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?
My late teens and young to middling adulthood were spent waiting for life to begin. Now in my sixties, it is spent in nostalgia for my past. The only time I felt that I was living was my childhood.
My feelings are those of the theme song to Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads: “… the only thing to look forward to is the past.”I think the frame of mind of most people throughout history is that the society they inhabit, the way things are organised and done, is natural and forever.
Talk of changing it, beyond this or that reform, is seen as a crazy notion of fanatical minorities whose minds are “not in the real world”; small pockets of overgrown adolescents, who need to “get a life.” (Which is precisely what socialism would give to everyone!)
Your two comments made me think about an interesting connection.
Perhaps we do something similar with society and with our own lives. We easily mistake what we have become accustomed to for what is inevitable.
Capitalism can appear natural simply because it was already here when we arrived. We are born into a world of wages, money, employers, markets and states, and eventually these institutions can seem almost as natural as the weather.
But they are human arrangements, not laws of nature.
And this connects, for me, with what you wrote about waiting for life to begin and later looking back nostalgically at the life already lived. Our time is finite. We cannot recover the years that have passed.
That gives the question of social change an additional urgency. If this is the only life we have, then accepting that most of our waking lives must remain organised around selling our time simply because “this is how the world works” is a remarkable thing to accept without question.
Perhaps class consciousness begins with a surprisingly simple realization:
What exists is not necessarily what must exist.
And once we understand that our time is our life, changing how that time is socially organised becomes much more than an economic question.
Yes, but that’s the tragedy: that the masses as a whole need to act on it in order to change things.
Advanced modern capitalism has, contrary to Marx’s expectations, eradicated the class consciousness that was evident when industrial capitalism was young, and before. The consolidation of the modern nation-state has obliterated it.
Mass literacy happened, and is now, in the 21st century, in retreat. Knowledge of the world, of history, is at an all-time low. Evolution is not understood nor accepted by the majority of humans.
The possibility of an informed social revolution by the masses has retreated into the mist. The more suicidal damage capitalism wreaks and the more blatant it becomes, the more its idols are worshipped, as, in the most industrial and technologically advanced parts of the world, alienation and superstitions increase. While science advances on one hand, it does not translate into mass awareness on the other.Things are the very opposite of what our founders were expecting to result from the development of capitalism back in 1904, heirs that they were of 19th century enthusiasm for the future.
The philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya wrote that the world was going to experience an ideological retrogression, but I would prefer to live in the old days, in the time of my youth, when we thought that a new world was possible to establish; we were always reading, and our heroes were not leaders; our “heroes” were Marx and Engels.
Right now, most people do not think that we can establish a better world, and they are supporting dictators and authoritarian leaders, and nobody is reading anything, including comic books; everybody is an expert on nothing and bootlicking.
Karl Marx and Engels overestimated the working class; they never thought that the world working class was going to support their own class enemies. Warren Buffett said that there is class struggle and that his class is winning that war, and he is correct because the capitalist class has more class consciousness than the working class.
In my youth, we were afraid of the capitalist class and their lynchmen, but now we must be careful with the capitalists and many members of the working class who also want their class brothers and sisters to be killed. In clinical psychology class, we studied the bizarre personality and at present many bizarre personalities fit that description; it is like a mental disease, similar to the bizarre Superman
All a bit doom and gloom comrades. We may be small but we do exist which counters any generalization such as: ‘Marx and Engels overestimated the working class’ or ‘that modern capitalism has eradicated class consciousness’. We are examples of the very things that you say don’t exist anymore. Are we that different or that special compared to everyone else? Slavery and feudalism lasted hundreds of years and capitalism a mere 400 so perhaps you guys are examples of the cult of ‘instant gratification’ that so permeates this culture? The working class murdered each other in their millions during the last century and that trauma has yet to pass. Given that recent history no wonder that political cynicism thrives. You speak of the ‘finite time’ of our individual existence but be aware that we are a very young species that is just emerging from the superstition of religions and reactionary ideology. Get a little perspective guys.
