ACFM - #ACFM Microdose: Theories of Consciousness

Episode Date: September 17, 2019

The #ACFM crew discuss the history of theories of ideology and consciousness in the radical tradition. Texts referred to include: Karl Marx The German Ideology György Lukacs History and Class Consciousness Vladimir Leinin What is to be Done Antonio Gramsci Selections From the Prison Notebooks Stuart Hall et. al Policing the Crisis Paolo Freire Pedagogy of […]

Hi, this is Jeremy Gilbert from ACFM, and this is one of our series of microdoses, extra bits to supplement the main episode. This is a supplement to our episode about consciousness raising. And what this is, is about 20 minutes or so of us discussing the history of ideas of consciousness in the radical political tradition. So we're talking specifically about ideas of political consciousness and ideology, going back to the writings of Marx in the mid-19th century. what we don't get into here really is the concept of consciousness from a strictly philosophical or scientific perspective

but it is worth noting that the very nature and origin of consciousness remain extremely mysterious and contentious subject within both those fields but that's not what we're concerned with here what we're concerned with here is really the history of theories of ideology and political consciousness going back as I say to Marx's writings in the mid-19th century I think before we start, for some people's benefit, it's probably worth me explaining a couple of the terms that we use here. I use the term bourgeois several times, and if you don't know, that is a term used by Marx in the 19th century. And the bourgeois essentially means capitalist, the bourgeois Z were the capitalist class in Marxist times. I mean, it literally means suburban or suburbanites, and that goes back to the time when the sort of, you know, the capitalist class. of Paris, lived into large houses around the outskirts of the city.

You know, the geography of Paris changed a lot after that, but that's kind of what it means. And we talk a lot about, we use this word ideology a lot. We just, in this sense, generally refers to a sort of way of thinking about the world, a worldview, a systematic set of ways of perceiving the world that tend to represent the interest of some particular social group or other. Okay, I think that's all the terms. There might need explaining for this one.

I hope some people find it useful. There you go. I mean, the idea of consciousness goes back arguably hundreds of years, but in these political terms, you're really talking about a history that begins with Marx, writing about, you know, the way in which capitalism reproduces itself, indeed, by presenting itself as to sort of natural and inevitable and a historical. And Marx differentiates what the kind of false,

consciousness, as he puts it, or he puts it in translation, that is produced by bourgeois ideology, which tries to naturalise capitalist social relations. And he counterposes that. Now, exactly what he's counterposing that theory is a bit vague at times, actually. So sometimes it seems to be that Marx is saying he has a kind of scientific method, which can tell us the truth of social relations, as opposed to kind of bourgeois ideology. Sometimes it seems to be a bit more complicated, in that. But broadly speaking, is counterposing truth to the sort of false consciousness, which is inculcated by bourgeois ideology. And false consciousness is also counterposed, as well as being counterposed to some sort of notion of objective truth, it's also counterposed

to class consciousness. And class consciousness is what happens when members of the working class or members of other classes are allied to them through being part of the socialist movement and the Labor movement, acquire a sense of the true nature of their position in the world and their position in the social world and their position in social power relationships and their position in history as, as, you know, people whose conditions are produced by contingent historical circumstances and which could be changed. But then Marx doesn't really develop that notion of class consciousness that much. It gets really developed by a guy called a Georgi Lukach, Hungarian communist writer in the early 20th century

and his big book is history and class consciousness he makes his famous distinction between the working class merely existing as a class in itself as a sort of objective reality and it becoming a class for itself like acquiring a sense of its own collective capacity for revolution and the pursuit of its own interests

and DuCatch has this really he has this in some ways quite strange, in some ways very insightful sort of position that actually were the workers, the working class, because of their position in capitalist social relations because they're kind of at the sharp end of capitalism, they can really sort of see and understand and grasp the truth of social reality under capitalism in a way that a bourgeois just can't. You know, they just always trapped inside their own sort of mythical conceptions about how the way the world works and it's an idea that gets developed by later thinkers who are trying to think about what is the nature of sort of ideology how do we approach it from a radical perspective and still probably

I think the most important and the most useful thinker for thinking through those issues is Gramsci, Antonio Gramsci, the great Italian sort of communist leader and theorist and sort of commentator and Gramsci has this notion of common sense the idea that what happens in a particular society, a particular culture, is that particular sets of ideas come to be seen as kind of normal and natural and inevitable by most of the population. So the idea that immigrants are taking our jobs and that's why wages are going down or unemployment is going up

becomes part of the common sense of sort of late capitalist culture from the 70s onwards would be an example. And, you know, Mark and I would always have these exchanges where he would say capitalist realism, I would say neoliberal common sense and I would insist on continuing to use that phrase because in some ways I think it is a slightly more it is a more sort of subtle concept

because Gramsci always stresses the fact that common sense isn't just one totally coherent picture of the world and he also stresses the fact that common sense always contains within it a kernel of what he calls good sense and good sense is like a kind of accurate picture of the world so on an issue like immigration well you know the common sense the right that people might be giving people the kind of false consciousness about the world.

