MARX’S chief work breaks off just as he is about to embark on the definition of class. This omission was to have serious consequences both for the theory and the practice of the proletariat. For on this vital point the later movement was forced to base itself on interpretations, on the collation of occasional utterances by Marx and Engels and on the independent extrapolation and application of their method. In Marxism the division of society into classes is determined by position within the process of production. But what, then, is the meaning of class consciousness? The question at once branches out into a series of closely interrelated problems. First of all, how are we to understand class consciousness (in theory)? Second, what is the (practical) function of class consciousness, so understood, in the context of the class struggle? This leads to the further question: is the problem of class consciousness a ‘general’ sociological problem or does it mean one thing for the proletariat and another for every other class to have emerged hitherto? And lastly, is class consciousness homogeneous in nature and function or can we discern different gradations and levels in it? And if so, what are their practical implications for the class struggle of the proletariat?

1 In his celebrated account of historical materialism [1] Engels proceeds from the assumption that although the essence of history consists in the fact that “nothing happens without a conscious purpose or an intended aim”, to understand history it is necessary to go further than this. For on the one hand, “the many individual wills active in history for the most part produce results quite other than those intended – often quite the opposite; their motives, therefore, in relation to the total result are likewise of only secondary importance. On the other hand, the further question arises: what driving forces in turn stand behind these motives? What are the historical causes which transform themselves into these motives in the brain of the actors?” He goes on to argue that these driving forces ought themselves to be determined in particular those which “set in motion great masses, whole peoples and again whole classes of the people; and which create. a lasting action resulting in a great transformation.” The essence of scientific Marxism consists, then, in the realisation that the real motor forces of history are independent of man’s (psychological) consciousness of them.

At a more primitive stage of knowledge this independence takes the form of the belief that these forces belong, as it were, to nature and that in them and in their causal interactions it is possible to discern the ‘eternal’ laws of nature. As Marx says of bourgeois thought: “Man’s reflections on the forms of social life and consequently also his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He begins post festum with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him. The characters ... have already acquired the stability of natural self-understood forms of social life, before man seeks to decipher not their historical character (for in his eyes they are immutable) but their meaning.” [2]

This is a dogma whose most important spokesmen can be found in the political theory of classical German philosophy and in the economic theory of Adam Smith and Ricardo. Marx opposes to them a critical philosophy, a theory of theory and a consciousness of consciousness. This critical philosophy implies above all historical criticism. It dissolves the rigid, unhistorical, natural appearance of social institutions; it reveals their historical origins and shows therefore that they are subject to history in every -respect including historical decline. Consequently history does not merely unfold within the terrain mapped out by these institutions. It does not resolve itself into the evolution of contents, of men and situations, etc., while the principles of society remain eternally valid. Nor are these institutions the goal to which all history aspires, such that when they are realised history will have fulfilled her mission and will then be at an end. On the contrary, history is precisely the history of these institutions, of the changes they undergo as institutions which bring men together in societies. Such institutions start by controlling economic relations between men and go on to permeate all human relations (and hence also man’s relations with himself and with nature, etc.).

At this point bourgeois thought must come up against an insuperable obstacle, for its starting-point and its goal are always, if not always consciously, an apologia for the existing order of things or at least the proof of their immutability. [3] “Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any,” [4] Marx observes with reference to bourgeois economics, a dictum which applies with equal force to all attempts by bourgeois thinkers to understand the process of history. (It has often been pointed out that this is also one of the defects of Hegel’s philosophy of history.) As a result, while bourgeois thought is indeed able to conceive of history as a problem, it remains an intractable problem. Either it is forced to abolish the process of history and regard the institutions of the present as eternal laws of nature which for ‘mysterious’ reasons and in a manner wholly at odds with the principles of a rational science were held to have failed to establish themselves firmly, or indeed at all, in the past. (This is characteristic of bourgeois sociology.) Or else, everything meaningful or purposive is banished from history. It then becomes impossible to advance beyond the mere ‘individuality’ of the various epochs and their social and human representatives. History must then insist with Ranke that every age is “equally close to God”, i.e. has attained an equal degree of perfection and that-for quite different reasons-there is no such thing as historical development.

In the first case it ceases to be possible to understand the origin of social institutions. [5] The objects of history appear as the objects of immutable, eternal laws of nature. History becomes fossilised in a formalism incapable of comprehending that the real nature of socio-historical institutions is that they consist of relations between men. On the contrary, men become estranged from this, the true source of historical understanding and cut off from it by an unbridgeable gulf. As Marx points out, [6] people fail to realise “that these definite social relations are just as much the products of men as linen. flax, etc.”.

In the second case, history is transformed into the irrational rule of blind forces which is embodied at best in the ‘spirit of the people’ or in ‘great men’. It can therefore only be described pragmatically but it cannot be rationally understood. Its only possible organisation would be aesthetic, as if it were a work of art. Or else, as in the philosophy of history of the Kantians, it must be seen as the instrument, senseless in itself, by means of which timeless, supra-historical, ethical principles are realised.

Marx resolves this dilemma by exposing it as an illusion. The dilemma means only that the contradictions of the capitalist system of production are reflected in these mutually incompatible accounts of the same object. For in this historiography with its search for ‘sociological’ laws or its formalistic rationale, we find the reflection of man’s plight in bourgeois society and of his helpless enslavement by the forces of production. “To them, their own social action”, Marx remarks, [7] “takes the form of the action of objects which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them”. This law was expressed most clearly and coherently in the purely natural and rational laws of classical economics. Marx retorted with the demand for a historical critique of economics which resolves the totality of the reified objectivities of social and economic life into relations between men. Capital and with it every form in which the national economy objectives itself is, according to Marx, “not a thing but a social relation between persons mediated through things”. [8]

However, by reducing the objectivity of the social institutions so hostile to man to relations between men, Marx also does away with the false implications of the irrationalist and individualist principle, i.e. the other side of the dilemma. For to eliminate the objectivity attributed both to social institutions inimical to man and to their historical evolution means the restoration of this objectivity to their underlying basis, to the relations between men; it does not involve the elimination of laws and objectivity independent of the will of man and in particular the wills and thoughts of individual men. It simply means that this objectivity is the self-objectification of human society at a particular stage in its development; its laws hold good only within the framework of the historical context which produced them and which is in turn determined by them.

It might look as though by dissolving the dilemma in this manner we were denying consciousness any decisive role in the process of history. It is true that the conscious reflexes of the different stages of economic growth remain historical facts of great importance; it is true that while dialectical materialism is itself the product of this process, it does not deny that men perform their historical deeds themselves and that they do so consciously. But as Engels emphasises in a letter to Mehring, [9] this consciousness is false. However, the dialectical method does not permit us simply to proclaim the ‘falseness’ of this consciousness and to persist in an inflexible confrontation of true and false. On the contrary, it requires us to investigate this ‘false consciousness’ concretely as an aspect of the historical totality and as a stage in the historical process.

Of course bourgeois historians also attempt such concrete analyses; indeed they reproach historical materialists with violating the concrete uniqueness of historical events. Where they go wrong is in their belief that the concrete can be located in the empirical individual of history (’individual’ here can refer to an individual man, class or people) and in his empirically given (and hence psychological or mass-psychological) consciousness. And just when they imagine that they have discovered the most concrete thing of all: society as a concrete totality, the system of production at a given point in history and the resulting division of society into classes – they are in fact at the furthest remove from it. In missing the mark they mistake something wholly abstract for the concrete. “These relations,” Marx states, “are not those between one individual and another, but between worker and capitalist, tenant and landlord, etc. Eliminate these relations and you abolish the whole of society; your Prometheus will then be nothing more than a spectre without arms or legs. ...” [10]

Concrete analysis means then: the relation to society as a whole. For only when this relation is established does the consciousness of their existence that men have at any given time emerge in all its essential characteristics. It appears, on the one hand, as something which is subjectively justified in the social and historical situation, as something which can and should be understood, i.e. as ‘right’. At the same time, objectively, it by-passes the essence of the evolution of society and fails to pinpoint it and express it adequately. That is to say, objectively, it appears as a ‘false consciousness’. On the other hand, we may see the same consciousness as something which fails subjectively to reach its self-appointed goals, while furthering and realising the objective aims of society of which it is ignorant and which it did not choose.

This twofold dialectical determination of ‘false consciousness’ constitutes an analysis far removed from the naive description of what men in fact thought, felt and wanted at any moment in history and from any given point in the class structure. I do not wish to deny the great importance of this, but it remains after all merely the material of genuine historical analysis. The relation with concrete totality and the dialectical determinants arising from it transcend pure description and yield the category of objective possibility. By relating consciousness to the whole of society it becomes possible to infer the thoughts and feelings which men would have in a particular situation if they were able to assess both it and the interests arising from it in their impact on immediate action and on the whole structure of society. That is to say, it would be possible to infer the thoughts and feelings appropriate to their objective situation. The number of such situations is not unlimited in any society. However much detailed researches are able to refine social typologies there will always be a number of clearly distinguished basic types whose characteristics are determined by the types of position available in the process of production. Now class consciousness consists in fact of the appropriate and rational reactions ‘imputed’ [zugerechnet] to a particular typical position in the process of production.[11] This consciousness is, therefore, neither the sum nor the average of what is thought or felt by the single individuals who make up the class. And yet the historically significant actions of the class as a whole are determined in the last resort by this consciousness and not by the thought of the individual – and these actions can be understood only by reference to this consciousness.

This analysis establishes right from the start the distance that separates class consciousness from the empirically given, and from the psychologically describable and explicable ideas which men form about their situation in life. But it is not enough just to state that this distance exists or even to define its implications in a formal and general way. We must discover, firstly, whether it is a phenomenon that differs according to the manner in which the various classes are related to society as a whole and whether the differences are so great as to produce qualitative distinctions. And we must discover, secondly, the practical significance of these different possible relations between the objective economic totality, the imputed class consciousness and the real, psychological thoughts of men about their lives. We must discover, in short, the practical, historical function of class consciousness.

Only after such preparatory formulations can we begin to exploit the category of objective possibility systematically. The first question we must ask is how far is it intact possible to discern the whole economy of a society from inside it? It is essential to transcend the limitations of particular individuals caught up in their own narrow prejudices. But it is no less vital not to overstep the frontier fixed for them by the economic structure of society and establishing their position in it. [12] Regarded abstractly and formally, then, class consciousness implies a class-conditioned unconsciousness of ones own socio-historical and economic condition. [13] This condition is given as a definite structural relation, a definite formal nexus which appears to govern the whole of life. The ‘falseness’, the illusion implicit in this situation is in no sense arbitrary; it is simply the intellectual reflex of the objective economic structure. Thus, for example, “the value or price of labour-power takes on the appearance of the price or value of labour itself ...” and “the illusion is created that the totality is paid labour.... In contrast to that, under slavery even that portion of labour which is paid for appears unpaid for.” [14] Now it requires the most painstaking historical analysis to use the category of objective possibility so as to isolate the conditions in which this illusion can be exposed and a real connection with the totality established. For if from the vantage point of a particular class the totality of existing society is not visible; if a class thinks the thoughts imputable to it and which bear upon its interests right through to their logical conclusion and yet fails to strike at the heart of that totality, then such a class is doomed to play only a subordinate role. It can never influence the course of history in either a conservative or progressive direction. Such classes are normally condemned to passivity, to an unstable oscillation between the ruling and the revolutionary classes, and if perchance they do erupt then such explosions are purely elemental and aimless. They may win a few battles but they are doomed to ultimate defeat.

For a class to be ripe for hegemony means that its interests and consciousness enable it to organise the whole of society in accordance with those interests. The crucial question in every class struggle is this: which class possesses this capacity and this consciousness at the decisive moment ? This does not preclude the use of force. It does not mean that the class-interests destined to prevail and thus to uphold the interests of society as a whole can be guaranteed an automatic victory. On the contrary, such a transfer of power can often only be brought about by the most ruthless use of force (as e.g. the primitive accumulation of capital). But it often turns out that questions of class consciousness prove to be decisive in just those situations where force is unavoidable and where classes are locked in a life-and-death-struggle. Thus the noted Hungarian Marxist Erwin Szabo is mistaken in criticising Engels for maintaining that the Great Peasant War (of 1525) was essentially a reactionary movement. Szabo argues that the peasants’ revolt was suppressed only by the ruthless use of force and that its defeat was not grounded in socioeconomic factors and in the class consciousness of the peasants. He overlooks the fact that the deepest reason for the weakness of the peasantry and the superior strength of the princes is to be sought in class consciousness. Even the most cursory student of the military aspects of the Peasants’ War can easily convince himself of this.

It must not be thought, however, that all classes ripe for hegemony have a class consciousness with the same inner structure. Everything hinges on the extent to which they can become conscious of the actions they need to perform in order to obtain and organise power. The question then becomes: how far does the class concerned perform the actions history has imposed on it ‘consciously’ or ‘unconsciously’? And is that consciousness ‘true’ or ‘false’. These distinctions are by no means academic. Quite apart from problems of culture where such fissures and dissonances are crucial, in all practical matters too the fate of a class depends on its ability to elucidate and solve the problems with which history confronts it. And here it becomes transparently obvious that class consciousness is concerned neither with the thoughts of individuals, however advanced, nor with the state of scientific knowledge. For example, it is quite clear that ancient society was broken economically by the limitations of a system built on slavery. But it is equally clear that neither the ruling classes nor the classes that rebelled against them in the name of revolution or reform could perceive this. In consequence the practical emergence of these problems meant that the society was necessarily and irremediably doomed.

The situation. is even clearer in the case of the modern bourgeoisie, which, armed with its knowledge of the workings of economics, clashed with feudal and absolutist society. For the bourgeoisie was quite unable to perfect its fundamental science, its own science of classes: the reef on which it foundered was its failure to discover even a theoretical solution to the problem of crises. The fact that a scientifically acceptable solution does exist is of no avail. For to accept that solution, even in theory, would be tantamount to observing society from a class standpoint other than that of the bourgeoisie. And no class can do that – unless it is willing to abdicate its power freely. Thus the barrier which converts the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie into ‘false’ consciousness is objective; it is the class situation itself. It is the objective result of the economic set-up, and is neither arbitrary, subjective nor psychological. The class consciousness of the bourgeoisie may well be able to reflect all the problems of organisation entailed by its hegemony and by the capitalist transformation and penetration of total production. But it becomes obscured as soon as it is called upon to face problems that remain within its jurisdiction but which point beyond the limits of capitalism. The discovery of the (natural laws’ of economics is pure light in comparison with medieval feudalism or even the mercantilism of the transitional period, but by an internal dialectical twist they became “natural laws based on the unconsciousness of those who are involved in them”. [15]

It would be beyond the scope of these pages to advance further and attempt to construct a historical and systematic typology of the possible degrees of class consciousness. That would require – in the first instance – an exact study of the point in the total process of production at which the interests of the various classes are most immediately and vitally involved. Secondly, we would have to show how far it would be in the interest of any given class to go beyond this immediacy, to annul and transcend its immediate interest by seeing it as a factor within a totality. And lastly, what is the nature of the totality that is then achieved? How far does it really embrace the true totality of production? It is quite evident that the quality and structure of class consciousness must be very different if, e.g. it remains stationary at the separation of consumption from production (as with the Roman Lumpenproletariat) or if it represents the formation of the interests of circulation (as with merchant capital). Although we cannot embark on a systematic typology of the various points of view it can be seen from the foregoing that these specimens of ‘false’ consciousness differ from each other both qualitatively, structurally and in a manner that is crucial for the activity of the classes in society.

2 It follows from the above that for pre-capitalist epochs and for the behaviour of many strata within capitalism whose economic roots lie in pre-capitalism, class consciousness is unable to achieve complete clarity and to influence the course of history consciously.

This is true above all because class interests in pre-capitalist society never achieve full (economic) articulation. Hence the structuring of society into castes and estates means that economic elements are inextricably joined to political and religious factors. In contrast to this, the rule of the bourgeoisie means the abolition of the estates-system and this leads to the organisation of society along class lines. (In many countries vestiges of the feudal system still survive, but this does not detract from the validity of this observation.)

