Lessons For The Left
Lesson 6 – Being Determines Consciousness (i)
Paul's approach is riven with idealism and subjectivism rather than materialism. The obvious manifestation is in Paul's discussion of “values”.
Paul writes,
“The Bristol University political scientist Paula Surridge has analysed the dataset coming out of the British Election Study, both for the 2019 election and for elections over the past decade. It shows that cultural values have come to determine electoral behaviour more strongly than left-right positions on economics, which in a previous era might correlate with class. She writes:
“These deeply held ideas of how society should behave come to play an increasing role in the political choices of the electorate as older group-based loyalties have lost their power and structural roots”.
British politics are now primarily influenced by “values”, not single class identities or raw economic interests. We can’t reverse our way out of that situation, or ignore it: we have to fight our way through it, to a more advantageous situation.”
This is pure, petty-bourgeois idealism and subjectivism of the type of Proudhon, Duhring, or the Narodniks. It accepts the precept of bourgeois idealism that ideas (values) are somehow autonomous from material conditions, that they somehow pop into people's heads spontaneously, rather than being conditioned by the material conditions they experience in life, the same conditions that determine class, based upon competing forms of property. (NB. Incidentally, its this competition between different forms of property that constitutes the basis of the class struggle, not simply immediate economic interest, which is the crude view of Economism, not of Marx. Immediate economic interest only manifests in a distributional struggle over revenues, the level of wages, rents, interest, profit of enterprise etc., and, as far as particularly workers are concerned, at times of heightened competition, leads to their division on lines of gender, race, sexuality, occupation, region or nation, rather than any recognition of shared condition, and resultant class consciousness. That is why during such periods of stagnation, class consciousness declines, and reaction rises, as occurred in the 1930's. As Marx says, in Capital I, the class struggle is necessarily manifest in the struggle of real human beings, but these human beings are merely personifications of competing forms of property.
“In the course of our investigation we shall find, in general, that the characters who appear on the economic stage are but the personifications of the economic relations that exist between them.”
(Capital I, Chapter 2, p 89)
It is the ideas attached to these different property forms that are far more significant than purely ephemeral short term economic interests and the distributional struggle.)
The idealist, subjectivist approach means that society cannot be studied scientifically, in the same way that we study, for example, the evolution of species, or the qualities and reactions of chemicals, because it means that there is no objective, material basis on which to study it. All that is possible is to describe it, explaining the picture painted purely on the basis of these changed ideas and “values”, without being able to explain, objectively, where those ideas/values themselves came from. It was precisely Marx's genius, as Lenin describes, in formulating the theory of historical materialism, that overturned that condition, and made it possible to understand the evolution of social forms just as scientifically as the evolution of species, to understand that ideas/values do not spring ready made into people's heads, like Minerva from the head of Zeus, but are themselves the product of real material conditions existing in the world, and the experience of them by individuals.
“The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations...
When, consequently, in order to save principles as much as to save history, we ask ourselves why a particular principle was manifested in the 11th century or in the 18th century rather than in any other, we are necessarily forced to examine minutely what men were like in the 11th century, what they were like in the 18th, what were their respective needs, their productive forces, their mode of production, the raw materials of their production – in short, what were the relations between man and man which resulted from all these conditions of existence. To get to the bottom of all these questions – what is this but to draw up the real, profane history of men in every century and to present these men as both the authors and the actors of their own drama? But the moment you present men as the actors and authors of their own history, you arrive – by detour – at the real starting point, because you have abandoned those eternal principles of which you spoke at the outset.”
(Marx – The Poverty of Philosophy, Chapter 2)
And, in determining these social relations, Marx is not concerned with the petty issue that they result in a conflict over distribution, or exploitation of one by another, but by the way changes in the productive forces, necessarily lead to an evolution of property forms, in the same way that changes in material conditions lead to an evolution of species.
“Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”
(ibid)
And, as he says, in Capital Volume III, the development of the productive forces on an even more massive scale leads to the dissolution of the private ownership of capital, the expropriation of the expropriators, by socialised capital in the form of the cooperative and joint stock company (corporation). As Lenin points out, when Marx says that Socialism is inevitable, he is not making a prediction about the future - which Marx never did - but is describing what has already occurred, and is in the process of assuming its mature form. Socialised capital already represents this new transitional form.
“The capital, which in itself rests on a social mode of production and presupposes a social concentration of means of production and labour-power, is here directly endowed with the form of social capital (capital of directly associated individuals) as distinct from private capital, and its undertakings assume the form of social undertakings as distinct from private undertakings. It is the abolition of capital as private property within the framework of capitalist production itself...
It is the point of departure for the capitalist mode of production; its accomplishment is the goal of this production. In the last instance, it aims at the expropriation of the means of production from all individuals. With the development of social production the means of production cease to be means of private production and products of private production, and can thereafter be only means of production in the hands of associated producers, i.e., the latter's social property, much as they are their social products.”
(Capital III, Chapter 27)
Paul's response to this, is that those social relations described by Marx, based upon a large industrial working-class, concentrated in large factories that led to the development of class consciousness based upon a shared condition by large numbers of workers, no longer exists.
