Class consciousness is not a category I’ve got much interest in, insofar as I’ve encountered it. William Sewell takes it his object of study in his 1980 book Work and Revolution in France, but not so much as a theoretical category. More along the lines of “what did (some) workers think?” I’m more open to that.
He writes that intellectual historians “analyze the ideas of particular theorists or recount the transmission and transformation of ideas from one theorist to another. But they fail to engage the issue of workers’ consciousness. Intellectual histories of ideology can tell us a great deal about the formally expressed ideas that were available to workers, but they are virtually silent about the workers’ own ideas, which were often very different from those of the theorists. (…) Intellectual historians are usually trained to see thought as emanating from the minds of authors, and thus to continually refer ideas back to the authors and their biographies. This method is quite workable with complete and considered texts that can be fit into the corpus of know authors. But it breaks down when confronted with collective movements of thought of the sort that characterize transformations in workers’ consciousness. In trying to make sense of the workers’ agitation following the revolutions of 1830 or 1848, for example, the ideas we are pursuing were stated partially and in fragments, written down in the heat of action, often by unknown persons or by groups of persons, and are available only in the most heterogeneous forms - in manifestoes, records of debates at meetings, actions of political demonstrators, statutes of associations, pamphlets, and so on. In such situations the coherence of the thought lies not in particular texts or in the “work” of particular authors, but in the entire ideological discourse constituted by a large number of individually fragmented and incomplete statements, gestures, images, and actions. The key problem thus becomes not the delineation of the thought of a series of authors but the reconstruction of discourses out of fragmentary sources.” (8-9.)
He continues: “”Ideas” or “beliefs” are not limited to certain classes of activities or to certain classes of people. They are woven into the very fabric of the everyday life of ordinary people; “all experience,” as Clifford Geertz puts it, “is construed experience.” The problem then, is to understand how people in the past construed their experiences. (…) Although we obviously cannot hope to experience what nineteenth-century workers experienced of to think their thoughts as they thought them, we can, with a little ingenuity, search out in the surviving records the symbolic forms through which they experienced their world. In part this means reconstructing the meanings of the words, metaphors, and rhetorical conventions that they used to talk about and think about their experiences. But because communication is not limited to speech and writing, we must also seek out the intelligible forms of many other activities, events, and institutions: of the practices of artisans’ organizations, of rituals and ceremonies, of the shape of political demonstrations, of legal regulations, or of details of the organization of production. If we can discover the symbolic content and conceptual coherence of all kinds of working-class experiences, then the workers’ adoption of explicit political ideologies will no longer appear as a sudden intrusion of “ideas” from the outside but as the introduction or elaboration of yet another symbolic framework into lives that - like all ours - were already animated by conceptual issues and problems. This approach will enable use to see class consciousness not as the imposition of the ideas of bourgeois theorists on an intellectually inert working class but as a a collective conceptual achievement of thousands of workers who developed or discovered it as a more satisfactory way of construing their inevitably construed experience.
This continued search for meaning embodied in workers’ action implies a certain approach to workers’ economic life. Labor historians have normally seen economic development as a material substratum more basic than, or prior to, ideological awareness. The perspective adopted here denis the ontological priority of economic events. Although economic forces and changes must retain a central role in labor history, they should be treated as continuous with all other aspects of workers’ experience. Processes of production and exchange, like all other social practices, are subject to conceptual limits and symbolic definitions, and their outcomes must be evaluated according to culturally specific standards. To treat economic experiences this way is not to deny their importance. Quite the contrary, it is to capture them as experiences, as being construed by those who lived through them, as having meanings that need to be recovered. Hence I have endeavored to treat from a single perspective phenomena that are usually thought to be essentially different and therefore to require distinct methods of analysis, to treat (…) all as meaningful statements, as a set of interrelated texts that demand close reading and careful exegesis. Only by this means, I am convinced, can we hope to understand workers as active, thinking agents who, in the words of E.P. Thompson, “contributed, by conscious efforts, to the making of history.” This book, in other words, is about the “language of labor” in the broadest sense - not only about workers’ utterances or about theoretical discourse on labor, but about the whole range of institutional arrangements, ritual gestures, work practices, methods of struggle, customs and actions that gave the workers’ world a comprehensible shape.” (10-12.)
“Finally, although the consciousness and the actions of workers must always be understood in the context of a changing larger society, we must also be attentive to what is particular about their version of the disputed world they inhabit. Their views, ideals, and judgments were never just a lower-level recapitulation of the values endorsed by the state and the dominant classes, nor were they ever a simple negation of those values.” (13.)
This reminded me of a bit from the Grundrisse I like very much, where Marx writes “Greek mythology is not only the arsenal of Greek art but also its foundation (…) Greek art presupposes Greek mythology, i.e. nature and the social forms already reworked in an unconsciously artistic way by the popular imagination. This is its material. Not any mythology whatever, i.e. not an arbitrarily chosen unconsciously artistic reworking of nature (here meaning everything objective, hence including society). Egyptian mythology could never have been the foundation or the womb of Greek art. But, in any case, a mythology. Hence, in no way a social development which excludes all mythological, all mythologizing relations to nature; which therefore demands of the artist an imagination not dependent on mythology.” (And just before that the provocative aphoristic “World history has not always existed; history as world history a result.”)
Also reminded me of this quote from Althusser. “[T]he relations of production are first reproduced by the materiality of the processes of production and circulation. But it should not be forgotten that ideological relations are immediately present in these same relations.” (I think Panzieri said something somewhere roughly similar to Althusser here, though it’s not as contiguous with Sewell, that the forces of production and relations of production aren’t really separable. A bit of searching, here it is - “The relations of production are within the productive forces, and these have been ‘moulded’ by capital.” Hence the non-neutrality of technology, the machinery of the factory like the machinery of the state can’t be simply seized and redeployed.)