Lessons For The Left
Lesson 6 – Being Determines Consciousness (ii)
When we look at this question of “values”, we find that they correlate extremely closely with the way people voted in relation to Brexit. Those that voted for Brexit, overwhelmingly also oppose immigration and have reactionary views on other subjects, from women's and LGBT Rights, to their views on the environment. Most of them, in December 2019, did not vote against Labour because they saw Corbyn as too anti-Brexit, but because they just did not like Corbyn, and the other progressive social-democratic ideas he represents. And, as described above, these kinds of views are given a boost during periods of stagnation, and increased competition between workers, a condition that has existed in those decaying towns for nearly forty years.
Nor is that peculiar to Britain. The same correlations can be seen in respect of support for Trump in the US, and for other right-wing populists across the globe. But, looking at material conditions, this is not surprising. The idea that this division is not a consequence of the same social relations that determine class consciousness is completely false. In fact, it relies on much the same subjectivism that led Proudhon, and the Narodniks astray. It conflates elements that are petty-bourgeois with being proletarian, whilst it assigns elements that are proletarian to the “middle-class”. In other words, its foundation is bourgeois subjectivist sociology, not Marxist class analysis.
On the one hand, millions of self-employed workers, and small producers are classified as “working-class”, simply on the basis that they undertake work, and may have a low standard of living. In fact, many of them were previously workers, but lost permanent jobs as a result of Thatcherism (in the US Reaganism) in the 1980's. They were thrust into self-employment as a result of the absence of permanent wage labour. The extension and logical manifestation of it is the ultimate in self-employment and individual self-reliance, the criminal, who makes their own way in the world based on their own individual skills, by burglary, drug-dealing and similar activities. They are the elements that comprise the “White Van Man” in Britain, or the Gilets Jaunes in France.
These are precisely the kinds of petty-bourgeois elements that Proudhon identified with, and that the Narodniks in Russia identified as being the labourers that they saw as the foundation of “People's Industry” out of which they saw the potential for a different, non-capitalist path of national economic development. But, it is precisely the nature of these elements as petty-bourgeois that determines the reactionary ideas they develop. It is precisely these elements that Bonapartism and fascism have always appealed to, not socialists.
On the other hand, millions of, mostly younger and better educated, workers are designated as middle-class, purely on the basis of their education, their lifestyle, and their income/type of employment. But, this simply reflects the fact that the nature of employment and of the working-class itself has changed. Capitalism is now characterised by service industry, that accounts for 80% of new value creation, of employment, and surplus value production. That service industry is itself bifurcated into low value service industries (McJobs), and high value service industries in financial services, professional services, healthcare, media production, technology and so on, which requires the employment of higher paid, better educated, and consequently, generally younger workers. Yet, there is no doubt that these workers are proletarians. They do not own their means of production, and are reliant on selling their labour-power in order to obtain revenue. That is not the position of the petty-bourgeois.
This is the same situation, again, as described by Lenin, as against the Narodniks. Lenin provides the data that showed that as the process of differentiation proceeded, some peasant households in the poorest category had higher net incomes than those of the average peasant household in the middle category. The reason for that was that the middle peasants, whilst obtaining income from the sale of commodities, also had expenditures involved in producing and selling those commodities.
Peasants who were unable to farm their allotments effectively, and so who rented them out, whilst working themselves as wage labourers, had no such expenses, and the result was that their wage income was higher than the net income even of the middle peasant. (See:What The Friends of The People Are, Part III). This again, is the difference that Marx describes in The Grundrisse between wealth and affluence, the ownership of property as against the receipt of income. In terms of income as opposed to wealth (ownership of assets/property, means of production) many wage labourers are better placed than the self-employed or small business owner, and this is one basis of the antagonism of the latter to the former.
