[Translation of P. Decker and K. Hecker, Das Proletariat. Munich: 2002, 272-279]
Why don't they leave it? Why do wage laborers put up with a community that systematically degrades them into maneuverable masses of capitalistic property and the omnipresent state force apparatus in addition?
The answer is already given. There are no other “causes” for it than the bad reasons the people have. But perhaps one must draw the attention of some remnants of the left to it once again.
In his criticism of the wage system and the willingness of the working class to go along with it, Marx talked of the necessary false consciousness displayed by the inhabitants of the modern class state and that social life determines consciousness. What Marx meant by this is that capitalistic class society -- as enlightened, rational, egalitarian and materialistic as it claims to be – appears to its members as a set of peculiar, thoroughly opaque, quasi-natural laws (which are indeed very one-sided in terms of whom they benefit). He intended to show that social relations in capitalism are not grounded in more or less rational deliberations between the members of society as to what their common interests are and how to go about fulfilling them, let alone even come up; rather they answer to money and the special laws of its accumulation in a completely irrational way that deserves scientific explanation; the peoples’ interests, i.e. the very class-specific and antagonistic interests they have in a system of exploitation, are determined for them by the economic objects that they are forced to make use of; and if wage-laborers, driven by necessity, go along with this system and decide to try and cope with the “given circumstances”, then they are making a serious mistake, for they subject themselves to capitalist property to their own harm. Marx's critical remarks on the literal madness of “free-enterprise” production relations, however, were taken quite differently. Legions of interpreters of capitalism have thrown his catchwords together – left critics who have seen themselves as his successors just like bourgeois apologists; and they do not spin from it anything more than fundamentally wrong theories about a supposedly nature-given, inevitable and to that extent not at all further criticizable determinism of the human psyche.
The early Social Democrats primarily and some communists -- all the representatives of the deceased “real socialism” – were very fond of the conception that “social being” -- i.e. the wretched class situation of the proletariat -- would completely by itself, automatically, supply the most appropriate level of revolutionary consciousness and the will to revolt; so that their own campaign, the work of the workers party, could limit itself to, and also would have to limit itself to, “advancing” the “objective contradictions” in the society, assuring the masses that their respective “historical situation” properly "progresses", until then – rudimentarily – developing a subversive communist world view and action programs that must avoid above all one "error": One was not allowed to overrate the naturally growing “ripeness” of proletarian consciousness, undertake no demands going too far for the non-proletarian “allies” of the worker’s cause and, by no means, “isolate themselves from the masses.” Failures, which could not be lacking at all, not only because of the strength of the opponent but also because of this screwy kind of calculating agitation, offered reasons for the appropriate “self-criticism” of having wanted too much too soon, perhaps too little at the wrong place; then in any case the activists of the socialist movement -- instead of agitating for the appropriation and reasonable, well-planned use of the social productive forces by the “masses”, who then would no longer have to serve as a proletariat -- were mainly busy with the absurd effort of correctly estimating the “revolutionary situation”, in “social reality” as in the minds of the people.
Quite a few disappointed revolutionaries have at one time or other arrived at the conclusion that it would be possible, but that the proletariat with its difficult “consciousness” leaves a lot to be desired. And because they firmly held as true the dogma of “conditions” that would at a given time “ripen” into the “revolutionary situation”, they have felt the need to supplement the theory of the quasi-natural necessity for the emergence of revolutionary consciousness from the objective class position with a determinism of the prevention of this progress in the thinking and willing of the masses.
Thus some have passed off an “explanation” which is characterized by a lot of moral outrage about the wage laborers’ culpability for what hopeful revolutionists have awarded to them as their “historical task”: The capitalists would have bribed their service forces -- the obvious question about the origin of the means allegedly spent on it was more rejected than answered by referring to the fruits of the “especially extreme” exploitation of the people held down by force in the colonies of the imperialistic powers -- or at least split the “revolutionary masses” by corruption of a proletarian elite in a way crucial for class warfare; and they would have allowed themselves to be bribed and split. The idea is not only political-economically inverted because it measures the exploitation of the wage laborers in the imperialistic metropolises by the desolate misery elsewhere and “estimates” the difference as a convincing reason for the wage laborers to be content, instead of merely registering the increasingly absurd contradiction between the continuously increased productivity of labor in the centers of world capitalism and its continuing subsumption under the laws of increasing capitalistic property. It is fatal insofar as one positions the materialism of the wage-labors quite explicitly in opposition to the “socialist perspective” on which one would like to set them; as if the communist revolution would be an act of moral self-denial which the capitalistically used masses would take upon themselves only under pressure of extreme distress – that communism and “classless society” could have something to do with a reasonable, comfortable organization of the worldwide dominant production relations is completely lost from view before loud devotions to an imagined world-historical moral obligation of the proletariat; and before loud determination ideas, which always reveal nothing but the not at all determined will to manipulate other people, one already no longer likes to imagine that facilitations of proletarian life could possibly be used, instead of by the bourgeoisie to produce deep gratitude among the happy wage laborers, also sometimes by properly agitated wage laborers for a few upright thoughts on the principles of an economic mode in which a bit more wages should compel appreciative docility towards the conspicuously easily solvent employers.
