Class Consciousness and Our Finite Time
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Leftism is not the proper source to obtain class consciousness or to become a socialist. It is like the blind leading the blinds
I think this is an important distinction. Moving politically to the Left does not automatically mean developing socialist class consciousness.
A person can support higher wages, nationalisation, stronger welfare programmes, progressive taxation or a left-wing government while continuing to accept wage labour, money, commodity production and the state as permanent features of society.
That doesn’t make those people foolish or “blind”. It simply means that dissatisfaction with capitalism can develop in many directions without becoming a consciousness of capitalism as a social system.
For me, the decisive step is not moving from Right to Left, but beginning to question the social relationships that both Left and Right generally take for granted.
Class consciousness begins when workers recognise their common position within those relationships and understand that fundamentally changing them requires conscious collective action.
So perhaps the real journey is not from Right to Left, but from accepting capitalism as the framework of political possibility to questioning that framework itself.
A poll today suggests so far that 95% of those polled want more welfare cuts and more military spending.
Where was that poll made ? Another polls show that peoples want more bread and butter and less military spending
Most peoples around the planet want peace and a better life for them and their children, Americans are the ones who want more state cut, based on the so called big government ( a concept spread by Ronald Reagan ) and more guns to defend the so called homeland, and Europe governments are cutting social democratic benefits to produce and buy more guns
It is a contradiction because most workers do not know that the state is financed with surplus value and the burden of taxation falls on the profits of the capitalist class, some sectors of the working class believe that they are the one paying for welfare, and only foreign workers use it, and that they paying the cost of wars to defend their homeland, both statements are completely wrong because the capitalist class is the one that want to cut benefits to make more profits and they are the ones paying for wars. This is part of the class consciousness or the lack of class consciousness
It’s a UK poll.
Most here are punitive towards their fellow workers, especially immigrants and the unemployed, called “chavs”, whom they call scroungers. They support military conscription for the young, longer and tougher prison sentences, and would like to see the death penalty restored.
Most left or right populists political candidates are xenophobic, racists, patriotic and warmongers, and blame the social, political and economic crisis on the foreign workers. and workers have been mentally influenced by those conceptions
They are hitting the Piñata on the wrong side, the capitalist class is getting the candies, fruits and toys, they are obtaining all the benefits from the suffering and exploitation of the large population of human beings ( human lives is not an expression used by molecular-celular biology, it is a religious expression, we are placental mammals animals, the pro life do not want to accept it )
In Chile both tendencies run a political campaign based on xenophobia, racism and patriotism, and the right wings populists won the election, in a country where they have had more leftwing governments than right wings governments, and several have call themselves socialists including Eduardo Frei before Salvador Allende, neither of them have been socialists
There was a coalition of communists and independent communists who supported xenophobia and racism, and most of the Chileans are descendants of Mapuches ( Araucanos ) and other ethics groups, and the Mapuche punished them with null or blank votes or supporting the right wing populists, and the leftist government had sent the military troops to their territory, and those territories have large deposits of minerals and fossil fuels
The leftwing populist blamed their lost on political maneuvers or election fraud, they lost because the leftist were doing the same job as the right-wingers, and they did not fulfill their false promises, and some of the laws passed by them are being used by the right wing populists and since they were minority in the congress both made alliances, the left communists which did not support anyone of them said that it was like a cow selecting the sides of a slaughter house
Those communist candidates wanted the Haitians and Venezuela workers to leave the country according to them they are taking their jobs, and they are gangsters, but with and without them the unemployment rate is pretty high, and crime will continue, the reality is that the majority of Haitians are leaving the country they are also living in extreme poverty. Most Venezuelans are not members of the Tren de Aragua gangs, they are leaving Venezuela because they are poor workers, it is like Trump saying that all foreign workers are criminals, what is the difference ?
https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-58550943. This article from BBC shows the real situation,
therefore, left wingers are running the same political campaign as the right wingers, they are not a choice eitherThose so called communists do not know the logic of the capitalist mode of production, which is the one producing unemployment, and need cheap labor power to produce more profits, the correct conception should have been to unite all the members of the working class. They must be reading marvel comics books instead of socialism
The ex president of Argentina ( who is considered a leftist Peronist ) expressed a public statement that “all them came on boats from Europe” , and it showed its historical ignorance,, because Argentinians are also descendants of natives Americans, and there is poverty among the descendants of Italians, Spaniard, German and Jews along with the Gauchos, mulatos, and natives Americans, the color of the skin is not an issue under the capitalist mode of production, it is just a fallacy. What is the difference between an anarcho capitalist known as Millei ?
The language spoken is not pure Spanish ( or Castilian ) it is known as Rioplatense Spanish, ( like in Uruguay ) and the national music which is the Tango came from the African , the word tango come from an African expression known as nTangu or Tangana, they removed the congas and the bongos to introduce europeans instruments like the accordion. Workers do not know their own history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_tango. The Milonga was influenced by Afro-cubans music. I collected music for several decades, and Cuba influenced in al the rhythms, and they have more than 140 varieties, it is like negating that American jazz and Rock and Roll is not African music which came from Blues
ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz. Square dancing was influenced by the Mexican music and dancers, as humans we do not know who we are, and where we came from, and the capitalist class wants to close all the natural history museums and all libraries
PS Adam Buick published on Facebook the names and percentage of all the natives peoples that exist in Latin America, and they are majority compared with the europeans, as well the composition of Mulatos ( mixed, come from Mules, Maria Teresa Babin wrote a book ) is also a big ethnic group. In Mexico several natives languages are spoken by a large population of natives Americans, the original name of those continents was Abya Ayala ( and Turtle island the north continent )
I think the piñata metaphor actually gets to the heart of the matter.
