of the capitalist firms. Similar work has been done by Harry Braverman. Braverman took a microscopic view and looked at changes in the labor process. He emphasized that the control of workers required task specialization, the separation of knowledge and execution, and scientific management techniques. The overall effect of these strategies is to increase productivity while decreasing the cost of labor. Machinery also plays a role in this process. Braverman was one of the first neo-Marxists to deal with white-collar clerical workers, as he tried to show that they faced a set of strategies of control very similar to that faced by manual laborers. One important line of research surrounds the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. Fordism is characterized by the assembly line and mass-production techniques, whereas postFordism involves small, flexible production runs and high technology. The importance of the Fordism/post-Fordism debate is related to the argument of whether our current society is modern or postmodern. While some have argued that post-Fordism is an improvement over Fordism, this overlooks the fact that both exist simultaneously across the world and that empirical studies have shown increased stress levels for those working in post-Fordist environments. Historically Oriented Marxism Perhaps the single most important contributor to historical Marxism has been Immanuel Wallerstein (1930- ). Unlike other Marx-influenced thinkers, Wallerstein focused on world-systems as his unit of analysis. The current capitalist world economy is but one of three possible world-systems, along with the world empire and a socialist world government, the latter of which has never existed. Wallerstein breaks down the world system into core, periphery, and semi-periphery. The core dominates the world economy and exploits the others. The periphery provides raw materials, and the semi-periphery is a mix of the two. The worldsystem eventually incorporated every nation, and was structured by three processes: geographical expansion, the worldwide division of labor, and the development of the core states. The world-systems perspective has been criticized for under-

developing a central Marxist problematic, since it focuses on relations within the world system rather than relations between classes. Neo-Marxian Spatial Analysis A number of Marxists, influenced by the work of Michel Foucault (1926-1984), have turned to an analysis of the production of space. Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) focuses on the ways in which space is used to reproduce the capitalist system and the class structure that underpins it. For Lefebvre, notions of space propagated by elites are used to achieve and maintain dominance, distorting the use of space that would flow from people's natural experience of it. Edward Soja attempts to integrated space, geography, and time. He developed the notion of trialectics to understand cities as historical-social-spatial phenomena, with an emphasis on the spatial dimension. David Harvey highlights the attention Marx paid to the spatial dimension, and the strength and weaknesses of his positions. For Harvey, the necessity of capitalist expansion puts space near the center of Marx's theory. Marx is faulted for paying little attention to the problematics inherent in the territorial organization of states and for ignoring the way space differentiates strata of the working class. Post-Marxist Theory Post-Marxists may be characterized by their nihilistic approach to the history of Marxist thought, to the extent that they dispose of much of Marx's philosophical underpinnings, as well as repudiating the existence of any truly Marxist "method." John Roemer's analytical Marxism attempts to employ modern positivistic methods of analysis to create a better "scientific" Marxism. This includes incorporating rational-choice and gametheoretic orientations. Erik Olin Wright has tried to bring robust, complex, empirical methods to the investigation of Marxist themes. This has led him to break from Marx in at least one way, illustrated in his notion of contradictory locations within class relations. This suggests that individuals may hold multiple, sometimes contradictory, class positions. Marxian theory as a field has not escaped the wide-ranging influence of postmodern thought. It has led to a focus on the relationship between discourse and ideology, time-space compression, and the continuity between Fordism/post-Fordism and modernity/postmodernity. More generally, Ronald Aronson has gone so far as to suggest that Marxism as a coherent theory is dead. The fall of the Soviet Union, and communism more generally, is seen as the ultimate historical test of Marxian thought, and it has failed. The birth of so

many variants of Marxism has destroyed its powerful coherence in totality. Aronson views these new modifications as pure theory, and not as an expression of the unification of theory and practice that was central to Marx's work. Because of this, he does not believe that these new formulations should be called Marxist.

2004 McGraw-Hill Higher Education Any use is subject to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. McGraw-Hill Higher Education is one of the many fine businesses of The McGraw-Hill Companies. Geoff Boucher, 11 June 1999

On History and Class Consciousness as an Unfinished Project[1] Response for the seminar What is Alive and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel Today? Sketch Draft for Hegel Seminar at University of Melbourne, 18th June 1999
The Hegelian Imaginary

