Picone, The Problem of Consciousness

Although the problem of consciousness is a fundamental one in Marxist theory, it

has not received the kind of attention that it deserves so that today, in the wake of a
renewed interest in Marxist theory and practice, there is hardly a solid theoretical account
of it. Wolpe has tried to give at least a summary of the present status of the problem as it
is dealt with by sociologists and political scientists, but the picture that he offers turns out
to be a disappointing one and he ends up by throwing up his hands in despair claiming
that no theory of consciousness (or of class-consciousness) that makes any sense is
presently available.1 Aside from the fact that Wolpe's treatment is completely
undialecticaland therefore precluded from the very start from grasping the Marxist
theory of consciousnesshe overlooks the most articulate account given so far, i.e.,
Lukcs, even if he refers to it in the footnotes. It is not possible here to give a full account
of the problema task deserving at least a full-length monographyet several
indications can be given so that more efforts will be devoted to the clarification of this
conceptual swamp in Marxist thought that should have been drained long ago. In order to
do so it is necessary to briefly examine the classical Marxist account and its historical
development to the present.
Obviously, in Marx the problem of consciousness is inextricably connected with
that of education and, therefore, with labor. The latter is the most fundamental concept
precisely because it is the only means of self-education and emancipation. The problem is
posed in the third thesis on Feuerbach: "The materialist doctrine concerning the changing
of circumstances and education forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that
the educator must himself be educated.The coincidence of the changing of
circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can only be grasped and rationally
understood as revolutionary practice."2 Self-education, therefore, is the intellectual labor
which, in creating the conceptual framework whereby the subject actively apprehends
and alters the world, also creates the person in an intersubjective cultural process whose
inseparable dialectical otherness is constituted by the production and reproduction of
social life. This is why the proletariat, in Marx, finds itself necessarily in a revolutionary
role, given its historical conditions of existence. In 19th century bourgeois society it is the
only laboring class which, however, because of the prevailing mode of production, is
separated from the products of its labor and thus becomes alienated. The economic
appropriation of the products by the bourgeoisie has the educational consequence of
debasing the laboring process from the level of "radical activity" 3 which is necessary and,
1

Harold Wolpe, "An Examination of Some Approaches to the Problem of the Development of
Revolutionary Consciousness," Telos, no. 4 (Fall 1969), pp. 11344.
2
Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy (New York, Toronto, and London,
1964), pp. 6768.
3
For an elaboration of the Marxist concept of "radical action," see Herbert Marcuse, "Contributions to a
Phenomenology of Historical Materialism," Telos, no. 4 (Fall 1969), pp. 4-11. Cf. also Marx's own
definition of labor in Capital, vol. 1, trans. Moore and Aveling (Moscow, n.d.), p. 177: "Labour is, in the
first place, a process in which both man and nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts,
regulates, and controls the material reactions between himself and nature. He opposes himself to nature as
one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body in
order to appropriate nature's productions in the form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the
external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering
powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway" (emphasis added).

in the process, alters both the subject and the object, to a passive mechanical function that
degrades the worker to the level of an animal while transforming abstract capital
(crystallized labor) into the decisive element. Thus, dead labor rules over live labor.
Revolution is the sole alternative not only because the capitalist system is inherently
unstable and, due to its inner economic logic, moves unavoidably to its own selfannihilation, but also because it prevents self-development (education) on the part of the
large majority of the population, the workers, by removing the workers' products (their
objectifications), consequently preventing the alteration of the laboring subject. So
deprived, the workers cease to be subjects, and since capital can be obtained only from
laboring subjects, either the system changes radically, or it grinds to a halt.4
Independently at this educational and self-developmental element, the Marxist concept of
alienation makes no sense whatsoever. In the sense of Entfremdung it refers precisely to
the "distancing" of the produced object from the producing subject and, since
subjectivity5 in Marx is not the contemplative residual ego of idealistic philosophy, but
"sensuous human activity," the consequence is Verdinglichung (reification) whereby the
working subject becomes an abstract thing while capital, the reified human activity
expropriated from the workers, becomes the real subject of bourgeois society.
It is crucial to indicate the Marxist account of education since, historically, it was
precisely the overlooking of this essential theoretical parameter that resulted in the
ideological failures of the Second and Third Internationals so that in the middle 1920s
any critical re-elaboration of Marxist theory had to begin from the problem of education
and its historical manifestation in late bourgeois society, i.e., alienation: the starting
points of Banfi, Lukcs, the existentialists, etc. Of course, it would be idealistic to claim
that the failures of the Second and Third Internationals were due to a theoretical error. In
fact, their causes are fundamentally economic in character and must be located in the
shifting of the class-struggle from the national bourgeois-proletariat context to the large
international framework where imperialism replaces capitalism and the main
contradictions obtain between advanced industrial countries and the underdeveloped
countries. The economism and revisionism of Kautsky, Bernstein, etc., are only the
ideological otherness of the more basic economic processes at work during that period,
4

