Structure, Agency and Theory: Contributions to Historical Materialism and the Analysis of Classes, State and Bourgeois Power in Advanced Capitalist Societies

By Ib Gram-Jensen

"Structure, Agency and Theory" challenges common readings of Marx' and Engels' historical materialism and argues the necessity of abandoning their conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of historical development and transformations because of its doubtful validity and deterministic implications. Instead another fundamental conception in historical materialism, the interaction between social circumstances and agency as the motive power of history, is accentuated with an emphasis on agents' experiences as a causal factor, arguing its potential in terms of historical explanation, and attempting to spell out some of its strategic implications for revolutionary socialism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Release date: May 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9788743037422

Ib Gram-Jensen

Ib Gram-Jensen, born 1953, is an MA in history and social studies. He has previously published Experience and Historical Materialism, Structure, Agency and Theory (in three volumes) and A Critique of Mau: Mute Compulsion and Other Essays, also dealing with the subject of historical materialism. He lives in Denmark.

Book preview

Illustration

Part Three: Class Struggle, Politics and State.

1. The Isolation of Class Struggle.

a. The Concept of Isolation.

As part of their general discussion of G. A. Cohen’s interpretation of Marxian historical materialism, Levine & Wright have described a number of aspects of what may be called the disorganisation of the working class and, more generally, the isolation of class struggle in capitalist society:

Cohen is very likely right that Marx himself saw the growth of class capacities (at least for the ascendant working class under capitalism) as a consequence of the emergence of revolutionary and transformative interests. As capitalism becomes increasingly untenable as an economic system, capitalism’s gravediggers, the proletariat, become, Marx thought, increasingly capable of transforming capitalist relations of production. This coordination of interests and capacities is achieved, on Marx’s account, by the mutual determination of interests and capacities by the development of productive forces. However, many Marxists have come, with good reason, to question this account. Instead of seeing an inexorable growth in the capacity of the working class to struggle against the intensifying irrationalism of capitalism, it has been argued that there are systematic processes at work in capitalist society that disorganize the working class, block its capacities and thwart its ability to destroy capitalist relations of production. These processes range from labour market segmentation and the operation of the effects of racial and ethnic divisions on occupational cleavages within the working class, to the effects of the bourgeois legal system and privatized consumerism in advertising. [.....] All of these processes contribute to reproducing the disorganization of the working class rather than the progressive enhancement of its class capacity.¹

It is with good reason that this disorganisation is a main plank of Levine & Wright’s argument against Cohen. In the first place, it suggests the question of the relationship between social circumstances and practice or agency (Verhältnisse/Verhalten) at the very heart of historical materialism. Secondly, it is obviously crucial to that of social transformation: if agents are assumed to act rationally according to their objective interests, it is impossible to account for the continuance of an antagonistic society in which most agents have an interest in its transformation; if agents are assumed to be the mere supports of their positions in such societies, which are in their turn determined by the telos of their self-maintenance, it is impossible to account for the transition from one type of society to another – something which, like their continuance, is encountered in actual history; and on the assumptions of discourse analysis, it is impossible to account for either. Thirdly, the question of this working-class disorganisation is, needless to say, extremely relevant to that of the failure of Marx’ expectations.

As noted in Part One, ch. 2. c above, Marx’ and Engels’ answer to the question of the ultimate working-class response to capitalist development essentially was that this development will force the working class to accomplish a socialist transformation, under penalty of its own destruction;² and that the class will be able to accomplish it because not only the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation grows owing to capitalist development, but also the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organized by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself.³ This was the expectation they cherished from the 1840s and throughout the rest of their lives, and which has, alas, so far failed to come true. The question is, then, how well the systematic processes that tend towards the disorganisation of the working class can be accounted for within the framework of the suggested conception of the interaction between social circumstances and agency.

One major conclusion from Part Two above is the (potentially) complex relationship between class positions and class interests on the one hand and agents’ experiences and responses on the other. The tendency or probability of experiences and responses to depart from class consciousness and responding in class ways or to make for a class-for-itself would seem to depend on the nature of the relations of production, the position of the given classes in them, specific conditions of fractions and social categories, and various historically determined circumstances. One point of the present chapter is to spell out this problematic in a little more detail.

The relationship between class positions and class interests on the one hand and experiences (consciousness) and responses on the other is not, then, simply arbitrary: on the contrary the very conditions for the latter to deviate from or correspond to the former ultimately depend on agents’ specific positions in specific relations of production. But this relationship of structural determination means that a field of possible lived reality, experiences and responses is delimited, with various pressures and probabilities for various outcomes to eventuate; while at the same time social practice is aimed at influencing the process – in this very context.

In fact, and hardly surprising, much of the debate on ideology, social practice and classes in the Marxist tradition seems to turn precisely on the lack of correspondence between positions in relations of production and working-class consciousness and practice; or, once again, on the failure of Marx’ expectations to come true. This failure has not, however, been accounted for in a way consistently linking it to the nature of capitalist exploitation and the capitalist type of society. At least three responses to it are discernible:

That of positing a completely arbitrary relationship between positions in relations of production and consciousness and practice – which means that consciousness and practice can only be accounted for by reference to unexplained discourse articulating agents as (social) subjects.

