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
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