Prologue and Summary

What follows represents only the preliminary stages of an effort to improve our understanding of an abiding question of both analytical and political importance: what causes social consciousness to be what it is and what it becomes in the social process?

In varying degrees of detail, emphasis, and plausibility, the paper speaks to a series of connected propositions which move between the generally accepted and the deeply controversial. Its point of departure is what few would dispute: the study of consciousness has been inadequate both in quantity and quality. Not least is this true for the Left (from whose standpoint this is written), for whom consciousness usually means “class consciousness,” and whose assumptions concerning the latter have derived more often from hope than inquiry—and as though, Sartre once remarked, “people are born when they apply for their first job.”

The process of social change must be understood by those who seek to change society. It seems obvious that no such understanding can be gained without working hypotheses as to the sources and the interactions of consciousness in the social process. The approach here is that consciousness arises from, is continually altered by, and in turn continually alters the processes and relationships emanating from the species' efforts to survive, from sex and from work, processes become increasingly more complex and involute over time; that in the capitalist era (but not only in it) the repression and diversion of sexual impulses and the conversion of work into exploited labor have both supported and resulted from the capitalist process; and that the resulting social character leads to the pursuit and development of false needs and false consciousness—if also, in some degree, to the construction and achievement of human needs and possibilities.

Consciousness is shaped from two directions: from the larger process of capitalist development and from the "personal” side of social existence, where “selves” and “character” develop. Implicit in what follows is the conviction that in this three-sided relationship between consciousness, character, and capitalist development it is the connection between character and consciousness which most needs further inquiry—and that the need is an urgent one.

Character and its central “self” serve as a sentinel at the gate of consciousness, a sentinel allowing selective entry to the many types of information confronting the passive being, a sentinel issuing passports for the inquiries of the active being. Character is shaped both in the family and by the larger society (which also shapes the family, of course), in different degrees of intensity and with different possibilities for change over the person's entire life. Character is “educated” in the home, in the school, and in the process of everyday life. The social process and its structures provide us with the full panoply of matters to be perceived, but our character selects out for us what matters we will (even can) perceive in what ways, and how we will respond to what we have perceived: given the social process, character is decisive for consciousness; given our character, the social process is decisive. But the complexity is greater still, for consciousness is itself a shaping force on both the social and the personal processes; that is, the relationships in this “dynamic triangle” are dialectical, in a process of mutual and constant transformation: there are no “one-way causal chains” in society.

Whatever else may be required, social understanding always depends upon historical inquiry. The latter cannot be sensibly undertaken without a methodological underpinning, but neither can it be gained without specific historical studies of particular times, places, processes, and relationships in dynamic linkage with each other. If there is novelty in the approach to consciousness put forth here it is found in the insistence that its understanding requires such specific historical studies as will reveal the relationships between it, the capitalist process, and character; that “the social existence that determines consciousness” is made up of both subjective and objective life and that historical inquiry can show how all these interact.

What follows here seeks to establish the minimal basis for understanding of contemporary U. S. developments. I begin with a long discussion of the evolution and nature of British capitalism, consciousness, and character and some of the ways in which U.S. developments in the 19th century resembled British conditions.

None of the processes of capitalist development in Great Britain, the U.S., or elsewhere, could have occurred without affecting and being affected by consciousness and character. Capitalist development required, helped to produce, and was altered by particular changes in the realms of what we may alternatively call thought and feeling. ⁽¹⁾It may be helpful in this Prologue to provide an inkling of some of the later and fuller treatment of the family, and its relationships with consciousness, character, and capitalist development.

The patriarchal family was an outgrowth of the same broad processes that brought capitalism into existence in (among other places) Great Britain. The family served the purposes of capitalist development—at least, for a time. What is discussed as “the old Freudian self” came into being in the same time periods and places as competitive capitalism and, in some of its key aspects, because of competitive capitalism.

Marx devoted his attention almost exclusively to the processes of capitalist development. Thorstein Veblen, whose work is pertinent to this analysis, was also much concerned with the capitalist process, but his focus was broader and probed more searchingly into the deep past. In having more to say about the irrational, he also had more to tell us about the shaping of consciousness than Marx. But neither he nor Marx paid systematic attention, as did Freud, to the formation of character and the self.

Freud saw the self metaphorically, structured by the “id,” the “ego,” and the “superego,” formed in the heartland of the family. He was not oblivious to nor unconcerned with the larger social process and its influence on the family, but he took it as given. He saw developing for the middle class family a particular morality system with an associated work and consumption ethic: a joyless diligence, a guilt-ridden abstinence, an attitude toward authority and toward life—“the individual forever afraid of life and authority” ⁽²⁾—which provided the character and the “selves” most useful to the capitalist process. (It is worth noting that the importance of culture in providing critical differences in all these respects, and thus enforcing the need for specific historical studies, stands out sharply if one so much as mentions, say, Japanese capitalism.)

