Class Consciousness and Our Finite Time
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Most of us here already understand that the fundamental problem is not whether capitalism is administered by the Left or the Right, but capitalism itself. Yet most workers do not see society in those terms. They work, pay their bills, worry about their families and naturally tend to regard the world they were born into as simply the way things are.
That is why I don’t think it helps to dismiss workers who lack class consciousness as stupid or irrational. The real challenge is helping people question what capitalism has taught us to regard as normal.
Lately I have been thinking about this through something very simple: our lives are finite, and our time is our life.
Under capitalism, most of us must sell a large part of that finite time simply to obtain the means to live. We call it “earning a living”, but we are also giving away hours of the only life we will ever have.
Perhaps this provides another way of talking about class consciousness. Workers everywhere share not only their dependence on wages, but a society in which much of their finite lifetime is subordinated to the requirements of capital.
So perhaps one of the simplest socialist questions we can ask is:
If our time is our life, who should control it?
Why Does Capitalism Still Seem Natural? Something I often wonder about is why, after generations of inequality, economic crises, wars and insecurity, most workers still regard capitalism as essentially the natural way of organising society.
Most workers know perfectly well that something is wrong. They complain about wages, rents, working conditions, inequality and politicians. They may distrust governments and corporations. Yet when looking for solutions, they usually return to the same alternatives: a different government, a stronger leader, more nationalisation, less nationalisation, the Left, the Right, nationalism or another reform.
Perhaps this is one of the greatest strengths of capitalism: it does not require workers to believe that everything is wonderful. It only requires them to believe that there is no realistic alternative to the basic system itself.
That makes me wonder whether class consciousness begins not with having all the answers, but with asking a different question.
Instead of asking, “Who could run capitalism better?”, perhaps the question should be:
“Why should we continue organising our lives this way at all?”
After all, capitalism is something human beings created and reproduce every day. It is not a law of nature.
If workers collectively produce society’s wealth, what prevents us from collectively organising that wealth directly for human needs rather than profit?
Perhaps the most interesting question for us is therefore not simply why workers don’t understand socialism, but what has to change in the way people see themselves and society before capitalism stops appearing inevitable?
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