- Other interpreters of proletarian consciousness and its surprisingly lacking revolutionary content came to the theory of a “socialization” that is less wrong than much too narrowly considered, with filthy lucre carrying out a paralyzing of the intrinsically foreseeable subversive impulses of the badly treated masses. One found that Marx in his “economistic view” would have “neglected” consciousness of the “subjective factor”; alongside the definition of the human psyche by means of “social being” one must move against an inner determinacy by means of psychotherapy. And this can be done of course: learned in the relevant inventions of academic psychology, left theorists of the dissatisfactory performance of an undeveloped proletarian revolutionary will constructed responsible “defects” and “deformations” of proletarian inner life. More philosophically oriented colleagues in contrast developed more epistemological theories of the all too hesitant “revolutionary consciousness” and from Marx's remarks on the irrationality of the capitalist mode of production, whose division of labor and exploitative purpose produces itself “behind the backs” of those involved and presents itself as a “social relationship between things”, they concocted the idea that the behind-their-backs working “logic of capital” cannot be seen through by the agents practically caught up in this “system”, and the proletarian underdogs the same; they lacked – as opposed to the Marxist theorists, who even so get it right ... – not by any chance merely the will or time or means to understand their own exploitation, but the – virtually transcendental – conditions of possibility for it. Nothing remains any longer in either case of opposition against the capitalistic mode of production, which after all was still contained in the faith in a virtually nature-necessary communist revolution, and a fortiori the will to agitate the affected persons to terminate their status as maneuverable masses: One substitutes for clarification and agitation the belief in the necessity of an upstream psychotherapy of the working class and lands in consequence with a criticism of capitalism that has nothing further to put out about the systematic exploitation of the wage-earning majority than their postulated psychic defect of resistance incapability. Others explain the proletariat generally as a lost lump whose imagined total and hermetic blindness is only good for philosophical consumption, to absolve oneself from it – “negative dialectically” or something.
Normal bourgeois theorists have from the start well liked the saying “social life determines consciousness”, in the opposite sense of one of Marx's criticisms. The image fits their a priori affirmative sociological worldview, the interpretation of capitalism as an ingenious systematic connection of interdependent elements, each functionally definable social ensemble making from the world an image appropriate to its function and its status; beliefs and attitudes are basically only correctly grasped as “behind their backs” results of the conscious agents’ prevailing meaning-making and integration processes. This theory says of none of the world views that it investigates that they are wrong: all it perceives is one -- limited -- function and is very satisfied with this finding.
But it all helps nothing: thoughts, even incorrect ones, are not products of social nature; also what the wage laborers themselves think about their position and deal with in their lives are the results of the conclusions that they draw from their life situation. Therefore, when they fail, there is no other reason than the -- appropriate or unfounded, good or bad -- reasons that the people have, and in any event there is no socially determining cause behind their -- be it however so crazy – reasoning behavior. If “social life is determinant”, it is not that some other mysterious effective power steps in the place of the thoughts of the people, even when they go to work for wages, however continuously, and then these thoughts go crazy; and indeed insofar as from the outset they do not critically scrutinize the social reality, but accept it as a determining guideline for all their own plans and activities, they allow themselves to be determined. Not by a determinism of any kind whatsoever, but by a mistake “of consciousness”: the fact that somebody submits to his damage by ruling interests and material compulsions and has no solid reasons for it at all.
The first and fundamental argument that the wage laborers ascertain for the purpose of positively getting involved in and adapting to wage labor as their livelihood is the calculation to which they are compelled in practice: They have no other means; they must use their minds from the start to find work and get along with the wages earned; thus nothing different probably remains for them than to resign themselves to it and make peace with their alternativeless situation in life. This “thus” is and remains a false conclusion: If an over-powering public force with property on one side also guarantees propertylessness on the other for the great majority of society, if it leaves no alternative to wage labor and endlessly takes lots of precautions to ensure that it is well performed, then this speaks against this force and not for a peaceful arrangement with its orders. The decision to submit and make peace with the systematically spruced up world of wage labor also does not become correct by the fact that the whole momentum of perfectly arranged conditions and one overhead enthroned violence monopolist is forced upon the affected persons and therefore appears as a practical life necessity -- this is severe, but is also the whole necessity that Marx ascribes the “false consciousness” of the proletariat to its situation and its life chances. How wrong they are thereby, the wage earners who make their alternativelessness the argument for their willingness to adapt, also then inevitably feel: they never get anywhere with their calculations. Therefore they stand again and again before the alternative that they always have: to grasp and comprehend theoretically the conflict of liberal-free market exploitation relations against their material interests in order to tackle them in practice or decide on invariably new calculating adaptations and invest mind and will in the search for means of indemnity and compensation. The practical constraint, to adapt oneself in accordance with “social life”, is again and again the same -- and the mistake, to search therein for happiness, as well.
This is however capable of improvement; and therein the modern employees brought it far ... What the workers' movement of earlier days has fought for in eased burdens and freedoms and socio-politically progressive governments have conceded, which in any case were not used for this purpose, political economic necessities from labor baiting and unemployment, wage squeezing and “flexibilization” now plunge the depths of. The opposite stands on the agenda: enlarged competition, smooth up to the pension through the life to come, to allow nobody -- except the bosses – to say anything, to feel good at the same time and make a powerful impression on the environment. Today's proletarians no longer only fulfill the compulsory bourgeois program of accepting wage labor as their destiny and allow themselves by the permanent failure of their calculations to be goaded into ever more work – and willingness to sacrifice. They have thoroughly settled accounts with their class position, regarding themselves as every possibility – Rhinelanders, owners of driving licenses, SPD voters, the life of the office, mountain climbers… -- rather than proletarians and show off with all their bourgeois “identities” that are turned into blinders.
Proletarians aren’t spared from finding out that their source of income isn’t exactly pleasure and that their desire to be content demands an extra effort on their own part. That’s why they also aren’t spared the question of what the whole thing is good for. Modern workers certainly aren’t interested in this simple question – but what is just as certain is that this question is by no means intellectually overwhelming, and that the effort required for dealing with this question definitely isn’t greater than what is needed to convince themselves throughout their lifetime that everything, and especially themselves, are just super. Answering this question would be a much better use of their effort.