It was only the new materialism, developed by Marx and Engels, as set out in The Poverty of Philosophy, that showed that these changing ideas were a reflection of changing material conditions, and that, as set out in The Communist Manifesto, the history of all previous societies is a history of class struggle, a struggle between these antagonistic forms of property.
“that these social classes warring with each other are always the products of the relations of production and exchange — in a word, of the economic relations of their epoch; that therefore the economic structure of society always forms the real basis, from which, in the last analysis, the whole superstructure of legal and political institutions as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period is to be explained.” (p 33)
The utopian socialists thought they could build their New Jerusalems and Little Icara, and be left alone to multiply and prosper, much as the Stalinists thought they could build Socialism In One Country. The utopians believed they could simply convince the bourgeoisie to adopt their ideas and principles, based on their rationality, much as the Narodniks argued in Russia, but failed to recognise that, for the industrial bourgeoisie itself, there was a greater rationality, based on their own self-interest, set against that of society as a whole. Indeed, they saw the interests of society as identical to their own self-interest, not vice versa.
When the bourgeoisie and its ideologists speak of “society”, “nation”, “people”, “state”, in the abstract, what they really mean is “bourgeois society”, the bourgeois class, and its interests, as the dominant class, and “the bourgeois state”, and its interests. The utopians were idealists and so failed to recognise that these bourgeois ideas were not simply irrational requiring only the irrationality to be exposed, but were entirely rational from the standpoint of that bourgeoisie, and as it was, and is, the bourgeoisie that was, and is, dominant, become rational also for the society it dominates, its ruling ideas.
The Narodniks, as Lenin described, could not understand why the Russian state pursued policies that they saw as irrational, as alien to the normal path of development of Russian society. But, as Lenin sets out, those policies were entirely rational from the perspective of the Russian bourgeoisie, whose state it was!
Similarly, the daily experience of the working-class throws up an alternative set of material conditions that challenge that rationality. Bourgeois-democracy, as Liberal Democracy, initially, denied the workers any political voice in expressing that alternative rationality. It is no surprise that Liberal Democracy had as one of its bases the ownership of property as a requirement to vote, and it is the petty-bourgeoisie, the independent labourers, rather than the industrial proletariat that comprised the majority of society – and, today, they still comprise around 30% of the population, a proportion that has grown by around 50% since the 1980's. But, later, as capitalism develops to a stage where it can accommodate some of the demands of the workers, and, indeed, the big, industrial bourgeoisie needs their votes and support against the reactionary classes, including the petty-bourgeoisie, it evolves into social-democracy, and attempts to convince the workers of those shared interests.
Social-democracy becomes the dominant expression of bourgeois ideology, of this common interest between capital and labour, initially between national capital and national labour, setting up the inevitable competition and conflict between nation states, as manifest in imperialist wars, i.e. wars between nations in which capitalism has reached this level of development of large-scale, monopoly capital closely tied to the state. Against this is set the ideas of international socialism, of the common interests of all workers against all bourgeois classes, of the self-determination of the working-class, as against the self-determination of nations.
“[Henceforward, Socialism no longer appeared as an accidental discovery by this or that intellect of genius, but as the necessary outcome of the struggle between two classes produced by history — the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Its task was no longer to manufacture as perfect a system of society as possible, but to examine the historico-economic processes from which these classes and their antagonism had of necessity sprung, and to discover in the economic situation thus created the means of ending the conflict.]” (p 33)
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