It was especially for the upper middle class families of Great Britain and the United States that bourgeois morality and its implications became commanding. There developed a particular personality type, symmetrical in its sexual and economic activities: possessive and greedy, financially and emotionally. Its rational and calculating abilities could shift easily into aggressiveness and then into ruthlessness. In the defensive and protecting bosom of the stern and punishing patriarchal family, the main emotional tendencies combined guilt and insecurity, anxiety and fear, producing people distrustful of themselves and all others—all of that encouraged and strengthened by the systemic insecurity and combativeness of capitalist political economy. Such deformation of character could not but combine with stunted consciousness and grotesque lives—sexual fantasies substituting for emotional fulfillment, family substituting for community, bank accounts serving as human achievement.

If such self-denying lives served the capitalist system in its competitive era, they do so no longer. In the monopoly capitalist era it became both useful and possible for the upper-middle class family to place itself in self-imposed exile from the cities built for its predecessors, to flee to the affluent and antiseptic suburb, with its presumed security, its cloistered individualism, its families huddled nervously at the edge of existence holding off the dark.

The morality system of the old Freudian self had also another meaning for the capitalist process: middle class reformers and “revolutionaries” may be seen as responding at least in part to the conflict between the positive stated principles of bourgeois morality and the ugly practices of everyday capitalist life. But the family and all that it meant to the capitalist process was inexorably transformed by that very process as the latter evolved in numerous and complicated ways toward social incoherence; in turn these developments joined to tendencies for the old Freudian self to “erode” during the late competitive era and to “vanish” in the monopoly capitalist era.

The patriarchal family serves capitalism diminishingly as this century proceeds, but also it seems less and less to produce the particular forms and degrees of moral resistance of the past. However, although the family decreases in importance for producing social character, the intensity, spread, and power of monopoly capitalist institutions (made especially effective through mass communications) appear to be substituting for the family to produce their own forms of acquiescence and resistance, of character and “fickle selves ” and of consciousness, with unpredictable futures, for better and for worse.

Introduction

“Men make their own history.…” Marx wrote that as he sought to unravel the tangled social process which allowed and encouraged the Nixon-like Louis Napoleon to launch a coup d'etat against the Republic whose president he was in 1851, and shortly to find support pervasive enough to proclaim himself Napoleon III, Emperor of France. All this in the France that had been the most fearsome aspect of the “specter that haunted Europe” in 1848, the France Engels saw as the archetypical modern class society: scarcely the nation one would expect to lurch backward into the spiritual arms of Louis XIV and Colbert. “But,” Marx added,

they do not make it just as they please: they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. ⁽³⁾

We who desire to understand society in order to change it (or even to keep it from changing) must understand to a greater degree than we do that the tradition that weighs so heavily is not composed of tangibles, but of culture and history: the intangibles, which for better and for worse, have always taken on compelling force in the social process; ideology and the social relations supported by it and from which it arises; religion, patriotism, the arts, the sciences, and all the realms of thought and feeling.

If we choose to take seriously Marx's metaphor of “base and superstructure ” we must also take seriously that the relationships between them are dialectical; rather than causal from base “upwards,” and that what is comprised by that dialectic is to be located as much in the sphere of the intangibles in the “base” as in its tangibles. ⁽⁴⁾That being so, we must push our inquiries deeply into the preserves of consciousness. We believe that means an equally serious commitment to studying character, the “other side” of social existence which in some degree, at least, determines consciousness.

Both subjective and objective elements are operating in the social process to produce motivations and conduct that combine the rational and the irrational, the conscious and the unconscious. As these matters are analyzed under the headings of consciousness and character they will be seen as they move through time in processes of “mutual effectivity,” shaping and being shaped by the social order.

The social order is seen here as the process of capitalist development—not because capitalism defines all, or brought all that is relevant into existence; that is not so, nor could it be. But capitalism at different times and places and in varying degrees must and has been able to alter all social institutions to fit its needs and possibilities—not always but often enough. In a modification of another famous Marxian phrase, capitalism “batters down all Chinese walls. ” It also batters down the structures it has created for itself as it creates and re-creates the social order to feed its voracious and ever-changing appetites.

