My Correct Views On A Couple Things: A Response to Tony Smith on Marxism and Reformist Struggle
As regular readers of my little blog are probly sick of hearing me say, I had a chapter in this book (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-36167-8) on Marxist accounts of the state. My chapter’s on social murder and the capitalist state as accomplice to it. I’m pleased with my chapter insofar as I learned stuff by writing it and hit a new-for-me degree of clarity on some issues I care about. I’m also excited about the other chapters and the authors who wrote them, so it’s cool to have a chapter put me in their company as well. This means I’m excited about this thoughtful review of the book over at the Marx and Philosophy Review of Books (https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21552_marxism-and-the-capitalist-state-towards-a-new-debate-by-rob-hunter-rafael-khachaturian-and-eva-nanopoulos-eds-reviewed-by-tony-smith/), and I’m even more excited that it’s by Tony Smith, whose work I’m a huge fan of and continue to learn a great deal from I recommend the whole review, it’s thoughtful, generous and well done. In what follows I want to respond to some points that Smith raises - these are points I agree with but which I think involve some nuances, which is part of my interest in writing this thing. Oh, also, this will make more sense if you read the review as a whole first, so I strongly encourage people to read the review first, but none of this presupposes you’ve read my chapter or anything else in the book. Though of course I do hope you read the chapter and the rest of the book. (And if you want to hear my talk on my chapter from Red May the other day, that’s here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjagEiBVn5M)And another thing - this is too long, as usual. I didn’t have time to make it short, too busy staring in horror and sighing in exasperation at my own limits. But let’s get on with it.
Smith’s review talks about the partial solubility of social problems through state policy and the importance of collective action. To be clear, he raises this as a matter of tension between some of the chapters - usefully highlighting the debate quality of the of the book - rather than as a comment on my work alone. I’ve had people I respect and who are sympathetic to my work raise constructive criticisms along the lines that my stuff doesn’t sufficiently account for these points. I think that’s a reasonable criticism and I largely agree, so I thought I’d write in response to his remarks in the hopes of clarifying my thinking. (I type this particular parenthetical sentence after having written the rest of this now far-too-long thing and I’ll say that I’m largely saying things I’ve said before but in a fairly dispersed and scattershot form in conversations, small colums and blog posts, and so on, though I’ve hit on some better formulations than before and drawn more connections to other things I’ve read and thought about. I’ll add that this is a political perspective that I’m fairly committed to and which informs all of my marxist writing at least in the general way in which general convictions and outlooks inform work. I have little sense of how much these convictions come through consistently in the work vs being an unstated presence. I suspect that people with similar convictions read them into the work, and people without those convictions don’t notice their presence much - which is a limit of the work, a bug and not a feature - but I dunno for sure. Anywho, enough throat clearing.)
Part of what Smith is saying is that while on the one hand capitalism can never be made sufficient to human needs and human dignity - capitalism will always be an unjust society that generates suffering - on the other hand we have rarely we’ve rarely hit the ceiling for the best possible capitalism, and, of course, it’s worth fighting for better lives here and now for lots of reasons. Our maximalism about human dignity - the fact that we insist on the need to replace capitalism with a good society - shouldn’t make us indifferent to the real differences between versions of capitalism and the real human stakes involved in reforms and efforts to create reforms.
Direct Action Gets The Goods - But Why?
Smith quotes me saying action “within state institutional channels tends to encourage social struggles to express themselves in ways that do not disrupt the operation of the valorisation imperative, let alone threaten to end capitalism.” To unpack that a little, ‘the valorization imperative’ (a term I got from Smith in the first place) refers to the fact that capitalists must profit - and not only individual capitalists but many capitalists: generally speaking in capialism many capitalists need to be able to make money into more money or big problems result for lots of people in society.
