Category Archives: Class and Marxism

Marxism and Literature – Raymond Williams

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Chapter 4: “Ideology”

Ideology for Williams is an inherently problematic concept, which he thinks requires radical revision. He outlines three meanings the concept has had in Marxist theory:

  • (i) a system of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group;
  • (ii) a system of illusory beliefs – false ideas or false consciousness – which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge;
  • (iii) the general process of the production of meanings and ideas.

In one variant of Marxism, senses (i) and (ii) can be effectively combined. (55)

Part 3: “Literary Theory”

Chapter 1: “The Multiplicity of Writing”

this identification of art with “imaginative” skill involves a reduction of art to a series of forms labeled the proper objects of aesthetic experience. In literature this has resulted in the reduction of “literature” to specialized forms that obscure the multiplicity in types of writing practices: literature is “fictional” and not “factual,” it is “imaginative” and not “practical,” and it is not “subjective” rather than “objective.” Literature’s association with these concepts is specific to the capitalist era, and a Marxist literary theory must attempt to recapture the multiplicity of forms of writing outside of the categories left to it by bourgeois critics.

The Abyss of Representation – George Hartley

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Contents

 

  1. Representation and the Abyss of Subjectivity 1

 

  1. Presentation beyond Representation: Kant and the Limits of Discursive Understanding 22

 

  1. The Speculative Proposition: Hegel and the Drama of Presentation 53

 

  1. Marx’s Key Concept? Althusser and the Darstellung Question 84

 

  1. Figuration and the Sublime Logic of the Real: Jameson’s Libidinal Apparatuses 127

 

  1. The Theater of Figural Space 182

 

  1. Can the Symptom Speak? Hegemony and the Problem of Cultural Representation 235

 

Author

Context

Thesis

 

Hartley describes how modern theory from Kant through Lacan attempts to come to terms with the sublime limits of representation and how ideas developed with the Marxist tradition—such as Marx’s theory of value, Althusser’s theory of structural causality, or Zizek’s theory of ideological enjoyment—can be seen as variants of the sublime object. Representation, he argues, is ultimately a political problem. Whether that problem be a Marxist representation of global capitalism, a deconstructive representation of subaltern women, or a Chicano self-representation opposing Anglo-American images of Mexican Americans, it is only through this grappling with the negative, Hartley explains, that a Marxist theory of postmodernism can begin to address the challenges of global capitalism and resurgent imperialism.

 

Methodology

 

Endless pages of talking

 

Key Terms

 

Hegel’s Absolute Negativity

 

Criticisms and Questions

Notes

 

  1. Representation and the Abyss of Subjectivity

 

-The abyss is not a problem of the subject, as the result of the subjects limited capacity for knowledge Beyond sensory experience, but the very ground of the subject: this paradox of a grounding Abyss means nothing more than that the subject is this space of inclination ability as such, the problem residing rather on the side of substance.

-Clear is no  ideology/ representation  without the category of the subject:  the category of the subject is constituentive of all ideologies, But the category of the subject is constituent of of all ideologies insofar as all ideologies has the function of constituting concrete individuals as subjects.

– subjectification/ interpolation is nothing but the attempt to cover over the traumatic recognition of the abyss of subjectivity as such.  this confrontation with the traumatic thing is the subject as such. interpolation, on the other hand, is the exact attempt to avoid this confrontation.

– the job of idealogy criticism is to identify the position in the other that functions as the desire that the hysteric desires to please.

 

  1. Kant

– if one agrees with Jameson that the sublime object for us in this post modern age is no longer nature but the vast network of global capital this in no way changes the fundamental structure of the experience of the sublime as Kant outlines it in the critique of judgment. Kant Conte says judgment is a bridge that spans the abyss between the real and the sensible.

– kant’s conception of the negativity of the symbol never the last prepares the way for hagel’s project of dialectical negation. What is presented in the symbol is symbolism is a mode of thinking the limits of thinking itself of the negative relationship between discursive understanding and its own discursive limits.

– because of the limits of discourse language can never give a pure representation of super sensible objects it’s symbolic presentations always carry and excessive element within them an unintelligible thing at the heart of the presentation of the supersensible that prevents language from ever becoming a closed symbolic system.