That so many of us in recent years have become occupied with what the capitalist process means to consciousness and character suggests that in its most recent phases capitalism has been impelled and able to extend its sway into all the corners of existence that make for life and for death. Paul Baran was referring to this horrifying quality of monopoly capital when he wrote, in 1959,

at no time in history has this power over the vast and growing productive forces been to such an extent power over life and death of millions of men, women, and children everywhere. But the most insidious, and at the same time the most portentous, aspect of this overwhelming power of the objectified productive relations over the life of the individual is their capacity to determine decisively his psychic structure. ⁽⁵⁾

Not even Marx anticipated that, probably because he did not anticipate the staying power of capitalism. Or should one say something else, that Marx did not gauge correctly the forms that consciousness would—or would not—take because he also neglected to think through the determination of character, and what Lichtman calls “the darker side of life,” and its part, as well as that of various other vital aspects of social existence in affecting consciousness?

Questions such as these have compelled me to join the ongoing and widespread attempts to rework and to synthesize the relevant Marxian and Freudian traditions, loosely and critically viewed. When, as here, such an attempt is made, assuming that all alterations of consciousness, character, and capitalist development occur in a process of mutual transformation, it then follows that any such synthesis renders the Marxian framework dominant, because of its dialectical reach—as contrasted with the dualistic, intrinsically limited approach of Freud and those of his followers who are non-Marxian.

On Human Nature

After so much in the way of preface, how am I using the terms “consciousness,” “character,” and “self”? Consciousness refers to what people perceive, what they think about and imagine, and their attitudes and beliefs toward matters having to do with the components, relations, and processes of society. All this implies inner and external articulation and language, whether in the form of writing, images and symbols, or sounds. Whatever the ways in which consciousness may be formed, we use the term to refer to a mental activity that is conscious—that is, not unconscious. All consciousness takes place within, enables, and requires the social process and particular social settings, whatever else may be involved that binds human beings to each other and that arises from and molds their “selves.”

There is an intimate connection between consciousness as just defined and “character,” and a murky area rather than a dividing line between the conscious and the unconscious, between emotion, feeling, and thought, between the rational and the irrational.

If by character we refer to how people seek to and do live, their values, impulses, and aspirations, their felt constraints and morality systems, and the ties between all of that and their behavior patterns, there is a substantial and dynamic “overlap” between consciousness, character and selves, and the social process. Recognition of that requires formulating a position on that much abused notion, human nature. Intrinsic in social analysis is investigation of the essential nature of human beings—the fundamental units of society, of the relationships and processes we seek to understand.

I follow in Marx's path, and see human nature as self-transformative, human beings as neither wholly formed nor wholly unformed at birth: human beings form themselves, in the social process. If that position is essential, it is insufficient, standing alone. The understanding we inherit from Darwin and, among others, Freud and Veblen must be added: and the biological elements not explicitly taken into account by Marx, and those elements of the social process to which he gave short shrift or ignored altogether must also be acknowledged.

What is most basic in the nature of human beings, as for all other animals, is the instinct to live, to promote and to preserve our biological life as individuals and, consequently, as a species. This may be seen as a natural need, as the foundation of our very existence, which we hold in common with all other living things. But, and as Marx argued, human beings differ from all other animals in not only having natural needs, but in developing human and false needs. ⁽⁶⁾

Dialectically related to this whole range of needs is a counterpart range of human possibilities going far beyond those of any other species possibilities for creative change and what it could mean to be human which, as seen by Marx (it may be argued), underlay his soaringly optimistic view of the future. But human possibilities for self- and social-destruction also place us in a different category from all other animals, as is all too clear to us today though barely glimpsed by Marx. Veblen more than glimpsed them; he saw our “darker side” as perhaps, even probably, doing us in:

…history records more frequent and more spectacular instances of the triumph of imbecile institutions over life and culture than of peoples who have by force of instinctive insight save themselves alive out of a desperately precarious institutional situation, such, for instance, as now faces the people of Christendom. ⁽⁷⁾

Marx and Veblen were remarkably similar on the creative possibilities of our species but, unlike Marx in emphasis and Freud in explanation, Veblen gave great prominence to the predatory and the irrational sides of our species—under the wry headings of “the instinct of sportsmanship,” and “force and fraud"—and thought the combination of rapacity and shrewdness on the part of the “vested interests” would manage to keep these disastrous processes very much alive.

Marx saw the production and the reproduction of the species as being the main shaping force in history; it is the hard core of what is suggested by historical materialism. Veblen would agree. But neither Marx nor Veblen offered any explicit systematic view as to the role of reproduction and the family in shaping human nature—except, for Marx and especially Engels, their view of the family as a social unit of production. It is here that the Freudian tradition makes an essential contribution, especially—I would say only—when it is integrated with the Marxian and the Veblenian frameworks.

