Class Consciousness

Karl Marx has never been more right. We live in a time when it's clear as day for everyone to see that all the power in the world is concentrated with the capitalists, the owners of the means of production.

The reason why the ideas of Karl Marx are so threatening for those in power, is that he identified the one power-struggle that shapes the reality of our daily lifes, and that's the struggle between the owner class and the working class. Starting from the fact that we are material beings who depend for our survival on the acquisition and transformation of material goods found in nature, his philosophy is based on dialectical materialism. Marx and Engels adapted Hegelian dialectic into their arguments regarding traditional materialism. Dialectic, or dialectics, is simply using discourse between opposing points of view to arrive at truth. We are human, we need food, shelter and so on, and we seek truth by letting opposing ideas duke it out through conversation or debate. Those are the very simple and very basic starting points that eventually crystallize in the dialectic materialism of Marx and Hegel.

The one overriding antagonism they found in post-industrial society (although historical materialism recognizes that history and society develop based on material, economic conditions, so the theory holds true for earlier periods as well) they identified is the one between the owner class and the working class, the capitalists and the employees, or the bourgeoisie and proletariat. The relationship between the two is defined by their relationship to the material goods needed for humans to survive and thrive; this should be enough to gain a basic understanding of the power relationship between capitalists and the rest. In Dune it's "he who controls the spice controls the universe", and here on Earth, in the real world, it's "he who controls the means of production controls the world." Capitalists' power is based in the ownership of the things we all need, and if the system is then geared towards the perpetual accumulation of those things, which it is, power is concentrated in the hands of the few who are left standing in the arena of market competition.

I like this philosophy, not just because it's so obviously true, but because it's clean and simple. It cuts right through all the smoke and mirrors thrown around by the powerful, it negates the need for conspiracy theories, some of which are undoubtedly true, but almost none of which are provable. We, the 99 percent, only have to understand that the system of capitalism is inherently geared against our own interests. And yes, it's a whole system that encompasses history, culture, politics, economy and everything else that shapes our daily lifes. This doesn't mean all other social antagonism's aren't real. This is not an invitation to descend into class essentialism, because there obviously are other power dynamics at work as well, such as the one between the races, and the one between the sexes. But it is an invitation for us all to regain some of the class consciousness we've lost, partially by focusing too much on those other power dynamics. We need to refocus on that one overarching struggle, the one that defines the one power relationship responsible for shaping our interactions with the material world.

I hope you'll forgive this little lecture of "Marxism-In-A-Nutshell." I thought it fitting as an introduction to the recent developments described in the below linked video. It is about how the recent economic depression could give rise to the very class consciousness Marx tried to instill in us. Like I said in the beginning: Marx has never been more right. In a pandemic where all of us suffered financially in some form, the capitalists made a killing. So much even, that some of them were able to indulge in extravagant endeavors like buying a 500 million dollar yacht or flying into space for a couple of minutes. One of them even had the audacity to thank his employees and customers for paying for his trip into space... We, the workers of the world, need to unionize. We need to stop thinking of our employers as our benefactors. They're not. Their interests are directly opposed to our own. They have power in wealth and money, we can only have power in numbers. We therefore need to unionize and start a new labor movement. Enjoy the video!

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