 

  1. Hegel

– Speculative language is not some foreign word from above that captures in itself the imported means to convey because hegel’s theory of language denies any such immediacy. The sign must be emptied out, become some stupid contingent and meaningless thing devoid of any associations with a particular image or intuition and through the radical negativity of it stupidity embody the point of articulation of the subject. Speculative language is ordinary language only more so. Our ordinary language is more than sufficient to provide us with an adequate presentation of the drama of the speculative.

 

  1. Althusser and the Darstellung Question

 

If we are to analyze economic or social or any illogical phenomena in terms of the mode of production with which they operate then we must construct a concept capable of conveying the type of causality at work in the whole.

– the task facing readers of marks Althusser implies is to purify the Marxist text of its pre-scientific metaphors its Figures it’s vorstellungin its dependence on representation.

-Three Notions of Darstellung operating here at once:

-Kant’s concept of versinlichung with its emphasis on the flushing out of the concept.

– the Hegelian sense of scientific method the motive Exposition adequate to the nature of the dialectic

– A sense that I have yet to explore and Althusser points to above the Marxist sense of the presentation of value in commodity production that has a relationship to but cannot be reduced to Consciousness which must rather be seen as an objective historical structural effect.

-The question at stake here is an epistemological 1 concerning our ability to read the structural determinations of the value relation or relation that appears in a mystified form in a society based on commodity production. The key is to see this mystification, however, not as a problem of our ability to see, of our consciousness, of our any law gical shortcomings, of our failure to see what lies before us and is simply hidden beneath a mystifying exterior but to see this mystification instead as a structural effect, and effect of the very structure of commodity production itself. Fetishism is an objective effect of the structure of the value of relation in commodity production, not a subjective illusion or shortcoming. We cannot correct this problem then by learning to see what is there before us but hidden from our view. We must instead learn to read the absences existing in the very fullness of our vision.

– Darstellung then is the presentation in the form of value- by way of the value form- of abstract human labor as it is materialized in the body of the commodity.  The relative form is nothing but the impossible identity of value to itself the void of its own inadequacy. Value must become something other, it must become the value thing that exists apart from its own value being.

– value cannot present itself in this opposition between exchange value and use value because it is not a property specific to the single commodity what a social relationship articulated through the whole commodity structure of which the single commodity is only one part. This structural causality can only operate because of the exceptional one, the commodity excluded from the structure of values. Existence of the structure can only be presented by an element excluded from itself.

– we have arrived at Marxist description of structural causality through the concept of presentation. Value is the effect of structure in that the structure presents itself, through the elaboration of the value form, as the articulation of homogeneous human labor power.

 

  1. Jameson’s Libidinal Apparatus

 

-The political unconscious is the picture developed their of some collective Unity of Consciousness. Only a collected Unity- weather that of a particular class, the proletariat, or of its organ of Consciousness, the Revolutionary party- can achieve the transparency required for the subject- here a collective social political subject- to be fully conscious of its determination by class and be able to square the circle of an illogical conditioning by sheer Lucidity and The Taking of thought. (PU 283)

-The political unconscious is not much concerned with the conditions of possibility of such Lucidity but rather with the mechanisms whereby we attempt to square the circle of 80 illogical limitation by projecting a world in which our actions and values would at an a seemingly Timeless and natural legitimacy, a process of wish-fulfillment that Jameson models on Freud’s development of that Concept in the interpretation of Dreams: figuration. If we are to become aware of class the classes already must be in some sense perceptible as such but this requirements can be fulfilled only when the social conditions of our daily lives had developed the point at which underline class structures become representable in tangible form.

–” the relationship between Class Consciousness and figurability in other words demand something more basic than abstract knowledge and implies a mode of experience that is more visceral and existential than the abstract certainties of economics and Marxian social science.”

-This visceral and existential motive experience is the demesne of culture where the classes have to take on the function of characters. In other words at the most basic level class Consciousness is always allegorical each class achieving figure ability to the extent to which it can represent it unconsciously through ART narrative and other idiot logical Productions as a character with its own particular qualities and personality. Figuration then is essentially a mode of allegorical personification.

– all interpretation is it base allegorical various interpretive models functioning not so much as theories per se but rather as unconscious structures and so many afterimages and secondary effects of a given historical mode of figuration. all allegorical methods are unconscious attempts to articulate a system for representing history.

– The political  unconscious it should be remembered is ultimately the process of a figurative meditation on the destiny of community.

