Tag Archives: Hate

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 71

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Marx states in ‘The Communist Manifesto’: ‘In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed . . . Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants . . . The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.’

‘The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie . . . At this stage, the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so.’

‘. . . but with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more . . .  The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (Trades’ Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts.’

‘Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle.’

‘This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier.’ 

‘Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.’

‘Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.’

‘The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.’

Marx goes on to set out the tasks of the working class revolution, which involves ‘the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.’ This revolution is not an eschatological thunderstrike out of the blue that suddenly transforms the world but a juncture arising within existing society through the development of its contradictions.

As a conscious process of real people, it cannot be the outcome of impetuous and spontaneous apprehension, but must arise from the considered and passionate commitment of the vast majority of the working class, arising from the history and development of their struggles as a class.

We can note at least three aspects of what Marx said that has obvious relevance to today.  The first is ‘the growing competition among the bourgeois’, which now takes place between previously inconceivably large corporations that span the globe that makes this competition an international phenomenon.  This both unites the interests of the world working class and divides it according to the strength of the capitalist system and political weakness of the working class.

The second is the the improved means of communication that can help ‘in the ever expanding union of the workers.’ We no longer need to merely read about wars but have daily, if not hourly, video coverage of its barbarity in Gaza and Ukraine.  What the working class movement has failed abysmally to do is to create its own international media, which remains in Lilliputian proportions in comparison to that of the bourgeoisie.

Through this media the bourgeoisie is compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena.  Hence the bias in coverage of the genocide in Gaza and the war in Ukraine.  Unfortunately again, we see the weakness of the working class movement that is happy to wallow in the lies about the imperialist character of the proxy war in Ukraine and line up behind its own ruling class.  The very saturation of the media allows those comfortable in this position to have their deception confirmed again and again.  A working class media would at least allow a wider source of information and debate, although again, such is the degeneration of much of the current left that petty bourgeois moralism is employed to silence critical voices.

In previous posts, we noted one result of such moralism in the call to hate capitalism more as a spur and guide to action.  We argued in response that a revolution conceived out of ‘negativity’ and ‘hate’, even if it is born out of oppression and exploitation, is utterly insufficient.  Such a view faces the problem of how such a social revolution could become the long-term goal of the working class and could be achieved by it.

Miéville, for example, can say that ‘capitalism is unbearable and yet, mostly, it’s borne’, resulting from the success of ‘capitalist-realist common sense that it’s impossible, even laughable, to struggle or hope for change.’  In part he puts this down ‘to a deliberate ruling-class propaganda strategy to discourage any belief in any such possibility’, but ‘also, at a base level, because it’s so difficult to think beyond the reality in which one has been created, lives and thinks now . . . conditioned as we are by existing reality, we cannot prefigure or simply ‘imagine’ such radical alterity.’

The result is that ‘it’s beyond our ken – we can only yearn for it, glimpse some sense of betterness out of the corner of the eye.’ (A Spectre Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, p 89)

Such is the idealist view of the possibility of social revolution that cannot ground the future society from the current one but sees the current in purely, or at least mainly, decisively and definitively, in negative terms for which the appropriate emotion is hate.  This is why he states that ‘it’s so difficult to think beyond the reality’ when it is precisely this reality, clearly seen – not out of the corner of the eye – that provides the grounds for the social revolution, giving rise to the appropriate emotions of hope and courage derived from passionate belief in the cause, with hatred of oppression as a motivation but not determining the struggle.

This reality, according to Marx, includes the development of the forces of capitalist production and the associated relations of production that include the creation, expansion, development, organisation and growing consciousness of the working class.  The prosecution of this class struggle involves the creation of a mass, political working class movement that demonstrates not only its power to increasingly defend the interests of the working class but its potential to lead to the creation of a new society ruled by it.

This alternative is built upon the conditions and circumstances of the real world and not by thinking a prefigured ‘radical alterity’ – some largely imagined future alternative – but by changing this reality through prosecuting the class struggle, ranging from the creation of democratic and militant trade unions, to workers’ cooperatives and their association with each other, to the creation of mass working class parties committed to socialism.  The forces recognised by Marx that governed the development of the working class still exist today and are the grounds for the concomitant development of socialist politics.

Back to part 70

Forward to part 72

The need to hate capitalism more

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In the 1970s I used to sell the paper of the International Marxist Group Red Weekly every Saturday afternoon on Union Street in Glasgow at the side entrance of the Central Station. I remember one occasion when a visibly agitated man rushed up to me demanding to know whether I was a communist – ‘Are you a communist?’ ‘Are you a communist?’  He launched into a few remarks I barely took in at the time and don’t remember at all now.  I gathered that he was very angry about something and ‘communism’ was some sort of answer. He then exited as frantically as he had arrived.  I doubt very much he had anything to do with ‘communism’ thereafter.

I was reminded of this minor incident reading China Miéville’s book on Marx’s Communist Manifesto, in which he borrows a phrase employed by someone else, and in a different context, to say that The Communist Manifesto’s “negativity is not negative enough”. ‘It does not hate enough’, (A Spectre Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, p 176)

This appears in a section entitled ‘On Hate’ in which he states that capitalism deserves to be hated, but that “a focus on hatred . . . is fraught, and dangerous territory . . . Hatred, after all, is an emotion that can short-circuit thought and analysis, can segue into violence, and not necessarily with any discrimination’; although he then notes that “hatred, particularly by the oppressed, is inevitable” (p170-171)

Against this he quotes Marx’s favourite maxim – Nihil humani a me alienum puto – nothing human is alien to me, and while he then states that it’s “hardly productive to pathologise hate per se, not least when it’s natural that it arises . . . the very absence of a critical mass of hatred may militate against resistance.”  He then quotes others on the need for ‘class hatred’ – “a radical structural hate for what the world has become” that is not “personal, psychological or pathological hate, but a structural hate.’  However, a hate that is neither personal nor psychological is not an emotion and a ‘structural hate’ must refer to something else entirely if it is to refer to anything at all.

