26.01.2012

Overcoming despair

Paul B Smith concludes his three-part article on the challenge of class-consciousness

Hillel Ticktin argues that there are four reasons that combine to produce a contemporary atmosphere of despair. These are: firstly, the difficulty of understanding modern political economy; secondly, the effects of the concessions made through the welfare state; thirdly, fear of bourgeois revenge: and, finally, the real history of Stalinism.^[1] I have addressed the last three of these in the first two parts of this article.^[2] The first, however, I have only briefly mentioned.

Understanding capitalism is difficult for a variety of reasons. According to Ticktin, the chief reason is that capitalism is in decline and has resorted to forms that compromise and appear to threaten the system itself. Thus the last century saw wars, imperialism, fascism, authoritarian rule and welfare states that interfered with the process of capital accumulation. Capitalists have tolerated them as least worst options to the alternative of socialism. What arose and continues today is the appearance of rigid conflicts between the market and bureaucratic forms of administration, the market and government regulation, and the market and systems of welfare. Private enterprise has been seen as efficient and bureaucracy as inefficient. The opposite has also been maintained. War, imperialism and the welfare state are seen as signs of strength of the system rather than weaknesses. Marx’s analysis of capitalism is therefore dismissed as outdated and irrelevant.

Another reason is that, since the October revolution in 1917, capitalism has entered a transitional period within which subjective changes have been as influential as objective changes. In the first part I mentioned the doctrine of socialism in one country. Ticktin recalls the vast number of political parties that have called themselves ‘socialist’; the masses of books and pamphlets that have addressed the overthrow of capitalism; the numerous nationalist uprisings that have taken place in the name of socialism and the fact that none of this effort brought socialism any nearer.

Moreover, there has been a vast effort on the left to try and prove that there was something positive about the former Soviet Union, and on the right to prove that if workers try to improve their conditions of existence they will create something as dreadful and horrible. None of this effort has shed light on the real nature of the regime - a society neither capitalist nor socialist in form. However, it has served to obscure an understanding of the present and any clear perspective on the nature of what a planned, classless alternative to capitalism would look like in the future.

It is not easy for class-conscious workers to disentangle this mess. Moreover, it seems that intellectuals are not around to help them in the task. Apart from a few maverick academics, there are few intellectuals who have the resources and freedom to theorise what Ticktin states are the interrelations between the laws of capitalism, the laws of its decline and the laws of its transition.

An example of a popular public intellectual ‘out’ as a Marxist is Terry Eagleton. He polemicises in favour of a Stalinised version of Marxism that neglects political economy and Marx’s development of the labour theory of value.^[3] Most academics that have made a career out of Marx are either anti-socialist or ambivalent - supporting a social democratic interpretation. This argues for market socialism or some combination of market and non-market forms. It thereby compounds workers’ confusion and sense of powerlessness.

According to Ticktin, a combination of the four reasons he mentions causes workers to look for any form of temporary respite from an all-pervading atmosphere of despair. He mentions hedonistic forms of consumerism, authoritarianism, nationalism, religious fundamentalism, green politics and the politics of identity, amongst others. For example, a temporary sense of hope in ending racism occurred when the apartheid system came to an end in South Africa. Despair overwhelmed hope after a majority government introduced policies that doubled the unemployment rate for black South Africans. Hope may have arisen in a strong leader such as Putin in Russia who offered stability and security, only to be deflated when he launched a destabilising war against Georgia. Hope also arose in the Middle East when Islamist parties came to power with policies guided by the principle of social justice. It disappeared when rates of poverty increased and corruption flourished.

Hope grows amongst young workers in imperial countries who may go into debt to buy a package holiday abroad. They look forward to partying and having carefree sex. It falls back into despair when one of them is hospitalised - a victim of alcohol-related violence - or another dies of alcohol poisoning. Hope flourishes amongst activists who think they can change government policy through direct action. Despair takes over when the government arrests or tortures their comrades.

The most desperate turn to rioting, attempting to organise armed uprisings or crazy actions such as last year’s massacre of youths in Norway. The desperate are also attracted to religions. These organise communal expressions of alienation through the repetitive acts of prayer and worship. Organised religions go, in some way, to contradict the feelings of isolation the atomised worker experiences. Ideologically they offer no hope for the present. They cultivate the expectation or anticipation of hope in the future - either after death or in some cataclysmic event, within which the faithful few will be saved.

