Marxism and the Individual

This is a lead off I gave at this weeks Socialist Party meeting in Galway.

Capitalists like to talk about freedom a lot. As if they somehow hold the monopoly on the word. As if somehow their exploitative and destructive economic and social system actually guaranteed freedom and prosperity to the billions of people who live under constant fear of economic instability and bullying from corporations and organs of the state.

Freedom is something which we all aspire to, it is the right to be free from harassment and to enjoy the ability to live ones life in the way in which we see fit and to be individuals amongst many other things.

Capitalists claim that we can only experience freedom under a free market. That any attempts to interfere with their freedom to make money and exploit their workers and the environment will somehow interfere with our own ability to be free.

In actual fact nothing could be further from the truth. While they may like to claim that Socialism would end individual freedom, the opposite is the case. By ending the exploitation of workers by an oppressive capitalist class Socialism would leave workers free to pursue their own lives and leave them with more time and greater security to do so.

In a capitalist society workers never see the full value of their labour and have to work extra hard in order to ensure greater profits for their bosses. A the same time greater and greater financial demands are placed on them in order to keep them enslaved in this unequal relationship. Paying mortgages and day to day expenses as well as having no security regarding health care or pensions mean that workers must work harder and harder not just to make money for their own bosses but for all the bosses.

Capitalists however say this system is necessary to ensure personal freedom for all. They claim that any attempt to interfere in the free market would lead to tyranny and despotism and that their version of liberal democracy has ensured freedom to all. The reason they want us to think that is because they are the ones who benefit most from this system and while the vast majority of people struggle on a day to day basis to make ends meet the ruling elite are able to lead lives of luxury and abundance.

However Leon Trotsky describes the relationship between the classes in a Capitalist society as one which has historical precedents and leads to certain conclusions is what he calls the materialist conception of history.

“Human society is an historically-originated collaboration in the struggle for existence and the assurance of the maintenance of the generations. 
The character of a society is determined by the character of its economy. The character of its economy is determined by its means of productive labour.
For every great epoch in the development of the productive forces there is a definite corresponding social regime. Every social regime until now has secured enormous advantages to the ruling class.
It is clear, therefore, that social regimes are not eternal. They arise historically, and then become fetters on further progress. "All that arises deserves to be destroyed."
But no ruling class has ever voluntarily and peacefully abdicated. In questions of life and death, arguments based on reason have never replaced the arguments of force. This may be sad, but it is so. It is not we that have made this world. We can do nothing but take it as it is.”

In other words our freedom is not inextricably linked to the freedom of the ruling classes. Rather they achieve their own freedom through their dominant social position. While there are those who believe that capitalism can be replaced by 'arguments of reason' in actual fact the ruling classes will use all means available to them in order to keep their position and one tactic they use is to make us believe that we will never be any freer under any other system.

They use organs of the press and educational institutions to extend their control into the daily lives of the people and to convince them that there is no other way and that no system would ensure them greater individual freedom than the current one.

In actual fact the worker suffers not just materially under capitalism but also psychologically. According to Karl Marx the lack of control they exercise over their daily lives leave many to develop a sense of alienation. As the worker does not work towards the common good or even, as they are led to believe, their own self interest but rather for the benefit of the bosses and they lose control of their lives by not having control of their work. They never become autonomous self realised human beings in any way except the way the bourgeoisie see fit.

Ironically while the Capitalist classes cry that socialism cannot lead to individual freedom they are never slow to appropriate revolutionary imagery for their own marketing purposes. Hammers and Sickles, Red stars and the letters CCCP have all found their way on to t-shirts as has the image of Che Guevara which is now one of the most reproduced images on the planet and symbol of Socialist Revolution which has made millions upon millions of dollars for those who would abhor the true substance of Guevara's politics.

He himself said:
'I am not interested in dry economic socialism. We are fighting against misery, but we are also fighting against alienation. One of the fundamental objectives of Marxism is to remove interest, the factor of individual interest, and gain, from people’s psychological motivations. Marx was preoccupied both with economic factors and with their repercussions on the spirit. If communism isn’t interested in this too, it may be a method of distributing goods, but it will never be a revolutionary way of life.'

Personally while I agree with a lot of this statement what I don't agree with is the factor of individual interest being removed from people's psychological motivations. Rather Socialism is a recognition of a common interest which can serve every individual through cooperation. Under Socialism rather than being pitted against each other as they are in a capitalist society, where they are encouraged to compete for work and lower the amount of money they will take to do a job, workers would be able to pool their resources in order to ensure that everybody would have a decent quality of life.