Every generation, it seems, discovers its own Hegel. This proposition has to be understood in three ways. Not only does every generation seems to find its own concerns anticipated in Hegel. Modernity tirelessly reinvents the central motifs of the Hegelian philosophy even in the same breath with which it declares that philosophy to be definitively superseded. And every generation also locates a philosophy who seems to embody the 'cultural logic' of the moment a characteristic philosophy which is seen to embody the cultural logic of the period. What Hegel might look like in the postmodern, why modernity tirelessly reinvents Hegelianism and how Hegel might be characteristic of the logic and the limits of a certain aspect of modernity would seem to be the contemporary form in which the question of "what is alive and what is dead" is characteristically posed. Indeed, it would seem that the characteristic contemporary gesture is to accede to Hegel's own self-description as a unity of form and content which precludes any separation into "method vs. system". Philosophy in the continental scene at least - would seem to want to either utterly renounce Hegel, or to perennially engage with Hegel. No-one, however, seems to be keen any more on the dialectical sublation of Hegel attempted by Feuerbach and Marx, or the separation into method and system (Engels), immanent dialectical logic and triadic external structure (Croce), or dual ontology and methodology of the reflection determinations (Lukcs).

The paradox of the 'postmodern condition' appears to be that of the actuality of Hegel: while there are no Hegelians, the 'post-Hegelian' moment tirelessly reinvents Hegelian motifs. Nonetheless, it is those who would term themselves postmodernists who claim to be free of Hegel. Symptomatic of this desire is the presence of Hegel in the canonical text of postmodernism, Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition. While seldom mentioned by name, Lyotard's polemic against "speculative thinking" and "grand narratives" in reality refers primarily to Hegel. These themes are precisely what postmodernism seeks to liberate itself from. This was confirmed by Lyotard's subsequent Postmodernism Explained: The 'metanarratives' I was concerned with in The Postmodern Condition are those that have marked modernity: the progressive emancipation of reason and freedom, the progressive or catastrophic emancipation of labour (source of alienated value in capitalism), the enrichment of all humanity through the progress of capitalist techno-science, and even if we include Christianity itself in modernity (in opposition to the classicism of antiquity) the salvation of creatures through the conversion of souls to the Christian narrative of martyred love. Hegel's philosophy totalises all of these narratives and, in this sense, is itself a distillation of speculative modernity.[2] The problem seems to be that while it is no longer tenable to maintain that Hegelian philosophy can be divided in a revolutionary method and a conservative system, the speculative dialectic, with its subordination of social being to philosophical logic and ambience of 'reconciliation under duress,' is something definitely to be avoided. As Stuart Barnett has argued: It is thus not too far-fetched to suggest that one could easily recast the story of post-war continental thought as the story of Hegelianism by other means. Although one cannot make an argument such as the one just outlined in anything but a Hegelian manner, it is necessary to put it forth because we still inhabit a Hegelianism of sorts. To truly think the end of Hegel it will be necessary to remain Hegelian to a degree. Most of the confident attempts to transcend Hegelianism have been in fact brilliant continuations of Hegelianism. As a result, speculative thought remains for the most part unchallenged. To truly confront Hegel, therefore, it will be necessary to account fully for our failure to transcend Hegel.[3] But this task was in evidence long before postmodernism. Indeed, Marx's bitter observation that "the proletariat is the unreason of every reason" already outlines an entire theoretical and practical program lying at the very limits of modernity. Whether Marxism can escape from recapture by the speculative dialectic, whether Marxism lies outside of the sphere of influence of the Hegelian Imaginary, is the question posed by this talk. The decisive superiority of the philosophy of praxis over the speculative dialectic is its location of the source of the problems and impasses of philosophy in the contradictions of social life, and the consequent realisation that the transcendence of philosophy can take place only through the practical resolution of these real contradictions. The defining trait of the philosophy of praxis is therefore the claim to show that the antinomies of philosophy can be resolved only in history. Marx argued that because Hegel could not conceive of radical changes in modern culture, Hegel rationalised temporary historical conditions as though they were eternal necessities. Social revolution, and not philosophical speculation, was needed to 'go beyond' Hegel and Kant. "The philosophers," Marx famously asserted, "have only interpreted the world the point is to change it."

Yet this lapidary formulation was taken by later generations as a call for the renunciation of any engagement with philosophy whatsoever, under the sign of "scientific socialism". In Adorno's celebrated formulation from the 1930s: Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed. The summary judgement that it has merely interpreted the world, that resignation in the face of reality had crippled it in itself, becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world miscarried.[4] Indeed, in the hands of the Second International Marxism became a mechanical determinism allied to a relapse into neo-Kantian ethics. It was not until the explosive wave of revolutions from 1917 to 1921 that the hegemony of the notion of the definitive supersession of Hegel could be challenged. It is the particular merit of Georg Lukcs' 1923 work History and Class Consciousness to have reconstructed the logic of a philosophy of praxis from Marx's apparently most narrowly "scientific" work, Capital.
History and Class Consciousness

