Tag Archives: working class

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 78 – the importance of labour to universal emancipation

Posted on by
Reply

Behind the decisive importance of the development of the productive forces and the potential abolition of classes, which provide the grounds for the end of capitalist exploitation and social oppression, lies the fundamental importance of labour in understanding human society.

In the ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’, (Marx, in Early Writings, Penguin, pp. 279–400) Marx stated that ‘The whole of what is called world history is nothing more than the creation of man through human labour’:

‘The first premise of all human existence, and therefore of all history…[is] that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to ‘make history’. But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life.’

This is just as true today, although it would be an obvious mistake to see ‘production’ and the ‘needs’ it addresses purely in terms of the creation of goods and services necessary for bare minimum existence, or even in terms of modern ‘consumer society.’

What is consumed has to be produced:

‘Through estranged labour man not only produces his relationship to the object and to the act of production as to alien and hostile powers; he also produces the relationship in which other men stand to his production and product, and the relationship in which he stands to these other men. (Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts , p 279–400.)

Production thus involves not just the bare existence of humanity but also the form that human society takes, including the relations of production that set out the pattern of exploitation and oppression.  Upon this rests the superstructure of society, conditioned by the productive forces and relations:

‘. . . the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.’  We thus produce not just material (and immaterial) goods and services but also our social, political and ideological institutions, including philosophy, morality and religion etc.

So, when Marx talks about production and needs he is talking about the production of humanity itself, the form that it takes in various societies and the necessary interaction with the rest of nature, of which it is part:

“Labor, then, as the creator of use-values, as useful labour, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself.” (Marx,, Capital, Volume I p133,). The satisfaction of human needs involves the ‘metabolic exchange with external nature’ (Grundrisse p. 528), which refers also to ‘historic needs … created by production itself, social needs’ (ibid p. 527), which are not just of a ‘physical’ nature (Capital Volume 1, pp 275, 341) but also include ‘intellectual and social requirements’ whose extent and number ‘is conditioned by the general level of civilisation’ (Capital: Volume I MECW Vol 35 p181.). 

It is in relation to this general level that individuals consider their own position, which makes inequality so corrosive of a person’s subjective and objective wellbeing: ‘our desires and pleasures spring from society; we measure them, therefore, by society and not by the objects which serve for their satisfaction. Because they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature’ (Marx,Wage, Labour and Capital)

A number of consequences follow. The first is that the development of humanity’s productive powers create new needs, and human beings “distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence.”  “The second point is that the satisfaction of the first need . . . leads to new needs and this production of new needs is the first historical act . . . a certain mode of production . . . is always combined with a mode of cooperation” (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, pp 42, 49, 50).

This form of cooperation can be understood in several ways. First, the organization of production is a historical process involving learning and tools that have been transmitted from one generation to another. Second, every previous historical form of production has involved some division of labour — division between mental and material labour, a gender division of labour, class divisions, racial and ethnic divisions, and a division which assigns different individuals to different tasks in the specific production process and in society as a whole.

Third, human consciousness, intrinsic to production, is itself social, as human consciousness is only possible through language, and language is inherently social. “Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all” (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p 51).

Finally, human production is fundamentally social because human beings are fundamentally social animals. As Sean Sayers puts it: “We are inherently and essentially social beings. We develop our natures . . . only by participating in society. . . . Sociality is inscribed in our very biology” . (Sayers 1998) What this means is not simply that we like to hang out with one another but that our very sense of individuality and the kind of individuality that we have depends on the form of society in which we live. “The human being,” Marx writes in the Grundrisse, “is in the most literal sense a zoon politikon [political animal], not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can only individuate itself in the midst of society” (Marx, Grundrisse p 84).

The Marxist understanding of humanity is thus that the ‘human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.’   These relations are conditioned by the need to produce socially: ‘In work, as we have seen, we produce not only goods but also social relations, and indeed we produce and transform human nature itself. ‘The whole of what is called world history is nothing more than the creation of man through human labour’ (Marx, Economic and philosophical manuscripts, p 400, 423).

In Engels’ ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man’ labour is described as ‘the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself.’

This creation is to be understood not just in terms of the need to produce in order to survive or to produce the culture we now currently enjoy, but also in terms of basic biological properties of humans that we take for granted and which developed from our evolution within the wider natural world.  This includes the development of cooperation and the necessity for language and the development of the specific configuration of the human brain, as the outcome of prior evolutionary changes in the corporeal configuration of hominids, eventually leading to the Homo Sapiens that includes opposable thumbs, bipedalism, binocular vision, etc. (Fracchia, The Capitalist Labour-Process and the Body in Pain, Historical Materialism 16, 2008: p 39)

This development is not, of course, the domain of Marxist theory, but of the natural biological and evolutionary sciences, but which Marxism has been able to build upon to explain the continuing development of humanity through its social organisation.  In terms of this development, Marxism perceives that humanity ‘by acting on the external world and changing it, at the same time change[s] his own nature.’ (Marx, Capital Vol. 1)

The development of the forces of production therefore can compel not only alienating labour but the source of what Marx considered real wealth: ‘when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc…. the full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as of humanity’s own nature? The absolute working out of his creative potentialities, with no presupposition other than the previous historic development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such the end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick? (Marx, Grundrisse p488)

Central to this is the reduction of necessary labour time, which we explained in the previous post is: ‘that required to reproduce the working portion of society at its given, historically developed, level of subsistence, its standard of living.’  Its reduction allows in the free time made available:

‘The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them.’ (Marx, Grundrisse p 705–6)

While the potential exists for the time involved in surplus labour to be transformed into free time, the character of necessary labour time will also change.  The existing character of labour as mostly alienating, in which the social and cooperative nature of it is distorted and disfigured, could be transformed by conscious control of the productive forces to the objective of meeting and further developing human needs and powers.

‘I would have the immediate satisfaction and knowledge that in my labour I had gratified a human need, i.e, that I had objectified human nature and hence had procured an object corresponding to the needs of another human being’ (Marx ‘Excerpts from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy’,Early Writings, pp. 259–78.)

‘Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. (Marx, Capital, Volume III p959)

The complete socialisation of the productive forces of society by the working class abolishing all classes, including itself, is a means, not of limited freedom from oppression – a purely negative objective – but ‘“the full development of human mastery over the forces of nature . . . the absolute working out of [their] creative potentialities . . . the development of all human powers as an end in itself ” (Marx, Grundrisse p488). Such is the claim of Marxism for the universal character of the working class struggle for emancipation.