Religious ideas encourage both an apolitical subordination to authority and - given a commitment to supporting the struggles of the oppressed - an excuse for martyrdom, self-immolation and posthumous glory. Many forms of nationalism use religion as a means of generating cross-class, communal allegiances. Secular forms of nationalism abandoned support for the struggles of the workers whom imperialism continues to oppress. This created a political vacuum which religious fundamentalists filled - with the armed struggle, local wars and sectarian killings.

Immiseration

Marx argued in Capital that there was a relationship between the length of time that capital continues to accumulate and an overall worsening in the quality of life workers experience. He stated that the law that equilibrates the relative surplus population established an accumulation of misery amongst workers irrespective of whether their payment was high or low. The relative surplus population refers to those workers whose labour-power is useless to the process of capital accumulation because of age, disability, ill health, prolonged unemployment or addiction. It also refers to a layer of workers that move in and out of the surplus population, competing for whatever work is available at whatever price employers are prepared to offer. This layer he calls the industrial reserve army of labour. The relative surplus population functions to control the level of wages of every worker, skilled or unskilled. It is a necessary feature of a mature capitalism and becomes even more visible during crises and as capitalism declines.

According to Marx, the accumulation of misery has an objective cause. This is the regulation of the process of capital accumulation as a whole. It also has subjective effects. Marx mentions overwork, the sense of no freedom, ignorance, brutality and mental degradation. If Marx meant by “mental degradation” that it would become increasingly difficult for workers to act in a class-conscious way towards each other, then it is an interesting hypothesis that workers’ intellectual and emotional capabilities are more limited now than in the 19th century.

Fear and despair limit workers’ intellectual and emotional capabilities by making them preoccupied with their distress. In other words, despite higher rates of pay, workers feel increasingly miserable. They are vulnerable to being drawn into the mental health system of oppression. According to the World Health Organisation, one in every four people worldwide develops one or more mental disorders in her or his lifetime. Mental illnesses are more common than cancer, diabetes or heart disease.

Workers feel they are unsafe with other workers, powerless to improve their own position and hopeless when they think of the condition the world is in. Victims of various forms of oppression, they have two choices. The first is to understand the way in which these oppressions serve to prevent them from uniting with other workers worldwide to liberate themselves and humanity as a whole.

The second is to assert their intellectual, moral or cultural superiority over other workers more oppressed than themselves, hoping that, in doing so, they will be able to preserve privileges granted to them historically. Thus male workers choose to oppress female workers; white workers oppress black; skilled workers the unskilled; the employed the unemployed; and workers of one religion, nationality or culture choose to oppress workers of another religion, nationality or culture.

The causes of these oppressions - and the limits they impose on workers’ intellectual and emotional capabilities - are the different political and economic responses the capitalist class has made to the class struggle. In the 19th century, as workers became more class-conscious, they posed a threat to the continued process of accumulation. The capitalist class turned to imperialism as a means of a continued source of accumulation, division and control.

In the 20th century, there was a global challenge to the system as a whole with the October revolution. The capitalist class turned to fascism, social democracy and world war to ensure the system survived the threat of its potential overthrow. The defeat of the Russian Revolution was also marked by the rise of Stalinism. This served to stabilise the global system in the post-war period of reconstruction and growth through the incorporation of trade unions, nationalisation, full employment and the welfare state. Increased workers’ militancy and the collapse of Stalinism led the capitalist class to turn to finance capital, privatisation, mass unemployment and cuts in social spending. Presently the capitalist class is divided on how best to manage a prolonged depression. It will therefore resort increasingly to tolerating - if not actively encouraging - fear and despair, division and oppression amongst workers.

Class-consciousness

Ticktin writes that the working class cannot replace the capitalist class simply by hoping for a failure of the system or as the automatic result of war or a depression. Workers must be aware that socialism is a new world system and “not just be disgruntled or desperate” (p14). The concept of socialism needs to be widely accepted both in theory and in practice. ‘In practice’ means that workers are involved in establishing forms of control from below and ‘in theory’ entails “a widespread education in the nature of the capitalist system and its successor, socialism”.

He concludes that there are two features necessary for workers to become a class. First, there is a need for a theory to understand the present. The second is an organisational form to provide workers with the ability to take power. He maintains that all the forms of workers’ self-organisation, from trade unions to workers’ councils, have been corrupted and absorbed into the system so far. There needs to be “a party or parties of the working class” to ensure that the educational and organisational work are present. Class-consciousness does not simply emerge from an elite, but must be the property of ordinary people. Struggles need to be mounted out of which workers can learn, and “a broad layer of intellectuals” can be created, who can expand the knowledge workers need to take power and refute the propaganda of the established order.

