Class Consciousness and Our Finite Time
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Why Has Socialist Class Consciousness Not Grown More?
Reading the different comments here has made me wonder why socialist class consciousness has not developed as much as earlier socialists might have expected.
I can think of several possible reasons:
1. Capitalism appears natural.
We are born into a world of money, wages, employers, markets, private property and states. We learn how to survive within these relationships long before we begin questioning why society is organised this way.2. Everyday survival consumes our time and attention.
Jobs, bills, housing, families and other responsibilities constantly demand our attention. There is always another day to get through. Ironically, the system we need time to understand also consumes much of the time and mental energy required to question it.3. Social problems appear as individual problems.
Instead of asking why millions of workers experience similar insecurity, we naturally ask: How can I get a better job? How can I earn more? How can I improve my own situation? There is nothing irrational about this — we have to survive — but individual solutions can obscure common social causes.4. Political dissatisfaction is channelled back into capitalism.
Workers can turn towards the Left, the Right, reforms, nationalisation, privatisation or another political leader. Governments and policies change while the fundamental relationship between capital and wage labour remains.5. Nationalism can obscure class interests.
Workers who share essentially the same relationship to capital can identify primarily as Americans, British, Argentinians, Puerto Ricans, Chinese, etc., sometimes seeing workers across borders as competitors or enemies rather than recognising their common social position.6. The meaning of socialism has been confused historically.
For millions of people, socialism has come to mean state ownership, government planning, welfare policies or regimes such as the former Soviet Union. Before discussing whether socialism is possible, we often have to clarify what socialism actually means.7. Capitalism does not automatically produce socialist consciousness.
Exploitation, inequality and crises may cause people to question society, but they can also produce resignation, nationalism, conspiracy theories or faith in another leader. Material conditions can create questions; they do not guarantee socialist answers.For me, the crucial transition occurs when a worker begins connecting the personal with the social:
My problems are not simply my problems. My dependence upon wages is part of a social relationship shared by millions of other workers. That relationship is historically created rather than natural or eternal, and fundamentally changing it requires conscious collective action.
And this brings me back to the idea of finitude that I mentioned earlier.
Class consciousness helps us understand how our lives are socially organised. Consciousness of finitude reminds us why the time involved matters.
Our labour power can only be exercised through our time, and our time is part of our finite lives. So the question is not only how much we are paid for our labour.
It is also:
Who controls so much of the time of our lives, and for what purpose?
I would be interested in hearing what others think. What other factors prevent dissatisfaction with capitalism from developing into socialist class consciousness?
CDM – ‘Nobody was able to buy their class consciousness.’
Except, of course, the sons and daughters of the parasite class who have their class consciousness bought for them in ‘public’ schools.——————————————————————————-
I do not think you saw that process and the moment that it took place. Most sons and daughters of the ruling class in that moment and place did not attend public schools; they attended catholic schools, they attended La Salle Schools ( John Baptist de La Salle ) or Salesian Schools ( Saint Bosco’s schools), which had a better curriculum than public schools; other people attended the Episcopal schools. I am talking about people who over mature peoples, who worked in those professions.
But the working class is not the same everywhere. I would say there is less class consciousness in places like Britain than there is in S. America and Africa, where the class struggle is more personal – as it was here in the days of the Chartists.
The poorest here in Britain are generally the most patriotic, reactionary, and punitive, and the most fawning and admiring of the bourgeoisie. Their communal sentiment is nationalism and pride in the military, macho, personality. The phenomenon of the autodidactic worker with his home library has mostly disappeared, and most people rely on the state for their education and on soundbite TV news programs and internet slop.—————————————————————–
The Chartists influenced the minds of the Caribbean workers, especially in Jamaica, Saint Thomas, and other islands where they speak English, and they took those ideas to other islands when the Puerto Rican sugar company was the main sugar producer, and they produced what is known as “Furfural “, and it was toxic.
The smoke from the sugar factories was toxic; it was called ‘Cachipa” or particles. It contaminated the atmosphere and produced lung diseases; most governments were controlled by that single corporation; it was a monopoly, and all the profits and capital owned by Paramount were made by those workers.
The Chartists were the ones who influenced the workers from the sugar plantations. Several workers’ union leaders were killed, and their slogan was: “Sugar, how bitter you are. ( Azúcar que amarga eres )
It was the slogan on their radio programs. It was bitter ( and sugar is sweet ) for them because they had to work many hours, and they received salaries of misery; they created cooperatives and their own grocery stores. Haitians lived in places known as “Bateyes”, and they were company towns; practically, they worked for free because they owed their salary to the grocery stores; they fed the workers to keep them alive; inside the plantation, their diet was water and sugar; they suffered diseases like diabetes and renal diseases ( CKDU ) or kidney failures
The writer who described that situation was killed; he wrote a novel titled Over, and the writer was Ramon Marrero Aristy. He was influenced by socialist ideas
https://ministeriodeeducacion.gob.do/docs/biblioteca-virtual/GwMA-over-ramon-marrero-aristypdf.pdfPuerto Rico also had a strong working-class movement, and they formed many cooperatives, and they worked in the sugar industry.