The whole of Freudian theory may be seen as being built around the instinct for survival and the ways in which that instinct in its social setting is in practice the source of irrationality. The pressures to reproduce the species through sexual activity are irresistible, and the need to eat to stay alive must be satisfied. For Freud, the family extant in his day “taught” the infant and the child to repress, suppress, and sublimate her/his sexual strivings and could do so effectively because the helpless infant had otherwise (unconsciously) to face death through abandonment. The “darker side” of the species, its irrationality, may be understood as being created out of the deflected “energy” of the life force, a force that cannot be quelled but only re-routed—along the paths to neurosis and misery (and, perhaps, creativity).

For Marx the social system was irrational, and produced by the socio-historical relations in which the society sat and moved through time, and “individuals are derivatives of the social system, rather than primary elements from which the system is constructed.” ⁽⁸⁾Veblen saw the sources of irrationality as derivative of the social system also, in a long and twisting evolution going back to the savage epoch, its necessary predatory activities, and the prestige, status, and power that came to be associated with killing and its trappings; Veblen paid no attention to sexual repression and its like. ⁽⁹⁾There is both the need and the possibility to synthesize the positions of Marx, Veblen, and Freud, for each standing alone is analytically vulnerable.

Freud's treatment of  “the id” is easily compatible with Marx's (and Veblen's) understanding of “natural needs,” the needs that must in some way or another be resolved through sex and work if the species is to survive. What about “human” and “false” needs? There is significant compatibility regarding them also, in Freud's conceptions of  “the ego” and “the superego.” The superego is the seat of conscience and constraint, of notions of right and wrong, of ideals and of aspirations. The superego is par excellence the product of socialization (crucially in the family) and the vehicle of cultural tradition; a prime source of both human and false needs.

The “ego” is the psychological system through which the “transactions” between the self and the external world are conducted. It has no “energy ” of its own; the ego develops by diverting energy from the id into cognitive processes: it is “the executive of the self”; the developer of consciousness. In the well-adjusted individual of the competitive capitalist era, the era also of the “old Freudian self,” the ego was in charge of the self, controlling and governing the id and the superego and maintaining relations with the external world in the interest of the total self and its varied needs. The ego and the superego generated their strength, individuality and self-reliance by accepting personal challenges and rewards, especially in interaction with parents in the middle class family and its commanding pater familias, who wielded absolute power of love, approval, condemnation, and inheritance.

Returning to our “natural” inclinations as animals, the most pressing need under all circumstances is to use our powers to survive, to find and/or to provide ourselves with nourishment and protection. The attempt at physical self-preservation by the species can only succeed through cooperation with other human beings. We prey upon other .species; at the deepest level, however, within our species the nature of the beast is cooperative and mostly peaceful except that the human powers we have developed lead us, unlike almost all other species, to prey upon our own all too often.

In the interest of self-preservation, we are driven by a fundamental natural need to be productive. We want to work and we want to unite with others. To work, we naturally seek external stimuli and bases for the biological purpose of achieving the immediate requirements of life. To unite with others, we naturally seek to discharge internal tension by engaging in affectionate and sexual activity, both for the immediate warmth and excitement of human contact and for the ultimate purpose of biologically propagating the species.

Out of the natural need of human beings to survive physically as organisms there grows the rational psychological need to develop our human powers, with consequences for good and ill. As bio-social organisms, human beings are freaks of nature—we are in nature, but also distanced from nature. We lack sufficient biologically conditioned instincts and survival apparatus to defend and provide for ourselves in the world. In this respect, we are among the most helpless of all animals, but this very biological weakness is the basis for our strength, the prime cause for the development of our specifically human qualities. We create a substitute for the instincts that direct the impulses and enforce the constraints that are instinctive in other animals. We do this, as Marx put it, by “making ourselves” in a human, that is, social environment, by taking direction from our autonomous impulses, by developing our integrative powers and by learning the consciousness and the skills of social cooperation.

Human needs are two-sided in their developmental consequences, arising as they do from our special weaknesses and from our special strengths. On the one hand, for example, our special traits have led to music, to architecture, to a dynamic technology, and much, much more. But the irrational side of us is just as much an outcome of our humanness, arising originally as it does from our overwhelming neediness and dependence upon others at the very time when our needs are forming—most especially, of course, our emotional needs. The deep fear of being abandoned as helpless infants and children (and, for some, as adults) leads to derivative fears and inclines us unconsciously to accept social indoctrination and domination (within and outside the family) in order to survive. All of this can and usually does occur without the intervention of rational considerations at every—or, in some cases, any—turn. This then is what “separates” character from consciousness. In other words, social character is largely an unconscious, unthinking, internalization of external necessities which, once in place, works as an automatic response mechanism.

