What is the ‘class struggle’? The term is a Marxian one, though not everyone who supports it follows Marx, and not even all Marxists support it these days.
What I intend to question is the Marxian notion of ‘class struggle’, the view held by most Marxists and some Marxian influenced socialists and anarchists. My criticism will no doubt also be relevent to other notions of ‘class struggle’, but I will not be dealing with these in any detail. Not least because for me they lack any kind of adequate definition, with their notions of ‘working class’, or ‘proletariat’ at best vague formulations that could refer to anything, from the fascistic classism, of some social subgroup, through a non-existant revolutionary class, to a trivial and ineffective classification including almost everyone. All of which are effectively counter revolutionary.
Many people have been quietly saying this for many years now, even some who still call themselves ‘class struggle anarchists’, but the institution of ‘class struggle’ has until recently been so deeply entrenched as to be dead weight that could not be shaken off. In fact in many ways it had become a religion. This is now beginning to change with the emergence of vocal currents within both libertarian Marxism and anarchist circles challenging this dogmatic faith. As well as a whole new generation, who, while increasingly politically conscious, regard the ‘class struggle’ as at best irrelevent, if not a major turn off.
This critique is not derived from scepticism towards the political siginificance of class as such, which is obviously of great relevance in many situations (economic class conflict will always be the most dominant form of relation in the work place for instance, and social class still remains a barrier to a unified community), but from scepticism towards the primacy of class in political analysis of life as a whole, and in particular its significance as the agent of revolutionary change.
This criticism will also have relevance to those who still style themselves ‘class struggle’ anarchists, many of whom use the term not as an indication of some Marxist delusion, but as a umbrella concept attempting to facilitate accord between a diverse range of anarchists of working class orientation and libertarian Marxists and others. Such a united front I suggest is a mistake. It is far more important to address the concerns of ordinary people and attempt to build a revolutionary movement from this, than it is to build bridges between politicized groups. The ‘left’ may be a tiny minority in need of unity but it will remain a minority (even if united) if it fails to address the everyday concerns of real people. While the ‘industrial class’ may have been a crucial factor in the 19th Century socialism of Marx and Bakunin (though some would even question this) it no longer is. In fact it may be part of the problem.
In this talk I will argue against the notion of Marxian ‘class struggle’, and suggest those comrades who wish to work through class based politics choose a better name (and better allies), and become specialists rather than generalists.
I also intend to challenge the whole basis of the Marxian paradigm which I think is the root problem, moving the critique on even further.
Finally I’ll suggest a few alternative approaches, which surprisingly may not be entirely free of the influence of Marx.
To start with I’ll look at more practical down to earth issues, and save the political philosophising till the end.
The first thing that needs to be said is the ‘class war’ to the extent it ever existed is over and lost. Whether we think the struggle lay in the hands of the industrial worker,
the dispossessed,
some wider notion of the proletariat or the underclass, all of these now generally
desire nothing more than a more comfortable position within capitalism, and
nothing we can do is going to convince them otherwise. Very few of todays
would be ‘revolutionaries’ are rooted in this economic background anymore.
I say this with reservations however, though not optimistic ones, as I think
part of our mistake is to assume that that such a ‘class’ exists as a unified
whole, with common interests, or could ever become one. Today’s citizen is
a complex individual moved by a wide range of interests that cut across simplistic
notions of class.
The notion of economic class is far more complex than it ever was with high wage industrial workers, ‘working class’ stockbrokers and permanently unemployed middle class dropouts everywhere.
Capitalism is also far more decentralised than it used to be with no clear division between wage slave and proprietor any more. The property owning elite has shrunk and disappeared into the shadows leaving a caste of payed, and so proletarian, local managers in control. And while the fat cats will always preserve their unequal share of the world’s wealth, the share owning society leads us ever closer to the Capitalism without Capitalists prophecy of some modern Marxists. Social class has also always been more complex than the simple tripartite upper, middle and lower class model, or working class vs bourgeois dualism. With a whole range of differing socio-cultural subgroups interacting within society. The middle class bank manager and the middle class school teacher are of very different subculture, as is the working class council estate dweller and working class suburbanite. And not to mention the cultural split between urbanite and ruralist often ignored by class struggle analysis. What we call the class system is not a simply binary relation but a massively complex interelation of a myriad of groups, some of whom can be classified into conceptually useful (though usually practically useless) general groupings. The only time binary relations emerge are in certain temporally limited and local conflict of real interests (such as those in the workplace).
Some may argue that this proves that workerist based struggles are the key
to change. But the ‘working class’ itself is now arguably a significant underpinner
of the capitalist system. The average person (of any class) has totally bought
into the notion of the consumer society and the worker is the integral unit
of an industrial society that not only feeds that consumption but pollutes
our environment too, driven not by feelings of alienation but by real desires
to improve (or sometimes just preserve) their economic power in order to buy
ever deeper into consumerism. This may all be psychological compensation for
their alienation under capitalist society but it is a deep seated one that
won’t be swept away with the wave of a red flag.
