Class Consciousness and Our Finite Time
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The USA working class is not ideologically ready, at least to elect a social democratic government, but in Europe the workers have elected several social democratic governments. Social democracy was founded in Germany.
It shows the ideological grip that the ruling class has on the consciousness of the whole working class; most of the social democrats’ candidates are descendants of workers from other countries, including muslims and Buddhists
Costa Rica is a small country in Central America; workers have elected several right-wing social democratic governments without so much fanfare as the MAGA movement
In Uruguay, the working class approved measures like abortion, same-sex marriage, secular education, free medical services, free education and textbooks; in the USA, they are called communist measures. The ex president that passed those social democrats measure was a member of the Tupamaros; Dilma Rousseff, ex-president of Brazil, was a member of a guerrilla organisation
More than 51% of the population in Uruguay are atheists, and in the USA, workers have not been able to move away from Calvinism and Adventism; religion is also a reflection of the working class oppression
Perhaps Consciousness Does Not Develop in a Straight Line. Reading your different comments, something occurs to me. Perhaps we sometimes expect class consciousness to develop in a straight line: capitalism develops, workers understand it better, socialist consciousness grows, and eventually society changes.
History clearly hasn’t worked like that.
There can be long periods of retreat, nationalism, reformism and support for leaders who promise to administer capitalism differently. But the failure of those alternatives can itself become part of the learning process.
A worker who once believed that nationalisation meant socialism may eventually ask why wage labour, money, capital accumulation and a privileged ruling group remained. Someone who believed that a left-wing government could fundamentally change society may begin asking why the same basic economic relationships survived the change of government.
Of course, none of this automatically produces socialist consciousness. Disillusionment can just as easily lead to cynicism, nationalism or another political illusion.
But it does suggest that consciousness is not something permanently fixed.
This connects with something I have been thinking about regarding our finite lives. We naturally judge social development through the few decades available to us. When consciousness retreats during those decades, it can appear that everything has been lost.
But historical learning does not have to fit within one human lifetime.
Perhaps our contribution is simply to keep asking the fundamental question and passing it on:
If every attempt to manage capitalism differently eventually leaves workers as wage workers, should we continue searching for another way to manage capitalism — or begin seriously considering a society beyond it?
I agree with everything here. But there is a consideration we need to note.
Capitalism has always been destructive, but it is only in modern times that it is threatening all of us with final destruction. Not just its WMDs, but the climate crisis too.Plus, the extinction of species, especially of bees, plankton and corals, affects the climate, the food chain, and oxygen levels. Plant, as well as insect and animal diversity, affects us, because all life is connected. Pollution in air and food produces cancers and capitalist production and waste disposal practices lead to disease.
I’m not a scientist, but I think you have an idea of what I’m saying, if generalising.People and other animals died in the summer heatwaves around the world. Droughts and floods kill, and capitalism is causing them, and each year will be worse. We could be wrong about time beyond our finite lives. There mightn’t be any.
Every suffering society, from antiquity onward, has had apocalyptic anxieties, but the difference now is that, whereas theirs were religious, ours today are witnessing real physical destruction happening as never before, and confirmed by science.“Perhaps our contribution is simply to keep asking the fundamental question and passing it on”. Yes, Roberto, that is one way of looking what we are doing.
Our declaration of principles (which are actually quite general) summed up the experience of the working class up to the beginning of the 20th century. As humans don’t just learn from their personal experience but also from learning what previous generations had experienced, that means that workers don’t have to reinvent the wheel each generation.
Of course what socialists say has to be related to our fellow workers’ personal experience but things haven’t changed basically since then — workers still experience problems arising from their being excluded from owning and controlling the means of producing what they need to live or, to put it the other way round, of these being owned and controlled by a minority within society.
So, yes, we are involved in passing on the lessons learned from the past experience of previous generations of workers. Present generations would eventually learn this without a group of organised socialists passing this on, but the growth of the understanding of what needs to be done would be slower.
” Present generations would eventually learn this without a group of organised socialists passing this on, but the growth of the understanding of what needs to be done would be slower.”
Really? We are so small a number and most never hear of us. Would it really be any slower without us?
I agree with everything here. But there is a consideration we need to note.
Capitalism has always been destructive, but it is only in modern times that it is threatening all of us with final destruction. Not just its WMDs, but the climate crisis too.—————————————-
Right-wing nationalists and leftists do not see the ecological disaster that is being produced by the war in Iran and the Strait; they are just waving the flags of nationalism and the so-called revolutionary war.
Native Americans, called savages, connected their own natures to the earth, space, and animals, and they did not know anything about natural sciences or astrophysics.
Probably thousands of sea animals have died, and the seabed has been completely damaged by the bombardment and the petroleum spill in the sea; the ships are spreading diseases because many organisms are attached to the bottom of the maritime ships. Still, many people believe that this is a religious war instead of being an economic war between the ruling class; we continue believing in witchcraft; the religious wars of the past were also economic.
On the island of Vieques, the US armed forces use depleted uranium and lead for military exercises, and the people from the island have cancer, the animals have mutated, and still many people think that the ecological disaster is a hoax.
I was in a right-wing forum; it is sad to listen to the comments of so many people who have been completely brainwashed by the ruling class regarding the ecological disaster. The rich are walking happily to the banks, and poor workers are living from paycheck to paycheck; if they miss one check their will go bankrupt.
We are not as modern as we claim to be; many peasants take better care of the land and the animals than many intellectuals who think that they know everything, and many peasants have a better daily diet, and they grow their own food.
Most of the so-called gurus do not know that we also come from the animal world; humans share 98.7% of our DNA with chimpanzees, some animals are stronger than us and are immune to many diseases, and a small mosquito can kill us by spreading diseases. Many people do not understand that COVID was transmitted from animals to humans, but they are supporting conspiracy theories spread by the capitalist class.
