Lack of alert class consciousness — explains why American labor self-destructs

03 January 2020

Today's theme is "class consciousness"

I approach this concept indirectly.

At the end, our meander will have made sense.

Today, we look at why American labor is politically ineffectual, when evaluated from the perspective of looking out for its own interests.

Our theme revolves around metaphorical sheep's inability to recognize what is going on around them and why.

Conceptually pertinent here is Professor David Schultz's revival of Karl Marx's concept of the Lumpenproletariat.

Schultz wrote that:

The American Democratic Party has a problem with white working-class America – they lost them, or at least large segments of them to Donald Trump’s Republican Party.

Policy reasons may explain part of this. But a better explanation may be that these voters fit the description of what Karl Marx used to call the Lumpenproletariat — reactionary working class opposed to revolution or at least progressive politics.

In America, policy positions adopted by the Democratic Party can partly explain the loss of the white working class.

One suggestion is that President Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the 1964 Civil Rights bill led to what he reputedly said was the loss of the south for a generation.

Yet it was not so much the signing of the civil rights act as it was the abandonment of class and the embrace of identity politics that cost the Democrats the South and white working class.

When US deindustrialization started to kick in during the 1970s, Democrats failed to offer a competing economic response to the global restructuring of capitalism.

Let's conceptually tighten what Professor Schultz said

What repeatedly strikes me in examining American voting behavior, is how frequently people are manipulated into disregarding their self-interests.

For the most part, people are reluctant to collect and analyze data and evidence. As a result, we are easily misdirected by irrelevant, politically directed button-pushing.

These distractions make it difficult to generate society-changing political clout.

This is where Wikipedia's definition of Lumpenproletariat is helpful — with regard to better achieving meaningful political focus:

Lumpenproletariat is a term used primarily by Marxist theorists to describe the underclass devoid of class consciousness.

Coined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 1840s, they used it to refer to the unthinking lower strata of society exploited by reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces, particularly in the context of the revolutions of 1848.

They dismissed its revolutionary potential and contrasted it with the proletariat.

Lenin and Trotsky followed Marx's arguments and dismissed its revolutionary potential, while Mao argued it can be utilized by a proper leadership.

Some radical groups, most notably the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, have sought to mobilize the lumpenproletariat.

"Devoid of class consciousness" is the defining phrase

If we accept that class usually defines social position and financial success — we can intuit that being structurally aware is mandatory to generating effective motivation and successful political action.

Let's get rid of one commonly attached misdirection

Marxists generally (for reasons obscure to me) define Lumpenproletarians as unworthy people.

For instance, from Wikipedia:

Among other groups criminals, vagabonds, and sex workers are usually included in this category.

And from David Schultz:

In theory, Marx failed to see how race could be used as a tool to break class solidarity among the proletariat.

Yet the concept of the Lumpenproletariat provides an opening, especially if one views racism and racialized rhetoric and politics as either structural or ideological tools to divide.

As Theodore Adorno contended in his 1950 The Authoritarian Personality, certain personality types are linked to, and prone to appeals to anti-democratic behavior.

The traits of the authoritarian personality included anti-intellectualism, stereotyping, and often misogynist behavior. The traits of the authoritarian personality fit well into the concept of the Lumpenproletariat.

Schultz thereby implies that President Trump's supporters are stupid, racist, authoritarian misogynists.

Namely, I suppose, Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables".

Those slams, even when accurate, miss the key societal point:

People who lack class consciousness have no idea how they are structurally imprisoned by the system they live in.

Thus, when they lash out, it generally is at easier to perceive irritations and obstacles.

This explains why it is so easy for Oligarchs to manipulate our voting.

The moral? — Rather than revile people for their alleged bigotries . . .

. . . educate and organize us into seeing the larger structural picture that includes us all.

Lack of insight is our complacent culture's most defining characteristic.

We Americans like to pretend that there is no such thing as social or economic class. Or, if there are, that (a) we all have equal access to them and (b) merit decides.

Both propositions are, inarguably, bullshit.

Therefore, from the perspective of generating social change, Mao Zedong and the Black Panthers were correct. If one recognizes how an oligarchically stratified society successfully operates to imprison most people, class consciousness emerges.

Achieving insightful solidarity would make it more difficult for Oligarchs to manipulate us into opposing ourselves.

Evading manipulation would be a first step to apportioning more societal and economic power to "ordinary" people.

Certainly, class consciousness — and the structural understanding that it generates — would put teeth into the United States' comatose labor movement.

Today's phrase is — therefore — "class consciousness".

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Lack of alert class consciousness — explains why American labor self-destructs