> Victor Friedlander wrote:
>
> > Marx, however, avers that consciousness, including class consciousness -
> > does not necessitate theory, i.e., the professional aid of the
> > intelligentsia (the dialecticians).
>
> The task Marx assigns to the proletariat requires, for its successful
> accomplishment, "theoretical consciousness," i.e. the nature of the task
> is such that it can only be accomplished by those with the developed
> capabilities required to raise "socialism" in imagination before erecting
> it in reality. He claimed capitalism would work to develop this.
>
> In The Holy Family, for instance, he and Engels claim that:
>
> "Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity,
> even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the
> conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of
> society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the
> proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical
> consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no
> longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need --the practical expression
> of necessity -- is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it
> follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself."
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch04.htm
>
> Engels, in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, gives "the theoretical
> expression or the proletarian movement, scientific Socialism," an essential
> role in the development of the required "theoretical consciousness," i.e.
> in the development of "a full knowledge of the conditions and of the
> meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish."
>
> "To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical
> mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly comprehend the historical
> conditions and thus the very nature of this act, to impart to the now
> oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the
> meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the
> task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific
> Socialism."
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm
>
> Ted
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>
> The practitioners of the social science can and should inform the
> proletariat of theory and experimentation concerning "scientific
> socialism", i.e., expanding the consciousness of the proletariat of the
> available means for the termination of the inhuman practices of the
> capitalist mode of production and of the alternatives it might choose from
> to replace it. However, the scientists of scientific socialism should keep
> in mind that doctrine leads to reification and fetishism (capitalism is not
> the only reifiable system and fetishism is not necessarily limited to
> representation of relations between commodities). Recognition of the
> limitations of theory for the practical realization of socialism is
> essential to the avoidance of doctrine. Practice is far more concrete than
> any and all theory, without the explicit subjectivity and universals of the
> products of theoretical work. Practice, the continuous, corrective
> reflection on the particularities and singularities of the work at hand
> relative to the needs to be satisfied is what produces a useful object; be
> it a hammer, a theory, or a socialist community.
>
-- Victor Friedlander