Class consciousness

1. How is ‘class consciousness’ created and what political role does it have? What is the difference between ‘workers’ and ‘the proletariat’?

For Marx, the creation of class consciousness is fundamental to the impending communist revolution, as the workers can only become the proletariat—a cohesive group that recognizes its shared goals and interests—when they are aware of themselves as a distinctive class.  Marx’s approach to history is teleological in nature, as he divides world events into steps that lead towards the inevitable proletarian revolution; in his specific teleology, the demise of the bourgeoisie is inevitable because “the conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them” (340), an issue that has served as the impetus for both colonial and domestic exploitation of vulnerable populations—namely, the proletariat.  Although workers initially form different, pre-proletarian groups, over time, class consciousness is created in the form of trade unions and other organizations that form as the proletariat “feels [its] strength more” (342).  The ossification of the proletariat as a true class, and subsequently a political party, is facilitated by “improved means of communication” (343) that allow workers from different locations to form a movement of solidarity.  The workers, thus, are the raw material from which the proletariat is formed through the emergence of class consciousness.

The main flaw in Marx’s critique of society and history, however, comes from his myopic view of class conflict and its importance—in seeing all of history as a story of class conflict, Marx obfuscates many workers and exploited people.  His references to age and sex in the age of bourgeois domination highlight this narrow-minded view; as modern industry grows in strength, Marx argues, “differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class” (341).  Such an idea obscures the unique plight that non-male, non-white, non-citizen, and disenfranchised workers suffer, and it also renders their contributions to resistance movements indistinct.  Class does not exist in a vacuum, as Marx proposes; it cannot be thought of outside of discourses of gender or race.  Modern leftist discourse often takes up Marx’s mantle in its white masculine emphasis on class as a more fundamental category of oppression than gender or race.  Such arguments, however, ignore the fact that the economic exploitation that Marx and his successors critique occurs through categories of gender and race.