The importance of HCC cannot be underestimated. At a time when Marxist theory still lagged behind many of its bourgeois counterparts in philosophical sophistication, Lukcs nearly single-handedly succeeded in raising it to a respectable place in European intellectual life. Indeed, HCC re-established the possibility of exploring Marxism's philosophical dimension, disposing of the naive position that Marxism was a science that had overcome the need for philosophical reflection. Finally, it offered a brilliant explanation of, and justification for, the cultural and intellectual validity of the Russian Revolution at a time when Lenin and Trotsky were engaged in desperate military and political struggles and unable to articulate any such defence. As such, History and Class Consciousness has to be seen as the most articulate expression on a theoretical level of the world historical events of 1917 presenting a twentieth century parallel to Kant's Critiques and their relation to the French Revolution, or to Hegel's Phenomenology and its relation to the internationalisation of the bourgeois revolution. In fact, the high water mark of Hegelian Marxism came with the cresting of the revolutionary wave; its decline which can already be discerned in the final sections of the book followed swiftly upon the postwar stabilisation of capitalism and the reversals of fortune of the Russian Revolution. Its partial revival had to wait for a comparable revolutionary wave, after 1968. In short, HCC was one of those rare synthetic visions that launch a new paradigm or problematic, in this case, that of Western Marxism. Lukcs' core innovation was the methodological, political and conceptual centrality of the category of the totality: "It is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality. The category of totality, the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts, is the essence of the method which Marx took over from Hegel and brilliantly transformed into the foundations of a wholly new science Proletarian science is revolutionary not just by virtue of its revolutionary ideas which it opposes to bourgeois society, but above all because of its method. The primacy of the category of the totality is the bearer of the principle of revolution in science."

But Lukcs' concern for totality was only a part of his even more fundamental assumption that methodology was the critical determinant of a revolutionary intellectual posture. This method it should be noted substantially anticipated the publication of Marx's most Hegelian text, the Grundrisse, particularly in its emphasis on the "methodology of the reflection determinations" from Hegel's "logic of essence" (which are for Lukcs "what is alive in Hegel"). In Hegelian fashion, Lukcs linked action and knowledge, contending that the apparent immediacy of facts had to be overcome by mediating them through a dynamic understanding of the whole: "Only in this context, which sees the isolated facts of social life as aspects of the historical process and integrates them in a totality, can knowledge of the facts hope to become knowledge of reality." Instead of equating the concrete with discrete entities or individual facts, Lukcs followed Marx's Hegelian usage: "the concrete is concrete because it is a synthesis of many particular determinants ie. a unity of diverse elements." The totality could be concrete precisely because it included all of the mediations that linked the seemingly isolated facts. This enabled a vision of the totality of history as a coherent and meaningful process of emancipation. But Hegel's concept of a retrospective totalisation, where the owl of Minerva takes wing at dusk, is absent from HCC. Lukc's stress on deeds, action and praxis means that those who make history are no longer separated from those who come to understand it. However, the historical subject of this totality was seen by Lukcs not only as a collective subject, but as the "creator of the totality of content". Lukcs criticised philosophy in general for its transcendental and ahistorical notion of the subject. Like Marx, Lukcs insisted that grasping the subject of history really meant recognising which social groups were practically active, and which were not. Throughout all previous history, Lukcs argued, no social group could lay claim to the role of universal subject (although some has attempted to do so). Only now, with the rise of the proletariat to power an imminent prospect, could such a claim justly be made. It is from this link between totality and subject of history that Lukcs notorious "identical subject-object of history" springs. Lukcs, like Hegel before him, contended that this possibility applied only when a universal totaliser made history in a deliberate and rational manner. To know the whole was thus dependent on the existence of a collective historical subject which could recognise itself in its objectifications: "Only when a historical situation has arisen in which a class must understand society if it is to assert itself; only when the fact that a class understands itself means that it understands society as a whole and when, in consequence, the class becomes both the subject and object of knowledge; in short, only when these conditions are all satisfied will the unity of theory and practice, the precondition of the revolutionary function of theory, become possible. Such a situation has in fact arisen with the entry of the proletariat into history." Certainly, capitalism had laid the groundwork for the proletariat's entrance by its relentless socialisation of the world, its incorporation of more and more of the globe into its economic system. But knowledge of the whole was denied to the capitalists themselves because they were not the true makers of history, however much they might have parasitically benefited from the labour of those who unconsciously were. Accordingly, mainstream bourgeois thought could not transcend its individualist, analytic and formalist biases.

