Standpoint and Class

Midjourney-generated, own prompt & copyright*, free to use.

Introduction

“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” (Marx, Preface)

The fact that ideologies, both doxas and doctrines, change over time gives rise to the question of how that change happens. There are various accounts ranging from Hegel’s Absolute Idealism, through the ‘first principles’ rationalism of the Enlightenment, to the pseudo-rationalist evolutionism of Dawkins’ meme theory. Without getting into the philosophical weeds of where each of these alternatives lie along the conventional idealism vs materialism spectrum, we recognise that one of the unique features of the materialist conception of history sketched out in The German Ideology is the idea that class position has some kind of determinative effect on ideological perspective. Whereas Hegel declared the class of civil servants as “the universal class”, because of their separation from the social production of the material means of life, Marx and Engels asserted that this same separation gave rise to particularly dissociated or inverted forms of consciousness amongst the “ideological classes”.

The relation between class position and ideology is therefore at the very heart of historical materialism. But it remains to be explained exactly how these effects take place.

In 1922 the Hungarian Marxist György Lukács came up with an account of the sources of ideology in capitalist society that asserted a kind of ‘epistemic privilege’ of the working class that potentially could allow them to see the world, not only differently from the capitalist class, but in a ‘truer’ more authentic way that would enable them to play their historic role of overthrowing the bourgeois order. Lukács called this positional advantage “the standpoint of the proletariat”.

The term ‘standpoint’ itself, comes from an early book by Marx and Engels “The Holy Family”, that Lukács references repeatedly in his text. One of the chapter headings in “The Holy Family” is “The Revealed Mystery of The “Standpoint”” in which the text quotes its main target Bruno Bauer, on the subject

First of all, let Criticism itself expound its theory of the “standpoint” in the words of its patriarch, Herr Bruno Bauer.

“Science […] never deals with a given single individual or a given definite standpoint […] it will not fail, of course, to do away with the limitations of a standpoint if it is worth the trouble and if these limitations have really general human significance; but it conceives them as pure category and determinations of selfconsciousness and accordingly speaks only for those who have the courage to rise to the generality of self-consciousness, i.e., who do not wish with all their strength to remain within those limitations” (Anekdota, t. II, p. 127).
B. Bauer, Leiden und Freuden des theologischen Bewusstseins

It’s worth noting in passing, that although Bruno Bauer is a forgotten figure today and no one would ascribe to his work any influence on today’s thinking, the view he expresses here is unmistakably ‘modern’. Despite it’s Hegelian idealist form, contrasting the view of science — general, true — with that of any individual standpoint — particular, hence partial and false — is very much today’s mainstream view of how scientific objectivity invalidates subjectivist and relativist views, more or less by definition.

Although Lukács’ references to the Holy Family throughout his text implies that the notion of “the standpoint” likely finds its origin there, if only in the term itself, his own interpretation does not follow directly from either Bauer’s idea or its criticism by Marx & Engels, but from his own original framework, as we will see further down.

It’s important to recognize the political originality of Lukács’s idea that the capacity for breaking from the dominant bourgeois ideology and evolving an antagonist socialist consciousness could come from within the working class. This was in contrast to the previous ‘orthodox’ classical Marxist views of Kautsky and Lenin on this topic. As is well known, Lenin approvingly quoted Kautsky in his 1902 “What is to be done?” pamphlet on how the working class could not achieve more than “trade union consciousness” without the outside support of specialists in Marxist revolutionary theory from the intelligentsia. To this degree, at least, Lukács was, like his contemporary Karl Korsch, tentatively seeking a theoretical middle way between the orthodoxy and the allegedly spontaneist ‘ultra-left’ heresies of Pannekoek and Gorter which had found an appeal amongst the militant workers of the period.

Nonetheless, for whatever reasons — there was a lot going on in 1920s Germany — the standpoint concept did not take over the international Marxist movement at the time Lukács’ book was published. And in the gathering ideological winter of the Stalinist period, it even triggered some accusations of heresy against him, which he was forced to recant. Certainly by the post-WW2 period, it was absent from the official Marxist discourse. Consequently most of the people today who have heard of ‘Standpoint Theory’ have come across it because it’s later adoption in the 1970s, by parts of the feminist movement. Having thus acquired a sense no longer exclusively tied to the proletariat or class in general. The vagaries of the winds of intellectual fashion — particularly in the academic-adjacent leftist milieus of recent decades — meant that the apogee of the feminist version of standpoint theory was a fairly brief period, before it was overcome by subsequent theories. In fact most people who have heard of standpoint theory today know it mostly as a foil to intersectionality — the problematic ‘other’ to which it (intersectionality), is assumed to be the more progressive successor.

However, if it has fallen out of fashion amongst academia and ‘the discourse’, the question of how material forces shape consciousness — and the evolutions and ruptures of doxa and doctrine both — remains at the heart of any materialist theory of ideology. So in this chapter we will recapitulate the origins and later developments of the ‘standpoint’.

But before we jump back to 1922, we need to take a brief detour through the work done by Charles W. Mills, in his early Marxist period, on the different possible forms of determinations that could relate class and consciousness. A review of Mills work will provide a sorely-needed framework for the more general discussion on what species of determination standpoint theory might be.

Mills on class and consciousness

In “Determination and Consciousness in Marx” Mills groups the different processes that past Marxist authors have proposed as to how the social relations of capitalism shape consciousness into 4 categories. He names these categories as 1. Class domination, 2. Societal appearance, 3. Class interest and 4. Class position. We’ll review each of these in order below.

But first we need to take note of the criteria that Mills asserts will allow us to evaluate proposed mechanisms of “ideational determination” as he terms it. He breaks these down into 3 criteria or issues at stake:

“I think there are at least three crucial issues involved here: (a) the scope of the beliefs affected; (b) the nature of the effect; (c) the reasons why determination has this effect”

Firstly, by scope Mills asks is it all beliefs — including ones about the objects of natural science for e.g. — or just some limited sub-set of beliefs? Secondly, the nature of the effect is whether the outcome is to distort or conceal the underlying reality, is it epistemically neutral, or even does it in some cases aid to demystify the distortions produced by other determinations? We could assign these epistemic valences of negative, neutral and positive, respectively. Thirdly, perhaps most importantly, by reasons is meant by means of what mechanisms or processes does the proposed type of determination produce this effect? This latter issue is often missing from ‘functionalist’ accounts of determination that assert that capitalism requires the support of a certain set of ideas, so these ideas mysteriously appear somehow to serve that function. (Usually these kind of functionalist accounts turn out to be circular reasoning, when subjected to critical scrutiny).

Finally, although Mills does not list it as a criteria at the outset, it is an issue he addresses later in the text, namely how selective is the effect in terms of whose consciousness is effected? That is, is the effect universal for all members of society, irrespective of class? Or is it instead particular to a specific class and affecting others either not at all, or only indirectly?

Before moving on to outline his proposed four categories of determination, Mills begins by closing off a few important dead-ends. The first is on scope. As Mills says, there are long-standing arguments within metaphysics and philosophy over whether determinative causation undermines the truth-status of beliefs. One side being the epistemic nihilist one (i.e. that no-one can really know anything for sure) that any form of caused belief is suspect by the nature of causation. Mills dismisses such metaphysics on the grounds that Marx was demonstrably not an epistemic nihilist. The second preliminary scope question is the reduced one that all socio-economically caused beliefs are equally suspect. Mills asserts that a lot of classical or orthodox Marxist notions of ideology have over-inflated Marx’s original ideas about ideational causation to this socially maximalist scope. This results in well-known problems of self-refutation. If all socially determined beliefs are false, then how can Marxism (or anything else) get outside of this delusion? Either you posit some transparently self-serving exceptionalism (e.g. “because Marxism is real science!”) or you fall into self-contradiction. This is in fact the case that Mannheim levelled against Lukács. (Not entirely without reason, as we will see later). Mills rejects the position that this hyper-extended scope is a reasonable or charitable reading of Marx’s writings on social determination.

The final preliminary dead-end that Mills dispenses with, is the notion of monocausal determination. The reason for this is similar to the self-refutation problem of the over-inflated scope. Given that at least some processes of determination that Marx talks about lead to distortion or an inverted or false picture of reality, then a monocausal determination would leave no “outside” for a demystification critique to come from. Another problem with a monocausal account of ideational determinism in Marx, is that in different places in his writings he appears to outline different processes. Leading some writers to propose that there are two, three or more competing theories within Marx’s account. Mills proposes that a multi-causal account, i.e. of multiple determinations operating within a single ontology (historical materialism), disposes of both problems at a stroke. If some determinations mystify reality, but others are either neutral or act as a countervailing tendency that undercuts the obscurations of the mystifying determinations, then materialist determination of ideas becomes compatible with the observable empirical history of change and progress in ideas.

So, on with the proposed four categories (and a graphical aid to help visualise them)

1: Class domination

The classic statement of this view is in The German Ideology:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; [Mills ends the quote here] hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy, and bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared, the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is expressed as an “eternal law.”
ch 1.b “Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas” (M&E, The German Ideology, emphasis added)

Mills breaks off this quote at the place I have noted. Which means he misses the following segment on the shared mastery between competing factions of the dominant classes. We will look at the theoretical consequences of this truncation in a minute.

There are two things to note here. First that although the genesis of the ruling ideas is particular to the ruling class (specifically to need to mediate and moderate intra-class conflict) its effect on consciousness is not limited to the ruling class alone, but is universal for all classes, or nearly so.

The second point — which is from the section of the quote that Mills discards — is the mystificatory role (in certain social formations, including capitalism) of the political class composition of the ruling class itself in distancing the resultant ideology of class domination, as a social good, from the unmediated material interests of any single particular ruling class fraction. Certainly, individual cynical actors originally involved in the machinations of intra-class competition and uneasy alliance, may well have been aware of the underlying compromises behind the ideological justifications of the day. But succeeding generations of “right-thinking” ruling and ideological classes predominantly accept doctrines such as the separation of powers, uncritically and without any more privileged insight into their true origins than the dominated classes.

This is a very different ideological dynamic from simply noting the exclusive control over the means of production and dissemination of ideas that the ruling class holds — if that was all there was to class domination, as a factor, then it would really only be a footnote to class interest (see 3 below).

Although Mills does not develop this second point, due to his premature truncation of the source material — he does nonetheless emphasize the importance of not falling into an instrumentalist or “conspiracy theory of ideological domination”, as he puts it. He quotes Jon Elster “Ideologists … must believe in what they are doing in order to have any efficacy. They may welcome the assistance of the ruling class, but typically they cannot change their views at a moment’s notice if that class expresses dissatisfaction with them”. In other words, this category of processes shaping ideological consciousness is only partly self-aware to even the ruling class themselves. That is, they are conscious that the ideas appeal to them, but not necessarily clear on the true motivations underlying this appeal. Engels’ famous 1894 letter to Mehring puts it so:

Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives

In other words, this is a very different category from the kind of spin, advocacy or disinformation that government spokespeople or corporate PR people dish out. In that contrary example, the role of domination in privileged access to state and private mass media is also in play. But the content of the messaging is clearly self-serving in an instrumental and self-consciously cynical way. Which is a different category of discourse (covered under class interest below). And one generally more easily seen through by at least a section of the wider audience.

