geneity ofamovement that also included anarchists and labor unions and that,
on the level of discourse,required continuous adjustments in response to the re-
peated failures of the historical workingclassasarevolutionary agent.
If, in Marx’swords,“the workingclass is revolutionary or it is nothing”and
if revolutions are indeed locomotivesofhistory,then the proletariat assumedits
historicalrole as the mostradicalized part of the workingclass with considerable
theoretical baggage and emotional weight.¹⁷This constitutive tension between
critique and imagination can be clarifiedthrough the often-misunderstood dis-
tinctionbetween class in itself (an sich), asocial class defined through its rela-
tion to the means of production, and class for itself (fürsich), aclass united in its
active pursuit of shared human interests andgoals. The distinction lays outs how
the economic and social conditions in capitalism can transform the infamous
massesofmass psychologyinto therevolutionary workingclass of Marxist theo-
ry.This is how Marx describes the process:“This mass is thus alreadyaclass
against capital [i.e.,an sichor in itself], but notyetfor itself. In the struggle
[...]this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself asaclass for itself.”¹⁸Yet
in order for this transformation to takeplace, the workers have to experience
themselvesasanoppressed and exploited class; they develop class conscious-
ness onlyin, and through, class struggle. To phrase it differently, class in itself
refers to an external necessity,whereas classfor itself describesahuman neces-
sity,with onlythe proletariat able to completethe transitionfrom the one to the
other.Confirming the importance of symbolicpolitics to this long and complicat-
ed process, the conditions of being“for itself”wereestablished with the creation
of aproletarian counterpublic at once separate from bourgeois society and
linked to its culturethrough acts of appropriation–includingofthe notion of
Bildung(education) as both cultivation and formation examined in chapter 8.
Mappingthe discursive field established by the proletarian imaginary must
extend to one of themost misunderstoodterms in Marxist theory,the dictator-
ship of the proletariat.Inintroducingthe concept,Marx concludes“that the
class struggle necessarilyleadsto thedictatorship of the proletariat[and] that
this dictatorship itself onlyconstitutes the transition to theabolition of all classes
of the particular and universal.Forasimilar but less developed argument,also see TimothyMc-
Carthy,Marx and the Proletariat:AStudy in SocialTheory(Westport,CT: Greenwood Press,1978).
SeeKarl Marx, Letter to Engels,18February 1865,MECW42:96. Lenin’sinsistenceonthe
vanguard function of the Bolsheviks (rather than the workingclass) simplyreverses this logic
in accordance with the new powerdynamics in the Soviet Union.
Karl Marx,“The Poverty of Philosophy,”MECW6: 211. On this point,also see EdwardAn-
drew,“Class inItself and ClassAgainst Capital:Karl Marx and His Classifiers,”CanadianJournal
of Political Science16.3 (1983): 577–584.
Proletarian Dreams: From Marx to Marxism 59