TOTW: False Consciousness

Watched Women Talking last night (and, you know, fuck Christianity and also pop culture that reinscribes pacifism, but regardless). There was a line in it that explicitly queried if all the people in the colony were victims, including the men and boys who had been raping the girls and women (not a spoiler). This question of people unknowingly or uncomprehendingly acting against their own best interests is one that I think holds special significance to anarchists.

I have long held that a central tension for anarchists is that we believe both a) that people know their own lives and agendas best and b) the conflicting idea that we know best for people. (my corollary belief is that problems occur with one's anarchist thinking when one or the other of those sides gets dramatically over-weighted. Let's not work that metaphor too hard though; seesaws are more fun on the playground).

At any rate, this question of knowing better than other people what they need is an allusion to false consciousness, a term coined by Lukacs and furthered by Marcuse, et al, to denote "people’s inability to recognize inequality, oppression, and exploitation in a capitalist society because of the prevalence within it of views that naturalize and legitimize the existence of social classes." Elsewhere the encyclopedia entry says that it's a term specifically for the proletariat, which, you know, of course, because those stupid working people don't know what's good for them. Anyway.

Obviously this is both a helpful concept (especially when more generalized, I think)--the idea that we all make assumptions based on the inequities and training of our socialization--and a fantastic excuse for managers and politicians of all sorts, including those who sport the circle a, to justify speaking, acting, deciding for (that is, representing) other people.

With what issues do you find yourself falling into that trap? Where do you accept that you do actually know better? How do you avoid it? Where do you recognize it in other people's behavior or rhetoric? How does whatever vision you have for a better life address this conundrum? (this is some people's argument for the superiority of some of the central tenet in bolo'bolo, for example.)

ps: Alternately, suggest a better metaphor for the tension between self determination and desire for dramatic change (to the extent that those are frequently in conflict). The one I used is too binary and now it's bugging me.

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I disagree with both “a) that people know their own lives and agendas best and b) the conflicting idea that we know best for people”. I am an anarchist, and I don’t hold that tension.

Traditionally a lot of anarchists have utopian visions and those do tend to think they “know best for people.” Most people aren’t anarchists and therefore have non-anarchist, capitalist, authoritarian, bigoted, what-have-you agendas by default.

Finding authority revolting does not lead me to think I know what’s best for others, or to fail to see how many people love authority, find it worthy of respect, or at the very least find it convenient and they might as well use it to their advantage since it’s unavoidable.

This recent article by Cyber Dandy mentions how arguments with non-anarchists usually go, and how anarchists choose their own ways of living according to their own ethic. The matter of whether there are more or fewer anarchists, and how much they shape the world around them is secondary. https://anarchistnews.org/content/anarchy-anarchists

Personally, I think most anarchists mostly hold barely disguised versions of mainstream beliefs and culture. For those few who hold ideas that are in stark contrast and would put them in conflict with almost everyone, they pick their battles, if at all, in order to get by.

Personally, I think the anarchist that I am holds clear non-beliefs and rejection of all certainties, and only worships the Unknown, and Strange and the Otherness.

OooOooh nOooo, we have another self-declared anarcho-nihilist! ;)

but don’t you think as an anarchist that the world would be better without states, prison, police, and capitalism? isn’t that believing that you know better than the rest of the world?

it's a critique, not a program. there's a difference between believing something and enforcing participation in support of said belief

I think a) is a lot more authoritarian than you might give it credit for, seeing as it fits perfectly with the capitalist ideology of “rational individual actors” and a system that controls people by leaving each one “free” to focus on our “own” interests. Few anarchist tropes are cringier to me than the uncritical embrace of individuality

And b) is as authoritarian as it sounds, such paternalism fits perfectly with vanguardism, as well as the communist ideology of “shared joy as collective force”, controlling people by lulling them with cultish ideology that handwaves away their individual agency, which is what this short column points at https://anarchistnews.org/content/agency-erasure-radical-subjectivity . Few anarchist-communist tropes are cringier or more clichéd than the embrace of community.

lately i've been thinking about mistaking skill sets for things like "culture", as in security culture

not that don't see why that phrase was coined but the end result can easily be a form of false consciousness: if people learn by rote and don't understand why a practice protects them, it's unlikely that they'll notice problems as they develop or be able to understand a failure. lots of people fling this term around and huge disparities of understanding are pretty obvious.

anyway, I think you can broaden that line of enquiry to include much of this problem laid out in the prompt. I don't presume to know how people should live their lives better than they do, except when they're mistaking a set of personal preferences, or a "culture", or just a straight-up fallacy of "emotional thinking" or whatever... when they're mistaking any of these things for something that's much better understood as a skill set.

nother example? people "doing their own research" about complex medical science. that's a fukin skillset and most people clearly ain't very skilled.

yes, people are often wrong, mistaken. but the topic isn’t “when people are wrong”, but false consciousness, as defined by Lukacs and Marcuse, as opposed to class consciousness. expired marxist concepts only the most antiquated western marxists hold on to.

are you saying the concept of ideology and cultural hegemony (Gramsci) is obsolete? do you really think the working class would spontaneously support the ruling class without throughputs of propaganda? we must continue to raise consciousness and awaken the proletariat.

Hi comrade,

Different anon here.

"we must continue to raise consciousness and awaken the proletariat."

Must we? We who? Certainly you do not mean we nihilist-anarchists that are right now laughing at you referencing Gramsci and this very idea of you playing savior?

You know there's a way for anarchists -that is traditional to anarchists- to respond to this disaster. And it doesn't really involve mutual aid. Statist fools believe you gotta go through established processes in order to make the culprits accountable for their actions. Anarchists don't. Anarchists DIY accountability, for the better or worse.

Competing with neofascists and neolibs ain't a very good idea, as not only you're likely outmatched and possibly outnumbered, you only make yourself yet another flavor of democracy, dissolved into legalism and "the public discourse". We're here to show the way of anarchy, less to do PR about it.

yeah, i'm familiar: when people have the values of their oppressors completely internalized, against their own self interests

i'm suggesting there's other examples where a "mistake" spreads outward, in to a whole culture built on bad assumptions that are harmful to the self or the group identity, as in WEB Du Bois's double consciousness. This was an answer to the prompt.

Did you have a question? Or were you just hoping to whip that dead marxist horse?

if marxism is a dead horse, then you seem to enjoy Ken-L Ration for breakfast

Don't kink shame, anon. Corpses can be sexy too.

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