The disintegration of the left and the retreat of the working class:

Towards a contemporary theory of class consciousness and organisation

Author’s preface: “This article was written in the mid-1990s, in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and the following accelerated marginalisation of the revolutionary left internationally, irrespective of how its diverse components characterised these regimes. Some of this dates. Some sections exist in no more than sketchy outline: for example, this is perhaps the kindest that can be said about the sections on programme and the differing approaches of Lenin and Luxemburg.

“However, I still believe that the goal of the piece - to offer an analysis of class formation and class consciousness that is in line with the method of Marx's Capital, and suggest a framework by which the historical forms that these take can be understood and influenced - remains valid, however inadequate the execution.

"The article was intended to be a contribution to a more substantial work on the logic of Capital and its implications for contemporary crisis and state theory, eventually abandoned to the dust mites in my PC. If this article ignites some discussion on these themes, it has at least fulfilled some of its purpose."

P Topliss

The coincidence of changing circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice. (Theses on Feuerbach III)

M

arxism and the proletariat are no longer on speaking terms. They seem now to inhabit mutually exclusive domains. Since the Seventies, there has been a decline in both the organisational size and combativity of the workers movement, combined with a fragmentation, isolation and dissolution of that which claims to be Marxist. Marxism seems to have failed on its self-proclaimed strong-point – the unity of theory and practice.

While the divorce of workers and Marxists appears to be to the detriment of both, the latter have been unable to convince workers that they have any relevance for them. For most, Marxists are either associated with a failed experiment in repression and bread-queues in Eastern Europe, or dismissed as those who obstruct the forecourt of Sainsbury’s of a Saturday morning in a vain attempt to sell papers.

This article contends that the failure of working class strategy during this period in part results from a theoretical failure by the left to understand the basic nature of the object of its desires – the working class. Marx has been caricatured, and one of the worst victims of this has been his theory of class. From a re-elaboration of the Marxist conception of class it is possible to understand how members of classes form their ideas about society, and how they express those ideas in practice through collective activity. Failure to engage in collective action able to pose an alternative to capital tells us something about the barriers to this. If the question is approached in such a way, then it is possible to embark on a meaningful critique of contemporary capitalist society that contains practical implications for the working class, rather than slogans.

This article aims to explore questions of class, class consciousness and forms of organisation, and in doing so point the way to the elaboration of a revolutionary strategy for today’s conditions. The starting point of this is an examination of the manner in which Marx approaches the concept of class.

Marx’s initial consideration of these problems defines him as a communist. Understanding the working class as the motive force of human progress necessitated a rejection of that society which held it in chains. The Introduction to his 1843 Critique of the Hegelian philosophy of law put the proletariat at the core of any further historical development. The Economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844 extends and deepens this perspective. The dynamic of class, and of the working class in particular, are further investigated in The holy family (1844), The German ideology (1845), and The poverty of philosophy (1847), not to mention the summary of Marx’s analysis in the Manifesto of the communist party, all of which this paper draws on. However, the location of the category of class in Marx’s mature work is indicated in Capital, and I therefore wish to turn to this first.

Political economy of class

The final chapter of Marx’s Capital is titled ‘Classes’. Like a character in a murder mystery, Marx does little more than drop a few hints… and then dies before revealing all, leaving only two pages of the chapter before the manuscript breaks off. We know only that his consideration of classes was to lead into a critique of the capitalist state in a fourth volume. However, this fragment, combined with the method of the preceding three volumes, and Marx’s earlier studies of class, enable us to construct the basis of his theory of class.

Marx counters the rhetorical question “What constitutes a class?” with another; “What makes wage labourers, capitalists and landlords constitute the three great social classes?” He discounts the “first glance” solution of the “identity of revenues and sources of revenue”. This gives us “three great social groups whose members, the individuals forming them, live on wages, profit and ground rent respectively, on the realisation of their labour power, their capital, and their landed property”. Such a perspective relates these three great social groups to their share of the social product. But it cannot explain what is fundamental about them:

[F]rom this standpoint, physicians and officials, eg, would also constitute two classes, for they belong to two distinct social groups, the members of each of these groups receiving their revenue from one and the same source. The same would also be true of the infinite fragmentation of interest and rank into which the division of social labour splits labourers as well as capitalists and landlords (Capital Vol III p886 Moscow 1984).

Taking source of revenue as a standard only shows what divides individuals in society, not what unites these individuals of the “three great social groups” into the “three great social classes”. And here’s the rub: how can a form of social production that atomises individuals by its very nature also combine them into classes?

It might be argued that all Marx is emphasising is that classes must be understood in relation to the production process, instead of in respect to their resulting revenues, as “their functions in the production process” (Rosdolsky The making of Marx’s Capital p31). But this merely poses the same problem at a different level: here again the “infinite fragmentation of interest and rank” resulting from the division of social labour atomises, not unites, individuals. Anyway, Marx has already extensively explained the proletariat and bourgeoisie’s relation to the immediate production process in Volume I. It is hard to believe that he intends a repetition of this in Volume III, only perhaps with the inclusion of landowners.

A Marxist theory of class must concern itself with the immanent laws of class reproduction. It is not a branch of taxonomy. The ‘Classes’ chapter in Capital, coming into the study at the end of an analysis of capitalist production as a whole, only makes sense if class formation is considered as logically determined by the social relations of production already outlined, not identical with them. Marx’s approach to the same question in the 1840s and 1850s indicates that he sees class formation not as a blind economic process, like capital formation, but a conscious reaction to the social stresses that this engenders:

The separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; in other respects they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors. (Marx & Engels The German ideology MECW 5 p77. See also Engels’ Conditions of the working class in England MECW 3 p376).

Being formed through association around particular needs, classes are a political category, not an economic one. To clarify the concepts resulting from Marx’s analysis I will make a distinction between the proletariat and the working class. The formation of the working class is not considered to be identical to the formation of the proletariat. The proletariat is distinguished as a group separated from the means of production and compelled to sell its labour power. The working class is constituted from this, emerging in the course of its necessary struggles against the bourgeoisie.[1] The proletariat, to even reproduce itself as such, must combine to defend its immediate interests. Such combination composes it as a class.

Marx clearly views the formation and development of the working class as a result of these struggles. At the birth of the capitalist system “the proletariat is not yet sufficiently developed to constitute itself as a class, and consequently ... the very struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie has not yet assumed a political character” (Marx The poverty of philosophy MECW Vol 6 p177). It is because of this understanding that Marx can speak of the “organisation of the proletarians into a class” in the Manifesto of the communist party (MECW Vol 6 p493. Emphasis added), and later, the “long and arduous unification of the English workers into a class” (ibid p539. See also p498). The contradictory factors in class formation are outlined in the consideration of the French peasantry in The eighteenth brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

Insofar as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests and their cultural formation from those of other classes, they form a class. Insofar as these small peasant properties are merely connected on a local basis, and the identity of their interests fails to produce a feeling of community, national links, or a political organisation, they do not form a class.[2] (From Surveys from exile p239).

What distinguishes the proletariat is that, while the peasantry is defined by a form of social life that militates against any wider combination, the development of capitalism breaks down not only local boundaries, but also national ones through the development of the world market. Neither is the proletariat connected to any narrow property interests, being the owners of no (productive) property. Its very existence within capitalism therefore compels its formation as not only a national class, but an international one.

Capitalists, likewise, are compelled to form a capitalist class in an attempt to check the destructive effects of competition, also to effectively fight, first absolutism, then their own workers. The main agency for this combination is the capitalist state.

The answer to the question, how a form of social production that atomises individuals also constitutes them as a class, must be that capitalism does not do so immediately. What it does do is to create the necessity for the formation of classes through combination. Class formation is therefore united with, but distinct from, the reproduction of the relations of production; dependent on, but not reducible to, those relations.

Contradictions in class formation

In works such as The German ideology and The poverty of philosophy Marx identifies two contradictory tendencies in the formation and development of the working class:

1) Combination resulting from the ever greater centralisation of capital;

2) Fragmentation resulting from the extension of the social division of labour, and the competition between workers as sellers of labour power.

