>could you clarify the following statement?
>
>> class dialectics tell us that our interests are objective, and that
>> political and economic struggle is a process of becoming conscious of
>> and organizing around those objective interests.
It is a basic premise of Marxist theory that interests are objective. This means that your interests do not need to be consciously realized to be an objective reality. Bourgeois categories conflate interests with preferences. This is false conceptualization. Preferences are the conscious recognition of interests. However, one's preferences may be somebody else's interests. For example, a worker's interests are opposed to the capitalist interest to exploit the worker. However, most workers' preferences are for the capitalist class to realize their interests. This is false consciousness. False consciousness is the identification of oneself with the interests of another social class.
These interests are embedded in objective social relations. Thus your interests are determined by your social and material position in relation to other social and material positions. Because classes are materially opposed to one another - e.g., the dialectic of the capitalist and the worker class - their interests are objectively opposed. Whether workers recognize this fact or not is another matter. Subjectivity/ intersubjectivity may be out of phase with objective reality. When they are aligned, this is class consciousness. Whey they are out of phase, this is fragmented consciousness, false consciousness, contradictory consciousness, incomplete consciousness.
The role of socialists and the organic intellectuals of the working class is to help the working class - eine Klasse an sich - align their preferences with their objective interests and politically organize the working class. This produces eine Klasse fuer sich. (Is it eine or ein?)
In the "Preface" to CCPE Marx argues: "In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out." What Marx is arguing here is that structural contradictions between social classes in a constantly changing historical and sociomaterial context determines the objective interests of members of the social classes. This can be determined with the precision of science.
This is why the revolutionary vanguard and the organic intellectual are absolutely essential to the socialist movement: they have the time, resources, and training to pursue objective class-dialectical and structural analysis. Because the working class suffers from a poverty of these necessary elements in the movement, their consciousness as a class is generally fragmented, contradictory, and false. Thus, Marx emphasizes, we cannot trust what a person thinks of her/himself any more than we can judge the adequacy of a social class's view of itself from its consciousness: "Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness" (from the "Preface").
The point being, then, that our judgment of the adequacy of the Soviet Union must be based on objective scientific analysis, not on whether the people who lived under the rule of the Communist Party judged the regime to be inadequate. To pursue an analysis that emphasizes the latter is to advocate a subjectivist ideology that stands contrarily to Marxist theory. Marxism gives up popular spirits.
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