chapter 11 Beyond the Law of Value: Class Struggle and Socialist Transformation

If only one tenth of the human energy that is now expended on reform- ing capitalism, protesting its depredations and cobbling together elect- oral alliances within the arena of bourgeois politics could be channelled instead into an effective revolutionary/transformative political practice, one suspects that the era of socialist globalization would be close at hand … The objective, historical conditions for a socialist transformation are not only ripe; they have become altogether rotten. The global capital- ist order is presently in an advanced state of decay. The vital task today is to bring human consciousness and activity – the ‘subjective factor’ – into correspondence with the urgent need to confront and transform that objective reality.1

Such was my assessment in Global Capitalism in Crisis, published in the imme- diate aftermath of the Great Recession of 2008–09. Nearly a decade on, one must concede perforce that little progress has been made in accomplishing the vital task prescribed. The capitalist class has waged a remarkably success- ful campaign to suppress the emergence of a mass socialist workers movement capable of addressing the ‘triple crisis’ of twenty-first-century capitalism that was outlined in Chapter 1. In the face of persistent global economic malaise, growing inequality, accel- erating climate change, and worsening international relations portending world war, global capitalism has avoided a crisis of legitimacy proportionate to the dangers facing humanity. This anomaly speaks volumes about the power of ideology, as deployed by the main beneficiaries of the capitalist order, to ‘obscure social reality and deflect attention from the demonstrable connec- tions that exist between the capitalist profit system and the multiple crises of the contemporary world’.2 InThe German Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote: ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e. the class, which is the ruling material

1 Smith 2010, p. 134. 2 Smith 2014, pp. 13–14.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004312203_012 308 chapter 11 force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speak- ing, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it’.3 For the founders of scientific socialism, however, this was by no means the whole story, since the consciousness of those who lack ‘means of men- tal production’ is determined not only by the reigning ideologies of the ruling class but also – in the end, more profoundly – by their own lived experiences and the glaring contradictions of their social being. For this reason, powerful socialist workers movements were able to emerge from the thick fog of ideology and tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, movements which not only forced the capitalist class to make real concessions to the working-class masses (in a bid to secure ‘class peace’), but which also posed the question of working-class power and socialist transformation. The most famous anthem of the class-conscious proletariat, The Internationale, took up these great themes in the following stirring lyrics:

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation! Arise, ye wretched of the earth, For justice thunders condemnation, A better world’s in birth. No more tradition’s chains shall bind us, Arise, ye slaves; no more in thrall! The earth shall rise on new foundations, We have been naught, we shall be all!4

Today, in the twilight of capitalism, we are confronted by the paradox that while the conditions of social being are becoming more and more intolerable, the ideological dominance of the capitalist class (its ‘hegemony’) remains rel- atively secure. To explain this adequately, however, requires something more than an invocation of Marx and Engels’s time-honoured dictums; it requires a willingness and ability to take the full measure of the immense historical defeat inflicted on the working class by the rise and fall of Stalinism in the twentieth century.5

3 Marx and Engels 1968, p. 89. 4 Eugène Edine Pottier 1871. 5 See Smith 2014, especially Chapters 8 and 10, entitled respectively ‘Revisiting Trotsky: Reflec- tions on the Stalinist Debacle and Trotskyism as Alternative’ and ‘Socialist Strategy Yesterday