Centralisation

While Marx argues that classes only arise through combination, this does not mean that he sees classes as incidental to capitalism. Centralisation is necessary in a society based on the expansion of profit, as “the concentration of labourers, and their large scale co-operation, saves constant capital.” (Capital Vol III p82 Moscow 1984). Co-operative forms of labour are the grounding for wider forms of co-operative organisation – organisation which stems from this relation to the production process and is therefore class organisation.

The process of capitalist production, and the antagonistic interests which it creates, compel the formation of classes even to reproduce the system itself. ‘The war of all against all’ would disintegrate social production, not least because the proletariat would not even be able to defend the conditions of its own reproduction. The reproduction of the proletariat is obviously a precondition for the reproduction of capital. The conditions for this have at times needed to be addressed by the capitalists themselves; eg, legislation on working conditions in the early nineteenth century in Britain.

With the emergence of capitalism comes the formation of its constituent classes. As capital concentrates, it concentrates workers; as it expands outwards, it creates an ever greater mass of workers, interlinked by production. As these workers form as a class, they develop definite class interests, which are expressed in their forms of struggle:

Large scale industry concentrates in one place a crowd of people unknown to one another. Competition divides their interests. But the maintenance of wages, this common interest which they have against their boss, unites them in a common thought of resistance – combination. Thus combination always has a double aim, that of stopping competition among workers, so that they can carry on general competition with the capitalist. If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages, combinations, at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as the capitalists in their turn unite for the purpose of repression, and in face of always united capital, the maintenance of the association becomes more necessary to them than the maintenance of wages (Marx The poverty of philosophy MECW Vol 6 pp210-11).

Unfortunately for the capitalists, it is a short step for the workers to go from combining in the labour process as demanded by capital, to strengthening that combination to improve the conditions within which they work. The expansion of the market clarifies that the problem for the worker is not any one capitalist, but the social power of capital. The consciousness of the working class as a class against capital has as its underlying motive force this process whereby ever greater masses of workers confront increasingly concentrated capital on a terrain which becomes more international, resulting from the development of capitalist production.

The division of labour

Critics of Marx have pointed at that were the above the case, workers would long ago have consigned capitalism to the dustbin of history. But this is only part of the story. Contradictory tendencies act to obscure the nature of this process, and thereby hide the real interests of individuals from themselves. Marx was no prophet of impending capitalist demise, but spilled much ink studying how the system reproduced itself. One key factor in this was the destructive effect of the division of labour on effective combination by workers. The social division of labour fragments workers into separate and competing groups – eg, on a trade and national level – concealing their common interests.

Individuals always proceeded, and always proceed, from themselves. Their relations are the relations of their real life process. How does it happen that their relations assume an independent existence over against them? and that the forces of their own life become superior to them?
In short: division of labour, the level of which depends on the development of the productive power at any particular time. (The German ideology MECW Vol 5 p93).

Socially divided labour is the precondition for commodity production, whereby the products of isolated and independent labours meet each other in the form of commodities. The contradiction between the one sided nature of labour, expressed in the social division of labour, and the many sided needs of the individual mean that the product of labour – and for the worker, her labour power – serves only as exchange value. So for the worker, productive activity is alienating activity, being confronted by the results of her labour over and against her: “the worker is related to the product of his labour as to an alien object.” (Marx Economic and philosophical manuscripts MECW Vol 3, p272). It presents an insoluble threat for the individual; soluble only through collective action of the class. Paradoxically, the more centralisation develops, the more the division of labour does. The division of labour increases productivity, allowing the greater centralisation of capital. The centralisation of capital, and thus of workers, allows their tasks to be further differentiated. The social division of labour strengthens partial interests, continually tending to fragment labour, and therefore the grounding of class consciousness.

The problem is, how do the general interests of the working class come to the fore, against – or, rather, through the mediation of – the partial interests which appear to undermine them? From this flow questions of what forms of action make the general interests a decisive material force, and how their development can be theoretically expressed and explained to its own subject: the proletariat.

From class to class consciousness

The problem of the formation of the working class is the same as its consciousness of itself as a class. Class consciousness, says Marx, is “the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution” (MECW Vol 5 p52). Revolution needs the conscious and united action of the great majority of workers, yet the material processes of society continuously destroy that consciousness.

Although the division of labour disrupts the unifying of the proletariat, it is also the medium for the socialisation of labour. Marx highlights this dual process as one of the “three cardinal facts of capitalist production”:

1) Concentration of means of production in few hands, whereby they cease to appear as the property of the immediate labourers and turn into social production capacities...
2) Organisation of labour itself into social labour: through co-operation, division of labour, and the uniting of labour with the natural sciences.
In these two senses, the capitalist mode of production abolishes private property and private labour, even though in contradictory forms.
3) Creation of the world market. (Capital Vol III p266. Emphasis added).

The development of the division of labour allows the extension of the market, and the drawing in of more workers into social production on a world scale. The greater exchange of commodities between branches of production, resulting from the development of the division of labour, makes interdependent what were previously independent areas, and so more openly draws the interests of the workers in them together. The extension of the division of labour is bound up with the process of the centralisation of capital. This presents the possibility of overcoming its destructive effects on class and class consciousness through the greater interdependence of ever larger numbers of workers.

Marx went further in drawing revolutionary conclusions from the contradiction between centralisation and the division of labour. Communist consciousness arose precisely because the division of labour made no other form of existence practical for workers in the long term: “for proletarians – owing to the frequent opposition of interests among them arising out of the division of labour – no other ‘agreement’ is possible than a political directed one against the whole present system.” (The German ideology MECW Vol 5, pp371-2).

The working class is not the passive object of these two tendencies, which act on it like the apple on Newton’s cranium. It is also their subject: its productive activity reproduces these tendencies. The intervention of the proletariat is therefore decisive in these developments. Its degree of organisation and awareness determine the effectiveness of this intervention, and therefore the conditions for the development of its class consciousness and struggle.

Ideology

So far, I have tried to show that Marx’s understanding of class and class consciousness is much richer than has generally been interpreted by his followers. The characteristic approach of the latter has been to reduce class to its grounding in the production process, and class consciousness – or rather its absence – to ‘false’ ideas which grip the proletariat from some external source (conversely, ‘true’ class consciousness is also often seen as being imposed from the outside. See ‘Organisation and consciousness’, below). This dualistic approach is alien to that of Marx.

For many revolutionaries, the hold of bourgeois ideology over the working class is reduced to the influence of a labour aristocracy and bureaucracy – the dominant strata of the workers’ movement – too lulled by crumbs from the capitalists’ table to even conceive of taking over the banquet. Although these factors are strategically important for the continuing domination of capital, they cannot in themselves explain the long standing identification of the proletariat in general with the capitalist system, even at times when there are scant few crumbs to be swept their way. Georg Lukács is right to doubt “whether such analyses satisfactorily explain the totality and hence the crux of the matter.” (Political writings 1919-1929 p101). Yet this has limited most revolutionaries’ understanding of the situation for the best part of the century. For instance, the first sentence of Trotsky’s 1938 Transitional Programme states:

The world political situation as a whole is chiefly characterised by a historical crisis of the leadership of the proletariat. (Leon Trotsky The Transitional Programme for socialist revolution p111 Pathfinder).

This crisis of leadership is the political expression of the dominance of the labour bureaucracy and aristocracy. Many revolutionaries remain trapped between the horizons of this one short sentence; blaming the defeats of the working class on the social democratic and communist parties. None of which explains why the working class continues to follow such parties, or often not even attain that level of consciousness. One could blame the collapse of the Second International on the betrayal of Karl Kautsky, Plekhanov, etc, but it does not explain why the mass of workers followed them in supporting their own ruling classes. In fact, it is debatable as to who followed who. Irrespective of whether the German social democratic deputies voted for war credits in 1914, it seems likely that German workers would still have queued up to enlist the following day.

