Forgive me if I’m just overthinking or thinking about nothing, I’m just wondering how educated should a worker be to be class conscious?
How I came to thinking was just pondering on people who are gullible to other people’s opinions, and the ethics of ethical education? Maybe just nonsense meta stuff, but what exactly can people do, and how can we teach people to be self-aware enough to listen to what they truly believe in. Especially when it comes to adolescents who are surrounded by information dumping news sources and ideas from all sides, and any one source just has to be charismatic/bold enough for it to stick in someone’s head for long term
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It depends on the goals of education. If you look a bit into Gramsci’s prison notebooks you will find that (formal) education is just an extension of capitalist power. Educated people only serve to reproduce the current power structures and to further the cultural hegemony of the ruling class. You can see that at play at all (most?) higher ed institutions where very little is done to lift off others versus personal advancement towards publications, grant funding, prizes.
Gramsci also has some ideas on how the education system can be rethought to benefit the masses. I’ll let you discover those ideas on your own :)
I think that it serves the intrest of the wealthy in a capitalist society but the formal education system doesn’t have to. The USSR is an example of this. Of course a capitalist government is not going to spend money on uplifting people but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done in a socialist society.
Not overthinking. It’s an important question.
My view is that the proletariat must become as well educated as it is possible to be. Ideally, this should be a class conscious education. It doesn’t have to be formal education but it could be. In the next stage of history, the proletariat will be the ruling class. It must be prepared and ready to rule.
There are problems with formal and informal education. With formal education, students have to rely more on having good teachers; and then they have to rely on the class conscious element in this cohort that is willing and able to deliver a class conscious curriculum.
With informal education, it’s difficult to become an autodidact without some formal training. And either way, it’s then unlikely that someone in this world would happen across Marxism without some guidance.
I agree, that both should result in being good at critical analysis. We’re all gullible, unfortunately. It takes active and concerted effort not to be brainwashed by reactionary propaganda.
As for what to do? Teaching numeracy can’t hurt. But mainly, teach and encourage people to read. Not just basic literacy but really to read and to interrogate texts. This is the crucial element for formal and informal education, to overcome either the lack of tuition or overbearing liberal tuition. I can talk further about techniques if you like.
https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/
One should never stop investigating new things, but let’s not pretend ideology is a matter of credentialed or non-credentialed education or sheer “intelligence” or “knowledge”. These things factor in, but what people think they have the highest incentive to ascribe to is just as important. This is part of the reason that academics aren’t more open-minded on average but just more adept at defending their positions (or seeing where some element isn’t necessary and letting go of it to better defend the core).
That said, Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” is a cool book.
When you are asking do you mean in general or specifically education on class consciousness and Marxism?
I mean the latter, because you have to be self aware and have core principles of empathy/love and solidarity to even realize why class consciousness and Marxist education is needed
I don’t think this true at all. If communism required everyone to behave according to core principles of empathy and love then communism wouldn’t work.
Marx’s analysis does not rely at all on empathy/love. What is needed is to recognize that Marx’s analysis shows that capitalist society will collapse and when it does it can only do 3 things: obliterate humanity, recreate capitalism, proceed to communism. That’s it. If you leave capitalism where it is, it risks exploding and destroying your way of life. In fact, most of your problems come from capitalism.
That’s all self interested analysis. None of that requires core principles beyond taking care of your needs.
I get that, so if I understand correctly, then Marx’s analysis does not rely on saying its human nature to be evil whatever, so the same way it does not also need to rely on saying its human nature ANYTHING, because its all needed to be realized under historical contexts and what has happened that makes said humans that way/does not make them
Thank you for your reply, I had my own biases due to myself being highly sensitive towards kindness and empathy, so I appreciate you, I understand why even if I think my biases are good, they also need to be desconstructed.
There is nothing wrong with being kind and empathetic, but it’s the core of Marxism to attempt a scientific approach at socialism that is independent of particular proclivities or values among individuals. If your system requires people to be “virtuous” according to some arbitrary definition of the term (as all definitions of the term would be), your system will live only on luck and die very quickly.
There are elements of “human nature” which are important to Marx, but they are more fundamental and generalizable, like how humans transform their environment to suit their desires, etc. Ideology is usually relevant on a sociological level, e.g. “In all ages, the ruling ideology is the ideology of the ruling class.”
