How about this then?

Marco wrote:

As long as the party remains the crucible where class ideology is elaborated and deepened, its guiding principle must not only be the greatest freedom of ideas and disagreement in the framework of its programmatic principles: an even more fundamental concern must be to ceaselessly maintain and facilitate the combustion of thought, by providing the means for discussion and the confrontation of ideas and of tendencies inside the organisation.

Marco certainly knew how to express ideas.  For instance, the party as "the crucible where class ideology is elaborated".  And later "the combustion of thought" which has ceaselessly to be maintained and facilitated.  (Wouldn't that have made Kautsky and his epigone cringe? Wouldn't that have upset the dying Third International's opportunist apple cart? But wouldn't Rosa have loved it?)

But  to quibble for a moment.  This article and its theses, constantly refers to the proletariat's "ideology" and only once, as far as I can tell, refers to "class consciousness".  I guess and hope that  Marco actually means "class consciousness" whenever "ideology" is mentioned and that use of the latter word  - which is surely a mistaken usage when it appears for instance in the phrase  "the crucible where class ideology is elaborated" - is an historic "slip" of the mind, a question of "fashion", or a bit of a confusion?  

But actually it strikes me as a horrible mistake. Because surely, the whole point about the proletariat and especially its party, and including its advanced minority groupings like the ICT and ICC today, is that it constantly seeks to expose ideology, which is essentially a mode of bourgeois thought, as an essential part of the proletariat's self emancipation.   And that consciousness,  in replacing blind confused anti-rational ideological "thought",  is the very key to the successful revolution.  So I wish Marco and his comrades had been a little more careful here, because the article is an absolute treat to read and gets so many things right in the clearest possible way.

  So about this then?  The party is the crucible where class consciousness  is elaborated and deepened.

Thank you for your comment baboon.  

Surely a great breakthrough for Marx and Engels was their understanding that, for the working class,  the concept "ideology"  was the equivalent of "false consciousness",  and that consequently  an all pervasive  "ideological conditioning" was an efficient way for the ruling class of keeping workers locked into the bourgeois world view. 

So the distinguishing  of the concept "ideology" and its juxtaposition with the quite different concept "consciousness"-  especially eventually with "class consciousness" - is a vital moment in the history of proletarian struggle, and may even have helped open  the way to the writing of the Communist Manifesto.   

You're probably right baboon  that I fixate on words, but I still find it surprising that the French Communist Left, so brilliant in their political analyses and grasp of the significance of proletarian class struggle  should make such careless use of the term "ideological" when actually referring to proletarian consciousness.  

And I also wondered is it true that the real meaning  of the word "ideology" as meaning "bourgeois ideology" and false-consciousness,  is confined only to "a small circle of Marxists"?  Surely not. 

I find you are right LBird about Engels coming up with "false consciousness".  Does that necessarily mean there's no such thing, because  Engels espoused  the backward  kind of scientific ideology and thus invalidated himself?    

But if everything is an ideology, and everyone thinks in ideological terms, and ideology is inescapable, doesn't that make the word more or less pointless.  Ideology then just just means "the ideas somebody has".  So: your ideas about politics and science are better than mine, means that your political and scientific ideologies are an advance and an improvement on mine and can be understood as such. In which case I should swap my outmoded  and "falsified"  ideological package for yours, because yours is better.  By "better" I mean it appears to make more sense at the moment.  Not that it embodies more "truth"!  Because we don't know scientifically and for ever  what's true and what isn't do we, though I wouldn't try jumping from a 10th floor window.  Though it is true ie. a fact that many people suffer under austerity and the actions of the Islamic State right now. In short many of us suffer under capitalism. 

So if we accept that there is a "bourgeois ideology" (as well as a German one!) I suppose we might accept that there is a "proletarian ideology" too: which is to build a "better" society, free from exploitation and free from enslavement to commodity-production-for-exchange.     We can only do this if the proletariat becomes aware of, and takes on board, the nature and the meaning, the significance of its own proletarian ideology and begins to act on it, so that bourgeois ideology is replaced in time, after a revolution,  with that of the proletariat.

 In short, the proletariat has to become conscious of its ideology; and act on the basis of this consciousness.     This consciousness is the knowing awareness of the ideology it has spawned which allows the proletariat a realization of itself as a class, and as a revolutionary class with an historic mission. (Or is this "consciousness" merely a new ideology capable of criticizing the old?) 

So where does that leave us? Does it leave us where  we started?  Still fixated on words?  

I remain inclined to think that "ideological thought" and "proletarian class consciousness" are the opposing ends of a dialectical  proposition.  Thats my ideology!  And that the one acts to dissipate the other.

 But if, when we've begun to build communism somebody says: "Ooh!  I really like this new ideology we're creating together. Its much better than the  one  we had before isn't it?"  I'll agree and leave it there.  