On a deeper level the very institution of labour itself and the work ethic in particular is one of the important pillars of capitalism. The worker, in his self valuation through work, is as much an active supporter of capitalism as his employer, or those who feed the system by consuming its junk. In fact the dividing line between these groups gets thinner every day. The revolution requires anti-workers not workers.
Beyond this categorisation of economic and social classes there are other equally important subdivisions of society with their own struggles. The most obvious being
gender, racial, sexual and cultural conflicts none of which can be really subsumed into class struggle, and it is only a false Marxian analysis we suggests they can. There is also the struggle between the free individual and the mass, class struggle tends to worsen rather than assist, being usually an ideology of the herd mind.
In short the ‘class struggle’ does not relate to the reality of modern society in any way and so cannot hope to be an effective means of change. In that respect it is counter revolutionary.
We can debate this further afterwards but first I want to move on to some more philosophical issues and state where and why I think Marx introduced the error of the ‘class struggle’, and why others found it so convincing.
On the whole I think Marx had a sound approach. Unlike other socialists who merely appealed to the ‘working class’ as an oppressed group (an approach bound to lead to social collectivism and fascism rather than individual freedom and to totalitariaism rather than libertarianism) Marx’s ideas were rooted in a practical philosophy of the emancipation of the individual within a communist society. And were geared towards not only a critique of Capitalism and Society but towards a sound project of social change. Firmly rooted in a Hegelian concept of the world Marx sought to shift Hegel’s emphasis away from abstract consciousness and towards concrete matter. This became both his strength and weakness.
But while Marx was a great thinker, he was not the only one, though he certainly acted as if he was, he could have learnt much from Nietzsche as well as from Bakunin (if he’d listened) and a better understanding of Hegel would have helped a lot.
Marx started with the correct premise that all human activity is rooted in the embodied human individual not abstractions like social groups or civilisations as Hegel had thought. As a materialist he believed that science would reveal truths about human activity that could be deployed in the service social transformation. If it had existed in his time he might have become a psychological behaviorist but as he admited himself no science of individual behavior was available in his time either psychological or biological. And anyway analysing the behavior of every human individual would prove hard. For this reason he turned to sociology that looked at the more managable phenomena of group behavior, with groups understood as abstractions for modeling human behavior or as sets of individuals acting in common interest. This was also appealing because sociology had become dominated by the only proved science of human behavior, economics. Or so he thought. This was not surprising Marx was right that his period of human history had been shaped by the bourgeois capitalist class, what he didn’t realise that science and economics had also been shaped by middle class as had the forms of sociology supervening on economics.
The other attraction of this economic basis for him was that it supplied a material basis for Hegel’s deterministic history and scientific laws to describe it. In time Marx’s Historical Materialism would become the infamous Dialectical Materialism. Marx saw the economic idea of developing production, advancing technology and economic growth as the driving force for this evolving history, which generated conflicts between economic interest groups, generalised as classes. The dominant class struggle was that between the Proletariat and the Capitalist Class. A determinate relation based on Hegel’s notion of the Slave – Master relationship. Here the Slave is predetermined to win out in the end and is on a historically determined path towards their own liberation and self realisation. Marx rightly saw the end result of human history not as something as trivial as the emancipation of the working class, but of the realisation of the full potential of every individual.
Unfortunately his thesis was fatally flawed. As he grew older Marx, who had come to see class as objective (rather than the abstraction it really was) due to the fact that it was based on material interests, and their rational consequences, without involvement subjective desires or awareness (which rooted in the embodied organism were far more concrete than class), saw class as something real in itself over and above the individual who merely manifested it. This kind of concrete idealism and associated social collectivism was not unlike the thinking of fascists and it is therefore not surprising that the red fascism of Leninism and Stalinism emerged from this trend.
But even in its earlier form the notion of class was problematic, individual actors in history never worked through class they worked through subgroups of society (landowners, police, industrial workers, lawyers). The initial response to this problem was that these subgroups were manifestations of the interests of classes that were never themselves seen. This instrumental class formation was interpreted in different ways and as malleable as any scientific hypothesis, including the non-existant epicycles that preserved the geocentric astronomy for centuries. Marxism was moving a long way from science (and as Popper observed eventually became irrefutable as it modified its thesis to fit all eventualities). Worse if class interests could unconsciously manifest in small groups within society, small groups, such as the Party, could consciously manifest the interests of the ‘working class’ and denounce as ‘false consciousness’ any ideas of the ‘working class’ to the contrary. Another slippery slope to totalitarianism.
To avoid this problem later Marxists, such as Lucacs, argued that class existed in potential but needed to be realised in moments of history when ‘class consciousness’ was achieved. But little evidence of such moments have been found.
Another problem with this view was that it claimed human consciousness was largely socially constructed and so itself was a product of the ‘class struggle’. The consequences of this was that everything not only supervened on material economics but on the class struggle itself. Which meant all ideology, culture and perhaps truth itself was reduced to manifestations of class dialectics. Thus most of the advances of western civilisation and the emergence of the autonomous individual could be discounted as a manifestation of bourgeois consciousness. Surely throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It is thus not surprising that Marxism in practise swiftly degenerates into Totalitarianism.
