Understanding People

Consciousness changes in struggle, but there is no preordained level, or particular content, that rising consciousness automatically takes. Socialist consciousness emerges as the movement matures. Until then consciousness takes many different forms, including ideas that turn out to be dead-ends, or which can derail a movement before it ever attains socialist consciousness. There are no inevitable lessons people mechanically learn from class struggle. There has to be discussion, debate and a discourse over lessons of past fights and what is the best way forward, in which various arguments contend for influence. Workers are not blank slates whose heads are waiting to be filled up. They carry ideological baggage from their past and they are influenced by the clash of contending opinions. Different political currents, from left and right, contest for the direction of the movement. Whether or not their ideas are appropriate or beneficial, most believe that what they are proposing is in the best interest of the workers’ movement.

The Socialist Party is one contender among others to prove their ideas and perspectives of the movement. If socialists don’t struggle for a set of political ideas to shape that movement, others will. Political movements, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Our ideas are based on our principles. Socialism can only occur by people determining their own fate. We reject elitism and vanguardism yet we do not bow down to the current level of struggle nor opportunistically flatter the movement, by saying: “Whatever you’re doing, that’s alright, that’s fine.”

The task of socialists in this situation is not simply to offer an alternative ideology, a total explanation of the world, but to draw out the class consciousness that makes such bigger ideas realistic. We do not proceed from some faceless idea of the working class. The roots of worker self-activity and self-organisation in opposition to the employer lie, in the first place, in the reality of exploitation; i.e., the wage relationship—the very heart of capitalist accumulation, expansion, and growth. It is in the workplace, in the basic social relations of production, that the fight over the extra product of productivity occurs most sharply on a regular basis, and where even perceptions of bigger events can be shaped in a class perspective. The workplace is also, of course, where workers have the most power to act on their class consciousness, whatever its source may be.

Imagine a society in which the worker, instead of working for the profit ends of a private owner, works instead for the benefit of other people. In socialism, the products of social labour are enjoyed directly by the community themselves as a class. So, rather than working for someone else’s profit ends, or competing for more bread-crumbs than your neighbour, you are working for your own benefit in the context of broader society. Why is this so? It is because your work (along with everyone else’s) will work to increase overall production in society, whose rewards will be enjoyed by the society as a whole. As a member of that society, as a worker in socialism, you are entitled to work and share in the products of that work. It is in this way that socialism will work to meet the needs and wants of all members in society in a way that capitalist exploitation cannot.

The capitalists would be quick to denounce such a thing as Utopian because according to them people are too motivated by self-interest to be interested by these abstract altruistic benefits. To them, the only way to encourage hard work is to have a carrot and stick, with material wealth being the carrot and abject poverty being the stick. Their understanding follows that capitalism is a true meritocracy; that the wealthy are wealthy by virtue of the value of their work, and if their ability to accumulate wealth is harmed, they will have no incentive to contribute this work to the social good. The example of a doctor is frequently given. Why work hard, go through many years of education, to become a doctor if you won’t make more money doing that?

But studies of human behaviour reveals remuneration is not the sole incentive for hard labour, in that many undertake care work without the same monetary incentives enjoyed by your average doctor. In any hospital, there are technicians, nurses and other workers who are not as well paid as doctors (yet do the same work, if not more work, than your typical doctor) that do their jobs very well without this fiscal incentive. In addition to paying the bills and providing some funds for personal maintenance and enjoyment, people undertake such jobs to reap other benefits, in that they may actually enjoy the work that they do or the feeling they get for helping others. These benefits fall under the meeting of human needs for production, in both the material and social sense. There is another force which will compel workers under socialism: the broader social need for certain types of labor to be done. In capitalism, where the profit ends of an ownership class decide what work is done for what pay, compensation and the social need for work rarely coincide. For instance, teachers are vastly more important to all members of society than models, actors or television spokespersons. Education is a vital social need, yet educators are paid very little for their work being that they aren’t in the more lucrative position of advancing a capitalists profit motive. The very people who build society are very meagerly compensated for their essential work, while those who aid the parasites in their exploitative adventures make a king’s ransom.

In socialism rather than capitalism’s carrot and stick, the necessary risk of unemployment under capitalism to force workers to take on work which is inadequately compensated (and therefore, undesirable) compared to the decadence enjoyed by those who best help advance the ends of capitalist profit, the emphasis in socialism is on the work that it needed for the betterment of social conditions. The bottom line is that every worker in socialism has their individual interests invested in the success of socialism. In order to protect these individual and collective interests, the worker is encouraged to take up that work that best suits current social needs. The force which would provide this encouragement is socialist consciousness, the understanding that one’s personal ambitions coincides with those of other members of society if anyone is to meet their needs.

It is here where the capitalists assert the “self-made man” theory and argue that it is irrational to put any other person’s needs above one’s own. This argument completely ignores the entirety of the human experience. It ignores the fact that human beings are social creatures, who fundamentally depend on one another’s labor for mutual survival. It ignores the fact that we have a fundamental relationship with the all the peoples of the world simply by living in it. Consider the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the car we drive. Where did these things come from? What force made them possible? The answer is labour; the labour of our fellow human being. To defend ourselves from exploitation, we must be willing to defend one another. It is only rational to do so, being that we depend on one another anyway for our continued material and social production, to protect oneself and one’s fellow person, compromises will need to be made between individual and social desires and needs. Yet, such compromise is already a fact of social life. We already accept on some level that we need to limit ourselves and make sacrifices for the benefit of others. Consider the situation of a crowded subway car, where a pregnant woman is in need of a seat. Will not two or three people stand in order to allow the woman to get off of her aching feet? Now, consider a more serious sacrifice, say in the face of a natural disaster. Aren’t there always those people who sacrifice their own time, efforts and even safety to help one’s fellow man and woman? This socialist consciousness is already, in one form or another, a component to our social selves.

Just as the ruling class works tirelessly to maintain their dictatorship over the workers, workers will work every bit as hard to maintain the social order in which workers control. They will work to defend the gains of their revolution, to defend themselves and every member of society from exploitation by working to meet collective needs and advance social ends. We already work to defend ourselves and our loved ones from poverty and the worst forms of exploitation, yet in socialism, the products of that labour will go to defend all people collectively.

The essential reality is that in a system construed around the profit motive, the success of the few is predicated on the suffering and loss of the many. We need one another, yet the current mode of production requires that the vast masses of workers be subjected to some of the worst conditions imaginable. Can we continue to live in a world characterised by such oppression? Can we call ourselves human if we can look away? The answer should be no. In order for anyone to be free of the forces of exploitation and alienation, everyone must be free of these forces.

It is these benefits that will guide the individual worker in what he/she desires to do for work in socialist society, rather than the avoidance of poverty. The question changes from “how can I make a profit” or “how can I make ends meet” to “how can I help, while enjoying what I do?” This change in the essential question that guides work is brought about through the construction of socialist relations to the means of production, as well as the consciousness of workers in society. As people no longer have to worry about going hungry doing the work they do, they are allowed to decide for themselves what work they want to undertake.

A socialist party is measured by the enemies it makes and the friends it makes.