Back to part 77

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 76 – the Universal class

Posted on by
Reply

When most people come to oppose capitalism they do so in recognition of the oppression which they personally suffer or see in others, giving rise to more than sorrow or despair but a visceral reaction against it.  The various oppressions perpetuated under capitalism are identified and given names, such as women’s oppression and sexism, racial oppression and racism, the oppression of gay people and homophobia, while the poor are those who suffer from poverty and inequality.

When Marx started to develop his understanding of society and its oppression, and how it had been understood by philosophers before him, he asked the question–in critiquing the German philosopher Hegel’s Philosophy of Right–what was ‘the possibility of a German emancipation?’

He answered: ‘In the formulation of a class with radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it . . .  a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man. This dissolution of society as a particular estate is the proletariat.’

While starting from the nature of the working class’s suffering and oppression he quickly argued that this class was the means by which all social suffering and oppression could be dissolved.  The ‘radical chains’ oppressing the working class gave rise to interests that encompassed the abolition of all social oppression ‘through a revolution, in which, on the one hand, the power of the earlier mode of production and intercourse and social organisation is overthrown, and, on the other hand, there develops the universal character and the energy of the proletariat, without which the revolution cannot be accomplished; and in which, further, the proletariat rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society.” (Marx and Engels The German Ideology MECW Vol 5 p 88)

The universal character of the working class is central to Marxism but, as we noted at the beginning, it is often through recognition of different oppressions that opposition to capitalism arises, with the various forms treated as separate and subject to different causes and prominence.  This arises partly from starting from the particular suffering incurred and the salience at any particular time.  As has been noted before, the oppression of Jewish women in Germany from 1933 to the Holocaust was determined by their being Jews, not women, while the oppression of Palestinians by the state of Israel, claiming to be the state of all Jews, is the result of national oppression.

However, accounts based on theories of ethnic, religious, women’s, or national oppression cannot explain why all of them have occurred and still exist, how they can be ended, and what the alternative was in the 30’s and is now.  The answer to these questions rests on a cogent class analysis and alternative to capitalism, including in its imperialist form, and the replacement by a society ruled by the working class.

In the two examples referenced, it is clear that the working class and socialism is an alternative to German imperialism and its Nazi ideology, and to the settler colonial Israeli state, its US imperialist sponsor, and the ideology of Zionism that justifies their actions.  This obviously does not mean that a working class–socialist answer is universally accepted but it can readily be acknowledged even by those who do not accept its arguments that socialism provides a relevant analysis and offers an alternative.

This is not the case with many opponents of other forms of oppression, for whom the working class and its interests, expressed in a socialist programme, is undesirable, irrelevant or not a primary concern. There is no claim on their part to be universal in the sense put forward by Marx.

If they do not identify capitalism as the problem, they often damn capitalism in such a way that they argue that the bad bits that engender women’s oppression or racial oppression etc. can be removed, indulging an understanding of capitalism that does not permit its abolition but envisages it continuing, with different nomenclature covering up its continued existence.  What is proposed is therefore just a reform of capitalism but with some changed secondary characteristics that allow it be called non-patriarchal, non-racist, anti-colonial, social-democratic, mixed economy, or simply ‘democratic’ but with no fundamental change to the economic and social system, and therefore no fundamental political change either.

Of course, there are always those for whom a more equal and just capitalism is the objective, in which case, for them, the exploitation and oppression of the working class either does not exist, can be sufficiently ameliorated, or is unimportant; a capitalism guaranteeing gender, racial and other social equality is enough. Class oppression would then have no biased outcomes based or sex or race etc.

Others who might have sympathy with the emancipation of the working class may consider that socialism does not directly address the particular oppression which is their primary concern, whether it be women’s oppression or racism, and they therefore prioritise these.  Often, this entails the view that the exploitation and oppression of the working class involves economic oppression, which might sit alongside others, but which has no claim to priority, never mind any pretence to universality.

For Marxists, however, none of this subverts the validity of the proletariat as the universal class whose emancipation involves not only its own emancipation but that of other oppressed groups, including all those within its own ranks.  This involves assertion of the importance of socialist revolution to working class emancipation, and that its scope cannot be encompassed in some notion of purely economic emancipation but involves the complete reordering of society and all its social relationships, which no other perspective of liberation can promise.

Marxists claim this because, among other reasons, of their understanding of what capitalism entails, which other ‘anti-capitalists’ do not.  This is why Marx recognised the revolutionary character of the capitalist mode of production and why simple anti-capitalism is not at all an adequate designation of what an alternative is.  He would certainly not have endorsed the slogan “another world is possible” as doing not much more than begging more questions than it answers. As the text of The Communist Manifesto makes clear, not even all socialisms are adequate, and some were positively reactionary, although that too, like the universal character of the working class, is no longer in fashion. Some values, such as pluralism, have been made absolute.

It means that the revolutionising of social relations by working class revolution involves not just economic liberation of the working class but the abolition of all classes including the working class itself.  The complete reordering of the economic and social basis of society involves changes to all aspects of it:

“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.’ (Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. 1859 Marx)

The working class revolution and its emancipation therefore does not just upturn economic and socials relations but also the entire superstructure of society including the state and intellectual life generally – the ideas people have of themselves, of others and of society generally.  This leads not just to the abolition of classes and therefore exploitation and oppression but also of the state and its oppression and repression.

The work quoted at the start of this post recalled Marx’s critique of Hegel’s idea of the universal interests of society being represented by the state, while he opposed this and saw the state as a separate and alien force that was a mechanism of class oppression that would no longer be required in a classless society.  Its non-repressive functions would no longer be the prerogative of bureaucrats in a body standing apart and on top of society but would be absorbed into it and become the activity of everyone directly involved in those functions.

In this he fought against those socialists who also thought that emancipation would come from outside, including the followers of Proudhon and Robert Owen, who believed that co-operative schemes devised by enlightened reformers would be the workers’ salvation, or those like Blanqui and Weitling for whom freedom would come from the revolutionary conspiracy of an enlightened few.

It is therefore ironic that today so much of what passes for Marxism envisages the state as the embodiment of emancipation with a vanguard that will make the revolution, encapsulated in the slogan that ‘it is the duty of the revolutionary to make the revolution.’  Many of those opposing Marxism and its claim that the working class is the universal class also rely on the capitalist state to enact the end of the particular oppression they oppose.

Back to part 75

Forward to part 77

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 71

Posted on by
Reply

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

Fragments of Victory’: The Contemporary Irish Left’, book review (6 of 6)

Posted on by
Reply

The most damning judgements in Fragments are that the movements since 2008 ‘failed to identify an avenue through which society might be changed’; ‘it is unlikely the Trotskyist People before Profit will manage to articulate a viable alternative . . . and the steps between the current situation and the long-term goal of socialism are less clear than ever before. The radical left ‘were engaged in a form of politics incapable of realising its own aims.’  (p183, 191, 192 & 181)

The left made gains during the years covered by the book, expressed in some relatively modest electoral successes, but this was achieved though pursuit of a strategy and practice that might be considered as one of least resistance, which had inevitable shortcomings and meant these ‘steps’ were not an ‘avenue through which society might be changed’; entailed a lack of articulation of ‘a viable alternative’; lacked clarity over how to achieve ‘the long-term goal of socialism’ and gave rise to the perception that its politics was ‘incapable of realising its own aims.’

