Expertise and class consciousness

I wonder if terms like expertise and specialist knowledge could shake up a more Marxist terminology of class consciousness, reification, praxis, false consciousness, and ideology?

The idea that capitalism objectifies human labour and relationships—making constructs like money, markets, and institutions appear natural and inevitable—was a big deal for 20th century Western Marxism. Reification ('thingification'), it was argued, established an illusion of inevitability. It made systemic change feel impossible. Understanding that things are actually not inevitable is the first step toward actually changing them.

I guess this did blow my mind at some point. But today, that critique feels less urgent. Does anyone really think any of this is inevitable? Don’t most people already know that commodities, institutions, and systems are produced by human activity, whether or not the specific people can be seen? Isn’t the air thick with comparisons? We operate in a hyper-visible world, where models and practices are endlessly contrasted. The alternatives are already real—just very unevenly distributed. 

Pretty much anything could be different from what it is. Things are quite different year to year: centrist-liberal hegemony has truly slipped, the Overton window is screeching through space, national borders are fragile, climate change can be seen and felt, disruptive tech start-ups absorb millions of investment dollars and then expire, genocide is live-streamed by the murderers and the murdered, and the destruction of fine towering cities is available as before and after pictures. The status quo doesn't describe anything.

Yet so what? Putting weight on mystification has become unfashionable. With good reason, too. It verges on a patronising insistence that we are all dupes, missing the significance of our own lived experience. It risks slipping into bad conspiracy theory, where reality is nothing but a rival fandom. In its most reductive form, it invites the caricature of a self-satisfied Marxist bro (#JeSuis) splaining to you what your feelings really mean. 

Lots of people have lots of good reasons for believing untrue things in our day-to-day lives. Beliefs do lots of things—emotionally, socially, aesthetically—besides model reality. It feels like the challenge is no longer exposing violence as constructed, but surviving it despite this awareness. Contingency is well-known, because precarity is well-known.

Yet I also wonder if some of the original critique can be repaired?

For me, focusing on how expertise or specialist knowledge could be radically reconfigured feels far less banal. There’s a living provocation here: the idea that areas of practice we take as determined by the specific properties of the things involved—medicine, engineering, music, economics, governance, biology, something like that—might not have to be constrained in the ways they always have been. 'Forms of practice are, typically, more interesting than states of consciousness,' writes Göran Therborn in 'Why Some Classes Are More Successful Than Others' (2012).

I feel like expert practice can carry an aura of inevitability which social and economic institutions and systems don’t really carry. What might this or that expertise look like if it were genuinely democratic, collective, adaptive, and responsive to the diverse needs and perspectives of those it serves? 

How might we understand class consciousness as expertise?

An anxiety about the proper role of expertise, I’d suggest, has even been at the bottom of a lot of the longstanding disagreement around state abolition, and therefore the left's internal spectrum between anarchism and socialism. 

‘The differences between revolutionary dictatorship and statism are superficial,’ wrote Bakunin in Statism and Anarchy (1873). ‘Fundamentally they both represent the same principle of minority rule over the majority in the name of the alleged “stupidity” of the latter and the alleged “intelligence” of the former.’ 

A big part of what is at stake in seizing the state, or steering well clear of the state, is to do with expertise. Does the revolutionary movement — whether that is the proletariat as for Marx, or some kind of Leninist vanguard, or a bunch of constructivist anarchists being the change we want to see in the world, or the peasantry of the Global South, or ex-Leninists getting into Indigenous cosmologies, or some other coalition or multitude — does the revolutionary movement know something that everybody else doesn’t? Does whatever teaches you to prepare and deliver a revolution also teach you enough to sustain it? Does it perhaps strip you of it? What do you do with these strange moments, which may be collective or solitary, dramatic or quiet, when you suddenly find yourself standing in the halls of power, wondering what it is that you thought you knew?