It does not follow from this that he thinks that a party or parties of the working class already exist. His analysis as a whole implies that he thinks there are barriers inhibiting the creation of a Marxist party or parties. As I have argued, workers associate party-building with the desperation of the left. This has led some members of revolutionary Marxist groups to act impatiently in relation to workers and foster false hopes in an imminent socialist revolution. It has led others to adapt to Stalinism and trade union consciousness - supporting nationalism and nationalisation as first stages in a revolution that inevitably never arrives.

Although there is a layer of academics whose consciousness has been formed for good or ill by involvement in these groups - Terry Eagleton is one such example - intellectuals have tended to avoid them. This is not just out of a fear that engagement might affect their careers detrimentally, but because it has been difficult to participate in a useful exchange of ideas with their members. I mentioned the habits of accusation, denunciation, implied threat and betrayal above. These have made individuals fearful of expressing criticisms or differences of opinion.

Immediate tasks

Ticktin identifies three tasks necessary for class-consciousness to come into being. These are the development of a theory of the present. This would contradict the propaganda of the established order. Secondly, there is the organisation of forms of control from below. These would need to be designed to resist corruption and being absorbed into the system. The third is the education of workers into the nature of capitalism and socialism as its alternative.

None of these tasks are prioritised, but Ticktin assumes that if a Marxist party or parties came into being they would undertake all three. In the absence of a party or parties, it seems that the first task will fall on intellectuals within or outwith the existing groups. Ticktin states that in order for workers to overcome the barrier of understanding the complexity of the present they need to be able to make sense of the interaction of laws of capitalism, the laws of its decline and the laws of its transition. However, I do not know of anyone working on this apart from Ticktin himself. I imagine that the work required in this area will take the concentrated effort of motivated intellectuals for some time outwith the confines of a propagandist group (and probably a university setting). However, I may be wrong and work on capitalism, decline and transition could become a priority of a particular organised group for a short period of time.

Ticktin also mentions that Marxists have not discussed the circumstances that enable workers to become a class and take power. I conceive this as a project of research and development with the potential to take on more of a collective character. It should have a resonance within a left inspired by the achievements of the Bolshevik revolution and interested in learning from the past. However, this would need to be a theoretical as well as a historical project. The dangers are that it would degenerate into mindless point-scoring about what happened from 1917-1924 in Russia. To avoid this, perhaps Marxists could initiate a discussion based on their understanding of capitalism in the present. This could engage critically with Ticktin’s analysis of decline, as well as with the line agreed by the leadership of their particular group.

I understand the organisation of forms of control from below broadly to include workplace, community, student and grassroots global struggles (including international movements of solidarity with workers in struggle). Moreover, the fact that trade unions and workers’ councils have been incorporated and absorbed into the system does not imply that in all circumstances they will be in the future. Trade unions and workers’ councils may come into being led by Marxists or principled class-struggle anarchists.

The question arises of the nature of Marxists’ involvement with these organisations. If they are already corrupted and incorporated, then they might decide it is not safe to be involved or a waste of time. On the other hand, if workers’ leaders have an understanding of the possibility of socialism as a global system (and do not confuse this goal with Stalinism or social democracy), incorporation and corruption are less likely. This requires that Marxists who choose to get involved in struggles support leaders consistently and reject the practice of parachuting in and out of disputes and campaigns favoured by some groups.

Marxists can assume that workers are the most knowledgeable people when it comes to organising from below. Workers are likely to be more experienced than intellectuals. They do not need to be told how to get things right. The nature of support therefore requires careful thought and discussion. It could be moral, political, educational or intellectual. It may be listening to leaders’ thinking on how to retain and generalise control from below or on how to develop direct and mandatory forms of democracy. It may be lecturing about capitalism and socialism within a structured setting derived from best teaching and learning practice. There are many exciting opportunities here to pool experience on what has worked in the past and might work in the future.

Conversely, Marxists’ involvement in workers’ organisations may need to wait until a culture of teaching and learning has established itself elsewhere. As I have noted previously, there is a growth of interest in studying Marx outwith both leftwing groups and institutions that instruct formally. There are now a few reading groups studying Capital in England. This movement is to be expected during a prolonged crisis and has been assisted by the publication of David Harvey’s online lectures on Capital and his books.