Historical –  the ideology of form as a matrix of symbolic messages related to different coexisting modes of production

Social-  The ideologeme as a unit in class discourse

political – Individual cultural object as a symbolic Act.
– figuration is necessary because the process of cultural revolution is not a positive empirically available event but rather a structural limitation on how we perceive ourselves and our relationship to the larger social totality that determines us.

– this search for ways of seeing whether conscious or unconscious is the process of cognitive mapping by which we obtained the figures necessary for locating ourselves in history.

– allegorical criticism does not so much interpret a given subject matter through the terms of another Master narrative- where interpretation is seen as the unearthing of some deeper meaning below the surface- as rewrites that subject matter in terms of a different code. Allegory is a process of diversion and reinvestment: the initial terms are diverted from their surface function into the service of other idiot logical functions in reinvested by what we have called the political unconscious.

– this process is not internal to me as an individual but is made possible by the objective figural apparatus available to me. In this way the text draws the real into its own texture as its imminent subtext but not as something external orange extrinsic to the text but something born within and vehicle ated by the text itself interiorized in it’s very fabric in order to provide the stuff on the raw material on which the textual operation must work.

– the literary work or cultural object brings into being that very situation to which it is also a reaction. it articulates its own situation and texture Eliza’s it there by encouraging and perpetuating the illusion that the situation itself did not exist before it that there is nothing but a text.

– ideologies is not something internal to individual consciousness what is an external effect of certain social practices that are displayed by staged by condensed in libidinal apparatuses.

-” it is not terribly difficult to say what is meant by the real in lacan. It is simply history itself”

– Lacanian split subject : The acquisition of language functions as a kind of primary repression, a repression of the imaginary logic of identification, which constitutes the subject as a divided, mediated by language because the subject can never coincide with the signifier that represents it. But binary logic of the imaginary is broken up by the introduction of this mediating third, the other, the unconscious, language itself.

– History is not a text not a narrative but an absent cause it is inaccessible to us except in textural form.

– language manages to carry the real within itself as its own intrinsic or imminent subtext.

– the literary work or cultural object brings into being that situation to which it is also add one in the same time or reaction.

– the difference between the sublime object for Kant and that for Hegel is that the sublime object for Kant is simply the phenomenal object that stretches are representative faculties beyond their limits while the sublime object for Hagel is the obscene embodiment of the nothing Beyond representation the embodiment of radical negativity. We experience the sublime when we come into contact with the miserable object through its it’s very wretchedness embodies this negativity.

– what unites the three levels is the concept of contradiction: at the first level the text functions as a symbolic act that seeks a figural resolution to some Unthinkable social contradiction. At the second level text functions as an ideologeme an utterance in the larger dialogue between contradictory class discourses and at the third level of the text functions as the ideological sedimentation at the level of form or genre itself of the larger process of cultural revolution, the ongoing contradictory process in which historical classes vie for hegemony.

– we cannot simply identify class types in novels because such a position treats class identification as an inert given line and tact outside the text where as the task is to show the textual reflection as constituent of the value of this outside as an allegorical process that produces alternatives to empirical history by emptying them of their finality Andrey orchestrating them in terms of some master fantasy structure of Phantasm.

– the real, this absent cause, which is fundamentally unrepresentable and non-narrative and detectable only in its effects, can be disclosed only by desire itself, whose wish-fulfilling mechanisms are the instruments through which this resistance surface must be scanned.

 

  1. Spivak

 

-A desire to touch the everyday. She does not desire to know what they think or to grasp their consciousness. The everyday and Consciousness operate according to different critical itineraries.

– is after a certain Poetics, a certain mode of putting together of a continuous seeming self for everyday life. This self which only seems continuous but has to seem as such for everyday functioning has been put together for such a seeming despite the chance Inus that may be reined in in the necessary production of this continuity.

Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form. – Anna Kornbluh

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Contents

 

Introduction: ‘A case of metaphysics’: realizing capital — Fictitious capital/real psyche: metalepsis, psychologism, and the grounds of finance — Investor ironies in Great Expectations — The economic problem of sympathy: parabasis and interest in Middlemarch — ‘Money expects money’: satiric credit in The way we live now — London, nineteenth century, capital of realism: on Marx’s Victorian novel — Psychic economy and its vicissitudes: Freud’s economic hypothesis — Epilogue: The psychic life of finance.