So, Paul writes,
“Claire Ainsley, Starmer’s head of policy, summarised the underlying problem in her book The New Working Class (2018):
“Structural changes to the British economy over the past 40 years have created a new working class, which is multi-ethnic, comprised of people living off low to middle incomes, and likely to be occupied in service sector jobs like catering, social care or retail. Many of them will not define themselves primarily through their work at all. The new working class is more disparate, more atomised, and occupies multiple social identities, which makes collective identity less possible.”
The “traditional” working class that coexists with this group numbers only 14% of the population, according to Ainsley’s methodology.”
This is simply a repetition of the arguments put by the Narodniks, like Danielson, in Russia, in the 1890's. They too argued that Marx's analysis could not apply in Russia, because capitalism could not be fulfilling its mission there, of preparing the ground for Socialism, because the number of workers in factories comprised only 1.4 million. Lenin uses data provided by Marx in Capital I to show that, if Danielson's method was applied to Britain, at that time, the conclusion would be that capital was not fulfilling its mission of creating a unified working-class then either. According to Marx's data, out of a UK population of 20 million, in 1861, 1.6 million were employed in the main branches of industry. That amounts to just 8%. Indeed, 1.2 million were employed as domestic servants, and Marx refers to the very rapid growth of that sector. Lenin comments sarcastically,
“How can one speak of the “mission” of capitalism when it has not united even one twelfth of the population, and when, moreover, there is a more rapid increase in the “domestic slave” class—representing a dead loss of “national labour,” which shows that “we,” the English, are following the “wrong path”! Is it not clear that “we” must “seek different,” non-capitalist “paths of development for our fatherland”?!”
(What The Friends of the People Are, Appendix II, p 319)
Paul's error is that he falls into a subjectivist definition of the working-class framed in terms of that old industrial working-class, concentrated in large workplaces, in just the same way as Sturridge and Aynsley. His view of the development of class consciousness arising from it is economistic, framed in terms only of the necessarily reformist, distributional struggles, between organised labour and capital, over wages and conditions that occurred in those workplaces. But, that is not at all the basis of Marx's analysis of the development of working-class consciousness, nor indeed, is it that of Lenin, who also pointed out that such trades union struggles are not class struggles, but purely economistic, distributional struggles confined within the parameters of capitalism, and bourgeois consciousness, as merely a market competition between commodity owners over the price of labour-power. The real basis, as both Marx and Lenin set out, is that capitalism deprives workers of the means of production, turning them all into proletarians, who can now only own the means of production on a collective basis, just as their labour becomes socialised rather than individual labour. It increasingly dissolves the class of petty commodity producers (petty-bourgeoisie), which by clinging to their small means of production, continue to have one foot in the past. As Marx put it,
“At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!"”
(Value, Price and Profit)
So, for example, we can say to Uber drivers, the real answer to your problems does not lie in a trades union struggle to be recognised as workers, and thereby paid wages, it resides in your recognition of the socialised nature of your labour, and the potential to own and control your means of production collectively rather than individually, to establish your own cooperative ride sharing company, and so on. And, the same applies to workers in a range of similar situations.
And, its on this basis that Lenin also responds to Danielson and the Narodniks.
“Thirdly—and this is the chief and most outrageous distortion of Marx’s theory of the progressive and revolutionary work of capitalism—where did you get the idea that the “unifying significance” of capitalism is expressed in uniting only the factory workers? Can it be that you borrow your idea of Marxism from the articles in Otechestvenniye Zapiski on the socialisation of labour? Can it be that you, too, identify it with work under one roof?
But no. It would appear that Nik. —on cannot be accused of this, because he accurately describes the socialisation of labour by capitalism on the second page of his article in Russkoye Bogatstvo, No. 6, correctly indicating both features of this socialisation: 1) work for the whole of society, and 2) the uniting of individual labourers so as to obtain the product of common labour. But if that is so, why judge the “mission” of capitalism by the number of factory workers, when this “mission” is fulfilled by the development of capitalism and the socialisation of labour in general, by the creation of a proletariat in general, in relation to which the factory workers play the role only of front rankers, the vanguard. There is, of course, no doubt that the revolutionary movement of the proletariat depends on the number of these workers, on their concentration, on the degree of their development, etc.; but all this does not give us the slightest right to equate the “unifying significance” of capitalism with the number of factory workers. To do so would be to narrow down Marx’s idea impossibly.”
(loc. cit)
(For more on this see: Appendix 2, Part 5)
Notable, here, also, in Lenin's account is his reference to Engels' description of conditions in Germany, where the continued existence of large gardens for workers facilitated the continuation of this kind of small commodity production, but in which those so engaged were doubly oppressed, because being tied to their locality, local employers were able to pay lower wages. Uber drivers as self-employed individuals, compete against each other, reducing the market price of the commodity they sell, and so of their own revenues, but also, because they are tied to Uber, to provide them with customers, they are doubly disadvantaged, because Uber can use its monopoly position to charge them higher prices, and so extract surplus value from their labour, in the form of rent, just as a landlord extracts rent from a capitalist farmer, who in turn extracts surplus value from the labourer. The only difference in respect of the self employed is that they personify both the capitalist and the labourer in their one being. The same applies to the effects of Brexit, and the removal of the right of free movement for workers, which will lead to a similar increased level of oppression of British workers.
If we want to understand the values in the heads of some of those in those old urban areas, we likewise have to look not to subjectivist descriptions culled from election surveys, opinion polls and focus groups by bourgeois sociologists, but to Marx's materialist method.
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