Marxist education

I understand that these study groups are not led by members or previous members of socialist groups. In fact most leftwing groups appear to have abandoned the study of Capital and appear to resist suggestions that this is an essential activity for anyone who wants to understand the nature of capitalism and socialism. One of the leftwing arguments against studying Capital is that it has nothing to say about socialism. On the contrary, there are many insights into the society of the future within the book. This argument is therefore based on ignorance of the text.

A further argument is that the book has lots to say about the way capitalism was in the 19th century but is irrelevant to an understanding of the way capitalism is in the 21st century. This is an argument about identity and difference. During the cold war, it was much easier to argue that capitalism was not a political and economic system within which the social surplus is derived from the use of labour-power within commodity form. It seemed that a bureaucratic elite could extract a surplus product from alienated workers without producing value - that the exchange of labour-power for a wage was no longer essential to the distribution of the surplus. It seemed that a new form of class society was emerging, based on bureaucratic controls over labour-power.

However, the point remains that capitalism now is not exactly the same as it was. The Marxist agrees with this point. Marx theorised a mature form of capitalism. Today’s capitalism is in decline. The law of value does not operate in the same way as it did. If workers are to understand the law of value and its decline, they need to appropriate concepts found in Capital, such as abstract labour and commodity fetishism, for themselves.

Bourgeois economics has none of these concepts. It assumes that capitalism is natural and eternal. It has no origin, development or termination - except one that coincides with species extinction. It is therefore useless for understanding the ways in which capitalism is the same as it was 150 years ago and how it differs from this now. Ignoring the importance of workers’ education in political economy therefore abandons workers to commodity fetishism and bourgeois intellectual influence.

The most convincing argument against prioritising the education of workers in political economy is that study only arms them intellectually. Organising workers and supporting them to develop policies are more important activities than study. Revolutionary political action takes a higher priority than intellectual activity. It is more important to change the world than to interpret it.

This argument implies breaking Marx into two. It suggests two separate and unrelated stages in Marx’s intellectual and political development. The first is the revolutionary socialist Marx of the Communist manifesto and subsequent political writings. The second is the social scientific Marx of Capital. In reality, there was no such separation. Marx’s political economy was at the heart of his revolutionary socialist politics (and the latter was at the heart of his political economy). There is no reason - other than the stultifying legacy of Stalinism - why revolutionary socialists today cannot aspire to be competent political economists (nor political economists revolutionaries).

Moreover, it is impossible to support workers to participate in formulating policies without encouraging them to study. For every democratically organised group with a programme or policy document there will be a process of study and discussion. If this process is inhibited or repressed, the group will become undemocratic. If Marxists have written these documents they will embody the best of their understanding of the relationship between the achievement of the socialist goal and the means of achieving it.

The literature of a Marxist group presupposes not only that workers are capable of understanding concepts and categories derived from Marx, but also that workers can acquire such an understanding if they deny they have this capability. Using policy or programmatic documents for teaching and learning can therefore be a means of educating workers in political economy - in helping them to conceptualise and use Marxist ideas to theorise capitalism and socialism. It should interest them in studying further and in greater depth. It should open up a range of organised opportunities that can develop the intellectual needs of workers attracted to a particular party or group. Study groups, classes, lectures and courses come into play as means both of introducing workers to the need to organise as Marxists, but also as a place where they can evaluate critically or challenge the superficiality or depth of the thinking of their elected leaders.

Finally, workers’ knowledge of political economy is essential to the first phase of socialism after a proletarian seizure of power. This phase requires measures that make sure the economy remains in control of the ordinary worker. One of these is that workers have a basic command of political economy. Without this, a strong state that crushes those involved with value could transfer exclusive control of the surplus product from the capitalist class to a bureaucratic or military elite. Without an education in political economy, workers would be unable to participate in debates on the economy and how to realise the transition from market to planned social relations. They would be politically and intellectually excluded from democratic decision-making.