That of defining the working class in such a way as to make it correspond (more or less roughly) to the most class-conscious groups of wage-earners; this renders it impossible to achieve a fit between positions in relations of production on the one hand and class positions on the other, and effectively dissolves the working class into various groups according to politico-ideological criteria.

That of explaining politico-ideological shortcomings in terms of bourgeois dominance or hegemony (Lenin, Gramsci), a retarded development of working-class consciousness, or ideological interpellation (Althusser), without explaining how such politico-ideological forms are able to make sense to working-class agents, or how such agents come to articulate such experiences, given their lived reality.

The phenomenon to be dealt with is not merely false consciousness, however: it can be defined precisely as the failure of the capitalist working class to organise effectively around the objective of a socialist transformation; or, seen from a slightly different angle, the restriction of responses to lived working-class reality in advanced capitalist societies to such forms as have not effectively threatened the social order. This definition covers the failure of workers to respond in class ways, their failure to respond according to their fundamental class interests, and their failure to realise those interests even when organising to do so. In less abstract terms this failure has tended to manifest itself in the failure of a revolutionary-socialist working-class majority to come into being, as large groups of wage-earners have opted for reformist or bourgeois policies, or given up any interest in the political scene altogether.

The term isolation is taken from Poulantzas, but used in a broader sense than his:

If we begin by examining the economic class struggle [.....] we note a fundamental and original characteristic, to be defined hereafter as the ‘effect of isolation’. It consists of the fact that the juridical and ideological structures (determined in the last instance by the structure of the labour process), which set up at their level agents of production distributed in social classes as juridico-ideological subjects, produce the following effect on the economic class struggle: the effect of concealing from these agents in a particular way the fact that their relations are class relations. The socio-economic relations are in actual fact experienced by the supports as a specific fragmentation and atomization. [.....] This effect of isolation is terrifyingly real: it has a name: competition between the wage-earning workers and between the capitalist owners of property.⁴

The Althusserian-structuralist context apart,⁵ this obviously refers to the fact that capitalist exploitation is not immediately obvious to agents, and that it allows the (juridico-ideological) articulation of them as free and equal juridico-political subjects or citizens. In the present text, the isolation of class struggle denotes the limitation of social practice to such forms as do not threaten to disrupt the capitalist type of society and its dominant relations of production.⁶ In this sense it is a crucial aspect of the disorganisation of the working class vis-à-vis its fundamental class interest in substituting the collective command of the means, process and outcome of production for capitalism; such disorganisation may also be achieved by means of repression.⁷ It thus becomes necessary to define the difference between the isolation of class struggle and repression on the one hand and Gramsci’s conception of consent and coercion on the other:

[.....]. What we can do, for the moment, is to fix two major superstructural levels: the one that can be called civil society, that is the ensemble of organisms commonly called private, and that of political society or the State. These two levels correspond on the one hand to the function of hegemony which the dominant group exercises throughout society and on the other hand to that of direct domination or command exercised through the State and juridical government. The functions in question are precisely organisational and connective. The intellectuals are the dominant group’s deputies exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government. These comprise:

1. The spontaneous consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group; this consent is historically caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production.

2. The apparatus of state coercive power which legally enforces discipline on those groups who do not consent either actively or passively. This apparatus is, however, constituted for the whole of society in anticipation of moments of crisis of command and direction when spontaneous consent has failed.⁸

It might be argued that this statement is in itself so brief, preliminary and open-ended⁹ as to render critique meaningless or at least unfair. It should be noted, however, that an explanation of hegemony is offered – the prestige of the dominant group because of its position and function in the world of production – which is definitely inadequate. And that Gramsci’s notion could be interpreted as one of hegemony in the sense of moral leadership or consent grafted on to an antagonistic society and so, in combination with force employed by the state, being the cement of social cohesion.¹⁰

What can be made of such a notion, especially when torn from its context of class and objective conditions,¹¹ is demonstrated by Laclau & Mouffe and Bertramsen, Frølund Thomsen & Torfing.¹² Suffice it to bring to mind that in the latter politics conceived as a process of creating consensus for certain options is responsible for the stability as well as the constant transformation of social relations, while consensus and direction are produced by hegemonic practices.¹³ In this context hegemony is conceived as the ability to articulate social identities (including that of the hegemonic subject) and the social discursively: that is, to win consensus for a certain way of shaping the social.¹⁴ Like the social in general, state power, too, is conceived as a product of this articulation, and equated with hegemony:

This offers an interpretation of state power as hegemony [.....]. Or to put it differently, in order to achieve state power any political strategy must provide a relatively stable consensus throughout society around its ideological project. [.....] This in turn makes it important to distinguish between hegemony and hegemonic project [.....]. The former refers to a political strategy which has achieved state power, whereas the latter refers to that stage in which hegemony is being constructed, but is not yet consolidated due to effective political opposition.¹⁵

Three comments are relevant here; firstly, for the record, Gramsci does not equate state power with hegemony:

The methodological criterion on which our own study must be based is the following: that the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as domination and as intellectual and moral leadership. A social group dominates antagonistic groups, which it tends to liquidate, or to subjugate perhaps even by armed force; it leads kindred and allied groups. A social group can, and indeed must, already exercise leadership before winning governmental power (this indeed is one of the principal conditions for the winning of such power); it subsequently becomes dominant when it exercises power, but even if it holds it firmly in its grasp, it must continue to lead as well.¹⁶

Secondly, returning from state power to hegemony, Bertramsen, Frølund Thomsen & Torfing miss both this distinction and the class context of Gramsci’s argument by making the gloss on it that,

Thus, to Gramsci the notions of political and intellectual leadership refer to the active attempt, and actual capacity to construct a set of ideological principles which actually manage to gain support throughout society, and to negate competing political strategies¹⁷

And thirdly, the objective conditions (lived reality) tending towards the spontaneous working-class experience of its own interests as non-antagonistic to those of capital (or: to the social order) may be considered a factor at least as important to capitalist hegemony as the prestige of the bourgeoisie or ideological projects of that class. While the isolation of class struggle is obviously related to capitalist hegemony defined as the absence or marginalisation of ideologies articulating antagonisms with the capitalist social order, it covers a wider range of phenomena. Thus, the structural context of hegemony is crucial, because it provides the conditions on which such projects may seem relevant and credible to dominated classes (or parts of them), and on which consensus may be won or eventuate. The disorganisation of the working class vis-à-vis its fundamental class interest and the isolation of class struggle are preferred to the conceptual couple of consent (legitimisation) and coercion precisely because they point towards the objective conditions for the effective organisation or disorganisation of the working class, and a wider range of possibilities than either consent or coercion or some combination of them.¹⁸

It is not just that Bertramsen, Frølund Thomsen & Torfing collapse coercion into consensus, which of course facilitates their reduction of social development to discursive articulation; it is also that they overlook the possibility that agents and actors conform to a social order without accepting it, because they can only secure their material existence by certain actions in their given social circumstances – as long as they cannot transform these circumstances. In this way agents and actors are subjected to the same structural determination or limitation as the state, because the capitalist mode is the given framework in which their material existence (and, by implication, such objectives as status, power, human relationships generally, and nonvital goods and services) has to be secured – as long as another basis of material reproduction has not been established. There may thus be many responses to the capitalist social order along the line between the opposites of consensus and the imposition of conformity by sheer coercion. At this point, it may be helpful to quote Genovese on the hegemony of the slaveholders in the antebellum South in order to disentangle the questions of hegemony, coercion/repression, the isolation of class struggle and the disorganisation of the subordinate class:

Accommodation and resistance developed as two forms of a single process by which the slaves accepted what could not be avoided and simultaneously fought individually and as a people for moral as well as physical survival. The hegemony of the slaveholders – their domination of society through command of the culture rather than solely through command of the gun – has no meaning except on the assumption of deep class antagonisms and on the further assumption that command of the culture could not readily have been established without command of the gun. The slaveholders’ hegemony, as reflected in their relationship to non-slaveholding whites, for example, did not eliminate the chasm between the classes of white society. Antebellum political struggles often became sharp and reflected class antagonisms, which appear to have been sharpening during the 1850s. To speak of the slaveholders’ hegemony is to speak of their ability to confine the attendant struggles to terrain acceptable to the ruling class – to prevent the emergence of an effective challenge to the basis of society in slave property.

The slaveholders established their hegemony over the slaves primarily through the development of an elaborate web of paternalistic relationships, but the slaves’ place in that hegemonic system reflected deep contradictions, manifested in the dialectic of accommodation and resistance. The slaves’ insistence on defining paternalism in their own way represented a rejection of the moral pretensions of the slaveholders, for it refused that psychological surrender of will which constituted the ideological foundation of such pretensions. By developing a sense of moral worth and by asserting rights, the slaves transformed their acquiescence in paternalism into a rejection of slavery itself, although their masters assumed acquiescence in the one to demonstrate acquiescence in the other.¹⁹

While maintaining the analytical distinction between hegemony (domination through command of the culture) and coercion (domination through command of the gun), Genovese in effect equates hegemony and the isolation of class struggle (the absence of an effective challenge to the given dominant class (exploitative) mode of production). The actual isolation of class struggle at any given point in time may well involve hegemony in the sense of command of the culture or the dominant/hegemonic class as leading, and will perhaps always do so, but analytically speaking hegemony in Gramsci’s sense is positive: the prestige of the dominant class and the consequent acceptance of its leadership, whereas the isolation of the class struggle is in the final analysis negative: the absence (or marginalisation) of certain responses, which may be due (mostly or conceivably wholly) to social circumstances (which may of course tend towards the acceptance of the leadership of a dominant class). One point in Genovese’s analysis of the slaves’ responses to slavery is precisely that the very improbability that revolt could be successful in their given circumstances²⁰ pressed them into endeavours to make the best of their position as slaves, along with occasional individual attempts to escape it.²¹

