Class Consciousness and Our Finite Time
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TM- Any chance that for once in your life you can answer a question? Would you agree with the simple proposition that the ruling elite are infinitely more class conscious than the working class?
I don’t know if they think at all beyond profits.
But yes, if only because they are such a small minority and are conscious of what they want, but not beyond that. One might as well ask if Scrooge McDuck knows about the materialist conception of history.
I would say that the capitalist class generally shows a much stronger awareness of its material interests than the working class does of its own, although I wouldn’t describe it as “infinitely” more class conscious.
Capitalists do not always act as one conscious and united class. They compete with one another, disagree politically and pursue conflicting interests. But when property, profits and the continuation of capitalist social relations are concerned, there are powerful institutions and organisations devoted to defending those interests.
The interesting question for me is why workers, despite sharing a common dependence on wages, so often understand their problems individually or through nationalism, political parties and competing identities rather than through their common class position.
That is precisely why the question of how class consciousness develops is so important.
I think that the SPGB keeping roughly the same number of members through over a century is maybe due to a father to son handing down of consciousness. Not in all cases of course.
TM – You don’t have to possess a knowledge of the materialist conception of history to be class conscious.
Roberto – Of course capitalists do not always act in their own class interests but this is down to economic ignorance rather than a lack of class consciousness. If you agree that the awareness of our ‘finite time’ on this planet does not affect ruling class consciousness why should it affect working class consciousness?TM “I think that the SPGB keeping roughly the same number of members through over a century is maybe due to a father to son handing down of consciousness. Not in all cases of course.”
Think that is a bit of a fallacy, it might be a bit of a limited phenomenon in the London area, but not really a huge thing, from my experience, outside of that area.
Interestingly enough though, I did the opposite, I passed the party case to my mother, who at the age of about 70 left the labour Party after 55 years and joined the SPGB!
One could paraphrase Voltaire, replacing Locke with Marx:
Most people don’t read.
Of those who do read, most don’t read Marx.
Of those who read Marx, most don’t understand him.That’s a fair question, and I think I should clarify what I mean.
I am not arguing that awareness of our finite lives automatically produces class consciousness. Clearly it doesn’t. A capitalist and a worker can both understand perfectly well that they have only one life and draw completely different conclusions from that fact.
Class consciousness comes from understanding one’s social position and interests within capitalism. Awareness of finitude is something different.
My point is simply that finitude can provide another perspective from which workers can examine their condition. A worker sells labour power, but labour power can only be exercised through the worker’s time. And that time is not an abstract economic quantity from the worker’s point of view — it is part of a finite life that cannot be recovered.
The capitalist can be equally conscious of finitude, but occupies a different position in the social relationship and therefore has no reason to draw the same class conclusions from it.
So I would put it this way: consciousness of finitude does not create class consciousness. Class consciousness tells us how our time is socially organised; consciousness of finitude helps us understand why that time matters to us.
I see finitude as a possible way of illuminating the socialist argument, not as a theory of how class consciousness necessarily develops.
Warren Buffett famously stated, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning. It should be the opposite way.
The capitalist class has more class consciousness than the working class, and in some places, like the USA, they have physical and mental control of the working class; the American working class can not even tolerate the election of a social democrat, and in Europe it is very normal to have social democratic organisations; in Europe it is very normal for left-wing political parties to participate in the election; in the USA it is capital sin to be a communist, and workers hate communists; the capitalist class has an enormous influence in the minds of the working class, including those workers from other countries.
One or two capitalists are not the capitalist class; the capitalist class is a group of individuals who form a social class.
I have seen one or two individuals who are members of the capitalist class building a whole neighbourhood for their workers and providing medical coverage and building schools for them and their children, but they are members of the capitalist class, and they continued extracting surplus value from their workers.
Some of their children attend private schools with the sons and daughters of the working class, and some of them also became members of the working-class movement, and some rich people provided financing to certain left-wing groups, but despite that, they were members of the capitalist class; when their interests were in danger, they went against the movement.
Engels is one of the few capitalists who betrayed his own social class; most capitalists will not do that.