This situation has its roots in the profound difference between capitalist and pre-capitalist economics. The most striking distinction, and the one that directly concerns us, is that pre-capitalist societies are much less cohesive than capitalism. The various parts are much more self-sufficient and less closely interrelated than in capitalism. Commerce plays a smaller role in society, the various sectors were more autonomous (as in the case of village communes) or else plays no part at all in the economic life of the community and in the process of production (as was true of large numbers of citizens in Greece and Rome). In such circumstances the state, i.e. the organised unity, remains insecurely anchored in the real life of society. One sector of society simply lives out its ‘natural’ existence in what amounts to a total independence of the fate of the state. “The simplicity of the organisation for production in these self-sufficient communities that constantly reproduce themselves in the same form, and when accidentally destroyed, spring up again on the spot and with the same name – this simplicity supplies the key to the secret of the immutability of Asiatic societies, an immutability in such striking contrast with the constant dissolution and resounding of Asiatic states, and the never-ceasing changes of dynasty. The structure of the economic elements of society remains untouched by the storm-clouds of the political sky.” [16]

Yet another sector of society is – economically – completely parasitic. For this sector the state with its power apparatus is not, as it is for the ruling classes under capitalism, a means whereby to put into practice the principles of its economic power – if need be with the aid of force. Nor is it the instrument it uses to create the conditions for its economic dominance (as with modern colonialism). That is to say, the state is not a mediation of the economic control of society: it is that unmediated dominance itself. This is true not merely in cases of the straightforward theft of land or slaves, but also in so-called peaceful economic relations. Thus in connection with labour-rent Marx says: “Under such circumstances the surplus labour can be extorted from them for the benefit of the nominal landowner only by other than economic pressure.” In Asia “rent and taxes coincide, or rather there is no tax other than this form of ground-rent”. [17]

Even commerce is not able, in the forms it assumes in pre-capitalist societies, to make decisive inroads on the basic structure of society. Its impact remains superficial and the process of production above all in relation to labour, remains beyond its control. “A merchant could buy every commodity, but labour as a commodity he could not buy. He existed only on sufferance, as a dealer in the products of the handicrafts.” [18]

Despite all this, every such society constitutes an economic unity. The only question that arises is whether this unity enables the individual sectors of society to relate to society as a whole in such a way that their imputed consciousness can assume an economic form. Marx emphasises [19] that in Greece and Rome the class struggle “chiefly took the form of a conflict between debtors and creditors”. But he also makes the further, very valid point: “Nevertheless, the money-relationship – and the relationship of creditor to debtor is one of money – reflects only the deeper-lying antagonism between the economic conditions of existence.” Historical materialism showed that this reflection was no more than a reflection, but we must go on to ask: was it at all possible – objectively – for the classes in such a society to become conscious of the economic basis of these conflicts and of the economic problems with which the society was afflicted? Was it not inevitable that these conflicts and problems should assume either natural ‘ religious forms’ [20] or else political and legal ones, depending on circumstances ?

The division of society into estates or castes means in effect that conceptually and organisationally these ‘natural’ forms are established without their economic basis ever becoming conscious. It means that there is no mediation between the pure traditionalism of natural growth and the legal institutions it assumes. [21] In accordance with the looser economic structure of society, the political and legal institutions (here the division into estates, privileges, etc.), have different functions objectively and subjectively from those exercised under capitalism. In capitalism these institutions merely imply the stabilisation of purely economic forces so that – as Karner has ably demonstrated [22] – they frequently adapt themselves to changed economic structures without changing themselves in form or content. By contrast, in pre-capitalist societies legal institutions intervene substantively in the interplay of economic forces. In fact there are no purely economic categories to appear or to be given legal form (and according to Marx, economic categories are “forms of existence, determinations of life”). [23] Economic and legal categories are objectively and substantively so interwoven as to be inseparable. (Consider here the instances cited earlier of labour-rent, and taxes, of slavery, etc.) In Hegel’s parlance the economy has not even objectively reached the stage of being-for-itself. There is therefore no possible position within such a society from which the economic basis of all social relations could be made conscious.

This is not of course to deny the objective economic foundations of social institutions. On the contrary, the history of [feudal] estates shows very clearly that what in origin had been a ‘natural’ economic existence cast into stable forms begins gradually to disintegrate as a result of subterranean, ‘unconscious’ economic development. That is to say, it ceases to be a real unity. Their economic content destroys the unity of their juridical form. (Ample proof of this is furnished both by Engels in his analysis of the class struggles of the Reformation. period and by Cunow in his discussion of the French Revolution.) However, despite this conflict between juridical form and economic content, the juridical (privilege-creating) forms retain a great and often absolutely crucial importance for the consciousness of estates in the process of disintegration. For the form of the estates conceals the connection between the – real but ‘unconscious’ – economic existence of the estate and the economic totality of society. It fixates consciousness directly on its privileges (as in the case of the knights during the Reformation) or else – no less directly – on the particular element of society from which the privileges emanated (as in the case of the guilds).

Even when an estate has disintegrated, even when its members have been absorbed economically into a number of different classes, it still retains this (objectively unreal) ideological coherence. For the relation to the whole created by the consciousness of one’s status is not directed to the real, living economic unity but to a past state of society as constituted by the privileges accorded to the estates. Status – consciousness – a real historical factor masks class consciousness; in fact it prevents it from emerging at all. A like phenomenon can be observed under capitalism in the case of all ‘privileged’ groups whose class situation lacks any immediate economic base. The ability of such a class to adapt itself to the real economic development can be measured by the extent to which it succeeds in ‘capitalising’ itself, i.e. transforming its privileges into economic and capitalist forms of control (as was the case with the great landowners).

Thus class consciousness has quite a different relation to history in pre-capitalist and capitalist periods. In the former case the classes could only be deduced from the immediately given historical reality by the methods of historical materialism. In capitalism they themselves constitute this immediately given historical reality. It is therefore no accident that (as Engels too has pointed out) this knowledge of history only became possible with the advent of capitalism. Not only – as Engels believed – because of the greater simplicity of capitalism in contrast to the ‘complex and concealed relations’ of earlier ages. But primarily because only with capitalism does economic class interest emerge in all its starkness as the motor of history. In pre-capitalist periods man could never become conscious (not even by virtue of an ‘imputed’ consciousness) of the “true driving forces which stand behind the motives of human actions in history”. They remained hidden behind motives and were in truth the blind forces of history. Ideological factors do not merely ‘mask’ economic interests, they are not merely the banners and slogans: they are the parts, the components of which the real struggle is made. Of course, if historical materialism is deployed to discover the sociological meaning of these struggles, economic interests will doubtless be revealed as the decisive factors in any explanation.

But there is still an unbridgeable gulf between this and capitalism where economic factors are not concealed ‘behind’ consciousness but are present in consciousness itself (albeit unconsciously or repressed). With capitalism, with the abolition of the feudal estates and with the creation of a society with a purely economic articulation, class consciousness arrived at the point where it could become conscious. From then on social conflict was reflected in an ideological struggle for consciousness and for the veiling or the exposure of the class character of society. But the fact that this conflict became possible points forward to the dialectical contradictions and the internal dissolution of pure class society. In Hegel’s words, “When philosophy paints its gloomy picture a form of life has grown old. It cannot be rejuvenated by the gloomy picture, but only understood. Only when dusk starts to fall does the owl of Minerva spread its wings and fly."

3 Bourgeoisie and proletariat are the only pure classes in bourgeois society. They are the only classes whose existence and development are entirely dependent on the course taken by the modern evolution of production and only from the vantage point of these classes can a plan for the total organisation of society even be imagined. The outlook of the other classes (petty bourgeois or peasants) is ambiguous or sterile because their existence is not based exclusively on their role in the capitalist system of production but is indissolubly linked with the vestiges of feudal society. Their aim, therefore, is not to advance capitalism or to transcend it, but to reverse its action or at least to prevent it from developing fully. Their class interest concentrates on symptoms of development and not on development itself, and on elements of society rather than on the construction of society as a whole.

The question of consciousness may make its appearance in terms of the objectives chosen or in terms of action, as for instance in the case of the petty bourgeoisie. This class lives at least in part in the capitalist big city and every aspect of its existence is directly exposed to the influence of capitalism. Hence it cannot possibly remain wholly unaffected by the fact of class conflict between bourgeoisie and proletariat. But as a “transitional class in which the interests of two other classes become simultaneously blunted ...” it will imagine itself “to be above all class antagonisms”. [24] Accordingly it will search for ways whereby it will “not indeed eliminate the two extremes of capital and wage labour, but will weaken their antagonism and transform it into harmony”. [25] In all decisions crucial for society its actions will be irrelevant and it will be forced to fight for both sides in turn but always without consciousness. In so doing its own objectives – which exist exclusively in its own consciousness – must become progressively weakened and increasingly divorced from social action. Ultimately they will assume purely ‘ideological’ forms The petty bourgeoisie will only be able to play an active role in history as long as these objectives happen to coincide with the real economic interests of capitalism. This was the case with the abolition of the feudal estates during the French Revolution. With the fulfilment of this mission its utterances, which for the most part remain unchanged in form, become more and more remote from real events and turn finally into mere caricatures (this was true, e.g. of the Jacobinism of the Montagne 1848-51).

This isolation from society as a whole has its repercussions on the internal structure of the class and its organisational potential. This can be seen most clearly in the development of the peasantry. Marx says on this point: [26] “The small-holding peasants form a vast mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse.... Every single peasant family ... thus acquires its means of life more through exchange with nature than in intercourse with society.... In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of other classes and place them in opposition to them, they constitute a class. In so far as there is only a local connection between the smallholding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national unity and no political organisation, they do not constitute a class.” Hence external upheavals, such as war, revolution in the towns, etc. are needed before these, masses can coalesce in a unified movement, and even then they are incapable of organising it and supplying it with slogans and a positive direction corresponding to their own interests.

Whether these movements will be progressive (as in the French Revolution of 1789 or the Russian Revolution of 1917), or reactionary (as with Napoleon’s coup d’état) will depend on the position of the other classes involved in the conflict, and on the level of consciousness of the parties that lead them. For this reason, too, the ideological form taken by the class consciousness of the peasants changes its content more frequently than that of other classes: this is because it is always borrowed from elsewhere.

Hence parties that base themselves wholly or in part on this class consciousness always lack really firm and secure support in critical situations (as was true of the Socialist Revolutionaries in 1917 and 1918). This explains why it is possible for peasant conflicts to be fought out under opposing flags. Thus it is highly characteristic of both Anarchism and the ‘class consciousness of the peasantry that a number of counter-revolutionary rebellions and uprisings of the middle and upper strata of the peasantry in Russia should have found the anarchist view of society to be a satisfying ideology. We cannot really speak of class consciousness in the case of these classes (if, indeed, we can, even speak of them as classes in the strict Marxist sense of the term): for a full consciousness of their situation would reveal to them the hopelessness of their particularise strivings in the face of the inevitable course of events. Consciousness and self-interest then are mutually incompatible in this instance. And as class consciousness was defined in terms of the problems of imputing class interests the failure of their class consciousness to develop in the immediately given historical reality becomes comprehensible philosophically.

With the bourgeoisie, also, class consciousness stands in opposition to class interest. But here the antagonism is not contradictory but dialectical.

The distinction between the two modes of contradiction may be briefly described in this way: in the case of the other classes, a class consciousness is prevented from emerging by their position within the process of production and the interests this generates. In the case of the bourgeoisie, however, these factors combine to produce a class consciousness but one which is cursed by its very nature with the tragic fate of developing an insoluble contradiction at the very zenith of its powers. As a result of this contradiction it must annihilate itself.

The tragedy of the bourgeoisie is reflected historically in the fact that even before it had defeated its predecessor, feudalism, its new enemy, the proletariat, had appeared on the scene. Politically, it became evident when, at the moment of victory, the ‘freedom’ in whose name the bourgeoisie had joined battle wit i feudalism, was transformed into a new repressiveness. Sociologically, the bourgeoisie did everything in its power to eradicate the fact of class conflict from the consciousness of society, even though class conflict had only emerged in its purity and became established as an historical fact with the advent of capitalism. Ideologically, we see the same contradiction in the fact that the bourgeoisie endowed the individual with an unprecedented importance, but at the same time that same individuality was annihilated by the economic conditions to which it was subjected, by the reification created by commodity production.

All these contradictions, and the list might be extended indefinitely, are only the reflection of the deepest contradictions in capitalism itself as they appear in the consciousness of the bourgeoisie in accordance with their position in the total system of production. For this reason they appear as dialectical contradictions in the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie. They do not merely reflect the inability of the bourgeoisie to grasp the contradictions inherent in its own social order. For, on the one hand, capitalism is the first system of production able to achieve a total economic penetration of society, [27] and this implies that in theory the bourgeoisie should be able to progress from this central point to the possession of an (imputed) class consciousness of the whole system of production. On the other hand, the position held by the capitalist class and the interests which determine its actions ensure that it will be unable to control its own system of production even in theory.

There are many reasons for this. In the first place, it only seems to be true that for capitalism production occupies the centre of class consciousness and hence provides the theoretical starting-point for analysis. With reference to Ricardo “who had been reproached with an exclusive concern with production”, Marx emphasised [28] that he “defined distribution as the sole subject of economics”. And the detailed analysis of the process by which capital is concretely realised shows in every single instance that the interest of the capitalist (who produces not goods but commodities) is necessarily confined to matters that must be peripheral in terms of production. Moreover, the capitalist, enmeshed in what is for him the decisive process of the expansion of capital must have a standpoint from which the most important problems become quite invisible. [29]

The discrepancies that result are further exacerbated by the fact that there is an insoluble contradiction running through the internal structure of capitalism between the social and the individual principle, i.e. between the function of capital as private property and its objective economic function. As the Communist Manifesto states: “Capital is a social force and not a personal one.” But it is a social force whose movements are determined by the individual interests of the owners of capital – who cannot see and who are necessarily indifferent to all the social implications of their activities. Hence the social principle and the social function implicit in capital can only prevail unbeknown to them and, as it were, against their will and behind their backs. Because of this conflict between the individual and the social, Marx rightly characterised the stock companies as the “negation, of the capitalist mode of production itself”. [30] Of course, it is true that stock companies differ only in inessentials from individual capitalists and even the so-called abolition of the anarchy in production through cartels and trusts only shifts the contradiction elsewhere, without, however, eliminating it. This situation forms one of the decisive factors governing the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie. It is true that the bourgeoisie acts as a class in the objective evolution of society. But it understands the process (which it is itself instigating) as something external which is subject to objective laws which it can only experience passively.

Bourgeois thought observes economic life consistently and necessarily from the standpoint of the individual capitalist and this naturally produces a sharp confrontation between the individual and the overpowering supra-personal ‘law of nature’ which propels all social phenomena. [31] This leads both to the antagonism between individual and class interests in the event of conflict (which, it is true, rarely becomes as acute among the. ruling classes as in the bourgeoisie), and also to the logical impossibility of discovering theoretical and practical solutions to the problems created by the capitalist system of production.

"This sudden reversion from a system of credit to a system of hard cash heaps theoretical fright on top of practical panic; and the dealers by whose agency circulation is effected shudder before the impenetrable mystery in which their own economic relations are shrouded.” [32] This terror is not unfounded,. that is to say, it is much more than the bafflement felt by the individual capitalist when confronted by his own individual fate. The facts and the situations which induce this panic force something into the consciousness of the bourgeoisie which is too much of a brute fact for its existence to be wholly denied or repressed. But equally it is something that the bourgeoisie can never fully understand. For the recognisable background to this situation is the fact that “the real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself”. [33] And if this insight were to become conscious it would indeed entail the self-negation of the capitalist class.