Just as it would not seem analytically helpful to telescope coercion, the isolation of class struggle or (class) dominance into a catch-all concept of hegemony, which would then simply mean (unspecified) dominance (of a class), a distinction should be made between the isolation of class struggle and the disorganisation of the working class: while the former obviously contributes to the latter, and vice versa, the role of coercion in the disorganisation of the working class vis-à-vis its fundamental – and immediate – interests (or objectives) in democratic as well as undemocratic capitalist societies should not be overlooked. There has, of course, been the armed repression of armed uprisings, such as that of the Paris Commune, with the subsequent massacre,²² and that of the Spartakist and other revolts in Germany 1918-1923, to mention but two examples. In 1878-1890 Bismarck’s Law against the Publicly Dangerous Endeavours of Social Democracy was in force in a vain attempt to suppress the Social-Democratic movement it made illegal.²³ The democratic constitutions of post-WWI in Germany and Austria were suspended in 1933 and 1934 respectively, in both cases with the workers’ movements as a principal target, with the Fascist takeover in Italy from 1922 as a forerunner.²⁴

It is not possible to enter into the problematic of repression in any systematic way in the present text, but it does of course emphasise the vulnerability of bourgeois democracy and the panegyrics on it; similarly the fact of repression in bourgeois-democratic societies signals norms of political culture defining what is, though perhaps perfectly legal, not done and hence illegitimate in the sight of actors able to exercise repression, ranging from heads of state and governments to unauthorised political bullies. As for the methods of repression, they range from harassment to the wholesale suspension of democracy and the killing (including murder) of opponents. To provide an illustration of the first of these, the surveillance of various actors may not in itself impede their activities all that much, and may of course go undetected by its object; but if not, it is not only an annoyance but also conveys a threat, and may indeed be intended to:²⁵ one’s actions are disapproved of and registered. As Laurie observed on the potential for far more sophisticated equipment for surveillance than at his time of writing,

[.....]. It is sobering to realize how much our present liberty depends on the sheer inefficiency of the government machine. Policemen, when talking about this potential state of affairs, say, logically, that the honest man has no need to worry, and they are more or less right. But it is the slight inaccuracy that alarms; for ‘honest’ one should read, ‘Government-approved.²⁶

Bunyan quotes Sir Harold Scott, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police 1945-1953 for the suggestion that,

The Special Branch is a part of the CID, and is primarily an intelligence department. Its business is to keep a watch on any body of people, of whatever political complexion, whose activities seem likely to result sooner or later in open acts of sedition or disorder.²⁷

Bunyan observes that this definition is adequate to justify the inclusion of every politically active person,²⁷ and a little later that, consistently with this, An historical study of the Branch (and the other agencies) shows only one consistent criterion – for ‘subversive’ read ‘all those actively opposed to the prevailing order’.²⁸

As Tariq Ali relates of his experiences when active in the Vietnam Solidarity Committee at approximately the same time as Laurie made his study of the Metropolitan Police, in and around 1968,

[.....]. We knew full well that phones were tapped, mail was opened and there were Special Branch infiltrators in VSC. This was part of the routine functioning of a capitalist democracy. In fact on one occasion a postman had dragged me out of the office and told me that our letters were opened every day before being delivered. He declined to be interviewed for the obvious reason that he would lose his job. Years later I was accosted by a young man on a platform on Brighton railway station. He had been a postman who sorted the post near my home and told me exactly the same tale regarding my personal correspondence.²⁹

The very fact that intelligence agencies and police monitor the political and ideological activities of certain actors, and perhaps intervene against them, is a message to others that these activities and hence these actors are suspect. Perhaps Ali was at one point physically attacked because there were people who got that message.³⁰ According to Bunyan, the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement of the 1920s and 1930s met a similar, but more heavyhanded response from the police and the Special Branch: The activities of the unemployed were completely legitimate actions within the liberal-democratic system – marching, petitioning and making speeches – yet the Branch and the police infiltrated the movement, followed its leaders, attacked peaceful marches, and prepared list of ‘militants’ to be arrested if the chance arose.³¹ The other side of this coin is the acceptance of illegal means of political struggle against actors considered to be outside the pale – as in the case of courts in the Weimar Republic dealing far more leniently with Nazi and other right-wing violence than with violence from the left.³²

If the estimates that in the mid-1970s the Special Branch held records of about three million people,³³ and the MI5 more than four million,³⁴ are reasonably correct, surveillance may indeed be considered part of the routine functioning of a capitalist democracy. It would, however, be a mistake to think of militant bodies on the political left as its only targets:

One key area in which the Branch contributed to the state’s monitoring is industry. Its interest starts at the top with the union leaders and extends to trade-union activity in the factory. Its attention is partly directed at firms undertaking contract work for the state, but this area is more the responsibility of other agencies. Most of the Branch’s activity is in private industry, especially in strike situations. What is to the trade unionist legitimate activity in furtherance of a pay claim or against an arbitrary management decision becomes, in the eyes of the Branch, industrial unrest led by politically motivated militants. Shop stewards, branch secretaries and political activists are key targets. [.....].