The capitalist class might be ideologically idealistic, but they know what their materialistic interests are
A social class is defined according to its relationship with the means of production. In the USA, everybody calls themselves middle class, and they are members of the proletarian class. When the capitalist crisis hits them hard, they make a line to apply for social benefits like any other member of the working class; therefore, they are totally confused. They do not know that they are members of the working class.
The expression: I am a member of the middle class, and you are a member of the working class ” is a totally false expression; it creates the conditions to keep some members of the working class outside of the struggle of the working-class movement. The class struggle has been ideologically eliminated, but in social reality, the class struggle has not been eliminated. You can tell any worker that he/she is a wage slave, and they get offended. We are fucked up
Roberto – Consciousness of our mortality, your ‘finitude’ as you call it, can also have the reverse effect in terms of religion and/or despair. I don’t see any evidence that this has been a positive motivation in political history. What are your thoughts concerning the reasons put forward by the ‘Frankfurt School’ for the lack of class consciousness among working people?
Those I have known wouldn’t think of themselves as capitalists. To be told they live on the labour of others would anger them immensely, even though it’s true. They lived on surplus value but the term wouldn’t have meant anything to them. One was aware. He owned a shipping company in East Asia. He liked my talk of socialism and agreed the word was misused all the time. He was fed up with the decades-long demonisation in Asia of Marx. He hoped more people would become real socialists. He became angry at anyone at the table who didn’t finish the food on their plate. He hated waste.
You can tell some proletarian workers that wealth is produced by them and that the rich class is parasitic, and they get offended because they do not know about the concept of capital and surplus value; even more, if you tell them that capital is unpaid labour, or legalised robbery, they will get offended. But personally, they know that somebody is making more money than them, but they have historically learned that it is something normal, and it is normal to have wars, economic exploitation and rich people all the time.
They have learned that history has been made by wars hero, kings, presidents, senators and charismatic individuals, but they do not know that history has been made by materialistic interests and that they are the real leaders. Individuals do not make history.
Some leftists are saying that history has been made by the people,( including salvador allende ) but the concept of the people is wrong too, because in every nation there are two materialistic interests in opposition, but they are nationalists like the members of the capitalist class.
How do we move away from those conceptions? By obtaining class consciousness and socialist consciousness, and socialist education, but class consciousness does not fall from the sky or from heaven; and we do not need a Moses to take us to the promised land; it must be obtained through political education, and that is the function of the socialist party to propagate socialist education within the working class, but we are not a vanguard party.
We have been around for one hundred years, but we have never asked the workers to become involved in reformist movements or interclass disputes ( but we support reforms beneficial for the working class temporarily ) like the left-wingers; they might be winning the game of membership, but the workers continue fighting for the same reforms as the social democratic groups.
If we become a reformist group, we might obtain thousands of members, and some reformist groups are losing members, and some reformist groups have died too; we can not compete about membership with the left-wingers; they will win the game, but they can not compete with us concerning real socialist conceptions; we will win the game; we have lost many members, and some have joined left-wing groups; are they obtaining better results? I do not think so; there are no shortcuts.
I have done my homework and window shopping, and I have not found anything better, and I have received invitations to join groups with larger membership and more resources, but I will not come back to my political past, and I know that probably I will not be able to see the future society; I do not get desperate or disappointed; Marx and Engels died, and they did not see it either, but they left a legacy.
With the war in Iran, most workers believe that it is a religious war and that the arabs have been in wars among themselves for hundreds of years (like the Lawrence of Arabia movie), but they do not know that economic materialists’ interests are the driving force for all wars, including the religious wars, and that the main problem is capitalism and the cause of wars is capitalism, and the Middle East holds one of the largest deposits of oil and gas; the same thought applies to Venezuela. Now the hysteria about communism and drug trafficking is gone because one sector of the capitalist class has obtained what they really wanted.
TM- Any chance that, for once in your life, you can answer a question? Would you agree with the simple proposition that the ruling elite are infinitely more class-conscious than the working class?
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I do not think that they are infinitely class-conscious. In a socialist society, they are going to lose their capitalist consciousness; they will be forced to go along with the interests of the working class, shape up or ship out.