Marx’s analysis of the nature of the labour aristocracy and bureaucracy was developed within the context of a more fundamental critique of the mystified relations of bourgeois society. Far from any single member of the working class being spontaneously class conscious merely because she or he is a proletarian, capitalist society is a ensemble of social relations which conceal this from its human subjects. The working class is the active producer of capitalist society, but is prevented from seeing this because of its alienation from its product and own activity. It follows from this that the domination of ruling class ideas within the working class cannot be reduced to any stranglehold of the labour aristocracy and bureaucracy. Rather, these are only able to play such a pernicious role because the results of the workers’ own labour under capitalism conceals the nature of that society: we build our own prison. Marx sees alienation of labour power as playing a role that extends beyond the mystification of the labour process to the legitimisation of the entire social structure of capitalist society.

The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, the dominant material relations grasped as ideas (The German ideology MECW Vol 5 p59).

Through this process, manifestations of the domination of capital such as the state also appear as natural; in the case of the state it embodies the “illusory ‘general’ interest” (ibid p47). This is because the capital relation which it defends appears as an ahistorical and asocial relation, as ‘normal’ as rainfall. Its role can appear to represent the general interest of society because it appears to defend the eternal and natural conditions necessary for society to exist, and not just for that particular, capitalist, form of society.

Marx deepens the analysis of ideology as generated by the social relations of capitalist production with his analysis of commodity fetishism:

[T]he relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things. (Capital Vol I p73 Moscow 1954).

Fetishism therefore expresses the appearance of the position of individuals within capitalism. Social phenomena are seen to obey immutable laws, impervious to human action.[3] Through naturalising the conditions of capitalist society from which it arises, ideology justifies and defends these conditions, even when articulated by individuals unaware or even hostile to this outcome. It is a ‘conscious’ expression of capitalism’s appearance, an appearance which inverts its essence:

The final pattern of economic relations as seen on the surface, in their real existence and consequently in the conceptions by which the bearers and agents of these relations seek to understand them, is very much different from, and indeed quite the reverse of, their inner but concealed essential pattern and the conception corresponding to it. (Capital Vol III pp209).

The domination of ruling class ideas over the working class is grounded in the conditions of the productive activity of the working class. The corollary of this is that they are open to be challenged and changed by the activity of that class. The paradox is how, when the working class cannot see the necessity of such action?

Fetishism expresses the immediate position of the individual in capitalist society, in distinction to the position of the working class as its collective producer. Marx saw the latter as the universal class, the real bearer of general human interest, in contrast to its illusory embodiment within the capitalist state. Marx’s concept of the working class is no disembodied ideal, far removed from the real individual workers with distinct individual interests. The immediate interests of individual workers compel them to forms of organisation that present ways to realise them; eg, interests such as employment at a living wage, etc. It is in this way that general class interests show their potential to come to the fore.

To understand not only what separates, but what links the particular fetishised interest of the worker with the working class is the start of the understanding of the necessary moments of a working class strategy. Working class consciousness does not stem from any partial economic interest, but rather from its absence. The working class has no property forms of its own to protect, and therefore no basis to establish or justify new forms of exploitation. In freeing itself from bourgeois ideology, it therefore does not establish its own ideology. Possessing no property interest of its own, the working class must demystify the situation it faces, in order to change it.

Quoting Marx, Franz Jakubowski illustrates the active role which this demystified consciousness plays, and the manner in which it allows the working class to understand its own position against capital:

“Thought and being are indeed distinct, but they are also in unity with each other.” Thought, as a part of human being, no longer plays a merely contemplative role outside the historical process. It becomes itself a factor of historical change. This opens the way to recognition of the dialectical unity of subject and object, and of theory and practice…
Consciousness is determined by the transformation of being: but, as the consciousness of acting men, it in turn transforms this being. Consciousness is no longer consciousness above an object, the duplicated ‘reflection’ of an individual object, but a constituent part of changing relations, which are what they are only in conjunction with the consciousness that corresponds to their material existence. (Ideology and superstructure in historical materialism pp58‑9 & 60 London 1990).

Ideology fetters the fighting capacity of the working class through concealing the social foundations of its exploitation, but is paradoxically overcome through the action of that class against the reality of that exploitation, which persists irrespective of its awareness of it. This is not the result of the experience of any exploited class under any conditions, but is unique to the working class under capitalism. The mystified appearance of the commodity can only be understood when the commodity itself is not only man’s object, but also its subject; ie, through the experience of a class which is the bearer of the essential commodity of labour power. The working class is confronted not only with the mystery of controlling the results of its own labour, but, in doing so, with taking over the control of its own life activity. It needs a correct understanding of its situation to free itself from the fetishistic domination of the wage relation. In doing so it prepares the ground to free humanity as a whole from the domination of capital.

Class in and for itself

The poverty of philosophy draws a distinction between a class in itself and a class both in and for itself. The terms are used without full explanation, but originate from classical German philosophy. An understanding of their ‘parentage’ – which Marx’s free usage in the context clearly takes for granted – is invaluable to properly understand what point is being made.

The working class organised to sell its labour power within capitalist society constitutes a class in itself. Organised to struggle against its role as labour power, it is a class in and for itself. This distinction is encapsulated in Marx’s statement in Wages, price and profit that the slogan of the working class should not be ‘a fair days pay for a fair days work’ but ‘abolish the wages system’. That both are organisational determinations, and therefore forms of association at differing levels of consciousness, should be noted. Hal Draper argues that the “Hegelese” of in itself and for itself has been “widely distorted into the claim that for Marx a class exists only in the form of conscious organisation” (Karl Marx’s theory of revolution, vol II: The politics of social classes, p41, fn). He later says “Fortunately, it was subsequently dropped” (ibid, p349). Though such terminology does not reappear in Marx’s work, its content remains – if anything, it is more ‘Hegelian’ in outlook.[4] Marx’s debt to Hegel is vast. Far from this formulation being an example of Marx’s unfortunate coquetry with speculative jargon, it is vital to a Marxist theory of class; therefore conscious organisation must be a key determinant of class at all levels.

Hegel states “Being‑for‑Self is the polemical or negative attitude against the limiting other ... something is for itself insofar as it cancels its otherness ... self consciousness is Being‑for‑Self accomplished and posited” (Science of Logic p171 London 1966). He restates the distinction in a socio-historical context in his Introduction to the Lectures on the history of philosophy:

In order to comprehend what development is, what may be called two different states must be distinguished. The first is what is known as capacity, power, what I call being-in-itself; the second principle is that of being-for-itself, actuality… [In the transition between in-itself and for-itself] no new content has been produced, and yet this form of being for self makes all the difference. The whole variation of the development of world history is founded on this difference. This alone explains how since all mankind is naturally rational, and freedom is the hypothesis on which this reason rests, slavery yet has been, and in part still is, maintained by many peoples, and men have remained contented under it. (LHP I pp20-1)

Through Marx’s application of Hegel’s categories, this “otherness” of being-in-itself emerges as the proletariat’s self‑estrangement through the alienation of its labour power. It is unfree because it is determined by something external to it – alien labour in the form of capital. The move from in- to for-itself overcomes the ‘otherness’ of this labour, so bringing it under conscious human control. Human activity is now self-determined and therefore truly free. The “negative attitude” is now not merely polemical, but practical: the overthrow of the limits of capital through workers’ revolution; as Marx put it, the weapon of criticism must be replaced by the criticism of weapons.

We can say that the working class is only truly a class for itself at the point where it practically “cancels its otherness”: in the course of its revolutionary struggle against capital. The working class for itself only fully exists when it asserts its autonomy as a class through its unity in struggle against its role as labour power: “the working class is truly working class only when it struggles against its existence as a class” (Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital politically p74). This is only fully expressed at the point of revolution. This is the only consistent interpretation of Marx’s use of the term “for itself”: ie, when it takes control of society.

We have explained ‘in itself’ and ‘in and for itself’, and shown their importance and how they arise in the course of Marx’s analysis. But this would be of no use unless we can show how they are interconnected; how the class necessarily emerges as for itself as a result of its activity. Stated broadly, the link is in the forms of activity and organisation of the working class through the course of its struggles, and its resulting and developing consciousness of the nature and necessary direction of those struggles – to the point of revolution and beyond:

Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution (The German ideology MECW Vol 5 pp52-3).