To put more technically, in capitalism social reproduction is subordinated to the accumulation of capital. Marx described each individual capitalist as engaging in a circuit beginning with spending money, ending temporarily with making a return on that investment, then restarting the process again. He wrote this circuit out as M-C…P…C’-M’ (M meaning money, C meaning commodities, P meaning production, the dashes indicating market exchanges, the ellipses indicating time passing during production, and the C and M with apostrophes attached indicated the transformed, ie more valuable, results of production and of the sale of those results). No capitalist can carry out that circuit in isolation, which is to say, the individual capitalist is product of capitalism’s social architecture. For one capitalism to buy commodity inputs in the first sequence of that circuit, M-C, is only possible because those commodity input are another capitalists’s C’-M’, ie, the sale of commodity outputs at a profitable price. And the sale of those outputs is only possible because there are buyers, a mix of other capitalists buying them as inputs and people buying them as means of subsistence. Those buyers in turn only exist insofar as capitalist enterprises are generally successfully completing those circuits, which includes paying wages in the process.
When I mentioned struggles that do or don’t disrupt the valorization imperative, I didn’t mean to suggest that disruptive struggles are necessarily more politically radical. Generally speaking the problems inflicted on people by capitalist social relations will tend to have both long term expansive solutions involving ending capitalism and short term limited solutions involving some capitalism-compatible solutions. The second kinds of solutions predominate almost without exception. This isn’t because people are brainwashed or anything of the sort, it’s because we need to live here and now, under capitalism, so of course we will reach for solutions here and now. That is to say, there are major pressures built in to the nature of life in capitalist society for people to look for capitalism-compatible solutions to their problems. Those solutions often involve really serious conflicts with capitalists and other powerful actors.
I looked at my chapter that Smith quotes from and I think I’m right but made the point in an overly compressed way that conflates two things: anticapitalism and militancy. (This is ironic because I’ve tended to stress that those are significantly different categories.) When I referred to state action tending to make struggles not disruptive of the valorization imperativ, I meant that the state tends to make struggles less effective in the short term.
The capitalist world we are in tends to lay down train tracks, so to speak, in the sense that the current version of capitalism we live in tends to have a trajectory or developmenal logic that unfolds over time. (This is the concrete particular form that capitalism’s general tendencies take at a given place and time.) Getting the system to switch to a different track - forcing a variation within capitalism, where we get off the current immediately unfolding trajectory and onto a different capitalism-compatible trajectory - is extraordinarily difficult. In the words of the sadly departed Utah Phillips, “the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked.” Constituting enough resistance to be able to divert the river - to make some other direction into the path of least resistance - is doable, but not easy. It takes a huge whack, so to speak, and in my view state institutional channels tend to pressure movements away from delivering that whack, or developing the capacity and disposition to doing so.
Generally speaking, the most effective ways to shift the path we’re currently on involve creating serious downsides for powerful actors, specifically by disrupting profit-making. In effect, it’s possible for the collective action of subordinates to squeeze to form a rock while the imperatives of profit-making constitute a hard place, and our social superiors get caught between the two. When that happens, we’re more likely to see results - as the old slogan goes, “direct action gets the goods.” That is to say, struggles over what people need in the short term are more likely to succeed when they don’t follow a prescribed set of institutional pathways. (The ‘direct’ part of direct action refers to this eschewing of prescribed institutional pathways.) That’s because prescribed pathways for struggle, especially those that pass through and/or are influenced by the state, tend to routed around rather than through the valorization imperative: social and institutional permission for conflict tends to correlate with those relatively permitted forms of conflict being less disruptive to the system’s imperatives, which means those forms are also less effective ways to win those struggles’ immediate demants. I want to underline that what constitutes ‘direct’ action changes over time to a significant degree because the prescribed set of institutional pathways for dealing with problems in capitalism change over time (in response to the general patterns of crisis and conflict that are endemic to capitalism) and because new problems will periodically arise (capitalism is a problem-generating machine).
Very schematically: people tend to face really serious problems they don’t know how to deal with. Over time, people tend to hit on direct action methods to deal with those problems, to create or demand solutions in the short term - which is to say, variations on capitalist social relations but variations not on offer and that have to be imposed on the existing capitalist powers that be. Those direct action struggles disrupt the system to some degree. The state represses them. Struggle keeps disrupting. The state creates means for people to deal with problems without direct action. Those means have important limitations in terms of how much mitigation they provide and that mitigation is overly localized, but often they do provide some real relief to some people. Time passes. People’s capacity for direct action declines, and eventually so does the capacity for the problem-resolution mechanisms to deliver the goods, and people are in some respects back to square one. And in the meantime new really serious problems in people’s lives keep arising as well. As a shorthand, I’ll call that schematic sequence the tendency to return to square one. That arises because capitalism generates corrosive pressures that afflict the institutions, organizations, and cultures that serve as repositories for the practical knowhow of struggle. This means movements end sometimes, or forget some of what they used to know. Either way, there are periodic losses of old skills, organization, analysis, etc. That’s a soluble problem but is a real pressure that we face.
