David Palmeter asks a question that has been asked many
times [and answered as well]. He writes,
“If socialism is to evolve incrementally out of the womb of capitalism, as capitalism
evolved incrementally out of the womb of feudalism, what is the point of
working toward socialism? Why not just let it happen? Would support of health
care for all, for example, or free higher education, be considered working
toward socialism, or are these things that inevitably will evolve--whether we
get all excited about elections etc. or not?”
But Marx does not think that things evolve behind our backs,
or “inevitably.” He thinks that at first
individual merchants pursued their trades and deals, not at all understanding
where these new ways of making money would lead, or how they might undermine
the existing feudal order. Little by
little, they became more aware that things were changing, and networks of
merchants developed. Then individuals
developed new ways of producing goods for exchange, until they became
self-aware of the conflict between what they were doing and the ways things had
previously been done. Slowly, their
individual actions began to form structures of institutional action, and
entrepreneurs, capitalists, became a separate and more and more powerful class.
In much the same manner, workers slowly become aware, with their fellow workers, of their shared exploitation. In the jargon of the French Marxists, they
cease being merely a class in itself and become a class for itself [do I have
that right? I can never remember.]
Socialism will not result from a manifesto or a tract or a
committee. It will grow within the womb
of capitalism, not spontaneously or behind our backs, but as the result of our
ever more self-aware actions within the
context of capitalism. If we lean
back and wait for it to happen, it will never happen, any more than capitalism
would have happened if early merchants had said, “Relax, the new order is
growing in the womb of the old, there is no need actually to hustle and bustle
and try to make deals.”
Isn't it the case that according to Marx, our ever more self-aware actions within the context of capitalism are the product of capitalism, not of our consciousness seen from an idealistic perspective? Social existence determines consciousness, not the other way around, but without our actions, ultimately determined by economic factors, there is no political change.
ReplyDeletePerhaps this is relevant to the discussion of ideas in relation to (left) politics?
ReplyDeleteStephanie L. Mudge, “Leftism Reinvented: Western Parties from Socialism to Neoliberalism” (Harvard, 2018)
There’s an interesting interview with her about the ideas in her book at
https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/left-political-party-economists-neoliberalims-keynesianism
(Yes, I know “Jacobin” isn’t everyone’s cup of tea.)
Uneven Development
ReplyDeleteProf Wolff, speaking of "womb" and "evolution", wondering if you could comment on this.
ReplyDeleteMany years ago I was listenting to a Cambrige Univ. don give a lecture in which he flippantly metioned that Karl Marx had cast his theories as an evolutionary one. It seems that it was fashionable in many fields, not just biology, to write their theories as evolutionary. In fact Marx had written to Drawin to ask if he could dedicate Das Capital to Darwin. No one knows if Darwin ever responded, but had Darwin agreed, do you think Das Kapital would've had a different reception than it did?
-- YAAU (yet another anon user)
Prof. Wolff's answer is a good one, but the question is still a good one:
ReplyDeleteMany Marxists, and historically this was even more true, believe that there should be a revolution to abolish capitalism as soon as possible, or even that there should be a small vanguard party of committed revolutionaries to work tirelessly to make it happen.
In the light of the answer, this should seem misguided, should it not? Surely capitalism, on the Marxist view, cannot simply be abolished without socialism already being quite mature and widespread in the economy? Or at least latent in it.
re: becoming aware of your shared exploitation..
ReplyDeleteThere is no ultimate "complete" language available to state the "true" value of things. Critical deconstruction of capitalist concepts such as exchange value, therefore, once we accept nominalism, is mere polemic.
"French jargon"? Here's Bukharin in 1921 claiming that the distinction goes back to Marx himself:
ReplyDelete"The result is that a class discharging a definite function in the process of production may already exist as an aggregate of persons before it exists as a self-conscious class; we have a class, but no class consciousness. It exists as a factor in production, as a specific aggregate of production relations; it does not yet exist as a social, independent force that knows what it wants, that feels a mission, that is conscious of its peculiar position, of the hostility of its interests to those of the other classes. As designations for these different stages in the process of class evolution, Marx makes use of two expressions: he calls class "an sich" (in itself), a class not yet conscious of itself as such; he calls class "für sich" (for itself), a class already conscious of its social role."