Roberto
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I think there is an important distinction here. We can certainly debate whether Lacan distorted Marx or whether Lacanian theory is compatible with socialism, but I don’t think it is historically accurate to say that Lacan never read Freud or Marx.
Lacan explicitly presented a major part of his project as a “return to Freud,” and Marx appears directly in his seminars. He discussed Marx’s surplus value and used it in developing his own concept of surplus-jouissance.
That doesn’t establish that Lacan understood Marx correctly, much less that his political conclusions were Marxist. In fact, that seems to me the more interesting question.
Rather than asking whether Lacan read Marx, perhaps we should ask: What did Lacan take from Marx, what did he change, and did those changes help us understand capitalist society or lead us away from Marx’s analysis of its actual social relations?
The same applies to Freud. Reading an author and remaining faithful to that author’s theoretical framework are two very different things.I think this identifies an important danger in psychological explanations of the absence of socialist consciousness.
If capitalism actually produces a psychological structure that makes workers positively desire capitalism, we then have to explain how anyone ever becomes a socialist. The theory risks explaining too much.
But perhaps there is a distinction between being psychologically determined to support capitalism and being socially conditioned to regard capitalism as normal. The second seems much less problematic.
Workers encounter wages, money, private property, markets, nations and competition before they have developed any systematic understanding of them. These relationships can therefore appear natural and inevitable without becoming permanently embedded psychological needs.
That would also explain why consciousness can change without requiring psychoanalysis or some prior psychological liberation. Experience, discussion and access to different explanations can lead people to reconsider what they previously took for granted.
The interesting fact is that socialists themselves emerged from capitalist society. If capitalist conditioning were psychologically irresistible, our own existence would be difficult to explain.
Perhaps capitalism’s ideological strength is therefore not that it makes workers psychologically want capitalism, but that it makes capitalism appear to be the normal background of life — until something gives us reason to question it.I think it might be useful to distinguish between saying that Lacan was not a Marxist and describing him simply as anti-Marxist.
What interests me is whether psychoanalysis can tell us something about why people become attached to ideas and social arrangements that cannot be explained by economic interest alone.
In our recent discussion about class consciousness, we have repeatedly asked why workers can experience exploitation, insecurity and inequality without necessarily developing socialist consciousness. Material conditions clearly do not mechanically produce a particular consciousness.
Perhaps this is where a critical examination of psychoanalysis could be interesting. Not as a substitute for the materialist analysis of capitalism, but as a possible contribution to understanding ideology, identification, desire and why people can become emotionally attached to nationalism, leaders, religion or other identities.
I would therefore be interested in asking: does Lacan actually help us understand why class consciousness does not arise automatically from class position, or does his approach ultimately obscure the material social relationships that need explaining?I think this brings us back to one of the central problems of class consciousness: workers can experience the same economic system while being encouraged to explain their difficulties by blaming another section of the working class.
A factory closes and the explanation becomes the foreign worker. Wages stagnate and the explanation becomes immigration. Housing becomes unaffordable and again another group of workers becomes the target.
But even if every immigrant disappeared tomorrow, the basic relationships of capitalism would remain: wage labour, competition, unemployment, commodity production, private or state ownership and production for accumulation.
That does not mean immigration has no economic or social effects. Of course it does. The important question is whether those effects explain the fundamental position of workers within capitalism.
Perhaps this is another reason class consciousness develops with such difficulty. Capitalism presents workers with many visible differences — nationality, language, ethnicity, religion and immigration status — while the social relationship they share is much less visible.
And this connects with the historical point you make. If workers don’t understand their own history, every generation can be presented with essentially the same divisions in a different form.
A Mexican worker did not invent wage labour. An American worker did not invent unemployment. A Venezuelan worker did not create the world market. They encounter these relationships after they are born, just as the rest of us do.
The development of class consciousness therefore involves seeing beyond those differences without pretending they don’t exist. It means recognising that workers can have different histories, cultures and immediate circumstances while still sharing a fundamental dependence upon selling their labour power in order to live.
Perhaps one of capitalism’s most persistent ideological successes is getting workers to fight over their differences before they recognise what they have in common.
I think the piñata metaphor actually gets to the heart of the matter.
When unemployment, low wages, inadequate housing or insecurity are blamed primarily on foreign workers, workers are encouraged to see other workers as the source of problems that arise within a much larger social and economic system.
