Class consciousness

“ The consciousness of the masses of the workers cannot be genuine class consciousness, unless the workers learn to observe from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events, every other social class and all the manifestations of the intellectual, ethical and political life of these classes; unless they learn to apply practically the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata and groups of the population. ”

“ The harsh and perilous division into classes and castes which is now universal, with its development of "class consciousness," is the direct and inevitable result of this imperial scale in life which has annihilated the social unit of human scale and brought in the gigantic aggregations of peoples, money, manufacture and labourers, where man can no longer function either as a human unit or an essential factor in a workable society. ”

“ It should, consequently, increase the amount of economic independence enjoyed by the average laborer, diminish his "class consciousness" by doing away with his class grievances, and intensify his importance to himself as an individual. ”

“ One of the next things that is going to happen is that the managing and creating minds of the world to-day are going to organize, are going to see suddenly their real power and use it. The brains are about to have, as labour and capital already have, a class consciousness. ”

“ The theory of class structure is about the relations between capitalists and laborers, about the conditions for the overthrow of these relations. The theory of class consciousness is about the relations between an organization and a mass, about the conditions for the organization's seizure of power over the mass. ”

“ Certainly only to such proletarian children will those privileges be accorded, whose souls, which make them independent, are already broken, who are robbed of their class consciousness and who become accessories of capitalist society. And at the same time these laughable experiments are presented to the people with a self-sufficiency which makes it possible for them to recognize very well the insincerity of the ruling classes. ”

“ Then he spoke of the day when class consciousness would not be needed, when the unions would have served their mission, when the class wrong that makes the class suffering and thus marks the class line, would disappear just as they have disappeared in the classes that have risen during the last two centuries. ”

“ Now, in all I have been saying, I have been wanting you to trace the fact that, ever since the establishment of commercialism on the ruins of feudality, there has been growing a steady feeling on the part of the workers that they are a class dealt with as a class, and in like manner to deal with others; and that as this class feeling has grown, so also has grown with it a consciousness of the antagonism between their class and the class which employs it, as the phrase goes; that is to say, which lives by means of its labour. ”

“ In other words, the workingmen are becoming Class-Conscious, i. e., conscious of the fact that they, as a class, have interests which are in direct conflict with the selfish interests of the capitalist class. With the growth of this class-consciousness this conflict of interests must inevitably become a political class struggle. ”

“ The labor organizations are evidence of the existence of a class interest, but, beyond this, there is no class consciousness other than that which is incited by the Socialist agitators in the hope that they may tempt the worker to deeds of violence. ”

“ While the workers are still a counter-crowd, struggling for power against the present ruling class, they are of course held together by a common cause—namely, their opposition to capital. But with labors triumph, everybody becomes a worker, and there is no one longer to oppose. That which held the vari [229] ous elements of labor together in a common crowd of revolt has now ceased to exist, "class consciousness" has therefore no longer any meaning. Labor itself has ceased to exist as a class by reason of its very triumph. ”

“ T was not seeing or experiencing Class Conflict as an idea germinating in the minds of the workers. In the Scientific Communist jargon, their class consciousness was not awakened sufficiently. Even today I do not find them growing in that direction in any way. An ordinary worker wants job, wants a stable source of income and wants rise in this income from time to time. ”

“ Subjectively, however, this proletariat is still far removed from any practical class consciousness, and this goes not only for white-collar workers but also for blue-collar workers, who have yet to become aware of any perspective beyond the impotence and mystifications of the old politics. ”

“ But no government can help the destinies of people who insist in putting sectional and class consciousness ahead of general weal. ”

“ The more alert, the better-educated, the more elastic the mentality of a nation is, the clearer will be the consciousness and the ideals of its classes. It is evident that our mind works better, that our sensations, ideas and conceptions are clearer and deeper when the external material presents itself to our senses in the most perfect manner possible. Now, the economic stages of our society which rest on private property are perfectly evolved. ”

“ For if, casting aside the impediments of stock notions and mechanical action, we try to find the intelligible law of things respecting a great land-owning class such as we have in this country, does not our consciousness readily tell us that whether the perpetuation of such a class is for its own real good and for the real good of the community, depends on the actual circumstances of this class and of the community? ”

“ They find themselves subjected to almost identical conditions in all sections and begin to recognize themselves as a class, regardless of races, nationalities or creeds. Recognition of class generates that sense of duty known as the social conscience—the moral sense of the working class. ”

“ There is a class morality and a class psychology the subtle influences of which few perceive as a matter of habit, which, however, to a great extent shape our judgments, our sympathies, and our antipathies. ”

“ And on the other hand, the class-conscious worker reads the statistics of the wealthy classes, knows what their incomes are, and how they get them. True, down all the past he has known his own material misery and the material comfort of the dominant classes, and often has this knowledge led him to intemperate acts and unwise rebellion. But today, and for the first time, because both society and he have evolved, he is beginning to see a possible way out. His ears are opening to the propaganda of Socialism, the passionate gospel of the dispossessed. ”

“ But the facts of the class struggle are deeper and more significant than have so far been presented. A million or so of workmen may organize for the pursuit of interests which engender class antagonism and strife, and at the same time be unconscious of what is engendered. But when a million or so of workmen show unmistakable signs of being conscious of their class,--of being, in short, class conscious,--then the situation grows serious. ”