Places of safety

I noted in the first part of this series that Naomi Klein’s idea of a shock doctrine ignores the influence of the Soviet Union on the inculcation of terror and fear within a population. Her analysis starts with research into the disorienting effects of sensory deprivation on students in 1950s America.^[4] It could however, have started with the similar experiences of the victims of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s. The secret police of many regimes have trained in these methods throughout the world. The terror, fear and despair of the Soviet population served to atomise workers so completely that it was impossible for them to organise against their oppression for over 50 years. It was a shock with longer-lasting consequences than anything that happened in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s or more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I also mentioned the effects this shock had on the organised left throughout the world. Anyone critical of the former Soviet Union from the left might be accused of being an agent of imperialism or of assisting the project of imperialist domination. Internal to the USSR, leftwing critics were exterminated. This created an atmosphere of fear and distrust. It served to prevent anti-Stalinists from developing a theory of Stalinism. The role Stalinism played in controlling workers during the cold war became opaque, obscure and confused. Klein, for example, makes no connection between the shock that Stalinism had on the left and its powerlessness when faced with the onslaught of the ideas and interests of finance capital from the 1970s to the present.

Is the left still in a state of shock? And does this explain the non-threatening nature of contemporary organised resistance to governments’ austerity regimes? Certainly, the left is weak. It has no popular influence or intellectual credibility. If it had, then the ruling class would be more united in opposition to it. It would be less tolerant of division within its own ranks. It would be more inclined to resort to terror and repression.

The experience of the terror of Stalinism was that there was an absolute absence of safety. Escape was impossible. Mutual communication and independent self-organisation were inconceivable. In the absence of a market, people were dependent upon each other for security, privilege and preferment. Even the ruling elite was atomised and a member could lose position or disappear from view as quickly as she or he had achieved recognition or prominence. There were no places of safety.

The terror experienced by the left in the period covered by Klein has been different in its intensity, scope and efficiency. Those with money or contacts were able to escape abroad. Capital’s reliance on economic rather than political forms of atomisation means that the secret police of military regimes are less well informed and integrated within the population as a whole. This enables limited forms of mutual communication and self-organisation to arise relatively quickly to form the basis of mass collective resistance and opposition. There are places of safety within which people could organise underground.

Research into teaching and learning has shown that people learn best when they are in a safe environment. As I have argued in this article, capitalism is an unsafe environment for workers. Klein’s review of contemporary events is evidence that a declining capitalism intensifies the levels of unsafety within the population. If a new Marxist culture is to come into being, then the question of safety arises. Without some guarantee of a safe environment, workers will find it difficult to learn what they need to find out about capitalism and socialism.

When repression intensifies, it is important that Marxists try to avoid - if possible - disappearing, along with other people deemed a threat to capitalism. It is important therefore to organise for a range of places of safety prior to this possibility. Marxists need a wide range of non-Marxist contacts and allies both at home and abroad. Given the extent of state surveillance and penetration, it would be careless to rely exclusively on members of their own group for protection.

Within the organised left, a starting point might be to address the lack of safety that exists between leftists. This manifests itself in a fear of criticism. Under Stalinism, criticism took the form of ad hominem attacks, leading to humiliation, exclusion or much worse. Fear of criticism led to dishonest relationships based on favours and flattery, acquiescence to the wishes of the most aggressive individual, an inability to think, and mindless recitals of the party line. The creation of places of safety, within which thinkers and writers can express their ideas free from fear, is therefore essential to the emergence of class-consciousness and a democratic form of class collectivity.

Conclusion

The challenge of class-consciousness is a collective one. Its immediate aim is to overcome the subjective barriers of fear and despair. It will be inspired by the courage and clarity of individuals’ goals for freedom. These individuals will be intellectuals and workers organised around a Marxist understanding of capitalism and socialism. Some of these individuals will prioritise theoretical work. Others will prioritise educational and organisational work. A joint project implies that at some stage a Marxist political party (or a variety of parties) will form nationally and globally.

These parties will be coordinated worldwide in order to counter all forms of propaganda for the established order. They will interact with and support the building of workers’ forms of control over production, distribution and consumption from below. Workers worldwide will then be in a position to contemplate the seizure of power and the abolition of the system of generalised commodity production we call capitalism. Workers will also create the conditions for the establishment of a democratically planned, classless, global society - thus realising their goals for self-emancipation and the emancipation of humanity as a whole.

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Notes

1. H Ticktin, ‘Political consciousness and its conditions at the present time’ Critique Vol 34, No1, pp9-26.

2. ‘The politics of fear and despair’, January 12; ‘Impediments to consciousness’, January 19.

3. See T Eagleton Why Marx was right Yale 2011.

4. N Klein The shock doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism London 2007.