That’s to say, reformist struggles or their results when institutionalized tend to become mechanisms for serving the valorization imperative, as part of the working out of the tendency to return to square one. The state encourages that in the short term and in the longer term there are also patterns and pressures that play out over time because capitalism has a kind of historical directionality to it - the system creates trajectories and enacts pressures that keep people on those trajectories (only to periodically scramble those trajectories when the system goes through one of its recurring crises).
Historically, social policies of the sorts that reformists pursue have helped create what Simon Clarke calls “institutionalised forms of class collaboration.” (Page 20 in the version of his Keynesianism, Monetarism, and the Crisis of the State here: https://files.warwick.ac.uk/simonclarke/files/pubs/kmcs.pdf) Class collaboration never occurs on equal terms: the working class or some working class people may get some benefits, but not as many as capitalists, and for not as long - you might win once in a while at a casino but in the long run the house always wins if you play the house’s games.
Institutions of class collaboration on the one hand are about “reinforcing the social reproduction of the working class in its subordination to the money power of capital and the constitutional authority of the state,” (Keynesianism, Monetarism, and the Crisis of the State, 136) which involves efforts “to accommodate the working class to the reproduction of capitalist domination” (142) by “a dual strategy of repression and concession.” The result, Clarke writes, is to “confine” the working class’s “ aspirations within the dual forms of capital’s power, the state and the wage relation, and concessions to the working class were made primarily to contain its struggles within those channels, reaffirming its continued subordination to capital.” (173. Clarke’s remarks are historical and conjunctural, as the book is a periodization of both continuity and change over time in capitalism in the UK, while I’ve put them here in a more general and structural phrasing. I don’t think he’d disagree though.)
Clarke takes pains to stress that the confinement of working class aspirations and so the efficacy of institutional channels that promote class collaboration is always temporary, being in effect eroded on the one hand by the various forms of action by working class people - because life in ameliorated capitalism still tends to be kinda lousy (Martin Glaberman: “workers will resist, because work sucks. Until someone can tell me that work has become real nice under capitalism, whether in the United States or anywhere else, I say that is the fundamental basis of our theory and our practice. Work sucks, and sooner or later workers are going to resist it in whatever way they can.” https://www.connexions.org/CxArchive/MIA/glaberman/1997/xx/workersreality.htm) - and on the other hand those institutions are under pressure from capitalism’s tendency toward crises of various kinds (or maybe they’re all crises of one kind with the differences being largely in the immediate precipitating cause - what’s the first domino and what tipped it. I’m unsure.) I wrote a bit about some of this in my chapter on EP Thompson and ‘moral economies’ a while back. (https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/edcoll/9781788119856/9781788119856.00020.xml) At any given moment there are institutions that serve as means for handling disputes and when they start to break down people’s investments in those institutions shifts from being a source of people’s relative governability to being a source of conflict. That said, not all conflict is anti-systemic. I’ll come back to this.
I talked above about capital’s circuits and the valorization imperative. If capital’s circuits seize up - or rather, when they seize up, as that recurrence seems unavoidable in capitalism, though the concrete particulars vary massively - huge consequences follow, including for the state. (The accumulation of capital bakes in a lot of suffering and death, but interruptions to the accumulation of capital do as well in this society, which is a serious challenge for anticapitalists.) Jack Copley has written a fantastic book analyzing this reality in close detail in the example of the UK government in the late 20th century. (My enthusiastic review is here: https://legalform.blog/2023/01/30/review-essay-economic-power-liberalism-and-crisis-nate-holdren/)
Peter Burnham has argued that avoiding or undoing this seizing up is a massive state priority: “state managers are above all circuit managers.” (p108 here https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/030981680107500109) “The role of the state in the capitalist economy, therefore, is essentially negative, removing barriers to accumulation.” (The Political Economy of Postwar Reconstruction, 183.) That sounded reductive to me when I first read it, but the point is not that state personnel walk around constantly thinking ‘how can I facilitate profits?’ Rather, what happens is that policy success tends to be defined by compatibility with the working of capital’s circuits. If some policy disrupts those circuits, that’s a big problem that has to be offset or makes the policy in question require serious defense. (Sometimes the defense rests on the fact that policy disrupts some circuits and facilitates others.) There are major tensions over all of this over time, manifesting in the concrete particulars in any given situation, which is part of why Marxism requires - and to an important extent, is at its best when doing - analysis of specific historical periods or conjunctures.
