Part One: On the subterranean maturation of class consciousness

Submitted by ICConline on

Printer-friendly version

The ICC maintains that the wave of strikes in the UK in 2022 marked the beginning of a “rupture” or break with several decades of resignation and apathy and a growing loss of class identity. It was the first of a number of working class movements around the world, primarily in response to worsening living standards and working conditions[1]. Crucial to our analysis of a new phase in the international class struggle are two fundamental observations:

  • this new phase was not merely a reaction to immediate attacks on workers’ conditions, one that could be measured in terms of the number of strikes and struggles at a particular moment, but has a more profound historical dimension. It is the fruit of a long process of the “subterranean maturation” of class consciousness which has been moving forward despite the enormous pressures exerted by the accelerating decomposition of capitalist society.
  •  this rupture, radiating outwards from the oldest centres of world capitalism, is a confirmation that the principal bastions of the proletariat remain historically undefeated since the initial revival of the class struggle in 1968, and retain the potential to advance from economic defensive struggles to a political and practical critique of the entire capitalist order.

These arguments have met with a rather widespread scepticism in the proletarian political camp. If we take the example of the Internationalist Communist Tendency (ICT), although they initially acknowledged and welcomed some of the struggles that came to the surface after 2022, we have criticised the fact that they failed to see the international and historic significance of this movement[2], and more recently, seem to have either forgotten about it (as evidenced in the lack of any published balance sheet of the movement) or have written it off as just another flash in the pan – as we noted in some of their recent public meetings. Meanwhile, a parasitic website dedicated to ‘research’, Controverses, has devoted a full article[3] to refuting our notion of the rupture, thus providing a ‘theoretical’ justification for the scepticism of others.

It is noteworthy that the author of this article has now lined up with the majority of those who are (or merely claim to be) part of the left communist tradition, and now dismisses the very concept of subterranean maturation. Not only that: in an article on the main developments in the class struggle in the last 200 years[4], he embraces the idea that we are still living in the counter-revolution which descended on the working class with the defeat of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave. In this view, what the ICC insists was the historical reawakening of the world proletariat after 1968 and the end of the counter-revolution, was at best a mere “parenthesis” in a global chronicle of defeat.

This view is broadly shared by the various Bordigist groups and the ICT, whose forerunners saw little more in the events of May-June 68 in France or the ‘Hot Autumn’ in Italy the year after than a rash of student unrest.

In the next two articles, rather than entering into detail about the struggles of the last two years, we want to focus on two key theoretical planks for understanding our notion of the rupture: first, the reality of the subterranean maturation of consciousness, and secondly the undefeated nature of the world proletariat.

The marxist basis of the concept of subterranean maturation

Let’s briefly recall the circumstances in which the ICC first took up the question of subterranean maturation in its own ranks. In 1984, in response to an analysis of the class struggle which revealed a serious concession to the idea that class consciousness can only develop through the open, massive struggle of the workers, and in particular a text which explicitly rejected the notion of subterranean maturation, our comrade Marc Chirik wrote a text whose arguments were affirmed by the majority of the organisation, with the exception of the group which was eventually to desert the ICC at its 6th Congress and form the “External Fraction of the ICC” (its descendants are now part of Internationalist Perspective)[5].  Marc pointed out that such a view tends towards councilism because it sees consciousness not as an active factor in the struggle but purely as something determined by objective circumstances - a form of vulgar materialism; and it thus severely underestimated the role of minorities who are able to deepen class consciousness even during phases where the extent of class consciousness across the proletariat may have diminished. This councilist approach evidently has little use for an organisation of revolutionaries which is able, because it is based on the historic acquisitions of the class struggle, to steer its course through phases of retreat or defeat in the wider class movement; but it also dismisses the more general tendency within the class to reflect on its experience, to discuss, to pose questions about the major themes of the dominant ideology, and so on. Such a process may indeed be called “subterranean” because it takes place in restricted circles of the class or even inside the minds of individual workers who may give voice to all kinds of contradictory ideas, but it is no less a reality for all that. As Marx wrote in Capital[6],  “All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided”: it is in fact a specific task of the marxist minority to see beyond appearances and try to discern the deeper developments going on within their class.

When the ICC published documents relating to this internal debate, the Communist Workers Organisation welcomed what it perceived as an attempt by the ICC to settle accounts with the councilist resides which still had a weight within the organisation[7]. But in the substantive issued raised by the debate, it actually sided, somewhat ironically, with the councilist view, since they too rejected the notion of subterranean maturation as non-marxist, as a form of “political Jungianism”[8]. We say ironically because at that stage the CWO had embraced a version of class consciousness being brought to the class from the ‘outside’ by ‘the party’, constituted by elements of the bourgeois intelligentsia– the idealist thesis of Kautsky which Lenin adopted in What is to be Done but later admitted “bent the stick too far” in a polemic with the proto-councilists of his day, the Economist trend in Russia. But the irony dissipates when we consider that vulgar materialism and idealism can often exist side by side[9]. For both councilists and the CWO in their article, once the open struggles dies down, the class is no more than a mass of atomised individuals. The only difference is that for the CWO, this sterile cycle could only be broken through the intervention of the party.

