File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1996/96-12-10.211, message 5


Date: Sun, 8 Dec 1996 11:43:26 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: Re: M-I: Gramsci,  Lukacs,  mass unemployment and worker militancy


                

Paul writes,  while introducing his excellent post: 

>Gramsci argued, that for the "lukewarmness of the working class" there
>were more reasons: 

>(1)Certainly--as you remarked--the conditions of life,

There is much that falls under the rubric of "the conditions of life" that
have yet to be intelligently discussed on any Marxism list.     One is the
dynamics of the "working class" itself,  as defined by the pathologies of
those who,  willy-nilly,  end up in its ranks.     One could argue that a
source for high worker militancy in the period 1900-1920 was that many of
the workers were drawn from the ruined ranks of the rural peasantry,  and
were driven into the novel and unattractive work in the factories by the
fear of starvation.    There is a remarkable degree of self-actualization
and self-motivation among rural workers.    Now -- and this is addressed to
the squat,  humorless dick-heads in the UK and nearby Continent who are
furiously moving their lips as they read this -- by "self-actualizing" I
don't mean the desire to read Proust or to appreciate Gauguin.    Rather,  I
am referring to that degree of self-direction called for to complete the
day-to-day tasks of agricultural life,  the wide range of rudimentary skills
necessary to maintain oneself and one's family amidst the vagaries of
weather,  crop failures,  price fluctuation,  livestock health and safety --
all within a social context of relative isolation and resource availability.

There are other issues here as well.    People who allow themselves to
driven,  day-in,  day-out like sheep into the soul-deadening routine of
factory life,  only dimly and sullenly aware of forces far beyond their
means,   who seek only surcease in nothing larger than their own bodily
reliefs,  are not in my view promising candidates to precipitate
revolutionary change in society.    The history of working class struggle
bears me out,  and presents irrefutable evidence against those who argue
that the working class is the primary agent of revolution in modern times.
It seems as though the western industrial employer got it right in managing
his workers' wants --"prudence to relieve,  but folly to cure",  in
Mandeville's acerbic epigram -- deftly foreclosing both the possibilities of
revolution (or even fundamental change) within the economic relationship,
as well as a scarcity of docile and ultimately passive toilers for as long
as it was expedient and profitable to employ them. 

One must juxtapose the great undifferentiated mass of "faceless and docile"
factory workers -- victims of corrupted power,  drilled into a hellish
passivity -- against those groups who,  by virtue of their conditions of
day-to-day life,  present prospects more propitious to revolutionary
activity.     One of course can only speculate,  but certainly a propensity
for self-direction in a deliberate and purposive fashion,  a consciuousness
of forces larger than oneself,  coupled with a willingness,  when pressed,
to engage in unrelenting but goal-oriented violence,  would,  when
competently led,  have a much greater likelihood of success against the
formidable weight of a bourgeois State.   

Add to this the undeniable fact that heavy industry in the West -- given the
configurations of the world economy -- is now a drag on,  rather than a spur
to,  the type of economic development one witnessed in past eras,  and the
equation becomes more problematic still.     In fact,  I would be prepared
to argue that your points (2) through (4) are rendered irrelevant almost to
the point of meaninglessness by this salient economic fact.   It is heavy
industry, the very reservoir of the proletariat -- the wellspring from which
the workers draw their very identity as a class -- that is now in danger of
perishing because,  to quote Marx,  "all the productive forces for which it
provides scope have been developed."     Thus,  these ancillory facts --
"the better organized statal coercive apparatus",  or "the hegemony of the
ruling classes,"  or,  even,  the "weakness and errors of the left" -- a
frequent complaint -- pale into insignificance when confronted with the
inexorable decline of the Western proletariat and the conditions attendant
to its long and tumultuous life. 

Paul continues:
        
>Michal Kalecki (in Political aspects of full employment, 1943), explains
>the economic policy of the Nazi-party as a deal between three positions,
>organized by the national socialists: 1) the capitalists agreed with a
>statal policy of full employment because the nazi guaranted the
>suppression of progressive forces and labor movements. 2) The workers
>tolerated and agreed with the authoritarianism of the nazi-state because it
>provided for employment and subsistence. 3) The nazi with this consensus
>could carry through their political objectives like political and
>social control, rearmament, preparation of war. So mass unemployment not
>necessarily leads to more consciusness of workers as "truly
>revolutionary class".

One is reminded here of worker support for the American war in Southeast
Asia.    Poll after poll showed the continued  "loyalty" of unionized
workers to the State,  urging,  for example,  the use of nuclear weaponry
against the Vietnamese people long after Nixon and Kissinger had more or
less given up the use of air power as a bad job.    Continued  "support" for
these enormous crimes -- at the time common knowledge among ordinary
Americans  -- cannot be explained away by "betrayals" of the trade union
leadership or by the "Stalinists" in the infinitesimally tiny politically
sects that formed the ass-end of the labor movement in the sixties.    Its
source must be squarely located within the working class itself,  and its
readiness to render itself complicit with US policy,  in Southeast Asia and
around the globe.

Would the industrial working class in the US today support a frankly fascist
regime?    Here,  I think,  the signs are less clear.    It is now
twenty-five years later.   Much of the bloom has fallen from the rose for
the American class.    Still,  despite unremitting assaults on its
well-being,  the worker maintains an almost stunned allegiance to the
mysteries of the free market.   I am reminded,  again,  of the nascent
French Marxists at the turn of the century (referred to in the thread  "How
fascism began") who were,  on the one hand,  "committed" to the apocalyptic
core of Marxism -- the class struggle -- while at the same time desirous of
preserving private property and the free market.    This form of economic
determinism -- with important qualifiers and amendments -- is a fair
*precis* of the attitude of American workers today.     Given an extreme
version of the type of nationalism we saw in the recent NAFTA/GATT debates
developing among,  say,  midwestern industrial workers,  it is not
inconceivable that an outright fascist regime could enjoy,  at least
initially,  widespread support among America's workers.      

>My third argument comes from the post-gramscian left discussion in
>Italy. Within political actions of social movements there is a
>mechanism, which leads to a braking and slow down of revolutionary
>impulses. People struggle for more civil rights, spaces, wealth, better
>working and living conditions etc. As a result of these conflicts they
>take over certain social and political positions: they gain more rights,
>they create welfare organisations, their salairs and living standards
>augment, their trade unions and left parties gain political influence
>etc.--these all beeing concrete objectives or results of their
>struggles. With all these actions they penetrate the state, become
>themselves parts of the state (in Italian: farsi stato), accept certain
>rules, consent to the state-institutions, they had contributed to
>create. Within recent political conflicts one can see, that they have to
>loose something, that they fight against cutting of social welfare of
>civil rights. Will say, that they accept the whole framework, beeing the
>state, that they operate as a corporate force within the state, not
>"revolutionary", but "reformistic", having historically constituted
>cognitive structures, that assume and reproduce capitalism and bourgeois
>state.

When this question is raised,  I sometimes resort to an analogy.   The
doctor tells the patient that he has an incurable disease,  which will get
worse at an unpredictable rate,  but that he may hope to carry on somehow
for a few years longer.   The disease can be cured by an operation,  but
there is quite a chance that the operation will kill the patient.    The
patient decides to carry on.    Rosa Luxemburg said that the decay of
capitalism would end either in socialism or in barbarism.    I suspect that
most workers today in the West prefer to face the slow decay of capitalism,
hoping that it will last out their time,  rather than face the surgical
knife of revolution,  which may or may not produce socialism.    

It is,  I suppose,  a tenable view. 


Louis Godena

        



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