This is not only a question of an absence of a revolutionary socialist programme, which we have already noted in previous posts.  The left has worked under the assumption that achievement of  its objectives requires a revolutionary party, which alone would understand the necessity for revolution and how it may be achieved, and that in its various forms it is the nucleus of this party, which is considered to be revolutionary because its leaders truly believe in revolution (regardless of how it looks from outside).  This obviously means that its own activity and building its own organisations are the absolute priority.

I am reminded of the slogan that the duty of a revolutionary is to make the revolution, except socialist revolutions are not primarily made by revolutionaries but by the working class in its great majority.  The emancipation of the working class can be the work only of the working class itself, as someone famous once said.  This is one of many principles widely acknowledged but without understanding what it entails.  Revolutionaries are ‘the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class . . . which pushes forward all others [with] the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.’ (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto).

The working class party is built not solely or even mainly by the activists of the left but mainly by the working class itself, with the socialist movement playing the role just mentioned.  Instead, the mantra of building the party is reduced to building the existing left organisations not as a consequence of the development of mass working class movements but separate from them.  Revolutionary organisations can only develop if they find within the working class this growth of socialist consciousness, which is itself partly a result of their own activity but only as an integral part of the struggles of the working class itself.

We have noted the need to challenge the existing leadership of the trade union movement as an example of what is needed to begin addressing these tasks. We have noted that the limits of single issue campaigns means that they were not a substitute, however useful they may be otherwise, and that the political education that was given was the failed statist politics that subordinates the class’s own activity to that of the capitalist state. This view has come to dominate understanding of what ‘socialism’ is and reflects the historical domination of social-democracy and Stalinism.

This was rudely demonstrated by the left’s customary call for nationalisation being appropriated by the state in relation to the banking system when it faced collapse; which was carried out to protect both capitalist ownership and itself, while dumping the cost on the working class.  I have seen it defended on the grounds that this was not ‘socialist’ nationalisation, but this complaint just admits its unavoidably capitalist character.  Could capitalist state ownership be anything other than capitalist? How could the capitalist state introduce working class control and ownership when it was its own ownership that was asserted?

Progress through the lines of least resistance does not necessarily involve conscious opportunism, precisely because it does involve progress, but like all opportunism it sacrifices long term principle for short term gains. Gains which can more readily dissolve as circumstances change and change they always do.  The approach of appearing more ‘practical’ and attuned to workers’ existing consciousness by declaring that one can leverage the state to do what the workers movement itself must do, through a ‘left government’ for example, does not educate, in fact miseducates, the working class.

This does not invalidate the struggle for reforms that of necessity are under the purview of the state, but these are of benefit not only, or so much, for their direct effects but for their arising from the agency of the working class through the struggle to impose its will on the state and capitalist class.  Reforms are ultimately required to create the best conditions for a strong workers’ movement, and not as solutions to their problems that act to co-opt workers to dependence on the state.  Handed down from above they can primarily be seen as performing the latter role. 

The alternative of seeking to mobilise workers when their organisations are bureaucratised and the majority are either apathetic or antipathetic, is often seen as less practical, less advised, and ‘ultra-left’.  However, the point of socialist argument and agitation is often not with the expectation of eliciting immediate action but to advance political consciousness, which sometimes might be seen as widening what is called the ‘Overton window’.

This approach addresses the argument that only in revolutionary times or circumstances can one advance revolutionary demands.  All independent action by the working class is a step towards its own emancipation, no matter how small, just as reliance on the state is not.  Reforms won from the state are significant such steps if they involve independent organisation of the workers’ movement to achieve them.  As Marx said in the Communist Manifesto in relation to workers’ struggles: ‘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.’

Something similar was pointed out by James Connolly, who knew that temporary victories would not yield permanent peace until permanent victory was achieved, and that for such victories ‘the spirit, the character, the militant spirit, the fighting character of the organisation, was of the first importance.’ Fragments’ statements that the left ‘failed to lay deep social roots’ and ‘failed to develop a mass political consciousness’ is the authors judgement that this didn’t happen.

It is banal and trite to acknowledge that demands need to be appropriate to their circumstances, but this must also encompass two considerations.  First, that even in situations in which it is almost impossible to achieve the working class mobilisation that is required, it may still also be necessary to say what must be done in order to achieve the desired outcome.

Second, only by always putting forward an independent working class position, which most often does not involve any call to more or less immediate revolutionary overthrow, is it possible for workers to begin to realise that an independent working class politics exists that has something to say about all the immediate and fundamental issues of the day.  As I have previously noted, this begins by instilling in workers the conception of their own position and power as a class, not that of an amorphous ‘people’.  What this involves in any particular circumstance is a political question and the subject of polemical differences that are unfortunately unavoidable.

The fall of the Celtic Tiger demonstrated that such crises on their own will not bring about the development of socialist consciousness – that capitalism is crisis-ridden and must be replaced by a society ruled by the working class.  One of the earliest posts on this blog noted evidence that these crises most often do not.  In order that they deliver such object lessons it is necessary for a critical mass of the working class to already be convinced that their power is the alternative to capitalism and its crises.  This requires a prior significant socialist movement integral to working class life and its organisations.

We are a long way away from this, with one reviewer of the book in The Irish Times noting that its editors had excessive optimism about the experience of the Irish Left over the period.  The reviewer makes other comments that are apposite.  The argument of this review is that the book records enough experience to show that optimism is unjustified, at least on the basis of continuation of the political approach recorded by it.

The project of a left government that would be dominated by Sinn Fein, with secondary roles for the Labour Party, Social Democrats and Greens is not the road to address the failures noted at the top of the post.  The project is a chimera that is incoherent and cannot work.  In (un)certain circumstances it might spur a further development of consciousness and independent working class organisation and activity, but this is by far the less likely outcome and is not, in any case, what is being argued by the projects’ left supporters.

The left is always in a hurry, partly because of the preponderance of young people involved but more decisively because of the project itself, which is not based on building the strength and consciousness of the class as a whole but of building the left organisations themselves, particularly through elections.  The next one is always the most vital.  The former is the work of years and decades to which the project of ‘party building’ and ‘the immediacy of revolution’, understood as insurrection, does not lend itself.  These are outcomes that cannot be willed by socialists but determined ultimately by the wider class struggle and the decisions of countless workers as well as by their enemies.