In adopting an expressive notion of totality, Lukcs was able to achieve a seemingly valid resolution of the antinomies of bourgeois thought and culture. The source of these logical impasses and the persistence of irrationalism within bourgeois philosophy, Lukcs argued, sprang from the contradictory nature of bourgeois social existence. Extrapolating from Marx's discussion of commodity fetishism in Capital, and applying insights from Bergson, Simmel and Weber, he introduced the concept of reification to characterise the fundamental experience of bourgeois life. This term, one not found in Marx himself, meant the petrification of living processes into dead things, which appeared as an alien "second nature". Weber's "iron cage of bureaucratic rationalisation," Simmel's "tragedy of culture" and Bergson's spatialization of dure were thus part of a more general process. This process of the reification of thought had infected the Second International as well. The neo-Kantian split of the revisionists between facts and values, and the orthodox with their economic fatalism and failure to consider subjective praxis, were both ideological expressions of a non-revolutionary age. The central antinomies Lukcs identified as characteristic of the bourgeois era were the separation of facts and values; the distinction between phenomena, or appearances, and noumena, or essential things in themselves; and the opposition between free will and necessity, form and content, subject and object. To regain the lost unity of subject and object was only possible if a transcendental and ahistorical morality of the Kantian type were replaced by the Hegelian notion of ethical life and the concrete customs of a specific historical totality. It was instead the acceptance of the partial relativism of the historical process in which collective values were posited by specific historical subjects. To Lukcs, the "is" and the "ought" would merge once the subject of history, the proletariat, objectified its ethical principles in the concrete mores and customs of an achieved communist society. Recognising itself in the world it had created, it would no longer be subjected to the moral alienation plaguing bourgeois culture. A comparable resolution of the antinomy between phenomena and noumena would follow from the coming to consciousness of the proletariat, for, from the perspective of totality, the mysterious impenetrability of the thing in itself will be revealed as no more than an illusion of a reified consciousness incapable of recognising itself in its products. In addition, general fragmentation of modern life, including the separation of will and fate, freedom and necessity, would also wither away, once the external world was no longer perceived as ruled by alien forces experienced as if they were a "second nature". The very opposition, popular among neo-Kantians and vulgar Marxists alike, between a world of objective matter and subjective consciousness would end as humanity adopted a practical attitude towards the objective world. Being would be understood as becoming, things would dissolve into processes, and, most important of all, the subjective origin of these processes would become apparent to the identical subject-object of history. Freedom was reconcilable with necessity because it was equivalent to collective action, action which constituted the world out of itself.
Collapse of History and Class Consciousness

Lukcs solution to the antinomies of bourgeois culture appeared remarkably powerful. But it soon became apparent that they could not bear close scrutiny. HCC was no sooner printed than the paradigm began to collapse not least at Lukcs own hands. An early indication was the social form which was to mediate between the proletariat's non-revolutionary

consciousness and its historical mission as identical subject object. During the book there is a shift, from Lukcs argument for an organisational mix between the party and the soviets, in which the latter play a key role, towards the vanguard party. While protesting that the party was never to "function as a stand in for the proletariat, even in theory," the logic of this shift is clear enough. The solution to the antinomies of bourgeois thought itself contained a number of fundamental theoretical difficulties. As Lukcs came to understand a decade later, he had erroneously conflated the process of objectification with the phenomena of reification. As Lukcs later said: "I can still remember even today the overwhelming effect produced in me by Marx's statement that objectivity was the primary material attribute of all things and relations. This links up with the idea already mentioned that objectification is a natural means by which humanity masters the world and as such it can be either positive or negative. By contrast, alienation is a special variant of that activity that becomes operative in definite social conditions. This completely shattered the theoretical foundations of what had been the particular achievement of HCC." By equating praxis with the objectification of subjectivity, instead of viewing it as the interaction of a subject with a pre-given object, Lukcs had missed the importance of the dialectic of labour as the model of social praxis in Marxism. Thus, although stressing activity as opposed to contemplation and arguing that the abolition of contradictions "cannot simply be the result of thought alone, it must also amount to the practical abolition as actual forms of social life," he nonetheless underestimated the material resistance of these forms. As Lukcs subsequently acknowledged: "the proletariat seen as the identical subject-object of the real history of mankind is no materialist consummation that overcomes the contradictions of idealism. It is rather an attempt to out-Hegel Hegel." Equally absent from Lukcs work is a notion of concrete human needs or a recognition that the proletariat as self-identical subject is based on the abstract notion of a completely unifiable class. The result, as one commentator argued, is an "abstract negation of a totally reified world". Equally damaging was Lukcs hostility towards natural science. Over-reacting to the mechanical determinism of the scientific Marxists, for whom society could be understood in exactly the same way as nature, Lukcs argued that "nature is a social category". Lukcs was certainly right to protest against Engels' naive assimilation of history to nature, but Lukcs erred in the opposite direction by categorically separating them. Restricting the sphere of validity of the dialectic to history was, however, essential to the argument that those who make history can know it. Without this proviso, Lukcs would have been forced to confront the fact that Kant's distinction between noumena and phenomena referred primarily to the natural world, which could not be construed as the objectification of a creative subject (except by Hegel). For Lukcs, this represented nothing short of an admission that science was incapable of grasping reality as a totality. In HCC, Lukcs added the further reproach that science was an inherently contemplative enterprise, the witnessing by a detached observer of a process outside their control. "Scientific socialism" was therefore an expression of reification a