Author

Context

 

In close rhetorical readings of financial journalism, political economy, and the works of Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope, Kornbluh examines the psychological framing of economics, one of the nineteenth century’s most enduring legacies, reminding us that the current dominant paradigm for understanding financial crisis has a history of its own. She shows how novels illuminate this displacement and ironize ideological metaphors linking psychology and economics, thus demonstrating literature’s unique facility for evaluating ideas in process.

Thesis

 

reality of the financial capital is itself structured like a fiction.

Methodology

 

The realist novel engages economics neither via reference to economic content nor through its production and consumption in the market, but in its narratological, rhetorical, and temporal structures and the resonance, smooth or sticky, intensive of ironic, across those structures.

Key Terms

 

Reading – attending to the aesthetic material of literary language. to the historicist’s reduction of literature to discourse. I oppose deconstruction’s insistance on the irreducibility of tropes to intuitive ideas, and I work instead to encounter the material and process of literary thinking.

Social close reading – blending deconstructive techniques and the best historicist impulses to explore the intellectual and political force of literary forms that do not reiterate a preexisting world, but rather limn. ironize, and even unmake forms of worlding.

literature – a mode of thought structured by juxtoposition and condensation, by senuous syntheis and syncretic sedimentation. To pose the question “what connexion could there be?” between voices, motifs, temporalities, and images that and mobilized within one bounded work.

Criticisms and Questions

 

Book is mostly useful in showing a powerful approach to Marxist literary reading. Finding an object of study, and to offer a methodology of close reading.

 

For Kornbluh, realism written in the 19th-century blossoming of finance capitalism performs much of the same work as political theory. She works with a specifically Marxist framework, but instead of subjugating literature to a Marxist program, her version of “aesthetic mediation” finds similar historical, aesthetic, scientific, and political thought in Marx’s metaphors and in the critiques embodied in novels.

The idea that finance is the naturally complex lifeblood of our economy whose path only a rarefied group of white men can chart, and not the triumph of the middle man: that’s a trope. It’s a cultural narrative, with material consequences. It’s a cultural narrative that engages with the question of what is and isn’t real because, for example, only Goldman Sachs’s money was treated as real in the last crisis.

the realms of value, fiction, and language are inextricable from each other. Money is a real fiction, itself a representation, and as Kornbluh writes, it is like literature, “a kind of representation that makes a claim to value.” Money is “a claim to represent an abstraction that lacks ontological positivity, money contrives to effectuate the concrete existence of that abstract substance” that is value. It’s only in seeing this contrivance that we might see how we create value and what is realistically open to change.

Kornbluh wants to denaturalize one of the “seminal metaphors of late modernity”: the idea of “psychic economies.”

– What We Talk About When We Talk About Finance By Michelle ChiharaNotes

“By tracing the cultural circulation of two specific tropes–“fictitious capital–” and “psychic economy”–Kornbluh makes a compelling argument about the complex figurative ties that bind the realist novel to our understanding of both capitalism and the psyche. This exciting and original book will make us reconsider the novel’s cultural work as well as that of its criticism.”

-Mario Ortiz-Robles, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Notes

 

Introduction: ‘A case of metaphysics’: realizing capital —

realism is a destabalization of reified reality, victorian novel’s investigating financial capitalism’s parallel destabilizations.

the realism of capitalism is not a matter of mimetic recording, but rather of aesthetic mediation: “the only true social element in literature is the form” -Lukacs

The truly financial element in realism is the form. The realist novel engages economics neither via reference to economic content nor through its production and consumption in the market, but in its narratological, rhetorical, and temporal structures and the resonance, smooth or sticky, intensive of ironic, across those structures.

London, nineteenth century, capital of realism: on Marx’s Victorian novel —

For Marx, capital functions like a novelistic protagonist.

Two tropes in catpial: personification, the representation of an abstraction for a person, and metalepsis, the substitution of one figure for an another with which it is closely related. And the concert between these two concepts intone the concept of drive. Coats and linen are personified, but people are just trager, agents of the ur-person: capital itself. Capital is the subject in this world.

the psychic economy metaphor is arguably nothing other than the personification of capital.

the power of these metaphors show how Capital realizes its insights not argumentatively, but aesthetically.

 

The Ticklish Subject – Slavoj Zizek

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Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. Verso, New York;London;, 1999.