In this way the objective limits of capitalist production become the limits of the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie. The older ‘natural’ and ‘conservative’ forms of domination had left unmolested [34] the forms of production of whole sections of the people they ruled and therefore exerted by and large a traditional and unrevolutionary influence. Capitalism, by contrast, is a revolutionary form par excellence. The fact that it must necessarily remain in ignorance of the objective economic limitations of its own system expresses itself as an internal, dialectical contradiction in its class consciousness

This means that formally the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie is geared to economic consciousness. And indeed the highest degree of unconsciousness, the crassest, form of ‘false consciousness’ always manifests itself when the conscious mastery of economic phenomena appears to be at its greatest. From the point of view of the relation of consciousness to society this contradiction is expressed as the irreconcilable antagonism between ideology and economic base. Its dialectics are grounded in the irreconcilable antagonism between the (capitalist) individual, i.e. the stereotyped individual of capitalism, and the ‘natural’ and inevitable process of development, i.e. the process not subject to consciousness. In consequence theory and practice are brought into irreconcilable opposition to each other. But the resulting dualism is anything but stable; in fact it constantly strives to harmonise principles that have been wrenched apart and thenceforth oscillate between a new ‘false’ synthesis and its subsequent cataclysmic disruption.

This internal dialectical contradiction in the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie is further aggravated by the fact that the objective limits of capitalism do not remain purely negative. That is to say that capitalism does not merely set ‘natural’ laws in motion that provoke crises which it cannot comprehend. On the contrary, those limits acquire a historical embodiment with its own consciousness and its own actions: the proletariat.

Most ‘normal’ shifts of perspective produced by the capitalist point of view in the image of the economic structure of society tend to “obscure and mystify the true origin of surplus value”. [35] In the ‘normal’, purely theoretical view this mystification only attaches to the organic composition of capital, viz. to the place of the employer in the productive system and the economic function of interest etc., i.e. it does no more than highlight the failure of observers to perceive the true driving forces that lie beneath the surface. But when it comes to practice this mystification touches upon the central fact of capitalist society: the class struggle.

In the class struggle we witness the emergence of all the hidden forces that usually lie concealed behind the façade of economic life, at which the capitalists and their apologists gaze as though transfixed. These forces appear in such a way that they cannot possibly be ignored. So much so that even when capitalism was in the ascendant and the proletariat could only give vent to its protests in the form of vehement spontaneous explosions, even the ideological exponents of the rising bourgeoisie acknowledged the class struggle as a basic fact of history. (For example, Marat and later historians such as Mignet.) But in proportion as the theory and practice of the proletariat made society conscious of this unconscious, revolutionary principle inherent in capitalism, the bourgeoisie was thrown back increasingly on to a conscious defensive. The dialectical contradiction in the ‘false’ consciousness of the bourgeoisie became more and more acute: the ‘false’ consciousness was converted into a mendacious consciousness. What had been at first an objective contradiction now became subjective also: the theoretical problem turned into a moral posture which decisively influenced every practical class attitude in every situation and on every issue.

Thus the situation in which the bourgeoisie finds itself determines the function of its class consciousness in its struggle to achieve control of society. The hegemony of the bourgeoisie really does embrace the whole of society; it really does attempt to organise the whole of society in its own interests (and in this it has had some success). To achieve this it’ was forced both to develop a coherent theory of economics, politics and society (which in itself presupposes and amounts to a ‘Weltanschauung’), and also to make conscious and sustain its faith in its own mission to control and organise society. The tragic dialectics of the bourgeoisie can be seen in the fact that it is not only desirable but essential for it to clarify its own class interests on every particular issue, while at the same time such a clear awareness becomes fatal when it is extended to the question of the totality. The chief reason for this is that the rule of the bourgeoisie can only be the rule of a minority. Its hegemony is exercised not merely by a minority but in the interest of that minority, so the need to deceive the other classes and to ensure that their class consciousness remains amorphous is inescapable for a bourgeois regime. (Consider here the theory of the state that stands ‘above’ class antagonisms, or the notion of an ‘impartial’ system of justice.)

But the veil drawn over the nature of bourgeois society is indispensable to the bourgeoisie itself. For the insoluble internal contradictions of the system become revealed with, increasing starkness and so confront its supporters with a choice. Either they must consciously ignore insights which become increasingly urgent or else they must suppress their own moral instincts in order to be able to support with a good conscience an economic system that serves only their own interests. . Without overestimating the efficacy of such ideological factors it must be agreed that the fighting power of a class grows with its ability to carry out its own mission with a good conscience and to adapt all phenomena to its own interests with unbroken confidence in itself. If we consider Sismondi’s criticism of classical economics, German criticisms of natural law and the youthful critiques of, Carlyle it becomes evident that from a very early stage the ideological history of the bourgeoisie was nothing but a desperate resistance to every insight into the true nature of the society it had created and thus to a real understanding of its class situation. When the Communist Manifesto makes the point that the bourgeoisie produces its own grave-diggers this is valid ideologically as well as economically. The whole of bourgeois thought in the nineteenth century made the most strenuous efforts to mask the real foundations of bourgeois society; everything was tried: from the greatest falsifications of fact to the ‘sublime’ theories about the ‘essence’ of history and the state. But in vain: with the end of the century the issue was resolved by the advances of science and their corresponding effects on the consciousness of the capitalist elite.

This can be seen very clearly in the bourgeoisie’s greater readiness to accept the idea of conscious organisation. A greater measure of concentration was achieved first in the stock companies and in the cartels and trusts. This process revealed the social’ character of capital more and more clearly without affecting the general anarchy in production. What it did was to confer near-monopoly status on a number of giant individual capitalists. Objectively, then, the social character of capital was brought into play with great energy but in such a manner as to keep its nature concealed from the capitalist class. Indeed this illusory elimination of economic anarchy successfully diverted their attention from the true situation. With the crises of the War and the post-war period this tendency has advanced still further: the idea of a ‘planned’ economy has gained ground at least among the more progressive elements of the bourgeoisie. Admittedly this applies only within quite harrow strata of the bourgeoisie and even there it is thought of more as a theoretical experiment than as a practical way out of the impasse brought about by the crises.

When capitalism was still expanding it rejected every sort of social organisation on the grounds that it was “an inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property, freedom and unrestricted play for the initiative of the individual capitalist.” [36] If we compare that with current attempts to harmonise a ‘planned’ economy with the class interests of the bourgeoisie, we are forced to admit that what we are witnessing is the capitulation of the class consciousness of the bourgeoisie before that of the proletariat. Of course the section of the bourgeoisie that accepts the notion of a ‘planned’ economy does not mean by it the same as does the proletariat: it, regards it as a last attempt to save capitalism by driving its internal contradictions to breaking-point. Nevertheless this means jettisoning the last theoretical line of defence. (As a strange counterpart to this we may note that at just this point in time certain sectors of the proletariat capitulate before the bourgeoisie and adopt this, the most problematic form of bourgeois organisation.)

With this the whole existence of the bourgeoisie and its culture is plunged into the most terrible crisis. On the one hand, we find the utter sterility of an ideology divorced from life, of a more or less conscious attempt at forgery. On the other hand, a cynicism no less terribly jejune lives on in the world-historical irrelevances and nullities of its own existence and concerns itself only with the defence of that existence and with its own naked self-interest. This ideological crisis is an unfailing sign of decay. The bourgeoisie has already been thrown on the defensive; however aggressive its weapons may be, it is fighting for self-preservation. Its power to dominate has vanished beyond recall.

4 In this struggle for consciousness historical materialism plays a crucial role. Ideologically no less than economically, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are mutually interdependent. The same process that the bourgeoisie experiences as a permanent crisis and gradual dissolution appears to the proletariat, likewise in crisis-form, as the gathering of strength and the springboard to victory. Ideologically this means that the same growth of insight into the nature of society, which reflects the protracted death struggle of the bourgeoisie, entails a steady growth in the strength of the proletariat. For the proletariat the truth is a weapon that brings victory; and the more ruthless, the greater the victory. This makes more comprehensible the desperate fury with which bourgeois science assails historical materialism: for as soon as the bourgeoisie is forced to take up its stand on this terrain, it is lost. And, at the same time, this explains why the proletariat and only the proletariat can discern in the correct understanding of the nature of society a power-factor of the first, and perhaps decisive importance.

The unique function of consciousness in the class struggle of the proletariat has consistently been overlooked by the vulgar Marxists who have substituted a petty ‘Realpolitik’ for the great battle of principle which reaches back to the ultimate problems of the objective economic process. Naturally we do not wish to deny that the proletariat must proceed from the facts of a given situation. But it is to be distinguished from other classes by the fact that it goes beyond the contingencies of history; far from being driven forward by them, it is itself their driving force and impinges centrally upon the process of social change. When the vulgar Marxists detach themselves from this central point of view, i.e. from the point where a proletarian class consciousness arises, they thereby place themselves on the level of consciousness of the bourgeoisie. And that the bourgeoisie fighting on its own ground will prove superior to the proletariat both economically and ideologically can come as a surprise only to a vulgar Marxist. Moreover only a vulgar Marxist would infer from this fact, which after all derives exclusively from his own attitude, that the bourgeoisie generally occupies the stronger position. For quite apart from the very real force at its disposal, it is self-evident that the bourgeoisie fighting on its own ground will be both more experienced and more expert. Nor will it come as a surprise if the bourgeoisie automatically obtains the upper hand when its opponents abandon their own position for that of the bourgeoisie.

As the bourgeoisie has the intellectual, organisational and every other advantage, the superiority of the proletariat must lie exclusively in its ability to see society from the centre as a coherent whole. This means that it is able to act in such a way as to change reality; in the class consciousness of the proletariat theory and practice coincide and so it can consciously throw the weight of its actions onto the scales of history – and this is the deciding factor. When the vulgar Marxists destroy this unity they cut the nerve that binds proletarian theory to proletarian action. They reduce theory to the ‘scientific’ treatment of the symptoms of social change and as for practice they are themselves reduced to being buffeted about aimlessly and uncontrollably by the various elements of the process they had hoped to master.

The class consciousness that springs from this position must exhibit the same internal structure as that of the bourgeoisie. But when the logic of events drives the same dialectical contradictions to the surface of consciousness the consequences for the proletariat are even more disastrous than for the bourgeoisie. For despite all the dialectical contradictions, despite all its objective falseness, the self-deceiving ‘false’ consciousness that we find in the bourgeoisie is at least in accord with its class situation. It cannot save the bourgeoisie from the constant exacerbation of these contradictions and so from destruction, but it can enable it to continue the struggle and even engineer victories, albeit of short duration.

But in the case of the proletariat such a consciousness not only has to overcome these internal (bourgeois) contradictions, but it also conflicts with the course of action to which the economic situation necessarily commits the proletariat (regardless of its own thoughts on the subject). The proletariat must act in a proletarian manner, but its own vulgar Marxist theory blocks its vision of the right course to adopt. The dialectical contradiction between necessary proletarian action and vulgar Marxist (bourgeois) theory becomes more and more acute. As the decisive battle in the class struggle approaches, the power of a true or false theory to accelerate or retard progress grows in proportion. The ‘realm of freedom’, the end of the ‘pre-history of mankind’ means precisely that the power of the objectified, reified relations between men begins to revert to man. The closer this process comes to it 1 s goal the more urgent it becomes for the proletariat to understand its own historical mission and the more vigorously and directly proletarian class consciousness will determine each of its actions. For the blind power of the forces at work will only advance ‘automatically’ to their goal of self-annihilation as long as that goal is not within reach. When the moment of transition to the ‘realm of freedom’ arrives this will become apparent just because the blind forces really will hurtle blindly towards the abyss, and only the conscious will of the proletariat will be able to save mankind from the impending catastrophe. In other words, when the final economic crisis of capitalism develops, the fate of the revolution (and with it the fate of mankind) will depend on the ideological maturity of the proletariat, i.e. on its class consciousness.

We have now determined the unique function of the class consciousness of the proletariat in contrast to that of other classes. The proletariat cannot liberate itself as a class without simultaneously abolishing class society as such. For that reason its consciousness, the last class consciousness in the history of mankind, must both lay bare the nature of society and achieve an increasingly inward fusion of theory and practice. ‘Ideology’ for the proletariat is no banner to follow into battle, nor is it a cover for its true objectives: it is the objective and the weapon itself. Every non-principled or unprincipled use of tactics on the part of the proletariat debases historical materialism to the level of mere ‘ideology’ and forces the proletariat to use bourgeois (or petty bourgeois) tactics. It thereby robs it of its greatest strength by forcing class consciousness into the secondary or inhibiting role of a bourgeois consciousness, instead of the active role of a proletarian consciousness.

The relationship between class consciousness and class situation is really very simple in the case of the proletariat, but the obstacles which prevent its consciousness being realised in practice are correspondingly greater. In the first place this consciousness is divided within itself. It is true that society as such is highly unified and that it evolves in a unified manner. But in a world where the reified relations of capitalism have the appearance of a natural environment it looks as if there is not a unity but a diversity of mutually independent objects and forces. The most striking division in proletarian class consciousness and the one most fraught with consequences is the separation of the economic struggle from the political one. Marx repeatedly exposed [37] the fallacy of this split and demonstrated that it is in the nature of every economic struggle to develop into a political one (and vice versa). Nevertheless it has not proved possible to eradicate this heresy from the theory of the proletariat. The cause of this aberration is to be found in the dialectical separation of immediate objectives and ultimate goal and, hence, in the dialectical division within the proletarian revolution itself.

Classes that successfully carried out revolutions in earlier societies had their task made easier subjective by this very fact of the discrepancy between their own class consciousness and the objective economic set-up, i.e. by their very unawareness of their own function in the process of change. They had only to use the power at their disposal to enforce their immediate interests while the social import of their actions was hidden from them and left to the ‘ruse of reason’ of the course of events.

But as the proletariat has been entrusted by history with the task of transforming social consciously, its class consciousness must develop a dialectical contradiction between its immediate interests and its long-term objectives, and between the discrete factors and the whole. For the discrete factor, the concrete situation with its concrete demands is by its very nature an integral part of the existing capitalist society; it is governed by the laws of that society and is subject to its economic structure. Only when the immediate interests are integrated into a total view and related to the final goal of the process do they become revolutionary, pointing concretely and consciously beyond the confines of capitalist society.

This means that subjectively, i.e. for the class consciousness of the proletariat, the dialectical relationship between immediate interests and objective impact on the whole of society is loc in the consciousness of the proletariat itself. It does not work itself out as a purely objective process quite apart from all (imputed) consciousness – as was the case with all classes hitherto. Thus the revolutionary victory of the proletariat does not imply, as with former classes, the immediate realisation of the socially given existence of the class, but, as the young Marx clearly saw and defined, its self-annihilation. The Communist Manifesto formulates this distinction in this way: “All the preceding classes that got the upper hand, sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby every other previous mode of appropriation.” (my italics.)

This inner dialectic makes it hard for the proletariat to develop its class consciousness in opposition to that of the bourgeoisie which by cultivating the crudest and most abstract kind of empiricism was able to make do with a superficial view of the world. Whereas even when the development of the proletariat was still at a very primitive stage it discovered that one of the elementary rules of class warfare was to advance beyond what was immediately given. (Marx emphasises this as early as his observations on the Weavers’ Uprising in Silesia.) [38] For because of its situation this contradiction is introduced directly into the consciousness of the proletariat, whereas the bourgeoisie, from its situation, saw the contradictions confronting it as the outer limits of its consciousness.

Conversely, this contradiction means that ‘false’ consciousness is something very different for the proletariat than for every preceding class. Even correct statements about particular situations or aspects of the development of bourgeois class consciousness reveal, when related to the whole of society, the limits of that consciousness and unmask its ‘falseness’. Whereas the proletariat always aspires towards the truth even in its ‘false’ consciousness and in its substantive errors. It is sufficient here to recall the social criticism of the Utopians or the proletarian and revolutionary extension of Ricardo’s theory. Concerning the latter, Engels places great emphasis on the fact that it is “formally incorrect economically”, but he adds at once: “What is false from a formal economic point of view can be true in the perspective of world history.... Behind the formal economic error may lie concealed a very true economic content.” [39]

Only with the aid of this distinction can there be any resolution of the contradiction in the class consciousness of the proletariat; only with its aid can that contradiction become a conscious f actor in history. For the objective aspiration towards truth which is immanent even in the ‘false’ consciousness of the proletariat does not at all imply that this aspiration can come to light without the active intervention of the proletariat. On the contrary, the mere aspiration towards truth can only strip off the veils of falseness and mature into historically significant and socially revolutionary knowledge by the potentiating of consciousness, by conscious action and conscious self-criticism. Such knowledge would of course be unattainable were it not for the objective aspiration, and here we find confirmation of Marx’s dictum that mankind only ever sets itself tasks which it can accomplish”. [40] But the aspiration only yields the possibility. The accomplishment can only be the fruit of the conscious deeds of the proletariat.