That does not mean that immigration can never create real pressures or that questions about migration, crime or public services should simply be dismissed. Those questions have to be examined honestly. But identifying a problem is different from identifying its underlying cause.
A Venezuelan, Haitian, Chilean, Argentine, British or American worker may speak a different language, have a different culture and cross a different border, but if each depends upon selling labour power in order to live, there is a fundamental social relationship they share.
This is where nationalism can become such an obstacle to class consciousness. It encourages the worker to think first in terms of “our jobs”, “our country” and “our people”, rather than asking who owns and controls production, why unemployment exists, why labour power is bought and sold, and why workers compete for access to the means of living in the first place.
Perhaps that is why neither a Left nor a Right label is enough. The important question is whether workers are being encouraged to understand their common class position or to blame another section of the working class.
To use your metaphor: workers can spend their lives fighting over who gets to hit the piñata while never asking who owns the piñata, who filled it, and why everyone has been made to compete for what falls out of it.
I think this is an important distinction. Moving politically to the Left does not automatically mean developing socialist class consciousness.
A person can support higher wages, nationalisation, stronger welfare programmes, progressive taxation or a left-wing government while continuing to accept wage labour, money, commodity production and the state as permanent features of society.
That doesn’t make those people foolish or “blind”. It simply means that dissatisfaction with capitalism can develop in many directions without becoming a consciousness of capitalism as a social system.
For me, the decisive step is not moving from Right to Left, but beginning to question the social relationships that both Left and Right generally take for granted.
Class consciousness begins when workers recognise their common position within those relationships and understand that fundamentally changing them requires conscious collective action.
So perhaps the real journey is not from Right to Left, but from accepting capitalism as the framework of political possibility to questioning that framework itself.
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.
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.
Why Has Socialist Class Consciousness Not Grown More?
Reading the different comments here has made me wonder why socialist class consciousness has not developed as much as earlier socialists might have expected.
I can think of several possible reasons:
1. Capitalism appears natural.
We are born into a world of money, wages, employers, markets, private property and states. We learn how to survive within these relationships long before we begin questioning why society is organised this way.2. Everyday survival consumes our time and attention.
Jobs, bills, housing, families and other responsibilities constantly demand our attention. There is always another day to get through. Ironically, the system we need time to understand also consumes much of the time and mental energy required to question it.3. Social problems appear as individual problems.
Instead of asking why millions of workers experience similar insecurity, we naturally ask: How can I get a better job? How can I earn more? How can I improve my own situation? There is nothing irrational about this — we have to survive — but individual solutions can obscure common social causes.4. Political dissatisfaction is channelled back into capitalism.
Workers can turn towards the Left, the Right, reforms, nationalisation, privatisation or another political leader. Governments and policies change while the fundamental relationship between capital and wage labour remains.5. Nationalism can obscure class interests.
Workers who share essentially the same relationship to capital can identify primarily as Americans, British, Argentinians, Puerto Ricans, Chinese, etc., sometimes seeing workers across borders as competitors or enemies rather than recognising their common social position.6. The meaning of socialism has been confused historically.
For millions of people, socialism has come to mean state ownership, government planning, welfare policies or regimes such as the former Soviet Union. Before discussing whether socialism is possible, we often have to clarify what socialism actually means.7. Capitalism does not automatically produce socialist consciousness.
Exploitation, inequality and crises may cause people to question society, but they can also produce resignation, nationalism, conspiracy theories or faith in another leader. Material conditions can create questions; they do not guarantee socialist answers.For me, the crucial transition occurs when a worker begins connecting the personal with the social:
My problems are not simply my problems. My dependence upon wages is part of a social relationship shared by millions of other workers. That relationship is historically created rather than natural or eternal, and fundamentally changing it requires conscious collective action.
And this brings me back to the idea of finitude that I mentioned earlier.
Class consciousness helps us understand how our lives are socially organised. Consciousness of finitude reminds us why the time involved matters.
Our labour power can only be exercised through our time, and our time is part of our finite lives. So the question is not only how much we are paid for our labour.
It is also:
Who controls so much of the time of our lives, and for what purpose?
I would be interested in hearing what others think. What other factors prevent dissatisfaction with capitalism from developing into socialist class consciousness?
I think this raises an important distinction between being conscious of belonging to the working class and having socialist class consciousness.
