Consciousness
Consciousness is awareness an individual or group has about its reality and circumstances. There exist two primary forms of consciousness — personal and social (by a group in society). Among materialists, consciousness is regarded as a property of highly organized matter, consisting in the psychological reflection of reality. Materialist philosophy also views consciousness as conscious being, the subjective image of the objective world; as subjective reality, in contrast to objective reality; and as the ideal, in contrast to and in the unity with the material.
In a narrower sense, consciousness means the higher form of psychological reflection inherent in the socially developed human being, the ideal side of purposeful labor activity. Marxism understands human conscious to be a product of social and otherwise material circumstances.[1]
Types
Class consciousness
Class consciousness is the ability for a class of society to collectively recognize its own interests, place in the mode of production and conditions for liberation. A particular form of this is proletarian consciousness, by which the working class under capitalism realizes its position as an exploited strata and seek the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and develop socialism.
"Trade union consciousness"
"Trade union consciousness" refers to the embryonic consciousness developed among the proletariat in the course of class struggle with the bourgeoisie. Unlike true proletarian consciousness, workers with "trade union consciousness", while developing an understanding of the conflict between worker and owner, do not yet fully recognize the irreconcilability of these antagonisms nor the role of capitalism in their exploitation. Actions done by workers in this early form of consciousness do not extend beyond spontaneous outbursts in the labor movement which are not taken out of a revolutionary desire for struggle and uprooting of capitalism, but more so desperation and vengeance.[2]
See also
References
- ↑ "Consciousness". Great Soviet Encyclopedia.
- ↑ Vladimir Lenin (1902). What Is To Be Done?, Ch. II. "The Spontaneity of the Masses and the Consciousness of the Social-Democrats", "A. The Beginning of the Spontaneous Upsurge".
"In the previous chapter we pointed out how universally absorbed the educated youth of Russia was in the theories of Marxism in the middle of the nineties. In the same period the strikes that followed the famous St. Petersburg industrial war of 1896 assumed a similar general character. Their spread over the whole of Russia clearly showed the depth of the newly awakening popular movement, and if we are to speak of the “spontaneous element” then, of course, it is this strike movement which, first and foremost, must be regarded as spontaneous. But there is spontaneity and spontaneity. Strikes occurred in Russia in the seventies and sixties (and even in the first half of the nineteenth century), and they were accompanied by the “spontaneous” destruction of machinery, etc. Compared with these “revolts”, the strikes of the nineties might even be described as “conscious”, to such an extent do they mark the progress which the working-class movement made in that period. This shows that the “spontaneous element”, in essence, represents nothing more nor less than. consciousness in an embryonic form. Even the primitive revolts expressed the awakening of consciousness to a certain extent. The workers were losing their age-long faith in the permanence of the system which oppressed them and began... I shall not say to understand, but to sense the necessity for collective resistance, definitely abandoning their slavish submission to the authorities. But this was, nevertheless, more in the nature of outbursts of desperation and vengeance than of struggle. The strikes of the nineties revealed far greater flashes of consciousness; definite demands were advanced, the strike was carefully timed, known cases and instances in other places were discussed, etc. The revolts were simply the resistance of the oppressed, whereas the systematic strikes represented the class struggle in embryo, but only in embryo. Taken by themselves, these strikes were simply trade union struggles, not yet Social Democratic struggles. They marked the awakening antagonisms between workers and employers; but the workers, were not, and could not be, conscious of the irreconcilable antagonism of their interests to the whole of the modern political and social system, i.e., theirs was not yet Social-Democratic consciousness. In this sense, the strikes of the nineties, despite the enormous progress they represented as compared with the “revolts”, remained a purely spontaneous movement."