Roberto
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.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.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.
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?
I largely agree with the emphasis on material interests, although I would add one qualification. We should be careful not to imagine the capitalist class as a single conscious body capable of collectively calculating when war has become too expensive and then simply turning it off.
Capitalism is competitive not only between individual capitals but also between states and blocs of capital. Different sections of the owning class can have conflicting interests. What benefits arms manufacturers may damage other industries; what benefits one national capital may threaten another; and what appears rational to one state from the standpoint of strategic competition may impose enormous costs upon capital elsewhere.
That is precisely why capitalism can produce wars which, viewed retrospectively, seem economically disastrous. There does not have to be a conspiracy or a single capitalist command centre directing everything. Competition itself can generate the conflict.
Political leaders and military establishments also acquire interests of their own, but ultimately they operate within a society whose wealth is produced by workers and whose states depend upon maintaining the conditions for capital accumulation.
So I would not confidently predict when Russia will be reintegrated into the wider world economy. But the general point remains important: today’s mortal enemies can become tomorrow’s trading partners when economic and strategic circumstances change. Capital has no permanent friendships, only changing interests.
And this brings us back to the position of workers. Whether Russian, Ukrainian, American, Chinese or European, they are repeatedly asked to identify their interests with those of “their” state and “their” national capitalist class.
Yet workers do the fighting, produce the weapons, finance states through the wealth they create, suffer the destruction and are then expected to rebuild what war has destroyed.
That old definition of a rifle therefore captures something profound:
“A steel tube with a member of the working class at each end.”
The socialist answer is not to decide which worker at which end of the rifle represents the more deserving national interest. It is to ask why workers should be pointing rifles at one another in defence of competing interests that are not fundamentally their own.
The tragedy is not simply that wars are expensive for capitalism. It is that workers are persuaded that conflicts between competing states and ruling classes are their conflicts too.
This illustrates precisely why socialists should judge political movements by their social content rather than by the labels they give themselves.
A government may describe itself as socialist, workers’ government, revolutionary or anti-imperialist, but the important question remains: what is the position of the working class under it?
If workers must continue selling their labour-power for wages, if production is still organised through capital and workers are expected to subordinate their interests to the needs of the national economy, then the fundamental relationship of capitalism remains.
The experience of the Chilean copper workers is particularly revealing. Workers were told that nationalised industries now belonged to “the people”, while at the same time they were told that they had a responsibility to increase production, moderate their demands and put the interests of Chile before their immediate interests as workers.
But this raises an obvious socialist question: if workers supposedly own an industry, why must they still be disciplined as wage workers within it?
This is where nationalism can unite Left and Right despite their very different rhetoric. The Right may tell workers to sacrifice for the nation, while the Left may tell them to sacrifice for the nationalised economy, the revolution or the “workers’ state”. In either case workers can be asked to subordinate their class interests to a supposed national interest.
That is also why terms such as “renegade”, “counter-revolutionary” or “reactionary” can obscure the real issue when they are applied simply because workers refuse to follow a particular political leadership. Workers do not acquire class consciousness by supporting a Left government, a guerrilla movement or nationalisation any more than they acquire it by supporting a Right government.
Nor does rejecting such movements automatically make somebody socialist.
Class consciousness means something more fundamental: workers understanding their common position within capitalism and recognising that their emancipation cannot be handed down to them by presidents, governments, parties, military leaders or national liberators.
Nationalisation changes the legal ownership of an enterprise. It does not by itself abolish wage labour, commodity production or the economic subordination of workers.
So the interesting historical lesson is not whether the Left behaved exactly like the Right. There can obviously be substantial political differences between governments. The deeper socialist criticism is that both can find themselves administering the same underlying social relationship: capital on one side and wage labour on the other.
For socialists, therefore, the question should never simply be: “Is this government Left or Right?”
The more important question is: “Have workers ceased to be wage workers?”