Miéville is correct to refer to a statement about “deliberate hate as a rational category”.  The philosopher Martha Nussbaum noted that “emotions always involve thought of an object combined with thought of the object’s salience or importance; in that sense, they always involve appraisal or evaluation.”  The neurologist Antonio Damasio similarly comments that “Emotions provide a natural means for the brain and mind to evaluate the environment within and around the organism and respond accordingly and adaptively.”

This is the opposite of the view of emotions–that they cloud rationality, which they obviously can, and fits comfortably into the long tradition of Western philosophy focused on what is rational but which exaggerates both the disruptive potential of most emotions and the precision and certainty of human rationality.  Emotions are an evolutionary development of humanity that helps us quickly gather and process information about the world and respond to it accordingly.  

Some have made the comparison of thinking slow and fast, with emotions involving the latter entailing problems associated with ‘snap decisions’ and avoidance of ‘careful deliberation.’  If anyone was to look to Marx for inspiration, they might consider his long years in the British Library in London; his purported need to read all potentially relevant books on a subject before forming a definite view, and this resulting in missed deadlines and much unfinished work left to posterity.

Miéville believes that hate is not only necessary for resistance but “may help not only with strength but intellectual rigour, and of analysis, too” (p173). He quotes an Anglican priest, Steven Shakespeare, quoted above regarding hate’s “dangerous territory”, that it is necessary to be “more discriminatory about hate, where it comes from, where it should be directed, and how it gets captured for the purposes of others.’

So, we are into Goldilocks territory of not too much, and not too little, hate but just the right amount. Or we can appeal to Aristotle’s golden mean; where, for example, courage is a virtue but if taken to excess is recklessness and if too little, cowardice.  “Emotional intelligence” is a modern variation.  Cogitating on how much hate to evoke against capitalism is, however, a pretty unproductive pursuit.

Miéville, however, is particular about determining the need for greater hate, including that “Marx and Engels were too generous in their eulogy to its [capitalism’s] transformation and energetic properties, and to the bourgeoisie itself, as well as about the likelihood of its collapse.” (p175)

It might be more accurate to say that Marx and Engels were too sanguine, optimistic and confident about the overthrow of capitalism (not its collapse) but that they didn’t live to see the development of the workers’ movement or the programmes developed by its various parts that impacted on the outcome of subsequent failures.  The point of this series of posts is not to relay this long and involved history but to set out what their alternative to capitalism was, which should go some way to exposing the reasons for failure so far.

As for Marx and Engels being too generous about the transformational and energetic properties of capitalism, this is simply false; it is in fact one of their most brilliant judgements and predictions, fully confirmed by today’s capitalism and its spread across the globe.

Miéville says we should retain our “shock” at the iniquities that capitalism throws up and that provoke an “appropriate human response, the fury of solidarity, the loathing of such unnecessary suffering . . . We should feel hate beyond words.”  But the feeling of solidarity is also an emotion.  An emotion that we should wish to promote, which is not (simply) a “humane” one but one based on a feeling of class solidarity, to be combined with the emotions of pride in our cause and our movement, and growing confidence in our success.

If there is a deficiency in emotional investment it is in these, which are more vital to our future than learning to hate capitalism that bit more.  No one experiences only one emotion at a time (hence the falsity of the question repeated by Miéville “is your hate pure”); and as we have said, even the most instinctive emotion involves rationality and a degree of thought.

Marx noted, in relation to Miéville’s call that we should retain our “shock”, “fury” and “loathing” that some suffering has not been “unnecessary”, but absolutely necessary for the development not only of humanity in general but of capitalism and the grounds it creates for the subsequent potential for socialism.  Many still cannot get their head round this: that the suffering imposed by capitalism was unavoidable for its birth and development – and in this sense necessary – but that this does not in the least mean we do not cease to damn it and to seek its overthrow.

To claim otherwise – that much of the suffering endured through capitalism was unnecessary must explain a number of things.  How could capitalism birth and develop without suffering?  Is a non-suffering capitalism possible? Is socialism possible without capitalism (and therefore without this suffering but then also without the working class)?  Was all this suffering therefore without any historical meaning, but simply contingent and accidental?  Explain the laws of the development of capitalism and its relation to the possibility of socialism without contradiction and antagonism and therefore suffering!

Marx is criticised in Miéville for his greater criticism of other socialisms than of the bourgeoisie because the former has none of the “ambivalence” that he attaches to the latter. (p176) This “ambivalence”, however, was entirely appropriate in a period in which capitalism was more or less fully developed in only a couple of countries and had yet to supplant the legacies of feudalism.  Apart from recognition of the insights of the original utopian socialists, Marx admonished their succeeding followers because there was no merit in repeating anachronistic nostrums that were now reactionary.

Did Marx and Engels hate capitalism more than Weitling, Proudhon and Bakunin?  This would be a hard claim to sustain, but whose politics is the best guide to ending it, and would their’s have been better had they done so?

The emotion of hate has its (inevitable) place, but this does not mean “we must hate harder than did the Manifesto”; the demand for greater hate (“hate beyond words”) is a substitute for politics.  After all his detour on the need for hate, Miéville says that “Hate is not and cannot be the only or main drive to renewal.  That would be deeply dangerous.  We should neither celebrate nor trust our hate. But nor should we deny it.”  It would have been better had he started and elaborated on this than drop it into the end of a disquisition on how much we must hate more.

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 68

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Forward to part 69

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