Elections allow socialists ‘a gauge for proportioning our action such as cannot be duplicated, restraining us from untimely hesitation as well as from untimely daring’, and ‘a means, such as there is no other, of getting in touch with the masses of the people that are still far removed from us, of forcing all parties to defend their views and actions.’  It is not a means to arrive at a government that is ‘left’ of the current bourgeois duopoly but right of socialism, and that peddles illusions that the current capitalist form of democracy can deliver fundamental change.

Back to part 5

Fragments of Victory’: The Contemporary Irish Left’, book review (5 of 6)

Posted on by
Reply

Fragments makes a series of observations about the political consciousness of the Irish working class, some of which we have already noted, such as the view of many on the Labour Party entering office that ‘the crisis was clearly not their fault and . . . the harsh austerity measures they took were seen as both forced by the Troika and, while painful, necessary.

It records the view of another author that the first year of crisis saw a large number of demonstrations but these ‘dried up once the public realised the magnitude of the banking crisis, and they were replaced by years of “muted protest”. Certainly, there was a sense of powerlessness at the scale and suddenness of the economic crash, a degree of acceptance of the official narrative . . .’ (p31)

It notes that the muting of protest was partially the result of emigration, particularly of the young with 106,000 leaving from 2009 to 2013.  ‘However, the muting of opposition was also due to the influence of the Labour Party and trade unions, which contained protest and channelled anti-government anger down institutional routes from 2009 to 2011.’ (p30). These organisations did indeed push anger down the road of inevitable failure, and yes, they were betrayed, but how was this possible?

One contributor notes that by late 2013 ‘it is difficult to overstate the feeling of exhaustion and disillusionment’, with the radical left ‘comprehensively defeated on the one anti-austerity struggle they’d seriously fought – household taxes.’ The ‘public mood was judged sullen but compliant’ and was successfully ‘blackmailed’ into voting yes to the EU’s fiscal Treaty in 2012 ‘even though this treaty restricted the possibility of future government spending” (p 40-41)

I wrote about this result at the time, noting that:  ‘At 60 per cent Yes against 40 per cent No there is no room for doubt.  It is a decisive endorsement of government policy and a mandate for further cuts and tax increases.  The result should not have been unexpected given the political forces ranged in support of the Treaty, the support of big and small business, the failure of the trade union movement to oppose it and the inevitable support of the mass media.  In the general election last year the Irish people voted by a large majority for a new government in no important way different from the previous one and with no claim to pursue significantly different policies.’

I also noted that ‘Austerity isn’t popular despite the vote and never will be.  Even the Yes campaign was under instructions not to celebrate its victory . . . In October last year when the Austerity Treaty was originally being negotiated an opinion poll recorded 63 per cent opposed to it with only 37 per cent supporting.’  I noted that some people had changed their minds or perhaps did not have the confidence to follow through on their opposition.  This might have united around the demand to repudiate the debt taken on by the state on behalf of the banks and their bondholders, but this also meant opposition to the Troika upon whom the state had become reliant.  It also meant opposition to the administration in the US, even though its Secretary to the Treasury Timothy Geithner thought it was ‘stupid’ to guarantee the banks liabilities. 

I wrote a number of blogs on the issue of repudiating the debt here, here and here, and the disastrous and ‘stupid’ decision to bail out the bondholders in the first place.  Doing so was a real political challenge and required an alternative that didn’t exist.  Without this the failure of the opposition to austerity was inevitable, even if the question of the debt was only one element of the necessary political alternative.

Where the book completely fails is the neglect of what the political content of the alternative might have been, although this is revealing.  In recording the activity of the left its non-appearance reflects the absence of this in the anti-austerity movement as a whole and the failure to win any significant section of it to a socialist perspective.

The same contributor noted above goes on to say that at a later time ‘A proper balance sheet would recognise how the Labour Party and the aligned section of the union movement were rendered powerless to influence or sidetrack the anti-austerity movement.’ (p 42). He points to the drop on the Labour vote from 19 per cent in the 2011 general election to 7 per cent in the 2014 local elections and the ‘victory for left-wing independents and Trotskyist parties alike.’ (p 43)

He argues this was possible because in 2014 100,000 marched against water charges in October followed by 150,000–200,000 in November and 80,000 (in Dublin alone) in December in what was ultimately a winning struggle.  We have already noted the limp role that was expected of the trade unions and political parties in the campaign in the previous posts but the argument that the Labour Party and trade union leaders could not divert the campaign is correct.

It won because it was a community campaign based on mass protests, blocking the installation of water meters and non-payment of bills.  Independents and left wing candidates benefited from their role in the campaign which also distinguished itself by exposing the equivocating role of Sinn Fein. Despite the political weaknesses of the campaign that we noted previously its tactics were able to beat the counter-measures of the government where the previous campaign against household charges could not.

The campaign proved that individual campaigns, given the right circumstances, could defeat particular austerity measures even where the wider offensive was continued successfully. It should be recalled that the water charges campaign took off almost a year after the state exited the Troika bailout programme. It is also worth recording again the failure to draw the right political lessons as the trade union official who contributed the chapter on the campaign finishes his story by endorsing the statement by ‘one of the world’s greatest authorities on water’ that:

‘The Irish system of paying for water and sanitation services through progressive taxation and non-domestic user fees, is an exemplary model of fair equitable and sustainable service delivery for the entire world.’ (p 61)

In fact, the Irish water industry was wasteful and inefficient and state ownership is neither democratic nor socialist.  For this, workers’ cooperative ownership or the demand for workers’ control would have been necessary but the Irish left, like so much in the rest of the world, have become habituated to statist views of socialism that Marx repudiated but that have become entrenched through the domination of social democracy and Stalinism over the last one hundred years.

With such a political platform the problem of the state being the solution, when the solvency and policy of the state was the problem, was once again avoided because doing otherwise would raise the question of ownership and control that would show the platform’s inadequacy.

The main victory in Fragments of Victory was thus necessarily limited and could not be a springboard to address the many deficiencies of the resistance identified in the book.  These included the failure ‘to build lasting political and social institutions’ and ‘no lasting form of working-class self-organisation.’  Reliance on capitalist state ownership as ‘an exemplary model’  illustrates why a problem could not be addressed: that ‘the steps between the current situation and the long-term goal of socialism are less clear than ever before.’ (p192)

The view that the trade union bureaucracy was ‘rendered powerless to influence or sidetrack the anti-austerity movement’ is therefore only partially true. The politics of the bureaucracy, and of the Labour Party, were not challenged by a wider political alternative and the much-trumpeted militant tactics of the campaign were no substitute for it.

back to part 4

Forward to part 6

Fragments of Victory’: The Contemporary Irish Left’, book review (4 of 6)

Posted on by
Reply

In the previous post I argued that the leadership of the trade unions were unable and unwilling to challenge austerity because it would involve a political challenge to the state it had decades of ingratiating itself with it as its ‘social partner’.  However, I also noted that ‘the undeveloped and inadequate political consciousness of the working class itself [was] also a major factor’ in the union movement being unable to successfully resist austerity.