The reality, instead of a romantic pipe dream, is that Marx thought the working class was going to rebel against the capitalist class instead of supporting them; probably, in his time was correct because the workers were rebelling against oppression. In Capital, one of its prefaces, it says that the working class was reading Marx’s Capital; in some places, mentioning Marx or Marx’s Capital is a capital sin.
I am always reading inside my house and outside of my house, and wherever I go, I take socialist books; the trunk of my car is like a library. I entered a restaurant, and I was reading a book written by Engels, and a couple of guys violently told me that I was reading diabolical literature. Now, capitalists and workers are making anti communist propagandas, it is getting like the time of McCarthy.
Yesterday Trump had a convention meeting, and everybody was shouting to kill other human beings. I grew up in a small town that the Americans call a shit hole, and I never heard that crap from anybody, including the rich of the town, and in my university the young people were always fighting for the same cause, in the Ghettos of NYC, where many illusory petit bourgeoisie are saying that they are full of criminals. I did not hear that either.
The case of the socialist party is different because it had the background of workers who had class consciousness, but in other places around the world, most organisations did not inherit the same conditions, and many of them have capitulated to the bourgeois class too.
At present, everything is dead. I remember the old days when we had socialist conferences all over, people selling socialist newspapers in different locations, socialist bookstores all over the cities, but now we just have a bunch of fanatic nationalists carrying signs to kill other human beings, and religious fanatics shouting in the corners about the end of time. In many forums, you have to be careful; otherwise, you are going to find a brown shirt like in the old days of Germany.
Has Class Consciousness Disappeared? I understand the pessimism, and perhaps this is one of the hardest questions socialists have to confront. Socialism cannot be created by a politically conscious minority on behalf of everyone else. It requires a majority that understands and wants a fundamentally different society.
But I wonder whether we should distinguish between class consciousness having disappeared and class consciousness having failed to develop beyond certain limits.
Workers still recognise conflicts with employers. They organise, strike, complain about inequality and understand perfectly well that those who own enormous wealth inhabit a very different world from those who depend upon wages. What is largely missing is the connection between those individual experiences and an understanding of capitalism as a social system.
Perhaps capitalism’s greatest ideological achievement has not been convincing workers that the system is good. Plenty of workers think it is unfair, corrupt or dysfunctional.
Its achievement has been convincing them that there is nothing beyond it.
That distinction matters.
If capitalism were genuinely regarded as satisfactory, the socialist case would indeed seem almost hopeless. But millions of people are dissatisfied with their lives under it. They simply search for explanations and solutions within capitalism itself: Left, Right, nationalism, stronger governments, different leaders or endless reforms.
So perhaps the problem is not an absence of dissatisfaction, but an absence of a different framework through which that dissatisfaction can be understood.
And history should make us cautious about assuming that today’s consciousness will necessarily be tomorrow’s consciousness. Social arrangements that appeared permanent to generations eventually disappeared.
There is no guarantee that workers will develop socialist consciousness. History owes us nothing.
But neither is there a law saying that today’s apparent acceptance of capitalism must last forever.
Perhaps that is the difficult position socialists occupy: without illusions that history will automatically produce socialism, but without accepting that the consciousness produced by capitalism today represents the permanent limits of human consciousness.Finite Lives and Historical Perspective. I think that is a fair criticism, but I would make one distinction. Recognising the finite character of our individual lives does not necessarily lead to a demand for instant gratification or to expecting socialism within our lifetime.
In fact, I think it can lead to almost the opposite conclusion.
None of us is guaranteed to see the society we would like to see. Social change operates on a historical timescale much longer than an individual human life. As you point out, previous social systems lasted for centuries, and there is no reason to assume that capitalism must disappear according to our personal timetable.
But our finite lives still matter within that much longer process.
