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COLOURS and the colour of false consciousness

Dec 09, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Yesterday, the manager of the Robb Street store, COLOURS, told me it was fine to bring my dog in, once I continued to cuddle her in my arms. I decided I would wait on the pavement with my pet while my daughter bought a pair of joggers. As my daughter came out of the store, two men came up to me; one of them in a very assertive way addressed me. He said loudly, “Mr. Kissoon, you have to talk to Minister Ramjattan to ban these push cart music vendors; you got to talk to the Minister to get them off the streets.”
My daughter looked inquisitively as he continued. “These people are a nuisance; they play the music loud man and disturb you.” With a thin smile on my face, I replied; “Why don’t you talk to him?” He shot back; “You know how many times I tried; only you can do it, Mr. Kissoon.”
By this time my daughter looked like she wanted the dialogue to end. We were walking east on Robb Street and as we approached Wellington Street, I said; “I don’t think I will do that; these are poor people trying to make a living.” As we crossed over Wellington Street, he remarked; “I know, I know, but they disturb people with the loud noise.”
I experience these kinds of encounters all the time. They all, (every one of them), remind me of how confusing class society is and how sad is the lack of class consciousness. Karl Marx in his famous book, The German Ideology, once wrote that ideology is false consciousness. The great Italian thinker, Antonio Gramsci, who still remains the most brilliant exponent of the nature of class society since Marx himself (even more than the Frankfurt School of philosophy in post-war Germany or the French post-war philosophical thinkers symbolized in no other than, Jean Paul Sartre), developed Marx’s point in brilliant ways when he coined the term, “ cultural hegemony.”
Marx explored the thought of the bourgeoisie creating a deceptive, controlled, one-dimensional society (thus the name of one of philosophy’s great books, One Dimension Man by the Frankfurt School’s biggest name, Herbert Marcuse; Marcuse’s arguments in this book owed a huge debt to Gramsci) through the saturation of false consciousness.
What Marx foresaw was that the ruling classes would pass on to the masses, values that are not in the interest of the masses, but that which they will still come to accept as truth.
It was left to Gramsci to develop this theme in Marx. Gramsci was superb, because he saw what 20th century society could do to the psychology of the masses that Marx could not see in the 19th century. Whereas Marx saw the Proletariat as selling out their own interests because of values they think are universally objective, it was Gramsci that best explained the success of false consciousness through the process of what he termed, “cultural hegemony.” Gramsci argued that 20th century capitalism obfuscates the division among the economic class by creating a system of culture which the oppressed classes come to accept as ideological truth.
All this philosophical jazz (if you think so) is relevant to understanding how that man was thinking when he approached me and my daughter. False consciousness is at work here, because for him it is un-cultural to be strolling down the streets selling CDs and playing the advertised music loudly. This man has no psychological consciousness of the dangers another class of people pose to the society – the container trucks.
Who did the music vendor kill? The answer is no one. Is he a disturber of the peace? The answer is yes. But he is an ephemeral “geographical” nuisance. When he passes by your house, the decibels are incredibly deafening. Then, he passes and is gone and may not come back in your area.
The container-truck is ubiquitous in Guyana. There is a City Council regulation that stipulates that these container trucks are only allowed on the streets during certain hours and certainly not during the rush time traffic.
The same restriction applies to sand trucks coming into Georgetown. They have to drop off their load before 6 a.m. That restriction is meticulously monitored, but the container-trucks are never touched. There have been several persons crushed to death by these container-trucks, two of which occurred this year and two school children barely missed being run over a few weeks ago, and in all cases the accidents have occurred within Georgetown.
The complaining gentleman does not see these trucks as burdensome as the music cart vendors. How interesting; the incident occurred outside COLOURS, because it tells the story of the colour of false consciousness.

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