if EVERYONE was class conscious there wouldn’t be a need for a revolution. That would even include cops so we could just stop listening to the rich and ignore them lol. What are they gonna do about it in that imaginary scenario?
Even if everyone was class conscious, people could still act in self-interest. For example, cops could keep protecting capitalists if they were paid enough.
if the cops were truly class conscious theyd know that theyd be better off not being the ruling classes dogs.
No, because that wouldn’t be true. The bourgeoisie could trivially pay any sufficiently small group of people so that it’s in their best interest to follow along. This is true of cops but also of lawmakers (small groups of people that exert great control), so the current system would be rigged in favor of the ruling class even under perfect cooperation of the proletariat.
That’s not to say I’m 100% sure a revolution needs to happen. Most likely, it does, but the reasoning above does not rule out specific cases (e.g., conditions where the threat of a revolution could provide sufficient leverage, or “loopholes” in a legal system that might allow an additional advantage for a cooperating majority).
That would even include cops
I think we had a struggle session about that, cops benefit from bourgeois extraction by protecting it, therefore they are not workers. If the cops became class conscious they would defend the bourgeoisie to their last breath because without capitalism they would have lose their way of life, i.e., bullying people. They’d have to learn to actually help them which a lot of them (probably not all of course) would find unappealing
Right now in the real world yes thats true. In this hypothetical where everyone is class conscious thats not the case tho. Its not a realistic hypothetical tho. But the systems the capitalists use to reward those cops for protecting them would entirely collapse, and the cops if they were class conscious would know this, and switch sides immediately since their material conditions would be better for it.
no need for a revolution as in like we wouldn’t need to bother since everyone would just agree that ya we should do socialism
This is not true because the bourgeoisie are class conscious and that helps them fool the proletariat who are not class conscious
But the bourgeois are free and the proletariat are many. If hypothetically everyone became conscious of class war and their place in it there is only one winner.
Merely having class consciousness would not change the fact that the capitalist class owns the means of production, and the working class needs wages to subsist.
I would argue we only need wages to subsist because there are so few of us with class conciousness. If everyone had it we could simply stop using money, and like grocery store workers, and farmers, and truck drivers just keep doing their jobs, but give the food out for free to people, and everyone could just stop paying rent, etc. Just stop participating in the capitalist system because there would be so few people left that would try to punish you for it. Thats why “everyone” being class conscious is a bit silly because its not a realistic thing to just happen overnight, and if it did then it would be like everyone suddenly agreed to overthrow the rich all at once. There wouldnt be a need for a struggle at that point really.