The socialist critique of the bureaucratic leadership of the trade unions is not that its passivity never reflects the views of its members but that the occasions in which members are prepared to take action are often betrayed and their passivity reinforced through ensuing demoralisation.

Protests and demonstrations (called by trade unions early in the economic crisis and also later) are only useful in so far as they are necessary steps to more effective action: by rallying the troops and persuading others that there are alternative courses of action and the means to achieve them.  Otherwise, they are what they are defined as, simply public expressions of objection, disapproval, or dissent, and public exhibitions of the attitude of a group toward an issue.

There is currently no other rival union leadership that believes in independent working class politics that is separate from and opposed to the state and seeks to increase the class’s political consciousness.  Bureaucratic organisation stifles any democratic control that might permit episodic bouts of struggle to advance and accumulate an understanding of class politics.  Lack of democracy and low participation are both causes and effects of political weakness.

Both the leadership and membership are wedded to the view that fundamental change can come only through the state as the only (legitimate) agent capable of achieving it.  All sections of ‘the left’, from Sinn Fein to supposed ‘Trotskyists’, have a political programme that hold that achievement of governmental office will enact this social transformation, and campaign on this basis.  How a capitalist state will permit this is never explained.

Of course, People before Profit and Socialist Party pay obeisance to the view that the capitalist state will have to be overthrown but this plays a role analogous to republicans’ view that the legitimate government of Ireland resides within the IRA.

During the crisis there was little to no awareness of the possibility of an independent working class political force as more than perhaps a vehicle to pressurise the state, or with a view to having its representatives occupy positions in its parliament so that they could legislate sought after policies and adopt necessary measures.

This reflects the widespread support for the democratic credentials of the state and its political system, further legitimised by the country’s colonial history and the struggle against it.  This gives the nationalism that is the express ideology of almost all political parties a progressive veneer and a reactionary essence.

Accompanying this is an acute awareness of the weakness of the small Irish state and its dependence on US investment and EU membership, where most power resides in the much larger European states.  There are some illusions in the independent sovereignty of the state but also awareness of its constraints.  When the Irish state became bankrupt the view that it could not resist the demands of the EU and US that it bailout the banks was reluctantly accepted because there appeared no alternative.

When your politics is based on winning concessions from the state, and/or the perspective of being the official government of the state, it is difficult to present these as possible when that state is bankrupt and your proposed actions are opposed by much more powerful states.  Not only does it look unconvincing, it actually is.  Hence the comment in the book, in relation to the Dáil, of the ‘futility of marching to an institution that was taking its own marching orders from elsewhere.’

One contributor to Fragments, writing about the trade union input into the one anti-austerity campaign that was successful – against water charges – reports that ‘political economy training . . . was the most impactful part of the campaign’. (p57) Except this training appears to have been peddling the same mistaken conception that state ownership is the answer that the whole crisis, and the response to it from the Irish state, should have utterly dispelled.

This campaign morphed into the Rights2Change movement that on paper united much of the left and some trade unions.  Its programme of rights, which went beyond the question of water, made sense only if the state had an obligation to satisfy them, and it didn’t begin to address the claims by the government about the lack of state resources to do so.  A programme based on the supposed moral obligations of the state was as weak as the commitment of the various organisations to the project. It demonstrated only that this spectrum of organisations was united in illusions in, and subservience to, the capitalist state.

Two aspects mentioned in the book illustrate these weaknesses: ‘throughout the period of Right2Water’s existence, nobody was working on the campaign full time. The bulk of the work on the union side was done by two or three trade union officials who also had their day jobs.’ (p61)

As to the unions role as a ‘pillar’ of the campaign, it was to ‘bring organisational skills . . . politically neutral; provide economic and political research; have activists in workplaces all over the country and bring financial assistance.’  (p 55) Nothing about workers action in the workplace and what sort of action its ‘activists’ should fight for.

The role of political parties was equally somnolent – to ‘bring political knowledge; an ability to raise issues in the Dail and have activists in communities all over Ireland.’  (p55) Again, without an acceptance that political debate over aims and strategy was absolutely required, as opposed to already accepted, there was no specifically political input sanctioned for political parties.

Like so many left campaigns, broadness was confused for depth, and political shallowness for agreement and unity.  One ridiculous outcome was that at one demonstration ‘we ended up with 36 speakers or acts.’ (p53) One unambiguously positive legacy of the campaign claimed by the writer is that the ‘unions and progressive political forces were in place to prevent the movement from being co-opted by the far right.’ (p60). Not a high bar.

If the original platform for the campaign was weak (that water was a human right), there remained differences on appropriate tactics, so it could be no surprise that this attempt at turning a ‘mass movements’ into a’ story of mass organisation’ rather than simply mass mobilisation’ was a failure (p180-1 &182). This meant that it was ‘large but ephemeral’, ‘failed to lay deep social roots’, ‘failed to identify an avenue through which society might be changed, and given this, . . .  failed to develop a mass political consciousness around the capitalist nature of our society or around what needs to be done to change it.’ (p183)

Sowing illusions in the state and failing to educate those mobilised on its unreformable class nature is guaranteed not to ‘develop a mass political consciousness around the capitalist nature of our society.’  The major success of resistance to austerity set out in the book came nowhere near this because it didn’t try, and it didn’t try because the left didn’t know what this would have to involve.

Back to part 3

Understanding ‘Citizen Marx’ 2 of 3

Posted on by
Reply

In one review of Citizen Marx, Mike Macnair states that ‘the conception of the democratic republic as the necessary first step to communism was, in fact, Marx’s conception: comrade Leipold has, I think, shown this beyond rebuttal.’  If this is taken to mean that the struggle always and everywhere involves firstly a fight for a bourgeois republic then we see that this is not the case. In the Paris Commune the struggle went immediately beyond it and Leipold argues that Marx never looked at the struggle for bourgeois democracy – a bourgeois republic – in the same way after it (see the previous post).

It is not true today because in many countries, capitalism is ruled by states with a democratic and republican form.  There are all sorts of restrictions and qualifications to this bourgeois democracy, and Marx noted and opposed them in his day, but this did not transform the working class struggle – and communists bringing ‘to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question’ – into a struggle first for a bourgeois ‘democratic republic’.  This is simply old-fashioned Stalinism in which the working class struggle is always limited to a fight for bourgeois democracy, and only when successful, then a struggle for socialism.  This never comes because the bourgeois allies asserted as necessary in the first struggle betray not only the struggle of the working class for socialism but also any struggle for democracy that involves the working class as an independent force.