According to Paci, the contradiction is the following: "capitalism reduces the exploited either to a mere
material thing or to an instrument. In this case capitalism cannot survive because men reduced to mere
things do not produce. Or else capitalism leaves to the exploited enough humanity, or psychic life, and
therefore enough will and possibility of becoming conscious, or of reflecting, that makes it possible for the
exploited to remain men. In the latter case, capitalism creates within itself the moment which tends to
destroy it." Cf. Funzione delle Scienze e Significate dell'Uomo (Milan, 1963), p. 310. It should be added
that only when the subject (worker) has been completely reduced to the level of an object (commodity), can
he attain the required class-consciousness needed for the revolution for at that point the subject corresponds
with the object and, in becoming aware of its condition of objectified subject, it can undertake the kind of
revolutionary political activity needed for the radical alteration of the conditions of its existence. Until the
subject-object identity is generated by the development of capitalist forces, the workers remain trapped
within false consciousness and alienation, and can only undertake reformist rather than revolutionary
activities.
5
Thus, in the Grundrisse, Marx writes: "the common substance of all commodities as commodities and,
therefore, as exchange-value, is constituted by the fact that they are objectified labor. The only thing
different from objectified labor is non-objectified labor yet to be objectified, labor as subjectivity," in
Lineamenti Fondamentali della Critica dell'Economia Politica, vol. 7, trans. Enzo Grillo (Florence, 1968),
p. 251.

and it is the task of historical materialism to relate the former to the latter.6 Marx and
Engels's account of the role of the trade-unions in the development of revolutionary
consciousness was somewhat ambiguous and not systematically elaborated. Thus, in the
Manifesto, they appear as organizational moments in the politicization of the working
class and, as such, they are seen as doomed to failure in terms of their immediate
economic aims while producing, in the long run, a viable political organization. "The real
fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate reality, but in the ever expanding union of
workers."7 If labor unions were successful in securing major economic victories for the
working class, their role would be negative and politically counter-productive since they
would become buffer elements in the class-struggle by ultimately bringing about the
social integration of the working class into bourgeois society: "Trades Unions work very
well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital.They fail generally
from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system,
instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a
lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition
of the wage system."8 Yet, labor unions were considered necessary as moments which, as
such, were only temporary and transient. In fact, one of Engels's main criticisms of the
Gotha program was precisely that it failed to mention trade unions and their historical
function.9 The reason why they could not become permanent institutions was that they
could not possibly succeed independently of the political action of the working class
which, eventually, would make them superfluous. Thus, the historical confrontation was
to obtain between the entrenched bourgeoisie and the working class organized in labor
unions and, eventually, in a revolutionary party. The confrontation would subsequently
become intensified proportionately to the bourgeoisie's inability to meet the economic
demands of the workers, until it reached the breaking point when revolution would break
out and the winning proletariat radically altered the prevailing mode of production.
Historically, however, this has not happened largely due to the fact that the
bourgeoisie found ways, toward the end of the 19th century, to partially meet economic
demands and thus prevent the class-struggle from developing to its logical revolutionary
consequences. This was accomplished through the imperialist expansion of national
capitalism so that the full burden of exploitation was passed on to the new working
6