The dialectical cleavage in the consciousness of the proletariat is a product of the same structure that makes the historical mission of the proletariat possible by pointing forward and beyond the existing social order. In the case of the other classes we found an antagonism between the class’s self-interest and that of society, between individual deed and social consequences. This antagonism set an external limit to consciousness. Here, in the centre of proletarian class consciousness we discover an antagonism between momentary interest and ultimate goal. The outward victory of the proletariat can only be achieved if this antagonism is inwardly overcome.

As we stressed in the motto to this essay the existence of this conflict enables us to perceive that class consciousness is identical with neither the psychological consciousness of individual members of the proletariat, nor with the (mass-psychological) consciousness of the proletariat as a whole; but it is, on the contrary, the sense, become conscious, of the historical role of the class. This sense will objectify itself in particular interests of the moment and it may only be ignored at the price of allowing the proletarian class struggle to slip back into the most primitive Utopianism. Every momentary interest may have either of two functions: either it will be a step towards the ultimate goal or else it will conceal it. Which of the two it will be depends entirely upon the class consciousness of the proletariat and not on victory or defeat in isolated skirmishes. Marx drew attention very early on [41] to this danger, which is particularly acute on the economic ‘trade-union’ front: “At the same time the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate consequence s of these struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects. . . , that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights . . . instead of simultaneously trying to cure it, instead of using their organised forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system."

We see here the source of every kind of opportunism which begins always with effects and not causes, parts and not the whole, symptoms and not the thing itself. It does not regard the particular interest and the struggle to achieve it as a means of education for the final battle whose outcome depends on closing the gap between the psychological consciousness and the imputed one. Instead it regards the particular as a valuable achievement in itself or at least as a step along the path towards the ultimate goal. In a word, opportunism mistakes the actual, psychological state 0 consciousness of proletarians for the class consciousness of the proletariat.

The practical damage resulting from this confusion can be seen in the great loss of unity and cohesiveness in proletarian praxis when compared to the unity of the objective economic tendencies. The superior strength of true, practical class consciousness lies in the ability to look beyond the divisive symptoms of the economic process to the unity of the total social system underlying it. In the age of capitalism it is not possible for the total system to become directly visible in external phenomena. For instance, the economic basis of a world crisis is undoubtedly unified and its coherence can be understood. But its actual appearance in time and space will take the form of a disparate succession of events in different countries at different times and even in different branches of industry in a number of countries.

When bourgeois thought “transforms the different limbs Of society into so many separate societies” [42] it certainly commits a grave theoretical error. But the immediate practical consequences are nevertheless in harmony with the interests of capitalism. The bourgeoisie is unable in theory to understand more than the details and the symptoms of economic processes (a failure which will ultimately prove its undoing). In the short term, however, it is concerned above all to impose its mode of life upon the day-to-day actions of the proletariat. In this respect (and in this respect alone) its superiority in organisation is clearly visible, while the wholly different organisation of the proletariat, its capacity for being organised as a class, cannot become effective.

The further the economic crisis of capitalism advances the more clearly this unity in the economic process becomes comprehensible in practice. It was there, of course, in so-called periods of normality, too, and was therefore visible from the class standpoint of the proletariat, but the gap between appearance and ultimate reality was too great for that unity to have any practical consequences for proletarian action.

In periods of crisis the position is quite different. The unity of the economic process now moves within reach. So much so that even capitalist theory cannot remain wholly untouched by it, though it can never fully adjust to it. In this situation the fate of the proletariat, and hence of the whole future of humanity, hangs on whether or not it will take the step that has now become objectively possible. For even if the particular symptoms of crisis appear separately (according to country, branch of industry, in the form of ‘economic’ or ‘political’ crisis, etc.), and even if in consequence the reflex of the crisis is fragmented in the immediate psychological consciousness of the workers, it is still possible and necessary to advance beyond this consciousness. And this is instinctively felt to be a necessity by larger and larger sections of the proletariat.

Opportunism had – as it seemed – merely served to inhibit the objective tendency until the crisis became acute. Now, however, it adopts a course directly opposed to it. Its aim now is to scotch the development of proletarian class consciousness in its progress from that which is merely given to that which conforms to the objective total process; even more, it hopes to reduce the class consciousness of the proletariat to the level of the psychologically given and thus to divert into the opposite direction what had hitherto been the purely instinctive tendency. As long as the unification of proletarian class consciousness was not a practical possibility this theory could – with some charity – be regarded as a mere error. But in this situation it takes on the character of a conscious deception .(regardless of whether its advocates are psychologically conscious of this or not). In contrast with the right instincts of the proletariat it plays the same role as that played hitherto by Capitalist theory: it denounces the correct view of the overall economic situation and the correct class consciousness of the proletariat together with its organised form, the Communist Party, as something unreal and inimical to the ‘true’ interests of the workers (i.e. their immediate, national or professional interests) and as something alien to their ‘genuine’ class consciousness (i.e. that which is psychologically given).

To say that class consciousness has no psychological reality does not imply that it is a mere fiction. Its reality is vouched for by its ability to explain the infinitely painful path of the proletarian revolution, with its many reverses, its constant return to its starting-point and the incessant self-criticism of which Marx speaks in the celebrated passage in The Eighteenth Brumaire.

Only the consciousness of the proletariat can point to the way that leads out of the impasse of capitalism. As long as this consciousness is lacking, the crisis remains permanent, it goes back to its starting-point, repeats the cycle until after infinite sufferings and terrible detours the school of history completes the education of the proletariat and confers upon it the leadership of mankind. But the proletariat is not given any choice. As Marx says, it must become a class not only “as against capital” but also “for itself”; [43] that is to say, the class struggle must be raised from the level of economic necessity to the level of conscious aim and effective class consciousness. The pacifists and humanitarians of the class struggle whose efforts tend whether they will or no to retard this lengthy, painful and crisis-ridden process would be horrified if they could but see what sufferings they inflict on the proletariat by extending this course of education. But the proletariat cannot abdicate its mission. The only question at issue is how much it has to suffer before it achieves ideological maturity, before it acquires a true understanding of its class situation and a true class consciousness.

Of course this uncertainty and lack of clarity are themselves the symptoms of the crisis in bourgeois society. As the product of capitalism the proletariat must necessarily be subject to the modes of existence of its creator. This mode of existence is inhumanity and reification. No doubt the very existence of the proletariat implies criticism and the negation of this form of life. But until the objective crisis of capitalism has matured and until the proletariat has achieved true class consciousness, and the ability to understand the crisis fully, it cannot go beyond the criticism of reification and so it is only negatively superior to its antagonist. Indeed, if it can do no more than negate some aspects of capitalism, if it cannot at least aspire to a critique of the whole, then it will not even achieve a negative superiority. This applies to the petty-bourgeois attitudes of most trade unionists. Such criticism from the standpoint of capitalism can be seen most strikingly in the separation of the various theatres of war. The bare fact of separation itself indicates that the consciousness of the proletariat is still fettered by reification. And if the proletariat finds the economic inhumanity to which it is subjected easier to understand than the political, and the political easier than the cultural, then all these separations point to the extent of the still unconquered power of capitalist forms of life in the proletariat itself.

The reified consciousness must also remain hopelessly trapped in the two extremes of crude empiricism and abstract utopianism. In the one case, consciousness becomes either a completely passive observer moving in obedience to laws which it can never control. In the other it regards itself as a power which is able of its own – subjective – volition to master the essentially meaningless motion of objects. We have already identified the crude empiricism of the opportunists in its relation to proletarian class consciousness. We must now go on to see utopianism as characteristic of the internal divisions within class consciousness. (The separation of empiricism from utopianism undertaken here for purely methodological reasons should not be taken as an admission that the two cannot occur together in particular trends and even individuals. On the contrary, they are frequently found together and are joined by an internal bond.)

The philosophical efforts of the young Marx were largely directed towards the refutation of the various false theories of consciousness (including both the ‘idealism’ of the Hegelian School and the ‘materialism’ of Feuerbach) and towards the discovery of a correct view of the role of consciousness in history. As early as the Correspondence of 1843 [with Ruge] he conceives of consciousness as immanent in history. Consciousness does not lie outside the real process of history. It does not have to be introduced into the world by philosophers; therefore to gaze down arrogantly upon the petty struggles of the world and to despise them is indefensible. “We only show it [the world] what its struggles are about and consciousness is a thing that it must needs acquire whether it will or not.” What is needed then is only “to explain its own actions to it”. [44] The great polemic against Hegel in The Holy Family concentrates mainly on this point. [45], Hegel’s inadequacy is that he only seems to allow the absolute spirit to make history. The resulting otherworldliness of consciousness vis-à-vis the real events of history becomes, in the hands of Hegel’s disciples, an arrogant – and reactionary confrontation of ‘spirit’ and ‘mass’. Marx mercilessly exposes the flaws and absurdities and the reversions to a pre-Hegelian stage implicit in this approach.

Complementing this is his – aphoristic – critique of Feuerbach. The materialists had elaborated a view of consciousness as of something appertaining to this world. Marx sees it as merely one stage in the process, the stage of ‘bourgeois society’. He opposes to it the notion of consciousness as ‘practical critical activity’ with the task of ‘changing the world’.

This provides us with the philosophical foundation we need to settle accounts with the utopians. For their thought contains this very duality of social process and the consciousness of it. Consciousness approaches society from another world and leads it from. the false path it has followed back to the right one. The utopians are prevented by the undeveloped nature of the proletarian movement from seeing the true bearer of historical movement in history itself, in the way the proletariat organises itself as a class and, hence, in the class consciousness of the proletariat. They are not yet able to “take note of what is happening before their very eyes and to become its mouthpiece”. [46]

It would be foolish to believe that this criticism and the recognition that a post-utopian attitude to history has become objectively possible means that utopianism can be dismissed as a factor in the proletariat’s struggle for freedom. This is true only for those stages of class consciousness that have really achieved the unity of theory and practice described by Marx, the real and practical intervention of class consciousness in the course of history and hence the practical understanding of reification. And this did not all happen at a single stroke and in a coherent manner. For there are not merely national and ‘social’ stages involved but there are also gradations within the class consciousness of workers in the same strata. The separation of economics from politics is the most revealing and also the most important instance of this. It appears that some sections of the proletariat have quite the right instincts as far as the economic struggle goes and can even raise them to the level of class consciousness. At the same time, ‘however, when it comes to political questions they manage to persist in a completely utopian point of view. It does not need to be emphasised that there is no question here of a mechanical duality. The utopian view of the function of politics must impinge dialectically on their views about economics and, in particular, on their notions about the economy as a totality (as, for example, in the Syndicalist theory of revolution). In the absence of a real understanding of the interaction between politics and economics a war against the whole economic system, to say nothing of its reorganisation, is quite out of the question.

The influence enjoyed even today by such completely utopian theories as those of Ballod or of guild-socialism shows the extent to which utopian thought is still prevalent, even at a level where the direct life-interests of the proletariat are most nearly concerned and where the present crisis makes it possible to read off from history the correct course of action to be followed.

This syndrome must make its appearance even more blatantly where it is not yet possible to see society ;is a whole. This can be seen at its clearest in purely ideological questions, in questions of culture. These questions occupy an almost wholly isolated position in the consciousness of the proletariat; the organic bonds connecting these issues with the immediate life-interests of the proletariat as well as with society as a whole have not even begun to penetrate its consciousness. The achievement in this area hardly ever goes beyond the self-criticism of capitalism – carried out here by the proletariat. What is positive here in theory and practice is almost entirely utopian.

These gradations are, then, on the one hand, objective historical necessities, nuances in the objective possibilities of consciousness (such as the relative cohesiveness of politics and economics in comparison to cultural questions). On the other hand, where consciousness already exists as an objective possibility, they indicate degrees of distance between the psychological class consciousness and the adequate understanding of the total situation. These gradations, however, can no longer be referred back to socioeconomic causes. The objective theory of class consciousness is the theory of its objective possibility. The stratification of the problems and economic interests within the proletariat is, unfortunately, almost wholly unexplored, but research would undoubtedly lead to discoveries of the very first importance. But however useful it would be to produce a typology of the various strata, we would still be confronted at every turn with the problem of whether it is actually possible to make the objective possibility of class consciousness into a reality. Hitherto this question could only occur to extraordinary individuals (consider Marx’s completely non-utopian prescience with regard to the problems of dictatorship). Today it has become a real and relevant question for a whole class: the question of the inner transformation of the proletariat, of its development to the stage of its own objective historical mission. It is an ideological crisis which must be solved before a practical solution to the world’s economic crisis can be found.

In view of the great distance that the proletariat has to travel ideologically it would be disastrous to foster any illusions. But it would be no less disastrous to overlook the forces at work within the proletariat which are tending towards the ideological defeat of capitalism. Every proletarian revolution has created workers’ councils in an increasingly radical and conscious manner. When this weapon increases in power to the point where it becomes the organ of state, this is a sign that the class consciousness of the proletariat is on the verge of overcoming the bourgeois outlook of its leaders.

The revolutionary workers’ council (not to be confused with its opportunist caricatures) is one of the forms which the consciousness of the proletariat has striven to create ever since its inception. The fact that it exists and is constantly developing shows that the proletariat already stands on the threshold of its own consciousness and hence on the threshold of victory. The workers’ council spells the political and economic defeat of reification. In the period following the dictatorship it will eliminate the bourgeois separation of the legislature, administration and judiciary. During the struggle for control its mission is twofold. On the one hand, it must overcome the fragmentation of the proletariat in time and space, and on the other, it has to bring economics and politics together into the true synthesis of proletarian praxis. In this way it will help to reconcile the dialectical conflict between immediate interests and ultimate goal.

Thus we must never overlook the distance that separates the consciousness of even the most revolutionary worker from the authentic class consciousness of the proletariat. But even this situation can be explained on the basis of the Marxist theory of class struggle and class consciousness. The proletariat only perfects itself by annihilating and transcending itself, by creating the classless society through the successful conclusion of its own class struggle. The struggle for this society, in which the dictatorship of the proletariat is merely a phase, is not just a battle waged against an external enemy, the bourgeoisie. It is equally the struggle of the proletariat against itself. against the devastating and degrading effects of the capitalist system upon its class consciousness. The proletariat will only have won the real victory when it has overcome these effects within itself. The separation of the areas that should be united, the diverse stages of consciousness which the proletariat has reached in the various spheres of activity are a precise index of what has been achieved and what remains to be done. The proletariat must not shy away from self-criticism, for victory can only be gained by the truth and self-criticism must, therefore, be its natural element.

March 1920.