Government and politicians were scared of the workers, and several Leninist groups penetrated the workers’ unions; they became agitators, and several of them were killed, like Doctor Guido Gil; he asked workers to produce slowly as a new form of workers’ strikes ( El Paso de la tortuga ), the turtles strike.
https://diccionario.funglode.org/gil-diaz-guido/. He was not a corporate lawyer,
The world working class has a rich history,y but most workers at present are not aware of their own history; some workers, like in the USA, have their struggles based on electing leaders and fighting for leaders and fighting against each other, which does not provide class consciousness.
https://www.abebooks.com/9780914441441/revolutionary-journalism-Felix-Martin-Isaac-0914441442/plp
I knew this man; he was a factory worker. He was a hillbilly; he had the accent of a hillbilly, the place where he grew up was known as Hell for certain. He said that they were free until they built a road and the police were allowed to enter his town.
He knew Karl Marx’s Capital better than any economist; he was a self-educated philosopher. We travelled to several places, and he was like a walking library.
He had class consciousness, and he knew that the real world power is the working class; and the real political power, he never followed any leader. He believed that workers should take the political power to transform society.
He was a military hero, and he returned his medals; he said that he was killing poor workers and peasants like him.
We were at a workers’ union meeting, and he said to everybody, ” Let’s close all factories and wait to see who the real leaders are, and everybody was making poops in their pants; they did not have the ball to make a general strike and go against their own exploiter
He was always saying that the members of the Sicilian Mafia were altar boys compared to the owners of the big corporation; it was a legalised mafia
He was ready for the future society
Before the Victorian age soldiers were despised by other workers as those doing the dirty work of the masters. “No son of mine will don a red coat” was a common saying. Recruits for the army and navy were tricked into it or press-ganged. The press gang was a regular terror, raiding taverns at night and dragging men off while drunk, hunting them down through the streets and/or clubbing them unconscious.
Class hatred was personal, as in the case of the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Upstart rural bourgeoisie were known by their tenant workers and both would exchange abuse and threats when the latter were prosecuted in court, their master presiding.
A popular song rang through London during the French Revolution: “God save the guillotine, which shaves the head so clean from King and Queen.” The British royals in their carriages were pelted with rotten fruit and stones whenever they ventured forth.
By the end of the 19th century and the death of Victoria the patriotic lie had destroyed the last vestiges of the old and personal class hatred of capitalism’s earlier centuries.
TM
You should have a section on the SS to write articles every month
You are well-versed in Old English, classical history, classical literature, and primitive religions
Thank you. You know a great deal about Latin America and Africa, and you speak Spanish, which I do not. You shine a light on the Spanish-speaking world’s contribution to socialist thought and you have travelled a lot and done a great deal that is interesting and of importance to communities.
I do not speak or read Old English, which is the name for Anglo-Saxon. But I have studied Old French and Occitan (Provençal).
Roberto – I can agree with your 7 points above but I think the problem goes much deeper , as described by Marcuse, Fromm and Adorno. Would you say the ruling/parasite class are ‘class conscious’? I believe that they are and doesn’t that rather contradict some of your 7 points?
One of the ways I have tried to use when talking to fellow workers is not to talk about their lives of struggle, uncertainty and worry, but to look to the future of their offspring.
Inspired by Republican propaganda from the Spanish Civil War, the line “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next” often seems to get people thinking. It is often easier to tolerate suffering yourself than it is envisage the same struggle for your family and future generations.
Wez, you mean the entire capitalist class are class conscious? Even all the dolts among them?
I think the comedy Cheers sums them up. Woody the bartender is working 24 hrs a day so he can buy a birthday present for his rich and clueless fiancée. She is told he is worn out after a 48 hr continuous shift, and replies, “Is that not normal? I wouldn’t know, not being one of the work force.”
When Woody tells her he hasn’t got any money, she says, “That’s ok. I’ll ask (the chauffeur) to drop you by an ATM on the way.”
When he says he takes the subway, she asks what’s that, and then laughs, “Really! A train that goes underground! You are such a joker, Woody!”
It is a fond belief that the rich are rich because they are bright.
It is the premis behind conspiralunacy that very bright and clever individuals are in charge of society.
Conspiraloons are not materialists.I think the ruling class are very class conscious in this country. They know instinctively who’s one of ‘them’ and who is not. If the working class had a quarter of the consciousness as our rulers then the revolution would have happened long ago. Of course this is helped by them living in their own social ‘bubble’ and never mixing socially with the majority. Nothing to do with intelligence – it’s just a sociological fact.
They don’t all live in a bubble. I have known capitalists, and I studied with some in Switzerland and at university in England. They didn’t exclude me from their circles.
I knew some in the theatre too, in my capacity as a stage-manager. You wouldn’t know one was a capitalist by looking at them. They didn’t live in palaces, just in flats in expensive areas.TM – I wasn’t talking about ‘capitalists’ I was talking about the ruling elite in what I said above. Of course they are all capitalists but not all capitalists are members of the elite. Would you agree with the simple proposition that the ruling elite are infinitely more class conscious than the working class?
There have, of course, been politicians from the working class, serving, of course, their class enemies. Hitler, for instance, couldn’t have been more working class; in fact he was lumpenproletariat. He was obsequious when visiting his capitalist handlers. The Bolsheviks saw themselves as working class, which they were. So did Castro.
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