I mention Burnham, capital’s circuits, etc because I want to underline the point that there is tremendous pressure acting upon working class collective action and state policies in order to make that action and those policies compatible with rather than disruptive of capital’s circuits. That disruption is fairly crucial to winning in the short term and obviously revolutionary challenges to capitalism are by definition disruptive of those circuits.
I talked about this in my essay on the limitations of the National Labor Relations Act. (https://organizing.work/2023/08/the-national-labor-relations-act-is-anti-strike-legislation/) The overriding priority of the NLRA is to prevent disruptions of commerce, and one product of the NLRA has been a less disruptive labor movement. It may have paid off in important ways in the short to medium term, but that capacity to pay off has a shelf life and came at significant tradeoffs as I talk about in the article. The section below draws out further what I think some of the other tradeoffs are, though I don’t get into that explictly. To reiterate, preventing or undoing barriers to the operation of the valorization imperative is an overriding state priority as Burnham discussed and it is the point of what Clarke called institutional forms of class collaboration and of state repressive action as well. Furthermore, part of how these mechanisms work is by promoting forms and practices of struggle that point away from disruption. (There’s a good related discussion posed in terms of Gramsci and hegemony in Zachary Levenson’s very good book. My review of the book is here: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/55b7e78ae4b044095cee137e/t/63b8a82176c0fc7697f5fb12/1673046049454/Review1.pdf)
Revolutionary Consciousness
The section above talked about why disruptive action is best for winning demands, all things being equal, and why reforming social policy tends to work against disruption. I want to underline that disruptiveness or militancy is not a straightforward measure of radicalism. Radicalism is in one sense importantly contextual, and on the other hand it’s invariant across context in the sense that there is straightforwardly a ceiling on what collective action can achieve if the people involved don’t actively seek to end capitalism (or don’t understand sufficiently what ending capitalism consists in).
In his review of the state anthology, Smith writes that collective action to end capitalism requires mass-based revolutionary consciousness, and further argues that while I and others are right about the limitations of many forms of collective action, those limited forms can serve as a seedbed for less limited form. Here too I agree, but I want to get into some of the details as thes are complex matters such that details matter somewhat.
It seems to be the case that mass based revolutionary politics will only come into being after a period of non-revolutionary social unrest, where a lot of people were engaged in non-revolutionary struggles. People who participate in those struggles often find them significantly transformative - to a significant degree, collective action is a collective learning process. Smith says as much though not quite in so many words: struggle can cause “confidence in the collective power of people to change the social world” to grow, and realizing the partial and limited character of the reforms won can lead movement participants to “conclude (correctly!) that the root problem lies with the property and production relationships of capitalism.” Of course, things can go awry as well, in that people come away more convinced of “the illusion that the shortcomings of capitalism can be overcome in some new variant,” the institutional transformations brought about by reforms can “rejuvenate capital by opening up new paths of accumulation,” and people can end up less confident and with lowered aspirations, instead embracing “accommodation, cynical opportunism, stoic resignation or despair.”
I’ve sometimes used the metaphor of a gas stove to get at this stuff. A gas stove has multiple relationships to fire: it works to create and sustain fire, but also to contain fire in space - so it doesn’t start new fires or link with others - and prevent its temperature from getting too high. It does so in order to make fire useful but not disruptive. In this analogy, fire is class struggle and the various parts of the gas stove are the ensemble of reformist organizations, both state and nonstate.