The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House Audre Lorde I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for the Humanities conference a year ago, with the understanding that I would be commenting upon papers dealing with the role of difference within the lives of American women: difference of race, sexuality, class, and age. The absence of these considerations weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political. It is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians. And yet, I stand here as a Black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of Black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism, and homophobia are inseparable. To read this program is to assume that lesbian and Black women have nothing to say about existentialism, the erotic, women's culture and silence, developing feminist theory, or heterosexuality and power. And what does it mean in personal and political terms when even the two Black women who did present here were literally found at the last hour? What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable. The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of Third World women leaves a serious gap within this conference and within the papers presented here. For example, in a paper on material relationships between women, I was conscious of an either/or model of nurturing which totally dismissed my knowledge as a Black lesbian. In this paper there was no examination of mutuality between women, no systems of shared support, no interdependence as exists between lesbians and women- identified women. Yet it is only in the patriarchal model of nurturance that women "who attempt to emancipate themselves ay perhaps too high a price for the results," as this paper states. For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power I rediscovered. It is this real connection which is so feared by a patriarchal world. Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women. Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative. This is a difference between the passive be and the active being. Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency Lorde 1

become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of difference strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters. Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being. Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged. As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist. Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference -- those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older -- know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support. Poor women and women of Color know there is a difference between the daily manifestations of marital slavery and prostitution because it is our daughters who line 42nd Street. If white American feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color? What is the theory behind racist feminism? In a world of possibility for us all, our personal visions help lay the groundwork for political action. The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower. Why weren't other women of Color found to participate in this conference? Why were two phone calls to me considered a consultation? Am I the only possible source of names of Black feminists? And although the Black panelist's paper ends on an important and powerful connection of love between women, what about interracial cooperation between feminists who don't love each other? In academic feminist circles, the answer to these questions is often, "We do not know who to ask." But that is the same evasion of responsibility, the same cop-out, that keeps Lorde 2

Black women's art our of women's exhibitions, Black women's work our of most feminist publications except for the occasional "Special Third World Women's Issue," and Black women's texts off your reading lists. But as Adrienne Rich pointed out in a recent talk, which feminists have educated themselves about such an enormous amount over the past ten years, how come you haven't also educated yourselves about Black women and the differences between us -- white and Black -- when it is key to our survival as a movement? Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educated men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of Color to educate white women -- in the face of tremendous resistance -- as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought. Simone de Beauvoir once said: "It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting." Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices Prospero, you are the master of illusion. Lying is your trademark. And you have lied so much to me (Lied about the world, lied about me) That you have ended by imposing on me An image of myself. Underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior, That s the way you have forced me to see myself I detest that image! What's more, it's a lie! But now I know you, you old cancer, And I know myself as well. ~ Caliban, in Aime Cesaire's A Tempest --- Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press. 110- 114. 2007. Print. Lorde 3

Quarterly Journal of Speech Vol. 95, No. 1, February 2009, pp. 43􏰀65 Bordering the Civic Imaginary: Alienization, Fence Logic, and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps D. Robert DeChaine

Current figurations of the ‘‘immigration problem’’ in the United States challenge our understanding of the rhetoricity of contemporary bordering practices. The public discourse of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps serves to chart the alienization of undocumented migrants and the enactment of alien abjection on the U.S.􏰀Mexico border. Alienization promises an antidote to majoritarian anxieties regarding national disunity in the form of a shoring-up of cultural boundaries that border-crossing subjects render troublesome. Ultimately, the fence logic engendered by groups such as the Minutemen reveals how struggles over the boundaries of citizenship both enable and limit an affect-charged civic imaginary.

Keywords: Borders; Alienization; Minuteman Civil Defense Corps; Citizenship; Social Imaginaries

The specter of the border haunts the language of social relations. At present, some 12 million undocumented migrants reside temporarily or permanently in the United States.1 Many of them entered the country across the border with Mexico, a frontier spanning nearly 2,000 miles from the Californian Baja through Texas and to Tamaulipas. These border-crossing individuals, the majority of whom venture to the United States in search of work and enhanced economic opportunities, are not recognized by the U.S. government as citizens, defined in legal terms as native or naturalized rights bearers. Nor, for the most part, are they considered legitimate in the broader sense of what Charles Taylor terms ‘‘recognition’’*that is, they are not viewed as valued and respected members of the national community.2 Indeed, upon D. Robert DeChaine is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Liberal Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2007 National Communication Association convention in Chicago. The author would like to thank Editor John Louis Lucaites, Mike Willard, Michelle Ladd, Scott Rodriguez, and two anonymous reviewers, each of whom made decisive contributions to the quality of the essay. Correspondence to: Department of Communication Studies, California State University, Los Angeles, 5151 State University Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90032-8111, USA. Email: ddechai@calstatela.edu ISSN 0033-5630 (print)/ISSN 1479-5779 (online) # 2009 National Communication Association DOI: 10.1080/00335630802621078

44 D. R. DeChaine close examination, the cultural politics of recognition reveals a telling link between state legitimacy and public morality. As Kent Ono and John Sloop note in their analysis of the role of media rhetoric in the passage of California’s Proposition 187 in the 1990s, [T]he contemporary citizenship narrative casts immigration in moral terms: Those who abide by U.S. laws and procedures for how to become U.S. citizens are cast as good and moral citizens; those who do anything but systematically follow expectations of U.S. government officials and their supporters are seen as bad and immoral ‘‘illegals.’’3 The transgressive act of unauthorized border crossing thus produces a double exclusion: it renders migrant persons both legally and morally abject. Given the subordinate status of undocumented migrants in the United States today, what is particularly interesting regarding the ‘‘immigration problem,’’ as it is typically invoked in public discussion, is that it is not framed predominantly in terms of the migrants themselves. After all, the United States is a nation composed of immigrants, so the oft-repeated narrative goes, and its promise as a land of opportunity for hard-working, law-abiding citizens continues to be exalted as among its preeminent gifts. Rather, the problem is most often cast in terms of a lack of border integrity: its leakiness; the ease with which undocumented migrants are able to slip across it unnoticed; and the inability or unwillingness by the U.S. and Mexican governments to seal, secure, and protect the national frontier and its stark line of demarcation. Notwithstanding the nativism and xenophobia that have historically shaped and continue to shape popular attitudes toward undocumented migrants in the United States, the problem of immigration, it seems, lies not with the migrant, but with the border.4 The prevalent characterization of the immigration problem as primarily a concern about the border gestures toward a number of longstanding assumptions regarding what a border is and how it functions. According to the traditional geography-based logic, a border exists as a given entity whose contours can be cleanly and clearly recognized, measured, and mapped.5 A border’s givenness and mappability implies its stability as a resource for delineating spatial territory. Despite its tenacity, the traditional border logic has increasingly been subjected to critique. This scrutiny is owing in part to the emergence and development of postmodern theories of the social character of space beginning in the 1960s, and to a subsequent proliferation of spatial metaphors endemic to human social life in a globalized world.6 Against the traditional view of borders as given and stable entities, the countervailing claim is that whatever form they may assume, all borders are socially motivated constructs.7 They are bounding, ordering apparatuses, whose primary function is to designate, produce, and/or regulate the space of difference. Thus conceived, borders simulta- neously shore up insides and mark off outsides while establishing the terms of their relationality. They perform both division and containment functions, differentiating the self from others, one culture from another, desirable elements from undesirable ones, and, often enough, ‘‘us’’ from ‘‘them.’’ Moreover, according to the revisionist

account, a border’s contingent configuration is often masked by certain political and economic discourses that labor diligently, sometimes feverishly, to maintain the semblance of stability, integrity, and reality. Recent scholarship in communication studies, chiefly in the area of immigration discourse, has begun to attend to the subject of borders and their cultural significance. A majority of this work aligns with critical scholarship that ascribes a truth function to the border, focusing on its constructedness and on the ambivalent identities of border(ed) subjects.8 Thus considered, a border operates as an inducement to action, deployed by agents in specific contexts to warrant claims to both unity and division.9 Circulating as a robust spatial metaphor, the figure of the border functions as a prevalent organizing doxa in a group’s collective vocabulary. Such assumptions, theorizations, and criticism regarding the constitution and function of the border beckon a considera- tion of two interrelated questions, each of which holds epistemological and ontological significance. What kinds of operations are at play in the construction of borders? And once entwined in the cultural fabric of a political community, how do constructed borders shape human values, attitudes, and actions? The aim here is to focus on the rhetoricity of contemporary bordering practices by charting the ‘‘alienization’’ of undocumented migrants in the United States, and to explicate the operations by which alienizing discourse is enacted on and around the U.S.􏰀Mexico border.10 Alienization, I contend, is a bordering project that draws force from a variety of common linguistic and nonlinguistic resources to render individuals and groups abject and unassimilable*irredeemable others whose putative exclusion from the national body is virtually absolute. Alienization materializes as a reactionary rhetoric goaded by a profound anxiety of incompleteness, an anxiety akin to what Arjun Appadurai refers to as a ‘‘fear of small numbers’’ engendered by a minority population whose alterity is perceived by a majoritarian national ethnos as a threat to its unity.11 Thus conceived, alienization promises an antidote to disunity and incompleteness in the form of a shoring-up of cultural boundaries that border-crossing migrant subjects reveal to be troublesome. Moreover, as a form of world making, alienization shapes a population’s collective attitudes toward and practices of citizenship. I share Robert Asen’s view of citizenship as a discursive mode of public action that is ‘‘always conditioned by social status, relations of power, institutional factors, and material constraints’’; as such, citizenship enactment necessarily involves hegemonic struggles over the very meaning of the term ‘‘citizen’’ in a multipublic sphere.12 Evoking the concept of the ‘‘social imaginary,’’ I examine how struggles over the boundaries of citizenship both enable and limit an affect-charged ‘‘civic imaginary.’’ An analysis of alienization and its bearing on the constitution of the civic imaginary requires a shift in focus away from the consideration of borders as physical, geographical entities to consideration of their instrumentality as performative, sociocultural productions. It places emphasis on the process, practice, and affect of bordering, and on the effects, both material and discursive, of border rhetorics on particular social collectivities. My chief ambition, then, is to throw light on the relationship between physical and social bordering practices, and to identify the very human implications of those practices for the shaping of civic culture. In order to lend historical specificity to the Bordering the Civic Imaginary 45

46 D. R. DeChaine discussion, I focus attention on the crafting of public appeals in support of the Border Fence Project, an initiative launched by the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC) in 2006. Originally created in 2005 by former elementary school teacher, military veteran, and California resident Chris Simcox in response to a perceived ineffective- ness of U.S. governmental action, MCDC proclaims itself to be ‘‘the country’s largest volunteer grassroots border security advocacy group,’’ boasting more than 350,000 constituents.13 The professed aim of the MCDC’s Border Fence Project is ‘‘to secure America’s sovereign territory against incursion, invasion, and terrorism’’ through the construction of a steel security fence along the U.S.􏰀Mexico border.14 The MCDC and its Border Fence Project has garnered considerable attention from popular media, and support from prominent members of the U.S. government. Drawing on a range of textual evidence including websites, speeches, visual and print media, an online discussion forum, and interviews with Simcox and other MCDC members, I show how the group’s public advocacy of the border fence reflects an articulation of economic, racist, and nationalist narratives that together produce a border rhetoric in which the alienized subject becomes both figurally and literally fenced out of the sacrosanct space of U.S. citizenship. The MCDC’s Border Fence Project presents a timely example of a symbolic enactment of alienization that fuels public sentiment and influences policy regarding undocumented migrants in the United States. Rather than dismiss the organization as extremist, as popular U.S. media often do, or consider its views to be peripheral to dominant attitudes toward immigration, I argue that a close examination of the MCDC identifies its reliance on symbolic strategies and commonly shared values that are anything but radical. In the analysis, I hope to illustrate the ease with which physical and geopolitical borders map onto cultural and ideological borders. Against the popular argument that the immigration problem is preeminently about the integrity of the border rather than about the qualities of the migrant as a human being, I contend that their relationship is in fact profoundly fraught. ‘‘Suspect bodies,’’ asserts Lisa Flores, ‘‘carry the border on them.’’15 As a transgressive, racialized subject, the alienized migrant literally embodies the border, rendering problematic any tidy relationship between physical and social space. Crafting the Abject: The Border(ing) Project of Alienization An examination of the rhetorical dimensions of the border requires a shift in focus from borders to bordering, from a consideration of static entities to analysis of a dynamic practice. As a social ordering practice, bordering produces and enforces spaces of identity and difference, defining terms of identification and exclusion. As such, it influences a community’s ways of seeing and experiencing itself, its members, and those deemed to be outside or unworthy of membership. In this section, I outline a project of cultural and political abjection, whose symbolic form operates according to an affective logic of alienization. My intention is to identify the characteristic features of alienization, to explain its motivations and functions, and to suggest some of its implications for its bordered subjects. My discussion is informed by the

complementary projects of critical rhetoric and cultural studies, each of which claims a stake in uncovering operations of power that shape human experience.16 While I would propose a certain degree of applicability to non-U.S. contexts, my focus is on the specific formation of alienization in post-9/11 U.S. society. Alienization in the United States did not materialize full-blown in the present social-political moment. Indeed, its current manifestation attests to a historical record of laws, policies, and practices reflecting longstanding attitudes about immigration and migrants. As Flores contends, ‘‘Contemporary images of immi- grants, such as that of the illegal alien, do not emerge in a vacuum. Instead, they are part of our nation’s history of immigration, race, and nation; they bring with them varied meanings, reflecting their origins and uses.’’17 This history has been steeped in nativism, an ideology based on a systematic exclusion of designated others, that can be traced back to at least the nineteenth century. Driven by the twin discourses of racism and capitalism, nativism has contributed to the construction of narratives that cast the migrant as culturally different or inferior, a necessary source of labor, and a drain on U.S. government resources.18 Its early manifestations are evidenced in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which denied migrants citizenship on the basis of national origin, and the Immigration Acts of 1921 and 1924, which placed numerical limits on immigration while entrenching for decades ‘‘a global racial and national hierarchy that favored some immigrants over others.’’19 During the Great Depression, as demand for labor diminished and job competition increased, nativism was reinvigorated in the form of voluntary repatriation campaigns that resulted in the deportation of a half a million Mexican undocumented migrants, U.S. citizens of Mexican descent, and permanent legal residents. During World War II, the U.S. government, presuming that all U.S. citizens of Japanese origin were racially inclined to disloyalty, incarcerated 120,000 persons, effectively nullifying their citizenship status. After the war, with the increased demand for labor, the government instituted the Bracero program, a contract labor policy for Mexican migrants that Mai Ngai describes as ‘‘America’s largest experiment with a ‘guest worker program’’’ to date.20 Arcing into the present, nativism has endured in actions such as 1954’s Operation Wetback, which led to the forcible deportation of more than a million Mexican migrant laborers, efforts in the 1980s to militarize the U.S.􏰀Mexico border, California’s Operation Gatekeeper, Propositions 187 and 209 in the 1990s, state laws mandating English-only policies, and recurring efforts to pass an English Language Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. As such historical patterns of response to migrants underscore, an account of the present conjunctural formation necessarily includes the history of nativist-born attitudes and practices that have designated immigration as a problem and the migrant subject as an undesirable outsider to the American civic community. In its most elemental sense, alienization is a form of otheringa way of seeing and not seeing, of experiencing and not experiencingthat conditions modes of human subjectivity and action. Rather than considering alienization primarily as a condition, or as a terminal state, or in terms of a culmination of effectsalthough it is certainly experienced on each of these registersI propose that it is most usefully understood Bordering the Civic Imaginary 47

48 D. R. DeChaine as an unstable hegemonic process that must constantly adjust the character of its form if it is to win the consent of a national community guided by properly American liberal democratic values. As a hegemonic process, alienization operates as a fundamentally rhetorical mode of action. Invoking Kenneth Burke’s formulation, it functions terministically to direct and reflect the experiential reality of symbol users.21 As a shaper of collective attitudes, it provides a national community with a repertoire of symbolic resources for naming and thus bringing into being its valuative structure. These resources include an array of metaphors ascribed to alienized persons, as well as linguistic and visual figures that serve both to condense and to amplify public values. As I elaborate below, for example, the metaphoric construction of an alien invasion, and inverted visual images such as an upside-down American flag or a photograph of a breached border fence, can provide powerful symbolic grist for mobilizing public sentiment against those perceived as threatening to the sanctity of American values and national security. Moreover, alienizing rhetoric operates according to an essentialist logic based on negative linguistic difference. As Mark Lawrence McPhail explains, ‘‘The socio-political realities of negative difference are products of a language defined in essentialist terms as much as they are a reflection of self-evident realities that exist independent of the languages we use to construct them.’’22 Viewed in this light, alienization operates as a moralizing discourse that tells the truth about undocumented migrants and the essential nature of their otherness. The terministic and ideological functions of language and imagery are integral to the development of a hegemonic border logic that negatively posits absolute identities onto other(ed) migrant individuals and groups. Alienization signifies a context-specific conjuncture of discourses that interanimate and mutually reinforce one another. In its present configuration, it is enacted as an expression of racial, ethnic, and national identity that categorizes and differentiates Americans from non-Americans*or, more accurately, un-Americans. It demon- strates the intimate social and political linkage of race and nation in directing racism as an expression of xenophobic attitudes toward inferior and undesirable constituents of the national body.23 As a bordering practice, alienization shares much in common with what Howard Winant describes as ‘‘racialization,’’ a process involving attempts to fix identities provisionally in accordance with particular social, historical, and political attitudes about race.24 Furthermore, racializing rhetoric is readily linked with economic arguments that reinforce cultural and political attitudes toward migrants. In their analysis of the rhetoric of California’s Proposition 187, for example, Ono and Sloop describe the racialization of the migrant as the discursive production of an ambivalent subject who is both desired and reviled, necessary for both capitalist production and the object of ‘‘loathing of the laborer who does anything other than work specific jobs associated with facilitating the interests of efficient capital processes.’’25 Arguments about the migrant’s relative economic value are tethered to ideologically charged prescriptions of racial and ethnic identity. The undocu- mented migrant becomes both integral to and separated from proper capitalist relations of production; as such, alienization bears more than a passing resemblance to Karl Marx’s conception of ‘‘alienation.’’26