It's this idea that our immigrants are taking their jobs and that's why wages are going down or unemployment is going up. But on the other hand, the kernel of good sense is, well, I mean, to some extent, immigration is mainly happening because someone somewhere thinks it's going to lower wages, because it's not happening just for the benefit of either the immigrants or the people they're coming to live alongside because the decisions about who goes to live where

are mainly being made by capital and its agents. So there's a kernel of good sense that, well, actually, decisions are being made about the composition of communities and flows of people and labour in somebody else's interest. And that what you have to do is you have, politically, is you have to sort of attack that. You have to sort of, you know, attack the bits that are just false consciousness, and you have to find the bits that are, have a kernel of truth and kind of, you know, create a different story that connects up the good sense with a kind of radical understanding of the world. And now the thing is that once you get into that kind of terrain, the idea that what you're doing is your change in people's consciousness, it starts to sound like a slightly crude, like version of what you're actually trying to do. It's more really kind of engaging with people's lived reality

and their interpretations of it in quite a detailed and subtle way. And I think that's partly why, you know, when people like on the English-speaking lefts really started reading Gramtchi in the 70s, then they started to move away from, that kind of false consciousness idea of ideology and they started to really think that maybe consciousness raising

the idea of just raising people's consciousness was like a bit of a crude idea, a bit of a simplistic idea. I mean probably the greatest sort of theorist of ideology in that Lucachian tradition is the French theorist Louis Altaire and Altaire again has

these two yeah he's does most of his work in the 60s but there's sort of two slightly different conceptions of ideology, even in his most famous essay about ideology. And one is that ideology is sort of false consciousness that it involves what he calls misrecognition. The person misrecognises their position in the social world. So you think you're an autonomous consumer, really you're an exploited worker. And so the job of like scientific Marxism is to show you the scientific truth

of reality. But then he has a slightly different conception, which is a bit more subtle. And it's that the function of ideology is actually institutionally to create what you calls a subject, you know, create a subject position for you, create a position from which you can act. So indeed, it becomes the case that it's institutionally true that you have no real power to kind of, you know, do anything effective in the world as an actor, that it's only as a consumer that you actually have any agency that you, you know, you can't choose anything about your work, but you can at least choose what, you know, cut a jacket to buy or what cake to eat. and in some ways again they sort of it comes back to some of the tensions in the idea of consciousness raising like well is it is it is consciousness raising just putting correct ideas in people's heads or is it actually enabling people to sort of you know to in some ways to operationalise the insights they might already have into the nature of social reality in a way which which you know feels empowering and effective

one of the things that comes out when you lay that that history out one of the things that's sort of not sort of dealt with is or one of the things it reveals about the problem of consciousness raising the way people might think about it is you know what is the role of

those who already have raised consciousness what's the role of the vanguard you know what I mean so that's where it sort of connects to things such as political education you know in the UK at the moment there's a big there's lots of people talking about political education and they need to develop political education and people react against it in this idea that there are a set of pre-conceived ideas that need to be sort of delivered

to those who don't have them do you know what I mean so that's where something like consciousness raising might butt up against another history a related history something like like paolo frere's pedagogy of the oppressed what you know yeah right right which is which is all about you know So this is a model of education that develops, gets developed by Paolo Freire in Brazil, in their 50s, perhaps 60s? 50s and 80s. 50s and early 60s. You know, and it's basically, he's going to teach, he's going to teach literacy to Brazilian peasants. And he's going to teach him literacy to Brazilian peasants because there's a literacy qualification for voting, et cetera, right?

but he develops all of these techniques of how you get people, you know, how do you give people the confidence, the confidence and the abilities to, you know, to read and then find out about the world, etc. And it's all about, you know, you start with their problems. It's a big concern is like, you know, how do we stop this banking model of education where these are the ideas

and the role of an educator to dump them in somebody's head, you know, and it's this thing about, well, You need to overcome the hierarchy, right? You need to overcome the hierarchy. And the only way you can do that is by starting with people's everyday lives and everyday problems because they are always, you are always the expert in your own life. Do you know what I mean? Or you're always the expert in your own problems and experiences.

