In the previous post a reader of the blog expressed disagreement with my approach in a comment.
He stated that “I find it hard to fathom how you can heavily criticise bourgeois democracy like you did in a recent post and at the same time advocate for something you call democratic rights.”
The comment doesn’t reference the particular post and makes only general references that are difficult to identify, including reference to the views of Marx as quoted by Paul Cockshott. I agree with the comment by Boffy in response that:
“I am always rather suspicious of people who cite what Marx and/or Engels are supposed to have said about something, without actually giving the quote, and source of it, because I have frequently found that either the claim is false, altogether, or else, the context, and text of what they said completely changes the meaning of what is being claimed. Given what they say in the Communist Manifesto about workers having no country, and the fact that they were themselves refugees from Germany, makes me doubt what is being claimed for them, here.”
I can only add that it is not altogether clear what the comment Boffy responded to is claiming.
In relation to bourgeois democracy – this post being one example – it is one political form of the dictatorship of capital – the exploitation of the working class, which is separated from the means of production and subject to wage slavery, as its labour power becomes a commodity. I don’t see how you can be a Marxist and not take this view.
Does this mean we cannot demand and fight for democratic rights within capitalism? Only the most formal of formal logics could lead to such a view and someone who regularly quotes philosophical thinkers should know this.
The fight for democratic rights was recognised by Marx as necessary in order for the working class to develop itself politically so that it could have the freedom to identify its separate interests, organise around them and struggle for the realisation of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The word ‘dictatorship’ has rather changed its meaning since it was used by Marx and does not refer to lack of freedom but to the economic and social domination of the working class – uniting the working class with the means of production through cooperative and common ownership, the ending over time of the wage relationship and thus ending of exploitation.
The struggle for this freedom includes the struggle for democratic rights which are not “abstract principles . . .like as a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat” but are concrete measures to be imposed on, or accepted by, the state through working class struggle. One of the points I have made continually is not to base the struggle for these rights on appeals to the state but to be won by the workers themselves, in opposition to the state if necessary.
He asks “Are your democratic rights legal claims that somehow endure without the presence of a State”?
Marxists do not invent a world subsisting without a state; we recognise the real world that exists in which there is one. It is why Marxism has no need to invent such things as natural law. Rights are not worth much if they cannot be validated and this very often is done by the state: so often the democratic rights demanded are demanded from the state, to be accepted by or imposed on it, but always with the view that it is the power and activity of the working class that will ultimately protect and defend them, to whatever extent this can be done within capitalism.
Marxists believe that society can only be understood as it really is – and thereby changed – by recognising that it is structured by classes with their irreconcilable interests. It is the writer of the comment who is guilty of proposing ‘abstract’ ‘principles’ and ‘morals’, which is why he states that he doesn’t understand what I have written. It is why he says such things as “I can honestly say I don’t know what these things are” and that “I might not agree with humanitarian morality but at least I could say I understood what was going on.”
When he says that he “would be happier if you and others who speak up for and march out for the asylum seekers did so on the basis of some common humanitarian morality” he simply says that he would be happier if I lapsed into the “abstract principles” he denounces as akin to “pulling rabbits out of a hat.”
He provides me with the option of justifying my position by saying that “I can see how you might get around the problem by imputing an interest and not a morality to the working class.” And this is roughly what I have done, although I would not put it in those terms. This, however, is an option that he obviously rejects, yet also rejecting a general “humanitarian morality” as an alternative. Where that leaves him is not my problem.
He then states: “let’s us assume that the bulk of the working class misrecognises the interest you impute to them or consciously rejects that interest. Well you are back with your principles again, an undisclosed humanitarian morality. It turns out therefore that lurking behind the objective interest of the working class is an undisclosed humanitarian morality.”
This is a big, big assumption, and the history of the working class demonstrates that significant numbers have identified that they have a separate interest. This is demonstrated objectively in the alienation of the working class; its distrust of its rulers and opposition to many of its actions – including those rulers support for the current genocide in Palestine. It is demonstrated in its separate organisations, and in its long history across the world of class struggles big and small – from strikes to revolutions.
Naturally the bourgeois media, culture industry and education system ignores or distorts all this, which makes its undeniable existence all the more necessary to recognise and appreciate. But let us presume that the assumption is correct for the sake of argument.
If it were true that “the working class misrecognises the interest you impute to them or consciously rejects that interest”; i.e. that it never develops class consciousness; then yes, there would be no material interests that could be realised, and any such interest would be abstract, therefore general and “undisclosed.” The point of the blog is to disclose this interest and advance understanding of what it is so that it can be realised in the real world, through informing working class struggles that are going on quite independent of it.