The other aspect is that even though this shared ruling class ideology transcends factional interest and presents itself as systemically essential, it is also not instrumentalist in the sense of being primarily driven by a motive of ensuring the subordination of the dominated classes — what I call the “hypnosis model” of ruling class ideology. This all-too common notion of ideology as an instrument of domination, inverts the causation between the two phenomena. It is not the ruling class ideology that creates domination, but the pre-existing fact of class domination that spreads their ideas. In other words, domination is cause, ideology is effect (in this specific determination).

It is important to go beyond Mills in understanding that the genesis of ruling class ideology is literally self-serving in the sense not of serving their domination over the subordinated classes, but in preventing the inter-class competition, conflict and strife between ruling class families, clans and houses that would risk weakening their collective strength. If uncontrolled, this internecine warfare could escalate to the point of threatening the very foundations of class domination itself. In that sense, ruling class ideology is analogous to the function that tribal honour codes play in more stateless and classless social formations. The ruling class’s relation to the code and system of ideological beliefs that mediate their own intra-class relations, is one of being inside the system of ideas[1].

Unlike the honour codes of stateless tribalist societies though, the modern ideologies of state and governance cannot justify themselves by appeal to age-old tradition. However, in practice, neither are they sustained by a consciousness of their real origin — i.e. the need for competing dominant class fractions to call a truce in the “will to power” struggle to face off the threat of revolution from the subjugated masses. It’s psychologically impossible to maintain the confidence and self-centredness to exercise domination while at the same time being aware that in truth you are reacting against the fear of the potentially greater power of the dominated. {arrogation problem} The collective consciousness of that latter truth has to be repressed (which is not the same thing as entirely forgotten). And so the justification for the ideologies of domination find their foundations not down in the dirt of real world power struggles, but in the lofty heavens of ideals, progress and “historical necessity”. This is the inversion of historical class agency that underlies what I call “protagonistic” ideology. And is also the basis of Mario Tronti’s famous 1960s “inversion” that turned the materialist conception of history the right way up again, after protagonistic ideology had entropically eroded the consciousness of proletarian agency within classical Marxism.

2: Societal appearance

The classic example of this category in Marx is the discussion of the “Fetishism of Commodities” at the end of Chapter 1 in Capital I. For Marx it is the generalisation of commodity relations in social production and the domination of exchange that creates the system appearance of “commodity fetishism”, whereby the “definite social relation between men [sic] themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things”. Mills here quotes Elster on the distinction, borrowed from cognitive psychology, between “hot” and “cold” mechanisms of belief formation: “The hot mechanisms include motivationally based purposes, such as wishful thinking… The cold mechanisms rest on purely cognitive processes and biases, unrelated to motivation”. Societal appearance then, is very much a “cold” mechanism here. Also it is even more universal than the class domination mechanism above, because it grows out of the practices of buying and selling more generally. Of course in a Marxist analysis, a society of generalised commodity exchange and production, presupposes a class of dispossessed, market-dependent workers with nothing to sell but their labour power — i.e. the capitalist class system. But the appearance of buying and selling and “money makes the world go round” is not immediately tied to class in the same way as mechanisms of the ideas of the ruling class being the ruling ideas of the epoch (i.e. class domination).

One of the other examples of societal appearance as an ideological determinant is found not in Marx, but his predecessor, the Ur-socialist William Thompson. Thompson characterized the capitalist system as “The System of Individual Competition” and analysed many of its damaging effects as stemming from the way it set every individual in competition with each other. It’s worth remembering that this is a historically novel feature of capitalism in that the subaltern classes of previous modes of production were not directly in competition with each other in the way that proletarians are in the labour market. Marx obliquely registered this when he compared the peasantry to a sack of potatoes in the 18th Brumaire

The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse.

What’s less clear in Marx, compared to Thompson, is that the very mutual intercourse that proletarians are brought into by capitalism, is also a competitive one. That is, it has a dual or ambiguous nature. On the one hand it makes possible the formation of class consciousness, but on the other it also contains the possibility of division and internecine rivalry. This latter possibility arguably re-appears in Marx, like the return of the repressed, in the problematic dichotomy he draws between the proletariat and the lumpenproletariat. Regardless of marxological questions, the historically novel condition of universal individual competition has potential ideational effects, particularly once capitalist societies stopped openly affirming class status by denying workers the electoral franchise. With the rapid extension of universal franchise in the wake of the epochal shock of the Russian Revolution of 1917, class moved from being an uncontested universally affirmed category, to rapidly becoming a contested concept, a process that was accelerated by the social changes of the post-WW2 era. This process has to be understood as not merely the effect of a barrage of liberal anti-socialist propaganda, but by the societal appearance of the “system of individual competition” that it’s a dog-eat-dog world, where we are all equally in a sink or swim situation.

In passing, its worth noting that bourgeois ideology has raised the historically-specific condition of universal individual competition to the level of doctrine in rational choice and game theory. An appreciation of this would have shown that the research project of analytical Marxism — to try and re-found Marxist economics on the basis of rational choice, game theory and the other pillars of neoclassical micro-foundations — was doomed from the outset. Not because of the “heresy” of dispensing with value theory and the dialectic, as their orthodox critics alleged, but by eternalising the effects of bourgeois social relations as a permanent feature of society and the human condition. The analytical Marxists (including the likes of Jon Elster and a number of Mills’ other reference points) would have been better off reading William Thompson rather than Robert Lucas if they wanted to renew the radical critique of bourgeois political economy.

3: Class interest

Class interest is a “hot” mechanism, in Elster’s terminology. It is also particularist, rather than universal in that class interests are not only different but in conflict, in the usual understanding of the relation between material interests and the class divide. It’s in the bosses interests to maximise profit and the landlord’s to raise the rent. And it’s in our interests to resist both, increase wages, improve working conditions and lower the rent. Much of Marx’s Capital I is taken up with the discussion of the different class interests in the length of the working day, intensity of production, absolute versus relative surplus value production, and so on.

Mills begins by asserting that this is the determinant popularly most associated with the Marxist theory of ideology. As an example, he quotes the political philosopher H. B. Acton “according to Marx and Engels, ‘ideologies’ were false thinking determined by class interests”. Mills adds that this perception — that the effects of class interest are distorting — is widely accepted. He then points out that this leads to the common objection of leading to a “genetic fallacy” — i.e. if ruling class interests lead to ideological distortion, then why would proletarian interests be any less distorting (albeit in a different direction), still less “demystifying” somehow?

Mills responds to this challenge in two ways. First by referring back to his introductory point that many of the objections of self-contradiction regarding Marxist theories of ideology presuppose a monocausal determination which disappear when a multi-causal model is accepted. Further, he proposes that contrary to the common view, that class interest does not itself generate distorted perspectives, that Marx regarded it as “an ‘epistemically neutral’ determinant, not necessarily connected with non-veridical beliefs” (Mills). Rather that class interests prime people to uncritically accept misleading appearances that happen to suit their viewpoint, rather than submit them to further scientific scrutiny. Class interest would then be a “selective”, rather than “generative” determinant (more of which in a moment). Class interest, then for Mills is “…would be more accurately viewed as a stimulus/inhibitor of the inclination to probe the veridicality of ideas largely generated through other causal processes”. For illustration he quotes Marx

The actual difference of magnitude between profit and surplus value … now completely conceals the true nature and origin of profit not only from the capitalist, who has a special interest in deceiving himself on this score, but also from the labourer” (CW 37:167)

Two things are worth noting here. First, like in the quote from “Ruling Class and Ruling Ideas” (TGI) above, deception is first and foremost the self-deception of the dominant party. Second, in contrast to that prior quote, here the ideational mechanism is operating not at the level of the ‘ideological superstructure’ but within the base itself, between capitalist and hired labour.

Mills reinforces the point he wants to take from this quote by adding “The ‘special interest’ of the capitalist contributes to his acceptance of an illusory belief about the nature and origin of profit, but it does not produce it — the capitalist structure does”.

If that accounts for the role class interest plays in shaping the views of the capitalists, what does it do for the workers? Mills notes that the “naive” common view of the topic he outlined at the start has even lead some critics to point to the acceptance of the bosses worldview by many workers as a refutation of the imputed Marxist theory of ideology. If class interests compel ideological views, why do so many workers start with the bosses' outlook, rather than the one that should hypothetically be their own, according to the “objective interests” that should, speculatively, be theirs? Again Mills points out this is an only apparent contradiction due to the assumption of monocausality in ideological influences. Mills asserts that Marx is not saying “…that proletarian class interests necessarily generate objective complexes of ideas, but, far more modestly, that the labourer — unlike the capitalist — has no ‘special interest’ in being deceived”. To conclude the point he quotes Michael Levin

The working class are also caught within the same world of appearances as the bourgeoisie… Politically the bourgeoisie have every interest in reinforcing the the prevailing picture of society… The proletariat, ideally at least, do not share this motivation… Dissatisfaction with the status-quo provides the potential for seeing through it.

Emphasis here being on “potential”, in contrast to any sense of necessity or inevitability. It’s also worth taking a note of that “ideally at least”, qualifier, which we will have to come back to later when we look at the role of differential oppressions that can divide the proletariat against itself.

The role of “dissatisfaction with the status” is a pointer to the next determination — class position. But before we leave class interest we have to put down a placeholder for a major topic that is not included in Mills schema, that apriori falls under class interest — the role of conscious propaganda in the service of class interests.

At the time of writing, the Israeli assault on Gaza has triggered a barrage of propaganda in Western media that demonstrates, once again, the continuing relevance of the “propaganda model” laid out in Herman and Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent”. Many things about global capitalism have changed since the days of the Vietnam War, but this aspect has not.

If the role of media manipulation, propaganda and disinformation could be put down to a limited marshalling of public opinion in favour of a particular foreign policy, that otherwise has limited wider ideological effect, the same cannot be said of the efforts of the global network of neoliberal think tanks spawned by Hayek’s Mont Pelerin Society and his disciple Anthony Fisher’s Atlas Network. This private capitalist extension of the ideological superstructure is an ideological war machine in the pay and service of particular fractions of the capitalist class of the current hegemonic powers (principally the USA and its allies within the OECD group of developed states).

This phenomenon deserves a fuller discussion, but for now let’s accept that it’s a feature of the polysemy of the word ideology and that this political dimension of conscious ideological warfare in the pursuit of class interests is a separate category. What Mills is interested in his schema of materialist determinations are the processes of ideological formation, rather than ideological promotion. That is, the processes that lead to the belief formation that are prior to, and mediate, the perception of collective interests — and indeed collective membership. The level at which all deception is first and foremost self-deception.

4: Class position

Mills opens by noting that many people lump class interest and class position together. He asserts that in fact different and distinct processes of determination are at work, explaining:

What we have here are not divergent epistemic attitudes, conditioned by class interest [over profit vs wages for eg], towards the same “appearance” of social reality, but significantly different experiences of that reality, arising out of the differential social locations of the agents involved.

So this is again a particularist rather than universal process. Each class has a different experience, by dint of its different position and role in social production. But this is more of a “cold” process than a “hot” one. The working class undergoes its particular experiences as a class-in-itself, not yet a class-for-itself. And therein lies the nub of the difference between potential and realisation that we are going to come back to later in relation to standpoint theory.

