MARXISM-LENINISM:
CLASS AND POLITICAL
CONSCIOUSNESS?
Socialist Reading Group
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What is the Marxist Theory of Class
What is Class and class struggle? – groups of people
sharing common relations in the production process
(making goods for sale).
Historic examples of classes: Slave and Slave Owners,
Serf and Landowners, Workers and Capitalist. Classes - in
struggle due to contradictions.
•
•
If you primarily live off a paycheck, then you are a worker
If you primarily earn your living and accumulate wealth from
capital investments/business ownership, then you are a
Capitalist
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Marxist Theory of Scientific Socialism
What is Socialism? - The working class in full political
power; real democracy, ownership or control of the means
of production, supersedes Capitalism and is the lowerstage of Communism
• Surplus value created by labor is returned to the working
class in the form of better living conditions, free education,
free healthcare, better environment,
• In the Communist stage of socialism, there is more
productive abundance, no classes, more freedom and
fuller development of the individual
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Engels: The Origin of Family, Private
Property and State
Political Consciousness
universal suffrage is only the gauge of the maturity of the
working class. It cannot and never will be anything more in
the present-day state. To the extent, however, that this
class matures for its self-emancipation, it constitutes itself
as its own party and elects its own representatives, and not
those of the capitalists.
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Status of U.S. “Democracy”
Gilens (Princeton University) and Page (Northwest
University) – “Testing Theories of American Politics:
Elites, Interest Groups and Average Citizens”
• In the United States, the majority does not rule -- at least
not in the causal sense of actually determining policy
outcomes
• When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic
elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose
• Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into
the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities
of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not
get it
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Karl Marx: A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably
enter into definite relations, which are independent of their
will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given
stage in the development of their material forces of
production. The totality of these relations of production
constitutes the economic structure of society, the real
foundation, on which arises a legal and political
superstructure (ar: the state) and to which correspond
definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of
production of material life conditions the general process of
social, political and intellectual life. It is not the
consciousness of men that determines their existence,
but their social existence that determines their
consciousness.
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Karl Marx: Communist Manifesto
• Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that a
person’s ideas, views, and conception, in one word,
their consciousness, changes with every change in the
conditions of their material existence, in their social
relations and in their social life?
• What else does the history of ideas prove, than that
intellectual production changes its character in proportion
as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of
each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
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Karl Marx: The German Ideology
• Consciousness can never be anything else than
conscious existence, and the existence of men is their
actual life-process
• Life is not determined by consciousness, but
consciousness by life
• Where speculation ends -- in real life -- there real, positive
science begins: the representation of the practical activity,
of the practical process of development of men. Empty
talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has
to take its place.
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Engels Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the
historical mission of the modern proletariat. To thoroughly
comprehend the historical conditions and this the very
nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed
proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of
the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to
accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of
the proletarian movement, scientific Socialism.
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Why Does Consciousness of Class and
Socialism Matter?
Without Class and Political Consciousness
• The working class can not unite
• The working class can not create its own political party,
• It can not lead to the class emancipation without
awareness of the exploitive nature of the capitalist
economic system, the limitations of the most democratic
capitalist state and the need for working class rule,
socialist transformation
• can not lead a broad alliance to change the capitalist
system to a the next stage, socialism
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Lenin: What is to be Done
The history of all countries shows that the working class,
exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade
union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is
necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and
strive to compel the government to pass necessary labor
legislation, etc.[2]
The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the
philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated
by educated representatives of the propertied classes (and
now working class), by intellectuals
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Lenin: What is to be Done
• We must take up actively the political education of the
working class and the development of its political
consciousness
• The question arises, what should political education
consist in? Can it be confined to the propaganda of
working-class hostility to the autocracy? Of course not. It
is not enough to explain to the workers that they are
politically oppressed (any more than it is to explain to
them that their interests are antagonistic to the
interests of the employers). Agitation must be
conducted with regard to every concrete example of
this oppression (as we have begun to carry on
agitation round concrete examples of economic
oppression).
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Lenin: What is to be Done
• Inasmuch as this oppression affects the most diverse
classes of society, inasmuch as it manifests itself in the
most varied spheres of life and activity — vocational,
civic, personal, family, religious, scientific, etc., etc. — is it
not evident that we shall not be fulfilling our task of
developing the political consciousness of the workers if
we do not undertake the organization of the political
exposure of the autocracy (ar: limitations of capitalist
democracy today) in all its aspects? In order to carry on
agitation round concrete instances of oppression, these
instances must be exposed (as it is necessary to expose
factory abuses in order to carry on economic agitation).
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Lenin: What is to be Done
• A basic condition for the necessary expansion of political
agitation is the organization of comprehensive political
exposure. In no way except by means of such exposures
can the masses be trained in political consciousness and
revolutionary activity.
• The consciousness of the working masses cannot be
genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn,
from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts
and events to observe every other social class in all the
manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life;
unless they learn to apply in practice the materialist
analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the
life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the
population.
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Questions and Further Discussion