Alienization functions discursively to shape public understandings of social and political identities. However, to gauge its influence only in terms of discourse misses a great deal about what drives it as an expression of national communal values. At the motivational level, alienization operates according to an affective logic similar to that which Appadurai describes in terms of an ‘‘anxiety of incompleteness.’’27 Appadurai accounts for what he takes to be an increasing propensity towards ethnic-based violence committed by national majorities (including liberal democracies) against their minority populations, a tendency he attributes in large part to the anxieties of social life in a globalized world: [W]here the lines between us and them may have always, in human history, been blurred at the boundaries and unclear across large spaces and big numbers, globalization exacerbates these uncertainties and produces new incentives for cultural purification as more nations lose the illusion of national economic sovereignty or well-being.... [T]he tip-over into ethnonationalism and even ethnocide in democratic polities has much to do with the strange inner reciprocity of the categories of ‘‘majority’’ and ‘‘minority’’ in liberal social thought, which produces what I call the anxiety of incompleteness. Numerical majorities can become predatory and ethnocidal with regard to small numbers precisely when some minorities (and their small numbers) remind these majorities of the small gap which lies between their condition as majorities and the horizon of an unsullied national whole, a pure and untainted national ethnos . . . . The anxiety of incompleteness (always latent in the project of complete national purity) and the sense of social uncertainty about large-scale ethnoracial categories can produce a runaway form of mutual stimulation, which is the road to genocide.28 According to Appadurai, it is the national ethnic minority populations who bear the brunt of the uncertaintiesand the violencespurred by globalization and its disjunctive modes of organization. Majorities, goaded by the anxiety of incomplete- ness and a fear of small numbers, find a scapegoat in the figure of the minority, whose presence is both necessary and unwelcome: necessary for dirty work such as fighting wars and shouldering menial labor, but unwelcome for the threats their racial, financial, linguistic, and cultural border-blurrings pose. Above all, Appadurai claims, national ethnic minorities ‘‘blur the boundaries of national peoplehood,’’ a cardinal transgression for which they are not to be forgiven.29 They are the embodiment of the anxiety of incompleteness. Minorities problematize the meanings of ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them’’*and for that, they must pay. Appadurai’s argument regarding the majoritarian fear of small numbers lends to an understanding of the affective logic of alienization in the United States today. In a globalized world, where both ‘‘vertebrate’’ and ‘‘cellular’’ tendencies of hypercapit- alism move across national boundaries with swiftness and ease, it is the figure of the border-crossing migrant who increasingly signifies the social (dis)ease of the U.S. border problem.30 To be sure, arguments casting undocumented migrants as criminals and threats to national security have long figured in U.S. popular, political, and legal discourse. However, public expressions of anxiety regarding the status of migrants have once again become pronounced in the wake of global free trade policies such as those engendered in the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs Bordering the Civic Imaginary 49

50 D. R. DeChaine (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). This has partly to do with the U.S.-led effort to relax economic borders under the auspices of creating an integrated North American market while at the same time resisting an equivalent integration of cross-border labor.31 However, underlying this contradictory policy, I contend, is an affective impulse motivated by fear of losing control. As economic borders loosen, sociocultural borders tighten; as the U.S. economy becomes ever more subject to the disjunctive flows of a global cultural economy, its majoritarian reaction is to allay its anxieties by maintaining control where it canon cultural terrain. In a post-9/11 climate stoked by an omnipresent affect of terrorthe threat of a cellular enemy who is both outside and potentially inside our national borders it is perhaps unsurprising that the population’s fears and uncertainties, as well as its search for enemies, turn inward. Undocumented migrants and their rapidly growing small numbers serve as constant reminders of the incompleteness of a unified, pure American ethnos. Their geographical and cultural border crossings are perceived as challenges, indeed threats, to national sovereignty. Alienization promises an antidote to border anxieties: the present U.S. cultural climate precipitates uneasiness and a compulsion to engage in shoring-up operations, to effect a return to an imagined wholeness, unity, authenticity, and knowability. Thus conceived, alienization is the panicked reaction to the anxiety of incom- pleteness. Coursing through the national body, it casts alienized subjects as abject, inassimilable outsiders to the American community. The abject migrant is not absent from social experienceabjection is not synonymous with absence, as non- recognition is not the antonym of recognition. Rather, because she is both necessary and unwelcome, she is both visible and invisible, both acknowledged and ignored.32 Indeed it is this ambiguous positionality, the troublesome both/and of migrant subjectivity, that compels a national community to search for a means of reconciliation. However, reconciliation entails symbolic violence. In its materializa- tion as a border rhetoric, alienization operates through victimage. Blamed for the ills of a society that proclaims root values of tolerance and pluralism but longs for wholeness, the undocumented migrant fulfills the role of a ‘‘perfect enemy,’’ a vessel for that which the American reviles, disavows, and fears.33 Rhetorical victimage relies on reductive categories and stereotypical modes of representation in its rendering of the subject-scapegoat it designates. Marouf Hasian Jr. and Fernando Delgado note this reductive tendency in their analysis of California’s Proposition 187: ‘‘The typology of illegal immigrant becomes a signifier meaning Mexican (collapsing distinctions among Mexicans, Mexican Americans, Latinos) in a stereotypical manner similar to the social construction of welfare mother as African American female.’’34 Through victimage, the reductive figure of the border-crossing, border-blurring migrant serves as a vessel for containing the threat of an un-American presence from within. As an ideological production that is woven thickly into the fabric of society, alienization is infused in the language and images of everyday communication practices. A reactionary expression of the nativism that has historically shaped the character of U.S. political culture, alienization assumes a more rather than less

ordinary rhetorical form. Nowhere is its manifestation more apparent than in the invocation of ‘‘illegal immigration,’’ a key figure that is rapidly subsuming the normative rhetoric of immigration in U.S. political culture. Its ubiquity in popular media, town hall meetings, public policy analysis, congressional hearings, and political campaign platforms attests to its ascendance as an orienting devil term. And the potency of illegal immigration is nowhere more concentrated than in the signifier for its idealized subject, the ‘‘illegal alien.’’ The illegal alien is the ideal embodiment of illegal immigration precisely because she is always already doubly stigmatized. Through a process of repetition and sedimentation in public culture, the articulation of the designations ‘‘illegal’’ and ‘‘alien’’ gives them the appearance of a singularity, of being inextricably interlocked. More and more, in fact, ‘‘illegal’’ is becoming an implicit modifier, the already- present threat that marks the alienized subject. To invoke the term ‘‘alien’’ is now nearly all that is required. Her illegality is given. Through the alien’s consolidation as the implicit subject-signifier of illegal immigration, alienization is enacted linguis- tically and performatively as a self-evident expression of the abject other. Moreover, through her tacit link with illegal immigration, the alien is made available for identification with a variety of other(ing) signifiers. These have historically included constructions of the alien as ‘‘criminal,’’ ‘‘communist,’’ ‘‘animal,’’ ‘‘dirt(y),’’ and ‘‘disease(d).’’35 Such signifiers call attention to the ultimately unknowable quality of the alien, an ascription that is threatening to the national community since it belongs to the one who seeps through the cracks, gets in and out, and troubles the very discreteness of the national inside/outside binary. Across all of its identifications and significations, it has become clear, ‘‘Whether invoked directly or indirectly, the figure of the ‘illegal alien’ is hauntingly consistent.’’36 Indeed, the totalizing ascription of ‘‘illegal alien’’ to the alienized subject performs an essentializing function that literally denies the possibility of a positive referent. Given her overwhelmingly negative social-cultural status, redemption of the alienized subject is unlikely in the United States today. In order to be refigured as a potential member of the American community, she would need to undergo a radical transformation, entailing both avowed and ascribed identity reformation. In effect, the alien would have to become an altogether different person. It is true that there are legal pathways to U.S. citizenship, although in rapidly restricting forms.37 However, the fact that alienization involves concomitant racialization makes the prospect of redemption difficult, if not doubtful. Not only do border guards check papers, but since the alienized subject carries the border on her back, she is constantly subject to surveillance and search. She may or may not be what she seems; although she is among the community, although she may be naturalized, she is not naturally of the community. As Bhikhu Parekh astutely notes in his discussion of multicultural citizenship, ‘‘Although equal citizenship is essential to fostering a common sense of belonging, it is not enough. Citizenship is about status and rights; belonging is about acceptance, feeling welcome, a sense of identification. The two do not necessarily coincide.’’38 Bordering the Civic Imaginary 51

52 D. R. DeChaine Alienization, I have suggested, is a border(ing) rhetoric par excellence. It operates in U.S. society as a hegemonic project concerned with the forging and maintaining of dominant American civic values. At the structural level, it signifies an alliance of racist, capitalist, and nationalist discourses that materializes rhetorically. At the motivational level, it is goaded by majoritarian anxieties of national incompleteness and a longing for civic communion. Although reactionary in tone, it reflects widely shared values and attitudes. Dogged by the threat of an ambiguous enemy within, the primary labor of alienizing rhetoric is the production of the abject subject, the illegal alien, the embodiment of that which is both necessary and unwelcome in the space of U.S. citizenship. Reviled for her border-crossing and border-blurring behavior, the alien is constructed through symbolic acts of reduction and victimage. With her identity tethered to the negative, racialized figure of illegal immigration, the alien’s prospects for redemption are acutely diminished. Above all, the rhetorical production of the alien illustrates the collective desire for purity, perfection, and order*a compulsion, as Burke insists, that is a hallmark of the human condition.39 Put differently, although alienization appears primarily to be about the imputed qualities of the undocumented migrant, it is also substantially about the fraught logic of the border and the symbolic power that it wields. Pledging ‘‘Eternal Vigilance’’: Rhetorical Alienization in the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps Since its inception under the leadership of its founder Chris Simcox, the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps has been effective in shaping public attitudes about the immigration problem in the United States. Proclaiming itself as ‘‘one of the most important, socially responsible, and peaceful movements for justice since the civil rights movement of the 1960s,’’ Simcox and the MCDC have garnered support from a number of legislators, including Republican representatives Duncan Hunter of California and Tom Tancredo of Colorado.40 Like other contemporary social movement groups, the MCDC is acutely attuned to the politics of the public screen and its power to mobilize popular attitudes.41 In order to promote its mission and its border operations, the organization relies heavily on hypermedia for the dissemina- tion of information, public statements, speeches, fundraising campaigns, and volunteer musters. Its official and unofficial discourse proliferates in the blogosphere, and postings of speeches by Simcox as well as protests against him can be found on popular video sites such as YouTube. Its continued media presence and its often infamous appearances on college campuses have helped the MCDC to maintain a significant profile in the public conversation on immigration reform, while contributing to its ethos as a controversial activist group. A substantial amount of the MCDC’s public advocacy has focused on its effort to secure funding for the construction of approximately 70 miles of fencing along portions of the U.S.􏰀Mexico border in southeastern Arizona. The MCDC has dubbed the initiative the Minuteman Border Fence Project, a campaign that serves as an umbrella for a number of regional fundraising efforts.42 Professing to be ‘‘doing the

job the [U.S.] President and the Senate refuse to do,’’ MCDC-aligned volunteers began constructing bits of the fence themselves in October 2006.43 Referring to the proposed border fence as ‘‘America’s ultimate protection against foreign invasion and terrorism,’’ the MCDC capitalizes on the historical symbolism of the Minutemen of the American Revolution, describing its undertaking as not a solution but an example of what committed AmericansWe the Peoplemust do in order to safeguard the border and the citizenry.44 Through its efforts to rally public support for a security fence along the U.S.􏰀Mexico border, particularly in its crafting of appeals that draw on affect-charged language and images of formative American values, the border(ing) rhetoric of the MCDC demonstrates how public under- standings of national identity, community, citizenship, and ‘‘the other’’ are mutually constructed. Reflecting commonly shared beliefs about migrants and immigration in U.S. political culture, its appeals bespeak a ‘‘fence logic’’ that effectively displaces claims about alien subjectivity and refigures them as claims about conditions said to result from nonsecure U.S. borders. In this way, the group enacts a project of alienization that avoids overt racism by framing the immigration problem as a concern about geographical borders rather than about the alien per se. In all, the MCDC contributes to the production of an anxiety-ridden narrative of citizenship of what it means to be a member of the broadly imagined American Community. Ultimately, its fence logic both shapes and reflects broadly held attitudes about culture and difference in contemporary U.S. society. The MCDC demonstrates its similarity to other social-political movement groups insofar as its public appeals, if they are to be acted on, must successfully construct an orientation toward a situationa compelling exigency, a plausible accounting of involved actors, and a fitting and attainable mode of redress. What most distinguishes the MCDC from other activist groups is its particular crafting of a vision of national community, an understanding of civic identity that seeks resonance with a dominant regime of true American values. In constructing appeals that articulate values of social unity, national security, rule of law, and civic responsibility, the MCDC draws from a common vocabulary of U.S. political culture to advance an alienizing logic that shores up communal boundaries while simultaneously defining terms of exclusion. The MCDC’s casting of the rhetorical situation turns on its characterizations of the duty-bound Minuteman volunteer and the nature of the national security nightmare at the U.S.􏰀Mexico border that impels him to action.45 The United States, the group warns, is a nation in peril. The threat strikes at the heart of the American democratic ethos: the Border Fence website asserts that the country ‘‘is under siege by forces and interests that have the capacity, over time, to destroy our great experiment of responsible self-government.’’46 The sovereignty of the nation and the unity of the American people have become jeopardized as a result of those whose unauthorized movements impinge on them. The danger, the MCDC insists, issues from the current state of unsecured U.S. borders, giving rise to a ‘‘human tsunami’’ of illegal border crossers and the threats they pose to citizen safety, economic stability, and cherished American values.47 Bordering the Civic Imaginary 53

54 D. R. DeChaine The forces and interests that are claimed to undermine American unity and sovereignty are both internal and external. In an address entitled ‘‘A Letter to My Fellow Americans,’’ Jim Wood, Executive Director of the Border Fence Project, cautions, ‘‘[T]he national language, character and culture of our sovereign American people are under attack by ‘multi-culturalism’ run rampant. It’s dangerous and it’s destructive.’’48 Employing violent metaphors and reductive categories to consolidate the gravity of the alien threat, constituents of the MCDC make repeated reference to the imputed ‘‘illegal invasion’’ now said to be underway.49 Such an evocation points to the danger to the American ethnos of an abstract, massified enemy already among us, ‘‘the illegal aliens residing in our midst who have been allowed by a feckless government to violate our laws and mock our sovereignty as a nation.’’50 The fear of increasing numbers of alien noncitizens in the United States and their ability to undermine American unity is further evidenced on the Border Fence Project’s website, which cites California as an example of the disunity produced by an ‘‘increased flux of illegals, who displace legal citizens whose numbers are decreasing there.’’ Moving unchecked across the U.S. border, the alien-enemy is now within, infecting the body politic. It corrupts the government, disunifies its citizenry, dilutes its culture, and precipitates a virulent strain of anti-Americanism: as Simcox stated, in response to May 1, 2007 demonstrations in which ‘‘anti-American extremist militants’’ flew upside-down U.S. flags and flew Mexican flags above the U.S. flag, I think it exposes an anti-American, anti-European sentiment. And we see that on college campuses across the country. The vitriol, the hate. The hate groups that exist on college campuses and then take to the streets are calling for a reconquista of the United States.51 Flags and other visual imagery are routinely employed by the MCDC to dramatize the anti-Americanism fueled by the alien invasion. For example, an image on the Border Fence Project website titled ‘‘Tear for My Country’’ features a close-up photograph of a portion of a human face, eye cast downward, with a tear rolling down its cheek. In the foreground flies a Mexican flag, positioned on its mast above an upside-down American flag. Superimposed at the bottom of the image is an iconic rendering of Uncle Sam (unaccompanied by its familiar ‘‘I Want You!’’ caption) pointing at the viewer, as if to admonish her to take up the pro-American resistance. In public appearances, Simcox and other MCDC members also often display photographs of anti-American migrant protesters, offering them as evidence of an enemy in our midst whose force, like that of a virulent disease or inexorable flood, must be contained. The destructive forces that threaten American unity, sovereignty, and democracy are the byproduct of more ominous threats to national security and public safety that an unsecured U.S. border represents. The MCDC invokes national security as a caution to Americans about the dangers of terrorism, criminality, and violence posed by an illegal invasion across broken borders. The alien-terrorist menace is real. ‘‘We’re being attacked by people from a foreign country,’’ exclaims Simcox; ‘‘Is that not

