ha! In my latest trip to the library, I stumbled over a book that caught my eye, Sara Maza's _The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary, 1750-1850_
I'm getting desperately, desperately bored by non-theory stuff. aiyiyiyi. After awhile, it just feels like you've read it all before. Tell me something new!
So far, Maza's a delightful writer but what made me want to share is this line:
"The thesis of bourgeois nonexistence* derives from my belief that classes only exist if they are aware of their own existence, a knowledge which is inseparable from the ability to articulate an identity. I posit here that the existence of social groups, while rooted in the material world, is shaped by language and more specificially by narrative: in order for a group to claim a role as actor in society and polity, it must have a story or stories about itself, it must take directions for a tale that links memories of the past to desires for the future. The French bourgeoisie was briefly offered an inspiring story of this sort, the one written mostly in the 1820s by liberal politicians and historians such as Augustin Thierry, Fracois Guizont, and Adlphe Theirs. That narrative, however, did not prove compelling for very long." **************
Here's something I'd like to share from History & Class Consciousness by Lukacs. To me, it relates to why class consciousness is so dim amongst the proletariat:
In the first case it ceases to be possible to understand the origin of social institutions. [5] The objects of history appear as the objects of immutable, eternal laws of nature. History becomes fossilised in a formalism incapable of comprehending that the real nature of socio-historical institutions is that they consist of relations between men. On the contrary, men become estranged from this, the true source of historical understanding and cut off from it by an unbridgeable gulf. As Marx points out, [6] people fail to realise “that these definite social relations are just as much the products of men as linen. flax, etc.”.
In the second case, history is transformed into the irrational rule of blind forces which is embodied at best in the ‘spirit of the people’ or in ‘great men’. It can therefore only be described pragmatically but it cannot be rationally understood. Its only possible organisation would be aesthetic, as if it were a work of art. Or else, as in the philosophy of history of the Kantians, it must be seen as the instrument, senseless in itself, by means of which timeless, supra-historical, ethical principles are realised.
Marx resolves this dilemma by exposing it as an illusion. The dilemma means only that the contradictions of the capitalist system of production are reflected in these mutually incompatible accounts of the same object. For in this historiography with its search for ‘sociological’ laws or its formalistic rationale, we find the reflection of man’s plight in bourgeois society and of his helpless enslavement by the forces of production. “To them, their own social action”, Marx remarks, [7] “takes the form of the action of objects which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them”. This law was expressed most clearly and coherently in the purely natural and rational laws of classical economics. Marx retorted with the demand for a historical critique of economics which resolves the totality of the reified objectivities of social and economic life into relations between men. Capital and with it every form in which the national economy objectives itself is, according to Marx, “not a thing but a social relation between persons mediated through things”. [8]
full: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/lukacs3.htm
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Mike B)
http://www.iww.org.au/node/10 "Would you have freedom from wage-slavery.." Joe Hill http://www.iww.org/en/join
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