As soon as someone says “there is nothing that I can do about it”, it already shows they are not fully class conscious
Obfuscation of class, cultural hegemony, is necessary for capitalism to persist.
At the same time, false consciousness is not the primary thing keeping well-off workers in the imperial core and periphery from revolting. They may buy into whatever delusions to avoid feeling guilt for their position, but when it comes down to it they benefit from imperialism. If given a choice between their humanity and their privileged position, they’ll happily abandon their humanity.
For the rest of workers, developing class consciousness is important, but more important (or maybe part of the same process) is presenting an organized alternative to the bourgeois state. People may agree or disagree with whatever ideals, but they’ll support the entity materially benefiting them.
The government tried to take away our houses, failed to provide food and medicine and education, abandoned us during the increasingly devastating environmental disasters. But this party calling themselves the Workers Front came in with aid and services. I don’t know much about politics but they have my support.
The manufactured false consciousness for the lower working classes is well-funded and omnipresent, but it’s ethereal, smoke and mirrors. A video of prosperity repeated 24/7 is not equivalent to real food on a real table. If the bottom falls out on material flows, the illusion breaks (and the bourgeois state has to increasingly turn to violence to enforce its power).
Only a small percentage of people are and will ever be political and ideologically disciplined. Others will get thrust into political action by their material circumstances, and it’s the role of a party to help them organize and realize their power.
The question every leftist has been trying to answer for the past 200 years is this:
“What are the conditions that would let us we wake up tomorrow and not do capitalism?”
All political theory on praxis has been trying to answer this question.
If everyone were class concious, the answer would be simple: just don’t.
OP, your question is touching on a great discussion between how much of our social order is arbitrary and how much is determined by material conditions (for example: having visited Cuba, a thoroughly socialist state, I witnessed racism to about the same level as would exist in progressive communities in the US despite no capitalist relations to produce it.). The dialectic between the base and the superstructure, as a Marxist might put it.
I didn’t want to muddy up my comment with a long quote, but I think this one has some nice insights.
But if reading isn’t one’s forte then the tl;dr is from Marx: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please”
These are from a book called “The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy”
From a left perspective, then, the hidden reality of human life is the fact that the world doesn’t just happen. It isn’t a natural fact, even though we tend to treat it as if it is—it exists because we all collectively produce it. We imagine things we’d like and then we bring them into being. But the moment you think about it in these terms, it’s obvious that something has gone terribly wrong. Since who, if they could simply imagine any world that they liked and then bring it into being, would create a world like this one?
Perhaps the leftist sensibility was expressed in its purest form in the words of Marxist philosopher John Holloway, who once wanted to title a book, “Stop Making Capitalism.” . . . This is the ultimate revolutionary question: what are the conditions that would have to exist to enable us to do this—to just wake up and imagine and produce something else?
To this emphasis on forces of creativity and production, the Right tends to reply that revolutionaries systematically neglect the social and historical importance of the “means of destruction”: states, armies, executioners, barbarian invasions, criminals, unruly mobs, and so on. Pretending such things are not there, or can simply be wished away, they argue, has the result of ensuring that left-wing regimes will in fact create far more death and destruction than those that have the wisdom to take a more “realistic” approach.
Elements of the Right dabbled with the artistic ideal, and twentieth-century Marxist regimes often embraced essentially right-wing theories of power . . . in their obsession with jailing poets and playwrights whose work they considered threatening, they evinced a profound faith in the power of art and creativity to change the world—those running capitalist regimes rarely bothered, convinced that if they kept a firm hand on the means of productions (and, of course, the army and police), the rest would take care of itself.
It would come with understanding that there is something you can do about it. Mass general strikes would happen overnight, and the upper classes would captiulate or die.
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.