The Branch’s activities in industry are both direct and indirect. When a question of public order arises, such as a strike, march or picket, the local police are briefed by the Branch on the ‘ring-leaders’ and these are the people who tend to get arrested. At any resulting trial of workers the Branch provides pictures on the event, and sometimes, transcribed notes of speeches made, to support the police case. It is their indirect intrusion into industrial affairs which is the more pernicious. Collusion between management and the Branch can lead to dismissal, blacklisting, or the continual failure to get promotion. Once sacked, militant workers can find themselves blacklisted throughout the industry in which they are skilled. For many years such a ‘blacklist’ has existed in car-making, building, engineering and aircraft-manufacturing. At other times it may be the firm which approaches the Branch for information on a prospective employee, which is usually readily given. This practice is quite normal for foreign firms based in this country especially the American and European ones.³⁵

The onslaught on the US left usually, and rather too narrowly, remembered as McCarthyism is another, more wide-ranging, example of repression at the hands of an ostensibly democratic political system, later to be followed by that on the Black Panthers and others, involving the striking tendency of dissidents to die a violent death or be convicted of crimes.³⁶ How much repression has contributed to the disorganisation of the working class, and thus to the isolation of class struggle in advanced capitalism is impossible to say; but it is at least conceivable that revolutionary-socialist movements that might otherwise have grown have in some cases been nipped in the bud. Murray notes the collapse of the International Workers of the World after the Red Scare of 1919-1920.³⁷ As for US Communism,

Membership in the Communist parties dropped sharply in 1920 from an estimated 70,000 to 16,000, only the most resolute, fanatic, and zealous Communists remaining in the ranks. [.....] the fact remains that the Red Scare had broken the back of the Communist movement for the time being. Even the Chicago Communist later admitted that by February 1920 the two thriving parties of October 1920 had vanished.³⁸

It is not, in any case, suggested that the disorganisation of the working class vis-à-vis its fundamental class interest and the isolation of class struggle depend on repression; nevertheless various degrees of repression in bourgeois-democratic formations, as well as the suspension of bourgeois democracy, are such significant phenomena that the discussion in the present chapter – and on advanced capitalism generally – would be incomplete if they were ignored. Goldstein concludes from his study of political repression in the modern USA that it has contributed significantly to the failure of the labour movement as a whole to achieve major power until the 1930s, to the destruction of radical labour movements, to the destruction of radical political movements and to the continuing self-censorship which Americans have imposed upon their own exercise of basic political freedoms.³⁹

If agents may consider their social order an inevitable evil, the capitalist type of formation is, again, the given framework within which experiences and responses are actually articulated, as part of the actual process of historical eventuation. It is thus crucial to see the historical record of isolation of class struggle and the disorganisation of the working class (including such actual anti-capitalist, revolutionary (socialist) struggles as are part of it) in its structural and historical context. Along with points of rupture there are structural factors exerting pressures in the direction of isolation and disorganisation, thus making practice to secure isolation of class struggle and disorganisation of the working class easier. And at the same time such isolation and disorganisation eventuate from the concrete interaction between agency on the one hand and structurally and historically determined social circumstances on the other, not simply from the workings of the structure of the mode as such.

It is also in this context that the organisation around fundamental class interests and their realisation – a task which may be far easier in the case of some classes than in those of others – must be accomplished or will fail to be accomplished, with the consequent effects on agents’ experiences, responses, and actual ranges of options. And it is in this context of structural determination and historical eventuation that the actual outcomes may be accounted for: not in that of either structuralist teleology or discourse analysis, nor in the simple terms of consent and coercion, or bourgeois hegemony. Unless grasped in this wider context, any of these remains a mere re-statement of the problematic of the maintenance of the capitalist type of formation.

As far as the practice of the working class is concerned, the isolation of class struggle may be caused by one or more of the following circumstances:

That agents do not realise they are members of the working class.

That they do not see the antagonism between capital and labour.

That they do not perceive the nature of this antagonism and hence the preconditions for doing away with it.

That they do not consider a revolutionary transformation possible.

That the working class is split into fractions etcetera in such a way as not to be united around its fundamental interest.

That the struggle to realise this fundamental interest is waged as a struggle for measures that are actually no threat to capitalism (gradualist and other illusory strategies for transcending capitalism).

This is no imputation that agents "are bloody silly."⁴⁰ The nature of the capitalist mode and its implications are not transparent to intellectuals either, superior training and conditions for theoretical work notwithstanding.⁴¹ And if the fact and nature of capitalist exploitation and hence the class antagonism between capital and labour are not given as transparent to agents’ experience, the nature and extension of the working class in the sense defined above of the class exploited by capital are not transparent either, nor is its fundamental interest in a socialist transformation. In addition to this, the question of how to supersede this antagonistic mode, and the task of accomplishing this transformation in actual practice, are baffling. This aspect of the relationship between individual lives (experienced in their totality by the agents living them) and history (or society as a historically developing whole): that the determinant causal links, with the limits, pressures and possibilities they imply are as often as not wholly or partly opaque to agents, is well expressed by Mills:

[.....]. The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and the failure of individual men and women. When a society is industrialized, a peasant becomes a worker; a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall, a man is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a man takes new heart or goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesman becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar man; a wife lives alone; a child grows up without a father. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