The distinction between ‘in itself’ and ‘in and for itself’ for the working class is a distinction between its existence and being. It is a distinction between its real and potential life: potential not in an arbitrary way, but because its own internal contradictions compel it to develop in such a way. The working out of this contradiction is the process of becoming of the working class; the prerequisite for revolution.

Contingent and necessary class consciousness

The class in itself and for itself are expressed in the contingent and necessary forms of consciousness. The distinction between contingent and necessary class consciousness is the contradiction between “what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim” and the conscious expression of “what, in accordance with [its] being, it will be historically compelled to do” (The holy family MECW Vol 4 p36).

It is in this sense that the existence of the working class in and for itself is necessary. As indicated in the ‘Ideology’ section, Marx is not talking about blind compulsion. Consciousness is not distinct from social being, but inherent to it. Therefore, what the proletariat is compelled to do must be seen in the context of its developing understanding of this compulsion, and its according response. Consciousness is always integral to practice, and develops with it.

Hegel’s Science of Logic defines the contingent as having “the ground of its being not in itself but in somewhat else” (p205). In other words, it is not actively self determined, but motivated by forces outside it. A working class that accepts the boundaries of capitalist society is therefore dominated by contingent class consciousness; in opposition to this, the expression of its being compels it to confront these boundaries.

It is not that such consciousness is false (a term first used in this context in a letter by Engels to Mehring in 1893), any more than fetishism is illusory, as it corresponds to immediate needs of the proletariat. Such needs, however, are sectional, representing the interests of particular groups of workers as sellers of labour power within capitalism. This is a consciousness that is rational, but a rationality of a sort, like that of the bourgeoisie, whose limits are those of the existing society.[5]

Necessary class consciousness is the awareness by the working class of capitalism’s historical limits, and the need to go beyond them through its class struggle; an awareness that arises from the objective contradictions of capitalism which compel the formation of the proletariat as a class.

Marx roots the development of class as arising from the contradiction between the reality and actuality of wage labour. The resolution of this contradiction demands the development of a class consciousness which properly expresses labour’s social being. What distinguishes contingent from necessary class consciousness is that while the contingent responds to particular forms of capital’s contradictions in a sectional manner, necessary consciousness sees such contradictions in their relation to the totality of world capitalism. This consciousness it not of a speculative kind, ideas bouncing around the skulls of workers like ping-pong balls in a biscuit tin. They have an organisational and political expression.

Contingent class consciousness tends to limit its horizon to confrontations that are confined to the immediate issue, however large they may be. Necessary class consciousness addresses the strategic question of social control – who rules? – even when its objectives appear to be restricted to its immediate conditions. Resistance to factory closure by its occupation under workers’ control, and attempting to spread such action, can be an example of how such issues can be posed.

What makes such a high level of consciousness possible – and not just possible, but the starting point for the real workers’ movement – is, as quoted above, that the conditions of capitalist society mean that for workers, “no other ‘agreement’ is possible other than a political one directed against the whole present system.” (MECW Vol 5 pp371‑2).

Contingent and necessary class consciousness have as much an objective basis as the working class itself. Both are grounded in the wage relation. Bound up with the formation of the working class, the formation of its consciousness is a contradictory process, stemming from the contradictions of social production and class struggle under capitalism. As explained above, the underlying motive force for this is the contradiction between the centralisation of capital and the extension of the division of labour. The proletariat is thrown into struggle in this context, and in the course of its struggles modifies both this development and its own consciousness. Lenin, speaking of the 1896 strike wave in Russia, illustrates this through his comments on the relationship between the spontaneous and conscious struggles of the working class:

[I]f we are to speak of the ‘spontaneous element’ then, of course, it is this strike movement which, first and foremost, must be regarded as spontaneous. But there is spontaneity and spontaneity. Strikes occurred in Russia in the Seventies and Sixties (and even in the first half of the nineteenth century), and they were accompanied by the ‘spontaneous’ destruction of machinery, etc. Compared with these ‘revolts’, the strikes of the Nineties might even be described as ‘conscious’, to such an extent do they mark the progress which the working class movement has made in that period. This shows that the ‘spontaneous element’, in essence, represents nothing more nor less than consciousness in an embryonic form. (What is to be done? CW Vol 5, p374).

The struggles of the working class in itself contain the immanent basis for its struggle as a class for itself: less developed forms contain the potential of the more developed, rather than simply exclude them. Struggles for a better deal within capitalism ultimately confront it with the limitations of that society. Contingent class consciousness accepts these limits, taking the boundaries of capitalism to be natural. Marx believed that such views would be undermined in the course of the conflict between the needs of capital and those of the working class: necessary class consciousness was necessary precisely because it corresponds to what workers “will be historically compelled to do.” The point is not to interpret the world, but to change it.

Marx did not see class consciousness as any kind of passive inevitability. Such a mechanical view of the compulsion would leave no room for consciousness. He grappled with the relation between the force of social necessity, and the working class’s consciousness of it, without which its movement can be diverted, fragmented and defeated, as capital is imposes its needs upon the working class.

Class consciousness therefore not only has an objective basis, but must also have an objective expression; the development of the struggles of the working class and the organisational forms which this takes. The working class per se fights as it will and must in a variety of different situations. For those that have learnt the most advanced – communist – lessons from such struggles, correct theoretical appraisal of this movement is therefore necessary as a prerequisite for its translation into action programmes [6].

The relation between the political and economic

Writing in 1845, Marx believed that the working class had little room for manoeuvre before it confronted the necessity for the overthrow of capitalism:

[E]ven a minority of workers who combine and go on strike very soon find themselves compelled to act in a revolutionary way. (The German ideology MECW Vol 5 p204).

It seems probable that Marx’s judgement is coloured by the time: the strength of the Chartists in Britain, and the rising tide of revolution on the Continent. Carried along with the torrent, Marx conflates the possible with the inevitable. [7] Such a revolutionary compulsion arises out of the working class’ ability to practically understand the real movement of society, and respond accordingly. Sadly, there is ample evidence to disprove the more immediate relation implied by Marx’s optimistic statement.

Having said this, there is also much to show that capitalism’s ability to contain the economic struggles of the working class at that level has increased in the intervening century and a half – at least in the imperialist countries. Has capitalism reinforced the division of the political from the economic since Marx’s day?

Many Marxists have illustrated such a split and advanced strategies based around overcoming it: for instance Lenin’s Imperialism and the split in socialism and Zinoviev’s The social roots of opportunism focused on the question of the labour aristocracy and bureaucracy. Trotsky identified “the dependence of the reformist trade unions upon the state” and argued: “In the epoch of imperialist decay the trade unions can be really independent to the extent that they are conscious of being, in action, the organs of the proletarian revolution” (Marxism and the trade unions pp6 & 10 New Park 1983). Others, while acknowledging this, seek to identify the breakdown of the basis of opportunism since the Seventies. István Mészáros refers to a strengthening of “material ground for solidarity” within the international working class in the light of the “growing structural crisis of capitalism” (The power of ideology p345). he validity of such claims can only be viewed within the context of a study of imperialism today. That is not the remit of this article. Nevertheless, accepting the trends outlined by Mészáros are real, they do not remove the primary barriers to conscious working class solidarity. However much the imperialist bourgeoisie’s hold over its working class is strengthened by its position, the grounding of this domination, throughout the world, is in the division of labour and commodity fetishism. This, of course, encompasses the sorts of divisions referred to by Lenin, Trotsky and Zinoviev, as fetishism and the social division of labour determine such phenomena. Strategies to extend working class solidarity must confront the problems that these raise, and confront them internationally, just as the division of labour is fundamentally an international one.