A worker may strongly identify as working class, recognise inequality, distrust the rich and complain about wages and conditions, while at the same time supporting nationalism, borders, the military or political leaders. Class identity by itself is therefore not necessarily class consciousness in the socialist sense.
I also agree that consciousness does not develop uniformly everywhere. Different historical conditions, traditions of struggle and everyday experiences can make class relations more visible in one place or period than another.
But I would hesitate to conclude that workers in one part of the world are inherently more capable of developing class consciousness than workers elsewhere. Consciousness can retreat as well as advance.
Perhaps the important question is what causes workers to make the connection between their individual experiences and their common social position.
For me, that is where class consciousness begins: when what appears to be my individual struggle to survive becomes understood as part of a social relationship shared with other workers — and when changing that relationship is understood as something that can only be done collectively.
Exactly. Class consciousness is not an academic qualification.
A person may have an impressive education and never seriously question the social relationships around them, while a factory worker, carpenter, barber or farm worker may understand very clearly the position of workers within capitalism.
Education and access to knowledge certainly matter, but understanding society is not the private property of intellectuals. Workers are capable of examining their own experience, learning from the experience of others and questioning what they have been taught to regard as natural.
Perhaps that is another reason not to underestimate people. Socialist consciousness is not something an enlightened minority gives to workers. It is something workers themselves are capable of developing.
I think the story about your father illustrates something very important in this discussion.
He didn’t live to see socialism, just as many of us may not. But the ideas he left around the house outlived the moment in which he placed those books and pamphlets there. At first they irritated you, later they made you think, and now you are passing those ideas on to other people. That seems to me a very concrete example of how human understanding does not have to begin again with every generation.
I also think your point about everyday life is important. Perhaps many workers don’t consciously accept capitalism so much as they are constantly occupied with surviving within it. There is always another shift, another bill, another family responsibility, another problem demanding attention. Questioning the entire organisation of society requires something capitalism itself often leaves us very little of: time.
And this brings me back to the idea I raised earlier. Our time is our life. Capitalism doesn’t only organise production; to a remarkable extent it organises the time in which we live our finite lives.
Your father’s experience also reminds us why not seeing socialism within our own lifetime does not make communicating socialist ideas pointless. A finite life can contribute to something whose consequences extend beyond that life.
Perhaps none of us knows which conversation, book, pamphlet or seemingly insignificant encounter will cause somebody else to begin questioning what they previously regarded as natural.
Your father leaving those books around the house seems a rather good example.
I think this is an important distinction. Opposition to the foreign policy or expansion of one particular capitalist state is not necessarily opposition to capitalism itself.
Competition does not begin when the shooting starts. Capitalist enterprises and states are already competing for markets, investment, resources, trade routes and economic advantage. Armed conflict is one possible expression of those antagonisms, but the underlying competition exists before a war begins and continues after it ends.
This is also why simply dividing the world into “imperialist” and “anti-imperialist” states can be misleading. A smaller capitalist country does not cease to operate within the competitive world market simply because it has less economic or military power than a larger one.
The oil example illustrates another part of this. Oil does not have one national price determined independently by each producing country. Producers and consumers participate in an interconnected world market, so disruption or anticipated disruption in one region can affect prices far beyond that region.
For workers, perhaps the more fundamental question is therefore not which capitalist state is the imperialist and which is the anti-imperialist one, but why production, resources and international relations are organised through competing capitals and states in the first place.
Anti-imperialism directed against one state is not necessarily anti-capitalism.
The Middle East is increasingly demonstrating how interconnected modern capitalism has become. A conflict in one part of the world can disrupt energy, shipping, production and prices almost everywhere.
Perhaps the real can of worms is that there is no genuinely “local” war anymore in a globally interconnected capitalist system.Yes, I agree that ecological destruction reinforces the point that neither our individual future nor humanity’s collective future should be taken for granted. The future is a possibility, not a guarantee.
For me, this makes the question of our finite time even more important. It is not only about how capitalism organises the limited time of individual workers, but also about what kind of world we are producing and leaving behind. There is little meaning in talking about human emancipation without preserving the material conditions that make human life possible.
And thanks for pointing me to the discussion on Puerto Rico, nationalism and independence. I will take a look at it. Being Puerto Rican myself, that is obviously a subject of particular interest to me.