Just to be clear, none of this is to say reformist organizations and reform policies are useless: things can be very useful for a wide range of human needs while also serving capital accumulation (this is built in to Marx’s account of every commodity having a use value and an exchange value) and so being bound up with the inflicting of suffering. Rather, it’s to say, for one thing, that they won’t deliver socialist revolution. And for another thing, Smith is right that they can sustain and raise aspirations (the historical process that is their social existence as it unfolds over time can cultivate and sustain confidence in collective capacity for deep social change and desire for that change paired with awareness that what we really want requires ending capitalism). The aspirations thus sustained and raised exist in tension with those reformist institutions or the policies they result in, either in the form of internal contention or in the form of those institutions coming to attack those aspirations and to replace them with resignation and/or illusions.
This means that while I agree with Smith that Marxists should avoid "renouncing progressive social movements” and that reformist struggles “can in principle be affirmed from a Marxian standpoint,” I think revolutionaries’ actual relationship to those movements and struggles is fairly complicated and context dependent. To again be very schematic and to lean on the analogy of the gas stove, if the fire’s almost out then radicals’ participation likely should look no different than any other sincere, competent participation: build the struggle however we can where we are. From there things change, and radicals’ participation should often be a mix of ordinary sincere competent participation and a degree of tension with the organization or struggle, tension over any of a very wide range of possible elements of the struggle - internationalism, militancy, democracy, the on-paper ideology of the effort and political education of participants, and so on.
I think the political statement (“As We See It”) of the UK organization Solidarity is very good over all and relevant here. Point 7 of that statement reads “meaningful action, for revolutionaries, is whatever increases the confidence, the autonomy, the initiative, the participation, the solidarity, the equalitarian tendencies and the self-activity of the masses and whatever assists in their demystification. Sterile and harmful action is whatever reinforces the passivity of the masses, their apathy, their cynicism, their differentiation through hierarchy, their alienation, their reliance on others to do things for them and the degree to which they can therefore be manipulated by others - even by those allegedly acting on their behalf.” (The whole statement is online here: https://libcom.org/library/as-we-see-it-solidarity-group In a follow up text, they made some important explications of section 7 and a lot else. I encourage people to read that here https://libcom.org/article/ii-we-dont-see-it and really to read both the statement and the clarification text in full. I’ll note in passing that this organization gets a nod from EP Thompson in Poverty of Theory as part of his nod to Cornelius Castoriadis and his organization Socialism or Barbarism. Castoriadis and SB were base in France. UK Solidarity were basically Castoriadisites in the UK.)
It’s worth noting that these qualities don’t involve loyalty to any particular tradition of left politics or any particular vocabulary like socialism, marxism, anarchism, etc. Along similar lines, Simon Clarke wrote that the “internationalist tendencies in the labour movement, and (...) the women's movement, the peace movement, the environmental movement, solidarity movements, and the world development movement” all “provide a political basis on which to build an internationalist alternative.” That internationalism, he added, doesn’t always involve “the rhetoric of socialism” but remains very radical because it expresses a political imagination “based on the subordination of capital not to the illusory community of the nation embodied in the national form of the capitalist state, but to the expression of human needs and aspirations, which alone point the way forward to socialism.” (P89 here https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/030981688803600104)
In the context of what I’m talking about here, I’d say that the qualities that Solidarity UK mentions - confidence, egalitarianism, etc - should be understood as tensions within struggles and organizations and processes that work out over time. Sometimes being inegalitarian in an organization is expedient. Sometimes principles are a liability. There isn’t any theoretical fix to be had in advance, everything has to get worked out in real time with the limited information, time, energy, and resources that people have to hand, and mistakes will be made.
Forward To Socialism From Today’s Struggles
In my view ultimately revolution requires relatively permanent political organizations rooted in the labor movement, or at least forms of struggle and organization analogous to them. Marx seems to have thought so as well, as I elaborate on further below. I think Simon Clarke’s on point here as well, writing that “forms of opposition remain fragmented, isolated and ephemeral unless they are integrated into a broader labour movement, the only secure base of which has proved to be the trade union organisation that develops out of the struggle over the terms and conditions of wage-labour, which cannot by any means be reduced to organisation on the basis of the sectional interests of particular groups of wage-labourers. (...) the labour movement (...) for all its faults, is the only collective expression of the interests and aspirations of labour, in hundreds of different ways, at every level and in every part of the world. (...) progressive intellectuals have a responsibility to supplement the intellectual resources of the labour movement, to help to broaden its understanding and its horizons, to analyse the movements of capital, to contribute to the critique of the modern forms of vulgar economy, to find and learn from new ways of organising and new forms of struggle so that the labour movement can begin to reverse the setbacks and defeats.” (https://libcom.org/article/class-struggle-and-working-class-problem-commodity-fetishism-simon-clarke)
Furthermore, in my view, revolution ultimately requires revolutionary unions specifically, or forms of struggle and organization closely analogous. Here too Marx thought so as well.