The Marx example that Mills pulls out for this is from the 18th Brumaire, but will be very familiar to anyone who has read the earlier chapter on Mills and the “protagonistic” reading of The German Ideology. Talking of the different worldviews of the Legitimists and the Orleanists, Marx remarks:

Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of different and distinctly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations

Now, I actually think this is not a great quote for illustrating this particular determination. Not least because it is not immediately evident what separates that quote from “The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas”, taken from the first TGI quote above that introduced the class domination determination. That said, it may well have been the best quote Mills could find because, when all’s said and done, other than in TGI Marx rarely wrote about ideology and he never developed it as a core concept in his critique of political economy. Certainly Lukács would have had a much easier time writing on “The Standpoint of the Proletariat” if Marx had explicitly articulated his views on how class, ideology and standpoint related to each other.

But if Marx can’t help us, it is worth reviewing the difference between class domination and class positionality schematically. Having already gone beyond Mills in identifying class domination as a generative determination, as opposed to a merely selective one, we can draw the contrast between a determinant stemming firstly from intra-class tension (domination) as opposed to one from inter-class tension (positionality). Secondly that one determination is generated from the perspective of the dominant class and the other from that of the dominated. Thirdly, in terms of epistemic effect, that one is mystificatory (negative valence), whereas the other is potentially revelatory (positive value). Fourthly, that class domination is a necessary, apriori determination in that domination is itself dependent on the ideological resolution of the intra-class struggle in order to present a united front in the inter-class struggle to maintain the subjugation of the dominated class or classes — whereas class positionality only allows for the possibility of developing an alternative standpoint to the perspective of the dominant classes, one that can only be actualised by collective struggle and is therefore the aposteriori result of class recomposition, not its presupposition. Finally, that class dominance, as an ideological determinant, is an effect of intra-class internalisation, whereas class positionality is the result of inter-class externalisation. We’ll come back to this in the section on domination and externality below.

Epistemic effects

Throughout the four different categories of determinations, Mills discusses the epistemic effects of each. One of the common prejudices around the word ‘ideology’ for example, is that the term itself implies a kind of epistemic toxicity — that is a process of distorted thinking that fundamentally falsifies reality in some way and obstructs any closer approach to objectivity. One of the words most commonly associated with ideology is ‘illusion’, as per the last Marx quote above (in fact given the availability of the 18th Brumaire and the absence of The German Ideology at the time of the controversy over Bernstein’s revisionism, this specific textual association between the superstructure and illusion was probably formative for the classical Marxist misreading of ‘ideology’)

Mills lays out the epistemic effects of his categories in the following manner. Societal appearance is held to be epistemically distorting, as any belief-shaping mechanism that is both universal and “cold” has to be, by elimination — i.e. otherwise it wouldn’t have any detectable effect to set it apart from straightforward perception. Mills argues that class interest is epistemically neutral, i.e. it doesn’t inevitably have to be distorting by definition of its mechanisms. He also argues the same, perhaps more controversially, about class domination, based on the Marxist idea of a potential, future proletarian ruling class who would not need to mystify its emancipatory project (according to orthodox Marxist doctrine). Finally, as regards the epistemic implications of class position, Mills not only argues that it is not necessarily inherently toxic, but that it is even possible to imagine that the subordinate class might even have a potential epistemic advantage in seeing through the distortions produced by more toxic determinations . Which, in a nutshell, is the gist of the ‘standpoint hypothesis’.

This idea of the possibility of this kind of epistemic privilege of the working class, to go alongside its putative historically privileged role as the “universal class” that can only liberate itself by destroying the class system, thus liberating humanity as a whole, is the foundation of Lukács’ theory of the standpoint of the proletariat, which we will look at in the next section.

As already noted above under the heading on class domination, I depart from Mills’ assessment of the epistemic effects of the different determinants in one or two important aspects which will be revisited in the concluding remarks to this chapter.

Generative vs selective determination

There is one final matter arising from Mills’ framework we need to address before moving on to Lukács.

In his discussion on societal appearance Mills contrasts it with the preceding determination, class domination

The important point, then, is that capitalism itself generates misleading categories and beliefs in the minds of those enmeshed in its structure, quite apart from any efforts by ruling class intellectuals. In Jon Elster’s (1985, 19) terminology, drawn from the vocabulary of cognitive psychology, Marx is implicitly relying on the distinction between “hot” and “cold” mechanisms of belief-formation: “The hot mechanisms include motivationally based purposes, such as wishful thinking…. The cold mechanisms rest on purely cognitive processes and biases, unrelated to motivation.” Societal appearance acts as a “cold” mechanism, like a mirage. Unlike class domination (which is in principle neutral, since a proletarian ruling class would theoretically not need to employ ideological mystification), this determinant does have intrinsic epistemic consequences for the resulting ideas and beliefs, since the appearance is, by hypothesis, illusory in nature

Mills goes on to assert a complementarity between class domination and societal appearance, in which the latter plays a “generative” role in creating illusion, bolstered by the “selective” role of the former in amplifying this effect, at the expense of other possible determinations.

The way that class domination contributes significantly to the maintenance of ideological hegemony is by giving an authoritative theoretical backing to these appearances, thereby underwriting the illusory elements of the inchoate belief-systems people develop about the social structure. By providing the clearly-defined and well-articulated matrices of the “legitimized” ideational patterns, and by conceptually blocking and diverting the development of others, the ruling ideology reinforces and crystallizes what would otherwise be only one tendency (even if a strong one) among various ideational possibilities. […] Class domination, therefore, should not be seen as an otiose determinant, for it buttresses societal appearance. The two in fact are really complementary, neither being capable on its own of supporting a long-term ideological hegemony.

So what is the advantage of drawing this distinction between generative and selective mechanisms? The theory of evolution by natural selection gives us a model here. By splitting determination into two independent processes, one generative, one selective, we can model an evolutionary process that produces outcomes that look as well-fitted, in terms of function and efficiency, to their environment as if they had been consciously designed that way — except without any conscious designer. All that’s needed is a generative function that can introduce random variation into the reproductive process, combined with a selective ‘fitness’ function that is able to prevent reproduction of less fit and promote that of more fit variants. If we look at the concrete processes of conveying ideas and beliefs — not just top-down from authoritative sources, but ‘horizontally’ in peer to peer social intercourse and cultural exchange — it’s easy to see that the imperfections of human communication are a source of introducing natural random mutations into the process of ideological reproduction.

This gives rise to the first, and still arguably the most common, approach to ideology-theory — what I would call ‘naïve empiricism’. A paradigmatic example would be Richard Dawkins’ meme theory. In this “god of the gaps” view, humans start with a position of ignorance about reality and make up fairy stories to explain everything they think needs explaining. The stories that fit appearance better than others get selected for as ‘memes’. There is one, and only one, materialist determinant in the naïve empiricist view, which is “science” understood through the lens of scientism. The naïve qualifier here refers to the sociological naivety that disregards the effects of social power structures (class, patriarchy, white supremacy) both on ‘pre-scientific’ meme generation and even on science itself (‘race science’ anyone?). With naïve empiricism the base assumption is that the historical ratchet of scientific progress will increasingly ‘narrow the gaps’ and good ideas will increasingly replace the bad. The persistence of ‘bad ideas’ then becomes a social mystery, a bit like theodicy is for religion, that needs to be solved. The most common response is the ‘deficit model’ of ideology — where ideology is seen exclusively as untruth and anti-science — where bad ideas persist due to a cognitive deficit in the masses, exploited by fraudulent racketeers.

Given that ignoring the effects of social power on ideas is contradicted by the everyday experience of most people, the second approach to ideology-theory is one that recognises the effect of power structures on generating and promoting ideas that suit them. This is the ‘instrumentalist’ ideology-theory which has many variants, but I will take Herman and Chomsky’s “Propaganda model” as paradigmatic. In this model, the existence of power centres with defined interests and control over the mass media is taken as read. The misleading or mystifying effects of ideology are then seen as conscious manipulation according to the rational agenda of the material interests of the agents of constituted power.

At first sight this model may appear to contradict naïve empiricist views. But in fact they still share most of their base assumptions — namely that science is the one true materialist determinant on thinking and that the motivated reasoning, disinformation and ‘anti-science’ must be coming from the outside. So I call this second ideology-theory the exogenous theory of ideology.

If naïve empiricism is the ideal type of a ‘non-theory’ of ideology and instrumentalist theories like the propaganda model are exogenous theories, then that leaves open the possibility of an endogenous theory for the historical materialist approach. That is, one in which “bad ideas” persist in social circulation, not because of the stupidity or lack of scientific capacity of the masses, or the evil machinations of powerful bad actors, but because certain of the material determinations within historically-specific relations of production — like Marx’s fetishism of commodities — are inherently epistemically negative.

Ultimately one of the main gambits of this wider text is that only endogenous theories are ideology-theories worthy of consideration. But now it’s finally time to begin at the beginning of standpoint theory, with Lukács.

György Lukács and the standpoint of the proletariat

In 1922 Lukács published a collection of essays and longer texts under the title of “History and Class Consciousness” (H&CC). Many of the essays had been published in the preceding period from the end of the First World War in 1918, but two longer texts, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” and “Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organisation” were written specifically for the book publication. These two longer pieces were less didactic than the earlier essays, written for publication in party newspapers and journals, and as a consequence, have a less well organised and sign-posted order of exposition (Darstellung), consisting more of a meandering enquiry of philosophical inquiry (Vorstellung). Which is a long-winded way of saying, they can be quite hard to follow for the lay reader. Perhaps for this reason, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” is a text more often name-checked in subsequent Marxist literature, than one whose elements — the theory of the proletarian standpoint included — have permeated into wider circulation. In fact, it’s arguable that if it hadn’t been for the work of Nancy Hartsock and other feminists in the late 1970s and early 80s, we probably wouldn’t be talking about ‘standpoints’ or ‘standpoint theory’ at all.

But before we get on to that more recent (re-)emergence of the idea, we need to review what Lukács originally proposed in his 1922 text. Even if in his later 1967 preface to a re-publication of H&CC he then resiled from many of the most important pillars of his original construction (which we will return to at the end of this section)

Readers note: What follows is a fairly lengthy review of Lukács’ text, if you are browsing the text, you might want to skip directly to the “Summing up Lukács’ contribution…” section below, and then come back to the detailed review later if you want to see where those conclusions came from in more detail.

Although Lukács’ general theory of class consciousness is also laid out in other texts in H&CC, namely “What is Orthodox Marxism?” and “Class Consciousness”, neither earlier essays contain a worked-out conception of the standpoint of the proletariat (although the phrase itself does appear), so we are going to narrowly focus on the “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” text.

The text of “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” is split into three major headings, “I: The Phenomenon of Reification”, “II: Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought”, and “III: The Standpoint of the Proletariat”. Of course the Lukács of 1922 would insist that all three parts form an organic whole and each succeeding section builds on the foundation of the ones before it. But for our purposes here, we’re going to break these headings and their sections down into parts for a number of reasons.

First, as already said, we are only interested here in the genesis of the standpoint concept alone. Wider questions of reification, alienation, the Hegel-Marx relation, the role of ‘totality’ and the metaphysics of “the identical subject-object of history”, are valid subjects for a discussion elsewhere of the fuller philosophical impact of this dense text, but we will have to take a pass here.

Secondly, there’s just an awful a lot of stuff in the premises and positions of the wider text that are just indefensible from a critical materialist viewpoint, to be frank. We’ve already mentioned in a previous chapter here, that Lukács’ identification of commodity fetishism (a universal, ‘cold’, systemic appearance, in Mill’s schema above) with Marx and Engels’ use of ‘ideology’ (a particular, ‘cold’, class position effect, limited to the “ideological classes” of the non-producing superstructure) is completely mistaken, from the outset. Even if that fundamental error can be excused by lack of access to The German Ideology in 1922, other logical problems of Lukács’ premises and reasoning, are inherent and non-contextual. As indeed he was later to mostly admit in 1967.