position Lukcs later retracted, while never renouncing his hostility to the notion of a dialectic of nature. In The Ontology of Social Being Lukcs argues that while "social being cannot be conceived as independent from natural being, Marx's ontology of social being just as sharply rules out a simple, vulgar materialist transfer of natural laws to society". The leap out of nature into social being, the "retreat of the natural boundary," as Marx put it, remained for Lukcs the crucial step for humanity. It justified his continued stress on the applicability of the dialectical method, with its mediation of subject and object, to history alone. Lukcs privileging of history over nature, his emphasis on subjective consciousness over objective matter, his premature confidence that the whole proletariat would emulate its most radical wing, and his reliance on an expressive view of totality were all obvious indications of the euphoric mood engendered by the events of 1917 and their immediate aftermath. The stabilisation of capitalism and the regrowth of the social democratic and labour parties, the need for a theory of united front tactics and the inherent theoretical weakness of many of Lukcs' theoretical formulations all meant that revision was inevitable. Central to this revision was a weakening of the expressive concept of totality and a retreat from the notion of the proletariat as identical subject-object of history. By 1926, in the important works Lenin, A Study in the Unity of His Thought and "Moses Hess and the Problems of Idealist Dialectics," the expressive totality as the objectification of a historical metasubject was quietly set aside. In Lenin, Lukcs certainly argued that "for every genuine Marxist there is always a reality more real and therefore more important than isolated facts and tendencies namely, the reality of the total process, the totality of social development". But no longer did he try to equate that totality with the objectifications of a creative subject. In so doing, Lukcs moved towards a "decentred" or non-genetic view of totality. No longer was the proletariat the metasubjective totaliser of history. Equally, Lukcs distanced himself from figures like Korsch, for whom theory was simply and directly the theory of practice: "Without orientation towards totality there can be no historically true practice. But knowledge of the totality is never spontaneous; it must always be brought into activity 'from outside,' that is, theoretically. The predominance of practice is therefore only realizable on the basis of a theory which aims to be all-embracing. But, as Lenin well knew, the totality of being as it unfolds objectively is infinite, and therefore can never be adequately grasped."
Unfinished Project

Marxism, then, is condemned to engage with philosophy precisely because theory is never the direct and unmediated expression of practice. The subsequent history of Western Marxism can be understood as an immense collective effort to rectify and then to reverse the paradigm launched by Lukcs, by producing a viable 'Marxist philosophy'. As each Western Marxist became entangled in the Hegelian Imaginary which Lukcs represents for Marxism, their synthesis unravelled and was superseded by an even more disillusioned edition, a kind of Phenomenology in reverse, without perspectives for redemption or even for renunciation. And the really interesting thing is that this logic applied as much to the anti-Hegelian currents of Western Marxism as for the direct descendants of Lukcs' line.

So the anti-totalising and anti-Hegelian Adorno, for whom "philosophy must renounce the illusion that the power of thought is sufficient to grasp the totality of the real,"[5] rejoins in some curious fashion the totalising but scientific anti-Hegelianism of Althusser, whose concept of "structural totality" was intended precisely to be an alternative to the Lukcsian totality. Indeed, Fredric Jameson has persuasively argued that "Adorno's life work stands or falls with the concept of totality,"[6] for Adorno's characteristic philosophical move is to displace the Lukcsian totality forwards into an abstract future "the standpoint of redemption," Adorno says in Minima Moralia as a regulative norm by which to measure the reified and fragmented reality of the present. Althusser, meanwhile, has to be read in the context of political struggles between Maoism and post-Stalinism in the French Communist Party, so that "Hegel here is a secret code word for Stalin". "Althusser's program for a structural Marxism," Jameson argues, "must be understood as a modification within the dialectical tradition" precisely the same modification Lukcs made in 1926 with the shift to a decentred concept of the totality as a methodological imperative and not an identity of the metasubject of history with the historical totality. "Indeed, in some paradoxical and dialectical fashion, Lukcs' conception of the totality may be said to rejoin the Althusserian notion of History or the Real as an 'absent cause'".[7] Yet in the terms being developed here, this means the recapture of both Adorno and Althusser by the Hegelian Imaginary and so we will not be surprised to learn that Althusser's concept of totality shatters within a decade of its elaboration, while Adorno's work increasingly refracts into disconnected fragments until ultimately renouncing Marxism altogether. The characteristic mistake of Western Marxism after Lukcs is to imagine that History and Class Consciousness represents a research programme for the development of a Marxist philosophy. Adorno's return to the notion of philosophy as interpretation and Althusser's idea of "theoretical praxis" express this misconception perfectly. But HCC is not an attempt to develop a Marxist philosophy at all. Instead, for all its faults, it is conceived as a contribution to Marxism understood as "the theory of the revolutionary process" intended to answer the specific question: "how far is commodity exchange together with its structural consequences able to influence the total inner and outer life of society?" As such, HCC operates in three registers:

