>>2616244>Eh, I think the mistake a lot of communists make is assuming class consciousness already exists or is like the default, and if that's the case then why isn't the socialism happening? So they think, well, it must be because THEY are trying to stop it because "they," like you, also anticipate the proletariat awakening (obvious!) and overthrowing them (inevitable / two weeks / etc.).whether a lot, or some, or even most communists believe that class consciousness is obvious i cannot speak for, but personally i have no illusion that class consciousness is at all something obvious. in the recent Reitter translation of Capital (that i have been enjoying immensely), the foreward states that one of capitalism's peculiarities is its opaqueness on its concrete presentation, i.e. the way you can analyze a factory or a corporation and be unaware of capitalism's intricacies and working components, contrasted with its clarity only through abstract theoretical analysis. you must study capitalism from a distance to understand how it really works because obscuring and camouflaging the appearance of things is core to how capital operates. lenin was correct in his conclusion that the proletariat must become organized and led to be able to see the chains on their wrists, otherwise they live believing that they are free, that those chains simply do not exist or that they wear them through their own free will, or that this is god's will, or nature's will, etc. this is the duty of the vanguard.
>But the most sobering possibility is that they have no reason to think that. The working class actually does not by default think of itself as a class, and your ideas are simply not shared by the vast majority of people in most developed capitalist countries in the first place. i agree
No one actually needs to "divide the working class" either if the existing structure that organizes society already does that.
here i disagree. although an ignorant populace is ideal, there still has to be a plan b, plan c, etc. and an eventual panic button. it doesn't hurt to guarantee success for the ruling class, and it doesn't cost them much either.
It's a kind of post-hoc way of thinking, like [things happened this way] so therefore [it must have been intended this way]. It's in the way you
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