A Class-For-Itself

When fear and terror become the organising principles of a society in which the tyranny of the state has been replaced by the despotism of an unaccountable market, violence becomes the only valid form of control. The net effect is an entirely intentional grinding down of the majority of the population in order to maintain the dominance of the rich and powerful. The system has not failed. It is doing exactly what it is supposed to do, which is to punish those it considers dangerous or disposable - which increasingly includes more and more individuals and groups.

 In an age when the delete button and an utterly commodified and privatised culture can erase all vestiges of memory and commitment, it is easy for a society to remove from itself sordid memories that reveal the systemic injustices and inequalities which disconnect broader understanding of the past that no longer has any connection to the present. For those who are able to find work, the workplace is increasingly precarious. Whether due to zero-hours contracts, the threat of cuts-related redundancies or the removal of funding, our pay packets are constantly under threat. It has been a case of ‘death by a thousand cuts’ accompanied by a barrage of scapegoating propaganda in the media. While capitalists have acquired increasing financial gain at the expense of now stagnating workers’ wages and from the slashing cuts to healthcare, housing, education and welfare it is not safe to assume that the working class, have finished reacting to all this. Many believe that the imposition of austerity policies would rally people to their cause. This is not an entirely baseless assumption. Today is a new day, particularly for those who embrace and proclaim the need for a total change — a new civilisation.

The Occupy movement was not exactly anti-capitalist, though it did take aim at key aspects of the neo-liberal model of capitalism such as financiers and bankers. Because the movement gave expression to what many people were feeling, and because it was leaderless and non-ideological, it grew rapidly. Still, their numbers were only in the thousands, or perhaps tens of thousands. However, support for Occupy’s goals and for what Occupiers were doing was more widespread. Their slogan “we are the 99%” rang true. Nevertheless, Occupy melted away. This remind us, of a few things. One is that relief from systemic oppression requires radical solutions. Calls for punishing the Wall Street crooks who caused the financial crisis will not reform the system that produced the financial debacle. Such reforms simply give the system a veil of legitimacy, suggesting it can be fixed. It can’t be fixed. The other is that for popular is not enough and that political action must be taken. The people it mobilised expressed rage and celebrated the realization that “a different world is possible.”  But they had no idea how to change the world; and, even if they had, they lacked the means to advance it.

In capitalism’s current phase, it is often expedient for capitalists to export high paying manufacturing jobs overseas. This keeps wages down, even as profits rise, harming all workers, and putting the unions that still represent them in jeopardy. It is a vicious cycle that is especially harmful to those who are least well off. Many people know that instead of bringing the bottom up capitalism pushes the bottom down. Austerity has had the effect of wearing people down, of creating fears, anxieties and deprivations that have forced many to fight simply to keep their own heads above water. The tightening of belts of essential services has meant that those already suffering are made to suffer again. Capitalism is the root of the problems that Occupy protesters onto the streets but this understanding has got lost. It is not enough merely to attack the symptoms of disempowerment; the solution must be more radical. In short, the remedy for political disempowerment is the economic empowerment of the disempowered. This cannot be achieved at the individual level; it requires restructuring the economic structure itself. Since capitalism has always been the main obstacle in the way of empowering people the time to once again make it Public Enemy Number One.

The Occupy movement was moving towards this understanding, but never quite got there. For socialists, changing the world for the better has always been the aim. It can sometimes be useful to vent anger at oppressive circumstances. But, in the end, political struggle is indispensable. The debate among the earlier socialists was not over whether struggles to end oppression should move into the political arena, but how. Every conceivable way was envisioned and tried – violent and peaceful, legal and extra-legal, vanguardist and mass-based. Many lessons should have been learned yet for all practical purposes, the lessons learned from bitter experience it is now lost knowledge. This has been the painful realization for many in the Socialist Party that instead of building upon the past, it seems we now once more require to re-invent the wheel. What is important is that we work out what has happened and learn from the past so that the coming struggles can be better comprehended. As long as solidarity cannot be extended anti-capitalist social movements will remain of limited effectiveness. When there are significant barriers to solidarity, the state can govern unimpeded. What is needed is a wholesale change, a revolution, and end to the misery of private property and the inevitable inequality which goes with it; a new system of society which integrates everyone and distributes its wealth according to the reasonable needs of its members. This new socialist society would abolish at a stroke the problems of deprivation and exclusion. It would enable the wasted talent of those who are presently excluded on economic grounds from a proper participation in the life of society to be properly developed.

The goal of a socialist society based on human values and not economic ones, means that the machines and technology serve the operators and not the other way round. Freed from pointless drudgery, more meaningful work can be developed by those who, for example, want to pursue a craft, but have had no time to develop skill, or those who yearn to do a socially useful task, but couldn’t afford to before. Scores of socially useful tasks, many related to restoring the environment, that today go undone will attract people to work for pleasure. We are not talking about eliminating all jobs, just the most stupid and boring of them, and reducing the time people spend at the rest. Necessary work, the kind that often is undervalued today, may be the most physically exhausting and should be shared in a just society.

But to achieve such a world people need to form themselves into agents of change – or as Marx said, a class-for-itself – to agitate for common ownership. Our ruling class is expert on creating dissension within the workers. One need only refer to the social divisions employers enforced in the early labour movement. However, women, blacks and immigrants often find themselves in identical situations, and the recognition of commonality in struggle begins to define class and galvanise into a force of class struggle. Socialism simply will not come about by wishing it so but requires action. We need a new politics of real change. One thing is certain, no social change of any significance will occur without a re-newed class struggle.