base, and are therefore by implication independent, creative and courageous. However, workers who act on their own, creatively, independently of the initiative, guidance or direction of the revolutionary organization, are said to act spontaneously. This 'spontaneous element' in essence represents nothing more nor less than consciousness in an embryonic form. In other words, their consciousness is not yet born. If such workers remain independent, if they are not taken under the wing of the revolutionary organization, they will be encircled on every side with a petty-bourgeois atmosphere, which permeates and corrupts the proletariat and causes constant relapses among the proletariat into petty-bourgeois spinelessness, disunity, individualism, and alternate moods of exaltation and dejection. Such workers may become more and more bourgeois until finally they become prisoners of bourgeois ideology and desert to the bourgeoisie. The working class, as defined by the theory of class structure, has been the majority of the population in highly developed industrial regions. However, since in these regions revolutionary organizations have not seized power, this working population has not been a class conscious revolutionary mass base; it has therefore been bourgeois, a prisoner of bourgeois ideology, and a deserter to the bourgeoisie. At first glance this logic is as bizarre as the first, and we are left with the paradoxical conclusion that the only truly revolutionary proletarians are bourgeois intellectuals, and that the proletarians themselves are by and large bourgeois.
The logic of the theory of consciousness is meaningless only if it is understood within the framework of the theory of class structure. But the logic does not lack significance. Its significance is military. The theory of consciousness does not describe relations between the social classes of capitalist society, but relations between soldiers and their commanders, relations between armies and general staffs. Although the language refers to dialectical logic, social classes, and socialist revolution, the frame of reference has nothing in common with the subject matter of German philosophy, English political economy or French socialism. It is a much older frame of reference. It is a theory of leaders and followers, friends and enemies. The language borrowed from the theory of class structure serves a moral function: its purpose in the theory of consciousness is to inspire loyalty toward the friends and hatred toward the enemies; the terms are retained solely because of their emotional suggestiveness.
Paradox and confusion disappear as soon as it becomes clear that the theory of consciousness is a theory of military relations. It is a theory of military relations among the individuals and social classes of capitalist society which were described by the theory of class structure, but the attributes of these individuals and classes have a purely military significance, since the entire purpose of the theory is
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