In summary, we’re going to say, crudely, that the first heading “I: The Phenomenon of Reification” is the premise of the argument — and that we broadly reject this premise — i.e. that “…the structure of commodity-relations [yields] a model of all the objective forms of bourgeois society together with all the subjective forms corresponding to them”. Which is not to say that it can’t be one of a range of multiple factors influencing the “subjective forms” of bourgeois society, e.g. ‘ideology’ in the conventional sense. Just that as a single, totalising, monocausal premise, it leaves no outside determinations and ultimately creates the kind of problems of circularity that Mills illustrated in his argument against monocausal explanations in general.

Again, crudely, lets call the second heading “II: Antonomies of Bourgeois Thought”, the epistemological consequences of the premise. There’s a lot in this second section — the discussion of bourgeois rationalisation (influenced by Weber and Simmel) as the attempt to reimpose rationality in a narrow field to flee from the irrationalities of the system as a whole, for e.g. — that is in many ways brilliant and rich fodder for social theory and philosophy, particularly in the field of science, epistemology and the limits of positivist utopianism. But again, we need to skip over this to get to our target, the standpoint.

In the third, final part of the piece, “III: The Standpoint of the Proletariat” Lukács makes an unpromising start with the opening paragraph

In his early Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx gave a lapidary account of the special position of the proletariat in society and in history, and the standpoint from which it can function as the identical subject-object of the social and historical processes of evolution. “When the proletariat proclaims the dissolution of the previous world-order it does no more than reveal the secret of its own existence, for it represents the effective dissolution of that world-order.” The self-understanding of the proletariat is therefore simultaneously the objective understanding of the nature of society. When the proletariat furthers its own class-aims it simultaneously achieves the conscious realisation of the — objective — aims of society, aims which would inevitably remain abstract possibilities and objective frontiers but for this conscious intervention.

Frankly this has the appearance of idealist apriorism of the form — because the proletariat represents the dissolution of the current world-order, therefore its self-understanding is necessarily the objective understanding of the nature of society. But in the second part of the opening section Lukács counters by asking, rhetorically, what change has been brought about by this standpoint, or even its possibility, and answering himself “‘In the first instance’ nothing at all”. He follows up by clarifying that the starting point is that “the proletariat shares with the bourgeoisie the reification of every aspect of its life”. In other words, metaphorically writing a check that the sections that follow will unpack and explain how we get from A to B.

What follows is broken down into 6 sections. Later editions of “History and Class Consciousness” have added individual titles to these 6 sections, but they don’t appear to be in the original next and are, if anything, somewhat misleading as a guide to the actual content, so I’ve ignored them here.

Section 1 asserts that while objective reality presents the same appearances to bourgeois and proletariat, their different positions within the economic process push them towards different perspectives on those appearances, based on different relationships to mediation. Section 1 is mostly taken up with how the vantage of the bourgeoisie pushes it towards the positivist error of mistaking appearances for reality in an unmediated way (Lukács frames this as taking objective reality for the “thing-in-itself”). The rest of this section is a digression in how this narrow outlook is reflected in bourgeois historiography, economics, philosophy and so on. The proletariat doesn’t get a look-in in this section.

In section 2 the proletariat at last makes an entrance, although still struggling to get a word in edgewise between all the Kant and Hegel talk. Despite multiple digressions on “is vs ought” in Kant, a side-swipe at “vulgar Marxism” and empiricism, infinite progression and bourgeois thought, mediation, the totality of social situations and the interconnectedness of all things, the absolute necessity of dialectics and mediation of everything, we still manage to collect one or two fragments possibly relevant to why the proletariat is not trapped in “immediacy” along with the bourgeoisie. For instance

For the social existence of the proletariat is far more powerfully affected by the dialectical character of the historical process in which the mediated character of every factor receives the imprint of truth and authentic objectivity only in the mediated totality. For the proletariat to become aware of the dialectical nature of its existence is a matter of life and death, whereas the bourgeoisie uses the abstract categories of reflection, such as quantity and infinite progression, to conceal the dialectical structure of the historical process in daily life only to be confronted by unmediated catastrophes when the pattern is reversed. This is based — as we have shown — on the fact that the bourgeoisie always perceives the subject and object of the historical process and of social reality in a double form […] For the proletariat social reality does not exist in this double form. It appears in the first instance as the pure object of societal events. In every aspect of daily life in which the individual worker imagines himself to be the subject of his own life he finds this to be an illusion that is destroyed by the immediacy of his existence. This forces upon him the knowledge that the most elementary gratification of his needs, “his own individual consumption, whether it proceed within the workshop or outside it, whether it be part of the process of reproduction or not, forms therefore an aspect of the production and the reproduction of capital; just as cleaning machinery does, whether it be done while the machinery is working or while it is standing idle.” The quantification of objects, their subordination to abstract mental categories makes its appearance in the life of the worker immediately as a process of abstraction of which he is the victim, and which cuts him off from his labour-power, forcing him to sell it on the market as a commodity, belonging to him. And by selling this, his only commodity, he integrates it (and himself: for his commodity is inseparable from his physical existence) into a specialised process that has been rationalised and mechanised, a process that he discovers already existing, complete and able to function without him and in which he is no more than a cipher reduced to an abstract quantity, a mechanised and rationalised tool.

To try and unpack this — basically as the capitalist is exercising agency, as the order-giver in the organising of production, social reality appears in the dual form of his own subjectivity opposed to the objectivity of the economic situation within which he is working. But because this two-fold subject-object separation does not apply to the worker, whose subjectivity is brutally repressed in his or her objectification as labour-commodity and order-taker, their only recourse to overcome this alienation and resist the truncation of their subjectivity lies in the discovery of dialectics. In short, the worker’s subaltern role in the production process potentially makes them into dialecticians — which is their only way out, according to Lukács. He repeats this position a number of times, for e.g.

And once again it is important to emphasise, that as in every immediate and abstract form of existence as it is simply given, here, too, we find bourgeoisie and proletariat placed in an immediately similar situation. But, here too, it appears that while the bourgeoisie remains enmeshed in its immediacy by virtue of its class role, the proletariat is driven by the specific dialectics of its class situation to abandon it.

It’s dialectics all the way down, in Lukács world.

Lukács opens section 3 with a warning that it would be wrong to see this antagonist proletarian consciousness as “the inevitable consequence of concentrating masses in large factories, of mechanising and standardising the processes of work and levelling down the standard of living” in the way that bourgeois sociologists like Weber or Simmel might. This would imply an unmediated relationship between the commodification of labour and workers becoming conscious of their own commodification. Lukács cautions

It is self-evident that immediacy must be abandoned at this point. If the attempt is made to attribute an immediate form of existence to class consciousness, it is not possible to avoid lapsing into mythology: the result will be a mysterious species-consciousness (as enigmatic as the ‘spirits of the nations’ in Hegel) whose relation to and impact upon the individual consciousness is wholly incomprehensible. It is then made even more incomprehensible by a mechanical and naturalistic psychology and finally appears as a demiurge governing historical movement.

But the closer we get to where the how of the distinctiveness of the proletarian standpoint should be, the more we end up with the “why” instead, and in an increasingly teleological historicist form

it is the proletariat that embodies this process of consciousness. Since its consciousness appears as the immanent product of the historical dialectic, it likewise appears to be dialectical. That is to say, this consciousness is nothing but the expression of historical necessity. The proletariat “has no ideals to realise.” When its consciousness is put into practice it can only breathe life into the things which the dialectics of history have forced to a crisis; it can never ‘in practice’ ignore the course of history, forcing on it what are no more than its own desires or knowledge. For it is itself nothing but the contradictions of history that have become conscious. On the other hand, however, a dialectical necessity is far from being the same thing as a mechanical, causal necessity.

In terms of a materialist determination, we’re actually regressing from the position in the previous section.

In section 4 little is added. There is a brief mention of the proletariat near the start, again in “historic role” mode

This image of a frozen reality that nevertheless is caught up in an unremitting, ghostly movement at once becomes meaningful when this reality is dissolved into the process of which man is the driving force. This can be seen only from the standpoint of the proletariat because the meaning of these tendencies is the abolition of capitalism and so for the bourgeoisie to become conscious of them would be tantamount to suicide.

And then the rest is more relentless Hegel-ing and a bit of Bernstein-bashing for lack of dialectics and insufficient Hegel-worship. There is some discursion on Marx as a theoretician of tendency, rather than ‘facts’, which is interesting in its own right, even if brief. But adds nothing specifically to the question of the origins of the proletarian standpoint.

Section 5 is more general philosophising about history, relativism and metaphysical dogmatism, utopianism and dogmatism and why dialectical materialism is none of the above. A brief mention is made of the role of the proletariat in sweeping all this away, once it comes to “its own class point of view”, but nothing further on how that actually happens, causally-speaking.

Finally, section 6 attempts to sum up. Opening with the barrier posed by reification to one and all, Lukács continues

the structure can be disrupted only if the immanent contradictions of the process are made conscious. Only when the consciousness of the proletariat is able to point out the road along which the dialectics of history is objectively impelled, but which it cannot travel unaided, will the consciousness of the proletariat awaken to a consciousness of the process, and only then will the proletariat become the identical subject-object of history whose praxis will change reality. If the proletariat fails to take this step the contradiction will remain unresolved and will be reproduced by the dialectical mechanics of history at a higher level, in an altered form and with increased intensity. It is in this that the objective necessity of history consists. The deed of the proletariat can never be more than to take the next step in the process

So whether the proletariat takes the next step or not, is not given, but the steps they have to take to get anywhere are set by history. As presaged by Kant’s ontological proof of the existence of god, apparently, in a passage way too good not to quote

The eminently practical nature of this consciousness is to be seen in that an adequate, correct consciousness means a change in its own objects, and in the first instance, in itself. In Section II of this essay we discussed Kant’s view of the ontological proof of God’s existence, of the problem of existence and thought, and we quoted his very logical argument to the effect that if existence were a true predicate, then “I could not say that precisely the object of my concept exists.” Kant was being very consistent when he denied this. At the same time it is clear that from the standpoint of the proletariat the empirically given reality of the objects does dissolve into processes and tendencies; this process is no single, unrepeatable tearing of the veil that masks the process but the unbroken alternation of ossification, contradiction and movement; and thus the proletariat represents the true reality, namely the tendencies of history awakening into consciousness. We must therefore conclude that Kant’s seemingly paradoxical statement is a precise description of what actually follows from every functionally correct action of the proletariat.

And on that bombshell, we’ll wrap up the section-by-section review of Lukács’ The Standpoint of the Proletariat.

Summing up Lukács’ contribution to the standpoint

Striking a balance on what level of detail to review Lukács text is not easy. I could have just presented my conclusions, but I thought it was worth trying to fine-comb out the bits where he gets near to looking at the potential origins of the standpoint. Really, mostly to demonstrate that when he later self-critiqued the text in 1967 as being “idealistic” he wasn’t exaggerating or being overly harsh in that judgement. But also to expose how little substance there was there, in terms of looking for a materialist determination of how the specific class position of the proletariat could lead to an epistemic advantage over the bourgeoisie in (potentially) seeing through the mystifications of the latter’s ideological worldview.