Personally being kind and empathetic is a good thing, in fact a very good thing, so long as you know where it can lead you astray. This is something that the film “Young Marx” deals with excellently, for example in this scene.
then Marx’s analysis does not rely on saying its human nature to be evil whatever, so the same way it does not also need to rely on saying its human nature ANYTHING
That’s right. To put it briefly, according to the Marxist world outlook, there is no such thing as universal human nature; the way that humans act is historically contingent. If there is such a thing as human nature, it has class characteristics, as well. People in one epoch will tend to act in one way, while people in a different epoch will act in another way. People in capitalism appear to be universally greedy in capitalism but why wouldn’t they be greedy? The system is set up in such a way that if you’re not greedy, you might starve and become homeless.
At the same time, the greediest people are the capitalists and they do two things particularly well: 1. projecting their own personalities onto everyone else, and 2. using news and entertainment media to convince the rest of us that they’re right. Movies like 1900 and I, Daniel Blake raise a challenge to this narrative.
Whatever else all this means, I’m well on board with ‘empathy/love and solidarity’. They certainly make organising easier. And appealing to these traits in most people can make it easier to erode some reactionary views.
The way I see it, there’s 3 ways to interpret human interactions. Very generalized and simplistic overview:
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Realists believe that humans act on self-interest and the pursuit of power/wealth/dominance. This is essentially the human-nature-is-bad camp. Realists believe that world peace and prosperity can be achieved if there’s a balance of powers, where if one individual attempts to dominate the others, the others will band together to stop the dominator, as it is in their self-interest. Example: the way Europeans carved the world after the Napoleonic Wars. Also, the Cold War.
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Idealists believe that humans act on mutual interests based on ethics and morality. This is the human-nature-is-good camp. Idealists believe that world peace and prosperity can be achieved if everyone is an idealist and preferably liberal. Example: US foreign policy focused on enforcing US ideology/hegemony all over the world through economic and military power.
These two worldviews have dominated politics for most of history.
- (Historical) Materialists (Marxists are part of this group) reject both of the above worldviews and instead believe that humans act based on multiple factors, that can be condensed into economic and material conditions. These conditions define class. Dominant classes (or nations) will always exploit the subservient classes (or nations) and define society to reinforce their dominance (i.e. their ownership of the economy), which Marxists are opposed to. Marxists believe that world peace can be achieved if classes are eliminated, and the way to eliminate them is to ensure that the economy is equally shared by all individuals and benefits all individuals equally. Marxists don’t believe that human nature is that important to consider, as humans will be forced to act in certain ways according to their circumstances.
We’ll put. I’ll only add that this,
Dominant classes (or nations) will always exploit the subservient classes (or nations) and define society to reinforce their dominance…
is because they’re compelled to do so by the logic of capital. And abolishing class society, at this stage in history, goes hand in hand with abolishing capitalism and it’s vampiric logic.
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I think that one of the greatest accomplishments of the Soviet Union was its 99% literacy rate which to this day is unmatched in capitalist countries. In comparison, the literacy rate in the United States stands at 79% while 54% of the population read below the sixth-grade level.
Education is really important and my stance on the matter is that the proletariat should be as educated as they are willing to be and are possible of being. Universities should stop being only accessible to the privileged as they are in capitalist countries and instead be opened up to the masses. No longer should technical know-how and the classics be relegated to the rich. In my ideal world, if someone were interested in studying literature, mathematics, or the liberal arts… they should be no barriers (or at least minimal barriers) to doing so.
Education should also be stripped of its elite status to avoid the intellegensia from getting full of themselves (I’m a college graduate and have experienced this form of elitism first-hand). This education (primary, secondary, tertiary, trade…) should also help reinforce communist values in contrast to our current education system which reinforces capitalist values. We should also avoid elevating STEM over everything else.
That being said, there should obviously be some sort of censorship and commentary over certain kinds of subversive works. Some works are inherently reactionary and pose no benefits to the revolution and as such should be discarded. Works such as Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” should only be printed with commentary attached while others such Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” should be forgotten in history. The specifics of how expansive this censorship should be will best be left to someone smarter than me.
I think there might be a correlation with higher education and internalizing doctrinal assumptions about capitalism. At least in the United States. But it really just depends on what you mean. You’re talking about formal education versus just learning about class consciousness throats independent study or life experience etc…
The latter is extremely important. The former can be useful but if anything I think it will funnel more people into further accepting the deeply ingrained ideological assumptions of the elite classes.
People do seem to inherently understand that the game is rigged but they have been conditioned in a million ways to either do nothing about it or to blame the wrong people. It does require some pretty serious deconstruction to try to avoid internalizing this.
I think a good source for this kind of thing is althusser and his work on ideological state apparatuses.
