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Michael Prior
© Michael Prior 2008
Socialism and class. Socialism and class? Socialism and class! Ouch! I think one way or another this is bound to hurt. But I suppose it has to be faced sometime.
Let's start right at the beginning. I am not going to attempt even to try and define either word. This is not a book. So let's assume that they mean something which is, roughly, familiar to anyone reading this. In this, slightly vague, sense, socialism and class have always been linked even when the terms themselves were very unfamiliar. Before, broadly, the period of Robert Owen, there were philanthropists and social revolutionaries of various kinds but not socialists. The importance of people like Owen was to associate the rise of a particular form of social organisation, capitalism, with the oppression of a particular social group, the industrial working class. Owen moved from being a philanthropist, moved by pity for the poor, to being a socialist specifically because he believed that only by setting up a particular kind of working community could industrial progress be combined with social justice.
These so-called utopian socialists (who never, of course, called themselves socialists) believed that the movement of action flowed from the description of the socialist system towards acceptance of it as being better than the existing state. They were derided by Marx as believing in 'small-scale experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example'. Marx' crucial shift was to reverse the direction of the link between socialism and class. He asserted that socialism was something which, in some way, originated inside the industrial working class itself and which necessarily required the establishment of socialism via the inevitability of class antagonism. According to Engels, socialism was not 'an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes - the proletariat and the bourgeoisie'.
In the hundred or so years after Marx and Engels first set up this reversal, no one much doubted the reality of this class struggle as such, at least not in Europe and North America. The critical problems arose with just how the rather mystical idea of socialism springing from the collective consciousness of the proletariat could in practice come about particularly when obscured by the hare of 'false consciousness' raised early on by Engels to explain why the proletariat sometimes seemed immune to the allure of their socialist destiny. In practice, socialists after Marx all tended to believe that only by the essential intermediary of The Party could true proletarian consciousness be raised to the point where a socialist society could be born. In practice, this really only moved the central problem on to which of the one, two, many competing socialist parties truly represented the underlying true proletarian consciousness. However, the belief that socialism flowed from working-class consciousness was never really disturbed until the 1960s.
Then three rather different issues intruded upon this consensus. First was the unpalatable fact that such progress as was being made towards establishing socialist states was in countries in which the industrial proletariat was conspicuous by its absence as was much in the way of industry. Not that this necessarily impeded the policy advisers in such countries. I vividly remember going in from the airport in Addis Ababa in allegedly socialist Ethiopia in 1983 under banners reading 'Ethiopian socialism will be achieved by heavy industry and the working class'. Weighty books were written devoted to showing that the minute working class in such countries were nevertheless crucial to their socialist transformation but they failed to prevent major ideological splits on the issue in the Marxist left.
The second, and in Europe more relevant, problem was that other kinds of -ism, rooted in other than class, became increasingly important, in particular feminism and nationalism. Again much ink was spilled attempting to show that such as Germaine Greer and the IRA were either linked to or were subordinate to the industrial class struggle but this made little difference to adherents of either. Forty or so years on, it has become clear that class by itself is a very poor determinant of what stirs groups to social action; a bit above the decline of the hump-backed whale but not by much.
Thirdly, the whole matter of class definition became more and more blurred. In the hundred and twenty years following the Communist Manifesto, the fount of proletarian consciousness had been effectively commandeered by large industrial groups in factories, mines and docks. It was the experience of large numbers of men working together under conditions of tight industrial discipline and formed into equally disciplined industrial unions that was seen as defining the essence of working class consciousness and therefore of socialism. As these large groups were disbanded by the logic of industrial development, so was much of the core of industrial socialism. Trafford Park was once a university for English socialism. Now it is just another shopping mall.
So where does this leave the concept of socialism flowing from proletarian class consciousness? Certainly knackered in the hard sense of an ineluctable historical force deriving from class antagonism. Certainly weakened, though perhaps not fatally, in the softer sense of an idea for a certain kind of social system being more often accepted by one kind of social group than by another. But does this mean that those of us who still call ourselves socialists (and this does include a pretty disparate bunch given that Cherie Blair seems still to regard both herself and Tony as such) are no more than modern Robert Owens? That the connection of socialism with class is back to attempts to devise new models of social organisation which have as their object the improvement of the conditions of the poor? Is that why Gordon Brown and Tony Blair might yet rightfully be termed 'socialist'?
Perhaps the basic problem is that we are now strung between two poles. Part of us still believes that we still possess a power, however latent, that derives from the historical role of a class. Which we do not. Part of us believes that we also hold inside ourselves, however poorly expressed, a vision of a new society, a New Jerusalem. Which we do not. At least not yet. And, in the thirty words I have left of my allotment, I am not even going to begin to search for a way out.
Ouch. I said it would hurt. .
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