Revolutionary Practice

 Most on the Left who are denouncing economic inequality and poverty take the system of private ownership for granted and merely call for greater income equality on its basis. What must be called into question are the reason commodities, money, and other privately owned things exist in the first place. As long as a system composed of private ownership of such things continued to exist, problems such as widening economic disparities, and poverty would be inevitable.

Today a variety of problems related to the economic system exist. Many people are treated as expendable resources by disreputable firms that subject them to excessively long working hours. And an increasing number of workers are unable to find permanent positions and have to settle for temporary jobs. The finance sector has swelled compared to the real economy, and speculative bubbles periodically expand and then burst, generating mass unemployment. All of these problems are peculiar to capitalism, and the fundamental cause is an economic system that prioritises profit. Human lives are sacrificed to money, throwing society into chaos.

 

The working class is the product of capitalist society. As such, its mindset is subjected to the influence of this society. Its consciousness is developed under the pressure of its masters. Education, the media and social life—in short,  all the factors shaping the consciousness of the working people—are powerful conductors of the influence of capitalist ideas and attitudes.

It is based on the recognition of the dependence of people’s thinking on their material environment. Such a recognition was characteristic of many progressive thinkers, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They all recognised that the mental servitude of the masses was generated by the material conditions of their situation in the present society. And all of them drew the conclusion that only a fundamental change in the material conditions in which the people lived,  only a fundamental transformation of society, would render the masses capable of directing their own destiny.

But who will change these conditions?

The intellectuals of humanity who come out of the privileged classes, that is to say, individuals freed from the material conditions that overwhelm the thinking of the masses—that was the answer of the Utopians and political leaders. The task of performing this transformation fell to the legislators and to the philanthropists

Marx observed in “Theses on Feuerbach”:

“The materialist doctrine that people are products of circumstances and education, and that, therefore, changed people are products of other circumstances and changed education, forgets that it is them people who change the circumstances and that the educators must themselves be educated. Hence, this doctrine must of necessity divide society into two parts, one of which is elevated above the other (in Robert Owen, for example).” 

Applied to the class struggle, this means the following. Driven by the very “circumstances” of capitalist society that form its character as a subjugated class, the proletariat enters into a struggle against the society that subjugates it. The process of this struggle modifies the social “circumstances.” It modifies the environment in which the working-class lives. In this way, the working class modifies its own character. From a class reflecting passively the mental servitude to which it is subjected, it becomes a class that actively overthrows all subjugation, including that of the mind.

This process is far from straightforward. It does not take place evenly in all sectors of the working people, nor all aspects of proletarian consciousness. It will not, of course, be complete when a combination of historical circumstances makes it possible or even inevitable the working-class tearing the apparatus of political power from the hands of the bourgeoisie.

The workers are condemned to enter socialism burdened by a significant share of those “vices of the oppressed”.

In the process of the struggle against capitalism, the proletariat modifies the material environment surrounding it, thereby modifying its own character and emancipating itself intellectually and spiritually.

Likewise, in the process of using its conquered power to systematically construct the entire social order, the working class eventually frees itself from the intellectual influence of the old society, because it achieves a radical transformation in the material environment by which its character is determined. of 

But only as the result of a long, painful and contradictory process in which, as in all preceding historical processes, social creativity develops only under necessity,

And the pressure of needs. The conscious will of the members of the working class can appreciably shorten and facilitate this process. It can never bypass it.

Some on the Left assume that if a cohesive revolutionary minority, with the will-power to establish socialism, seizes the machinery of state administration and concentrates in its own hands all the means of production and distribution as well as all organisational institutions of  society it may if guided by the ideals of socialism create conditions in which prevailing attitudes can be purged of its past belief-system and be filled with a new content, such as Che Guavara’s “New Socialist Man”. Then, and only then, will the people on their own and take the path to socialism.

If this ideal was followed, it would lead to the diametrically opposite result, if only because, in Marx’s words, the “educators must be educated,” and because, therefore, such relationships established between the “advanced” minority and the “ignorant” masses, educate the dictators in all possible ways, but not as people capable of directing the course of social development along the path of building a new society.

 

It goes without saying that such an education can only corrupt and debase the masses. The only possible builder of the new society, and consequently the only possible successor to the former dominant classes in the administration of the state, is the working class considered as a whole, including knowledge-workers, the workers of intellectual labour, whose cooperation in the direction of the state and the administration of the economy is so obviously necessary. (Marx wrote Capital to “shorten and lessen the birth-pangs” for socialist society to emerge from the womb of capitalism.

This change must manifest itself in every part of the life of society. This is only possible with the maximum development of the organised self-activity  of all the component parts of the working class—that is, under conditions that absolutely preclude the dictatorship of a minority standing “above society,” along with its indispensable companions of such a dictatorship: authoritarianism and bureaucracy.

This “despotism of capital” allows capital to create conditions for its own accumulation. However, workers eventually see through this mechanism to understand that protecting their own lives requires safeguarding the lives of the unemployed, and “by setting up trade unions, etc., they try to organise planned co-operation between the employed and the unemployed in order to obviate or to weaken the ruinous effects of this natural law of capitalist production on their class.” as Marx explains.

In the process of freely constructing a new society, working people will re-educate themselves and reject those behaviours and traits that come directly into conflict with the tasks they face. This applies both to the working class as a whole and to each of its individual sectors.

Marx points out, “the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.” The possibility of such revolutionary practice is conditioned by human activities and the environment reproduced through those activities.

Our goal is not to merely to change masters, but to cease having masters altogether.