POST MODERN CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS
REPEAT AFTER ME
'WE ARE CAPITALISM'
It (Capitalism) is thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time,in order to reduce labour time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development.
K. Marx, Grundrisse
PART 1.
Today's blog post is about the Grundrisse Marx's notebooks that were the basis for his later work; Capital.
I first read the David Mclenan edition, which was published in 1970. We sold it in our Anarchist coop bookstore Erewhon Books. Did I read it from cover to cover, no neither have I read all of Captial, or the collected works of any author.
But what I read then and reread over the years was the chapters I have quoted from here today. Specifically about what Marx thought would occur in advanced capitalism as it moved towards the domination of what he called disposable time over labour time.
Disposable time is what has occurred under advanced capitalism of the twentieth century. In particular the automation and mass production of post WWII North America and then the defeated Germany and Japan allowed for rapid postwar mass production that created the modern consumer societies of the OECD and G7 countries. The last decade of the 20th Century and the first decade of the 21st have seen its expansion into the developing countries, the BRICS and those who have added to the G7 to become the G20.
Back then computer automation was only just beginning, it was still called, quaintly; Cybernetics, and a whole academic industry was created to deal with predicting what would occur in the future with automation 'freeing' us from drudgery, and of course the crisis in Capitalism that would occur with the masses having no work, leisure time galore, and Freedom 55.
As George Caffatis discusses in his recent article on the Grundrisse, this was a period where sociologists waxed lyrical about the jobless future and the end of work, sounds familiar, but this was Stanely Aronowitz and Alvin Toffler not Jeremy Rifkin.
Zerowork was a project like Zero Growth, that challenged the idea that with us producing surplus goods and plenty, we should address the fact that less was producing more and more, and more.
Zero Growth challenged capitalism with the Malthusian indictment writ large, globally, about how by the end of last Century the billions of us on the planet would use up all our resources.
Zero Work was a critique of workerism of the old communist parties and even the new left that classified the working class as blue collar industrial workers. It too talked about cybernetics, and self management, as did Norbert Weiner twenty years earlier.
Later one of its American theorists would become so critical of capitalism that he would posit a return to Plato's cave, proposing to undo his first forms. His theory is that all of industrial society, created by and for capitalism was corruption itself, and he ran off to take to moral high ground, which would be embraced by Animal Rights anarchists, Primitivists and the Black Bloc from Oregon.
The future lay before us all in the Seventies, we had survived the tumultous Sixties, some could not wait to put it behind them, others still embraced its counter culture with hopes for a revolution any day, because the mass disapproval of the War in Viet Nam was growing and showing in the streets across America and the world.
A TV show that reflected the sixties optimism and seeking that the seventies began with in North America was CTV' Here Come the Seventies, produced in 1970 projecting about the coming future of leisure and endless consumption while applying science to the problems of food shortages that would produce the Green Revolution. All this bright sci fi futurism was becoming an academic and pop culture industry it even produced its own university status with spokespeople who remained popular in the eighties and even nineties.
As I was young and impressionable in this period it was for me a period of radicalization as it was for many of us who were teenagers or draft age adults.
I grew up on sci fi, as well as reading Marx, Bakunin, Kropotkin, Engels, etc. etc. my library began then and is still with me today fifty years later. Now at least I have a place to house it.
I listened to rock n roll, embraced all the lifestyle culture that was occurring, including the occult revival, the rebirth of witchcraft and magick, but most importantly I too was a futurist. It was nature of the culture at that time as the book publishing industry would attest to, and which the record industry would come of age because of.
In fact beyond rock n roll the seventies sound was best reflected by the theme for Here Comes the Seventies Tillicum by the Toronto electronic band Syrinx. 1970 saw the emergence of electronic music in a big way, with Nice, ELP, Klauze Schultz, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, etc.
A rock and roll album that was a concept album telling a whole sci fi story about flying spaceship away from earth to colonize a utopia, called Blow Against the Empire. It was
a collaboration between the Jefferson Airplane, Greatful Dead and San Fransisco area
musicians. It won the only Hugo ever give to a rock album.
Of course only the year before two earth shattering events had occurred, man had landed
on the moon and it was broadcast in glorious b&w around the world, even behind the Iron Curtain, and in Red China, and yes Viet Nam. The other was the release of the most advanced sci fi special effects movie ever, 2001 a Space Odessy in wonderful Technicolor and the latest in stereophonic sound..
In this hothouse of anything is possible, be realistic demand the impossible, out came a new edition of Marx's original notebooks for Capital. First published after WWII, in the midst of the Cold War, and the Mcarthyite purges it lay dormant in the ferment of the sixties not to be re-released till the seventies.
It was in this atmosphere of possibilities of anarchist dreaming of a utopia to be, I came across intellectual dynamite, something I read in this immense tome struck me as an answer. We all had questions in fact the Moody Blues even recorded an album about them. But here was an answer, a critical one, something that there and then I thought was damned important I should mark it down. I did and then I used it to develop my vision of workers class conciousness based on the idea of leisure time, cybernetics computer automation, and self management of society by us.
I read Wilhelm Reich's essay on Class Consciousness, and sometime later
Luckas on History and Class Consciousness, and finally Erik Olen Wright. But I did not find this clear a statement about class consciousness. In fact whole fields of Marxist academia discussed the importance of real class consciousness vs false class consciousness,
who was the real vanguard of the revolution the much discredited white working class that sided with the Republicans, the Viet Nam war, or with radical students, African Americans, anti war activists, SDS, and yes the IWW.