In short, the general problem of Lukács theorisation of the standpoint is not the general existence or possibility of the existence for a different perspective, based on different social position, which seems intuitively plausible on any number of bases (which we will look at later). But really his specific account of the causative genesis of this alternative standpoint. How is it exactly that the proletarian standpoint is alone able to see what the bourgeois class vantage point cannot? That is, how to penetrate the “veil of reification”?

I propose that by basing his starting premise on the nature of reification as a total and closed system of consciousness formation, Lukács has created a trap for himself that he needs to find an escape from — a kind of theoretical escape room challenge. How can there be an outside to the closed ideological system that a monocausal universal determinism creates?

Unfortunately, the solution Lukács proposes ends up being mostly teleological. He accepts that the starting point for ‘actually-existing’ proletarian consciousness is what he calls elsewhere “false consciousness”. But he asserts that because history is dialectical and the proletariat have the unique historical mission of going beyond the contradictions of the capitalist present, they contain, as a potentiality the possibility of an “imputed consciousness” — i.e. the one they must have in order to fulfil their historical mission. (NB the term “imputed consciousness” is his own terminology from his 1967 auto-critique/preface). From such a position it is very hard to go forward. Not to mention, it makes defending oneself from the charges of Karl Popper, that Marxism is a theological “historicist” belief system, practically impossible.

Lukács’ problem is two-fold. On the on hand, by making fetishism the sole and unique determinant of miscognition, he starts without the role of class, as this particular determinant (fetishism) is a ‘cold’ and universal phenomena (2: systemic appearance), not linked to class positionality (4) or class interest (3). On the other hand, in order to reintegrate class back into the system (otherwise it is hard to justify as historical materialism at all) he has no ‘internal’ relation, because fetishism is already a totalising effect. So he’s forced to introduce an external mechanism — a historical telos — as a deus ex machina that can impel the desired movement.

Arguably it is impossible to relate the determinants of societal appearance (fetishism) and class position (standpoint) in a rational way, if you start from a position of monocausality. As we have seen Charles Mills observed above. Therefore, bridging the gap, via standpoint, ends up with an idealist teleological fudge because all other routes are blocked by the starting assumption of there being just one single universal systemic — and thus classless — determinant. Based on a tendentious reading of chapter 1 of Capital 1 and the indefensibly mistaken identification of fetishism with ideology.

In 1967, four and a half decades after the initial publication, Lukács wrote a new introduction to a re-edition of “History and Class Consciousness”, which combined both self-criticism and self-justification. In his self-critical reflections on “Reification…” Lukács judged that his text had suffered from idealism and that this stemmed from his rooting his analysis in fetishism, an phenomenon that arises from real appearances, but in the sphere of circulation. A more properly materialist analysis, in his retrospective view, would require starting again from within the sphere of production, using productive labour as the foundation stone.

Although Lukács’s first exposition of the standpoint concept led ultimately to the dead end of intractable tangles of either self-contradiction or indefensible teleological reasoning, it is worth recalling the point that he re-emphasises in the final paragraph of “Reification…”

History is at its least automatic when it is the consciousness of the proletariat that is at issue. The truth that the old intuitive, mechanistic materialism could not grasp turns out to be doubly true for the proletariat, namely that it can be transformed and liberated only by its own actions, and that “the educator must himself be educated.” The objective economic evolution could do no more than create the position of the proletariat in the production process. It was this position that determined its point of view. But the objective evolution could only give the proletariat the opportunity and the necessity to change society. Any transformation can only come about as the product of the — free — action of the proletariat itself.

The rejection of any Kautsky-style inevitabilist determinism, the insistence on the central and irreplaceable role of proletarian self-activity in raising their own consciousness to the level required for their own liberation, remains the fertile seed of a concept whose unfolding can give a foundation to the old slogan that “the emancipation of the workers must be the task of the workers themselves”

Nancy Hartsock and the feminist standpoint

Coming from an activist feminist background, Nancy Hartsock decamped from the US to Paris in the early 1970s to study Marxist theory, both class and contemporary. Coming down firmly in the Marxist-Humanist camp, contra Althusser and his successors, she found in Lukács’ writings on standpoint the beginnings of a way of theorising a feminist epistemology and theory of liberation.

This resulted in her 1978 essay “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism”. As the title suggests and Hartsock recounted, this text was in reaction to the debate occasioned by Heidi Hartmann’s “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism”. Specifically in response to the call of Iris Marion Young, in her counter to Hartmann, for a feminist reworking of historical materialism . One that would resolve the limitations of the eclectic “dual theory” approach of taking existing “gender-blind” historical materialism and then bolting on feminism in the manner of a computer game expansion pack.

Although she took her main inspiration from Lukács’ standpoint, rather than attempting to work directly from the texts of the 1920s, she took heed of the then recent self-critical 1967 introduction written by Lukács on his earlier work, of which she later said:

Lukacs, in his self-critical Introduction to History and Class Consciousness , made several points worth remembering. He noted that he had made three errors: first, his separation of the natural and social worlds, leading to his view of Marxism as a social philosophy, but not a theory of the natural world; second, following Hegel, his equating objectification with alienation; and third, perhaps most fundamental, his failure to ground his argument against the contemplative attitude of bourgeois thought in the activity of labor. He began, not with a consideration of work, but rather with the complicated structures of a commodified and reified economy.
(ref)

She goes on to say that although her text will try and address all three failings, in her view the last one is the most transformative. So her repackaging of Lukács original commodity-centric standpoint of the proletariat into a more generic standpoint theory, centres on the (exploitative) extraction of surplus labour, specifically the unwaged labour of women in patriarchal family and social relations, in the feminist standpoint.

In her introduction to what a standpoint is, from a specifically feminist perspective, Hartsock elaborates:

…women’s lifes make available a particular and privileged vantage point on male supremacy, a vantage point which can ground a powerful critique of the phallocratic institutions and ideology which constitute the capitalist form of patriarchy

A standpoint, however, carries with it the contention that there are some perspectives on society from which, however well-intentioned one may be, the real relations of humans with each other and with the natural world are not visible. This contention should be sorted into a number of distinct epistemological and political claims: (1) Material life (class position in Marxist theory) not only structures but sets limits on the understanding of social relations. (2) If material life is structured in fundamentally opposing ways for two different groups, one can expect that the vision of each will represent an inversion of the other, and in systems of domination the vision available to the rulers will be both partial and perverse. (3) The vision of the ruling class (or gender) structures the material relations in which all parties are forced to participate, and therefore cannot be dismissed as simply false. (4) In consequence, the vision available to the oppressed group must be struggled for and represents an achievement which requires both science to see beneath the surface of the social relations in which all are forced to participate, and the education which can only grow from struggle to change those relations. (5) As an engaged vision, the understanding of the oppressed, the adoption of a standpoint exposes the real relations among human beings as inhumane, points beyond the present, and carries a historically liberatory role.
(emphasis added)

A key point in Hartsock’s originally anti-essentialising framework, is in point number 4 — which follows on from Lukács concluding remarks above. That is, that an alternative vision is available to the oppressed, but is not a given. That it can only be achieved through the practice of [collective] struggle. First ‘available but not given’ pushes back against the positivist determinism of an individual viewpoint directly producing a vision, in simple reflective and unmediated way. Second it is anchored in the ‘praxeological’ epistemology of Marx’s second thesis on Feuerbach (that Hartsock explicitly references) that truths must be proved/established through material practice, rather than ‘discovered’ via idealistic contemplation.

Sadly it is precisely these key anti-positivist elements of Hartsock’s theorisation that were later unceremoniously dumped by the other feminist writers operating under the “standpoint theory” label, like Smith, Harding, etc, transforming it back into a liberal framework of an ‘essential’ epistemic privileged, ontologically granted to individuals by simply being a woman (or other oppressed identity) and neutering its radical potential. Clothing that ascribed ontological privilege of being with terms like ‘experience’ does not materially change that automatic individual passive accretion is substituted for the contingent gains available only through active practices of collective struggle. Antagonist standpoints are won, or lost, but never granted. And only collectively, never individually.

In the 1983 text, Hartsock makes three key moves away from Lukács’ 1922 problematic. First — perhaps most importantly — she mostly (but not completely as we will see) shifts from a ‘systematic appearance’ to a ‘class domination’ determination. In the process she partially breaks with the original problematic of ideology as false consciousness and reification. In so doing, she rescues the standpoint concept from its premature funeral announced by Adorno and Horkheimer. And, despite her ultimate failure to overcome the defensive pushback of liberal ideology, the fact that standpoint theory remains a talking point today (however currently academically unfashionable) is down to her work successfully re-opening Lukács’ foreclosed problematic.

If we go back to her five points, point 1 — “class position not only structures but sets limits on the understanding of social relations” — is a straight-forward restatement of the conventional historical materialist view of the relation between material life and ideology.

If point 1 is relatively simple, the next point 2 is the complete opposite, in having 3 distinct, questionably conjoined subclauses — “If [i] material life is structured in fundamentally opposing ways for two different groups, one can expect that [ii] the vision of each will represent an inversion of the other, and in systems of domination [iii] the vision available to the rulers will be both partial and perverse.” These three subclauses are structured sequentially as a premise and two consequences. In all honesty, I don’t think the consequences logically follow from the premise (even if there wasn’t an obvious circularity between i) & ii)). But that doesn’t mean that the general intent of the argument necessarily falls, so long as we can establish a causal relationship between dominance and a “partial and perverse” perspective. Note that this is an epistemically negative effect of class domination, that is generative in its own right, rather than merely selective/transmissive (contra Mills).

The passage from point 2) to 3) is important. As we will see in a minute, the “partial and perverse” view of the dominant group may still look like it’s being attributed to the systemic appearance effect of reification/fetishisation, as in Lukács, but item 3) is where it becomes clear that we’re actually opening out onto a different paradigm here, that of class domination. To wit, as 3) makes clear — “The vision of the ruling class (or gender) structures the material relations in which all parties are forced to participate, and therefore cannot be dismissed as simply false.” First note that here ideology is not simply “false consciousness” because it reflects the material reality of domination. But second, most importantly, the dominant vision is not a universal vision — like Capital I’s fetishism of the commodity — but one particular to the dominant class — here we have clearly moved back onto the terrain of “the ideas of the dominant class are the dominant ideas of the age” — i.e. class domination.

However the need of the worker/woman to internalise not only the language of the boss/man, but also their worldview, is actually determined by their class position within the relationship of domination. In other words, to take direction from the exploiter, you have to internalise their way of looking at the situation, in order to understand what they want from you. Otherwise you risk being excluded, with at the very least a loss of livelihood if not, in certain circumstances, the threat of direct violence or worse. This is an effect of the class position, internal to domination directly, not just the social influence of ruling class monopolisation of the mass media and publishing. In short, Hartsock’s reformulation is not just moving the origin point of the ideological dynamic from systemic appearance to class domination, but to class domination in conjunction with class positionality. And class domination not at the societal, superstructural level, but within the base of social production.

This shift in the origin-point of the distorting effects of ideology, from the relations of production of society as a whole — which through fetishism appear to individual members of that society as if it were an external force, of mysterious, impersonal origin — to a source internal to the relation of dominance itself, around the command of labour and the exploitative appropriation of its surplus, means that the potential epistemic advantage of the dominated party in possibly seeing through the mystification of the dominant “partial and perverse” viewpoint escapes from the charge of abstract genetic fallacy by being located instead in the concretely different positional and experiential situation of the subject.

