07.11.1996

Going to the dogs

Around the left

The ideas and ideology of the ruling class dominate society. This is an essential truth which Marx pointed to, and over the years nothing has happened to disprove it. Indeed, the sheer power and scope of the capitalist mass media has made Marx’s dictum doubly true. On top of that, the collapse of the so-called socialist states has given bourgeois ideology an extra burst of life - even if nobody tells us to go back to Russia anymore.

If we understand this, then it only stands to reason that the mass of ‘ordinary people’ at this time are unable to rise above, or transcend, bourgeois ideology. Workers require consciousness in order to do so. This consciousness, regrettably perhaps, will not spontaneously pop into people’s heads during the normal course of events, or magically appear the moment you go on a 24-hour strike.

That basic fact eludes many on the left, particularly Socialist Worker. This is seen clearly in an article by Alex Callinicos. Discussing the Snowdrop campaign for a ban on all handguns, Callinicos writes that this

“is not simply a consequence of the natural horror evoked in everyone by the Dunblane massacre. It also reflects that many feel it’s time ordinary people intervened to stop British society going completely to the dogs.” (November 2)

Callinicos completely misses the point of course. Leaving aside the question of whether the Dunblane relatives are “ordinary people” or not, what we are witnessing is a totally bourgeois-orchestrated debate and ‘intervention’. The large wave of support for Snowdrop just demonstrates how “ordinary people” are unable at the moment to go beyond the bounds, and mores, of bourgeois society. In other words, it symbolises perfectly the rightwing political culture which envelopes us.

Because Callinicos wants to sidestep this unpalatable fact, he trots out ‘a-political’ concern instead: “British society is breaking down because it has stopped shaping its members, and so they are running amok with no sense of right or wrong” - hardly the stuff of serious Marxist analysis. Nor is his talk of “mass rebellion” in Belgium, when in reality you have a very contradictory explosion of anger which can assume many forms.

This same default is also displayed in Socialist Worker’s approach to the 1956 Hungarian uprising. John Molyneux tries to convince us that this was a “workers’ revolution heading in a socialist direction” by virtue of the “class composition of its fighters”. Never mind that the workers “tore up pictures of Lenin and burned red flags”, as Molyneux points out.

Snowdrop and Hungary 1956 both show the counterrevolutionary dangers of spontaneity when it is not infused with class consciousness.

Don Preston