This is where morality ceases to be abstract, is attached to material interests, where ‘what is’ meets ‘what should be’. To understand this, it is necessary in some way to be part of the struggle to understand and change the world. The commentator is not part of this, so appears incapable of understanding Marxism. It is this purely contemplative perspective that, it seems, means that he never gets the point.
Sráid Marx 
There is a high profile youtuber called Academic Agent who maybe some sort of fascist. He uses elite theories drawn from the Italian school of political sociology some of whom were close to the Fascist movement.
I mention it because he recently posted a video concerning the dominant ideology. The name of the video is Progessive Neoliberalism : why won’t it die? Now certain Marxists still regularly refer to the dominant ideology as neo liberalism. The academic agent departs from that usual somewhat by adding progressive to the mix. His video can be broken down to three sections . Part one lists the main features of progressive neo liberalism, part two describes the tactics of political groups that follow the ideology and part three alerts to some case studies.
Here is the list or programme of progressive neo liberalism :
A managed market economy.
A private public partnership.
Austerity.
Regular tax breaks for banks and corporations while socialising their losses.
Pro- transational globalist instuitions.
A pro intervention foreign policy.
Generous patronage for minority client groups.
Anti discrimination laws favouring women and ethnic groups.
Increasing mass surveillance of the entire population.
Anti populism.
There are a further set of traits which accompany the above including things like open borders and human rights.
Academic Agents names progessive neo liberalism the dominant ideology of the managerial class. What is interesting about the above is how key elements of progessive ideology are blended with the neo liberal elements. I think there is a great deal of accuracy in this claim. I cannot fail to notive that the massive advertising industry and the massive arts and media industry are preoccupied with selling us products under a generally progessive banner. Just look how many black and gay people there are on just about every media sell. I think that Branson’s Virgin Company was one of the pioneering examples. The company even pushes trans sexualism progressive ideology on its airline ads.
What this melding of neo liberal ideology and progessivism does for socialist opposition is make life very doubly difficult. I know that I for one often over react against many of the elements of progessive ideology because these elements like the ideal of the strong successful women are now so synonymous with corporate capitalism and the dominant ideology. There are some days when I think that it would be better to dump the whole of feminism and the like because of the entanglement that now prevails between corporate ideology and progessive ideas.
If the dominant ideology really is progessive neo liberalism it is fiendishly cunning and hard to combat.
Clearly defining the terms would help, as would clarifying the class interests involved. Most of the terms you use (and employed by the petty-bourgeois and reactionary right) are broad-brush and allow all sorts of reactionary conceptions to hide behind sometimes accurate observations. What exactly is neoliberalism, so often used by the left as way of avoiding more precise definition? Where are these ‘open borders’ that is claimed to be the problem – open to who or what? What is the meaning of progressive? What do you mean by ‘feminism’? What ‘groups’ of ethnic minorities receive patronage by the state and who is subject to ‘surveillance’?
Without clarifying all of this, combatting reactionary ideas is not hard because it is cunning but becomes impossible without a Marxist approach, leading to some reactionary ideas to be rejected on the basis of other reactionary ideas.
The only minor point I would disagree with, here, is this.
“If it were true that “the working class misrecognises the interest you impute to them or consciously rejects that interest”; i.e. that it never develops class consciousness; then yes, there would be no material interests that could be realised, and any such interest would be abstract, therefore general and “undisclosed.””
The interest, unrecognised, misrecognised or consciously rejected, would not be any less real, or objective, so long as correctly analysed, and scientifically identified. For thousands of years, humans did not recognise the category of value, indeed, as Marx describes, the etymology of the word “value”, or “worth” was actually identified with use-value. It was only the science of political economy, in the form of the labour theory of value that identified, what had previously been unrecognised, or misrecognised and theorised it.
That didn’t mean, as Marx sets out in his Letter to Kugelmann, that for all of those millennia of human production, value itself did not exist as a category, and certainly not that its existence did not impose itself, via the Law of Value, on the decisions and actions of human society.
Similarly, its identification has not stopped millions from not recognising the existence of value, as so defined, or of them continuing to misrecognise it, as stemming from use-value/utility.
Or to give another example, used by Marx in relation to value and the Law of Value, from the realm of chemistry, did the fact that the existence of oxygen was only recognised in the work of Priestley mean that it did not exist prior to that, or its existence impact the real world? Prior to that, the effects were misrecognised as signifying the existence not of oxygen, but of phlogiston.
The objective reality of the material world exists independently of our reflection of it in the realm of ideas, and there is then nothing abstract about that objective reality, properly recognised or not.
You are right, the phrase “there would be no material interests that could be realised” is wrong and should be removed. I will leave the post as it is so the reader can make sense of the comment.