 

Contents

 

Author

 

Zizek, duh

Context

 

Engaging with the Cartesian Subject

 

Thesis

 

This book  Endeavors to reassert the Cartesian subject whose rejection forms the silent pact of all struggling parties of today’s Academia. The point is not to return to the cogito in the guise  in which this notion has dominated modern thought what to bring to light it’s forgotten obverse, the excessive, unacknowledged kernal of the cogito, Which is far from the pacifying image of the transparent self.

Part I – confront Heidegger’s attempt to transcend the horizon of modern Cartesian subjectivity. He does not account for the excess of subjectivity (diabolical evil in Kant, ‘night of the world’ in Hegel). Imagination is really anti-synthetic

Part II – four descendants of Althusser

Laclau – theory of Hegemony

Balibar – theory of egaliberte

Ranciere- theory of mesentente

Badiou – theory of subjectivity as fidelity to the truth event

How do each tackle the predominant ‘post-political’ liberal-democratic stance

Part III – tendencies of post-modern thought to assert the liberating proliferation of multiple forms of subjectivity, where cultural recognition more important than socioeconomic struggle

How are we to reformulate a leftist, anti-capitalist political project in the era of global capitalism.

Methodology

Key Terms

Criticisms and Questions

Notes

 

  1.  The politics of Truth, Alain Badiou as a reader of St.Paul

 

– the subject emerges interpolated from the truth event.

– budgie provides an elaborated analysis of being. At the bottom is the presentation of pure multiple, the not yet symbolically structured multitude of experience, that which is given. This multitude is not a multitude of ones since counting has not yet taken place. Glad you called any particular consistent multitude a situation, a situation is structured and it is its structure that allows us to count as one. However for us to count as one 3 duplication proper to the symbolization of a situation must be at work that is in order for a situation to be counted as one its structure must always already be a med estructura that designated as 1.

– the truth is always the truth of a specific situation, its repressed truth.

“This symptomal torsion of being which is a truth in the always total texture of knowledge”

– whereas post-modernism says there is no event and that nothing really happens, Badiou insists that miracles do happen.

whereas Kant celebrates the sublime effect on passive Observers Badiou says that the truth event is truth in itself for its agents themselves not for external Observers.

-Subjectivity engages the individual in some cause

-Badiou’s opposition of knowledge and Truth seems to turn exactly around Althusser’s opposition of ideologies and science:Non authentic knowledge is limited to the positive order of being, blinds to its structural void, to its Symtomal torsion; while the engaged truth that subjectivizes provides authentic insight into a situation.

Two  divisions of the subjects: 1)  conscious ego who adhere’s to the law and decentered desire which works against its conscious will 2) Law / desire versus A New Beginning breaking out of the deadlock of Law and its transgression AKA Christian love.

-”ne pas ceder sur son desir” = “do your duty”

– 4 marks the emergence of working-class subjectivity is strictly co-dependent on the fact that the worker is compelled to sell the very substance of his being as a commodity on the market, that is to reduce the treasure the precious core of his being to an object that can be bought for money.  there is no subjectivity without the reduction of the subjects positive substantial being to a disposable piece of s***.

 

The Lacanian Subject:  the subject is strictly correlative with the ontological gap between the universal and the particular.  the subject is an act, the decision by means of which we passed from the positivity of the given multitude to the truth event.  subject is not a name for the gap of freedom and contingency what is the contingency that grounds the very positive ontological order the vanishing mediator whose self-effacing gesture transforms the pre ontological chaotic multitude into the semblance of A+ objective order of reality.

-Truth is condemned to remain a fiction precisely insofar as the innomable real eludes its grasp.

 

  1. Political Subjectivization and its Vicissitudes

 

-”single unemployed mother” is a synthome: a knot at which all the lines of the predominant ideological argumentation meet.

-The middle class is the very form of the disavowal of the fact that Society doesn’t exist, in it Society does exist.  this constant displacement and falsification of the line of class division is the class struggle. Laclau class antagonism would thereby be fully symbolized it would no longer be impossible / real but a simple differential structural feature.

-Antagonism is inherent to universality itself, split into the false concrete universality that legitimizes the existing division of the whole into functional parts, and the impossible/ real demand of abstract universality.

-The proletariat stands for Universal Humanity not because it is the lowest exploded class but because it’s very existence is a living contradiction, it exposes the fundamental imbalance and inconsistency of the capitalist social hole.  criticism of the possible Iggy logical functioning of the notion of hybridity should in no way advicate the return to substantially identities. The point is precisely to assert hybridity as the site of the universal.

