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Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation (2018)

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Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation (2018) Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation Pamphlet of the £3/$4/€4 Communist Workers’ Organisation Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation Pamphlet of the Communist Workers’ Organisation Affiliate of the Internationalist Communist Tendency in Britain Introduction 1 1 Idealism and Bourgeois Materialism 2 2 How Working Class Consciousness Develops 7 3 Marx, Engels and Proletarian Organisation 11 4 The Era of Social Democracy and the Fight Against Revisionism 15 5 On the Eve of Revolution: the Debate Between Luxemburg and Lenin 21 6 Class Consciousness and Working Class Political Organisations 28 7 Party and Class in the Revolutionary Wave 1917-1921 33 8 The Decline of the Russian Revolution and the Cult of the Party 37 9 The Idealism of Bordigism 43 10 By Way of Conclusion: Towards Proletarian World Revolution 49 For correspondence write to: BM CWO London WC1N 3XX email: [email protected] or visit our website: http://www.leftcom.org Subscriptions to Revolutionary Perspectives (3 issues) and Aurora (at least 4 issues): UK: £15 (€18) Europe: £20 (€24) World: £25 (€30, $30) How to pay: By cheque made out to the “CWO” and sending it to the address above. By emailing us at [email protected] and asking for our banking details. By Paypal using the “Donate” button on our webpage. You can also take out a supporter’s sub by adding £10 (€12) to each sum. This will give you priority mailings of Aurora and other publications including free pamphlets as they are published. Introduction The issue of class consciousness is one of the most important for the working class, and for its revolutionary minorities. Behind it lies the really big questions, such as “How can capitalism be destroyed?”, and “Is the working class capable of creating a new society?”. Some, impatient to bring about the end of a system which has plainly outlived its usefulness for the vast majority of humanity, have even despaired of the fight because they say “the working class has been bought off” or because “capital’s control of the media is so complete that workers can easily be fooled into accepting capitalist ideas”. Others, like the various Bordigist “parties”, argue that the only sense in which the proletariat actually exists as a class is if it forms a political party which is the sole expression of its revolutionary consciousness. Still others (and these seem to be a growing band today), believe the whole question of revolution will be posed without worrying about revolutionary consciousness at all. For them revolution is basically a spontaneous issue which will arise directly from the daily economic struggle of the working class. It is our aim to address these, and other questions here, but not as abstract philosophy. Our approach will be unashamedly historical and attempt to draw out the real experience of the working class in its struggles of the last two centuries. Communism is not just a theory or ideology but the expression of the real movement of the working class in its fight against exploitation. This struggle is not a linear one, progressively homing in on an inevitable victory but now advances, then retreats, as we have seen in the Paris Commune of 1871, and the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917. One thing though, it never completely vanishes, for capitalism’s contradictions constantly recreate the material conditions for the existence of a separate working class consciousness. In this historical approach we are in conformity with Marx who rejected speculation for a study of real life. When, Empty talk about consciousness ceases and real knowledge has to take its place. When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence. (The German Ideology) Or to borrow from his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach our aim here is not merely to interpret the world but to contribute to the revolutionary practice required to change it. In this sense our short pamphlet is only part of a work in progress, a contribution to debate and to the future struggle of our class. The pamphlet has its origins in a series of articles which appeared in Revolutionary Perspectives. For this reason some arguments tend to be repeated but we hope that this adds rather than detracts from its overall message. We would like to thank all the comrades who have sent in corrections for this reprint but we know that It is not by any means exhaustive and does not deal with questions like, for example, how a party comes to be organised inside the working class under present conditions (this is dealt with in our other publications) but it is a statement about where we think the class struggle has so far brought us on this long road to the freedom for not only the world working class but, through it, for the whole of humanity itself. But before we can fully embark on that task, we need to first remind ourselves how the whole issue of consciousness arose… CWO May 2018 1 Class Consciousness and Revolutionary Organisation Consciousness in General to human beings (alienated from them in philosophical terms) and this could not be 1 deas do not spring from thin air. The source fully understood by them as it was God- Iof ideas, or consciousness, has occupied given. It was only under the impetus of the the ideologists of class society for thousands scientific revolution, which was predicated of years. For them the great problem was on the early development of capitalism, Idealism and the distinction between mind and matter, that this approach began to break down. between the animal bodies of human beings The Copernican revolution overturned the Bourgeois Materialism and their capacity for abstract thought. Biblical and Ptolemaic understanding of the In ancient society, particularly in Ancient cosmos. This in turn opened up the way for Athens, philosophers like Plato saw ideas as crude materialist philosophy. being “innate”, only being brought into the light of day by the articulation of thought. This took several forms from the rationalism For him the real world was the world of of Descartes (who came up with ideas only ideas and the material world contained only using reason - he boasted he made his best shadows or partial reflections of these ideas. leaps in knowledge in bed!) to the empiricism The material world was thus a secondary of Bacon who had the merit of understanding world dependent on the world of ideas, that the world was a product of humanity’s and without the world of ideas the material material existence. Bacon was the father of world would not exist at all. By studying the modem English empiricism in that he argued shadows and reflections in the secondary that what could not be proved by immediate material world the wise man can come to experiment was unscientific. know the world of ideas or the real world. Consciousness of the real world is attainable The same type of vulgar materialism can only to the philosophers who can undertake be found in the works of Thomas Hobbes this study. The rest of humanity is deceived and John Locke. Locke, both in science and by the world of shadows, and consequently politics, upheld the rule of law. For him have “false consciousness”. It was no accident scientists like Newton, who systematised that such an idea was developed within a whole branches of knowledge (like physics leisured class in a society where slaves did and mechanics), gave new laws to explain the all the work, and where labour was seen as order of the universe. For Locke, the English something close to animal activity. “Glorious Revolution” of 1688-9 brought the same spirit of law and order to British society These Greek aristocrats are the earliest of after the turbulence of the Civil War and what we would call the “idealists”. For them, Commonwealth. There was little room for the ideas have an existence independent of supernatural in either Newton’s or Locke’s human activity and are the prime motive view of the world, a fact which brought them of all historical change. In some ways, both criticism from the established Church. this idealism was an advance on the Not surprisingly this initial bourgeois later Christian philosophers of the feudal materialism developed strongest in Britain, period such as Thomas Aquinas. He re- a country where capitalism and industrialism interpreted Aristotle’s world-view for the was already advancing rapidly. It was to expanding Christian Church. He placed the remain so for a further century. Thus, ‘The Judaeo-Christian God (rather than “The summit of eighteenth century science One” in Greek philosophy) as the fount of was materialism” (Engels, The Position of human consciousness. For the Christians England in the Eighteenth Century). This was our thoughts belonged to the soul which certainly an advance since it established the departed the animal body after death. Long fundamental basis of the materialist world before the advent of Christianity, humanity outlook that: All consciousness is derived as a species that is aware, came to explain from the material world and experience of that awareness by discovering something this world. outside itself in religion. Religion, throughout most of human history, was a substitute for But, whilst this materialism was opposed science. Or as Marx put it in the Economic and to the spiritual subjectivism of religion, it Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 could not seriously challenge it. This was due to several reasons which can only be The gods in the beginning are not the dealt with schematically here. In the first cause but the effect of man’s intellectual place, the rising bourgeoisie tended to see confusion.
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