Yet men do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction. The well-being they enjoy, they do not usually impute to the big ups and downs of the societies in which they live. Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary men do not usually know what this connection means for the kinds of men they are becoming and for the kinds of historymaking in which they might take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and world. They cannot cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural transformations that usually lie behind them.⁴²

To pose the question at the most fundamental level: is there anything in a given social order as such that tends towards the isolation of class struggle? The articulation of experiences (or, if one prefers, consciousness) and responses (or, if one takes the emotional and affectional part of it, along with articulated experiences: ideology) is taken to be structurally determined by modes of production and types of society – both as a general environment and in terms of agents’ specific positions in relations of production and the social order. This does not in itself imply that the structure limits agents’ experiences or consciousness or ideology to such forms as do not threaten to disrupt the social order (as embodied in a type of society). It merely means that a relation of determination is taken to exist, and that the articulation of experiences and responses, or consciousness (including knowledge, and science more specifically), is hence not arbitrary relative to modes of production and types of society.

Relations of production determine in what way, and at what level, the material reproduction of society takes places, and provides a framework for the development of social relations as well as technology, and of the positions of agents in those relations, and in hierarchies of income, authority, education, and structure. In other words, agents’ lived reality is structurally determined by modes of production and types of society; and so, consequently, is the articulation of experiences and responses. The effect on agents of that lived reality is not, of course, uniformly positive, and so points of rupture and differences over values and social objectives, perhaps dissatisfaction with the type of society itself, may be articulated and responded to. It is superfluous to observe that this has indeed been the case throughout history.

Other things equal, however, the very fact that agents are born into a given social order, grow up in it and live in it must make it more likely that this order is taken for granted: experienced as the given basis of life rather than as something which has eventuated from history, and may be transformed along with other historical (or potential) forms. As for (advanced) capitalist society, it is obvious that various effects of the capitalist mode of production are likely to be experienced as negative by various groups of agents: pressures on wages, the degradation and subordination of labour and the intensification of its work, unemployment, environmental problems, and so on. Such issues cannot be arbitrarily excluded from their experiences. On the other hand, their basis in the very structure of society is not self-evident; they may be experienced and responded to precisely as issues, and plausible remedies suggested. In fact various direct and indirect effects of capitalist accumulation may be more or less effectively countered, though not eliminated, as tendencies inherent in the mode: reformist and bourgeois policies may thus seem beneficial enough to sufficiently large groups to prevent conflicts over issues and values from taking on forms and objectives threatening to disrupt the social order – although they will have to be constantly adapted, and the fortunes of specific policies will vary.

One should not read this as the positing of a constant, and total, state of bewilderment and experienced helplessness. The degree to which bewilderment and helplessness are real both as objective conditions and experience must certainly be considered variable between different positions in the structure of classes etcetera and over time. Yet the tendency towards a limitation of experiences and awareness of larger causal relationships described by Mills⁴³ is no doubt, and for several reasons, real, though counteracted by various factors and historical outcomes, too.

Capitalist society as the lived reality to be articulated into experience, the specific nature of capitalist exploitation, the articulation of relatively autonomous levels, the complex structure of interests, and the structurally determined role of the capitalist type of state constitute the structural framework within which the isolation of class struggle may be realised. On the other hand, the actual organisation or disorganisation of the working class relative to its fundamental interest depends on practice (agency) within that framework: contradictions and antagonisms are inherent in it, too, as so many potential points of rupture. The role and functioning of the capitalist state, as eventuating from the interaction between its structural determination and struggles to control or influence it, is a crucial part of this context. For that reason, reformism, political parties, and the welfare state are dealt with in the chapters below.

The present chapter centres on the failure of working-class agents to articulate a working-class identity as part of their experience, and the failure of the class to unite around its fundamental interest owing to this and splits between fractions etcetera. These aspects of the isolation of class struggle result in both a tendency of working-class fractions to consider themselves outside (and above) the working class (set apart as fractions by the politicoideological consequences of this) and competition, not least for status, between workers.⁴⁴ Moreover, as a socialist transformation fades from the horizon of action because of the isolation of class struggle, hierarchisation of the working class and competition among workers, the more one may expect working-class agents to respond by making the best of their positions in terms of conditions of work and pay, status, and perhaps social mobility within capitalism experienced as the given social framework. Given the inherent difficulty of accomplishing a transition to socialism and eventually communism, and that it is possible for workers (though not all workers all the time) to improve their situations, either individually, sectionally or collectively, in capitalist society, such a response is hardly surprising.

At this point a warning not to underestimate (revolutionary) socialism as a political force is appropriate: as at least a potential mass phenomenon it is part of the history of advanced capitalism at least into the second half of the 20th century, depending on where the line between revolutionary socialism, gradualist socialism and (mere) reformism is drawn. On the other hand, the shock effect of May 1968 in France was due precisely to the exceptional nature of these events – which have not, indeed, so far had any counterpart since.