That doesn't mean, you know, you don't need to connect with other people's expertise. You know, the educator might have expertise about some of the structural causes of those problems. But, you know, it's a way to try to. to do away with the hierarchical function. And that probably butts up with another tradition, which would be Felix Guateri's conception of group analysis, which I think is very similar to consciousness raising, which is like a more psychoanalytic,

schizoanalytic practice in which the group dynamics, the dynamics of the group, and trying to overcome the dynamics that you'd fall into, become a central focus for discussion. And, you know, literally, it was, you know, he used to practice this in a, in a psychiatric institution deal with schizophrenic patients, you know, and they would, you know, they would, you know, they would deliberately make everybody do the roles and jobs of everybody else in order to try and break down the barriers and the hierarchies that come into it. Now, I think that's really important, and it reminds me the thing, you know, stupidly I left out of that history is probably the most important thing is the Leninist intervention. So the big Lenin's big break with the Marxist movement and tradition that had built up to that point is he comes to the conclusion that contrary to what most socialists think,

the working class are never going to achieve truly revolutionary consciousness by themselves. They're never going to get to the point. They're only ever going to achieve what he calls trade union consciousness. They're just wanting higher wages and better public services. They're never going to realize that they need to overturn capitalism. And he thinks the only way you can actually get that revolutionary consciousness to them is you have a professional elite of highly trained kind of revolutionary cadras who then sort of take, you know, who will educate the people,

but will also lead them and will always be sort of ahead of them. And that forms the basis for the idea of the vanguard party. And, I mean, it has to be said to some extent, I would say the debates Lenin has with other people who disagree with him, you know, within the socialists or, movement in Russia, they do somewhat echo debates that Marx has with the anarchist leader Mikhail Bakunin in the 1870s when, because, you know, I mean, you've got to say, I mean, people always want to let Marx off the hook for this. And I think, but, you know, if you get into the Communist Manifesto, he does have this Jacobin model of revolution that you're going to take over the state, you're

going to have a strong centralized authority, you're going to take control of the media. You know, you're not going to brook any opposition for a while while you implement the dictatorship of the proletariat. And then some point after that, you might have something, like democracy. And the anarchists like Bikunin from straight up, at the start saying, well, that's not going to work. That's just going to produce a kind of totalitarian bureaucracy. And then Lenin has similar arguments with people in the 1910s, 19, and, you know, and, well, we see what happens. And then the Maoists are really committed to a similar model. Gramsci is sort of trying to, he doesn't want to say Lenin is wrong, but he's developing a kind of coming back to the idea of the mass party.

But then people like Friere and Guatari are very much reacting against that. They're very much reacting, I think, to the realisation that, well, if you have this idea of revolutionary consciousness as the thing that you bring to the masses from outside as a kind of revolutionary elite, you just end up with this kind of totalitarian situation. And again, in the 70s, you know, Al-Tazer had been, you know, was kind of loyal member of the basically Stalinist sympathising French Communist Party. and people like Grotari were sort of reacting against him

and so there's and all the way through there's always this dynamics you're right and this is bringing up to contemporary debates around political education there's always this question well how do you deal with the fact that well I mean sometimes yeah there is just a load of shit people just don't know there's a lot of stuff that people just don't know

they need to be told by someone who does know and yet if you reproduce that if you go too far in reproducing that model you just end up with elitist hierarchy and I think my understanding of the way of it's the idea of the consciousness raising group the idea of having a group

whose purpose is consciousness raising as I understand it it is based ideally on an awareness that even if you are one of the people who knows a lot of stuff you know might read all the books might know a lot of other people don't know

that you are aware that you nonetheless will continually be sort of conditioned and sort of affected by patriarchy or bourgeois ideology or whatever it is and that you also need help in kind of constantly to some extent, you know, going beyond it. And that's, you know, my experience of

when we've, a couple of times we've done at events, we've done these sort of quote-unquote consciousness raising so workshops sort of led by you two, but led by Kieran Nadia, where, you know, we basically get a bunch of people and we all talk about who are at the event and we all talk about certain aspects of our lives and how they relate to neoliberal capitalism.

And, you know, my experience of those is quite powerful is that even though I know, you know, I'm a sort of, you know, on some levels, on some measures, I'm a sort of world expert on a lot of this stuff and I'm in the room with people, you know, who are not, then nonetheless, that experience of that form of engagement, you know, affect me sort of affectively, sort of in my body, you know, in my kind of emotional state.

in a way which seems really important and it seems like well and I think this is one of, for me this is one of the kind of basic insights of the acid communist acid communist project actually or you know what I've sometimes called psychedelic socialism is that well

you can sort of know theoretically conceptually that you know it's a myth to think of yourself as a sort of individual subject in constant competition with others but we but also we all know that the vast apparatus of

you know capitalist society is constantly trying to make us feel like that all the time so it's just naive to think you can just kind of liberate yourself from that sense of yourself just by sort of knowing something that we all need to engage in in types of technique and practice which can enable us to feel to really feel differently than that and to me my understanding of the idea of the consciousness of raising groups at least in the liberation movements

like women's liberation and gay liberation is that that's part of the point of it. This show is brought to you by Navarra Media. To find articles, videos and more audio content like this head to navaramedia.com. If you particularly enjoyed this podcast and would encourage others to listen to it, why not head to iTunes?

And as well as subscribing, leave us a review. Navarra Media can only exist thanks to subscribers and supporters. If you have the means, please consider subscribing at support.navaramedia.com. As well as helping us continue to produce regular content, subscribers will also receive priority access to events as well as promotions throughout the year for regular updates follow us on Facebook Twitter and YouTube Navarra Media media for a different politics