It’s vital to emphasise this possible reading, because when Hartsock first unfolds how the vision of the dominant group comes to be “partial and perverse” she says this…

As to the second claim of a standpoint, a Marxian account of exchange vs. production indicates that the epistemology growing from exchange not only inverts that present in the process of production but in addition is both partial and fundamentally perverse. The real point of the production of goods and services is, after all, the continuation of the species, a possibility dependent on their use. The epistemology embodied in exchange then, along with the social relations it expresses, not only occupies only one side of the dualities it constructs, but also reverses the proper ordering of any hierarchy in the dualisms: use is primary, not exchange.

On the one hand she is reinforcing the point she has just been making in the text up to here — that Marx’s epistemological method involves going below the forms of appearance presented by the sphere or circulation and finding the real dynamics of the system inside the realm of production — and that the five elements of the standpoint she has presented reflect his method — “If one examines Marx’s account of the production and extraction of surplus value, one can see in it the elaboration of each of the claims contained in the concept of a standpoint.” However, on the other hand, it looks like the “partial and perverse” viewpoint of the capitalist finds its origin in “the epistemology growing from exchange” — i.e. from outside the sphere of production back in the sphere of exchange.

If that sounded like a reversion to Lukács’ reification, then worse is to follow…

The third claim for a standpoint indicates a recognition of the power realities operative in a community, and points to the ways the ruling group’s vision may be both perverse and made real by means of that group’s power to define the terms for the community as a whole. In the Marxian analysis, this power is exercised in both control of ideological production, and in the real participation of the worker in exchange. The dichotomous epistemology which grows from exchange cannot be dismissed either as simply false or as an epistemology relevant to only a few: the worker as well as the capitalist engages in the purchase and sale of commodities, and if material life structures consciousness, this cannot fail to have an effect.

So here we have moved back from a declared intention to go beneath the surface of appearances of the realm of exchange to find the real dynamics inside the realm of production, to a position where “the material relations in which all parties are forced to participate” operate only in exchange, not in production.

Thankfully the rest of Hartsock’s text, taken up as it is by the ideological and social effects of women’s unwaged work in domestic labour, locates the dynamic firmly back within the sphere of production itself — necessarily so, given that unwaged labour is not mediated by exchange, by definition. Nonetheless, this internal inconsistency within the 1983 text can mislead readers into missing the potential novelty within Hartsock’s reinterpretation of the standpoint.

I’ve belaboured the point here, but I think it is important to make, given the relative (and in my opinion, unjustified) neglect that Hartsock has fallen into, to emphasise the originality of her reformulation of, and incipient break from Lukács’ original stillborn formulation of the standpoint.

The above is not a full consideration of the whole of Hartsock’s text, most of which is, as mentioned, taken up by considerations of the putative sexual division of labour and how this affects childhood socialisation into the socially constructed gender roles, the internalisation of masculinist viewpoints and so on. All of which also fed into the various controversies that raged around the wider inter-feminist debate around the dual systems controversy, Hartsock included. The questions raised by that wider debate we will have to come back on in a subsequent section. But for now we are restricting ourselves to the theoretical grounding of the standpoint concept itself.

The mixed legacy of Hartsock’s feminist standpoint

As noted above, Hartsock’s original intent with her standpoint essay was to counter Hartmann’s dual systems proposal and defend a ‘single system’ Marxist feminist approach. For reasons both internal and external, she lost out the hegemonic position to other tendencies. Even within the feminist writers and theorists who initially adopted standpoint epistemology with enthusiasm, including figures such as Sandra Harding and Dorothy Smith, Hartsock was relatively marginalised, both in terms of actual academic status and heft, and ideologically as an actual Marxist feminist. Ultimately, Hartsock and the other Marxist-feminist advocates of single system analyses got caught in a pincer movement between dual system anti-Marxist ‘Materialist feminists’, the defection of many other left feminists to post-structuralist or postmodernist perspectives (via Gramsci-Eurocommunist or Gramsci-Althusserian pipelines) and the overtaking of them all by radical liberal frameworks like intersectionality. The latter impelled by the material failure of white feminists, radical leftists included, to properly recognise or give voice to black and PoC experiences. On a more geopolitical scale, it would be utopian to think that Marxist feminism could survive unscathed the tidal shifts of academic fashion in the wake fall of the Berlin Wall and European official Communism, regardless of internal theoretical considerations.

Nonetheless, while eschewing the ‘theoreticist’ delusion that the socio-historical success or failure of ideological tendencies is directly or even substantially affected by intrinsic problems of theory, given that this is our focus in a theoretical text, it is worth reviewing some of these issues in Hartsock’s articulation. Even if these are to some extent side-issues relative to the bigger picture of why her version of standpoint theory fell out of fashion.

The first, most obvious theoretical problem is Hartsock’s over-reliance on dogmatically dualist oppositions. In many ways she inherits this from Lukács, with his idiosyncratic ‘Hegelian Marxist’ traduction of the dialectic from open-ended triadic forms into dogmatic binaries — like reification being the separation of subject and object, only undoable by the proletariat’s unique ontological capacity to become “the identical subject-object of history”. This rigid reliance on binary oppositions, leaning heavily on Hegel’s lord/bondsman dialectic, meant that Hartsock’s schema was not easily adaptable to adding in a third factor, most immediately, race, to the class and gender binary. In later writing, reviewing the reception and response to the feminist standpoint, Hartsock accepted that the difficulties of expanding her schema to incorporate the oppressions of race specifically (but also other factors like heterosexism, disability, colonial subalternity, and so on) were the biggest inherent obstacle it faced.

The second problem, which is also linked to the first, is Hartsock’s partisan adherence to the Marxist-Humanist tendency in general and Lukács in particular. She has a pronounced tendency to attribute Lukács’ positions to Marx. Similarly her fifth and final point in the definition of the standpoint that “the adoption of a standpoint exposes the real relations among human beings as inhumane, points beyond the present, and carries a historically liberatory role.” shows the extent to which she identified Marxism with humanism. In the first instance this presents problems of flexibility over time, if you have nailed your colours to the mast of a single reader of Marx and gone so far as to put their words in his mouth, its hard to walk that back at a later date. Secondly, in Hartsock’s particular conjuncture, the drift of other Marxist feminists down the Althusserian post-humanist road to post-structuralism, left her with little shared ground for ongoing dialogue with those thinkers. Even today, writers engaged in the recomposition of a Marxist-feminist ‘single system’ perspective (Aruzza, Fraser, et al) mostly steer clear of Hartsock’s partisan position as post-autonomist Marxisms tend to incorporate a balanced appreciation of both humanist, Althusserian and some post-structuralist legacies, without any apriori exclusions.

The final problem is the one we already looked at above. Namely the lack of consistency in fully moving the grounds of the analysis from the sphere of circulation to that of production.

Domination and externality

Given the incompleteness and inconsistency of Hartsock’s move from systemic appearance (fetishism/reification) to class domination and class positionality in the determination of the standpoint, its worth taking a moment to propose one possible new vision of how the viewpoints of both parties can be shaped by the positional dynamics directly within the relation of domination-in-production itself.

Externality within the immediate process of production

Arthur experienced that dull throbbing sensation just behind the temples which was a hallmark of so many of his conversations with Ford. His brain lurked like a frightened puppy in its kennel. Ford took him by the arm.

“An SEP,” he said, “is something that we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem. That’s what SEP means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out, it’s like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won’t see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye.”
“Life, the Universe and Everything”, Douglas Adams

Who amongst us, in our working lives, has not heard the boss utter the immortal words “It’s not my problem, that’s your problem — just get it done”. The reality of domination between boss and worker is that the boss gets to choose which problems are ones they want to be involved with and which ones they want to ‘delegate’. Of course there’s a huge range in this practice, from the reasonable (no one wants to be micromanaged, after all), through to the utterly unreasonable or even sadistic, from the worst bosses. But in either form it’s taken so much for granted within the work relationship that don’t give it a specific name. I’m going to call it “externalising the problem” or just “externalisation” for short.

In economics we recognise a category of ‘externalities’ but these relate to the non-labour elements of the means of production, more specifically as transformed into the outputs of production. In the conventional category of economic externalities, we include waste products, and unintended effects of production like release of greenhouse gases, toxins or other pollutants or other environmental effects. While these ‘side-effects’ are important, especially when we are addressing the roots of the climate crisis, limiting the concept of externality to non-labour factors of production only results in a truncated, one-sided view of the full production process.

Returning to our example, if the boss gives you a task without bothering with a list of specific instructions, because they know your skills and capacity make that unnecessary, that’s not externalisation in the meaning I’m looking for. Ordinary delegation is not of interest to us here. When, however, an incompetent or bullying boss hands out a task they themselves don’t know how to complete and then shut down any queries or objections with a “I don’t want to hear it! Get it done by the end of the week, or you’re fired!” — that’s externalisation. Yes, it’s part of domination — the request for further discussion or help is shut down with threats of one kind or another. How do I define domination? As a first approximation, let’s say “domination is the non-consensual appropriation of the agency of another through direct or indirect coercion”. That immediately raises the question of how this is different to exploitation, but I’m going to put a pin in that for now, to come back to in a minute.

So much for externalisation through direct, face-to-face confrontation. A lot of externalisation in the workplace happens more organically and mostly without such confrontations. I’m talking about the gap between how the office thinks the shopfloor works and how the shopfloor knows the shopfloor works.

Let’s take the example of a traditional manufacturing or goods warehouse/distribution workplace, where the division between mental and manual labour is physically and spatially mapped out between an office space and a shop floor. In the collective mind of the office, they control the process of production by issuing the necessary paperwork for orders and tasks, for the shopfloor to follow and implement. Meanwhile, on the shop floor the workers adjust the flow of the work to a rhythm that prevents them from being either too stressed at crunch points or too bored at potentially slower times. In addition, they fill in the gaps of the paperwork issuing from the office, where either the numbers on the sheet don’t match the goods on the floor, preliminaries have been forgotten or any other of the myriad possibilities that open up between the theoretical world of the office and the practical world of the shopfloor.

In some cases, these improvised practices can’t fill in the gaps or overcome the incoherence in the paperwork issued and the foremen or women have to go the the office and show them something is unfixably wrong with that paperwork. These are the only mistakes the office actually has brought to their attention, so in their ignorance they assume these are the only ones they make. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Here we have a mostly passive externalisation. The work process that the office thinks is going on — its model ‘rationalisation’ of the process — is continually being amended, fixed and supplemented by the improvisational practices of the shopfloor. A greater or lesser amount of the latent knowledge of the production process has been externalised into the workforce of the shopfloor. The supposed strict divide between mental and manual labour has been subverted, mostly through simple adaptation rather than intentional design.

We can frame the effects of domination’s externalisation in terms of a movement of disintegration and reintegration. As the office issues multiple commands to the shopfloor, with little understanding of the process of implementing them (thanks to externalisation), through organisational entropy the contradictions, inconsistencies and plain errors that arise from their interaction create a disintegration effect. The shopfloor then has to improvise a way to reconcile these conflicts and inconsistencies, through an autonomous process of reintegration.

