Specific question

James Devine jdevine at popmail.lmu.edu
Fri Oct 16 11:26:30 PDT 1998


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



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