Old Grey – Socialist

Old Grey – Socialist consciousness comes from life experience, but then that automatically implies that every worker should achieve it, that it should have happened by now. I also see another problem. It leads to a belief of the old “historical inevitability” of socialism, that inevitably people will come around to becoming socialists. That would indeed leave no role for a Socialist Party. We can join a Party and then watch revolution unfold before our eyes. However many have not accepted this inevitability and wonder what exactly is our role? Where do we “intervene” to raise consciousness and how do we intervene? What practical measures can we take as a Party? We ask why are not more people achieving this consciousness?We do not minimise the importance of the worker keeping up the struggle to maintain the wage-scale, resisting cuts, etc. After all, a working class that can’t defend itself is also a working class that is incapable of making a revolution. Communists will not bring consciousness to the working class from the outside but it will be developed in its struggles to defend itself against the inevitable intensification of the attacks against it. The economic crisis (like war, etc.) can provide a stimulus for class struggle, but this is not always the case. The liberation of our class will only come about we, the class ourselves for ourselves do the hard work of organising, which needs we class conscious workers doing the equally hard work of convincing our fellow workers. Marx said “Philosophers have only tried to understand the world. The point is to change it.” The IWW wrote “Don’t moan, Organise!” There’s nothing inevitable about this and if the working class cannot rise to the occasion overall it will be defeated. And usully it has been. For decades self-proclaimed “marxists” (usually Trotskyists but previously those like the CP and ILP in the 30s) fetishised the word “crisis”, and describe every economic downturn and political turn of events as the “crisis of capitalism”, prophesising the “inevitable” end of capitalism – the more shit  happens – the closer we are to revolution. Some welcome the economic crisis of capitalism and claim there is no perspective of revolution without it. It is argued that crises opens up the possibility of revolution, it doesn’t guarantee it. But without crisis there is no possibility whatsoever. The worse conditions become – the more politicised and inclined to take direct action the populace become.  They argue that crises make people angry and more susceptible to revolutionary ideas. This is an over optimistic (utopian?) wish fulfilment mixed with crude determinism. The track records of crises are such that they have not produced a lasting positive effect on any attempts to eclipse the current method of organising society. It may be recessions just lead to despair, fatalism, acceptance of misery and cynicism to things getting better. Upturns in the economy make revolution more likely because it is the human condition never to be satisfied and when you’ve got the job, house, wages, car and all the mod cons then you want more – security, control over your own life which can only be got by workers ownership and control of our own work, residents ownership of their own homes and individuals control over our lives, all of which can only be got by anarchist communism (or whatever you wanna call it) by way of social revolution.What will happen is the working class will be beat down more than it already has been in the last 30 years or so. The working class is mostly under the sway of bourgeois ideology, is not organised even into class fighting organizations, and therefore will not be able to even hint at threatening the bourgeoisie’s power. After all, the Great Depression produced no revolutionary upsurge and the appalling conditions of workers in the 3rd world haven’t automatically led to revolution either. But most of the communist left seems to be hold the vague hope that the working class will engage in some kind of spontaneous communist revolution. Yet what we can actually expect to see reactionary ideology make a resurgence, even amongst the working class, in the midst of a crisis. If the working class is not already prepared, it will just get beaten up more badly than it has been for the last 30 years. In some circumstances it can demoralise the class or, even if the class struggles it can be dragged onto bourgeois terrain like the strikers in France in the 30s who supported leftist governments and marched under the national flag. Despite the considerable militancy, the class struggle was contained. The very fact that the bourgeoisie were able to go to war demonstrated their success in that endeavor. Economic crisis and increasing misery for the working class doesn’t necessarily and inevitably lead to revolution. Relying upon the effects of the crisis seems to be the lazy way to try and approach social change, scrap all the groundwork and hope the crisis does it for you. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That is our basic function – to develop alternatives, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. The best we can hope for is to use this as an opportunity to re-group, in order to get the working class in a stronger position to start from when the boom returns.But the end of the day however, as pro-revolutionaries, it is not in our interest to try and save capitalism but rather to destroy it. Unlike some in the Occupy Movement who denounce finance capitalism as the main enemy is to side with industrial capital in the struggle between the two over how much each is to get of the wealth produced by the worker class.As revolutionaries being such a small minority, we can’t do much more than keep on arguing that the only way-out is to replace capitalism by a system based on common ownership (instead of class ownership) and production solely for use (instead of production for profit) and to keep on urging workers to self-organise themselves democratically to bring this social revolution about.  We have to make available the right ideas, in sufficent depth and breadth, so that they can be picked up and used. But until that time comes it is just like pissing against the wind. Not a very morale raising prospect.I don’t want it seem that i am anti-Occupy Movement. I do find many things positive about it.  Struggles should be aimed towards achieving real gains for the sake of those gains and about  delivering an increased confidence, autonomy, initiative, participation, solidarity, egalitarian tendencies and self-activity. Workers benefit from their struggles in terms of learning how to organise, discovering their collective power, etc. The generalisation of struggle by elements of th Occupy Movement will make that harder for governments and capitalists to off-load gains made by one sector of workers onto other sectors of workers  and can potentially push back the austerity measures accross a wider front at least on a temporary basis. The current Occupy struggles develop on an independent, self-organised and extend accross national boundaries may well give rise to an escalation of the class struggle, but only in the  context that it starts to challenge capitalism as a whole from a position of some class strength. Only the self-organisation of the whole proletariat and that necessarily requires the trade unions contains the potential to defend its own interests both in the short-term economic and the longer term political.Marx said in the Holy Family:”Not in vain does it go through the stern but steeling school of labour. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today.” – Consciousness is something that workers has to acquire, even if it does not want to.And apologies Stuart for the length. Constructing replies helps me to clarify my own perspectives. Selfish, i know!