Macnair appears to accept grounds for rejecting this approach today, on the basis that ‘It is nonetheless arguable that the more advanced stage of the spread of capitalism across the whole globe, and its decline at its core, means that we should focus more on socialisation: the immediate need to move beyond markets and privately-owned concentrations of capital as the means of coordinating human productive activities. . .  . In this sense socialisation is more immediately posed than it was in the later 19th century.’

This means that the working class is the majority of society, with the existence of a much more developed capitalist system that brings to the fore the question of working class dissolution of capitalist private property through socialisation of the productive forces.  To defend this process requires a Commune type state and not a bourgeois republic that will, no matter how democratic or republican, stand upon and defend capitalist property relations.

Unfortunately, Macnair rejects this – ‘There are two problems with this line of argument’ he claims. ‘The first is the Soviet case’ in which economic planning failed.  He argues that ‘Democratic republicanism is essential to effective economic planning; and, because it is essential to effective economic planning, it is also essential to believable socialism/communism.’

In fact, the Soviet Union was not an example of an ‘advanced stage’ capitalism and the initial major problem with socialisation of production was the small size of the forces of production that could most easily be socialised, and thus the associated weakness of the working class that would carry it out. This experience is not therefore an argument against working class socialisation of the forces of production and a state form of the Commune type adequate to defend this process.

The second problem he identifies with a ‘focus more on socialisation: the immediate need to move beyond markets and privately-owned concentrations of capital’ is not so much a structural feature of the current stage of capitalism (that it rules out socialisation) but an obstacle to it.  What he poses is an obstacle to any and all independent political action by the working class, including reform of the capitalist state that Macnair poses as the ‘necessary first step to communism.’

He writes that it is ‘illusory to imagine that it is possible to fight for “workers’ democracy” against the bureaucracy, without simultaneously proposing a constitutional alternative to the regime of the capitalist state as such. Without challenging the capitalist constitutional order, it is impossible to render transparent the dictatorship of the labour bureaucracy in workers’ organisations.’  The capitalist state must be democratised before the working class movement can also be so transformed appears to be the argument.

Democratising the capitalist state requires a force to do it, which presumably is the working class, but as long as the workers’ movement is strangled by bureaucracy this is not going to be done.  In terms of voting, elections in most minimally democratic bourgeois republics involve a bigger turnout than elections within trade unions, which illustrates the necessity to politicise the working class movement.  The prior task to making changes to the capitalist state is to dissolve illusions in it, including that it can be ‘really’ democratic and that it can be made a (more?) neutral mechanism that can be employed by the working class for its own ends.

Any mass mobilisation of the working class will face the immediate task of sidelining or removing the labour bureaucracy because the organisations and mobilisations this bureaucracy stifles are the workers own.  This task will need to be both independent of any change to the ‘constitutional order of the capitalist state’ and go beyond it.  Constitutional forms can change but the essential nature of the state remains.  Prioritising changing this is to invest in the capitalist state the power of making changes that only the self-emancipation of the working class can accomplish.  Why would a capitalist state, again no matter how democratic or republican, help ‘render transparent the dictatorship of the labour bureaucracy in workers’ organisations?’

Removing or otherwise destroying the labour bureaucracy will undoubtedly be accompanied with the need to struggle for goals outside the workers’ organisations, but these struggles should not be under the misapprehension that what we need is reform of the capitalist state constitution in order to change the constitution of the workers own organisations.  In so far as we often seek to change the operation of the capitalist state it is often to remove its influence on workers’ organisations.  The functioning of this state is not an example to follow, or an aid to understanding working class interests, but an obstacle to overcome including the many illusions workers have in it.

Attempts to give a place to republican politics within socialism that it should not have ignores the class character of even the most radical republicanism and inevitably drags us back to accommodation with the capitalist state.  This is not a lesson Citizen Marx teaches.

Back to part 1

Forward to part 3

‘The People’ before Profit? – Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism (part 67)

Posted on by
Reply

The substitution of ‘the people’ for the working class as the subject of struggle is presented In Ireland, in an almost classic case, by the People before Profit organisation, whose reformist politics are based on actions demanded from the Irish capitalist state.  While ‘people’ are to come ‘before profit’, ‘people’ replaces the working class, while coming before profit still leaves profit in place.  And anyway, aren’t capitalists people as well? 

This precept fails to bring to the fore the ‘property question’, demanded by Marx in the Communist Manifesto, whereby the profit of capital arising from exploitation of the working class is not de-prioritised but abolished!

It might be argued ‘what’s in a name’, were it not for the fact that the name was deliberated on and selected precisely in order to avoid clearer identification with the working class and socialism. Presumably because reference to ‘the people’ is more readily acceptable; postponing the task of raising awareness of the paramount role of class and denying the centrality previously accorded to it by anyone calling themselves Marxist. In asserting the priority of the people, and so rejecting the primacy of class, the organisation is setting an example to be followed, not one to be excused or ignored.

Failure to root socialist politics in the material reality of the working class leaves it rootless and prey to the material reality of other forces – we have already pointed to the role of the state in the political alternative offered by People before Profit – but the ideologies encompassing this are many.  Nationalism and racism require denial of the separate political interests of the working class – socialism is international while racism denies working class unity.  It is precisely class interest that is the alternative to these reactionary programmes, not acceptance of the prior interests of an undifferentiated people.

It is possible to fill this missing foundation with moral claims to ‘humanity’ which bases internationalism on ‘human rights’; the ‘self-determination of (capitalist) states’, or protection of minorities based simply on their being a minority.  Similarly, it is possible to oppose racism based on human rights, ‘diversity’, ‘inclusion’ and opposition to ‘hate’, but these are even more vague and useless than the concept of ‘the people’.  Their employment by many on the left, tellingly often paraded under the banner of a ‘social justice’ movement, is testament to a collapse into liberal (i.e. bourgeois) politics compared to which the 19th century republicanism we have been examining in the previous posts looks positively revolutionary.

If class is not primary and immediately necessary in order to take forward a movement and programme what is opened up is the intrusion of a wide variety of identity politics that makes nationality, race, or sex etc. the primary means of securing freedom from oppression. This in turn can lead to ‘intersectional’ coalitions that further divide while pretending to unify.