– leftists must equate universalism with a militant divisive position of 1 engaged in a struggle. True universalists are not those who preach Global tolerance but those who engage in a passionate fight for the assertion of the truth that enthuses them.

– the line that separates two opposing sides in class struggle is not objective, it is not the line separating two positive social groups, But ultimately radically subjective. it runs diagonally to the social division in the order of being, between those who recognize themselves in the call of the truth event and those who deny or ignore it.

The Debate on Classes – Erik Olin Wright

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Wright, Erik O. The Debate on Classes. Verso, New York;London;, 1989.

Contents

Author

Context

 

In the late 1980s in the United States trying to figure out how to incorporate the reality of the Middle class into a Marxist understanding of class.

Thesis

 

Methodology

 

A use of statistics and a questionnaire to try to map out mediary class positions. The book is a series of articles which debate back and forth the basic premise presented in the first article.

 

Key Terms

Criticisms and Questions

Lots of the interesting responses in this book of essays to Wright’s theory show just how tricky and difficult the question of class is. How does the relationship between empiricism and Marxism, Weberianism vs. Marxism (does it all have to lead back to the main antagonistic division between bourgeois and proletariat), how much do other forms of exploitation and oppresion like gender and race fit in to the schematic, etc.  couldn’t you use gender and race as other axis in the forms of exploitation? (the category of status exploitation)

 

In this equation (the commonality of material interests helps to explain the inherent tendency towards conflict between classes; the commonality of lived experience is how they develop common identities.) wouldn’t the first part, the tendencies, not be captured within the realm of consciousness at all? Isn’t it beyond individual consciousness, but something structural to a class?

Notes

 

A general framework for the analysis of class structure – Erik Olin Wright

-main sticking point of class analysis is the “embarrassment” of the middle class.

-how to restore exploitation at center of class analysis to accommodate the empirical complexities of the middle class.

-in state bureaucratic socialism, exploitation is based on burueacratic power: control over organizational assets.

-so two things to add in along with ownership of the means of production: skills and organizational assets.

Bourgeoisie Expert manager Semicredentialed manager Uncredentialed manager
Small employer Expert supervisor Semicredentialied supervisor Uncredentialed supervisor
Petty bourgeois Expert nonmanager Semicredentialed worker proletarian

 

X access is organization assets, Y is skill assets

-class alliances can take place among classes, but there are only certain combinations that are plausible. The more skilled and managerial, the more likely to support existing class relations.

 

Concept of class structure:

1) class structure imposes limits on class formation, class consciousness, and class struggle.

2) class structures constitute the essential qualitative lines of social demarcation in the historical trajectory of social change.

3) the concept of class is relational.

4) social relations which define class are intrinsically antagonistic rather than symmetrical.

5) the objective basis of these antagonistic interests is exploitation.

6) the fundamental basis of exploitation

 

-To save sociology from the sins of bourgeois thought and to save Marxism from the sins of dogmatism: the joining of statistical methods with conceptual rigour is the most effective way to accomplish this. Hard to suss out empiricism sing we can only see experiences (facts) in this causal chain:

mechanisms ====> Events ========> experiences (facts)

class consciousness (mechanisms) ====> attitudes (Events) ========> responses to questionnaire (experiences (facts))

 

competing models of consciousness formation:

 

initial model:

class structure =========> patterns of ideological class formation

alternative model:

ideologies of class =======> party strategies =========> ideological class formation

 

slight debate between Wright and michael Buraway about dogmatism and scepticism between marxism and empiricism.

impossible to view mechanisms or know if they really exist in the Real. Wright clarifies that there is an inherent tension between the psychological states required for revolutionary practice and scientific activity.

-class consciousness is not static and measurable by a questionaire. both structures and ideologies need to be seen in their historical and conjunctural specificity. May be contradictory. Many social phenomenon go into an individual’s consciousness. Not only determined by individual ideas about capital, but also by attitudes toward unions, women, migrants, blacks, gays etc.

-politics and ideology are only relatively autonomous from conjunctural class interests, but her it is just this autonomy that makes conjunctural class interests deviate from true class interests.

LaClau and Mouffe: concepts like objective class interests lack “any theoretical base whatsoever” and the search for the working class is a “false problem.” the social is open and made through discourse, class is just one identity, and not even priveleged.

-objective class interests tied up with teleology, has become one of the bad “-isms”

-capitalists have objective interest in capitalism, new middle classes have interest in statism, and proletariat in full communism.

