Consciousness raising: personal and social – The struggle for change

The process of raising social consciousness about the need for revolutionary socialism parallels the process of raising personal consciousness in psychotherapy.

People are brought up by people. Their original primary caretaker(s) are responsible for their existing, surviving and thriving even from before the moment of birth, usually until pre-adolescence, when they may begin experimenting with alternative views of themselves and the world, which, to varying degrees, are divergent from what they’ve been taught to assume by whoever raised them.

When people are very young and vulnerable, they look to their essential primary caregiver(s) to provide ways of thinking about life, including about what is possible, based on what is available and validated by them. It’s their life-giving air, even if it might be smoggy.

They don’t know there’s more refreshing air to breathe. The unconscious dread of challenging the original life-giving caretaker(s) can linger, even into adulthood, governing their ability to entertain other ways of thinking.

Many experiences outside the close circle of caregiver(s) can also contribute to a person’s orientation toward themselves and the wider world. That’s how personality is built.

Embedded life-limiting attitudes vary. They can include, for example, that the only trustworthy people are those who are like themselves and their family members. All “others” are dangerous. If the child’s neighborhood also espouses these assumptions, they have little or no opportunity to question them. They can become angry, blaming certain “unsavory” groupings for their unhappiness, and can even form alliances with others who share their anti-social views.

An interpersonal therapeutic approach to personal consciousness raising

Therapists work with people whose early learned embedded attitudes toward themselves and the world prevent them from enjoying satisfying and productive lives. In therapy, the process of raising personal consciousness includes taking a detailed history of the person’s life to understand why they embrace their particular orientation to themselves and life, and what aspects of that orientation are useful and what are limiting. Taking a history also includes the circumstances they might have endured while growing up, such as poverty, diasporas, racism, immigration and war.

The person also learns how they came to feel so much dread about challenging the emotional status quo established by their life-giving primary caretaker(s).

With biological exceptions, personality isn’t hardwired or hereditary.

The therapist’s goal is to help them organize for alternate experiences, more ways of thinking, more people who matter, more validators, so awareness of what is possible in life begins to change -– but not without that storm of dread (a major component of anxiety).* Simultaneously, they help the person weather that storm. That is the process of raising personal consciousness.

Accumulating new acceptable experiences into consciousness

Unawareness of fresher air to breathe causes despair. The therapist slowly points out what’s been missing in their early years, how to make up for “unfinished business,” and what’s possible in the current situation. Helping the person develop a closer network of validating friends can reduce the volume of the original audience and raise the volume of a new cheering squad. Optimism slowly replaces despair.

Unaware of unconscious restrictions against change, a person finds many reasons to avoid imagined or real disconnection from their original caretaker(s). These reasons make up their protective wall against change. Depending upon the degree of early restrictiveness, the wall has degrees of rigidity. Unconscious motivating attitudes tend to govern. Consciousness has a very difficult time being raised.

They might revert back to old ways of thinking about what’s possible. Or new experiences can open little fissures in the wall and new assumptions can penetrate their personality.

If this process goes well, growth can snowball and the person is able, with the help of the people who now matter to them, to diminish or shed those life-limiting restrictions, the very assumptions that have brought them into therapy. Their unconscious audience changes, and the air is fresher.

Once forward motions take hold, they can make that person’s life radically different from the one they assumed was all life had to offer. It can take a long time for unconscious assumptions to push past the wall, then weeks to spurt into radical change.

When emotional and interpersonal conditions are ready, a spark of insight can cause a personal “prairie fire.”

Societal consciousness-raising therapists

Revolutionary Marxists strive to inform people, in a manner they can hear, about qualitatively different air to breathe and to the reality that they’re being massively short-changed in their lives, and that it doesn’t have to be that way. People need to be awakened to the multitude of ways capitalism limits their lives, pushing deceptions that are repeated and repeated, until they feel like truths. Then they can unite with others to do something about it.

Enveloped by that smoggy air, people assume that the only way to live is within this scamming capitalist society. For example, the only world they know is one in which, if they get a job, they must accept no more than a living (or less than a living) wage – and their boss reaps all the profits from their work. Or perhaps if they work hard enough, please the boss enough, and don’t challenge the status quo, they’ll get a raise — even become a manager and live a “wonderful” life.

