working class consciously recognizes its historic mission at the wholly political level of state power; it refers to a transitional dynamic, a pull through the materially based necessity of basic struggles for what are objectively class interests toward the beginnings of a conscious, subjective awareness of class identity.
Of course, this “pull” does not automatically take the form of an uninterrupted progress toward class unity, as implied by the enthusiastic young authors of the Manifesto. Bur the crucial insight around which Marx and Engels built their political lives was that the roots of any meaningful movement toward socialism by the class defined in terms of its potential for social transformation lie in the objective realities of class conflict that push workers, whatever their subjective consciousness, into resistance against capital.
Whatever the optimism of the clarion call rolled out in the Manifesto, it is these crucial insights we invoke in calling for a return by the left to “class consciousness”—for a shift of emphasis away from programmatic rectitude on the one hand and theoretical fixation on text or “discourse” on the other to the perhaps difficult recognition that the key to socialist advance lies in that most despised and least acknowledged expression of “socialism from below,” basic material class struggles.
Contradictory Consciousness
The zeitgeist of the 1840s, when meetings of thousands of workers inspired by the “People’s Charter” took place on the Yorkshire moors, and even of the second decade of the twentieth century, when American workers traveled miles across the Great Plains to attend socialist tent meetings in equal numbers, seem to belong to another world from that of late-twentieth-century consumerism and individualism. In this “postmodern” age, consciousness of so “fundamentalist” a category as class appears to have shrunk to a scarcely discernible pulse, a sluggish bleep on the blank screen of a commodity-based culture pushed relentlessly to the wildest shores of the “global village.” And yet there remains a countervailing force, all the more significant for swimming against this overwhelming ideological stream. The persistence of highly conflictual economic struggles entered into by workers whose subjective consciousness may be profoundly reformist, not to say conservative, continues to confound prophets of “postindustrial” stability and to demonstrate, as we argue below, a transformative potential in terms of both consciousness and praxis.
Recent events in the United States, such as the change in leadership of the AFL-CIO, the waging of a number of climactic strike struggles and, at the time of writing, a key national victory—in a strike for jobs and greater pay equality—have opened up a new receptiveness to class thinking in that most individualistic of cultures. During roughly the same period, the simmering anger provoked by years of neoliberalism has been reflected in open political protest on the streets of France, South Africa, South Korea, and many other countries. Such developments can be taken to illustrate the potential for renewed class-based revolt even after years of apparent quiescence.
How and why do apparently “hegemonized” workers achieve such qualitative leaps into outright conflict with employers and the state? Marxist theoretical development in the wake of the distortions of Stalinism has concentrated almost entirely on the domination of such “superstructural” factors as ideology, culture, and political process and on their role in structuring consciousness and blanking out dissent. In urging a more thorough exploration of the complexities of working-class consciousness and “common sense,” our own argument sets out to challenge this widespread assumption of the uncontested hegemony of ruling ideas.
We begin by reversing the critique. Just as a crude determinism of economic structures and interests cannot be assumed in the trajectory of class consciousness, nor can an uncontested “overdetermination” of ruling-class or even reformist ideology be assumed to be a stable property of the capitalist system. Rather than positive endorsement of the ruling ideas of the epoch, a “dull compulsion” to accept the apparently inevitable may be a more accurate description of at least some strands of working-class response to the prevailing system. And if we substitute fatalistic acceptance for coherent and positive consent, it becomes possible to sight gaps—potential breaks in the apparently seamless canvas of late-twentieth-century “common sense.”
We start by citing an absence: the absence of ideology. What is being proposed here is not that workers do not subscribe to ruling-class ideas, wholly or in part, or that they do not accept, in one or another sense, the parameters of reformist ideology; the boundaries of that acceptance and the pervasiveness of reformist ideology are realities that if anything deserve much greater recognition in many segments of the left. Yet the impermanence, the instability, in many ways the fragility of this acceptance is also indicated when we probe more deeply into the precise nature of “actually existing” working-class consciousness. Here we discover, rather than coherent and explicit assent to a consistent set of ideas and “values,” a more complex mix: one characterized less by undifferentiated ideological domination than by inconsistency, contradiction, and lack of information.
The essentially incoherent nature of working-class social and political attitudes was noted in a cluster of studies produced in the 1970s that united in indicating that workers’ views on general social issues tend to exhibit a mixture of indifference and inconsistency rather than active “legitimization” of the status quo.17 The term “pragmatic acceptance” was used by Michael Mann to express the essentially fatalistic, rather than actively participatory, dimension of workers’ outlooks.18 Later, Scott Lash provided strong grounds for a dismissal of workers’ perceptions of class and similar political concepts as confused and incoherent.19 But workers’ consciousness is also contradictory—a crucial feature allowing a corresponding potential for struggle and subversion of ideology. Edwards and Scullion’s 1982 study of workplace organization shows shop stewards subjectively endorsing the profit-related ethos of their management while objectively undermining it with their own actions: “There was, as it were, an unconscious form of resistance whereby stewards’ everyday actions challenged managerial rights in many ways even though their articulated ideology involved commitment to the same aims.”20
More recent research is less directly concerned with “consciousness” but touches nevertheless on workers’ outlooks and attitudes. For example, David Croteau’s 1995 study of the apparently unbridgeable gulf between “radical” and working-class politics shows that these (primarily white) workers’ apparent dismissal of socialist ideas had little bearing on their endorsement of the prevailing ideology; in fact, as Croteau points out, the workers in his study were often considerably clearer as to the corrupt realities of present-day capitalism than were their “radical” counterparts. Rather, workers’ perceptions of society revealed a profound cynicism and fatalism, a sense that there is nothing you can do about these problems and that it is best simply to concentrate on one’s family and private concerns.21
This essentially abstentionist outlook confirms our hypothesis of an “absence” of ideology or indeed any positive, coherent conception of social structure. Nevertheless, the fragile balance between “pragmatic acceptance” and the underlying resentment indicated in the details of Croteau’s study do not augur well for any prognosis of stability in the conduct of capitalist relations. While the issue of struggle is unexplored by Croteau, who leaves his workers as fatalistic and powerless as they began, such apparent resignation stands in sharp contrast to his interviewees’ anger over issues of working time and labor intensification, issues which have propelled many similarly “nonpolitical” groups of workers into major industrial struggles in both Britain and America.22
The attempt to draw links between such material conditions and potentially subversive action has led in recent years to a revival of the old refrain about “economic determinism.” Chantal Mouffe, for example, writes: “How can it be maintained that economic agents can have interests defined at the economic level which would be represented a posteriori at the political and ideological levels? . . . That amounts to stating that interests can exist prior to the discourse in which they are formulated and articulated.”23 The problem with this kind of argument is that it in itself advocates