The fact that we may never see socialism does not make understanding capitalism, communicating socialist ideas or contributing to the development of class consciousness meaningless. We inherit ideas and experiences from people who died before us, and whatever understanding we contribute can outlive us in the consciousness of others.
I also like your point that our very existence contradicts the claim that capitalism has completely eradicated class consciousness. If a small number of ordinary workers can arrive at these conclusions, there is nothing biologically or intellectually unique about us that makes it impossible for others to do the same.
There are no historical guarantees. Capitalism will not automatically produce socialism simply because enough time passes.
But neither should the limits of our individual lifetimes become the limits of our historical imagination.
Perhaps that is another consequence of taking finitude seriously: we don’t have to see the destination for the journey we contribute to having been worthwhile.If Everything Were Dead, We Wouldn’t Be Having This Conversation. I understand your point better now. You are not simply saying that workers have always lacked class consciousness. You are describing something you have personally witnessed disappearing during your lifetime: a political culture of reading, discussion and belief that society could fundamentally change.
I don’t dismiss that experience. Perhaps something genuinely has been lost.
But I still hesitate when you say that “everything is dead”, because there is a contradiction in that statement. You are still carrying socialist books in your car. You are still reading Engels in restaurants. We are still having this discussion. And none of us was born with these ideas.
That doesn’t prove that socialism is around the corner. Far from it. Nor does it guarantee that workers will eventually develop socialist consciousness. There are no guarantees in history.
But perhaps we should distinguish between a historical retreat and a historical impossibility.
This is also where finitude has changed my own way of thinking. Our individual lives give us a very small window through which to observe enormous historical processes. If consciousness moves backwards during our lifetime, it can easily feel as though history itself has reached a dead end.
But capitalism is not nature, and present-day consciousness is not necessarily permanent human consciousness.
Perhaps our responsibility during our finite time is therefore much more modest: to understand, to question, to discuss and to pass something on.
We may never know what becomes of it.
After all, Marx and Engels never lived to see us having this conversation either.
Socialism is not inevitable either.
Workers in the so-called third-world country ( it is not an economic term ) are questioning capitalism more than workers in advanced, developed countries, and more organisations are taking a similar stance to the socialist party. And some have rejected Leninism and sovietism
One of the negative factors has been nationalism due to the influence of the Leninists and the national liberation movement, but the failure of those movements and the global expansion of capitalism have motivated many workers to question those points of view.
In the USA, workers have been poisoned for a long period of time by nationalism and patriotism, and with the arrival of right-wing populism, that factor has increased more lately, but it is changing due to the stance on foreign workers; even more, the capitalist class of both tendencies are scared of the social democrats, and socialism is not a dirty word among young people like in prior epochs.
The failure of state capitalism in Venezuela has motivated several organisations to question the character of the so-called workers’ state, or state capitalism.
And the stance of Cuba is motivating workers to question Castroism and Guevarism, which has been a heavy ideological burden within the Latin American working class.
In Mexico, there is a movement that is questioning the real character of capitalism and the real character of state capitalism and Bolshevik socialism.
It is not like the left communists who are Leninist with other stripes; they are rejecting old conceptions completely.
The arrival of the right-wing populists will motivate people to question capitalism from the point of view of both tendencies.
If the Trotskyists win the election in Argentina, it is going to be the failure of Trotskyism, and they will be forced to adopt a stance similar to the Peronists.
Argentina is the only country in Latin America where the Trotskyists are very popular, and they have made many conciliatory mistakes and stand out in the region, including support for dictators and interclass disputes
The economic reality has already shown that anarcho-capitalism is just a fallacy; capitalism without a state apparatus can not be established; it is the same repressive state, and workers are being beaten up in the streets.
The Red Shadow of Peronism: The Rise of Myriam Bregman (Part One)
The red shadow of Peronism. The Rise of Myriam Bregman (Part Two)
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