Marx read a paper at a meeting of the First International in 1865 opposing an argument made by another member, John Weston. Marx began by noting that in Europe at the time there was “a real epidemic of strikes, and a general clamour for a rise of wages” and that the International “ought to have settled convictions upon this paramount question.” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ch01.htm#c0) The position Marx argued in the paper was close to Smith’s, that the First International should support beneficial reforms and collective action to achieve them. Indeed, this was crucial for the survival of working class people. If the working class were, Marx wrote, “to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement” then “they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation.” Struggle is necessary to survive, and for Marx those struggles were “inseparable from the whole wages system.” Fighting over wage levels “is inherent to [workers’] condition of having to sell themselves as commodities.” He added that “the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market.” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ch03.htm#c14)
That’s all to say, struggles for survival are not struggles for revolution. As important as the former are, those efforts are limited for Marx, and as Smith argues as well. At the same time, the two have an important relationship: “Trades Unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capital,” Marx wrote, but “fail generally from limiting themselves to a guerilla war against the effects of the existing system, instead of simultaneously trying to change it, instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system.” The relationship between survival struggles and revolutionary struggles, then, can be one of continuity for Marx. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ch03.htm#c14)
One important element of that continuity for Marx was that the working class’s “centers of resistance” against capital’s “encroachments” should simultaneously have a critical analysis of capitalism as a system and a commitment to emancipatory anticapitalist politics. This is why Marx held that “Instead of the conservative motto: ‘A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!’ they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: ‘Abolition of the wages system!’” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/ch03.htm#c14) The revolutionary union the Industrial Workers of the World would add those words to the Preamble of its constitution in 1908, and sought (and still seeks) to combine fights here and now for better lives in the short term with the longer term struggle to end capitalism. (https://archive.iww.org/PDF/Official/Annotated%20Preamble.pdf) The IWW isn’t the only organization to do that combining. I’m a big fan of this book by the Solidarity Federation, which is affiliated to the International Workers Association, which advocates a similar position. (https://libcom.org/article/fighting-ourselves-anarcho-syndicalism-and-class-struggle-solidarity-federation)
Part of the idea, to my mind anyway, of combining struggles for a better life to a limited extent in the near future under capitalism with struggles for a better life to a fuller extent in the longer term by ending capitalism, is that collective action is transformative in various ways, developing capacities and sentiments that make people more capable and driven to fight for more in the future. This is a matter of, to use a phrase Simon Clarke used a lot, the aspirations of the working class.
In my view not all nonrevolutionary struggles are equally likely to give rise to revolutionary consciousness, and furthermore revolutionary consciousness is not a necessary let alone a sufficient condition for struggling effectively. It’s very possible for struggles to occur in limited ways while conducted by sincere anticapitalist radicals. A good ideology on paper is not a guarantee of anything in practice. On the other hand, the best practices in the world for fighting for a better life under capitalism will not lead to the end of capitalism unless there is, as Smith stresses, widespread revolutionary consciousness. That consciousness is best cultivated (to borrow again from Solidarity UK, working class confidence, autonomy, initiative, participation, solidarity, egalitarianism and self-activity best arise) if the fighting organizations of the working class are actively committed to that cultivation, and if they try to conduct the short term “guerilla war against the effects of the existing system” in such a way that actively does that cultivating. I’ll add that preventing this uniting of practical orientation in the short term and revolutionary aspiration in the long term has been a pretty major state policy aim, as this uniting can lead to pretty big obstacles to capital’s circuits. (I’ll add as well that labor leftists in the US often point to the Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947, which among other things fostered purges of communists from the labor movement. That’s real and important but as I discuss in my article on the National Labor Relations Act, passed in 1935, the new labor relations framework itself was conservatizing, fostering the success of more conservative and less democratic and less militant unions. Furthermore, the powers over the unions used by Taft-Hartley were powers granted to the government by the NLRA: Taft-Hartley pulled the trigger but the NLRA loaded the gun and put it in the government’s hands.)