It leads to rejection of the view that the working class is the only social force able to create a new society and which alone can unite the oppressed through the abolition of class. It thereby simply becomes one segment of society with no reason to prioritise its role more than any other.  Petty bourgeois ideas of individual subjective identity flourish where the nebulous abstraction of ‘people’ becomes the source of power to change the world.  With this view of politics the numerous instantiations of the people come to substitute for the working class, which in turn leads to the search for a mechanism for them to do so, and which is invariably found to be the state.

In 1849 Marx criticised the naive belief in a single “will of the entire people” rather than that of a singular ruling class (or grouping of classes) that might represent its own interest as that of society as a whole, or at least of its large majority:

‘For the National-Zeitung there exists one will of the entire people, which is not the sum of contradictory wills but a united and fixed will. How is that?

That is—the will of the majority.

And what is the will of the majority?

It is the will which emerges out of the interests, life situation, and conditions of existence of the majority.

In order to have one and the same will, the members of the majority must therefore have the same interests, the same life situation, the same conditions of existence, or must be temporarily linked together in their interests, their life situation, their conditions of existence.

In plain words: the will of the people, the will of the majority, is not the will of separate estates and classes but of one single class, and of those classes and fragments of classes that are socially—i.e., industrially and commercially—subordinated to this ruling class.

“What should we say to that?” Is the will of the entire people the will of the ruling class?’

(Marx, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 8 p272, Articles from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung)

Marx, in The Civil War in France, noted that the Paris Commune ‘was the first revolution in which the working class was openly acknowledged as the only class capable of social initiative, even by the great bulk of the Paris middle class—shopkeepers, tradesmen, merchants—the wealthy capitalists alone excepted. The Commune had saved them by a sagacious settlement of that ever-recurring cause of dispute among the middle classes themselves—the debtor and creditor accounts.’

It was necessary then (as it is now) for the working class to be the ‘universal’ class and to represent the needs of a society oppressed by the prevailing system: ‘For the first time in history the petty and moyenne middle class  has openly rallied round the workmen’s Revolution, and proclaimed it as the only means of their own salvation and that of France!.’ (Marx, The Civil War in France, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol. 22 p336 & 496)

This was not something that Marx learned only from the Commune but was something strikingly demonstrated by it, particularly the need to win the majority of the population that was then composed of peasants.  How this need is addressed today depends on the particular class composition of society, but this requires that the idea of a unified people is abandoned and the various classes and their interests identified.  In relation to the peasantry, for example, it did not mean strengthening or enlarging their individual property, while a programme based on the demands of ‘the people’ would leave this wide open.

In the writings through which he and Engels formulated their particular politics, The German Ideology, he argued that ‘For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.’ For the working class, this is realised through the abolition of all classes, including itself.

Marx identified this early in his political development (in 1843) before becoming a ‘Marxist’ and expressed himself in the language of the philosophy of the time: ‘No class of civil society can play this role without arousing a moment of enthusiasm in itself and in the masses, a moment in which it fraternises and merges with society in general, becomes confused with it and is perceived and acknowledged as its general representative, a moment in which its claims and rights are truly the claims and rights of society itself, a moment in which it is truly the social head and the social heart.’ (Marx, Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)

For this to happen the working class must win others as allies to its programme.  This can only be done if, in the words of The Communist Manifesto, socialists ‘disdain to conceal their views and aims.’  It will not be done by pretending that its views are those of an amorphous ‘people’.  You can only rally others to your flag if it is your flag.

Back to part 66

Forward to part 68

Part 1

‘The People’ vs the Working Class 

Posted on by
Reply

Republicanism and Communism differed on the nature of the revolution that was required and so disagreed on the social force that would accomplish it. For the former it was ‘the people’ and for the latter the ‘proletarians of all countries’, which should ‘unite.’

Republicans accused communists of “ignoring the rest of humanity” while they viewed the people as the non-elite sections of the population, which may or may not have included the capitalist class, depending on the particular republican view.  Karl Heinzen, for example, did not see the new bourgeoisie as the enemy.

Marx argued that “The people . . . was a vague expression” to be replaced “by a definite one, the proletariat . . .”  The attempt to use the former combined various classes with an assumed common interest so that any separation within them was an unwarranted division that set back their common interests.

Even were a “privileged class” identified such a view failed to identify the different interests of the ‘non-privileged’ classes as if they had common class interests, including, for example, the working class, independent artisans, peasants and other petty bourgeois classes.

Only an identification of class and their associated interests could specify their material interests that might unite them or divide them. Such an analysis was inevitable as soon as one identified the particular class interest of the “privileged class”, which might prove to be varied – feudal princes or modern capitalists for example – which would then identify the subordinate class(es) they oppressed and exploited.  Talk of “the people’ obscured the interests of all classes, particularly the subordinate ones, and most importantly for the creation of a new society, concealed or blurred the interests of the working class.

Marx argued that failure to identify the separate interests of the different classes making up “the people” resulted in a false understanding of contemporary political realities.  So, in the elections to the French Constituent National Assembly in 1848 the republicans’ “imaginary people” were replaced by the “real people” the majority of whom voted for the candidates of the anti-republicans and elected the representatives of the bourgeoisie and landowners.

‘Accordingly, when a struggle is impending, they do not need to examine the interests and positions of the different classes. They do not need to weigh their own resources too critically. They have merely to give the signal and the people, with all its inexhaustible resources, will fall upon the oppressors.’  (Marx in Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 11 p 65)

In the event of defeat ‘then either the fault lies with pernicious sophists, who split the indivisible people into different hostile camps, or the army was too brutalised and blinded to comprehend that the pure aims of democracy are also the best thing for it, or the whole thing has been wrecked by a detail in its execution, or else an unforeseen accident has this time spoilt the game. In any case, the democrat comes out of the most disgraceful defeat just as immaculate as he was innocent when he went into it, with the newly-won conviction that he is bound to win, not that he himself and his party have to give up the old standpoint, but, on the contrary, that conditions have to ripen to suit him.’ (Marx in Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 11 p 65-66)

Politics based on the purported interests of ‘the people’ create imaginary interests that are not shared.  Marx gives the example in France of its famous fraternité, which in the 1848 revolution ‘found its true, unadulterated and prosaic expression in civil war, civil war in its most terrible aspect, the war of labour against capital.’ (Marx in Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 7 p 147)

Marx accused the republican, Karl Heinzen, of invoking the solemn concept of ‘humanity’ to distract from the fact that while individuals may adopt a position that does not accord with their class position, this cannot be true of ‘whole classes which are based on economic conditions independent of their own will.’ (Marx in Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 p 330)

The result is to deny the reality of class struggle, which has the result not of abolishing it but of confirming the interest of the bourgeoisie.  In 1850 Marx and Engels wrote that:

‘The struggles of the various classes and factions of the classes against each other, whose progress through their individual stages of development actually constitutes the revolution, are in the view of our evangelists only the unfortunate consequences of the existence of divergent systems, whilst in reality the reverse is true, the existence of various systems is the consequence of the existence of the class struggles. This itself shows that the authors of the manifesto deny the existence of the class struggles. Under the pretext of combating dogmatists, they do away with all specific content, every specific party point of view, and forbid the individual classes to formulate their interests and demands vis-à-vis the other classes.  They expect them to forget their conflicting interests and to become reconciled under the flag of a vagueness as shallow as it is unblushing, which only conceals beneath the apparent reconciliation of all party interests the domination of the interest of one party—the bourgeois party.’  (Marx in Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 10 p 530)

Concepts such as ‘the people’ are unable to identify the specific interest of classes and are very rarely appropriate terms of analysis.  Their use usually denotes a false unity of interest behind which lies the interests of the capitalist class.  This can also appear credible because the social system, the dominant mode of production, aligns with the interest of the dominant class.  So, the claim to represent or act in the interests of the people is also the primary ideological justification of the capitalist state.