Marx was adamant that any such strategy must be based on the real experiences of the working class; action programmes for working class resistance are not born irrespective of the conditions of the class it is tailored to suit. Not the ones that work, anyway. Writing in reference to the First International, Marx highlights the dynamic of working class convergence at that time:

Since the various sections of the working men in the same country, and the working classes in the different countries, are placed under different circumstances and have attained different degrees of development, it seems almost necessary that their theoretical notions, which reflect the real movement, should also diverge.
The community of action, however, called into life by the Intern[ational] W[orkers] Ass[ociation], the exchange of ideas facilitated by the public organs of the different national sections, and the direct debates in the General Congresses, are sure by and by to engender a common theoretical programme. (Marx in 1869, MECW Vol 21 p45).

I want to now look at the basis of such a programme.

Programme

The programme is not a shopping list of demands. As a guide to action, it results from, and guides, the necessary struggles of the working class. Neither does it develop irrespective of the conditions of that class – its state of organisation, level of class consciousness, etc – or the development of its communist component. The programme must not just be for when communists have the masses behind us, when we are the mass party, but a guide to the fusion of communist politics with the working class in today’s conditions. Otherwise it remains a utopia:

The development of necessary class consciousness does not imply its constitution as a homogeneous psychological bond ... but the elaboration of strategically viable programmes of action embracing a multiplicity of specific social groups in whatever variety of organisational forms may be required... What cements various social groups together in a favourable historical situation – for instance, at the time of a general strike – is not some mysterious psychological power but significant practical programmes arising from the empirical reality of the common structural subordination of the groups concerned to the power of capital. And the historically necessary development of class consciousness consists precisely in this practical elaboration of a set of strategic aims corresponding to the objective structural position of the various social groups which formulate them. (Mészáros, Philosophy, ideology and social science, pp97-8).

Programme develops with the working class. Marx and Engels could remark that elements of the Communist manifesto had become antiquated soon after it was written. This was not because the programme was found to be wrong, but because the forms of capitalist society had developed, requiring the development of programme with it.

Lenin forcefully argued the need for the development of the programme to reflect changing conditions in Our revolution, 1923, in response to the Menshevik Sukhanov, who counterposed the October Revolution to the programmatic ‘orthodoxy’ of the social democratic parties:

It need hardly be said that a textbook written on Kautskian lines was a very useful thing in its day. But it is time, for all that, to abandon the idea that it foresaw all the forms of development of subsequent world history (Lenin CW Vol 33 p480).

In the same way, the perspectives outlined in Lenin’s Two tactics of the social democracy were superseded by the events of 1917, events that were both theorised and anticipated in the innovations of his Letters from afar and April theses, written between the February and October revolutions.

¨

Given that Marxists cannot wish away their isolation, we need a strategy to orientate and develop the small potential cadre that presents itself today. A strategy is not a series of opinions but, as the Communist manifesto put it, our line of march. In the course of this development, strategies must be developed which make these cadre effective within the working class movement on a mass level. In this sense, it is always a programme for the mass – but one that recognises its degree of fragmentation, national isolation and low level of consciousness, rather than a schema which addresses itself to a working class which it presupposes exists like an army waiting for instructions.

The strategy for the development of class consciousness has as its cutting edge the fight around demands that are structurally necessary to the ending of the continuing subjugation of labour by capital, both of a universal nature (eg, the proletariat’s domination in the labour process and the necessity for workers’ control, or the necessity of women’s oppression for capital to reproduce labour gratis. Another example is racial oppression, creating divisions within society to maintain and strengthen the hegemony of the ruling class, also driving down the price of labour power), or issues that express the contradictions of capitalism particularly sharply for a particular society. Such questions highlight the division between the revolutionary and the reformist approach within the workers’ movement. They are not in themselves a strategy, but issues around which one may be developed. That the identification of such key questions is itself insufficient is indicated by the fact that where sections of the left have identified these issues, they have not been able to build sustainable and effective work around them.

Marx’s aim was to realise criticism in political activity. This requires organised, practical activity, and continuous analysis of factors blocking this realisation. Insofar as the latter is not done – and it is not being done – then revolutionaries are not practically fulfilling their criticism, but running round after sterile slogans. The true dynamic of capitalism must be recognised if it is to be successfully challenged.

Organisation and consciousness

Organisation and consciousness condition one another. Unless directed towards changing the world, consciousness is merely speculative. Conversely, Marx views class consciousness as an active process. It follows that the expression of this is the organisational forms it takes.

If the working class is the medium for the transition from capitalism to socialism, then organisation is the form of that mediation. Each development of the working class must be expressed organisationally, each important defeat sees its reflection in the erosion of working class organisation. Organisation and class consciousness are therefore inseparable: the experience of the organisation of the class increases its consciousness, so spurring continuing development in a dynamic and reciprocally conditioning fashion. It is therefore incorrect to state that the “proletariat in struggle does not form an institution distinct from its immediate being” (Rossana Rossanda, ‘Class and party’ in The socialist register 1970, p221). The working class can be understood as nothing other than its determinant – ie, mediated – forms of organisation.

Class consciousness is embodied as a self-conscious human agency. This, inevitably, takes organisational form. Such forms must be appropriate to the social and historical conditions within which the working class fights if they are to be adequate to the task, be they unions, workers’ councils, parties or whatever. For the struggles of the working class to have any lasting effect they must have a lasting and responsive organisational expression. The spontaneous development of the working class – in the sense of an absence of organisational codification of its own struggles – is not possible.

The highest level of this self-consciousness on the part of the working class is what Marx refers to as communist consciousness, which of course demands organised expression.

Communist organisation

On the historical development of communism, Marx states:

Just as the economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class, so the socialists and the communists are the theoreticians of the proletarian class. So long as the proletariat is not yet sufficiently developed to constitute itself a as class, and consequently so long as the very struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie has not yet assumed a political character, and the productive forces are not yet sufficiently developed in the bosom of the bourgeoisie itself to enable us to catch a glimpse of the material conditions necessary for the emancipation of the proletariat and for the formation of a new society, these theoreticians are merely utopians who, to meet the wants of the oppressed classes, improvise systems and go in search of regenerating science. But in the measure that history moves forward, and with it the struggle of the proletariat assumes clearer outlines, they no longer need to seek science in their minds; they have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece. So long as they look for science and merely make systems, so long as they are at the beginning of the struggle, they see in poverty nothing but poverty, without seeing in it the revolutionary, subversive side, which will overthrow the old society. From the moment they see this side, science, which is produced by the historical movement and associating itself consciously with it, has ceased to be doctrinaire and has become revolutionary. (The poverty of philosophy MECW Vol 6, pp177-8).

Communist consciousness is an appropriation of developing working class experience through a commensurate development of an adequate philosophical outlook. This expresses the maturation and coincidence of a dual movement in history; presupposing and incorporating humanity’s entire development as a practical being. The level of development that this reaches in the proletariat, in the necessary struggle to transcend alienation, allows the incorporation of the concurrent development of philosophy, which in its own way confronted the same problem. Such a sublation is expressed theoretically by the consciously communist section of the workers’ movement.

Marx explains the relation of these communists to the working class:

The communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement (Manifesto of the communist party MECW Vol 6, p497).

Communist organisation exists to develop the conscious self activity of the working class, and is itself an expression of that self activity.

The German ideology states that from the proletariat “emanates the consciousness of the necessity of a fundamental revolution, the communist consciousness, which may, of course, arise among the other classes too through the contemplation of the situation of this class” (MECW Vol 5 p52). “Contemplation”, either inside or outside the proletariat, however, is not the root of this consciousness, but the mass activity of the proletariat itself directed at the goal of such a “fundamental revolution”. Yes, it must be theorised – Marx isn’t advocating spontaneous activism – but such theory must go beyond its own frontiers into the realm of what the first Thesis on Feuerbach calls “‘practical-critical’ activity”.