it is a theoretical contribution to the analysis of class consciousness it is a political intervention into the Third International and European society generally it is an effort to theorise the practice of the recent revolutions by updating an existing body of theory.

Let's look at this more closely. I believe the way to both engage with the Hegelian Imaginary and avoid its logic of speculative totalisation lies with a reconceptualisation of the place of praxis in Marxism. In order to do so, I want to draw on Fredric Jameson's appropriation of the work of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. This requires a brief exposition of Lacan's distinction between the three registers of discourse: the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. The Imaginary is the register of speculative identification, making it the register of the ideological par excellence. For this reason Althusser recast the Marxist definition of ideology as "Imaginary solutions to Real contradictions". The Symbolic Order, meanwhile, is the framework of language and culture, as defined and structured by alienation and relations of power and authority. The Real, finally, is "that which resists symbolisation absolutely": in psychoanalysis, the unspeakable fact of castration, or more generally, the reality of

disempowerment. For Lacan, all discourse is inhabited by these three registers, in a dynamic relationship, and the unconscious is the name given to the repressed knowledge of the Real of castration, lack, disempowerment.
Imaginary Symbolic Real

Jameson recasts these registers as follows:

Political Imaginary The Social and Cultural History

Where the political unconscious is the repressed knowledge that "history is the history of class struggles". For Jameson, "history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form and that our approach to it and the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious". [8] Now, in one way, Marxism did not need Jacques Lacan to tell us this, for clearly the following diagram applies to Marxism:
Theory "=" Praxis Practice Symbolic Real Imaginary

But if there is a 'Marxist unconscious,' it is the above all the repressed knowledge of the symbolic, discursive nature of praxis. The characteristic Marxist illusion is the collapse of theory into practice "a conceptual reproduction of reality" and the denial of the decentring fact that "the totality of being as it unfolds objectively is infinite, and therefore can never be adequately grasped" ie that praxis, class consciousness, is never identical with theory or with practice. I believe that this has the potential to unlock part of the puzzle of the persistence of the Hegelian Imaginary within Marxism: the unsettling possibility that Lukcs' definitive work is both necessary and an illusion, that the perspective of action requires totalization just as the perspective of historical events ceaselessly undoes every theoretical totality. But I also believe that it is only Marxism which can approach this problem, for Marxism alone, it seems to me, has this relationship to the unfolding of history. It is in this sense, finally, that History and Class Consciousness is an 'unfinished project': not just as a theoretical demand to cognitively map the totality of capitalist society from the perspective of transformation; not just as an intervention into the current cultural malaise of relativism and the metaphysics of

contingency; but also, and ultimately, as a practical revolutionary project which has yet to begin.

1 Compare with Fredric Jameson, "History and Class Consciousness as an 'Unfinished Project'," in Rethinking Marxism no. 1 (1989). 2 J. F. Lyotard, cited in Stuart Barnett, "Hegel Before Derrida," in Stuart Barnett, Hegel After Derrida, (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p3. 3 Stuart Barnett, "Hegel Before Derrida," in Stuart Barnett, Hegel After Derrida, (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p25. 4 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), p3. 5 Theodor W. Adorno, "The Actuality of Philosophy," Telos 31 (Spring 1977). 6 Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism. Adorno, Or, the Persistence of the Dialectic, (London and New York: Verso, 1992), p9. 7 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp37, 49 and 54. 8 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p35.

materialist semiotics
History and Class Consciousness, overdetermined, Tel Quel, The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism

voloshinov sign language marxist structures althusser subjective ideology Ads by Google