Most serious of all for Marxists is that if this account is true then they have no position for criticism at all outside of the class war, as all other perspectives, moral, aesthetic and theoretical, were mere bourgeois artifacts.
This problem was realised within Marxism quite late and led to the development of Critical Theory Marxism and the attempt to find a a critical position not solely conditioned by Class and Economics. This was a great step forward in that it opened up Marxian analysis to other determinents (taking cultural theoretic, psychological, biological, feminist and existentialist concepts into account) and above all sought an ethical underpinning for Anti-Capitalism. This position was quite tenable as anyone who has studied Hegel would realise. Early Hegelians, and particularly Marx himself, had over simplified the dialectical process into the classical ‘linear’ formulation of Thesis – Antithesis – Synthesis. But as Hegel himself said this was not part of his philosophy. For Hegel this was a ‘dead formula’ with little relation to a complex reality. It was he said like expecting an artist to only have two colours on his easel. Thus Marx’s distortion of Hegel can be seen as responsible for this overestimate of the class struggle (along with a subsequently blinkered view of history) as THE dialectic and Critical Theory a return to a more Hegelian insight of multiple, non-linear dialectics (a variety of socio-psychological determinants including ideology). This was not a new idea, Engel’s writings often suggested that cultural and even ideological factors overrode economic factors on occassions (though the economy always was the final deciding influence for him).
Of course the majority of Marxists retained their faith, and reasserted it in their collective denunciation of the ‘new left’ as bourgeois revisionism and heresy. But as they were a minority within a minority made no serious attempt to suppress them. This denunciation was ironic as if anything the ‘new left’ didn’t go far enough.
Two basic problems remained largely unchallenged by the ‘new left’. One was that work was still seen as essential and the worker and his/her ‘class struggle’ still seen as central. While it is true that Capitalism is rooted in labour and its view of the world dominated by economics, it does not follow that this is a necessary truth and that alternative societies need be. In fact the emphasis on labour and economics can be seen as supportive of the Capitalist paradigm, even when it comes from anti-Capitalists. Some in the ‘new left’ realised this and turned to Nietzchean concepts of the vitalising importance of play, over the deadening influence of work, and the significance of the carnivalesque, but they failed to put this into practise.
Today these ideas have been taken further, notably amongst the anti-capitalists of the Mayday protests and in Marxist theory by the followers of Postone. The latter argueing that while Capitalism is underpinned by labour it does not follow that labour is the ‘revolutionary subject’. Though this does not neccesarily undervalue the importance of necessary ‘labour’ or work based politics (but does give a new perspective on them). It implies appealing to people’s direct life experience and way of living, and working, rather than revolutionary strategies and workerist militancy. In essense it is a return to what the Situationists called the Revolution of Everyday Life.
The second problem for the ‘new left’ was (and largely still is) the fact that despite the welcome innovations of multiple dialectics and the anti-work ethic they remain wed to a deterministic materialistic analysis of the world. This is a problem because it makes the very individual autonomy that (genuine) socialists seek to promote an impossibility. We have no freedom because we are determined. Worse still it means that the ‘revolutionary struggle’ is historical and predetermined, which means the ends justify the means, and so all notions of responsibility and ethics goes out the window. This can (and has been) used to justify all sorts of terrorism and violence.
No deterministic or materialistic philosophy (even an existentialist one) can really account for your free will. My own response to this is another return to Hegel. Many Philosophers today are realising that the materialist paradigm is no better than the idealist paradigm. Hegel in contrast arguably held that both these views were wrong and that in reality mind and matter were two sides of the same coin, and mutually determined each other in a dialectical relationship. A view Hegel inherited from Spinoza via Schelling. If this Panpsychic view is true (and quantum mechanics suggests it might be, as do emerging theories of consciousness) then we may have free will after all, and our autonomous moral choices may well be an important part of the multiple dialectic (while realising that our idea of morality itself is just a historical evolving concept). As Nietzsche said, we have the freedom to create ourselves and become the self that we really are (at least in potential). As with the self so with the world I would add (once obstacles to human freedom are removed). In this worldview amoral acts become self defeating as the means are the ends. This will no doubt sound ‘religious’ or even ‘mystical’ to the average Marxist, though this ironic from a sect that believes in the absolute truth of their own faith, and a faith which includes undetectable abstractions such as ‘classes’! A classic case of projection perhaps?
Finally I think we even need to go past Hegel, who was self critical regarding the closed, deterministic aspect of his own philosophy, and with the assistance of the above paradigm look towards non-deterministic open systems. A road that might involve exploring the growing new sciences of general systems theory, process theory and complexity theory. But these are just glimpses into possibilties and not something I can go into further tonight.
In conclusion I’ll suggest that deterministic ‘class struggle’ theories simply do not match up to reality, and that a Neo-Hegelian multi-dialectic theory (modified under Nietzschean, Bakuninist and various (post)modern insights) alone can hope to accurately model our current situation and thus be truly Revolutionary. And from there open the debate.