They will be influenced to obtain workers’ consciousness, and social class will no longer exist; wage slavery will be eliminated by the working class, and the proletarian class will negate itself; probably they will have better enjoyment and less social pressure; capital is one of the enemies of the capitalist class.
They have lost their status as members of the capitalist class; they will become workers too, and the proletarian class will vanish, and money will lose its value of exchange; gold and silver will be used to manufacture cooking pots and electric wires, paper money can be recycled to print newspapers, toilet paper, and books, to avoid deforestation, and banks will become museums, as an ex minority force of power will not be able to overthrow the democracy of the majority.
Lenin and Leninists are saying that from socialism you can come back to capitalism, but how? You need a capitalist class first; you have to accumulate capital, and you need wage slaves; you need means of production. Probably, he was talking about going from state capitalism coming back to corporate capitalism, and it took place in Russia in 1989.
It would be like taking a candy from a child; I do not think that the majority of humans would have the desire to come back to capitalism, probably only a minor group of masochists
Religion will become a system of personal incumbency; priests are not going to have large power and influence in the new society. They are not going to dictate to women what they must do or not do with their bodies; we might have some religious people, but they would have the freedom to practice their own beliefs.
I would say that the capitalist class generally shows a much stronger awareness of its material interests than the working class does of its own, although I wouldn’t describe it as “infinitely” more class conscious.
Capitalists do not always act as one conscious and united class. They compete with one another, disagree politically and pursue conflicting interests. But when property, profits and the continuation of capitalist social relations are concerned, there are powerful institutions and organisations devoted to defending those interests.
The interesting question for me is why workers, despite sharing a common dependence on wages, so often understand their problems individually or through nationalism, political parties and competing identities rather than through their common class position.
That is precisely why the question of how class consciousness develops is so important.
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What is the main objective of the so-called national liberation movements or wars? To eliminate one capitalist class that is controlling another capitalist class. One capitalist class want to have freedom of movement and their own market; the case of the vietcong is the best example. There is no unity among the world capitalist class; it might be a global class, but they have their own internal interests too.
BRICS has been formed by a group of capitalists looking for their own market, their own currency, versus the G7 who is also looking for its own market and better profits and better prices to compete; some members of the European Union have joined or are collaborating with Mercosur, which is a cartel formed by capitalists, and the UK is one of them; the US is changing its stance regarding the Malvinas Islands
There are interclass conflicts among the members of the European capitalist class; there are interclass conflicts within the members of the Latin American capitalists. At present, one sector is looking for support from the USA capitalists, but as soon as they establish their own economic tents, they will want to have freedom of operations.
Some of them are rejecting the so-called Chinese communists, but they are having commodity trade agreements with China and taking loans from the Chinese or engaging in monetary swaps with the Chinese. They are fighting drug trafficking, but they are being financed by some cartels; they always compete among each other; they do not have friends; they have temporary alliances.
They are like gangsters defending their own family, but they are gangsters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe
Let’s write a hypothesis.
Can you imagine the world’s working class reading this dangerous collection of books? The capitalist class might last less than a cockroach inside a chicken coop; that is the reason why many governments in the past prohibited the reading of this time bomb, and the collection was smaller; we only had pamphlets loosely.
For centuries, we have been bombarded with bourgeois and religious crap through the educational system, televisions, radio, magazines, churches, pastors, priests and teachers, our parents, and now through the internet, with AI, you do not know what is true and what is false.
When I read Engels for the first time time I said to myself, what was I missing all these years? I was discovering a new world of thoughts; probably they went through the same discovery. He was more popular because he was easier to understand. The book was given to me by a man who was not an intellectual, and he had more class consciousness than me.
Our only problem was that we took the wrong road ( the 57 varieties of Lenin soup), but some members of the socialist party took the correct road, like they are saying in the computer world: A clean installation in their mental computer; therefore, we need a mental revolution; the objective conditions have already been
establishedhttps://fearlessmovimientosocialistamundial.com/2026/09/18/5797/. These varieties do not provide class consciousness
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