Economic interest and class consciousness

In Marxian theory, classes refer to categories of persons who have similar positions in the production process. As such, classes have an objective (ob­servable, verifiable) existence apart from the subjective awareness of the agents involved.

In this section, we consider the awareness of class interests within capi­talism under three headings: (a) the nature of class consciousness and its relationship to economic interest, (b) the nature of class consciousness as it applies to workers, and (c) the nature of the political interest of capitalists.

Class consciousness

In order to arrive at a notion of class consciousness appropriate to the de­velopment of a political agenda, the Marxian approach requires the fulfillment of two conditions. First, the individual must come to see his private and particular circumstances in a broader light, understanding their connection to the circumstances of other members of his class. Second, the class thus constituted must translate its narrow economic interest into a political agenda, and this means that the interests of the class must take on the characteristics of an interest appropriate to society as a whole.

The first step toward class consciousness is the one linking a typical position in the relations of production to an individual’s thought concerning that position.

In answering these questions, the Marxian theory proceeds along two di­mensions. First, it uncovers those characteristics of the (objective) economic condition of the class that provide the content of its political consciousness.

Second, it specifies a political agent for articulating the implied (or imputed) consciousness. This political agent translates and transforms material con­ditions into a political agenda. For the workers, the appropriate agent is argued to be the party, for the capitalists the state.

The working class

Two characteristics of the economic condition of workers are essential in providing the basis for the development of class consciousness: deprivation and collectivization. We consider each briefly.

In a subsequent section we outline the dynamics of the capitalist economy as Marx conceived them and indicate how he deduces a tendency toward the leveling of workers toward the standard of living defined by their subsistence. This economic analysis substantiated for Marx an insight at which he had arrived prior to his work in economics. The insight is not, in fact, original to Marx but can be found in one form or another in works of Adam Smith and G. W. F. Hegel with which he was certainly familiar. Shlomo Avineri summarizes Marx’s contention regarding the implication of deprivation for class consciousness (1969:59-61). Avineri’s quotations from Marx’s early works provide a flavor of and the elements of Marx’s argument:

A class must be formed which has radical chains, a class in civil society which is not of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong in general, (p.

For Marx, the working class is, indeed, “in civil society but not of civil society.” Civil society creates, recreates, and extends the scale of the working class but never allows the working class access to its benefits. This “wrong” to the working class is its deprivation not simply of material goods but of the kind and level of civilization represented by those goods, which Marx also considers the products of the worker’s labor. “Wrong in general” thus refers to exclusion from the civil life that your own work makes possible. This deprivation of the working class endows it, according to Marx, with the attributes of a “universal class,” whose “suffering and dehumanization” are, according to Marx, “a paradigm for the human condition at large” (Avineri, 1969:52).

Whether correct or incorrect, the argument that attempts to root political consciousness in deprivation suffers from a crucial limitation. Deprivation is essentially negative. We may oppose something from which we are excluded (though this is not inevitable), but, for political consciousness, it is not enough simply to oppose civil society, it is also necessary to counterpose something to it. The universality of the working class has a positive side as expressed implicitly by Marx in the following statement:

For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aims, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality.... The class making a revolution appears from the very start... not as a class but as the representative of the whole society. (From the German Ideology, quoted in Avineri, 1969:58-9)

The universal class must have real, positive interests, and this positive side, as much as the negative, must have its roots in the material (economic) conditions of the class. Workers must see in the circumstances of their ex­clusion from civil society the germ of a social order different from the one (capitalism) that creates them.

Marx’s answer to this centers on the collective nature of labor under cap­italism (1967axh. 12). Capitalism brings about the development of

the cooperative form of the labour-process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use of the means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and with this, the international character of the capitalist regime. (From Capital, Vol. I, quoted in Avineri, 1969:172)

Statements such as this suggest that economic development affects more than workers’ income and employment. Of greatest importance, Marx con­trasts the isolated and specialized character of what he calls handicraft labor with the collective, rationalized, and universal character of labor under capi­talism (for a more detailed discussion, see Levine, 1978:ch. 7). Not only do workers work together but the nature of their work creates a bond between workers in different industries. Workers lose those specialized skills that set up qualitative barriers between those working in different crafts. Now all workers labor no matter what their product. In this sense, capitalist development makes the objective condition of the worker universal and places him into a collective rather than individualized work process and environment. All that remains is for the worker to recognize the implication of his own conditions.

The capitalist class

The economic condition of capitalists is one of opposed private interest and individualized circumstances.

In some respects the Marxian argument parallels the neoclassical argument for economic policy based on the idea of externalities (see Chapter 4 of this book). Private decisions often (perhaps always) have consequences beyond those taken into account by the parties directly involved. Sometimes those consequences can, in the large, be destructive for social order and individual well-being. In some cases those consequences may threaten the social order of a market economy and therefore the ability of individual capitalists to pursue private accumulations of capital.