Modern scientists are modifying the hearts of pigs to be transplanted to human beings, and pretty soon it is going to be perfect, and the transplants are going to be successful without any rejection; pigs’ hearts are similar to human hearts.
We are still influenced by religion and superstition, and there is a shortage of human donations because we think that our bodies came from god; we are not so ideologically advanced.
To acquire socialist consciousness, we must understand the logic of capitalism first, understand our own world and then we can acquire socialist consciousness; it does not come automatically. The left-wingers think that class consciousness will come by adopting their distorted views; they also need a political exorcism
Roberto,
it would be really interesting to see your idea of ‘our lives are finite, and our time is our life’ woven into a propaganda article.We Don’t Have to Start Again From Zero. I think this is an important point, and it connects with what I have been trying to express about our finite lives.
None of us starts from zero. We inherit language, science, history and knowledge from people who lived before us. The same can be true of socialist understanding.
Workers today do not have to personally repeat every political experiment of the last two centuries before discovering its limitations. Previous generations have already experienced reformism, nationalism, nationalisation, state capitalism, war and the repeated attempts to administer capitalism in the interests of workers.
Their experience can become part of ours.
This perhaps gives a small socialist minority a significance quite different from trying to lead the majority. Its role is not to make history on behalf of workers, but to preserve, develop and communicate an understanding that workers themselves can examine against their own experience.
And this is where finitude becomes important to me. Each of us has only a limited amount of time, but understanding does not necessarily die with the individual who acquired it. It can be passed from one finite life to another.
We inherited ideas from people who never knew we would exist. In the same way, something we understand and communicate today may become useful to people we will never meet.
Perhaps that is one reason why what we are doing matters even when the immediate results appear very small:
our lives are finite, but human understanding does not have to begin again with every generation.
Yes, I would like to try that. The idea I want to explore is quite simple: our time is not something separate from our lives — our time is our life.
Under capitalism, workers have to sell their labour power, but in a very real sense what we surrender is a portion of our finite lifetime. Those hours can never be recovered.
That raises a question that goes beyond wages and working conditions: if this is the only life we have, why should so much of our finite time be organised around the accumulation of capital rather than around human needs?
I think there may be the basis of an interesting socialist article there. I will give it some thought.
Finite Lives on a Finite Planet. I think this adds another dimension to what we have been discussing.
When I say that our lives are finite and our time is our life, I don’t mean that only at the level of the individual worker. Our finite lives also depend upon material conditions that we did not create: air, water, land, other living species and a habitable planet.
Capitalism treats both human time and nature in a peculiar way. Our time appears as labour time with a price attached to it, while the natural world appears largely as resources, property and inputs for production. Yet neither human life nor nature exists for the purpose of accumulating capital.
This is why the ecological question cannot really be separated from the social question.
A society organised around endless accumulation confronts a world whose ecological systems have limits, while each of us inhabits that world for only a finite period of time. The contradiction is striking: what is treated economically as an endless process of accumulation depends upon finite human lives and a planet with physical limits.
But, as you say about socialist consciousness, understanding this does not arise automatically. People have to understand the social relationships behind what they experience.
Perhaps class consciousness therefore means more than understanding who owns the means of production. It also means asking what we are producing, why we are producing it, how we are producing it, and what it is doing to the conditions of life itself.
If our time is our life, and our lives depend upon this planet, then taking conscious control of production is ultimately about something much larger than wages.
It is about deciding collectively what we want to do with our finite time on a finite Earth.
Even the Future Is Not Guaranteed. I think this is an important qualification to what I said earlier about our finite lives and passing understanding from one generation to another.
I was thinking about finitude mainly at the level of the individual: I will not always be here, but others may continue after me, just as we inherited knowledge and experience from people who died before we were born.
But you are pointing to something deeper. We should not turn “future generations” into another kind of eternity.
They are not guaranteed either.
That actually strengthens, rather than weakens, what I mean by finitude. The future matters precisely because it is vulnerable. A habitable planet, human civilisation and the continuation of other species are things that have to be maintained; they are not promises made to us by history.
And capitalism introduces a particularly dangerous contradiction. It requires continual accumulation and expansion, while human beings live finite lives on a planet with ecological limits.
This doesn’t mean that catastrophe is inevitable any more than socialism is inevitable. Neither conclusion follows automatically from history.
But it does mean that we cannot simply say that if socialist understanding doesn’t develop in our generation, another generation will eventually get there. There is no historical guarantee that humanity has unlimited time in which to learn.
Perhaps this gives even greater meaning to what we were saying about passing understanding from one generation to another.
Our lives are finite. The conditions that make those lives possible are vulnerable. And even the future itself should not be taken for granted.
For me, that is not an argument for despair. It is an argument for taking the present seriously.
Yes, and I think that strengthens the point about finitude. We shouldn’t treat humanity itself as though it possesses an infinite amount of time.
Socialism is not inevitable, but neither is the continuation of civilisation guaranteed. Nuclear war or ecological destruction could remove the very conditions in which a different society could be created.
So perhaps finitude applies at more than one level: our individual lives are finite, the conditions that sustain human life are vulnerable, and history itself gives us no guarantee of unlimited time.
That doesn’t lead me to despair. It makes what we do with the present more important.
Speaking of inevitability our planet will see another ‘extinction event’ so we better make the most of our species time here. The band Nightwish have a tune called ‘the greatest show on earth’ which traces the evolution of life on our planet. It ends with the words ‘we were here’ to emphasize the ecstasy and tragedy of human existence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJepbPuqNU4
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