Marxism 42 (consciousness)

 Someone said, Marxist predictions have failed. On hat:

 

Marxism is not astrology and hence does not believe in predictions. It is a dynamic science. Feudalism lasted for over 2000 years and capitalism is still less than 400 years old. Such predictions about Marxism are being trumpeted since Marx's early intellectual days. It gives fits to the agents of capitalism, mainly under false consciousness of not being proletariat but part of ruling classes, though surviving by doing alienated labor. Marx terms term as lumpen proletariat. In the Latin American context Andre Günter Frank terms the imperialist agents as lumpen bourgeois. Transition from feudalism to capitalism was transition from one class society to another class society. Transition from capitalism to communism is a would be transition from a class society to a classless society -- a qualitatively different kind of transition and the process shall be complex and longer. Capitalism being most advanced class society has most powerful and most sophisticated instruments of resistance and repression. The main role in this transition shall be that of consciousness at two levels -- 1. disillusionment from the false consciousness (of class/caste/religion) and 2. acquisition of class consciousness. Marx wrote in his classic --'The Poverty of Philosophy' (1847)-- that workers by economic circumstances are "class-in-itself" but they remain a lump of mass until they organize themselves into "class-for-itself" on the basis of common class interest. That they can do only by equipping themselves with class consciousness. Therefore the link between the "class-in-itself" and the "class-for-itself" is the "class-consciousness"

 

Proudhon, a Marx's contemporary anarchist philosopher wrote 'Philosophy of Poverty' to ridicule Marx's discovery of proletariat as the new protagonist of history, in response to that Marx wrote 'Poverty of Philosophy', a classic.

 

To every stage of social development corresponds a certain for and level of social consciousness. I used to tell my daughters and female students that they are lucky to be born couple of generations later. To verify which they can compare their level of social consciousness with that of their mothers and grand mothers. In 1982 I had to wage a fierce struggle with the entire clan for my sister's right to higher studies. Today no parents would publicly say that they differentiate between a son and a daughter. It is a different matter that they could have 5 daughters to have a son. There still be many "Pradhanpatis" but this species shall soon disappear.