Marx saw this communist consciousness as the theoretical and practical expression of the working class. In contrast, I would argue that the ‘Marxist’ Second International came to see the working class as being dependent on a theory that was independent of it, as recognised by the neo-Kantian one-time Marxist Lucio Colletti in his critique of the Second International theorist Rudolph Hilferding:

[Hilferding’s] view clearly allows no room for a link between science and class consciousness ... Socio-economic development is seen as a process unfolding before the observer and the scientist like the movement of the stars. ‘Economic laws’ are objective laws, external to classes and independent of our wills just like the laws of nature. (Colletti From Rousseau to Lenin p230)

The Marxist ‘orthodoxy’ of the Second International, and later the post-Lenin Third, erased Marx’s concept of proletarian emancipation in this way. The working class’s potential for conscious action became subsumed by immutable social and economic laws. ‘Orthodox’ Marxists such as Kautsky and Hilferding could thus retain a commitment to revolution without it affecting the nature of their practice, as revolution was perceived as an purely objective law driven process, much the same as Newton’s laws of motion. Marxism was reduced to a set of ‘scientific’ predictions on the one hand, and an unrelated series of moral beliefs on the other – a sort of secular Calvinism. Marx perceived his method differently:

History does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth, it wages no battles. It is man, real living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; history is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims. (The holy family MECW 4 p93)

Objective economic development can only provide the working class with the possibility of changing society. That change can only be realised if the working class consciously grasps it, acting as a free, self-determined agent.

In What is to be done? Lenin extensively and approvingly quotes a passage from Kautsky (who, like Hilferding, believed that Marxism was a positive science with no necessary connection with the working class):

[S]ocialism and the class struggle arise side by side and not one out of the other; each arises under different conditions. Modern socialist consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge... The vehicle of science is not the proletariat but the bourgeois intelligentsia... Thus, socialist conscious is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without (quoted in Lenin CW Vol 5 pp383‑4).

Immediately after this, Lenin continues:

Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement, the only choice is – either bourgeois or socialist ideology... [T]he spontaneous development of the working class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology ... for the spontaneous working class movement is trade unionism ... and trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie. (ibid p384)

This adoption by Lenin of Kautsky’s positivism – so clearly different from Marx’s approach – left him open to the criticism that a theory of class consciousness originating outside of the class that it represents – outside of the social relations of production upon which forms of thought are themselves produced – is idealist. If Kautsky’s view was correct, then the middle class intelligentsia is the revolutionary class, with the working class merely its vehicle. This is clearly not what Marx had in mind. [8] Indeed, in the third Thesis on Feuerbach, he criticises this sort of approach as forgetting that “it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.” Instead, Marx stresses “human activity or self-changing… revolutionary practice.” In fact, Kautsky’s formulation contradicts Lenin’s insight into the relation between spontaneity and consciousness in the same pamphlet (quoted in ‘Contingent and necessary class consciousness’, above).

The positivist thesis expressed in What is to be done? is correct to state that the economic struggle is in itself “too narrow”. Where it not, there would be no need for any form of working class organisation generated outside the most immediate and spontaneous of struggles. Yet Kautsky’s thesis lays an inadequate basis for this assertion. While arguing that class consciousness must be brought to the workers “only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers” (ibid, p422) but must in effect rest on a comprehension of the social totality, this thesis is not grounded in an appreciation of the central mediating role of labour in the reproduction of “the interrelations between all classes”; interrelations which only exist because of the labour process, through the subjugation of the proletariat.

It is this position of the working class in the labour process – not its degree of exploitation or size – which determines it as the revolutionary class against the power of capital. Ultimately, it is the developing contradictions between capital and labour, and consequently between the struggle and consciousness of the working class, which is the motive force in the development of the working class movement, in all its forms. The power of capital forces the workers to combine as a class. Through this organisation, the working class finds it exists. The necessity arises to respond in an ever more conscious and wide‑ranging manner to the counter‑strategies of capital, which serve to fragment labour and dissolve class consciousness.

To effectively respond, the working class must understand these processes at work in society, and equip itself with strategies to confront them in such a way that acts to overcome the obstacles to its development. This, if anything, is what Marxism is ‘for’. It is the method that is capable of understanding, explaining and responding to the development of capital in the interests of the working class.

Intellectuals from outside the working class can, have, and probably will continue to, play a part clarifying the logic of the workers’ own struggles. Marx refers to their role – and so his – in The German ideology, quoted above. The position of such individuals from other classes is described incisively by Lukács:

The individual Jacobin who joins the revolutionary class can shape and clarify its actions through his determination, militancy, knowledge and enthusiasm. But the social existence of the class and its resulting class consciousness must always determine the content and trajectory of his actions, which are not undertaken by him on behalf of the class but are the culmination of class activity itself (Lukács Lenin: a study in the unity of his thought emphasis added).

It is important to distinguish between class consciousness and its systematisation; between mass activity and science. The party is the scientific appropriation of the experience of the working class movement, rather than the sole embodiment of such consciousness, as for instance appears in Stalin’s interpretation. The working class creates revolutionaries. However, as an intrinsic part of the working class, revolutionaries are integral to its own process of self-creation – increasingly so as a greater part of the working class becomes revolutionary. Communists seek to guide the development of class consciousness in line with their understanding of the necessary development of working class struggle. The working class and revolutionaries form a dialectical totality, continuously re-creating each other.

Lenin and Luxemburg

Returning to Lenin, it is not my intention to reduce his theory of the party to one quote from Kautsky in one pamphlet – no matter how influential – from 1902. Lenin theorised and built an organisation demanded by the concrete conditions the Russian workers faced. This was possible through a break with the mechanical fatalism characteristic of the parties of the Second International, equipping the vanguard with a consciousness of, and a strategy for, its own developing strength. It is therefore not possible to give general support to Jakubowski’s criticism of Lenin’s approach:

The party is simultaneously the product and the producer of class consciousness. Lenin brings out only the one side, Luxemburg only the other. (F Jakubowski, Ideology and superstructure p123).

Had not Lenin given accurate consideration to the social conditions in which class consciousness was produced, then, figuratively speaking, October would not have followed February.

Accepting that Lenin constructed party solidarity out of the concrete conditions of the development of class consciousness in Russia, it cannot be true that this was one of the “fixed poles” of his idea of party organisation, as Lukács argues (Lenin: a study in the unity of his thought). Simply, it cannot be so because, as I have argued, class consciousness is not a fixed thing. It is a dynamic moment in the development of the proletariat and of society. So its conscious forms of organisation cannot be produced from some eternal shopping list of criteria. This is well illustrated by Rosa Luxemburg, in a critical evaluation of the difficulties of developing revolutionary organisation, and shows that Jakubowski’s conclusions on her, too, are rather glib:

On the one hand, we have the mass; on the other, its historic goal, located outside the existing society. On the one hand, we have the day‑to‑day struggle; on the other, the social revolution. Such are the terms of the dialectical contradiction through which the socialist movement makes its way.
It follows that this movement can best advance by tacking betwixt and between the two dangers by which it is constantly being threatened. One is the loss if its mass character; the other is the abandonment of its goal. One is the danger of sinking back into the condition of a sect; the other of becoming a movement of bourgeois social reform.
That is why it is illusory, and contrary to historic experience, to hope to fix, once and for always, the direction of the revolutionary socialist struggle with the aid of formal means, which are expected to secure the labour movement against all possibilities of opportunist digression. (Luxemburg ‘Organisational question of social democracy’, in Rosa Luxemburg speaks pp128-9).

In other words, the conditions of the organisation of the most conscious elements of the class must be appropriate to the particular social conditions which the proletariat faces – particular conditions which Lenin so clearly grasped. Seen in this way, it seems more satisfactory to summarise the political demarcation between Lenin and Luxemburg as does Mészáros:

Methodologically Lenin’s greatest asset was his unrivalled perception of the given historical and social specifities and of the immediate practical possibilities that could be derived from them. Rosa Luxemburg, by contrast, orientated herself towards the signposts of the broadest historical tendencies, often defiant of the given historical realities ... in most cases the circumstances required Lenin’s unsurpassable grasp of the concrete if one wanted to prevail against the powerful historical adversary…
Thus, it would be hopelessly one‑sided to identify oneself with the perspectives of Lenin or Luxemburg, one against the other, without recognising at the same time the historically determined – problematic aspects of both. For only the two together, in their complementarity as reciprocal correctives to one another, could add up to a fully adequate strategic vision. One that transcends the immediacy of the sociohistorical constraints, in the spirit of Luxemburg, and at the same time provides the necessary practical correctives from Lenin’s standpoint, in accordance with the ‘force of circumstance’, to the most fundamental socialist principles and corresponding material determinations ... which can only prevail in the long run. (Power of ideology pp325, 329 & 328).

