Jim wrote:
If I'm not mistaken, Ted is referring to the problem of the expression of public opinion through plebiscites. If people are isolated, having few or no popular organizations that allow popular discussion and self-education, people tend to veer toward the most individualistic ideologies. In 19th-century France, people voted for Napoleon III in plebiscites not because it expressed their long-term, collective, or class interest but because it expressed their isolated, atomized, consciousness -- especially since there was little choice on the ballot.
This is one factor. The social relations within which individuals develop and live provide more or less opportunity for contact with other individuals with different perspectives and thus for the development of what Kant calls "enlarged thought" (though what Kant emphasizes is not so much contact with other perspectives as the capacity to think about things from the perspective of others, to put yourself in others' shoes). Marx also claimed, though, that the coup d'etat even more accuratley represented the self-consciousness of the peasant class base.
The aspects of Marx I'm emphasizing, however, are the roles given to (a) the potential for rational self-consciousness as the defining feature of human being and as the key factor explaining human phenomena (b) a developmental view of self-consciousness that allows for varying degrees of rationality and (c) an "internal relations" - i.e "dialectical" - view of this development, one that emphasizes relations of production as the key developmental relations.
So "class analysis" in Marx's sense is a particular form of an analysis of the role of self-consciousness in the determination of social phenomena e.g. the coup d'etat of Napoleon III. If this accurately represents Marx's analytical approach, a "Marxist" answer to the question "why did the USSR fall" would point to various kinds of more or less rational self-consciousness and their relative importance in the context where it occurred.
It seems to me, however, that the particular form of Marx's relational treatment of the role of self-consciousness needs amending. What explains, for instance, the tenacious persistence of the irrational religious self-consciousness that played an important role in the election of Bush. A significant part of this, apparently, is the extreme Book of Revelation form found in Ashcroft. These irrational religious beliefs and feelings also play an important role, I would argue, in what the Bush administration does (i.e. they aren't merely camouflage for the instrumentally rational pursuit of surplus extraction and accumulation - an idea that, in any event, doesn't, in my judgment, accurately capture what Marx means by "class" or "dialectical" analysis).
Ted
