How to Study Class Consciousness, And Why We Should

With or without class: Resolving Marx’s Janus-faced interpretation of worker-owned cooperatives

“…Rather, class consciousness develops only when individual workers unite with others in theoretical discussion and political actions that catalyze deeper understandings of the capitalist system. The development of class consciousness is not an individual process of enlightenment but is a collectively experienced development of ‘group consciousness’ (Ollman 1976). In this regard, a Marxian concept of class consciousness involves more than individual workers seeking strategies to improve their own economic situation, and more than workers at a specific workplace developing an antagonistic relationship to their employer.…”

International Political Economy of Labour and Gramsci’s methodology of the subaltern

“…Therefore, actively engaging with IPE from labour’s perspective – a strategic IPEL – becomes a ‘vantage point’ to study uneven capitalist development and the immanent processes that enable its transcendence. Or put it differently, if strategic action is ‘the art of creating power’ (Freedman, 2015: xvii), capitalism and class formation from the perspective of labour is a strategic manoeuvre to understand how the working class realises its own interests (incompletely), and the limits and contradictions it finds in such process of class emancipation (also McNally, 2015: 140–141; Ollman, 1987: 67–70). Oppositely, if we solely focus on how capital produces class hegemony, for example, by studying how ‘comprehensive concepts of control’ underpin neoliberal and austerity policies, or how labour is fragmented because of its location in multi-scalar global labour markets, it will be futile to account for how the working class engages with such processes and becomes the main actor of its own history because, no matter what it does, capital always wins.…”

“…Such openness underpins a strategic form of analysis that helps us to both analyse the actual transformation of past and present structures of class power as a result of workers’ strategic action and to, as well as, understand the potential transformation of class structures when pursuing different class strategies. It is only by redefining and updating its objective interests via class struggle that the working class builds its own project of social emancipation (Ollman, 1987: 67–68; Thompson, 2016 [1963]: 9–11). Acknowledging the open possibilities for workers’ action is crucial because it is up to the history of labour – and if possible with the help of partisan scholarship – to discover new forms of class organisation and, most importantly, to prove which strategies serve workers’ interests best (Gramsci, 1971: 150–151, 330–341).…”

“…As a corollary, explaining working-class formation must always be understood in relational terms (Ollman, 1987; Thompson, 2016 [1963]) and workers’ empowerment is in turn contextual to the level of abstraction we are using, including the spatial dimension (Jessop et al, 2008): the empowerment of a set of workers via their conscious engagement with one or several of the above mentioned strategic dimensions and tactics will always be at the detriment of the capitalist class and/or another working-class fractions towards whom they have generated a more advantageous position (e.g. Bieler, 2006; Las Heras, 2018c).…”

Being smart at work: responsibility and resistance in precarious Australian workplaces

“…one-on-one) basis, individual worker responses were contextualised as a function of a wider organisational process. In a manuscript exploring class consciousness, Ollman (2018) argues that workers are the embodiment and personification of capital and wage labour (p. 5). As such, he argues that workers are essential to understanding the social effects of the working relationship because they are the living function of that relationship (Ollman, 2018, pp.…”