-analysis of class structure can not be used to find “take off areas” of teleological historical processes or for rational objective interests. There are other dimensions at play.

-Weberian analysis of classes does not need the basic class schism behind it between who own the means of production.

-Middle class are exploited in terms of capitalist mechanisms of exploitation, and exploiters in terms of the one of the secondary mechanisms of exploitation. with hegemony of bourgeoisie middle class tie their class interests to them.

-the commonality of material interests helps to explain the inherent tendency towards conflict between classes; the commonality of lived experience is how they develop common identities.

-Lived experience and Habitus help to explain the source of variation within a class rather than a criterion for class as such.

-the relationship between class structure (exploitation and interests) and class experience (workplace practices and identity formation) which then can be treated as a theoretical problem in its own right.

imagine a triangle:

capitalist mode of production                           simple commodity production

bourgeoisie

small employers

 

managers and supervisors                              petty bourgeoisie

 

semiautonomous employees

 

proletariat

 

state mode of production (and the class position of the bureaucracy) has been notoriously undertheorized.

 

Rescuing Class from the Cultural Turn – Vivek Chibber

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Contents

Author

context:

 

class theory has been deeply influenced by what is known as the “cultural turn.” the idea that social practice cannot be understood outside of the ideological and cultural frames that actors carry with them—their subjective understandings of their place in the world

some central arguments for cultural mediation are undoubtedly correct, and potentially devastating to an economic theory of class. Any response to the cultural turn, then, has to take account of these worries and show that, whatever arguments there are in favor of materialism, they have to acknowledge the ubiquity of culture.

Thesis:

 

In the classical account, the class structure is taken to generate class consciousness, which in turn induces workers to build class organizations. I have tried to argue that, in fact, class consciousness is the consequence of class organization. Since the latter is an arduous process, highly vulnerable to disruption and precarious at its foundation, so is the formation of class identity.

Methodology

 

focus on workplace organizing experience to show the actual difficulties of organizing, and how it should not be taken as a given.

Key Terms

 

class consciousness

Criticisms and Questions

 

Notes:

Challenged to Materialism:

-class action does NOT take place outside of meaning and values like any other social practice

-once a class structure does not generate a particular set of subjective identities — of belonging to a certain class and of wishing to pursue a political agenda prioritizing that identity.

Sewell – for structures to become causally efficacious, they have to be interpreted by agents

-but two different questions a)social structures must be interpreted to take effect b) but are there some structures that radically reduce, or even extinguish, the contingency in meaning construction ie. class

-class is different than other social roles because it is tied economic viability ie they set the rules for what actors have to do to reproduce themselves. they force proletarians and bourgeois to accept their class positions. contingent culture accepted as long as it doesn’t get in the way of structure.

– challenge for  materialist theory: how how possible for workers’ class location to converge around a strategy of collective resistance, but also a strategy of individual accommodation. Class consciousness is a product of some very particular conditions that might have to be produced and sustained, rather than assumed to fall into place through the internal logic of class structure.

-past accounts of class consciousness fail to describe those aspects of the class structure that mitigate against collective course of action.

– Class consciousness can then be understood as a product of some very particular conditions that might have to be produced and sustained, rather than assumed to fall into place through the internal logic of class structure.

-two main obstacles:

1) workers’ baseline vulnerability against the power of employers

– common for class orientation in which one’s welfare is secured by non-class forms of association.

2) generic problems that arise in collective action.

– interest aggregation (from Claus Offe and Helmut Wiesenthal, “The Two Logics of Collective Action”)

-workers must seek agreement although their welfare effected in various, uneven ways

-some workers would have to subordinate their immediate welfare to the larger agenda

– free-riding

all three of these factors reinforce the atomizing effect of the labor market and dilute the impulse toward collective action and class consciousness.

class structure underwrites its own stability by making individual reproduction more appealing than organized contestation.

there is no easy road from Marx’s class in-itself to a class for-itself, but cultureal phenomena play crucial role in building working-class associational power

-By cultural, what is meant is the construction of a solidaristic ethos

– working-class identity is an act of social intervention, it is not a social construction.

-Because of great risks, workers can rationally chose not to be organized. (blamed in the past as  false consciousness)

-It is possible to accept the premise that all social action is filtered through culture while resisting the conclusion that class structure is therefore fundamentally shaped by it.