Strangely enough, although Marxist writers ritually claim to apply historical materialism to the study of
ideologies (understood in the broad sense which includes not only philosophy, social science, etc., but even
the form taken by investigations in the natural sciences), there has been no study conducted this far that
seeks to relate the failures of the Second International to the socio-economic events of the period. Even
Colletti, in his brilliant essay on Bernstein in Ideologia e Societ (Bari, 1969), ultimately ends up by
showing the Marxism of the Second Internationl to be theoretically inadequate. The more important
question, i.e., why did such an inadequate brand of Marxism ever develop and succeed is never even raised.
7
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party," in Selected Works, vol. 1 (Moscow,
1962), p. 42.
8
Karl Marx, "Wages, Price and Profit," in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, vol. 1, op. cit., p. 447.
9
Cf. Engels's letter to Bebel dated March 18-25, 1875, in which he writes that in the Gotha Program "
there is not a word about the organization of the working class as a class by means of the trade unions. And
that is a very essential point, for this is the real class organization of the proletariat, in which he carried on
its daily struggles with capital, in which it trains itself, and which nowadays even amid the worst reaction
(as in Paris at present) can simply no longer be smashed. Considering the importance which this
organization has attained also in Germany, it would be absolutely necessary in our opinion to mention it in
the programme and if possible to leave open a place for it in the Party organization." In Marx and Engels,
Selected Works, vol. II, op. cit., p. 41.

classes of the underdeveloped countries, while the proletariat of the mother country was
gradually elevated to a privileged economic position with respect to the new international
situation. Prophetically enough, the first volume of Marx's Capital, the only one
published during his life-time and, therefore, the only one that can be regarded as a
finished work, concludes with a chapter on colonization. But his purpose there is only to
better show the inner mechanism of the advanced capitalism in the mother country10 and,
to the extent that he focuses almost exclusively on the then-sparsely populated North
America and Australia, since capital can only be extracted from living labor, his analysis
restricts the development of capitalism these areas to the growing surplus of immigrants
in some of the industrial coastal areas. What he overlooked were the large populations of
non-whites in Asia, Africa, and Latin America which were rapidly becoming drawn in the
economic orbit of capitalism and that, in redefining the battle lines of the class struggle,
were to become the major revolutionary force in the 20th century when racism and
nationalism became the predominant epiphenomenal expressions of the new situation.
When, at the closing of the 19th century, it became evident that Marxism as it had
been developed by Marx and Engels was not entirely adequate, this inadequacy could,
and was, interpreted in two radically different senses that, up to the eve of World War I,
defined respectively the revolutionary and the reformist wings of German socialdemocracy. At this point, Marxism can be seen as a system to which Gdel's theorem
becomes applicable.11 To interpret this inadequacy as inconsistency, as Bernstein and the
entire right wing of the German Social Democratic Party did, entailed the complete
recasting of Marxist theory in terms of the predominant categories of bourgeois ideology
which eventually led to the full integration of the organized proletariat in bourgeois
society. And this cannot be idealistically explained away in terms of theoretical
deficiencies, corruptions, or lack of leadership, but must be historically traced to the fact
that, by that time, in terms of the new economic world situation, the European proletariat
was no longer the sole working class and that, in relation to the rest of the working class
in the underdeveloped countries, it occupied a privileged position whose objective
interests were no longer revolutionary. On the other hand, to interpret the inadequacy in
Marxist theory as incompleteness led the left, or revolutionary, wing of the party to pick
up precisely where Marx had broken off, at the end of the first volume of Capital, and
develop a new theory of imperialism. This is precisely what people such as Lenin and
Luxemburg did. However, this broadening of Marxist theory entailed consequences that
they neither fully understood, nor wished to recognize. In this respect Rosa Luxemburg's
case is typical of the inherent contradictions of the whole European social-democratic
left-wing.
10

One needs only recall the closing paragraph of the volume: "However, we are not concerned here with
the condition of the colonies. The only thing that interests us is the secret discovered in the new world by
the Political Economy of the old world, and proclaimed on the house-tops: that the capitalist mode of
production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition
the annihilation of self-earned private property: in other words, the expropriation of the labourer." Marx,
Capital, vol. 1., op. cit., p. 774.
11
It does not follow from this that Marxism is thereby treated as an abstract formal system for, as Kosok
has shown, Gdel's theorem can be seen as a theorem of dialectical logic, in which case it ceases to be a
puzzle, and becomes an expectable consequence. Cf. Michael Kosok, "The Formalization of Hegel's
Dialectical Logic," International Philosophical Quarterly, vol. IV, no. 4; and his "The Dynamics of
Paradox: Dialectical Phenomenology of Science," Telos, no. 5, Spring 1970.