Bordering the Civic Imaginary 55 terrorism in its own right?’’52 Those who threaten national security, whether wittingly or unwittingly, are culpable: ‘‘If you’re breaking into this country when this country is at war, then you’re a potential enemy of this country, and you should be treated accordingly.’’53 In MCDC discourse, a link between illegal immigration and ‘‘terrorism,’’ another prominent devil term in post-9/11 U.S. society, is forged through an association of the border crosser with crime and violence. Simcox, emphasizing this association, makes reference to ‘‘the violence caused daily by illegal entrants and often violent alien intruders,’’ and advocates ‘‘the feasibility and efficacy of fencing to secure America’s borders from illegal incursion by aliens and international criminal cartels.’’54 And the alien-borne violence is growing.55 As the number of unauthorized border crossings increases, ‘‘More gang violence erupts in our cities by murderous thugs such as MS-13, the ruthless gang of self-professed friends of al Qaeda.’’56 The deadly admixture of crime, violence, and terrorism at the hands of undocumented border crossers is perhaps most dramatically asserted by the Border Fence Project: ‘‘Because illegal aliens murder 5,000 innocent Americans every year and we take a trillion dollar hit overall to our economy, illegal immigration rewards us with a 9/11 or worse every year.’’57 Close-up photographs of decrepit and hole- ridden fencing along the U.S.􏰀Mexico border, and images of aliens individually and collectively breaching the fence, are offered by the MCDC as evidence of the national security nightmare that is claimed to exist. A Minuteman Border Cam with multiple views of the border fence is featured on the MCDC website, so that viewers may witness for themselves the always-looming threat to national security in real time. By playing on national anxieties regarding a terrorist threat both beyond and within U.S. borders, the MCDC collapses categorical distinctions between terrorism, criminality, and alien subjectivity, drawing an abstract figure of the dangerous, already suspect un-American other. The MCDC readily identifies the U.S. government as the primary agency responsible for the immigration problem. Although it is the alien who crosses the border into the United States, she is rarely directly named as the villain. Rather, the group insists, it is the U.S. government (and to a lesser extent, the Mexican government) and its lax attitude toward border enforcement that allows aliens to cross the border. The government’s negligence in upholding its commitment to safeguard the border has ominous consequences. As Simcox fervently warns, The existing border crisis is a dereliction of duty by those entrusted with American security and sovereignty, leaving America vulnerable to terrorist infiltration and an unprecedented crime wave caused by drug smugglers, rapists, thieves, human traffickers and murderers who currently cross our borders at will.58 In its attribution of the problem, the MCDC fuses the values of national security and the rule of law, imputing a causal relationship between lax border enforcement, a permissive welfare state, and the economic and social burdens shouldered by law- abiding U.S. citizens. Placing emphasis on this causal relationship, Simcox calls on fence logic to offer a remedy:

56 D. R. DeChaine When you secure the borders, cut off welfare and social services to illegal aliens at the expense of the American taxpayer, and strictly enforce the laws against hiring illegally, the problem of what to do with the estimated 12-20 million illegal aliens already in this country will drastically shrink in size and scope.59 Political, economic, and social reform such as that proposed by Simcox and the MCDC requires a strong, morally committed U.S. government. Simcox warns, In a time of war, the future of the American republic hangs in the balance . . . . The confidence of we the people can only be restored by those elected officials who will truly act in defense of Americaher liberty, sovereignty, security and prosperity in the face of all foreign threats.60 Taken at face value, the MCDC’s assignation of blame to the U.S. government would seem to belie the main thrust of alienization, the chief operation of which is the rendering of the abject alien subject. However, the displacement of the alien and her deflection away from being the primary agent of blame is key to the crafting of the group’s persuasive appeals. For all its drama and hyperbole, the MCDC’s alienizing, nativist rhetoric appears on its surface to be relatively devoid of overt racism and open hostility toward migrants as persons. Notwithstanding the xenophobic tenor of its appeals, one is hard pressed to locate explicit epithets directed against migrants in its official discourse. It is tempting to attribute this lack of directness to what Stuart Hall terms ‘‘inferential racism,’’ those ‘‘apparently naturalised representations of events and situations related to race, whether ‘factual’ or ‘fictional’, which have racist premises and propositions inscribed in them as a set of unquestioned assumptions.’’61 As its narrative makes clear, inferential racism infuses the group’s language and visual imagery. Be that as it may, the indirectness of the MCDC’s alienizing project is also reflective of its formal construction, which effectively displaces an alien-centered threat and refigures illegal immigration as a border-centered threat. Alienizing rhetoric does not so much actively ascribe an identity quality to the alien subject as to passively describe that which is said to result from the condition of unsecured borders. As an effect of this formal refiguration, ‘‘invader’’ is reinscribed as ‘‘invasion’’; rather than an agent-centered claim that aliens are invading our nation, it is more common in MCDC discourse to encounter condition-centered statements such as ‘‘Our borders are under attack’’ or ‘‘Our borders are being invaded.’’ Likewise, agent-centered references to aliens as terrorists or criminals are more often refigured as statements referring to the threat of terrorism and criminal activity*both claimed to be effects of the condition of unsecured borders. Functioning as the rhetorical form of inferential racism, alienization depersonalizes (and dehumanizes) the alien subject while providing the rhetor, whether an individual or an organization, with an alibi. By establishing a socially acceptable position for anti-migrant sentiment, one that places blame not on a person or an ethnic group but on an impersonal condition, the formal construction of alienization provides an inoculation against charges of racism and scapegoating. Thus conceived, rhetorical alienization allows the MCDC and other alienizers to proclaim unself-

consciously that broken borders, not aliens, are the source of the immigration problem. As the MCDC’s account of the exigency works to underscore, the dire situation on the U.S.􏰀Mexican border demands immediate and decisive action. Against the corrupting forces of an alien invasion and a complicit U.S. government, the group calls on true Americans ‘‘to safeguard our beloved nation from violence, from sedition, from wholesale attack by those who do not love America and wish to see her destroyed or irremediably altered from a nation of liberty, equality, and justice, and a bastion of western civilization.’’62 Such an intervention requires selfless action, honor, respect for tradition, and love of country: moral qualities embodied in the figure of the MCDC citizen volunteer. Deriving ethos from the venerable narrative of the American Revolutionary Minuteman, the MCDC citizen volunteer exemplifies the values of a national polity based on the rule of law and civic responsibility. As Article Four of the Minuteman Pledge attests, ‘‘[a] Minuteman believes in a strong, safe and secure America that begins with borders open only to those who have a legal right to enter, and who have met all the lawful criteria to cross into our territory established by the sovereign American people.’’63 In its appeal to the U.S. citizenry to secure its borders, the MCDC extols individual and collective responsibility, cementing together American virtues of patriotism and duty in taking action against present and future threats of an alien invasion. The U.S. government’s dereliction of duty must be met by the force of duty-bound American citizens*patriotic Minutemen who ‘‘will not sit idly by while we are colonized by another country.’’64 As the Minuteman Border Fence Project proclaims, ‘‘The politicians will talk; the liberal media and the ‘Hate America’ crowd will offer AMNESTY to law breakers. The Minutemen will ACT in defense of America!’’65 The appeal to American responsibility is future oriented: in the fight to secure U.S. borders against the alien invasion, the ‘‘future security and public tranquility for generations of our American posterity’’ hangs in the balance.66 Looking toward the future well-being of the country, the MCDC citizen pledges his commitment to responsibility as an individual, consecrating it in a vow before God and his fellow Americans. Invoking a phrase popularized by Wendell Phillips in a speech to American abolitionists, the Minuteman declares, ‘‘‘Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty . . . ’ And so I will stand watch on America’s borders and in her sovereign interest until relieved from duty by my fellow countrymen.’’67 As movement-oriented action, this commitment to responsibility is not simply individual; it is also collective. The MCDC pledges eternal vigilance, promising to ‘‘continue to stand watch at the border and report illegal activity, build border fencing, urge local and federal officials to enforce the law and push for the enforcement of our laws to keep our country and your families and children safe.’’68 Several Border Fence Project websites feature photographs of groups of MCDC citizen-patriots building, repairing, and guarding the border fence, offering a vivid demonstration of the organization’s collective commitment to civic duty and responsibility. The theme of eternal vigilance recurs Bordering the Civic Imaginary 57

58 D. R. DeChaine regularly in MCDC discourse and serves to codify its sacred pledge to the American people. On the California border, an MCDC-run outpost named Camp Vigilance serves as a base for the group’s semi-annual musters, from whence fence-building teams are organized and deployed. Additionally, the MCDC offers an opportunity to enact eternal vigilance virtually. On joining its ‘‘Become a Cyber Minuteman!’’ campaign, those owning property on the U.S.􏰀Mexico border are provided with motion-sensing surveillance cameras that down-stream video directly to MCDC representatives, local police departments, and U.S. Border Patrol agents.69 What is apparent from this brief examination of the MCDC’s rhetoric is that its impassioned call for greater U.S. border security bespeaks an intense border insecurity. Relying on common tropes of American identity in the crafting of its appeals, the group’s rhetoric reveals a stock of motivations consonant with broadly shared majoritarian anxieties. Through hyperbolic appeals to the oblique yet powerful values of social unity, national security, rule of law, and civic responsibility, the group crafts a vivid human drama in which modern Minutemen take up their historical calling to pledge eternal vigilance, dutifully safeguarding American borders from the threat that lies beyondand, increasingly, within. The current corruption of the U.S. government, its political process, its economy, and its cultural character provides proof that the danger posed by millions of necessary but unwelcome border- crossing aliens is real. The alien invasion strikes at the very heart of national civic identity, threatening its purity. Harboring terror both known and unknown, the invasion must be stopped; the future safety of American citizens and the sanctity of American values are at stake. The fear of small but increasing numbers of illegal aliens combines with anxieties of national disunity and a federal government complicit in a hegemonic project of colonization. Only a counter-hegemonic movement led by a unified corps of committed American patriots can hope to stop the invasion, fence the border, protect national sovereignty, and illuminate a path toward civic restoration. As its appeals make clear, the MCDC relies on a fence logic that underwrites its construction of the immigration problem. In characterizing the threat of an alien invasion as preeminently an issue of border security, the MCDC contributes to an essentializing epistemology of the border. In its public discourse, national borders are static and given; their realness is never in question. The implications of such an epistemology and the worldview it constructs are not only political but profoundly ethical. Fence logic works to (re)inscribe the naturalness of geographical borders, positing the alien as a subject who is naturally out of place. Border security is thus framed as being about legal enforcement, not about wielding power and control. As Joseph Nevins explains, [T]he ‘‘illegal’’ is someone who is officially out of placein a space where he does not belong. Thus, the official relationship of the ‘‘illegal alien’’ to the particular national space in which he finds himself defines his status. The practice of territorialitythe effort to exert influence over people and/or other phenomena by asserting control over a defined geographic areareinforces the designation of the ‘‘illegal.’’ Territoriality helps to obfuscate social relations between controlled and

Bordering the Civic Imaginary 59 controller by ascribing these relations to territory, and thus away from human agency.70 It is not only geographical borders that are naturalized. As a territorializing apparatus, the MCDC’s fence logic also works to (re)inscribe the social-cultural borders as natural. Defining clear and self-evident lines between American citizen and alien invader, as the MCDC does, reveals the ease with which psychic territories and their cultural investments map onto and reinforce physical territories and their geopolitical investments. More importantly, the us/them binary that such bordering practices work to cement into place all but guarantees an irredeemable non-place for the racialized, alienized, border-crossing migrant in the United States today. Ultimately, as the MCDC’s rhetoric illustrates, the naturalization of borders reflects an affect-charged, ideological operation. It provides an anxiety-ridden American ‘‘we’’ with terms for ordera common-sense orientation for gauging the truth about people, places, social statuses, and communal allegiances. Bordering the Civic Imaginary I have argued for the centrality of the figure of the border in contemporary rhetorical culture. In so doing, I have advanced an account of political and cultural abjection that prompts a scholarly reorientation away from a static concept of borders toward a dynamic conception of bordering practices. Proposing alienization as the name for a racializing project that produces an abject migrant subject, I have focused attention on the articulation of discourse and affect and its labor across geopolitical and sociocultural space to subjugate the border-crossing migrant. In particular, I have aimed to convey a sense of the panicked character of alienizing rhetoric, and, through the example of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, to illustrate the enduring tenacity of fence logic in a globalized world. Although reactionary in tone, the symbolic strategies that the MCDC uses to craft its appeals, and the attitudes it expresses, are far from radical. The liberal democratic values propounded by the groupunity, national security, the rule of law, patriotism, and responsibilityand the ordinariness of the language and images it mobilizes to advance its cause demonstrate the group’s close affinities with the tradition of U.S. social justice movements. As such, its narrative offers a cautionary tale about the all too easy slide from communal appeals based on majoritarian values to violent ethnonationalist exhortations. Writ large, the fears and anxieties that spur the MCDC’s alienizing practices signal the increasing friction between the denationalizing tendencies of economic and cultural globalization and a redoubling of desire for a singular national community, purity, and civic identitya condition betraying a long history of racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and gender exclusions in the United States. The alienization enacted by the MCDC and other adherents of fence logic is goaded by an overriding fear of losing control: this fear itself is based on a fictional premise*that the American community (and its putative boundaries of identity and citizenship) was ever in control, secure in a state of order, sovereignty, and wholeness. ‘‘Borders,’’ as Anne

