Specific question

[James Devine]

Charles writes: >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. <

This is basically right, but bourgeois economics does have this distinction
between "interests" and "preferences." One's interest is to have clean air,
but one's preference may be to disconnect the anti-smog device on the car
to get better gas mileage and more acceleration. The "free rider" prefers
to go against his or her own interest, which involves the production of a
"public good" (clean air).

Where Marxian theory differs is in its recognition that there are
fundamental divisions within the "public," so that instead of a "public
good" or a "public interest," there are conflicting collective interests,
i.e., class interests. While there may be some shared interests,
capitalists' class interest is to preserve and extend its domination,
exploitation, and alienation of the working class, while the workers' class
is the opposite, i.e., to gain freedom from class rule, exploitation, and
alienation.

There is a version of the free rider problem: a capitalist speculator, for
example, may seek short-term gain in a way that destabilizes capitalism as
a whole. This, of course, is the problem that Keynesian economics (and most
of modern liberal economics) tries to deal with. 

Similarly, a working-class scab acts on preferences instead of class
interests.


>... The role of socialists and the organic intellectuals of the working
class is to help the working class - [the class in itself] - align their
preferences with their objective interests and politically organize the
working class. This produces [a class for itself]<

Exactly: Marxists try to get workers together to produce the class'
collective good, to get away from the narrow self-interest of the scab. The
"class for itself" is one united for this purpose (collective
self-liberation), whereas the class in itself is simply the empirical
reality of the working class at any point in history.

Jim Devine jdevine at popmail.lmu.edu &
http://clawww.lmu.edu/Departments/ECON/jdevine.html