If the answer is no, then changing the political label attached to the state has not yet amounted to the emancipation of the working class.
I think this reinforces the distinction between rejecting the Left and developing socialist consciousness. They are not the same thing.
Workers can have perfectly understandable reasons for becoming disillusioned with governments that called themselves socialist. If those governments promised fundamental change but workers continued to experience wage labour, inequality, insecurity, repression and the accumulation of wealth by a privileged minority, it is hardly surprising that many eventually rejected them.
The mistake would be to conclude that workers moving to the Right have therefore moved closer to understanding their class position. They may simply have moved from one proposed administration of capitalism to another.
That is why the pendulum you describe is important. The Left disappoints workers and creates an opportunity for the Right. The Right eventually confronts the same fundamental limitations of capitalism and disappoints them in turn, creating another opportunity for the Left. The names, rhetoric and policies can change considerably while the underlying social relationship between capital and wage labour remains.
Venezuela, Cuba, Chile or Argentina therefore raise a much more fundamental question than whether a Left or Right government has succeeded. What exactly do we mean by socialism?
If wage labour continues, production remains separated from the producers, goods and services are produced within monetary and market relations, and workers remain dependent upon selling their ability to work, calling the state or government “socialist” does not make the society socialist. Nationalisation itself does not abolish capitalism; it can simply make the state the organiser or owner of capital.
This also explains why calling disappointed workers “fascists”, “poor fascists” or politically ignorant is a dead end. A person can reject a government for entirely rational reasons while still lacking an understanding of the alternative.
That is where socialist education becomes important. The objective is not to persuade somebody who has abandoned the Left to return to it. Nor is it to persuade somebody on the Right to become a better nationalist. It is to demonstrate why both sides repeatedly encounter problems that cannot be solved merely by changing governments.
Abstention, blank ballots and electoral disillusionment do not by themselves constitute class consciousness either. They may simply express the recognition that the available political choices have failed.
Class consciousness begins to develop when workers go one step further and ask why this pattern continually reproduces itself regardless of who governs.
So I think the political pendulum is a useful image, but socialism represents something quite different from making the pendulum swing back towards the Left. The point is to understand why the pendulum exists in the first place — and ultimately to make it irrelevant.
I think your last point gets to the heart of the matter. Supporting the Right is not inherently more irrational, from a socialist standpoint, than supporting the Left when both ultimately accept the continuation of capitalism.
The crucial issue is not whether workers vote Left or Right, but whether they understand their position as a class.
Workers do not become class-conscious simply by moving from a right-wing party to a left-wing one. If they still believe that their interests can be secured through better leaders, nationalisation, protectionism, national liberation, stronger borders, or a more efficient administration of capitalism, the fundamental relationship remains unchanged: capitalism continues and workers remain wage workers.
This is also why I would be careful about describing workers attracted to nationalism simply as stupid or irrational. As you say, people can change their minds. What matters is giving them an explanation of society that enables them to examine their own experience.
A worker may begin with nationalist ideas and nevertheless ask perfectly reasonable questions: Why, despite working all my life, do I remain economically insecure? Why are housing, employment and public services permanently under pressure? Why does every government promise fundamental change while the same basic problems continually reappear?
Those questions provide an opening for socialist argument.
And this is where class consciousness matters. It does not mean persuading workers to support the “correct” capitalist political camp. It means reaching the point where workers recognise that their common interest is not British, Argentine, American, Cuban or any other national interest, but a class interest shared across national boundaries.
The pendulum between Left and Right can continue indefinitely. The failures of the Left can prepare the ground for the Right, and the failures of the Right can eventually restore the Left. Changing who administers capitalism is not the same thing as changing the social system.
So perhaps our response to the growth of the Right should not be: “How do we get these workers back to the Left?”
It should be: “How do we get workers to stop looking to either side of capitalist politics and begin thinking in terms of their own class interests?”
That seems to me the much more important question.