In our reply[10], we insisted that the notion of the subterranean maturation of consciousness was not at an innovation of the ICC, but is a direct descendant of Marx’s notion of the revolution as the Old Mole which burrows under the surface for long periods only to burst to the surface in certain given conditions. And in particular we cited a very lucid passage on this process from Trotsky in his masterly study of precisely this process – The History of the Russian Revolution, where he wrote: "In a revolution we look first of all at the direct interference of the masses in the dest­inies of society. We seek to uncover behind the events changes in the collective conscious­ness...This can seem puzzling only to one who looks upon the insurrection of the masses as ‘spontaneous' - that is, as a herd-mutiny art­ificially made use of by leaders. In reality the mere existence of privations is not enough to cause an insurrection, if it were, the masses would always be in revolt...The immediate causes of the events of a revolution are changes in the state of mind of the conflicting classes... Changes in the collective consciousness have naturally a semi-concealed character. Only when they have attained a certain degree of intensity do the new moods and ideas break to the surface in the form of mass activities."

By the same token, the international wave of struggles that began in May 1968 in France did not come from nowhere (even if it initially surprised the bourgeoisie who had started to think that the working class had become “embourgeoisiefied” by the “consumer society”). It was the fruit of a long process of disengagement from bourgeois institutions and ideological themes (such as trade unions and the so-called workers’ parties, the myths of democracy and “real socialism” in the east, etc), accompanied by worsening material conditions (the first signs of a new open economic crisis). This process had also expressed itself here and there in strike movements like the wildcats in the USA and Western Europe in the mid-60s.

The same goes for the rupture of 2022, which also came in the wake of a number of strikes in the US, France, etc, many of which had been interrupted by the Covid lock-down. But what happened after 2022 revealed more clearly what had been gestating within the working class for some years:

  • The widespread slogan “enough is enough” expressed a long-nurtured feeling that all the promises doled out in the period that followed the “financial crisis” of 2008 – promises that a period of “austerity” was needed before prosperity could be resumed -had proved to be lies, and that it was high time workers began raising their own demands. It was all the more significant in that the movement in Britain emerged after decades of stagnation and resignation that followed the defeats of the 1980s, in particular the defeat of the miners in 1985.
  •  The slogans “we are all in the same boat” and “the working class is back” expressed a tendency for the working class to regain a sense of itself as a class with its own collective existence and distinct interests, despite decades of atomisation imposed by the general decomposition of capitalist society, assisted by the deliberate dismantling of many traditional centres of working class militancy (mines, steel, etc). In the struggles in France against “pension reforms”, and elsewhere, frequent references to the movement in Britain which had “kicked off” the class revival testified to the stirrings of an awareness that this class identity does not stop at national borders, despite the enormous weight of nationalism and populism.
  • Again in the movement in France, the slogan “You give us 64[11], we’ll give you 68” expressed a definite memory of the significance of the mass strikes of 68 (a phenomenon we had previously noted in the student assemblies in the anti-CPE movement of 2006, where there was a powerful desire to learn from what happened in 68).
  • Just as the process of subterranean maturation prior to 1968 was to give birth to a new generation of politicised elements attempting to rediscover the real history of the revolutionary movement (and thus to the recovery of the tradition of the communist left), so in the current period we are seeing the international development of minorities tending towards internationalist and communist positions. The fact that the majority of these elements and their efforts to come together have been engendered less by the immediate class struggle than by the question of war is evidence that the current class movements express something more than concerns about deteriorating living standards. We have noted the importance of the fact that the struggles of the rupture broke out precisely at a moment when the workers of western Europe were being asked to accept living costs and wage freezes in the name of supporting the “defence of Ukraine” against the tyrant Putin. And again, some minorities within the demonstrations against the pension reforms in France were explicit about rejecting sacrifices in the name of building up a war economy.
  • A further sign of the process of maturation can also be seen in the efforts of the bourgeoisie’s political apparatus to radicalise the messages addressed to the working class. The success of Trumpism in the USA can in large part be attributed to its capacity to take advantage of real concerns of the US working class about rising prices and the effect of military spending on living conditions. And on the opposite wing of the political spectrum we have seen the appointment of more radical union leaders, as in Britain, and a definite move to the left on the part of the Trotskyists, with groups  like Revolution Permanente in France or the Revolutionary Communist Party  in Britain shifting their focus from identity politics to talking about communism, internationalism and the necessity for the proletarian revolution – the aim being above all to “mop up” young elements who are asking serious questions about the direction that capitalist society is taken.

We could continue with these examples. They will no doubt be countered by arguments which seek to prove that the working class has actually forgotten more than it learned from the wave of struggles after 1968 – notably, as demonstrated by the fact that there has been little attempt to challenge the union control of the current strikes and to develop forms of self-organisation. But for us, the broad tendencies initiated by the “break” of 2022 are only at their beginning. Their historic potential can only be understood by seeing them as the first fruits of a long process of germination.  We will return to this in the second part of the article.

Amos

January 15, 2025.

 

[5] See our article The “External Fraction” of the ICC in International Review 45

[6] Capital Volume 3, part VII, chapter 48

[7] In Workers Voice 20, second series

[8] This was in response to our citing of Rosa Luxemburg’s insistence that “the unconscious precedes the conscious” in the development of the class movement, which is actually an application of the marxist formula that being determines consciousness. But this formula can be abused if it does grasp the dialectical relation between the two: not only is being a process of becoming, in which consciousness evolves out of the unconscious, but consciousness also becomes an active factor in evolutionary and historical advance.

[9] Since that time the CWO has ceased defending the Kautskyist thesis, but it is has never openly clarified why it has changed its position.

[10] Reply to the CWO: On the subterranean maturation of consciousness, International Review 43

[11] i.e. the proposed new retirement age

Rubric: 

The historic roots of the “rupture” in the dynamic of the class struggle since 2022