7 ms·

Isn't there something patronizing, even patrician, about saying "the propaganda machine has so effectively manipulated the working class"? Why aren't their vie

Isn't there something patronizing, even patrician, about saying "the propaganda machine has so effectively manipulated the working class"? Why aren't their views as legit as yours or mine? There seems to me a great assumption in saying that they are "manipulated". Who isn't? This is the idea of false consciousness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness), and it has always seemed questionable to me. Who are we to say that someone else's way of relating to their own life and their own concerns is wrong? Why should their priorities be any different than they are? By the way, I'm not trying to start an argument. These are questions that I worry about myself, and I'm genuinely interested.

Mediterraneo10 7y ago
> Why aren't their views as legit as yours or mine? Could it not be argued that the legitimacy of views depends on how much information the person has access to? The average working-class person, due to lack of free time and interest may be unable to acquire more information than is conveniently delivered to them through a handful of sources, and if those sources are controlled by certain actors and not balanced by other sources, then that would appear to place a limitation on how informed their views might be. Some influential 19th-century traditions of working-class radicalism heavily emphasized learning for the sake of it, but I am not sure that conditions today are conducive to that.
- neonate 7y ago
  That's a good argument, but let me continue the other side: I wonder if this doesn't just repeat the question. Who are we to say that the information we have is the true information? At least on the internet, we all select the information we want. I listen to my preferred sources, and I bet you listen to yours. Why are the working class doing something less legitimate if they do the same?
- leereeves 7y ago
  The average working class person knows more than you think. They probably don't have a lot of time for abstract theory, but they do have experience dealing with the government. They've seen how broken their local public schools, VA care, and Medicare are. They've been overwhelmed and overborne by the complicated rules of government programs, and faced harsh penalties for slight missteps. They also know that Democratic programs generally exclude them because by working for slightly more than minimum wage they earn too much to qualify. And they usually know people receiving government benefits, and they see the lifestyle these benefits impose, and they don't want that for themselves.
  - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
    > The average working class person knows more than you think. They probably don't have a lot of time for abstract theory... Yet there are traditions both within working-class leftism and working-class libertarianism that emphasise that what you call the "abstract theory" is key to activism and informed participation in the democratic process. After all, the argument for why whatever political system is just and fair is based on a canon of writings that goes back centuries. Thus, as I said, in the past political thinkers have urged the working class to read, read, read, and not just go off their anecdotal experiences of interaction with government and society or their gut feelings.
    - leereeves 7y ago
      > the argument for why whatever political system is just and fair is based on a canon of argument that goes back centuries. Those would be the same kind of arguments that justified communism, which was once popular among the intelligentsia? Abstract theory often leads people astray. I think the working class might be wise to ignore those arguments in favor of their own experiences. We've seen what the government is actually doing, and theory doesn't match reality. Those who advocate more government intervention should first improve those government interventions that already exist, so government programs can serve as an advertisement for their ideas, instead of a warning.
      - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