“ I need not further illustrate the more special distortions of sociological belief which result from the class-bias. They may be detected in the conversations over every table, and in the articles appearing in every party-journal or professional publication. The effects here most worthy of our attention are the general effects—the effects produced on the minds of the upper and lower classes. Let us observe how greatly the sentiments and ideas generated by their respective social positions pervert the conceptions of employers and employed. We will deal with the employed first. ”

“ I conclude, therefore,—what, indeed, few of those who do me the honour to read this disquisition are likely to dispute,—that we can as little find in the working-class as in the aristocratic or in the middle class our much-wanted source of authority, as culture suggests it to us.
Well, then, what if we tried to rise above the idea of class to the idea of the whole community, the State, and to find our centre of light and authority there? Every one of us has the idea of country, as a sentiment; hardly any one of us has the idea of the State, as a working power. ”

“ Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture. ”

“ But it was this only in so far as it was the State of that class which itself represented, for the time being, society as a whole; in ancient times, the State of slave-owning citizens; in the middle ages, the feudal lords; in our own time, the bourgeoisie. When at last it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself unnecessary. ”

“ Instead of a number of classes in society, especially instead of a bourgeoisie and a proletariat, there must be but one class, which works directly or indirectly for the state, and receives as wages what the state decides to give to them. ”

“ But it is obviously at variance with our definition of culture, or the pursuit of light and perfection, which made light and perfection consist, not in resting and being, but in growing and becoming, in a perpetual advance in beauty and wisdom. So the middle class is by its essence, as one may say, by its incomparable self-satisfaction decisively expressed through its beautiful and virtuous mean, self-excluded from wielding an authority of which light is to be the very soul. ”

“ And how can we of the middle classes, we the capitalists and our hangers-on, help them? By renouncing our class, and on all occasions when antagonism rises up between the classes casting in our lot with the victims: with those who are condemned at the best to lack of education, refinement, leisure, pleasure and renown; and at the worst to a life lower than that of the most brutal of savages—in order that the system of competitive Commerce may endure. ”

“ Very possibly; but, my dear, that lower class, with limited culture and narrow views, is nowadays the dominating class. It is, in fact, the privileged class, it pays no taxes, and yet elects our rulers; our class is politically swamped, we exist upon sufferance. ”

“ In other words, they understood the nature of the class struggle; hence the class character of their manifesto, which was obviously intended, not for "the people," so called in bourgeois parlance, but for the working people, "who alone are entitled to the esteem of their fellow citizens," and whose mission, as a body, "is to regenerate the world." ”

“ And if those classes had really been incapable of being touched by that instinct which produced the passion for freedom and equality aforesaid, what would have happened, I think, would have been this: that a certain part of the working classes would have been so far improved in condition that they would have approached the condition of the middling rich men; but below them would have been a great class of most miserable slaves, whose slavery would have been far more hopeless than the older class-slavery had been. ”

“ We recognize unconsciously that they form the foundation of our economic life.
The class struggle, then, is between two clearly defined and self-conscious elements in modern industrial life that are the natural product of our machine industry. ”

“ Below them in the social scale we shall expect to find a larger class who, because they were not consumed by ambition to excel, or because they lacked the means to achieve distinction, have come to occupy a place midway between the high and the low, to fill the numerous professional and business positions below the kings and great captains, and to hold the balance of power between the aristocracy and the proletariat. Below these, in turn, are the so-called masses, who fill the lower ranks of labor, and who are essential to the well-being of those who are reckoned above them. ”

“ He has no visionary schemes of revolution and transformation, though of course he would like his class to rule, as the aristocratic class like their class to rule, and the middle class theirs. But meanwhile our social machine is a little out of order; there are a good many people in our paradisiacal centres of industrialism and individualism taking the bread out of one another's mouths. ”

“ By a process akin to natural selection in the organic world, the ruling class learns by experience what conduct is helpful and what hurtful to it, and blesses in the one case and damns in the other. And as the ruling class has always controlled all the avenues by which ideas reach the so-called lower classes, they have heretofore [61] been able to impose upon the subject classes just those morals which were best adapted to prolong their subjection. Even to-day in America the majority of the working class get their ideas—like their clothes—ready-made. ”

“ It set up in places of authority men whose views were agreeable to it—who believed in the beneficence of its rule and the permanence of its system; who would pour out ridicule and contempt upon those who suggested that any other system might be conceivable. And so the class-war was waged, not merely in the world of industry and politics, but also, in the intellectual world. ”

“ That difference is imposed by the difference between the capitalist and socialist pattern of stereotypes. ‘There are no classes in America,’ writes an American editor. ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,’ says the Communist Manifesto. ”

“ The middle classes will one day become conscious of the discontent of the proletariat; before that some will have renounced their class and cast in their lot with the working men, influenced by love of justice or insight into facts. For the rest, they will, when their conscience is awakened, have two choices before them; they must either cast aside their morality, of which though three parts are cant, the other is sincere, or they must give way. ”

“ In relation to this question, I would ask, "Is there anybody so high, that they do not see others above them?" The [Pg 132] working classes of this country have no social communication with the aristocracy. Every day of my life I see people who can dress better, and live in better houses, than I can afford. ”