Marxists study and teach social history and the science involved in understanding and tearing down pervasive capitalist assumptions that deceive, delimit and destroy people’s lives. They organize ways to break through the disinformation smog in the effort to raise social consciousness.

As with raising personal consciousness, the process of raising social consciousness is not easy or linear. The disinformation smog is thick and compelling. Although the smog is choking them, people have been made to believe that it would be so much more dangerous to struggle for an alternative societal system that would substantially improve their lives: socialism.  And they had better not challenge the status quo.

This issue is complex. Readers are encouraged to study the classes on the Workers World website: workers.org/educational. Offered in this article is a mere smattering of what’s embedded in the capitalist smog. Like the individual, when there’s repeated familial misinformation about what is possible in life, societal change can be terrifying. What would happen if they questioned the “truths” disseminated by those in power?

When people are living in a smog of lies and distortions, they cannot but assume that their impoverished lives are caused, instead, by “others,” immigrants, for example. The scapegoats change, but the accusations have targeted people who are, for example, Black, Latine, Asian, Arab, Jewish, Muslim, communists, LGBTQIA2S+, disabled.

For MAGA workers, rage about the economy goes deep, but they think a demagogue can fix it just by kicking out old politicians, cutting taxes and scapegoating migrants, for example, not by dismantling capitalism. “’There ain’t no such thing as balancing a budget no more, when you go to work and you’re making, let’s say, $10 to $15 an hour, and it costs you $22 an hour to live where you are,’ William Guden [a MAGA supporter] said. ‘How do you make up and adjust for that cost of living?’” (New York Times, Aug. 11) Social therapists must expose capitalist scams, tackle that terror, and explain that there’s a better system.

Capitalists promote fear of socialism

Embedded in the capitalist smog is repeated propaganda: convincing people that no other kind of society is possible, and that socialism is dangerous, totalitarian and doomed to failure. The repeated lies include the notion that people would have no private property, and that they would be forced to follow the wills and whims of a self-serving and ruthless dictator.

Capitalists deviously maneuver and spew lies to keep people confused and divided. For example, the United States imposes strangling sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba. Without embargoes and blockades, these countries would be able to develop their economic capacities to meet the needs of their populations, so that people come before profits. Blaming those countries’ struggling economies, the U.S administration and their obedient news outlets then point to the number of Venezuelans and Cubans immigrating to the U.S. for a “better life.”

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro won reelection in spite of being bedeviled by U.S-financed right-wing sabotage. The Biden administration demonized him, claiming the election was fraudulent and declaring a U.S. puppet was the legitimate president. (workers.org/2024/08/80187)

Profound change is possible

Capitalism in its last desperate stage has, in its very structure, the built-in demise of itself. Whether they understand Marxist theory or not, capitalists can foretell its own destruction, so they employ imperialism, war and neo-fascists to keep their system afloat. Current examples include the Western proxy war in Ukraine against Russia; U.S.-financed Israeli genocide against Palestinians, risking a wider war in Western Asia; and the demonization of China to justify military encirclement and provocation in Asia.

Deeper insight into this phenomenon can be found in “Capitalism at a Dead End” (Goldstein, 2012), in “Clarion call to the movement/Prepare for the biggest global capitalist crisis in history,” by Larry Holmes, Workers World Party First Secretary. (workers.org/2022/10/6719), and in other articles posted at workers.org.

Marxist societal therapists raise people’s consciousness to ultimately join the anti-capitalist struggle and fight for socialism to replace capitalism – as opposed to “softer” progressive fixes or letting society deteriorate into neo-fascism.  Revolutionary optimism slowly replaces despair. As with the individual living in a smog, it can take a long time for unconscious assumptions to push past the societal resistant wall, and then weeks to spurt into radical change.

The sparks of insight among workers and oppressed peoples, in unity, can start a prairie fire: revolutionary struggle. In the long run, they can build a workers world.

*The concept of anxiety, which can take many forms, including disorientation, is beyond the scope of this discussion. (See Harris, et. al., “Interpersonal Psychoanalytic Theory for the 21st Century: Evolving Self,” 2023.)

Janet Mayes is a psychotherapist and co-author of “Interpersonal Psychoanalytic Theory for the 21st Century: Evolving Self.” (Lexington Books, 2023) Reviews can be found at interpersonaltheory.com.