        > Those would be the same kind of arguments that justified communism, which was once popular among the intelligentsia? Or the arguments for American democracy and the nascent European democracies, whose founding fathers advocated for such systems by citing literature from Ancient Greece to the Enlightenment. The 19th century saw a wave of low-cost, mass-market editions of the classical canon precisely because it was thought that democracy required an educated citizenry. Or modern libertarianism, which points to many of the same sources but adds more recent thinkers like Hayek or von Mises. With your third paragraph, you seem to be suggesting that I favour government invention, but I have made no such suggestion in my posts. Rather, as I said, the need to be informed and aware of the tradition of political argument holds regardless of where a person might be situated ideologically, whether on the "left" or "right".
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  > The average working-class person, due to lack of free time and interest The average American watches three hours of TV a day. People have plenty of free time. If they’re not interested their political opinions are irrelevant, politics will happen to them, not with them.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - squiggleblaz 7y ago
    Yet they still get a vote. And if they vote for something you don't understand, then it just proves that watching the news helps you know what journalists think - not the public.
- frockington1 7y ago
  Lets win back the working class by disparaging them? This doesn't seem like the greatest path to success
- mensetmanusman 7y ago
  No, because Internet. A better argument would replace information with IQ/EQ.
tristram_shandy 7y ago
I think you might be having a completely valid emotional response to your consciousness being called false. False Consciousness, like Dictatorship of the Proletariat, are specific terms within Marxist thought that are popularly misinterpreted, and often used by more cynical capitalists to misdirect. False consciousness has to be understood as false as it relates to 'class consciousness', the true consciousness of the Proletariat as the Proletariat relates to its position within the dialectical materialism applied by Marx to the historical process. This has nothing to do with psychological consciousness. The Proletariat has class consciousness when it collectively realizes that capitalism is simply a phase in history, and not an eternal state of nature. It's awfully pompous. Marx wasn't infallible. False consciousness developed a lot after Marx, and you truly can't see it when you're in it. Krein, for example, is in false consciousness. He can't properly conceptualize that capitalism will be replaced, and has developed his own asinine class analysis not on the bedrock of Hegel, but on dividing the working class by race, gender, and ethnicity. It blinds him from seeing the real class antagonisms in society between the Proletariat and the bourgeoisie. He doesn't seem to know he's a prole like the rest of us, for instance.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  The definitions may be as you say. But you seem to be assuming that the Marxist definitions are correct; that is, that they correspond to reality. Here's what I mean: By your definition, I'm a prole. I should have "class consciousness" that I'm a prole, and since I don't, I have "false consciousness". But try and expand your mind to the point where you can consider the alternative: People like me might actually see our condition reasonably clearly. When Marxist theory puts us in the same bucket as a ditch-digger, that could be because Marxist theory doesn't correspond to reality, and it's not reality's fault. And telling us that our understanding is false could betray the weakness of your analytic framework rather than the weakness of our understanding of our own position in society. If this alternate position is correct, then we really don't need to care very much about what bucket Marxist theory puts us in, or about what it says we ought to think. You've got your position, which you think is correct. But at least consider the possibility that it could be mistaken.
bambataa 7y ago
It's a very tricky problem. My awareness of false consciousness is more from feminism. So what if a woman aspires to being nothing more than a good housewife? But what if she's been brought up in a culture where she has been told from early childhood that being a good housewife is all she every should aspire to? I don't think you can tell that person that their desires are wrong but you can point out what other options they have. It's up to them how they personally live. Voting and public life are different, however, because they have an impact on wider society. I think is then reasonable to critique others' decisions because those decisions impact us. On the big, high-level stuff there will always be disagreement about objectives, their relative importance, the best way to get there and so on. I don't think you can do too much there. But on