Dual Consciousness
April 9, 2006One of the defining elements of STO’s political analysis was the concept of “dual consciousness.” This referred to the notion that working class people (in some formulations, white working class people) held two competing forms of consciousness, essentially a bourgeois and a proletarian consciousness. “Toward a Revolutionary Party,” one of the earliest published articulations of STO’s politics, explained bourgeois consciousness in this way:
“Working people are led to certain patterns of thought and action because they and their parents before them live in a capitalist society. The "ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas." Capitalist ideology and capitalist culture is in the air. To ’succeed’, or to just get by workers normally must behave according to capitalist standards of rationality and practicability.” (p.31-32)
In contrast, proletarian consciousness represented the potential for a new organization of society (communism):“The second factor determining the content of working class ideology is the potential of that class to become a ruling class. This potential is manifested in, and demonstrated by, ideas and actions which run counter to the capitalist conception of the world. As has been said, these ideas and actions become mass phenomena during periods of sharp struggle…often being articulated as the explicit basis of the struggle.” (p. 32)
These two contradictory sorts of consciousness, said STO, could be seen as the basis for the white working class embrace of white skin privilege, as well as the basis for the incredible solidarity that can sometimes be witnessed during a wildcat strike or other militant job action. (There’s all sorts of interesting stuff to explore here as well in terms of capitalist notions of what is “crazy” and “sane,” or bourgeois notions of legality and illegality…)The upshot was that the task of a revolutionary organization was to support the development of proletarian consciousness and to critique and oppose bourgeois consciousness. In true historical materialist fashion, STO maintained that this process was possible only in and through the collective actions of the working class itself: in particular, moments of intense class struggle at the point of production (the aforementioned wildcat strike, for example) can help accelerate the process of replacing bourgeois with proletarian consciousness.
Obviously, this schematic is too clean, too neat and tidy a way to understand the contradictions of life under capitalism, but it does have some important conceptual advantages. Too many radicals adopt the notion that the masses of humanity have simply been “duped” by capitalism, the state, patriarchy, etc., as if there were an even more neat and tidy distinction between “true” and “false” consciousness, with a handful of educated revolutionaries holding the franchise on the “true” version, while the rest of humanity is saddled with the “false” kind. A few years back, I had an exchange with Jon Bekken from Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, in which he took this position, maintaining that the millions of humans who feel some affection for one or another nation are simply brainwashed.Others hold the opposite, but similarly untenable view, that everyone always makes rational decisions and that only a lack of knowledge keeps people from “choosing” revolution. From this perspective, producing and distributing mass propaganda is the primary (or even the exclusive) task of revolutionaries. In its sub/counter/cultural way, Crimethinc. represents a contemporary example of this simplistic approach.
At the very least, a dual consciousness theory allows us to think of people in a more three-dimensional way than either of the two alternatives identified here. It also helps us make sense of the complicated reality of working class life in the twenty-first century, where people may express the most profoundly radical notions in one sentence, only to follow them up immediately with unreflective prejudices.
In my own experience, anti-fascist organizing can be one arena for attempting to expand “good” consciousness and challenge the “bad” stuff: when people are confronted with the ultimate logic of racial and gender hatred, for instance, they can begin to see the need for some alternative framework. Of course, there is always the danger that the good gut impulse against fascism will coincide with the bad gut impulse against revolution, and lead even further into an uncritical embrace of new, “multi-cultural” forms of capitalism. But that is a topic for another day.Related to all this is the unorthodox view STO held of dialectics in general, positing the primary contradiction of capitalist life as one internal to the working class, rather than external (as in, the contradiction between labor and capital, or between the working class and the bourgeoisie). More on this later …
hey there Mike,
Thanks for this. That STO study course you linked to looks great. I’m going to have to read the whole document when I get more time, I just skimmed it. Your comment about the main contradiction being one internal to the working class is fascinating. Some other friends and I have been talking about this in conversations about Mario Tronti recently. Tronti argues that the working class is the pre-condition for capital, which I think works as a similar formulation to what you/STO put forward. It means that the most important contradictions are the ones inside the class (hierarchy inside the class).
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — April 14, 2006 @ 12:26 am
Thanks for this article, I’ve been reading your posts and enjoying them. I think here you could have been more critical. In some ways dual consciousness is a problematic notion itself, and one that in the leninist framework often (though there are exceptions, like STO) led to the thought that the working class could never move beyond “trade union” (reformist) consciousness.
I guess I would have liked to have seen this drawn out a little more. How does consciousness arise, do both(?) have similar or distinct origins. For example Martin Glaberman (who the STO were close with) shows how the process can be distinctly different for different modes of thinking. For example when autoworkers voted for a no-strike clause in WWII but then struck quite frequently and illegally. He points out that there are different social contexts in which voting and taking action collectively happen. Race is equally (if not more) complex. As individuals few would call themselves racist or even propagate overtly racist language. Yet in the workplace white workers would frequently take direct action aimed at retaining their privledge. Other times white workers would act along class lines.
Sometimes I personally doubt the usefulness of the concept. Marx needed it because he needed to explain, given his social analysis of class struggle which would seem to indicate that it would continually and spontaneously emerge, reactionary and “retarded” developement of working class struggle. As you have shown these concepts can lead us down some problematic paths from labeling workers as counter-revolutionary and backwards if they’re not writing pamphlets, to saying workers are always revolutionary just misled, and splitting worker’s brains. Ultimately I think the process by which one’s thoughts about society, class, and race are acquired and enacted, as well as how one acts in a social context is quite a complex ordeal which seems to traverse the bourgeious/communist distinction. Nevertheless I think you’re right that STO has interesting and useful (in the practical sense) things to say about these issues.
Comment by Todd — June 30, 2006 @ 12:52 am