When unemployment, low wages, inadequate housing or insecurity are blamed primarily on foreign workers, workers are encouraged to see other workers as the source of problems that arise within a much larger social and economic system.
That does not mean that immigration can never create real pressures or that questions about migration, crime or public services should simply be dismissed. Those questions have to be examined honestly. But identifying a problem is different from identifying its underlying cause.
A Venezuelan, Haitian, Chilean, Argentine, British or American worker may speak a different language, have a different culture and cross a different border, but if each depends upon selling labour power in order to live, there is a fundamental social relationship they share.
This is where nationalism can become such an obstacle to class consciousness. It encourages the worker to think first in terms of “our jobs”, “our country” and “our people”, rather than asking who owns and controls production, why unemployment exists, why labour power is bought and sold, and why workers compete for access to the means of living in the first place.
Perhaps that is why neither a Left nor a Right label is enough. The important question is whether workers are being encouraged to understand their common class position or to blame another section of the working class.
To use your metaphor: workers can spend their lives fighting over who gets to hit the piñata while never asking who owns the piñata, who filled it, and why everyone has been made to compete for what falls out of it.
I think the piñata metaphor actually gets to the heart of the matter.
When unemployment, low wages, inadequate housing or insecurity are blamed primarily on foreign workers, workers are encouraged to see other workers as the source of problems that arise within a much larger social and economic system.
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Someone travelled by car the whole USA from east to west, west to east, north to south and south to north, and saw that most poor people were white Americans; they were not Mexicans, and there were many ghost towns.
All factories were closed, taken by the capitalists to other countries, and many were seating in the front porch waiting for the mailman to bring the unemployment or welfare check.
Now the right-wing politicians are saying that the foreign workers are eating the Piñatas and that they have taken all the jobs, and many workers believe that lie.
Statistics have shown that crime is not a monopoly of foreign workers, and some jails system are run by private corporations that make profits like any corporation, and some companies employ prisoners, giving them underpaid jobs, lower than the pay rate required by law. Similar to the jails for undocumented workers, they are run by private corporations; they need tenants.
https://www.beacon.org/They-Take-Our-Jobs-P1419.aspx. This book debunks all those fallacies. She is the daughter of Noam Chomaksy, and she has a doctorate in Latin American studies.
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https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/laii_events/41/. This book, written by Aviva Chomsky, demonstrates why emigration became illegal and when and why, and that the so-called melting pot is just a historical lie, and that one group entered through the east, but there was a large group that entered through the west, and they are not mentioned, which are the Chinese, and they also contributed to the development of capitalismAll those fallacies and hysteria help to keep the workers divided and do not help to obtain class consciousness, and the capitalist class knows the reality.
An American ambassador told the soviet union that they knew that Russian leaders were developing state capitalism, but many workers have been lied to by both sides, who were saying that the soviet union was socialist. or developing socialists, and the Leninists also propagated the same lies
We can cite thousands of examples that will contribute to the disunity of the world working class.
I think this brings us back to one of the central problems of class consciousness: workers can experience the same economic system while being encouraged to explain their difficulties by blaming another section of the working class.
A factory closes and the explanation becomes the foreign worker. Wages stagnate and the explanation becomes immigration. Housing becomes unaffordable and again another group of workers becomes the target.
But even if every immigrant disappeared tomorrow, the basic relationships of capitalism would remain: wage labour, competition, unemployment, commodity production, private or state ownership and production for accumulation.
That does not mean immigration has no economic or social effects. Of course it does. The important question is whether those effects explain the fundamental position of workers within capitalism.
Perhaps this is another reason class consciousness develops with such difficulty. Capitalism presents workers with many visible differences — nationality, language, ethnicity, religion and immigration status — while the social relationship they share is much less visible.
And this connects with the historical point you make. If workers don’t understand their own history, every generation can be presented with essentially the same divisions in a different form.
A Mexican worker did not invent wage labour. An American worker did not invent unemployment. A Venezuelan worker did not create the world market. They encounter these relationships after they are born, just as the rest of us do.
The development of class consciousness therefore involves seeing beyond those differences without pretending they don’t exist. It means recognising that workers can have different histories, cultures and immediate circumstances while still sharing a fundamental dependence upon selling their labour power in order to live.
Perhaps one of capitalism’s most persistent ideological successes is getting workers to fight over their differences before they recognise what they have in common.
A person can support higher wages, nationalisation, stronger welfare programmes, progressive taxation or a left-wing government while continuing to accept wage labour, money, commodity production and the state as permanent features of society.
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The welfare system was created in 1935 by white peoples and for white peoples, and passed by Roosevelt, and in 1964 black peoples were allowed to have welfare to obtain their votes, and later on Latinos or others minority were allowed to have welfare, and now the right populist leaders are blaming the latinos about having handouts which they call socialism, and Ronald Reagan called women the welfare queens. Who is financing those social democrats benefits ?
That is the question of the millions dollars, the burden of taxation falls on the profits of the capitalist class, to understand that conception workers must read David Ricardo and Karl Marx on taxation, or the literatures of the socialist party because leftist do not have that conception either
In the United States, the modern national welfare system was created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt when he signed the Social Security Act of 1935.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt established federal welfare programs under the Social Security Act. This included Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) to help single mothers and widows, alongside aid for the elderly and blind.1960s
President Lyndon B. Johnson expanded the safety net significantly. He signed legislation creating Medicare, Medicaid, and the permanent Food Stamp Program.1996
President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. This law changed welfare into the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, adding work requirements.
Chancellor Otto von Bismarck created the first modern state social insurance system in the 1880s to provide worker protections.
Early forms of state-administered income support, child benefits, and food stockpiles via the public treasury (Bayt al-mal) were established under Caliph Umar
These reformist reform are been used to divide the working class , it was not created by foreign workers
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