The concept of the people is incapable of exposing the claims of the state to act on behalf of the people because it rejects the separate interest of the working class.  At most it permits the view that the state is imperfectly or unsatisfactorily acting on behalf of the people but that it can be made to act in a way that remedies this.  This is the basis for the view that the state can reform the social system in such a way as to truly implement the interests of ‘the people’ and therefore that the state itself can be made to carry this out by reforming itself.  It is what Marxist call reformism, which denies that a replacement of capitalism and its state is necessary or possible.

Part 66 of Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism

Back to part 65

Forward to part 67

Part 1

Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 56 – the conditions for emancipation

Posted on by
Reply

Containers sit on the tarmac at Felixstowe Port | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

At the end of a lecture to workers in Brussels written in 1847, Karl Marx stated that:

‘Before we conclude, let us draw attention to the positive aspect of wage labour . .  . I do not need to explain to you in detail how without these production relations neither the means of production—the material means for the emancipation of the proletariat and the foundation of a new society—would have been created, nor would the proletariat itself have taken to the unification and development through which it is really capable of revolutionising the old society and itself.’

(Marx, “Wages”, Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 6, p 436.)

For him, capitalism had already so revolutionised society that it provided the conditions for the creation of a new one and the means to achieve the emancipation of the working class – ‘material conditions . . . that could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone’ (Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party. Collected Works, vol. 6, p 514)

Today, one very rarely reads a positive analysis of material conditions for working class emancipation created by capitalism, even though these have massively developed since Marx wrote these words, when they were really only becoming evident in one country and were too undeveloped even then.   They provide the most striking proof of the potential for the development of socialism out of present society.  In many respects however they are no longer recognised as such and rarely considered; in other respects they are rejected, but we will come to that later.

In Volume I of Capital Marx describes the creation of these conditions:

‘As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialisation of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form.’

‘That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralisation of capital. One capitalist always kills many.’

‘Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime.’ (Marx, Capital Volume I p929)

In earlier posts on Marx’s alternative to capitalism we outlined many of these and how the contradictions within this development, including that between the forces and relations of production, would lead to social revolution.  We outlined the increasing socialisation of production through the colossal expansion of capitalism across the world, turning more and more activities into commodities to be sold for profit, through a massive increase in the division of labour – within and between workplaces – that involves the the creation and enabling of new, previously undreamed of, technologies.

This massive ‘development of the forces of production is the historical task and justification of capital.  This is just the way in which it unconsciously creates the material requirement of a higher mode of production.’ (Capital Volume 3 p 181)

This is elaborated in the Grundrisse:

‘The great historic quality of capital is to create this surplus labour, superfluous labour from the standpoint of mere use value, mere subsistence; and its historic destiny is fulfilled as soon as, on one side, there has been such a development of needs that surplus labour above and beyond necessity has itself become a general need arising out of individual needs themselves – and, on the other side, when the severe discipline of capital, acting on succeeding generations, has developed general industriousness as the general property of the new species – and, finally, when the development of the productive powers of labour, which capital incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth, and of the sole conditions in which this mania can be realized, have flourished to the stage where the possession and preservation of general wealth require a lesser labour time of society as a whole, and where the labouring society relates scientifically to the process of its progressive reproduction, its reproduction in a constantly greater abundance; hence where labour in which a human being does what a thing could do has ceased.’

‘Capital’s ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness, and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because a historically created need has taken the place of the natural one. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces. It ceases to exist as such only where the development of these productive forces themselves encounters its barrier in capital itself.’ (Marx, Grundrisse p 409-410)

The passages above, which might appear difficult – the first paragraph is comprised of only one sentence! – demonstrates capitalism’s contradictions, with its laying of the foundation for its supersession.  So, the drive for capitalism to ever greater exploitation of workers – by their giving up more and more of their time labouring for the capitalist that is not recompensed in wages – is indeed their intensified exploitation.  However, this very development of production, beyond what is required to simply maintain the working class at some minimum level of existence, expands productive powers in such a way that greater and higher needs can be satisfied – of course for the benefit of the capitalist class initially and to the utmost extent – but also increasingly for workers by increasing what they can consume; in their whole mode of living, and how they can further their personal interests and development.  Above all, this expansion can allow this development by potentially reducing the time necessary for work, permitting time to take part in the running of society while also pursuing other collective and individual interests.  The massive increase in the productivity of labour forced by capital in ruthless competition can be turned from a means of capitalist exploitation to working class emancipation.

Capitalist expansion of exploitation is ceaseless because it seeks the accumulation of wealth in the form of money, for which there is no limit, but at the same time must do this in the form of the creation of real objects and services which address genuine needs, even if capitalist society distorts and degrades their development and expression.  The potential freedom from want, insecurity, inequality and from the subordination of everyone subject to the imperatives of capitalist accumulation, is the foundation for the belief that the ending of the class system will herald the end of all social domination and oppression.

The capitalist has only a ‘transitory existence implied in the transitory necessity for the capitalist mode of production’ who ‘ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake; he thus forces the development of the productive powers of society, and creates those material conditions, which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle.’ (Marx Capital Volume 1 p 739)

Consequently, ‘from the moment that the bourgeois mode of production and the conditions of production and distribution which correspond to it are recognised as historical, the delusion of regarding them as natural laws of production vanishes and the prospect opens up of a new society, [a new] economic formation of society, to which the bourgeois mode of production is only the transition.’ (Marx, Theories of Surplus `value MECW Vo 33 p 346.) Capitalism is therefore just a transitional phase in the evolution of human society and its development of productive powers through which it shapes itself and its environment.

* * *

This post is the continuation of a series, the previous one of which is linked here, and the first of which can be found here.

Back to part 55

Forward to part 57