more focused things you absolutely can question someone's rationale, their evidence base and how their vote or political activity will achieve their stated objectives. Take Brexit as an example. If you just don't want foreign people around then voting for Brexit probably makes sense. I disagree with your objective but there's a consistency to what you're doing. If you're voting for Brexit because you think the NHS needs more money then it's absolutely incumbent on you to explain what kind of economic impact you expect Brexit to have, how that'll affect tax receipts and the evidence for all of those expectations because I'm not aware of any informed analysis that says Brexit is consistent with increased NHS funding. It's not sufficient to just say "well they said on the bus that we give £350m a week to the EU and now that's going to go to the NHS". You're entitled to have whatever concerns you want, relate to your own life however you like. You're not entitled to have inaccurate beliefs based on a poor understanding of how things work.
- neonate 7y ago
  (I don't mean to be rude or argumentative, just interested.) Don't you think this is patronizing in the way I described above? By all means point out options, but if people decide not to choose those options, I don't see what entitles us to call that false consciousness. A caricature of this view might go as follows: "if you accept my political agenda then you have true consciousness and are entitled to your beliefs; if you do not then you have false consciousness and are not entitled to your beliefs." What is missing in that caricature?
  - 7y ago
dangerface 7y ago
> Why should their priorities be any different than they are? Because we are all humans with the same priority, to carry on the species / tribe. > Who are we to say that someone else's way of relating to their own life and their own concerns is wrong? Humans don't consider their way of life they act on instinct (of self / human preservation) first and only consider their life upon reflection if at all. Personally I find it difficult setting aside time to consider my life and even more difficult to reflect and deal with the fact that i'm usually wrong, at first. I know the average person doesn't bother doing this, maybe they are just way smarter than me and don't need to but more likely they have the same default as me and are wrong and just haven't considered.
porknubbins 7y ago
I know a lot of working class people, and their views are just as valid and often they are smarter/more well informed about some particular low level details of the way the economy/society operates. But without a college education in today’s complicated world its really hard to be a sophisticated consumer of information (even with one many fail) so working class people are more susceptible to manipulation by propaganda, oral information, conspiracy theories, availability heuristic etc. Being able to google something vs being able to search skeptically and critically are two different skills.
- remarkEon 7y ago
  I’m not following how a college education somehow inoculates someone from being susceptible to propaganda. Aren’t they just trying to install their own branded software on your OS anyway? Searching skeptically and critically is, at least judging based on some recent hires coming from well-know and (ostensibly) “elite” universities, not necessarily part of the base install. 100% not saying you intended to imply this, but the “sophisticated” qualifier can imply that the people or group in question is simply not reading the “right” things. Which is an interesting thought (again I don’t think you meant to imply that).
  - porknubbins 7y ago
    You’re right many college educations still fail to teach these skills (as I said) but I disagree completely about installing their own OS. That was not my experience at all, though maybe its changed. My professors encouraged open minded critical inquiry. College failed me in other ways but forcing an agenda was not one of them. Sophisticated is probably the wrong word but what I mean is like paying attention to which news sources are accurate and push which agendas requires a fairly lengthy process of learning the institutions themselves, politics, economics etc. I think college gives most people a better shot at doing that but obviously isn’t the only way.
- malvosenior 7y ago
  Isn't there an argument that many people currently saddled with college debt made poorly informed decisions? Maybe the working class people who knew not to do that actually processed information better than many people who took massive amounts of debt on for degrees of dubious economic value.