Inspired mainly by Karl Marx's philosophy, materialist semiotics comprises a set of theoretical approaches to signs production and communication. The Marxist emphasis on material conditions stands in contrast to those semiotic approaches concerned with apparently intangible structures that cannot be observed directly such as language and consciousness, and tend to construct formalistic abstractions for which historical contexts are irrelevant. Orthodox Marxists criticize such work as idealist, ahistorical, and subjectivist. By contrast, materialist semiotics insists on putting socioeconomic contexts back into the picture. Signs and codes are not seen as standing outside of time, place, and socioeconomic relationships. Rather, materialist semioticians explicitly examine the ways in which sign systems and socioeconomic systems interpenetrate and influence each other. Marxist studies of communication, and by extension materialist semiotics, make the relationship between text and context explicit. Within the American pragmatic tradition, the Peircean model of semiosis implies that the historical context of a community is instrumental in molding the milieu within which social discourse takes place, although exponents of materialist semiotics seem to have paid little explicit attention to Charles Sanders Peirce's work. But Valentin Voloshinov appears to have been aware of Peircean pragmatism, and Ferruccio RossiLandi showed an early interest in the work of Charles Morris, a disciple of Peirce. Voloshinov was part of the Leningrad School of Soviet semioticians, which formed around Mikhail Bakhtin during the late 1920s and early 1930s. There is some disagreement over whether Voloshinov was in fact a mask used by Bakhtin in publicizing work he believed would be unacceptable to the Stalinists. At any rate, Voloshinov disappeared during the purges of the 1930s, and his work was consigned to oblivion in Soviet academic circles. Voloshinov attempted to merge the semiotic concern with subjective structures and the Marxist concern with historical materialism's objective structures. He developed an approach to semiosis premised upon a subjectobject totality. Although Voloshinov's concern was with language and subjectivity, he managed to stay clear of subjectivism, in which the material is forgotten. Voloshinov's approach shares with the wider materialist tradition a rejection of methodologies that claim the existence of purely autonomous subjectivities. His study of language sees signs as the sites where subjects and objects meet or interpenetrate each other. So the sign is where the social world and the psyche (consciousness and the subjective) intersect, but the sign is also objective. Hence, for Voloshinov, semiotics becomes a site from which to study the subjective from a materialist perspective. Through studying the sign, it becomes possible to initiate a materialist study of ideology. Voloshinov's semiotics does not locate ideology purely in consciousness, nor does he define ideology as the mere subjective reflection of the economic base. Rather, ideology is interpreted as the way in which society enters the mind through signs within a particular context. Voloshinov's understanding of ideology as semiosis is historically and materially grounded. It is a neoMarxist semiotics: consequently, it is not a semiotics that seeks universals but one that investigates the contextbound nature of semiosis.

This is a significant modification of the traditional Marxist understanding of ideology because, for Voloshinov, language communities do not coincide with class categories. There is no Marxist reductionism in terms of which language and sign systems in general are comprehended in only oneonone relationships with class. Rather, different classes use the same language or sign system. Hence, language and signs become sites of struggle. In this sense, signs and meaning are dynamic and may even be contradictory. Voloshinov builds the notion of dialectic into his understanding of sign systems, but it is not a materially driven dialectic in the strictly Marxist sense. For Voloshinov, class struggle does not determine language use, as it does in the orthodox Marxist concept of ideology; instead, class struggle takes place within a shared sign system used by a single community of users. In fact, the sign itself becomes a site of class struggle. Social contradictions can manifest themselves in sign systems as surely as they can in the economic system. Voloshinov's semiotics, then, unlike Saussurean semiology, is a dialectical structuralism that is concerned with both material and subjective structures: there can be no generalized given sign. Rather, each sign is historically and materially conditioned and actively struggled over within the totality of its social context. The sign dialectically connects the interface of the subjectobject totalitythe individual psyche and the social contextwithin class struggle. Ideology is seen to emerge within this dialectical totality of subject and object. Voloshinov, however, recognizes that the dominant ideology as a sign system in a given context will try to stabilize itself, though he allows space for active human minds and praxis within his nondeterministic subjectobject structuralism. Human beings are seen as active cocreators of meaning as they use, make, modify, and struggle over signs. There is an alternative, more orthodox, Marxist conception of language and semiosis to the one formulated by Voloshinov. In this rival approach, a direct relationship is drawn between language and other sign systems and classbased ideology, and language becomes a means of class rule in which reality is disguised. This approach is derived ultimately from Gyrgy Lukcs's notions of reification and alienation as developed in History and Class Consciousness (1971). For Lukcs, capitalism has destroyed the subjectobject totality of a humanized world. Under capitalism, people (subjects) can be treated as things or commoditiesthat is, they are objectified. The result is alienation. Thus, Marxist semiotics derived from the Lukcian view of ideology is concerned with subjective linguistic alienation.
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A key exponent of this form of Marxist semiotics has been Ferruccio RossiLandi, for whom humans are social beings and hence need to exchange ideas and actions via signs within code systems. The control of sign systems translates into the control of people. For RossiLandi, capitalists control economic relations of production and thus control linguistic exchange and sign systems. Capitalism therefore affects how and what humans are able to communicate. The result of capitalism is a curtailed linguistic exchange that results in linguistic alienation. In developing his theory of exchange within sign systems, RossiLandi developed numerous concepts that have enriched materialist semiotics, such as linguistic work, linguistic tools, and linguistic capital. Both RossiLandi's and Lukcs's concepts of communication, however, ultimately face the limitations of the orthodox Marxist conception of ideology in which the economic base is seen to determine the subjective superstructure. Both assume that a direct correlation can be drawn between economic exchange and the exchange of signs within language structures. It is a somewhat problematic assumption that Marx's methodology can be shifted in this way, but this idea that Marx's method of analyzing material structures can simply be transferred into a means for analyzing language structures also bears some resemblance to the premises underpinning Louis Althusser's work. The key break that Althusser initiated within Marxism came in his effective destruction of the traditional historicalmaterialist model of base and superstructure (object and subject). As with Voloshinov's construct, there is no oneonone relationship between class and language in the Althusserian model. For Marx, the economic structure was the center; it determined other structures. Similarly, in his structuralism, Althusser specifically detaches ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) from the economic base. ISAs become autonomous within a complex reality. Within this model, human thought or consciousness can be formed independent of given economic conditions, purely as a result of the interpellation of people into subjective structures. The Althusserian structural model argues that at any historical conjuncture there will be multiple and complex interrelationships and causations. Althusser used the term overdetermined to describe this complex structural reality. Althusser's structuralism is premised upon a decentered hierarchy of practices within which one of the structures is dominant at any particular point in time. Theoretically, a subjective structure