Class consciousness was defined by academic sociologists as having been conquered by post modern post war capitalism. Everyone was Middle Class we were no longer producers neither farmers, nor factory workers, or trades people, we were all regardless of our jobs, primarily consumers. We saw the rise of a service worker sector in both government and the private sector.
Our aspirations despite the warning of Death of a Salesman, was to embrace the post war service economy, to becomea white collar suburban middle class . And while this was predominately a white American dream, it was embraced by sociologists as an explanation in at least one study of Oakland Afro Americans who while working as janitors, or rail car workers, were considered middle class because they had steady employment and could buy a house and belonged to Fraternal Orders and social clubs.That these wants, needs or aspirations were as much the promise of post war economics and working class dreams as they were part of a new mythical identity of a declasse America, the old American exceptionalism and with the help of Cold War paranoia, the socialst struggles in America became part of the post fifties social amnesia.
The irony is that the combination of deliberately induced historical social amnesia, made academics, pundits, cultural mavens, literati, media, etc. respond with the dance of the dialectic, at once both happy to have leisure and job security till retirement, the social compact that was the result of armed men coming home who needed to be reintegrated into society without overthrowing those in charge.
Next the crisis was not what to do but what to do with all that leisure time, that disposable time as Marx called it. It was going to lead to all sorts of good and bad future possibilities from Star Trek wageless socialist future, or it could be a return to barbarism. The revolts of 1968 still fresh in peoples minds, were not of priveleged students or any privelged class but rather a revolt of overproduction, declining economies which had boomed in Europe for a decade were now
stable and declining in a global competiton for markets.
These bourgeois revolutions occurred as the economies in Europe and North America and even in Latin America and Asia were booming, production was increasing, in fact it led to overproduction and by 1973 the world face a oil crisis. One so serious that it was predicted we would run out of oil and gas by 2000.
But all this had occurred before immediately after WWI Thorstien Veblen the American socialist economist wrote about the new methods of post war production, and the importance of the engineers, as a middle class between the workers in the factory and management. He told them they had a choice and he advised them to join with the workers.
He wrote of the new leisure class, and their conspicuous consumption as factories with mass production began processing food for housewives in cities to purchase in department stores.
Again a post war boom which led to a further boom until the crash of '29, and the resulting failure of capitalism with its Great Depression during a major climate event the dustbowl of the praries in North America and the steppes in Ukraine and Russia.
Veblen was influenced by the IWW and they intern worked with a group of engineers inspired by Veblen which would later become Technocracy Inc.
Veblen criticized the price system and trying to move beyond Marx came up with a time credit, an attempt to build on Marx's disposable time, this later became the energy credit of Technocracy.
Veblen was not the only economist coming up with new ideas to solve the crisis of capitalism and its overproduction, waste and inequality in sharing the wealth. WWI had devasted a generation, it was the first full scale capitalist war, one which saw huge advancements in science and technology aimed at mass killing.
At its end there was a huge cultural revolution as well as a workers revolution, and during the depression post war ideas like Distributionism, Social Credit, the Cooperative Commonwealth, Guild Socialism, Syndicalism, joined with socialism and capitalism as economic theories of the times. Of course Keynes won and the Austrians took their marbles and left the stage for thirty years.
Each time there was a revolution or war in the twentieth century the following occurred;
capitalism adapted realizing that its most effective form would be state capitalism,
Peasant economies were modernized often through militarization and corporatism
and later through wars of National Liberation resulting in the creation of a proletariat
in the cities
After wars or revolutions the victorious imperialist nation invested in infrastructure rebuilding
the capitalist economy in the defeated country.
The two most successful economies after the US and Canada following WWII were Japan and Germany and I would say they actually are more efficient capitalist states than the US because they are state capitalist with a social compact.
The sixties saw the discourse on development that Trotsky had first proposed; the economics of even and uneven development in what became known as the third world and the third world anti imperialist struggles, we had Che and Andre Gunder Frank debate with Regis Debray and the beginning of serious Latin American marxist praxis in that developing world.
.What Kautsky prophetically called Super Imperialism divided up the world into four spheres of interlocking influence three Superpowers USA, Russia, China and then the Non Aligned Movement of Nations.
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After the 1929 crash and depression state ca[pitalism as a historical phenomena saved Capitalism indeed it seemed triumphant, it had small crisis's like the oil crisis of the seventies but no severe crash till 1964 and then the big one like 1929 again in 2008.
I was brought up like many on the left with the economistic reductionist crisis theories of traditional Leninism. Despite our various designations or allegiances to parites or left ideologies I knew no one who doubted the mechanistic therom that what goes up must come down and if it goes high enough the crash is huge. What occurs next according to the mechanistic revolutionary theory of history was that this crisis was to be so severe as to challenge capitalism to its very core. All we then needed was the revolutionary party of the proletariat to lead it in the fight to defeat capitalism. It was like we were storming the Winter Palace of Capitalism, rounding up the parasites, and planting the red flag on top of the government buildings. And indeed that is what the Bolsheviks in Russia did.
But it was not a workers revolution, it was a bourgeois revolution conducted by the working class in order toe save capitalism from itself as Keynes would point out in his General Theory of Economy, in fact the failure of the Bolshevik revolution, not its success, was what saved capitalism from itself said Keynes. Something Hayek argued against in the mirror for the rest of his life.
END OF PART 1.
TO BE CONTINUED
EUGENE W. PLAWIUK
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