Thank you for your replies LBird and Alf.  A final point from me.  When LBird asks above in post 8 "who constructed Marxism?" because he says that's what this discussion is about...the answer is easy.  The proletariat both constructed Marxism and invented it too. For without the existence and struggles of the proletariat Marxism wouldn't exist and Marx would have remained for ever Hegel's heir and upside down! 

As AS states above: "proletarian class consciousness is indeed something radically and qualitatively different." But from where does it emerge?  How is it different?  And what does "qualitatively" mean in this context? (Forgive me for sounding like A.J.Ayer in the "Brainstrust" program many  years ago) 

This quote is also from years ago, 1948 to be precise. 

Marco wrote:

 Socialist consciousness is not produced by spontaneous generation but is constantly reproduced; once it has appeared it becomes, in its opposition to the existing capitalist world, the active principle determining and accelerating its own development in and through action. However this development is conditioned and limited by the development of the contradictions of capitalism. In this sense, Lenin’s thesis of ‘socialist consciousness injected into the workers by the Party’ is certainly more precise than Rosa’s thesis of the ‘spontaneity’ of the development of consciousness, engendered during the course of a movement that starts with the economic struggle and culminates in a revolutionary socialist struggle. The thesis of ‘spontaneity’, despite its democratic appearances, reveals at root a mechanistic tendency, a rigorous economic determinism. It is based on a cause and effect relationship, with consciousness as merely an effect, the result of an initial movement, i.e., the economic struggle of the workers which gives rise to it. In this view, consciousness is seen as fundamentally passive in relation to the economic struggles which are the active factor. Lenin’s conception restores to socialist consciousness and the party which materialises it the character of an essentially active factor and principle. It does not detach itself from life and the movement but is included within it.

It is of course the juxtaposition of what Lenin said with what Rosa said that is striking. I had got the impression that we weren't supposed to take much notice of what Lenin had said about consciousness being injected into the class by an all-knowing Party,  because, as left communists we knew (1) he didn't really mean it but was making some kind of a special point and/or (2) he did mean it but changed his mind later. And (3) we also know that this particular remark has been  forever  held against him by anarchists of many hues and others too.  

Yet now now here are the French Communists sticking up for him in 1948 and subjecting Rosa - whose hand was supposedly close on the pulse of the proletariat in their Mass Strikes and so on -  to criticism because of her passion for "spontaneity" and it's  outcomes which are denounced as imprecise. Far from being "democracy in action" spontaneity is accused of being at base "mechanistic" and not democratic in a proletarian consciousness kind of  way, because  It's not thought out enough.  It's a bit of a knee-jerk reaction.  

But our French comrades while preferring Lenin's thesis find it only  "in a sense" more accurate and reliable than  Rosa's.  For they assume The Bolshevik Party to have developed a significant amount  of class consciousness in its own right  - just  as the Gauche Communistes had themselves - and at least to be in a position to disseminate their understandings of it, if and when required.  

 Rosa didn't have the benefit of an advanced thinking Party,  only Kautsky and the 2nd International. Matters like the question of from whence emanated class consciousness were not high on their agenda, though they had been on Marx's. But she wasn't all wrong  was she?  It was certainly possible for open-minded revolutionaries to learn things from the apparently spontaneous actions of the class in struggle.  Didn't Lenin learn of the importance of Workers Councils  from the class itself?  And hadn't the class invented workers councils so to speak "spontaneously" the product of their own practice  - no injecting of the idea from some outside  party in this particular case.  

So it appears that a combination of ideas and analysis stemming from both Lenin and Rosa  (and others) is what we should aim for. And is presumably what Gauche Communists were actually doing in both theory and practice, for how did they get to be so good! And the Party of course is a part of the  class for itself, 

Hello radicalchains. The article above by Marco, which may be a translation, is not an easy read but isn't filled with jargon.  That it was written at all in the year 1948 is amazing.   That any communist group existed at that time to write any kind of article at all is a remarkable  fact.

1948 (Orwell's "1984") was a terrible year. True the war was  over but the misery and horror continued unabated. Atomic  bombs were being detonated ominously and what seemed like continuously all over the world,  and film of the monstrosity of their power played non-stop in crowded Cinemas. A Third World Holocaust was generally anticipated.  Survivors of the one just finished struggled with one of the coldest winters on record  in Europe,  along with coal and food rationing, and generalized misery and fear. 

That the Gauche  Communiste  group had survived the war is remarkable, but that they were capable of orgsnising and writing a coherent and thought provoking discourse at all In 1948  is to be commended and taken to heart. 

But now, from the serious to the comic. That the SPGB is about to participate in a bourgeois election only goes to show the power of the century old time warp they've got stuck in. They cannot be compared to Marco's group. 

And finally, with regards to IR 154 which you have been reading comrade radical,  which piece in particular are you recommending, and why exactly, or do we need to read the whole lot? 

Hi radicalchains. You're absolutely right. We aren't in a competition. It's just that I think (suspect?) that the communist consciousness of the Gauche Communiste group far exceeded - far exceeds! - that of the SPGB.

I will sample IR 154 at your suggestion. Thank you radical.