could even be dominant at some point. This possibility represents a radical departure from the original Marxist model. The Althusserian approach to materialist semiosis differs significantly from the Voloshinovian approach precisely because of the implications of the notion of decenteredness and because of the granting of autonomy to subjective structures. In fact, the Althusserian approach can be seen as no longer strictly materialist. By detaching subjective structures (ISAs, language) from material structures, Althusser effectively moved into the realm of freefloating subjectivities and thereby opened the door to what Marx had objected to about philosophynamely, its subjectivism and idealism. Ironically Althusser's philosophy is a subjectivism without an active human subject. By ignoring the humanist strand and the subjectobject dialectic within Marxism, Althusser merely succeeded in transforming the most reductionist aspects of Marxism's materialist determinism into a subjectivist determinism. He collapsed ideology as false consciousness into determining subjective structures. In this respect, there is a parallel between Althusser's work and Roland Barthes's Marxist phase. Barthes fused a Maoist interpretation of Marxism with a Saussurean semiology to produce a social critique that rested upon the decoding of meanings. Barthes and the Tel Quel group sought to strip away the myths of bourgeois life by applying a structuralist methodology to the texts and intertextuality of their society. Ultimately, however, Barthes and the Tel Quel group drifted into the production of subjectivist semantic games or metalanguages that were divorced from considerations of the historical material context. Althusser's work, on the other hand, attempted to deal with the methodological crisis of Marxism. But Althusser's solution to this crisis proved to be no solution at all. In fact, his work seems to have accelerated the collapse of the Marxist dream. However, even if Althusser failed to save Marxism, he unintentionally enriched the debate about structuralism, as Althusserian structuralism melted into postAlthusserianism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction. Materialist semiotics has, however, resurfaced in the expanding field of cultural studies, which includes among its models Althusser's and Voloshinov's reformulations of structuralism, Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemony, and Raymond Williams's culturalism. The resultant concern with an active human subjectivity within a material context has meant that cultural studies has developed a specific interpretation of materialist semiosis in which to undertake a humanist rereading of structuralism. [See also Althusser; Marx; Mass Communication; and RossiLandi] .
Bibliography and More Information about materialist semiotics

Benton, T. The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism. London: Macmillan, 1984. Coward, R., and J. Ellis. Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977. Fiske, J. British Cultural Studies and Television. In Channels of Discourse, edited by R. Allen, pp. 254289. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Gramsci, A. Selections from Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971. Lukcs, G. History and Class Consciousness. London: Merlin, 1971.

RossiLandi, F. Ideas for the Study of Linguistic Alienation. Social Praxis 3.12 (1976): 77 92. RossiLandi, F. Introduction to Semiosis and Social Reproduction. Working Papers of Centro Internazionale di Semiotica e Linguistica 63, series C. Urbino: University of Urbino, 1977. Voloshinov, V. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. New York: Seminar Press, 1973. Williams, R. Culture and Society. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1961. Williams, R. The Long Revolution. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1965.

Eric Louw

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