60 D. R. DeChaine Demo reminds, ‘‘function as an index of sovereignty because their very presence (real or imagined) symbolizes claims of authority over a territorial entity.’’71 In this sense, border(ing) rhetorics serve as crucial sites for investigating intersections of community, territory, identity, and power in contemporary society. As the analysis illustrates, rhetorical renderings of the border are instrumental in the crafting of American civic community. In his discussion of borders and power relations, David Newman argues, [T]he stronger the barrier function of the border, the more powerful the imagined, the more abstract the narrative of what is perceived as lying on the other side. Perceptions of borders usually focus on what exists on the other ‘‘invisible’’ side of the line of separation. Borders exist in our mind by virtue of the fear we have of the unknown of the ‘‘there’’ and which, in turn, causes us to stay on our side of the border in the ‘‘here.’’72 Newman’s emphasis on the correlation between the fear of the unknown, the perceived integrity of borders, and the mystification of the other speaks to the current hold that fear has on U.S. civic culture. The oxymoronic alien subjectshe who is both known and unknown, simultaneously inhabiting the ‘‘here’’ and ‘‘there’’ of the national bodyincites a redoubling of political and moral boundaries in an era of an omnipresent war on terror. Burke’s dictum that ‘‘[a] way of seeing is always a way of not seeing’’ aptly characterizes the situation of the always already suspect border- crossing migrant.73 The intensifying compulsion to deal with the immigration problem, a defining exigency of post-9/11 America, underscores the terministic power of alienizing rhetoric to direct and reflect the social reality of the abject alien noncitizen. Put another way: as alienization is enacted, citizenship is enacted. Significantly, the fears and anxieties foregrounded in this discussion also attest to the force of the imagination as an integral agency in human social life.74 The construction of modern social imaginaries, according to Taylor, involves ‘‘the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.’’75 Extending Taylor’s definition, my analysis of the excision of the alienized subject from the space of U.S. citizenship lends credence to an equally powerful notion of the civic imaginary as a social horizon for defining the constituents and limits of civic culture. A contested space for adjudicating conditions of citizen identity and inclusion, the civic imaginary is a contentious production with material consequences for those who deliberately or incidentally occupy it. Both real and imagined, performative and affective, it is a consummately rhetorical space where culture and politics converge, identity is shaped, and power is wielded. An adjunct of the public sphere, it proscribes conditions for citizenship enactment and the voices that are to be included in and excluded from deliberation.76 More than anything, the space of the civic imaginary serves as an ethical horizon for the articulation of the citizen as an embodiment of personhood. For alienizers like the MCDC, civic personhood reduces the border-crossing migrant to a racialized juridical subject. Crucially lacking in such a formulation is consideration of the border-crossing migrant as a human being

worthy of recognition, respect, and dignity. For this alone, the present construction of the American civic imaginary warrants concerted critical attention. Alienization continues apace in the United States today, with real implications for those alienized. In 2006, approximately 222,000 undocumented migrants were removed from the United States, roughly a 20 percent increase from the previous year.77 Moreover, as Ngai notes, ‘‘In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, the Department of Justice used immigration laws to arrest and detain over 1,100 aliens, many without charge and in secret.’’78 Despite resistance in Congress and protests by numerous city mayors and property owners, plans to complete a security fence along the U.S.􏰀Mexico border have been recently stepped up by way of a presidential mandate granting Michael Chertoff, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, supra-constitutional authority to build it. Current U.S. immigration policies and the social attitudes that shape them do more than affect individuals’ legal status; they tear apart families, deny basic services to those in need, and create conditions whereby growing numbers of the U.S. population are demonized as necessary but unwelcome nonpersons. Such attitudes and conditions, as Dana Cloud has convincingly argued, are not new. Indeed, they are entirely congruent with the naturalizing border epistemology of Samuel Huntington’s ‘‘clash of civilizations’’ thesis and its ascendant hegemony.79 What is novel, I have claimed, is the discursive-affective alliance that shapes its present rhetorical form. The ordinariness of alienization as a mode of citizenship enactment beckons scholars to attend closely to the ways in which alienizing rhetoric works its way into the public vernacular. As I have hoped to show, its conception of the American citizen reveals a profoundly immoral discourse that excludes, racializes, and otherizes individuals and groups*a discourse all too readily conscripted for the cause of national unity in troubled times. A vibrant civic imaginary requires an understanding of personhood that moves beyond questions of legal status to include recognition and respect as formative constituents of citizenship. In the name of such a counter- hegemonic project, it is the debunking of alienizing practices that is urgently needed today. This does not mean substituting border logic for a logic premised on a ‘‘world without borders,’’ as some have suggested; to unborder, after all, is still a bordering practice.80 Rather, it entails a collective effort to recognize, make public, and work against alienization and its material and symbolic violence. Such a project, I have insisted, begins by taking borders seriously. In his meditation on the ‘‘unreflective nationalism’’ that an uncritical view of borders is currently fomenting in U.S. civic culture, Robert Chang observes, ‘‘Although the border is everywhere, your perspective may render it invisible. It is through this invisibility that the border gains much of its power.’’81 Working to unmask this invisibility will be vital to a project that aspires to broaden rather than border the horizon of the civic imaginary. Bordering the Civic Imaginary 61

62 D. R. DeChaine Notes [1] Jeffrey S. Passel, ‘‘The Size and Characteristics of the Unauthorized Migrant Population in the U.S.,’’ Pew Hispanic Center, March 7, 2006, http://pewhispanic.org/files/reports/61.pdf/. It must be acknowledged that this is a contested statistic. My choice of ‘‘migrant’’ to characterize undocumented persons in the United States reflects my intention to leave open the variety of statuses, motivations, and modes of mobility of border-crossing individuals. For a sympathetic discussion of the term, see Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), xix􏰀xx. [2] Charles Taylor, ‘‘The Politics of Recognition,’’ in Multiculturalism and ‘‘The Politics of Recognition,’’ ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 25􏰀73. [3] Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California’s Proposition 187 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 26. [4] Ronald Walter Greene, ‘‘Malthusian World(s): Globalization, Race, and the American Imaginary in the Immigration Debates of the Twentieth Century,’’ in Argumentation and Values: Proceedings of the Ninth SCA/AFA Conference on Argumentation, ed. Sally Jackson (Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1995), 191􏰀95. See also Marouf Hasian Jr. and Fernando Delgado, ‘‘The Trials and Tribulations of Racialized Critical Rhetorical Theory: Understanding the Rhetorical Ambiguities of Proposition 187,’’ Communication Theory 8 (1998): 245􏰀70; Justin Akers Chaco ́n and Mike Davis, No One Is Illegal: Fighting Violence and State Repression on the U.S.􏰀Mexico Border (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006). [5] Michael Curry, ‘‘On Space and Spatial Practice in Contemporary Geography,’’ in Concepts in Human Geography, ed. Carville Earle, Kent Mathewson, and Martin Kenzer (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), 3􏰀32; Henk Van Houtum, ‘‘The Geopolitics of Borders and Boundaries,’’ Geopolitics 10 (2005): 672􏰀79. [6] D. Robert DeChaine, ‘‘Imagined Immunities: Border Rhetorics and the Ethos of Sans Frontie`risme,’’ in Interdisciplinarity and Social Justice: Revisioning Academic Accountability, ed. Ranu Samantrai, Joe Parker, and Mary Romero (New York: State University of New York Press, in press). [7] Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin, Brendan Bartley, and Duncan Fuller, Thinking Geographically: Space, Theory and Contemporary Human Geography (New York: Continuum, 2002), 33; Joe Moran, Interdisciplinarity (New York: Routledge, 2002), 165. [8] On the rhetorical constructedness of borders, see Lisa A. Flores, ‘‘Constructing Rhetorical Borders: Peons, Illegal Aliens, and Competing Narratives of Immigration,’’ Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (2003): 362􏰀87; D. Robert DeChaine, Global Humanitarianism: NGOs and the Crafting of Community (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005). On the ambivalent character of border(ed) subjects, see Gloria Anzaldu ́ a, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987); Pablo Vila, Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the U.S.􏰀Mexico Frontier (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000). [9] Aimee Carrillo Rowe, ‘‘Whose ‘America’? The Politics of Rhetoric and Space in the Formation of U.S. Nationalism,’’ Radical History Review 89 (2004): 119􏰀20. [10] I borrow the term ‘‘alienization’’ from Joseph Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the ‘‘Illegal Alien’’ and the Making of the U.S.􏰀Mexico Boundary (New York: Routledge, 2002), 143. [11] Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 51􏰀52. [12] Robert Asen, ‘‘A Discourse Theory of Citizenship,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 204. [13] Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, ‘‘Minuteman Civil Defense Corps Replaces Volunteer Administrators,’’ http://minutemanhq.com/hq/print.php?sid􏰁342/.

Bordering the Civic Imaginary 63 [14] Minuteman PAC, http://www.minutemanpac.com/about.php/. [15] Flores, ‘‘Constructing Rhetorical Borders,’’ 381. See also Robert S. Chang and Keith Aoki, ‘‘Centering the Immigrant in the Inter/National Imagination,’’ California Law Review 85 (1997): 1397; Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). [16] On the complementarity of critical rhetoric and cultural studies, see Maurice Charland, ‘‘Rehabilitating Rhetoric: Confronting Blindspots in Discourse and Social Theory,’’ Communication 11 (1990): 253􏰀64; Thomas Rosteck, ed., At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies, Revisioning Rhetoric: A Guilford Series (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), 1􏰀23. [17] Flores, ‘‘Constructing Rhetorical Borders,’’ 363. [18] Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, ‘‘Unpacking 187: Targeting Mejicanas,’’ in Immigration and Ethnic Communities: A Focus on Latinos, ed. Refugio I. Roch ́ın (East Lansing: Julian Samora Research Institute, Michigan State University, 1996), 93. [19] Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 3. [20] Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 129. [21] Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 44􏰀62. [22] Mark Lawrence McPhail, The Rhetoric of Racism Revisited: Reparations or Separation? (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 66. [23] Hemant Shah, ‘‘Race, Nation, and Citizenship: Asian Indians and the Idea of Whiteness in the U.S. Press, 1906􏰀1923,’’ Howard Journal of Communications 10 (1999): 251. [24] Howard Winant, Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 59. [25] Ono and Sloop, Shifting Borders, 27. [26] See, for example, Marx’s discussion of alienation in ‘‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,’’ in Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin Books, 1975), 279􏰀400. [27] Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers, 8􏰀10. [28] Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers, 7􏰀9. [29] Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers, 45. [30] Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers, 21􏰀31. [31] Douglas S. Massey, ‘‘Understanding America’s Immigration ‘Crisis’,’’ Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 151 (2007): 309􏰀27. [32] It is worth adding that women and men are often differently alienized. As some scholars have noted, the meaning of ‘‘alien’’ is itself gendered, shifting its connotation according to particular sociohistorical exigencies. Hondagneu-Sotelo, for example, notes, ‘‘Contemporary xenophobia targets women and children because it is they who are central to making settlement happen’’ (‘‘Unpacking 187,’’ 93). [33] Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 18. [34] Hasian and Delgado, ‘‘Trials and Tribulations,’’ 257. [35] Otto Santa Ana, ‘‘‘Like an Animal I Was Treated’: Anti-immigrant Metaphor in U.S. Public Discourse,’’ Discourse and Society 10 (1999): 191􏰀224. See also Sarah Hill, ‘‘Purity and Danger on the U.S.􏰀Mexico Border, 1991􏰀1994,’’ South Atlantic Quarterly 105 (2006): 777􏰀99. [36] Flores, ‘‘Constructing Rhetorical Borders,’’ 363. [37] With a recent increase in applications for U.S. naturalization, and under pressure to err on the side of caution in vetting applicants for potential security threats, federal examiners have increased their rejection rates. In 2007, for example, approximately 12 percent of applications for naturalization were denied. See Julia Preston, ‘‘Perfectly Legal Immigrants, Until They Applied for Citizenship,’’ New York Times, April 12, 2008.

64 D. R. DeChaine [38] Bhikhu Parekh, ‘‘What Is Multiculturalism?’’ Multiculturalism: A Symposium on Democracy in Culturally Diverse Societies 484 (December 1999), http://www.india-seminar.com/1999/ 484/484%20parekh.htm/. [39] Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 3􏰀24. [40] Chris Simcox, ‘‘About Us,’’ Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, http://www.minutemanhq.com/ hq/aboutus.php/. [41] Kevin Michael DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples, ‘‘From Public Sphere to Public Screen: Democracy, Activism, and the ‘Violence’ of Seattle,’’ Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 125􏰀51. [42] The Border Fence Project emerged on the heels of the 2006 Secure Fence Act, authored by California Republican Representative Duncan Hunter, which required the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to build 854 miles of fence along the 1950-mile U.S.􏰀Mexico border. [43] Chris Simcox, ‘‘Senate and President Promote Anarchy at Borders and in American Cities,’’ Minuteman National Blog, April 11, 2006, http://www.minutemanhq.com/b2/index.php/ national/2006/04/11/. [44] Border Fence Project, BorderFenceProject.com, http://www.borderfenceproject.com/. [45] Chris Simcox, ‘‘Minuteman Corps Expands is [sic] Efforts to Secure the Border,’’ Minuteman Border Fence, January 2, 2007, http://www.minutemanhq.com/bf/pl7.php/. [46] ‘‘About Us,’’ Minuteman Border Fence, http://www.minutemanhq.com/bf/about.php/. [47] Simcox, ‘‘Minuteman Corps.’’ [48] Jim Wood, ‘‘A Letter to My Fellow Americans,’’ BorderFenceProject.com, http://www.border fenceproject.com/letter.shtml/. [49] See, for example, Minuteman Border Fence. [50] Chris Simcox, ‘‘Open Letter to the President of the United States,’’ MCDC Forums, June 19, 2007, http://forum.minutemanhq.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t􏰁11793/. [51] Chris Simcox, interview by Trish Hinojosa, NOW on the News, PBS, May 4, 2007. [52] Chris Simcox, interview by Alan Colmes, Hannity & Colmes, Fox News, April 3, 2006. [53] Susy Buchanan and David Holthouse, ‘‘Minuteman Leader has Troubled Past,’’ Southern Poverty Law Center, http://www.splcenter.org/intel/news/item.jsp?aid􏰁149&site_area􏰁 1&printable􏰁1/. [54] Simcox, ‘‘Open Letter’’; ‘‘Donate to the Minuteman Border Fence,’’ Minuteman Border Fence, https://secure.responseenterprises.com/mmfence/?a􏰁571. [55] The MCDC works to document what it perceives as an increase in criminal activity in the United States as a result of unsecured borders. For example, the online MCDC forum includes a main thread titled ‘‘Illegal Alien Crime,’’ with the subheading ‘‘Please post any articles about illegal alien crime and DUI incidents here. Having these in one place will illustrate the tragic consequences of illegal migration.’’ ‘‘MCDC Forums,’’ Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, http://forum.minutemanhq.com/phpbb2/. [56] Simcox, ‘‘Minuteman Corps.’’ [57] ‘‘DIY Border Fence,’’ PirateNews.org, http://www.piratenews.org/newswire/html/. No docu- mentation for either of these statistics is provided on the website. [58] Brian Bonner, ‘‘Minutemen to Build Arizona-Mexico Border Fence,’’ April 20, 2006, http:// bonner.wordpress.com/2006/04/20/minutemen-to-build-arizona-mexico-border-fence/. [59] Chris Simcox, ‘‘Message from Chris Simcox,’’ Minuteman Border Fence, http://www. minutemanhq.com/bf/about.php/. [60] Simcox, ‘‘Open Letter.’’ [61] Stuart Hall, ‘‘The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media,’’ in The Media Reader, ed. Manuel Alvarado and John O. Thompson (London: BFI Publishing, 1990), 13. [62] Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, ‘‘About Us.’’ [63] Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, ‘‘The Minuteman Pledge,’’ http://www.minutemanhq.com/ hq/mmpledge.php/. [64] Wood, ‘‘Letter to My Fellow Americans.’’

Bordering the Civic Imaginary 65 [65] ‘‘Build It Now!’’ Minuteman Border Fence, http://www.minutemanborderfence.com/. [66] Simcox, ‘‘Open Letter.’’ [67] Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, ‘‘Minuteman Pledge.’’ [68] Simcox, ‘‘Minuteman Corps.’’ [69] ‘‘Become a Cyber Minuteman!’’ BorderFenceProject.com, http://www.borderfenceproject. com/cybermm.php/. [70] Nevins, Operation Gatekeeper, 147􏰀48. [71] Anne Demo, ‘‘Sovereignty Discourse and Contemporary Immigration Politics,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005): 295. [72] David Newman, ‘‘On Borders and Power: A Theoretical Framework,’’ Journal of Borderlands Studies 18 (2003): 20. [73] Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (New York: New Republic, 1935), 70. [74] Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cam- bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). See also Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). [75] Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 23. [76] See, for example, Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005); Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Benjamin Lee, eds., ‘‘New Imaginaries,’’ Special Issue, Public Culture 36 (2002); Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer, eds., Counterpublics and the State (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). [77] Julia Preston, ‘‘As Pace of Deportation Rises, Illegal Families Are Digging In,’’ New York Times, May 1, 2007. I was unable to locate reliable data regarding 2007 deportation rates. [78] Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 269. [79] Dana L. Cloud, ‘‘‘To Veil the Threat of Terror’: Afghan Women and the BClash of Civilizations􏰂 in the Imagery of the U.S. War on Terrorism,’’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 285􏰀306. [80] DeChaine, ‘‘Imagined Immunities.’’ [81] Robert S. Chang, ‘‘A Meditation on Borders,’’ in Immigrants Out! The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the United States, ed. Juan F. Perea (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 244, 246.