Mediterraneo10 7y ago

> Why aren't their views as legit as yours or mine? Could it not be argued that the legitimacy of views depends on how much information the person has access to? The average working-class person, due to lack of free time and interest may be unable to acquire more information than is conveniently delivered to them through a handful of sources, and if those sources are controlled by certain actors and not balanced by other sources, then that would appear to place a limitation on how informed their views might be. Some influential 19th-century traditions of working-class radicalism heavily emphasized learning for the sake of it, but I am not sure that conditions today are conducive to that.

neonate 7y ago
That's a good argument, but let me continue the other side: I wonder if this doesn't just repeat the question. Who are we to say that the information we have is the true information? At least on the internet, we all select the information we want. I listen to my preferred sources, and I bet you listen to yours. Why are the working class doing something less legitimate if they do the same?
leereeves 7y ago
The average working class person knows more than you think. They probably don't have a lot of time for abstract theory, but they do have experience dealing with the government. They've seen how broken their local public schools, VA care, and Medicare are. They've been overwhelmed and overborne by the complicated rules of government programs, and faced harsh penalties for slight missteps. They also know that Democratic programs generally exclude them because by working for slightly more than minimum wage they earn too much to qualify. And they usually know people receiving government benefits, and they see the lifestyle these benefits impose, and they don't want that for themselves.
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  > The average working class person knows more than you think. They probably don't have a lot of time for abstract theory... Yet there are traditions both within working-class leftism and working-class libertarianism that emphasise that what you call the "abstract theory" is key to activism and informed participation in the democratic process. After all, the argument for why whatever political system is just and fair is based on a canon of writings that goes back centuries. Thus, as I said, in the past political thinkers have urged the working class to read, read, read, and not just go off their anecdotal experiences of interaction with government and society or their gut feelings.
  - leereeves 7y ago
    > the argument for why whatever political system is just and fair is based on a canon of argument that goes back centuries. Those would be the same kind of arguments that justified communism, which was once popular among the intelligentsia? Abstract theory often leads people astray. I think the working class might be wise to ignore those arguments in favor of their own experiences. We've seen what the government is actually doing, and theory doesn't match reality. Those who advocate more government intervention should first improve those government interventions that already exist, so government programs can serve as an advertisement for their ideas, instead of a warning.
    - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
      > Those would be the same kind of arguments that justified communism, which was once popular among the intelligentsia? Or the arguments for American democracy and the nascent European democracies, whose founding fathers advocated for such systems by citing literature from Ancient Greece to the Enlightenment. The 19th century saw a wave of low-cost, mass-market editions of the classical canon precisely because it was thought that democracy required an educated citizenry. Or modern libertarianism, which points to many of the same sources but adds more recent thinkers like Hayek or von Mises. With your third paragraph, you seem to be suggesting that I favour government invention, but I have made no such suggestion in my posts. Rather, as I said, the need to be informed and aware of the tradition of political argument holds regardless of where a person might be situated ideologically, whether on the "left" or "right".
barry-cotter 7y ago
> The average working-class person, due to lack of free time and interest The average American watches three hours of TV a day. People have plenty of free time. If they’re not interested their political opinions are irrelevant, politics will happen to them, not with them.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- squiggleblaz 7y ago
  Yet they still get a vote. And if they vote for something you don't understand, then it just proves that watching the news helps you know what journalists think - not the public.
frockington1 7y ago
Lets win back the working class by disparaging them? This doesn't seem like the greatest path to success
mensetmanusman 7y ago
No, because Internet. A better argument would replace information with IQ/EQ.

tristram_shandy 7y ago

I think you might be having a completely valid emotional response to your consciousness being called false. False Consciousness, like Dictatorship of the Proletariat, are specific terms within Marxist thought that are popularly misinterpreted, and often used by more cynical capitalists to misdirect. False consciousness has to be understood as false as it relates to 'class consciousness', the true consciousness of the Proletariat as the Proletariat relates to its position within the dialectical materialism applied by Marx to the historical process. This has nothing to do with psychological consciousness. The Proletariat has class consciousness when it collectively realizes that capitalism is simply a phase in history, and not an eternal state of nature. It's awfully pompous. Marx wasn't infallible. False consciousness developed a lot after Marx, and you truly can't see it when you're in it. Krein, for example, is in false consciousness. He can't properly conceptualize that capitalism will be replaced, and has developed his own asinine class analysis not on the bedrock of Hegel, but on dividing the working class by race, gender, and ethnicity. It blinds him from seeing the real class antagonisms in society between the Proletariat and the bourgeoisie. He doesn't seem to know he's a prole like the rest of us, for instance.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
The definitions may be as you say. But you seem to be assuming that the Marxist definitions are correct; that is, that they correspond to reality. Here's what I mean: By your definition, I'm a prole. I should have "class consciousness" that I'm a prole, and since I don't, I have "false consciousness". But try and expand your mind to the point where you can consider the alternative: People like me might actually see our condition reasonably clearly. When Marxist theory puts us in the same bucket as a ditch-digger, that could be because Marxist theory doesn't correspond to reality, and it's not reality's fault. And telling us that our understanding is false could betray the weakness of your analytic framework rather than the weakness of our understanding of our own position in society. If this alternate position is correct, then we really don't need to care very much about what bucket Marxist theory puts us in, or about what it says we ought to think. You've got your position, which you think is correct. But at least consider the possibility that it could be mistaken.

