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For Marx, the transition from the objective conditions of a class “in itself” to one “in and for itself” results from workers experiencing and interpreting contradictions between “the existing individualist relations of production and the emerging collective forces of production” (Mann 1973: 12).
While the variation in Marxian discussions of the objective conditions is relatively consistent and circumscribed — a class s objective position within the social relations of production; amassing of workers in increasingly larger factories and in specific urban locations; material conditions of work; forms and processes of exploitation; absolute and relative deprivation — the development of class consciousness is more varied. Lenin, at one extreme, maintained workers could only achieve ”trade union consciousness, requiring a vanguard party to reach revolutionary consciousness. Gramsci, at the other, argued organic intellectuals, developing within the working class, would challenge the existing hegemony. For class consciousness to become revolutionary, workers must identify as members of a single class, oppose other classes, believing their total situation (indeed, society as a whole) must and can be transformed into a better, envisioned, social totality.
E. P. Thompson (1968: 9—11) best captures the class/class consciousness dialectic: ”class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. While class experience stems from one’s location in the social relations of production, class consciousness is how those experiences are ”expressed in cultural terms. Class is not a thing; it is how people ”live their history.
Bibliography:
- Mann, M. (1973) Consciousness and Action among the Western Working Class. Macmillan, London.
- Thompson, E. P. (1968) The Making of the English Working Class. Penguin, Harmondsworth.
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