Accusations of workers’ illusions presuppose workers can have no autonomous class conception

Evidence

Once again, aft er World War I the Ordinovisti shook these bien pensants in their primary assumptions: “those who speak of fallacious illusions necessarily imply that the working class always has to bend its neck in front of the capitalists, [they] imply … that the working class has to persuade itself of being incapable of having its own conception to counterpose to that of the bourgeois, of having ideas, sentiments, aspirations, and interests that are contradictory to the ideas, sentiments, aspirations, and interests of the bourgeois class” (Gramsci 1920f, 2). On the contrary, workers were the revolutionaries whereby “being revolutionary means working eff ectively toward transforming the whole productive order” (Togliatti 1919a, 72). — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 514

Categorization

• XREF: The Gramscian point that dismissing workers as deluded presumes their incapacity for independent thought is the ideological mirror of the austerity argument that workers must accept painful necessity. — connects to: Worker disinterest in top-level participation reflects ignorance, not lack of desire — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2073; The Institute treated workers as unable to articulate their own decisive factory attitudes — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2068; Ignorant workers make more productive industrial laborers than thoughtful ones — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 542 (+1 more)