As such, organisation not only acts as the mediation between theory and practice, but also between the present and future goals, contingency and necessity.

Lukács and the party

Georg Lukács’ theorisation of class consciousness and the role of the communist party in History and class consciousness has been the source of much debate since a yellowed manuscript had the dust blown off it in the London School of Economics in the Sixties. Much of what Lukács did do represents a constructive elaboration of Marxism and an assault on dogma. However, qualifications must be made to his theory of the party. He was correct to identify the “idea of the Communist Party ... as one of the most important intellectual questions of the revolution”, rather than as merely an organisation question (History and class consciousness p295). The same essay, ‘Towards a methodology of the problem of organisation’, also emphasised “Organisation is the form of mediation between theory and practice” (ibid p299). [9]

However, it is characteristic of Lukács’ view of class consciousness and its organisational embodiment at this time is cut free from anything outside its own immediate terms of reference. The political conflicts of the party are abstracted from the material determinations of these conflicts. What is more, Lukács justifies this, and nowhere clearer than here:

The stratifications within the proletariat that lead to the formation of the various labour parties and of the Communist Party are no objective, economic stratifications in the proletariat but simply stages in the development of its class consciousness. Individual proletarian strata are no more predestined to become communists by virtue of their economic existence than the individual worker is born a communist. Every worker who is born into capitalist society and grows up under its influence has to acquire by a more or less arduous process of experience a correct understanding of his own class situation (ibid p326).

This ignores the material conditions in which particular workers struggle. Stratifications within the proletariat, between the relatively privileged sections in the imperialist nations to those of the oppressed nations, fragmentation resulting from the social division of labour, etc, are reduced to stages in the development of their class consciousness. This leaves Lukács without any real grasp of where this consciousness stems from.

Although Lukács’ work of the time represents a real development of the theory of class consciousness and its organisational embodiments, his failure to relate it to socio‑economic conditions leads him to voluntarism. On the role of the party, he disagrees that:

the party is a power which can accelerate and provoke development, but only within a movement which will – in the last analysis – progress independently of what the party decides.

Instead he proposes the function of the party as:

rousing the proletarian masses from their lethargy through independent party action, undertaken at the correct moment and with correct slogans ... severing the knot of the ideological crisis of the proletariat with the sword of action. (Political writings 1919‑1929 pp98 & 104).

It seems strange that such a profoundly dialectical thinker as Lukács should resort to such a mechanical counterposition. After all, what dictates what is the correct moment to use the correct slogans, if not the real conditions and movement of the working class?

If we are to gain anything from Lukács’ writings – and there is much to be gained – his assessment of the role of consciousness, organisation and the party must be rerooted in their material grounding. The communist party is not only the systemisation of necessary class consciousness, and its organisational expression. It also politically overcomes the atomisation of the social division of labour to the extent possible within capitalist society. As such, the communist party must give shape to the interests of the class in and for itself, while being able to relate this to the immediate conditions of the proletariat as it is constituted.

Its ability to guide the working class is a result of the interaction between the social conditions of capitalist society which stratify the proletariat and the party’s ability to provide effective programmes of action to unity the masses in accordance with this.

Lukács’ abstract consideration of class consciousness in the early 1920s cut him off from the necessary analysis of its basis, in effect reducing him to appeals to the party as the bearer of class consciousness: what workers would do if only they were aware of their real situation. Lukács views the role of the party is essentially ethical and moral, as one can see from the subject matter of much of his writing at this time, and so fails to understand the real interaction between party and class.

Paradoxically, while discounting the economic stratification of the proletariat as in any way determinant, Lukács relates the possibility of class consciousness to the immediate work situation of the worker:

For his work as he experiences it directly possesses the naked and abstract form of the commodity, while in the other forms of work this is hidden behind the facade of ‘mental labour’, of ‘responsibility’ etc... the man reified in the bureaucracy, for instance, is turned into a commodity, mechanised and reified in the only facilities that might enable him to rebel against reification. (History and class consciousness p172).

Lukács relates the form of consciousness to the immediate form of individual labour. The manual labourer, it seems, can transcend the limits of her immediate individual interests within capitalism because her “humanity and soul are not changed into commodities” (ibid), whereas for the mental labourer this is not the case. But mental and manual labour are divisions within the proletariat. A mental worker is no less capable of being conscious of her true social position than the manual worker. Alienation of labour power for the mental worker is not alienation of the power to think independently – let alone of soul, whatever that is – anymore than alienation of labour power for the manual worker is the alienation of the power to act independently. The development of class consciousness for the proletariat as a whole is a result of the social processes set in motion by the alienation of labour power per se. Lukács was to acknowledge absence of a coherent understanding of the social form of labour and its relation to consciousness in his 1967 preface (ibid pxvii).

Conditions of organisation today

How to bridge the gap between existing contingent and the possibility of necessary class consciousness? Its possibility does not make it an historical inevitability. It remains a task that confronts the working class, only attainable through the action of that class. Such action will not be spontaneous, but only develop through the different levels of organisation of the working class.

Because of the existing and developing fragmentation of labour by capital, at any time the majority of the working class will only at best be partially aware of their situation, and, to a greater extent, not organised to the degree necessary to give this understanding a material expression. It is (a) true(ism), then, that those sections of the working class with a greater awareness of their situation will organise accordingly. One can also add, that when this awareness has not resulted in any viable strategy to alter the situation of the working class, those sections will remain marginalised and tend to fragmentation. Whether one accepts the explanation of the causes, it is fairly uncontroversial that this end result is not so far from the condition of the left in Britain: a condition that has not markedly changed through the experience of workers’ struggles over the last decade and more.

There has to be a relationship between the manner of the reproduction of labour, strategy, and the forms of organisation. The key problem is that such a relationship is at best inadequately theorised.

The consciously revolutionary members of the working class must exist in such a way as enable it to make the movement against capital a reality within the working class. This requires their organisation. That much is obvious. What is not so obvious are the forms of organisation appropriate to the conditions communists face today – organisation that will be able to both structure, and be structured by, the development of working class struggle, adequate to the strategic objectives of that class.

In many ways, Marxists are in a position not confronted by our authorities of the past. Marx played a key role in the organisation of the European workers’ movement for almost half a century. Luxemburg and Gramsci wrestled with the strategic problems of a mass movement of which they were a part – indeed, central to: from the mass organisations of German social democracy, to the mass revolts of the Italian workers’ councils. Bolshevism grew with the workers’ movement in the volatile and unstable Russian empire.

Today in Britain we live the reality of Luxemburg’s warning of the danger of socialism losing its mass character. This is generally the case world-wide. The lack of effective strategies from the workers’ movement to confront capital’s attacks, accelerated by the effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have had a destructive effect on workers’ consciousness and especially on those organisations that consider themselves Marxist. In particular, we have seen first the ossification, erosion, and, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the implosion of many of the world’s Communist Parties. These parties represented a distortion of Marxism – more often than not, that’s the most charitable one could be about their ideology. But they were also an organised expression of the real development of class consciousness – consciousness that has largely been dissolved through ideological crisis and organisational collapse. These organisations lost first their goal, then their mass character.

For the first time, Marxists are peripheral to the workers’ movement. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the ‘Marxist’ parties of the Second International built and maintained their mass character by adopting to the changing conditions of capitalism as the workers’ movement lost its revolutionary character. Later, many Communist Parties, even in Western Europe, retained a mass base within the working class. Although these parties shed any real adherence to Marxism, their formal espousal of it helped maintain a currency for the idea of communism within the working class. There is now no international movement which offers Marxists an immediate audience. There is certainly no substantial movement in Britain which does. The corollary of this is that the working class is bereft of its own strategy against capital. It is socially and politically dominated by the bourgeoisie to a degree that has not existed for at least the greater part of this century.