An example of what can be achieved through cooperation can be seen by the tremendous advances made by trade unions in the past. Benefits and entitlements such as weekends, sick leave, holidays, overtime and and pensions weren't handed out by bosses because they were feeling generous. Rather these were rights that were won by militant mass actions where the workers cooperated with one another in order to extract concessions from their employers that would benefit all.

This mass action terrified the bosses as they saw what the workers could achieve if they cooperated so in the latter part of the twentieth century massive assaults were launched on the workers and their unions. Many of the benefits won by militant industrial action over the previous century were stripped away and workers were forced into insecure employment with only a fraction of the benefits their parents might have had.


These are the sort of individuals the ruling elite want us to be. People who do not recognise our common class interest and who do not cooperate in order to extract what is rightfully ours from the bosses. And when they pay their individualist non union workers they are to express their individuality further by consuming any number of an array of goods produced by big business, information on which they can find on the television stations and in the publications of other big businesses.

In 2002 the BBC (which is a State run broadcaster) ran a four part series called century of the self. It focused on the role that the ideas of Sigmund Freud had played in creating modern society. Mostly it looked at how his ideas had been exploited by Big business or politicians to sell their products or themselves to the public.

Shortly after the end of WW1 a young man named Edward Bernays, who happened to be Sigmund Freud's nephew opened the World's first Public Relations company in New York. He set about using psychoanalysis to help companies to sell their products. One of his first major publicity coups was to make smoking fashionable to women. A cigarette company approached him as they were concerned that as smoking was taboo for women they were losing out on half their market. Bernays approached a psychologist who explained to him that the cigarette was a phallus and therefore a symbol of male power. Bernays realised that he had to create a connection in women's minds between cigarettes and female power. He did this by encouraging a group of débutantes to join New York's Easter Parade and at a given moment to produce cigarettes from under their clothing and light them. Meanwhile he tipped off the press that a group of suffragettes were planning to infiltrate the parade and light 'torches of freedom' as a symbolic protest. All of a sudden smoking cigarettes became a symbol of female power and the cigarette companies had doubled their markets.

Bernays had just solved a major problem for the capitalists. Quite simply he had found a way to sell the people things they didn't really need by appealing to their hopes and desires rather than their needs. Very often notions such as freedom and independence became wrapped up in marketing and people were encouraged to express their individuality through their purchases. Psychological marketing was to enter its golden age from the sixties onwards as a new breed of 'self actualising individuals' sought to express themselves by consuming.

Modern politicians also use such psychological tactics in order to promote themselves by appealing to people's aspirations. A prime example of this is Barak Obama who used the words change and hope to allow people to project their own desires on to him.

So then if we are tricked into conforming to the desires of the ruling elite by attempting to express our individuality can we break out of this cycle by acting as individuals?
If it is only inside socialism we will find the ability to be ourselves and not feel alienated can we take individual courses of action in order to achieve a Socialist society?
Leon Trotsky said that acts of individual terror were counter productive to the cause of revolution as they belittled the role of the masses and the nature of the society Marxists sought to create.

''Terrorising' with the threat of a strike, or actually conducting a strike is something only industrial workers can do. The social significance of a strike depends directly upon first, the size of the enterprise or the branch of industry that it affects, and second, the degree to which the workers taking part in it are organised, disciplined, and ready for action. This is just as true of a political strike as it is for an economic one. It continues to be the method of struggle that flows directly from the productive role of the proletariat in modern society.'

Trotsky says that if the workers are not operating en mass then any revolution can not be a truly proletarian revolution;

' Only the workers can conduct a strike. Artisans ruined by the factory, peasants whose water the factory is poisoning, or lumpen proletarians in search of plunder can smash machines, set fire to a factory, or murder its owner.
Only the conscious and organised working class can send a strong representation into the halls of parliament to look out for proletarian interests. However, in order to murder a prominent official you need not have the organised masses behind you. The recipe for explosives is accessible to all, and a Browning can be obtained anywhere.'

By recognising a common class interest and by organising and cooperating the workers can once and for all unite in order not only win their entitlements but create a society where they are not victim to the machinations of a predatory capitalist class and are able to exercise their individuality free from the tyranny of class division and where society can operate in a truly democratic manner.