However that process means that over time, without management intervention that goes beyond ‘business as usual’, a portion of the knowledge necessary to organise the whole production process, tends to leak away from the office to the shopfloor. Potentially this can result in increased workers control over the process of production over time. In turn, if that potential can be actualised as power and exercised for workers benefit, then management are incentivised to find ways of reorganising the work process, possibly with additional fixed capital in the shape of new technology, to “decompose” — as the operaisti put it — this autonomous power and regain mastery of the process — a kind of counter-reintegration, if you like.

Another way of looking at it is through the opposition of epistēmē to tékhnē in Aristolean philosophy. As seen through the eyes of Weber’s bourgeois rationalization, epistēmē represents the rationalized knowledge, command and control of the bureaucrat, technical specialist or boss over the process of production, and tékhnē the “mere craft” of the wage labourers so directed. Marx wrote “A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.” (Capital I, pt III, ch 7). But of course architects don’t build their structures with their own hands any more than Elon Musk personally makes Teslas.

With the division between mental and manual labour in the historically peculiar form of social production under capitalism, the imagination of the architect — the epistēmē — has to be conveyed and translated into the tasks and jobs of the builders and craftspeople — the tékhnē. And as anyone who has ever worked on a building site and born witness to the continual rows between architects, civil engineers and building contractors, the course of this ‘rationalized’ process — like true love — never runs smooth. The collective assemblage of the different ‘imaginations’, that mark out human constructions from spiderwebs, we can call an instance of ‘concrete intellect’ — in a nod to Marx’s conception of the ‘general intellect’ in the Grundrisse. The progressive, entropic leakage of the ‘concrete intellect’ of the process of production from the grasp of epistēmē to the purview of tékhnē suggests we name this process technical externalization.

Externality in the “social factory” at large

But the concept of externalisation -> disintegration/reintegration really adds explanatory power beyond what we might normally lump in with exploitation only when we leave the relatively closed loop of the immediate process of production in the individual workplace and enter the sphere of everyday life and social reproduction more generally.

Within the relationship of waged labour, the reduction of living labour, the whole human being, to a partial facet — the labour-power purchased by capital for a specific set of tasks — is so ubiquitous a feature of our lives that we take it for granted. We divide our lives between in-work and outside-of-work as if this was a natural part of the human condition. ‘Work’ becomes like the sea to a deep sea-diver — a specific environment that we adapt to when we are in it, reverting back to our normal existence as soon as we leave it again.

But the idea that we are only ‘partial’ (‘objectified’ in Lukács’ terminology) within work and, upon leaving it, become fully ourselves again, is an illusion. One dispelled by looking more closely at all the unwaged activity that goes on outside of the workplace to reproduce our own existence and that of others we care for.

If, in place of the shopfloor wage-worker we take the unemployed single mother on welfare as our exemplar proletarian[2], the disintegrative effects of the capitalist division of labour in social reproduction become more pronounced.

As an unemployed single mother, our proletarian has to deal with, at the very least, the following different institutions or bodies. The welfare office in relation to basic income, fending off the ‘return to work’ inquisition, maybe a different government department regarding child benefit, the family doctor for her children’s and her own health needs, the local government housing office in relation to her housing payments, her landlord, the kids schools and/or nursery, and if she’s been unlucky, social services or maybe the police might be sniffing around as well. And there’s probably a lot more I haven’t thought of.

Each of these bureaucracies, institutions or bodies puts demands and challenges on our proletarian, demanding attendance at various places around the city at different times, with neither thought nor care for incurred costs or any of the other bodies and whether any of the conflicting demands they are all putting on her — on top of the unwaged labour of cleaning, shopping, cooking and caring for young children — are contradictory or impossible to adequately satisfy at the same time. Each body externalises the problem of trying to reintegrate the disintegrating effect of these uncoordinated, relentless and at best unsympathetic if not outright hostile demands for additional unwaged work, onto her alone. And if she is truly alone, without the support of family, friends and wider social network, it may well be impossible, one way or another.

We can call the material aspect of this struggle for subsistence reproductive externality. Although our example was an unemployed single mother, in reality most working class people have to navigate some version of this institutional obstacle course, whether employed or not, mothers, fathers or childless.

The very existence of a distinct sphere of reproduction, separate and aside from social production, is an historic innovation of capitalist society innately linked to the creation of commodified labour — the proletariat. In previous class societies, where the base producer class were direct producers, their subsistence activities were not divided between ‘productive’ and ‘reproductive’ work. That distinction does not exist for peasants, nomadic pastoralists, hunter-gatherers and forest peoples (although the work/leisure distinction still does). When primitive accumulation threw our peasant ancestors off the land to become industrial (or rural) wage labourers, their subsistence activities outside of wage work, acquired this newly separate existence, outside the social production organised by capital. In an epochal sense, the sphere of reproduction — as a new distinct sphere of activity— was created by externalising, on a societal scale, the reproduction of living labour.

But returning from the scope of the historic to the contemporary, there is an additional aspect beyond either technical or reproductive externality. Which is the psychological effect to proletarian existence of living in a society where there is no agency or power that ever interacts with you as a whole person. Whether in the workplace, or in dealings with the fragmented public and private agencies of the wider social sphere, all interactions are only dealing with the partial, objectified facet of your existence that particular agency cares about. Whether in the pursuit of profit or bureaucratic diktats. If ‘society’ was a body that you were supposed to be a member of as a non-objectified, whole human being. One that cared for your entire existence and needs as an individual. Then in the end Thatcher had a point. Under capitalism, there really is “no such thing as society”. Other than your network of family and friends, no one and nothing particularly cares whether you live or die.

This final form of externality I call existential externality. In many ways this treads on similar terrain to what many writers have tried to conceptualise under ‘alienation’. But I would argue that many alienation discourses tend to locate its origins in the systemic effects of bourgeois society as a whole (systemic appearance) rather than an effect integral to class domination and domination in the immediate production process.

The combination of these three forms of capital’s externalisation of the productive organisation, bodily and psycho-social needs of the proletariat — technical, reproductive and existential externalities — can be combined under the general heading of social externalities — in contradistinction to the environmental and natural resource externalities of conventional economics.

The organising challenge for reintegration

As we already mentioned, within the workplace, the progressive leakage of real knowledge of what the shopfloor workers have to actually do to make the office directives into reality, creates an organising opportunity for workers to increase their control over the work process. This in turn can be leveraged by organised workers, both defensively against attacks on their terms, conditions and pay, and offensively in obtaining real gains. This is well-trodden ground in left theory and organisational practice and culture.

Outside of the workplace, at first sight the contrast between the shopfloor workers in relation to the office and the single mother in relation to the myriad of uncaring or hostile institutions that dominate her material existence, couldn’t be stronger. The shopfloor workers are many, they outnumber the office staff and the management. The single mother is (potentially) alone in the face of multiple institutions, some employing hundreds or thousands of staff. But the apparently impossible odds stacked against her, are in some ways an illusion that community organising can dispel. Because in reality she is not alone, living alongside her in the same community are many, many others in similar conditions to her.

Whether in the workplace or in the community, organising is the answer to transform the challenge of reintegration that externalisation poses the waged or unwaged worker from an individual struggle against impossible odds, to a collective project of mutual empowerment. And whether organising in the workplace or the community, effective organising needs to reflect the needs of the members for reintegration of all the facets of their existence, including recognition of their dignity as a whole person. But for the potential opportunities that externalities present, they must first be recognised.

The ideological side of the reintegration challenge

What we just discussed is only the organisational side of reintegration in the face of the disintegrative effects of social externalisation. If collective organising is the solution to the threat of being crushed as an individual faced with these challenges, there is still the political and ideological side of that process. And when Hartsock talks about the standpoint as something to be achieved, through struggle, this is where standpoint emerges from mere situation.

So long as the individual proletarian in the workplace or the community is mentally and ideologically dominated by the viewpoint of the boss or the institutions, then they experience the gap between that viewpoint and all the problems that they are forced to deal with, that have been externalised from the consciousness and care of the dominating power, as a form of cognitive dissonance. There are many different individual strategies to escape from the mental anguish of this cognitive dissonance, from macho stoicism, escapism through ‘hobbies’, extreme sports or drink, drugs and ‘living for the weekend’, retreat into inner fantasy lives, and so on. All of them ultimately losing strategies and mostly self-harming in the long run.

Only through a political process of connecting and communicating with those in the same subaltern position, the comparison of experiences whose discussion or even admission is forbidden by the dominant power, can people collectively begin the reintegration of all those aspects of their lives that have been externalised by domination. In effect, the reintegration of their whole selves, so brutally truncated by subalternity and subjugation.

In the process is formed a new, collective viewpoint, the basis for a new standpoint. Which becomes the standpoint only through the process of collective action against the powers that be. There is no theory without practice and there is no antagonist ideology without practical proof of the capacity to exercise autonomous agency for change through direct action. Deeds not words are required to make a standpoint real. In that sense, the standpoint is the ideological counterpart to the autonomous agency it makes possible, but that it in turn needs to grow and reproduce.

The concept of collective action needs some nuancing, however, if it is not to be mistaken for only the most dramatic moments of open rebellion — the strike, the insurrection, the slave uprising. These extreme high-risk events are normally the culmination of the growth of the antagonist standpoint, not its starting point. Conditions of extreme repression, such as military occupation by hostile foreign or colonial power, or historical slavery in the Caribbean and Americas, may not be the norm everywhere, but they are instructive to understanding the dynamics of how non-confrontational ‘passive’ and covert resistance first lays the ground for future open rebellion. The covert resistance of crypto languages like cants or creoles that sound like one thing to the boss or overseer but convey a different, hidden message to fellow speakers. The creation of occulted cultures of resistance, through song, story or hidden initiate cults. All these and many more are examples of autonomous cultural technologies of resistance that could (and have) fill many volumes. The point is that these are still the results of the activity of oppressed groups, not in themselves, but for themselves.

But if standpoints are won, not granted, not only through covert resistance and noncompliance, but also in the high-risk actions of open confrontation, they can be lost as well as gained. The standpoint does not represent some automatic ideological ratchet that can only go in one direction. Catastrophic and historic defeats can destroy the confidence, self-reliance and morale of antagonist standpoints, just as victories can build them. In a world dominated by capitalist ideology, the advertisement warning that “the value of your investment can go down, as well as up” seeps into our consciousness and reminds us that there are no guarantees. “Historic missions” notwithstanding.

Given the concept of exploitation, is externality a redundancy?

So, as I mentioned above, there’s an obvious potential objection to posing externality as an additional concept to accompany our already-existing concept of exploitation. Is the former not already included in the latter? Do we not risk confusing matters, rather than clarifying them, by adding redundant or otiose terms? When the boss tells us “it’s your problem to sort out”, is that not just dumping extra work on us? A quantitative increase in exploitation, rather than anything qualitatively different?

Hopefully the above discussion will have given some food for thought about why thinking of how domination forces externalities onto the dominated can expand our understanding of domination beyond the cold exchange value maths of exploitation.

But in addition it helps us to answer a natural question raised by Hartsock’s claim that in systems of domination the view of the dominant will be “partial and perverse”. From the naïve empiricist perspective, this makes no sense. If the dominant party controls all the communications structure and commands all the available information, then surely their viewpoint will be the most complete possible?

What factor, internal to the exercise of domination itself, could result in the truncation and distortion of that dominant viewpoint? The fact that the exercise of domination involves externalising not just raw work, but also problems, and that ‘out of sight is out of mind’, leads in my opinion to the opposite view to the naïve empiricist one. That the more extensive the exercise of dominant power is, the more disconnected from the full reality of the very system it commands it becomes.

