As far as "today", many (most) workers know that the capitalists (GM, for example) is screwing them. They just feel POWERLESS to do anything about it AS A CLASS. They see no way to a dictatorship of the proletariat to overthrow the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
Capitalism can ONLY be challenged effectively when the character of that challenge is shaped with self-authority by its only viable opponents.
Charles Brown
>>> Jim heartfield <Jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk> 08/05 4:14 AM >>>
In message <l03130301b1ecf65f2cff@[166.84.250.86]>, Doug Henwood
<dhenwood at panix.com> writes
>I just read Vanneman & Cannon's 1987 book, The American Perception of
>Class, which argues, using existing survey data and original research, that
>(working-class) Americans are far more class conscious than anyone
>realizes. Since the book is over 10 years old, I looked at some more recent
>polls (General Social Survey, New York Times, ABC) and found there's not
>much reason to change that conclusion. But consciousness is one thing - a
>thing deeper and more complicated than self-naming even - and action is
>another. People do think of themselves as working class, but do they act
>politically on it?
I would have said that there is more to class consciousness than a feeling of being the underdog, or pride in the dignity of labour, and so on. If anything thre is a greater sense of everyone - even those who aren't - being hard done by. But in itself that has no radical consequences. 'Poor little me' is not a sentiment that will overturn the apple cart. The class consciousness that Lukacs and Marx talked of was a consciousness of a conflict - tied to a goal of social change. That latter part is definitely missing in today's outlook.
>
>Or, as my new pal Zizek says in his leftist plea for Eurocentrism in the
>Summer issue of Critical Inquiry:
...
> To be proletarian involves assuming a certain subjective
>stance (of class struggle destined to achieve redemption through
>revolution) that, in principle, can occur to any individual;
In the second volume of his work on Marx, in the introductory chapter, Hal Draper makes the point that the differentiation made (by Lenin) between a 'class-in-itself' (objective condition of being working class) and a 'class-for-itself' (subjective realisation of said position) misquotes Marx. The differentiation Marx makes is 'mass-in- itself'/'class-for-itself'. The point being that class is as Zizek says a subjective as well as an objective condition. As English Marxist historiography argues, the working class is present at its own making. Organising itself as a class with a goal, it makes itself into something out of the mere mass or rabble that it was previously.
However, to put all this in up-to-date terms, we should ask whether the conflicts that Marx outlined, or those that Zizek strains to elide with the ideological struggle he is describing, are the paradigmatic conflicts of our age.
Marx described a time when the capitalist class was revolutionising the means of production, organising an objective mass of workers, and promoting a particualr version of social progress. The character of the challenge to capitalism was necessarily shaped by its opponents. It does not follow that the social conflicts of the present are of the same character.
-- Jim heartfield