bambataa 7y ago

It's a very tricky problem. My awareness of false consciousness is more from feminism. So what if a woman aspires to being nothing more than a good housewife? But what if she's been brought up in a culture where she has been told from early childhood that being a good housewife is all she every should aspire to? I don't think you can tell that person that their desires are wrong but you can point out what other options they have. It's up to them how they personally live. Voting and public life are different, however, because they have an impact on wider society. I think is then reasonable to critique others' decisions because those decisions impact us. On the big, high-level stuff there will always be disagreement about objectives, their relative importance, the best way to get there and so on. I don't think you can do too much there. But on more focused things you absolutely can question someone's rationale, their evidence base and how their vote or political activity will achieve their stated objectives. Take Brexit as an example. If you just don't want foreign people around then voting for Brexit probably makes sense. I disagree with your objective but there's a consistency to what you're doing. If you're voting for Brexit because you think the NHS needs more money then it's absolutely incumbent on you to explain what kind of economic impact you expect Brexit to have, how that'll affect tax receipts and the evidence for all of those expectations because I'm not aware of any informed analysis that says Brexit is consistent with increased NHS funding. It's not sufficient to just say "well they said on the bus that we give £350m a week to the EU and now that's going to go to the NHS". You're entitled to have whatever concerns you want, relate to your own life however you like. You're not entitled to have inaccurate beliefs based on a poor understanding of how things work.

neonate 7y ago
(I don't mean to be rude or argumentative, just interested.) Don't you think this is patronizing in the way I described above? By all means point out options, but if people decide not to choose those options, I don't see what entitles us to call that false consciousness. A caricature of this view might go as follows: "if you accept my political agenda then you have true consciousness and are entitled to your beliefs; if you do not then you have false consciousness and are not entitled to your beliefs." What is missing in that caricature?
- 7y ago

dangerface 7y ago

> Why should their priorities be any different than they are? Because we are all humans with the same priority, to carry on the species / tribe. > Who are we to say that someone else's way of relating to their own life and their own concerns is wrong? Humans don't consider their way of life they act on instinct (of self / human preservation) first and only consider their life upon reflection if at all. Personally I find it difficult setting aside time to consider my life and even more difficult to reflect and deal with the fact that i'm usually wrong, at first. I know the average person doesn't bother doing this, maybe they are just way smarter than me and don't need to but more likely they have the same default as me and are wrong and just haven't considered.

porknubbins 7y ago

I know a lot of working class people, and their views are just as valid and often they are smarter/more well informed about some particular low level details of the way the economy/society operates. But without a college education in today’s complicated world its really hard to be a sophisticated consumer of information (even with one many fail) so working class people are more susceptible to manipulation by propaganda, oral information, conspiracy theories, availability heuristic etc. Being able to google something vs being able to search skeptically and critically are two different skills.

remarkEon 7y ago
I’m not following how a college education somehow inoculates someone from being susceptible to propaganda. Aren’t they just trying to install their own branded software on your OS anyway? Searching skeptically and critically is, at least judging based on some recent hires coming from well-know and (ostensibly) “elite” universities, not necessarily part of the base install. 100% not saying you intended to imply this, but the “sophisticated” qualifier can imply that the people or group in question is simply not reading the “right” things. Which is an interesting thought (again I don’t think you meant to imply that).
- porknubbins 7y ago
  You’re right many college educations still fail to teach these skills (as I said) but I disagree completely about installing their own OS. That was not my experience at all, though maybe its changed. My professors encouraged open minded critical inquiry. College failed me in other ways but forcing an agenda was not one of them. Sophisticated is probably the wrong word but what I mean is like paying attention to which news sources are accurate and push which agendas requires a fairly lengthy process of learning the institutions themselves, politics, economics etc. I think college gives most people a better shot at doing that but obviously isn’t the only way.
malvosenior 7y ago
Isn't there an argument that many people currently saddled with college debt made poorly informed decisions? Maybe the working class people who knew not to do that actually processed information better than many people who took massive amounts of debt on for degrees of dubious economic value.