ABSTRACT
The problematic nature of the relationship between theoretical consciousness and practical consciousness must be the starting point of any analysis of working class radicalism. It is then the combination of class-wide solidarities and an oppositional consciousness that characterises the radical worker, or what Westergaard referred to as identification with workers in other situations outside the local community and a tentative vision of an alternative society. For the emergence of a radical class consciousness has its precondition in the affinity between the theoretical consciousness of socialist soteriology and the practical consciousness of working class life. The radicalisation of the worker thus entails the manufacturing of new forms of relative deprivation by a systematic arraignment of the existing industrial order which will demonstrate the interconnectedness of particular conflicts and at the same time provide a conception of a practicable, alternative socialist totality.
