Knowledge and affirmation of the ultimate needs and possibilities historically open to the revolutionary class and of the means necessary to realize them.
Class consciousness and constitution as a political subject
From the moment the proletariat appears, its antagonistic position to bourgeois society as a whole forces it to assert generic human needs. As a universal class, and one universally denied by capitalism, it can only form itself through a self-recognition, a self-affirmation of its own program, communism, and of the means to make it a reality (internationalism, centralism, etc.). In other words, the process of constitution as a class is, above all, the process of development and extension of class consciousness.
In the development of productive forces there comes a stage when productive forces and means of intercourse are brought into being which, under the existing relationships, only cause mischief, and are no longer productive but destructive forces (machinery and money);
And, at the same time, a class is called forth which has to bear all the burdens of society without enjoying its advantages, which, ousted from society, is forced into the most decided antagonism to all other classes; a class which forms the majority of all members of society, and from which emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness.
Marx and Engels. The German Ideology, 1845-1846
Class consciousness is not a "state of opinion", nor is it born from one. It is born from a historical necessity inscribed in the very being of the proletariat as an exploited and revolutionary class: the only interests it can consistently defend are those that reflect generic, universal human needs.
In any struggle, however small, the proletariat needs to affirm a practice that, even unconsciously, reveals itself to be internationalist and centralist, a way of confronting the order of things that dissolves all barriers, all the particularisms, oppressions and privileges produced by a split society.
It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organisation of bourgeois society today.
Marx and Engels. The Holy Family, 1844
Class consciousness, emancipation and revolution
The development of this class consciousness that expresses historical necessity is only attainable in the course of the class struggle. When Marx insists that "the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves", to the point of making it the motto of the First International, he is stressing that class consciousness does not "come from outside", but is born and develops within the very movement of the class.
Because the key word is "emancipation". Emancipation does not mean socialism, but liberation from tutelage, from the patronage of the ruling class's thought. The emancipation of the workers is the process in which their collective action -and behind it their class consciousness- frees itself from the dominant ideology, a process that merges with the Revolution itself.
Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.
Marx and Engels. The German Ideology, 1845-1846
Emancipation and militant expressions of the working class
That class consciousness is not something imposed on the class or "inoculated" into it from outside does not mean that it develops in a homogeneous way. The proletariat is not only the last revolutionary class, it is also an exploited and oppressed class, and as such it cannot develop its consciousness in a generalized way from the very first moment.
The proletariat, when it does not react, is only the force through which capitalism reproduces itself, taking advantage of the general apathy of its historical enemy. The working class is then only an amorphous conglomerate of people who get by as best they can to survive in an unbearable society, reproducing the atmosphere of competition and enmity, the unhealthy spirit of capitalism. In a word, it does not act as a class with common interests in the face of the capitalist vermin.
At other times, however, the proletariat acts united as a class bearing the only possible human future: communism. Then two kinds of society can confront each other, one reactionary and the other revolutionary.
Between these two states of affairs and these very facts there are individuals who are revolutionaries regardless of the momentary state in which the class as a whole finds itself; only their number varies according to the social situation. They are revolutionaries because they are aware that their goal and that of the class as a whole is communism.
These revolutionary individuals tend to organize themselves by affinity of ideas, ideas that do not fall from the sky but come from a particular interpretation of the history of the class struggle. From every confrontation between capital and the proletariat lessons are learned, from which revolutionary theory is born and which make it evolve.
G. Munis. Organization and revolutionary activity, 1979
The role of these cupellations is fundamental. They are specific organs in which, collectively, groups of workers and kindred elements develop the critique (=demolition) of ideology from the historical experiences of the class, in order to nourish and give direction (=meaning) to present and future struggles.
The objective conditions of the communist revolution are not enough to guarantee its victory, and the subjective conditions will not necessarily be engendered by the former. The subjective conditions are nothing other than the theoretical consciousness of previous experience and of the maximum possibilities offered to the proletariat; it is knowledge eager for human action and ready to turn its subjective existence into objective existence.
Party-State, Stalinism, Revolution. G. Munis, 1976
That subjective element forms the party, a party in becoming, present and necessary from the first political manifestations of the proletariat. It is neither an external body nor an entelechy. It is the process of constitution of a conscious minority with effective capacities for the political leadership of the class as a whole.
It therefore unites program and will to act, although its constitution is not a voluntarist act, but a development parallel to that of the constitution of the class as a party within bourgeois society and, finally, as the ruling class in socialism, a transition to its own disappearance as a class, communism. Party and the unitary mass organization of the class are therefore two dimensions of the same process of the constitution of the proletariat as a political subject and of the development of its class consciousness.