Daily Times

A person
having an itchy conscience, usually nicknamed a ‘whistle blower’, has to choose between life in prison (Chelsea Manning) or permanent exile (Snowden). Besides enhanced productivity, irrationality becomes a reality, an idol, in front of which everyone has to yield. A rationally organised bureaucracy that remains invisible dispenses the prescriptions for inhumanity and injustice. People deceived by the higher culture once presented by the bourgeoisie, during and after the French Revolution, are left dumbfounded. The slogan of liberty, equality and fraternity or at least its nostalgia still resonates in their minds. But the bourgeoisie has long given up this slogan. It tolerates its ideals in art alone, since what happens in art happens without any obligation. The biggest challenge faced by humanity is to regain its true consciousness by seeking liberation from this market-based freedom and prearranged consciousness. Once this liberation is achieved and the human being is free from the necessity of proving himself in the market as an economic subject, technology will become a tool in the hands of humanity through which it will certainly be able to release its potential into freedom beyond necessity. This will be the beginning of the end of the state, which has adopted a totalitarian character.
The majority of developing countries are far too backward to understand the dynamics and relation of the state with its people. Even in their dreams the word liberation does not dare lurk as a shadow. Poverty, scarcity and uncertainty have tied them to religion, even stronger than before, which promises them something somewhere else, away from the real world. In such a famine of hope, they crave for reward, spiritually if not materially, in a world that is beyond history. This brief and uncertain life has lost its meaning for them and hence they find solace in the private realm of spiritualism; whether it exists or not does not concern them anymore. Gramsci is precise in his premise: “Take away from the proletariat their class consciousness, and what have you? A puppet dancing on a string.” In the mid-20th century what was true for Italy holds true for most developing nations/countries today.
Let us borrow the expression from Gramsci himself. He says: “In Italy, capitalism is in its infancy…the law is the modern excrescence on an ancient edifice. It is not the product of economic evolution but of international political mimicry, of the intellectual evolution of jurisprudence, not of the instruments of labour. Behind the facade of democratic institutions, the Italian state has retained the substance and framework of a despotic state (the same can be said of France). There exists a bureaucratic centralist regime, founded on the tyrannical Napoleonic system, with the express aim of crushing and containing any spontaneous drive or movement. Foreign affairs are conducted in the highest secrecy; not only are the discussions not public but even the terms of treaties are kept from those whom they nevertheless affect. The army had a career structure. There is a state religion, supported financially and in other ways by the state. There is no separation of church and state nor equality of all religions. Schools are either non-existent or the teachers who come from a restricted number of needy folks, given the paltriness of wages, are not equal to the demands of national education. The suffrage is far from giving the nation the capacity to express its will. Free competition, the essential principle of the capitalist bourgeoisie, has not yet touched the most important aspects of national affairs. So we have a position where political forms are mere arbitrary superstructures; they lack any effectiveness and achieve nothing. The seat of power is still confused and interdependent, hence there is no class state in which the principle of free competition ensures efficiency with great parties.” He exacts this logical conclusion: “The system is collapsing” and perhaps so are these developing ‘nation’ states. The question remains: where are the gravediggers of capitalism? Do they have the same faces as Marx elucidated or as Herbert, in a weak moment of scepticism or enthusiasm, described: “Their faces may be very different from those of the wretched of the earth, from those of misery and want.”
However, can one doubt the class basis of the revolution? Marcuse himself admits that for Marx and Engels, “the concrete forms of the transition were variable, its class basis was not. The revolution was to be the direct organised action of the proletariat as a class, or it was not at all. Marx and Engels did not recognise any other agent of the revolution or any ‘substitute’ for it, for substitution would signify the immaturity of the class as such. The Marxian notion of socialism implies some form of ‘representation’ because the proletariat cannot act as a class without organisation and division of functions. However, Marx and Engels considered only representation, which was constituted by the class itself, that is to say directly delegated by and directly responsible to the ‘immediate producers’. “The class organises itself into a ‘party’ but this party develops straight out of the ‘soil of modern society itself’.” It is the self-organisation of the proletariat and not the vanguards that, in previous revolutions, acted on behalf of the proletariat.

(Concluded)

The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com