Externalisation allows us to see the causal mechanism, inherent and internal to domination itself, that both truncates and distorts its own perspective and allows the potential for an epistemically superior view from the viewpoint of the dominated.

Final caveat

This digression into domination and externality was necessary, in my opinion, to provide an alternative grounding for the standpoint that Lukács failed to provide and Hartsock opened the way to, but did not fully attain. But we have not yet begun to talk about oppression, or answer the questions raised by the feminist dual systems debate that Hartsock was attempting to resolve. To do that we will have move beyond presenting domination as a simple dipole between exploiter and exploited. Both within exploitation, when the exploited are divided by discrimination, within workplace and community, and also outside of it, through mechanisms of exclusion that may even prevent people from even entering the workplace at all. All of that will have to wait until the next chapter on ideology and oppression. But for now, I believe we have enough to put the concept of the standpoint on firmer ground.

Summing up

Let’s start with a review of Mill’s “4 corners” model, in relation to how we might categorise historical Marxist approaches to ideology and politics.

Classical Marxism of Liebknecht, Bebel, Kautsky, Plekhanov, etc, is primary a ‘corner 3’ model. i.e. classes exist in an ontologically prior way, they have opposing interests over the distribution of surplus value and the class struggle is the result and this determines the evolution of the ‘ideological superstructure’. It’s a simple model, intuitively plausible and straight-forward to proselytise to the masses. In its historical context it mirrors the popularity of Darwinism amongst the socialist movement of the time. Rather than the social darwinism of the right, we could call this a ‘socialist darwinism’— the idea that the social pressures of the class struggle would lead to a natural evolution of the proletariat into the “grave diggers of capitalism”.

This general ‘natural evolution’ outlook has a number of associated consequences. One being an essentially neutral model of ideology as simply the reflection in thought of the class interests being served. So, from a socialist point of view, the bourgeois have their ideology (bad) and we have our own ideology (good). Describing Marxism itself as simultaneously both science and ideology did not appear to any of the Marxists of the classical era as a problem (it is worth emphasising that the mutually exclusive opposition of science versus ideology had not yet been established).

But another consequence of this view was that socialism was basically the workers struggle in defence of proletarian interests. A perspective that does not, in itself, contain any pointer to going beyond or outside of the class system itself. This is why Bernstein’s heresy presented such a challenge to the classical Marxists and prompted the defensive formation of an Orthodox Marxism — workers were supposed to not just defend their interests within capitalism, but go on further to overthrow it, because… er… Marx said so?

Bernstein’s attack was two-pronged: On the one hand he simply denied that capitalism was innately doomed and countered that there was no reason it couldn’t go on developing and (potentially) delivering material benefits to workers forever. On the other he attacked Hegelianism as an idealist philosophy of history that asserted a teleological end-goal towards which history was inevitably programmed to go, and that this teleology had infected Marx and Engels who had never completely freed themselves from the siren song of their old master.

It’s a sign of how strong the hold of the ‘corner 3’ model was over most of the orthodox reaction to the Bernsteinian heresy that they mostly concentrated their fire on the first prong of his attack, by trying to prove that in some way or other, capitalism was innately self-destructive. In German this discourse was christened “Zusammenbruchstheorie” (roughly, Systemic-collapse theory) in the purely economic sphere, with contributions ranging from Henryk Grossman to Rosa Luxemburg. More ‘superstructural’ variants included the idea of capitalism ending in catastrophe through global war, following Hilferding’s Marxist reading of the liberal John Hobson’s theory of imperialism (later taken up by Bukharin, Lenin, et al). But no one really attacked the base assumptions behind a simple ‘corner 3’ model and the reality that there was nothing necessarily revolutionary inherently within it. The proof of which is that today all political parties descended from the social-democrat tradition are trivially and uncontroversially Bernsteinian.

However, as well as the automatic breakdown models of Zusammenbruchstheorie, the popularity of Bernstein’s revisionism amongst SPD workers required a modification of the socialist darwinist notion of the working class evolving the ‘correct’ class consciousness necessary becoming capitalism’s gravediggers. Thus was born the now-notorious concept of “trade union consciousness”. The working class was still capable of perceiving its immediate material interests, of course. But where Bernstein was wrong, was that the working class had a higher, historic mission beyond that. An ultimate ‘interest’ — the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist mode of production. But attaining this ‘higher’ perspective, according to Kautsky, required that workers be aided by members of the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia, with access to the resources of modern science, Darwin and Marx included, who would come over to the workers side, within the bosom of the Marxist party.

If the original ‘classical’ view of ideology was essentially optimistic, Lukács revision was written in a more pessimistic time in the wake of the defeats of the German revolution of 1918–19 and the failures of the Hungarian and Bavarian Soviet Republics. Lukács response to Bernstein was unconventional then in taking the ‘road less travelled’ by attacking Bernstein’s second prong, planting the banner for “Hegelian Marxism” and locating the genesis of ideology in ‘corner 2’ . In so doing, he initiated a sea-change in the whole discourse on ideology — even if Karl Mannheim’s “Ideology and Utopia” was the ultimate vehicle for later propagating that change to the wider, non-Marxist intellectual and academic community.

Lukács insisted that ideology was not neutral, but was unambiguously a negative, distorting effect of fetishism/reification. Marxism could no longer be both science and ideology, because in order to become the former it must overcome the latter. Even when later stripped of its dangerous Marxist origins and neutered by Mannheim’s liberal recuperation, the new opposition between science and ideology has become so deeply rooted in our everyday discourse that most people do not realise this was not always part and parcel of the very definition of ideology from the outset, but a later development of the inter-war period.

But if Lukács move away from the empiricism of ‘corner 3’ Marxism potentially allowed a reopening of the vista for workers power as pointing beyond capitalism, rather than merely defending its material interests within it, it did so in a fatally ambiguous way. On the one hand it invoked the dystopian phantom of “total reification”. Total reification being the nightmare vision of the proletariat joining the bourgeoisie in remaining trapped in the partial and perverse mystifications of ideological reification — forever. On the other, even more problematically, it begged the question of how, exactly, the proletariat could access a different perspective from that of the dominant class, given that reification was universal and not class-specific.

For Lukács this prompted the recourse to another possible determination, that of class positionality — the standpoint — even if his proposed foundation for it was wanting. As suggestive and pregnant with possibilities as the new conceit of class positionality was, rescuing it from the theoretical impasse of Lukács’ idealist historical teleology had to wait until after WW2.

As mentioned above, had it not been for Hartsock’s valiant attempt at resurrecting the concept, albeit in a new feminist context, its likely that no one today would be talking about, or even had heard of, ‘standpoint theory’. Whether logically necessary or not, in the event, to rescue positionality, Hartsock relocated the origin point of generation of ideological distortion from systemic appearance to class domination. Or at least, as discussed, she mostly did. But unfortunately with a counter-tendency to fall back onto fetishism as the origin point of the “partial and perverse” distorted dominant ideology, despite her undertaking to heed Lukács’ 1967 advice to relocate the origin point inside the sphere of production itself.

Finally, in “Domination and externality” above, I have attempted to carry through Lukács’ admonition and complete Hartsock’s attempt, by proposing a mechanism internal to production itself, that can generate the epistemic asymmetry that distorts the dominant perspective while forcing irreconcilable experiences on the dominated that allow them the possibility of going beyond the viewpoint of their overseers.

Even with an asymmetric class positionality determinism, the kind of domination in production, whether in the field of employment and wage labour, or individual exploitation of unwaged labour within the patriarchal family unit, cannot exist in a vacuum. Lukács and Hartsock may have posited class positionality in contrast to different ‘primary’ determinations — societal appearance (fetishism) and class domination, respectively — but it’s clear that the standpoint cannot exist in isolation. Even if, arguably, neither writer managed to clarify the logical necessity for a multi-causal schema with the clarity of Mills’ analytical philosophy approach.

I believe also, that a clarified class positionality determination can untangle some of the confusions that have arisen in the past around class interests. This problem of objective class interests that exist, particularly for the working class, prior to their own consciousness of their collective existence and subjective interests, is summed up in a famous passage in E. P. Thompson’s preface to his “The Making of the English Working Class”

There is today an ever-present temptation to suppose that class is a thing. This was not Marx’s meaning, in his own historical writing, yet the error vitiates much latter-day “Marxist” writing. “It”, the working class, is assumed to have a real existence, which can be defined almost mathematically-so many men who stand in a certain relation to the means of production. Once this is assumed it becomes possible to deduce the class-consciousness which “it” ought to have (but seldom does have) if “it” was properly aware of its own position and real interests. There is a cultural superstructure, through which this recognition dawns in inefficient ways. These cultural “lags” and distortions are a nuisance, so that it is easy to pass from this to some theory of substitution: the party, sect, or theorist, who disclose class-consciousness, not as it is, but as it ought to be.

Class positionality and the necessity for the achievement of the standpoint, which then defines the subjectivity that perceives collective interests at odds with the dominant power, allows us to square this circle. Similarly the operaist accounts of the political class recomposition, and the strategic schemas of ‘deep organising’ models also align with this general schema.

This concludes our initial investigation of how class position can relate to ideology in a historical materialist framework. In the next chapter we will look at how the concept of domination needs to be further extended to include dynamics of discrimination and exclusion that we need theorise ‘structures of oppression’ other than class. And we will circle back and address the strange absence of any discussion of solidarity in relation to the standpoint, either by Lukács, or Hartsock, (or this chapter, to be fair).

Notes:

* Without prejudice to any lawsuits regarding copyright claims by artists to AI graphic generators like Midjourney. FYI the prompt was “the standpoint of the proletariat, a silhouetted crowd looks out over a sea of mist in an industrial setting style impressionistic”

[1] The contrary “hypnosis model” view of an instrumental ruling class ideology would require ruling class agents to have “two minds”, one inside the ideology as believer, the other somehow outside it, from some hypothetically meta “non-ideological” unbeliever viewpoint that would allow the intentional crafting of the ideology specifically to ensnare the minds of the dominated classes. A process that would require a superhuman socio-psychological vision that could perceive all future social consequences of the intentionally manufactured belief system. Mills himself calls the idea of this view the conspiracy theory of ideological domination with good reason, as it presupposes the kind of superhuman, future-predicting consciousness invoked by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and all its conspiracy theory descendants (of which there are many).

[2] The word proletarian comes from the Latin “proletarius” from proles (offspring) + -arius “(suffix forming adjectives from nouns, or forming nouns denoting agents of use from other nouns)”, originally meaning the lowest class of citizens in ancient Rome whose only contribution to the state was providing offspring. Unemployed single mothers on welfare are the literal embodiment of this original meaning. Unfortunately orthodox Marxist-inspired discourse tends to either marginalise or discount proletarians not actively engaged in valorising capital via wage labour as either “the reserve army”, or “declassed/declassé” or, worst of all, “lumpenproletariat”. Including unemployed single mothers in the proletariat ‘proper’ is one of the red lines demarcating orthodox from heterodox readings of Marx. To make my position clear, my class analysis does not posit a minimal level of inclusion in capital’s direct valorisation cycle as a determinant of class membership. Membership of the proletariat is defined apriori by exclusion from access to the means of production, not aposteriori by the contingency of wage-work employment, in my view.