The Moral and Spiritual Forces of Solidarity and Clarity
I’m going to stop in a moment but the final thing I want to say is that I think the real evaluations of action should be what Solidarity UK pointed to, which are subjective qualities, or to put it another way, the cultivation of a collective subject. This is not primarily a matter of dollars and cents or wins and losses in any narrow sense, though those things do matter. We shouldn’t assume that raises or better laws or other victories automatically translate into building a more radical working class. The process and the social life as experienced matters as much or more, and furthermore the aim of the left should be in part to engage with people’s processing of their experiences. And by the same token, such a left can only really meaningfully exist in a context of widespread collective action.
Søren Mau has an essay on the importance of visions of what a communist future would look like. My favorite bit of the essay, though, is not on those visions but on the social conditions for their efficacy - the presence of lots of collective action. He writes that despite “what many intellectuals are led by their vanity to believe (...) having the right ideas, arguments, and analyses” is less important than “having concrete experiences of being able to act and make changes together with other people. If millions of people in the early decades of the 20th century considered socialism to be a real possibility within reach, it wasn’t because socialist intellectuals had finally managed to sufficiently sharpen their arguments, but because the worker’s movement in its heyday had created political organizations that were capable of giving people a lived experience of accomplishing concrete improvements in their quality of life by means of collective action. Beautiful utopias don’t matter if they’re not accompanied by a confidence in the ability of collective action to change the course of history, and such a confidence can’t be conjured up by good arguments: political communities is the inevitable basis for ideas about another and better society.”
On the flip side, In his “Reflections on Organizing,” part of the Sojourner Truth Organization’s Workplace Papers, Don Hamerquist writes that “the lessons of [any] particular struggle” must be put “into a form in which they can be understood and socialized.” Without that “the various lessons that capitalism constantly beats into the workers (you get what you deserve, look out for Number One, take it to the union, nobody gives a damn about anyone else) will be the lessons that are learned. Any Left group which relies on direct action to develop an autonomous working-class consciousness and an independent revolutionary workers' movement by itself, is going to wait forever.” (Page 12 here http://www.sojournertruth.net/workplacepapers.pdf.) I think this is overstated - capitalism is a contradictory social system that beats a wide range of lessons into people, including some correct and very radical ones - but it’s more right than wrong. An approach that relies on action alone with no interpretive efforts is in effect planning to reach into a grab bag of many bad and only a few good lessons. As I said above, I think the best approach to providing these interpretive efforts is as part of revolutionary unions and similar fighting organizations, which can help provide both the experiential context Mau wrote about and the interpretive dimension Hamerquist wrote about.
The confidence Mau emphasizes and the lessons Hamerquist emphasizes are both, as I said above, subjective elements. I’m going to give the last word here to Anton Pannekoek. He writes that “united action of the whole class is not possible, if it is not sustained by a strong moral force,” which Pannekoek calls “proletarian virtue” consisting in “a feeling of fellowship, of mutual aid, of self-sacrifice.” This is a key “element of proletarian power,” he stresses, adding that “solidarity is the bond that unites the will of all the separate individuals into one common will, thus achieving one mighty organized action.” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1936/05/power-classes.htm.)
Victory in struggle “must be attained by merging all the forces at the masses' disposal -- not only material and moral force with a view to action, unity and enthusiasm, but also the spiritual force born of mental clarity. The importance of [left-wing] parties or groups resides in the fact that they help to secure this mental clarity through their mutual conflicts, their discussions, their propaganda. It is by means of these organs of self-clarification that the working class can succeed in tracing for itself the road to freedom.” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1936/party-working-class.htm) I quote this because what I’ve tried to argue via Solidarity UK is the importance of what Pannekoek calls “moral force” and “spiritual force,” not terms that all marxists are comfortable with. (Seems like a skill issue to me…) To perhaps put too fine a point on it, to my mind ‘is it building the moral and spiritual force of the workers’ movement?’ is the fundamental question behind that Solidarity UK quote and where the emphasis should be for Marxists in considering how to relate - and as I hope is aleady clear, Smith is right to emphasize that we should seek to relate - to various struggles in capitalist society.