In the previous section of this chapter, we encountered an example. When individual capitalists (or firms) decide that prospects for profit making are not satisfactory, they refrain from investing in new capacity. This means that they reduce their demand for labor and for capital, and this leads to a fall in wages and revenues for the producers of capital equipment. Falling wages mean falling demand for consumption goods, which, together with declining demand for capital goods, imply falling aggregate demand. This means a deterioration in the profit of firms producing those goods, which further discourages investment. In cases such as this, the pursuit of private interest by capitalists becomes self-defeating; it threatens the viability of the economic system as a whole.

A second, and related, example has to do with the condition of the working class. The individual capitalist benefits by lower wages because he experiences wages as a cost. Yet, as we have seen, by working against wage increases, the capitalist deprives the worker of purchasing power in the capitalist system. Furthermore, for the class of capitalists, wages are a primary source of de­mand for their products, and this means that capitalists as a class may benefit from higher wages (since this provides workers with a stake in capitalism and maintains aggregate demand) even though the individual capitalist taking a purely private view does not see things that way.

Each capitalist has two kinds of interest: an interest in his wealth position (and in the prospects for enhancing it) and an interest in the security of the social system that allows pursuit of private accumulations of wealth. The first implies the second, but it may also work against the second. The first interest is purely private; capitalists do not share it, they compete over it. The second interest is held in common. It secures the basis upon which capitalists can articulate a political interest.

Clearly, and by definition, the capitalist class has a stake in the preservation of capitalism as the only system within which it can exist. The capitalist economy is, after all, designed with the capitalists in mind. Claims for uni­versality of the broader interests of the capitalist class arise not out of the commonality of situation of each capitalist with every other member of the class but on the universality of its aspirations.

Many have argued that the pursuit of private accumulations of wealth constitutes a universal aspiration of men and that since capitalism frees this aspiration (and nurtures it) it is the only truly universal system and its uni­versality is best represented by the capitalists. The inevitability of conflict between the pursuit of private interest and the securing of the aggregate conditions needed for pursuit of private interest casts the problem of the relation between narrow material interests and the broader class interests of capitalists in a different light. It suggests that narrow material interests do not directly and smoothly translate into broader political agendas. Indeed, this translation now seems both complex and problematic. Marxian analysis of the state speaks to this issue. Particularly important is the Marxian analysis of the autonomy of the state in relation to what we have termed the narrower material interests of the capitalists.

Summary

The issues raised by the Marxian approach to class consciousness and political interest refer us to basic features of Marx’s method. This method directs our attention to the circumstances of persons in (civil) society and finds in those circumstances both the logical and the historical origin for their political agendas. In one respect this method differs little from the utilitarian since both root politics in civil society. Unlike the utilitarians, however, Marxists retain the idea of universal interest and make claims regarding the universality or lack thereof of the interests emerging within the private sphere. Because of this, Marxism confronts issues not well defined within the utilitarian theories.

Marxism concerns itself with the ways in which the circumstances of per­sons within the private sphere form and determine their consciousness, and how the development of society determines the private circumstances and their associated ways of life and ways of thinking. As theory, Marxism con­cerns itself with the clash between differing conceptions of the well-ordered society. It sees the struggle between capital and labor as a struggle between fundamentally opposed judgments concerning what is, indeed, universal to the aspirations of persons. Does capitalism express the fundamental human aspiration to individual self-aggrandizement and pursuit of wealth? In this sense does capitalism accord with the general interests of society as well as the narrow interests of capitalists? Or, does the material situation of workers imbue them with a communal and egalitarian ethic more in line with the universal interests of persons?

Bear in mind, as we pursue the Marxian approach, the underlying meth­odological judgment concerning where we look for the source of universal interests - in civil society and not in politics or in the state. As one Marxist expresses it, civil society is the “real home, the theatre of history” (Bobbio, 1979:31). Politics provides a space for the confrontation of concerns emerging elsewhere. This raises a problem: How can interests emergent within an explicitly private sphere (the economy), a sphere within which individuals are encouraged and required to focus on and act on their private interests, become universal? Clearly, a tension exists between the fractioning of interest demanded within the economy - where workers oppose not only capitalists but also one another, and the constitution of the interested parties as persons sharing a goal.

One way in which Marx resolves this tension is by recourse to his argument concerning polarization. If this argument holds, then the tendency of capi­talism is to relegate larger and larger proportions of the population to a common circumstance within civil society - the circumstance of those with nothing to sell but their labor power. If, as Marx also argues, the development of capitalism reduces and eliminates differences (of skill and so on) among workers, making them into a more and more homogeneous mass, then dif­ferences that tend to particularize workers and oppose their private conditions and private interests become less and less important. The working class becomes universal in two senses. First the working class becomes the class of the vast bulk of the population. Second, the circumstances within the working class become progressively more homogeneous.

Within the Marxian method, politics makes the implicit universality of private circumstances explicit. Economics takes the active role. This theorem underpins the Marxian theory of the state and also defines the important challenges to that theory. The state does not take an active role in forming society and determining the social structure that creates private interest. It incorporates a process for making the universal aspect of private interest explicit.