Growing Consciousness

Some writers in have been saying that the Marxist theories have become antiquated owing to the facts of economic science, and that therefore it would be necessary to proceed to a complete revision of the theories expounded by Karl Marx. To make a long story short, nothing has really changed within the camp of the capitalist. Exploitation, oppression and reaction still reign supreme. And violent repression is always present, available as often as necessary.The Socialist Party makes no apology for our  principles.  We seek  the common of all wealth production, and this involves the complete elimination of the capitalist system.

There are doubtless many sincere people who shudder at the word socialism yet who, nevertheless wish  to see better conditions and who think things are steadily improving. Ask them how and they will answer you with vague platitudes and some cherry-picked statistics. Ask how soon will be the abolition of  poverty for all and the answer becomes even more hazy. Yet it we socialists who are charged by them for not being explicit enough in our ideas and aspirations and they turn a deaf ear to our education and agitation.

The aim of Socialism has always been to abolish squalid conditions of life, and  replace with by at least sufficiency, if not abundance or even luxury,  for all alike without discrimination. Socialism has never proclaimed itself proponents of spartan austerity or puritanical abstinence. On the contrary, we demand good living for all.

 Those whose sympathies are with the economic demand of socialism, but who still hold reservations ask what attitude socialism takes up as regards other questions of personal and social life, apart from its strictly economic aspects.  We don’t want hard-and-fast lines drawn, but  nor evasions, to many questions continually being asked but our aspiration is a social ideal,  not a personal goal.

We are well acquainted with the critics of socialism declaring human ‘nature’ being what it is all men and women are greedy and lazy. We live in a post-scarcity society. It is now possible for the whole world, not just the lucky minority, to live a comfortable life with more than just adequate food clothing and shelter. We can produce abundance, enough for everybody. The doomsters and catastrophists are wrong.

Of course, if we all lived the American lifestyle where 5 percent of the world’s population uses 25 percent of its resources, we would require four Planet Earths. The average American eat too much meat, drive too many miles, live in houses that are too big and too far apart, shop too much for stuff they don’t really need. America’s poor are wealthier than most of the world. Depictions of  consumerism tend to suggest that blame lies with the ravenous, grasping masses.

Yet it is the top five hundred million people by income, comprising about 8 percent of global population, are responsible for 50 percent of all carbon emissions. It’s a truly global elite, with high emitters present in all countries of the world. In Western Europe, the transportation footprint of the top income earners is 250 percent of that of the poor.

People drive cars instead of taking the bus or train, move to a house with a garden instead of going to the park, buy books and home entertainment systems instead of going to libraries and museums, drink bottled water instead of tap—if they can afford to. It doesn’t make us any  happier. Rather, the status-symbol treadmill of keeping up with the Jones frequently produces and fuels  anxiety, inadequacy and debt under the banner of individual liberty and freedom of choice.

 The sociologist Juliet Schor says we could work four-hour days without any decline in the standard of living; similarly, the New Economics Foundation proposes we could get by on a 21-hour workweek. This is not a new message. In the 19th century Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, was arguing for the right to be lazy.

At a certain stage in the life of every individual acquires a “consciousness” of personal identity and  becomes aware of their own  distinctiveness, physically and mentally. This sense of individuality, this power of ordered thought (“consciousness”), is the result of the development of the requisite brain-organ; and, as each individual from conception to maturity successively reproduces the stages through which the species as a whole has passed, by comparison we can ascertain the relative degree of development reached by any individual. When an individual has become “conscious”,  arrived at that stage of growth at which one perceives both the distinction and relation between oneself and the rest of creation— he or she  has acquired a power of reacting upon their environment; a power (limited but real) of “self-determination,” within, of course, the possibilities set by his physical powers and the said environment.

When conditions are ripe the working class will acquire, with the recognition of their place in society, and of their constraint and that which constrains them, and a perception of the vital organic force impelling them to struggle, their consciousness as a class—their power of “self-determination.” To make the working class thus “conscious,” it is necessary to make it understand the relation between it and the rest of (i.e., the other classes in) society.

Class-consciousness on the part of any one worker thus entails the recognition by him of his place as a unit in a class, at present politically ruled and economically enslaved, whose historic mission it is to carry Society forward into a higher stage of development: the recognition that the interests and therefore impulses of the individuals composing either ruling or ruled classes respectively are mutual and those of the two classes antagonistic, and consequently that the development of Society more and more produces a class-struggle for the possession of political power as a necessary pre-condition on the one hand for rule and on the other for emancipation.

The working-class-consciousness will express itself in a political organisation for the purpose of accomplishing this emancipation. That worker is class-conscious who has seen the duty of enlisting under the banner of Revolution—in the political party of the workers —a socialist party.