Of all the many unexpected events of the late 1960s, a remarkably bad period for prophets, the movement of May 1968 in France was easily the most surprising and, for left-wing intellectuals, the most exciting. It seemed to demonstrate what practically no radical over the age of twenty-five, including Mao Tse-Tung and Fidel Castro, believed, namely that revolution in an advanced industrial country was possible in conditions of peace, prosperity, and apparent political stability.⁴⁵

If the political and social stability of bourgeois democracy, which was to last through two decades of recession and mass unemployment in the 1970s and 1980s, cannot be taken for granted as part of the very order of things in advanced capitalism, what that unique instance of a revolutionary or semirevolutionary⁴⁶ situation proved was, as Hobsbawm pointed out, not that revolutions can succeed in western countries today, but only that they can break out.⁴⁷ As Miliband observed,

[.....]. For the foreseeable future at any rate, no formation of the Left will be in a position seriously to place the question of socialism on the agenda of most advanced capitalist societies. Nor certainly is this to be achieved by spontaneous eruption. The events of May-June 1968 in France showed well enough the yearning for fundamental change which simmered beneath a seemingly placid political surface, and to use Régis Debray’s phrase, the degree to which the ‘small motor’ of a student movement may activate the ‘big motor’ of the working class. But these events showed equally well that, in the absence of appropriate political organisation, what is possible is turmoil and pressure but no revolution.⁴⁸

To be sure, having criticised the idea of the New Left that the working class had lost its revolutionary potential,⁴⁹ the Introduction to a collection of texts by Mandel and Novack on that issue drew a somewhat more optimistic lesson from those events:

Mandel and Novack draw important conclusions from the revolutionary crisis in France in May and June of 1968. Here was a demonstration of the role the student movement could play as a catalyst, as well as the limits of its power in a showdown with the capitalist state. At the same time, the May-June events gave a graphic example of the workers’ ability to stand up, begin to shake off their reformist leaders, and go into action in an advanced industrial country.⁵⁰

Hobsbawm’s later assessment is, however, less sanguine and, as it would seem with hindsight, more realistic:

The reason why 1968 (with its prolongation into 1969 and 1970) was not the revolution, and never looked as though it would or could be, was that students alone, however numerous and mobilizable, could not make one alone. Their political effectiveness rested on their ability to act as signals and detonators for larger but less easily combustible groups. Since the 1960s students have sometimes succeeded in doing so. They sparked off enormous working-class strike-waves in France and Italy in 1968, but, after twenty years of unparalleled improvement for wage-earners in economies of full employment, revolution was the last thing in the minds of the proletarian masses.⁵¹

The student rebellions were thus disproportionately effective, especially where, as in France in 1968 and in the ‘hot autumn’ of Italy in 1969, they released huge waves of working-class strikes which temporarily paralysed the economy of entire countries. And yet, of course, they were not genuine revolutions nor likely to develop into such. For the workers, where they took part in them, they were merely the opportunity to discover the industrial bargaining-power they had accumulated without noticing over the past twenty years. They were not revolutionaries.⁵²

The quarrel is not with the identification of the working class as the potential basis or subject of a transition from capitalism to socialism, but with Marx’ and Engels’ confidence, which was inherited by orthodox and other revolutionary Marxists, that the class is bound to act as that subject sooner or later. The Introduction quoted above summarises this confidence, and the reasons why the subject, if any, of such a revolution, must be the working class, well enough:

In 1848 Marx and Engels published their famous pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, and put the goal of a socialist future on a scientific and political basis, not just a moral one. The Manifesto traced the evolution of economic forces that had produced capitalism and concluded that socialism was on the agenda as the next stage in social development. Capitalism itself was laying the foundation for the kind of productive system that could meet all human needs efficiently. However, the dynamics of a system dominated by profiteers made it irrational and subject to crises. Periodically it was hardly able to function at all, let alone for the public good. But at the same time, capitalism was creating the force that would reorganize production on a collective basis – the workers.

This growing class of producers, Marx and Engels explained, had both the incentive and the power to take control of industry and transform it. The working class had no vested interest in capitalist society. It had no special privileges or property to defend. On the contrary, its only hope lay in ending exploitation and running society for the benefit of the majority. For the working class socialism was not an idle dream but a vital historical necessity.

Furthermore, the workers were in a strategic position. They were concentrated in the very heart of the system, the cities and the factories. Capitalism itself was organizing them into an industrial army, a giant mass that had to cooperate to carry out its daily work. This gave the workers a glimpse of their own social power, their ability to act together to produce – or stop production. Marx and Engels pointed out in the Manifesto that strikes and efforts to form unions were spreading almost as fast as industry itself.⁵³

The contrast between such confidence on the one hand and the record of advanced capitalism on the other is simply too vast to be disregarded. Since 1968, capitalism has in fact taken a major step towards becoming an effectively global social system, as the socialist countries of Eastern Europe have been transformed into capitalist ones. Not that the downfall of these pseudo-socialist regimes and systems is deplorable; but apart from exerting a certain pressure on capitalist regimes not to alienate too large social groups during the Cold War, these countries at least demonstrated by their very existence – even though they were both materially stagnant and politically oppressive – that capitalism was not the only feasible social order. Their historical record was certainly a negative one, but it did suggest that capitalism was not necessarily bound to last forever.⁵⁴

One more general issue should be touched on at this point. Both Bukharin & Preobrazhensky and Gramsci explicitly offer hegemony as part of the answer to this question put by the former:

As we have seen, capitalist society is based upon the exploitation of labour. A small minority owns everything; the working masses own nothing. The capitalists command. The workers obey. The capitalists exploit. The workers are exploited. The very essence of capitalist society is found in this merciless and ever-increasing exploitation.