It is not surprising that, amongst the petty-bourgeoisie, therefore, we see the predominance of reactionary ideas, and the reflection of that in their support for reactionary political representatives, be it the BNP, UKIP, or the reactionary wing of the Tory Party, and that it is amongst this group that the biggest support for Brexit was to be found. Similarly, given that 80% of the economy, and of employment now consists of service industry, is characterised by the younger profile of its workers, and their higher levels of education, its not surprising that it is amongst these proletarians that the advanced guard of the working-class, today is to be found, and that it is amongst this group that the more progressive ideas, and support for Labour is found. In Russia, too, in 1917, it was amongst the more skilled, and so better educated workers, for example, amongst railway workers, skilled engineers and so on, that the highest levels of class consciousness was to be found. In Britain, its amongst the skilled craft workers that trades unions are first created, that the founders of Chartism and support for the First International are to be found. Its the same better educated workers that in the middle of the 19th century created the cooperatives that rapidly grew to challenge private capitalist retailers and wholesalers.
But, material conditions can also affect the way workers in particular conditions arrive at ideas on particular issues. It would not be surprising if workers who believed that their livelihoods might be at risk from cheap imports of food, for example, should favour the retention of the Corn Laws, or protectionism in other industries. Its precisely, why Marx and Engels had to write on the issue of Free Trade to demonstrate that, for the working-class, neither free trade nor protectionism offered a solution. In 1905, when the TUC met for its Congress, here in Stoke, and passed the resolutions that led to the creation of the LP, it also discussed motions on free trade, as well as on immigration. The existence of reactionary ideas within the working-class, and the labour movement existed at that time too. This debate is also reflected in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, by Robert Tressell.
It is always a problem to try to uncover the underlying reality that is the determinant of workers real interests as against the superficial appearances that determine apparent immediate interests, but it is precisely for that reason that Marxism exists as a scientific means of digging beneath those superficial appearances to uncover the reality and the real interests of workers. So, in the 19th and early 20th century, it is not surprising to see backward sections of workers, or workers who appear to have an immediate interest from Protectionism, lining up behind it, and behind those that advocate it, which in those instances was the Tory Party. The same elements lined up to support the British Brothers League to argue for the Aliens Act, the first piece of immigration law, designed to keep out Jews fleeing from pogroms in Eastern and Central Europe, in 1905. Equally, the more advanced sections of workers, and those workers who could see an advantage in the increase of trade arising from free trade, lined up behind that agenda, and its proponents, which meant the Liberal Party. And, this is reflected in the positions taken by the TUC, and by the Labour Party when it is created by the unions.
Similarly, when a global crisis of overproduction of capital arises in the 1920's, leading into a period of Depression and stagnation in the 1930's, it is not surprising that the easy solution to this problem appears to be protection, to the idea that jobs in the particular national economy could be defended by keeping out imports, thereby, throwing the burden of the crisis on to workers in other countries. It is that kind of economic nationalism that has always tainted sections of the left reformists, and where they link up with the economic nationalism of the Right. So, for example, when Oswald Moseley draws up his Moseley Memorandum, in the 1930's, when he was a Fabian member of the Labour Party, it is not surprising that he is supported in it by the likes of Nye Bevan. The Memorandum was simply a left-reformist bit of Keynesian state interventionism, combined with polices of economic nationalism, that sought to protect British capital against foreign competition. It was little different in content, in that regard, to the economic nationalist polices of the Nazis or Mussolini, nor from the Alternative Economic Strategy created in the 1980's by the Bennites, and their fellow travellers in the Communist Party.
So, its not particularly comforting when Paul says,
“The left, by contrast, has the resources, expertise, organisations, platforms and historical tradition to set the agenda: we can own Labour’s vision of the alternative, just as Bevan, Maxton and Cripps did in the 1930s.”
But, what it does show is that the current support for such positions within sections of the working-class and labour movement is not new or the consequence of some new sociological changes within the composition of the class itself, as Paul's hypothesis, following Surridge and Ainsley's analysis would have us believe.
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