The nature and stability of this domination can only be properly understood through a detailed study of the ideological, political and economic process at work within the different sections of the working class in this period. That is not within the scope of this article – or this article would be a very thick book – so any conclusions are necessarily of a provisional nature.

Just how relevant is the Bolshevik form of organisation in current circumstances? Lukács argues “Lenin’s concept of party organisation presupposes the fact – the actuality of revolution … as in instrument of class struggle in a revolutionary period” (Lenin: a study in the unity of his thought). Lenin makes the same point:

Politics cannot be separated mechanically from organisation questions and anybody who accepts the Bolshevik party organisation independently of whether or not we live in a time of proletarian revolution has completely misunderstood it. (quoted in ibid)

Or is anyone seriously arguing that “an acutely revolutionary situation can break out at any moment” (ibid)?

If we look at much of the left’s caricature of Bolshevism, it seems to be precisely the formal means acting as a talisman to ward off opportunism that Luxemburg warned against. A situation exists where the theoretical activity of much of the left either has no bearing on its practice – much less the practice of the wider working class movement – or is tailored to suit it.

The conditions of society are the departure point for Marxists, and so the study of the processes at work a prime concern. Marx concludes his ‘Summary of the materialist concept of history’ in The German ideology in this vein, in a manner which has some bearing on the conditions and manner of the communist parties’ operation, as understood by Lenin and Lukács:

These conditions of life, which different generations find in existence, determine also whether or not the revolutionary convulsion periodically recurring in history will be strong enough to overthrow the basis of everything that exists. And if these material elements of a complete revolution are not present – namely, on the one hand the existing productive forces, on the other the formation of the revolutionary mass, which revolts not only against separate conditions of existing society, but against the existing ‘production of life’ itself, the ‘total activity’ on which it is based – then it is absolutely immaterial for practical development whether the idea of this revolution has been expressed a hundred times already, as the history of communism proves. (MECW Vol 5 p54).

Seen in this light, it seems apparent that the some of the most ‘practical’ and activist‑orientated organisations bear the most responsibility for reducing Marxism to a body of speculative dogma. Not having a concrete understanding of the conditions which enables the development of effective, practical strategy – or even a grasp of the Marxist method with which to make this possible – activism has merely continued to add to the one hundred expressions of the idea of revolution that Marx had totted up by 1845.

Immediate tasks

The working class movement needs to develop an understanding of its own situation in this period. Marxists need a clear perspective with which to contribute to this: a perspective I believe is lacking. This is published both in the belief that it has something to offer in remedying this, and to engage wider numbers in debate and self‑clarification.

This is not a retreat from practice, but a necessary prerequisite for effective practice. By way of example, after the defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1847‑8, Marx and Engels argued that the revolution had subsided, and carried out an orderly retreat of the small numbers that remained around them, in opposition to the Willich‑Schapper group in the Communist League, who argued for sustained activism. This was precisely to engage in the vital task of self‑clarification. As Engels expressed it in a letter to Marx in 1851:

The main thing at the moment is to find some way of getting our things published: either in a quarterly in which we make a frontal attack and consolidate our position so far as persons are concerned; or in fat books where we do the same without being under the necessity of mentioning any one of these vipers. (MECW Vol 38 pp290‑1)

Marx and Engels did not so much as reject the activity of party building, but recognise that the basis for its achievement – both around them in society, and theoretically within the revolutionary milieu – did not exist. They therefore set themselves the basis for its future undertaking through critique of the one, thereby equipping the other. In order to do so, they quite consciously severed their links with confused activist trends, organisational subsumption within which would only have side-tracked their work. Marx’s dispute with Schapper was between one trend which recognised the demands of the current situation and organised accordingly and another, which did not, and retained only a husk of working class organisation; a historical dead‑end.

The thorough‑going critique undertaken from the early 1850s yielded not only Capital, published in 1867, but the International Working Men’s Association, founded in 1864.

Without looking for exact parallels it is possible to say that, like the 1850s, we are living through a period of working class defeats; defeats which have not been adequately understood by the left, which contracts and expresses ever greater confusion as a result. It is necessary to recognise and evaluate these defeats, and to critically reassess, to prepare the way for the future reconstruction of the working class movement. In the process of theoretical elaboration, we must aim to contribute to the development of a cadre able to realise the Marxist method within the working class movement. Not only is this a prerequisite for the regroupment of advanced workers around a revolutionary strategy, communist organisation is inconceivable without such a level of consciousness:

The centralised organisation of the party is of course a prerequisite for the revolutionary discipline of its members. But the fully developed consciousness of the party members in this question is in turn a prerequisite for the feasibility of any such centralisation. (Lukács Political writings p116).

If this is not the case, the fully‑rounded participation of revolutionaries within the organisation that is supposed to express their interests is impossible, and the organisation ossifies into an elite leadership and a politically passive rank and file.

The organisational fragmentation of the left is not only a result of working class defeats, but a symptom of the fact that ‘Marxists’ have not understood Marxism. Organisational fragmentation mirrors ideological confusion, the failure to elaborate any meaningful strategy, and therefore the absence of any real criterion to judge one’s theory and practice. Unity under such circumstances is a shallow hope: there is no clear appreciation of unity around what, and for what. “Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.” (Lenin CW Vol 20 p232). Unity, as Marx warned, is bought at too high a price if it is at the expense of bargaining about principles. The job is to re‑elaborate and clarify these principles, as they arise from the real conditions of society.

Towards this end of developing Marxism, and unifying Marxists, we must be clear about what Marxism is and its relevance for today.

P Topliss

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[1] This is the reverse of the convention generally adopted by those holding a similar view, such as Stephen Perkins’s Marxism and the proletariat, pp169-71. I have done this to avoid labelling something I do not believe to be a class ‘the working class’.

[2] Hegel makes a similar point in regard to “the class of slaves … [which] is not a class, for it is only formally a universal. The slave is related as a single individual to his master.” (System of ethical life and First philosophy of Spirit, Eds: HS Harris and TM Knox, p152).

Hal Draper attempts to make an economic reductionist of Marx by adding “[subjectively]” to the end of the above quote from the Brumaire (Draper, Karl Marx’s theory of revolution, vol II: The politics of social classes, p349). Suffice to say, if Marx had meant subjectively, I think he would have said subjectively.

[3] One facet of this is the separation of physical and mental labour, where thought appears to be merely contemplative, relating externally to reality, not a transformative and integral part of that reality. This is because mental labour is divided from practically transformative, physical labour. Practice and consciousness seem naturally separate, not as what they really are: a historically specific result of class society.

[4] Recent works that argue that Marx has an increasing debt to Hegel, despite an abandonment of the ‘Hegelian’ terminology of early works (in contrast to the structural Marxist distinction between the young Hegelian Marx and the mature ‘scientific’ Marx) include Tony Smith’s The logic of Marx’s Capital and Ali Shamsavari’s Dialectics and social theory. This is an approach I am in broad agreement with.

[5] There are important links between Marx’s approach to this and Hegel’s categorisation of the Understanding (see David MacGregor, The communist ideal in Hegel and Marx).

[6] See ‘Programme’, below

[7] David MacGregor puts this more strongly, in regard to what Marx in the 1840s failed to take from Hegel: “Marx, with his expectations of imminent revolution, jettisoned every element of the Hegelian system which promised to restore unity to the disintegrating fabric of industrial capitalism. He ignored Hegel’s suggestion that the consciousness of the proletariat is not all that different from the Understanding of the bourgeoisie, and as a result he underestimated the potential for reformism in the working class movement” (The communist ideal in Hegel and Marx p33). Although I believe there is much of interest in MacGregor’s work, on this point at least he does not give enough credit to the uniqueness of Marx’s theory of alienation/commodity fetishism.

[8] This is not to substitute Kautsky’s brand of positivism with a form of workerism based on immediate experience. Communist theory and class consciousness are also a product of the immanent development in science and philosophy (eg, Smith and Ricardo’s political economy and Hegel’s dialectic), themselves historically situated.

[9] This is a straight paraphrase of Hegel’s statement that “work and effort, [are] the middle term between the subjective and objective” (Philosophy of Right p126, trans: TM Knox).

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