Capitalist production is a practical instrument for the extraction of surplus value.

Why has this instrument been able to continue in operation so long? For what reason do the workers tolerate such a state of affairs?⁵⁵

Not only was this not the first time this question was posed; it has been asked several times since, more or less explicitly, and more or less generally or specifically. In the early 1980s, for example, by Miliband:

[.....]. Class success means the ability of a dominant class to maintain its position in society, and to contain and subdue any challenge to its power and privileges. This is what has happened in Britain. National failure may in time come to threaten class success; but it has not so far had this effect. The question I seek to answer here is ‘why not?’⁵⁶

Against this whole problematic – which is obviously also enshrined in the concept of the effect of isolation – Mikkelsen has argued that,

Karl Marx’ ideal-type distinction between Klasse an sich and Klasse für sich, predicting that the objective class structure of capitalism will give rise to a revolutionary consciousness in the working class, has certainly not been of any use to research in working-class history. Rather than looking for explanations of the rise and political practice of radical movements, historians and sociologists have been far too preoccupied with explaining the absence of an expected revolutionary class consciousness. This epistemology of absence has given rise to countless works and explanations why a social group or class has not been able to act according to some specific scientific prediction; and to screen off reality even more, counterfactual, teleological arguments have been spun out and speculative meta-theoretical considerations applied at the expense of a problem-directed definition of theory.⁵⁷

This critique is incisive in the case of arguments on the failure of Marx’ expectations in general – and the failure of the working class to organize effectively around the objective of a socialist transformation in particular – which assume that the rise of a revolutionary consciousness is the natural course of development in capitalist society, bound to eventuate if only certain obstacles such as hegemony or reformist illusions are removed; so that it is either merely that (in the words of the report on Structure, Agency, and History), the time line for the development of consciousness and agency leading toward socialist revolution has turned out to be longer than we had thought and hoped for, or that the development immanent in the structure of the mode will indeed not eventuate because the theory cannot point to any way in which these obstacles actually could be overcome.⁵⁸

Obviously, however, the question how an exploitative, antagonistic type of society is upheld is relevant even if one does not take the development of a revolutionary consciousness for granted. This and the question when and why radical movements do come into being are in fact two sides of the same problematic: the experiences and responses of agents in given positions in relations of production. The open-ended historical process of their articulation, and their interaction with each other and with social circumstances, must be accounted for in its structural context, and with its strategic perspective kept in mind.

In fact Mikkelsen quotes Katznelson on four separate aspects of the making of a working class which (especially the third one) have an obvious, and indeed very striking, affinity with the approach suggested in the present text, even if the notions of class seem to be different:⁵⁹

the development of a capitalist economic structure;

the social organisation of society, or in other words conditions and ways of life;

the way in which people understand and interpret their life-situation, including their relations to other people;

how social classes act as organised groups and form social movements to influence society and their own social position, in short a matter of collective actions.⁶⁰

b. Interests, Status, and the Effect of Isolation on the Working Class.

Agents are of course no less exposed to the direct or indirect effects of capitalist exploitation because it is not immediately transparent. Conflicts over wages, conditions of work, the length of the working day, organisational and political rights, proletarianisation, status, welfare provisions, education, housing etcetera etcetera are inherent in capitalist society, and constitute potential points of rupture as they may be articulated into an issue of the type of society as such, and struggles around them into struggles over fundamental class interests. But while this potential is attributable to the social structure of capitalism, its realisation depends precisely on such ideological and practical articulation, and the clusters of conflicts and interests have a divisive potential as well, as positions in them differ, and agents may face – or be brought to face – each other in conflicts cutting across class interests. So that these conflicts neither add up to an obvious division over the structural interests of capital and labour, nor provide an unequivocal basis for organisation around the fundamental working-class interest in a socialist transformation.

Seen from a slightly different angle such conflicts may be experienced as issues of the level of reproduction of agents in their given positions within the capitalist social order, so that practice aiming at securing the best conditions possible on this basis corresponds to one aspect of lived workingclass reality, but not to the more fundamental one of overcoming the social order as such. And given this limitation there is no inherent reason why organisation and practice should centre on class rather than fractions and categories etcetera, according to strategic and tactical considerations and possibilities. The eventual articulation of class identity in experiences and responses is not inherent in the plurality of interests, conflicts and options present in capitalist society: insofar as the horizon of action is confined to the social order of capitalism (and after all struggles over immediate interests have to be waged even if a socialist transformation is conceived as the ultimate objective), group or individual advance – in material terms and/or those of status – may be a more obvious line than struggle at class level.

There is, to be sure, a counteracting tendency inasmuch as the widest possible organisation and solidarity give more clout at all levels. But even this cannot eliminate hierarchisation of the working class, or the fact that some parts of the class will inevitably be less able to