Once our biological needs are taken care of, human nature can be said to be essentially historical. It is shaped by and fitted to the needs of the current social institutions. Thus, we harness our human energy for the tasks of the economic and social system into which we have been placed by fate. We adapt ourselves to social conditions and develop those traits that make us desire to act as we must act, in order to function effectively under those conditions. As Erikson has pointed out, “society seems to get, more or less, the social character it needs.” As long as a society offers human beings simultaneous psychological and physiological “satisfactions,” character structure is the cement which holds the social structure together.

The acquisition of character is a necessary element in the process of human survival, but it also has disadvantages and dangers. Inasmuch as character is formed by traditions and motivates us largely without appealing to our reason, it is often not adapted to or is sometimes even in direct contradiction to new social conditions. Human character and social institutions tend to function in contradictory ways. Both are created, in the first instance, to manage human survival and well-being by providing us with social and psychological foundations of traditional wisdom on which to live our lives more efficiently and decently, to become more fully human by increasingly realizing ourselves at higher levels of human potential. Both have inherent defects that undermine their life-furthering constructive functions. Both combine to produce and maintain in us false needs detrimental to our basic need and possibility, the protection and the enhancement of life. False needs are tied on one hand to the stupidities of irrational thought, feeling, and behavior inherent in the rigidities that are an integral part of our social character. On the other hand, they connect with the institutional rigidities that develop over time as institutions tend to take on lives of their own, serving the ongoing needs of the social system to the continuous and long-term detriment of our natural and human needs and possibilities.

In short, human nature is “naturally” peaceful, sensitive, and constructive, with goals of human survival and the realization of human potential. But that potential is not necessarily for good, for ill, or for anything in particular: human nature is, in its very nature, plastic. If the social relations shaping its growth and development frustrate its strong impulses toward a good, decent, and expansive life, those same strong impulses move in other and perverse directions. Human nature comprehends everything that human beings have ever willed or done: Auschwitz and the Rasoumovsky Quartets, “love and pain and the whole damned thing”—as it also comprehends everything the species seeks and has yet to do.

Now it is time for us to turn to the world made earlier, to the creation .and operation of the capitalist process. It will be analyzed in terms of its essential properties and the manner in which those properties have allowed and required the needs and the possibilities of capitalism to alter substantially—of capitalism, and of the consciousness and character of the people.

The Capitalist Social Process

Capitalism must be characterized and analyzed in different ways, times, places, and at different levels of abstraction to suit particular analytical purposes. For us this means going well beyond any simple probing of the political economy of capitalism. To understand the shaping relationships between consciousness, character, and capitalist development it is now necessary to treat at least the following matters in an intertwined manner:

(A) the pre-capitalist, or incipiently capitalist socio-historical developments from which capitalism emerged; that is, the dynamic social process in which pre-capitalist consciousness and character helped to create and to feed the needs and possibilities of embryonic capitalist political economy—Marx's period of “primitive accumulation”—and, in so doing, to strengthen those same aspects of consciousness and character while other (non- or anti-capitalist) traits atrophied -thus, over a period of centuries, altering the social process so as to produce the capitalist social order;

(B) the coalescence in Great Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (and with somewhat different forms and timing in the United States) of the essential features of the capitalist political economy and society: exploitation, expansion, and oligarchic rule. None of these is or was peculiar to capitalism, of course; all are both “economic” and “non-economic” in origin, functioning, and consequence; all are essential, in one form or another and in combination, whether for the early competitive or the present monopoly form of capitalism; and taken together they set both the needs and the possibilities of capitalism's existence and development.

Interspersed in those discussions will be the attempt to show the ways in which capitalism altered and was altered by consciousness and character.

(A) The Pre-Capitalist Social Process

Initially it is well to note a distinction between capitalist political economy and capitalist society, and to remind ourselves that the existence of “full-bodied” capitalism in either sense has required their simultaneous existence. Elements of both were in partial and dynamic development for a very long period, forming, as Marx has put it, “in the womb of the old society.”

The emergence and the blossoming of capitalist political economy depended upon the development and interaction of at least two processes—widening and deepening patterns of global trade and, in what thus become(s) the core nation(s) of the capitalist global economy, the creation of two classes: the hallmark of capitalism as a social formation. ⁽¹⁰⁾The social structure is composed of a property-less, wage-earning, working class which must sell its labor power to survive, and a capitalist class which, because it is defined by its ownership and control of the means of production (that is, of the means of life), sets the terms of the labor process, and, of course, does so to meet its endless quest for profits and power. A moment's reflection would show that neither the creation nor the functioning of such a class system can sensibly be thought of in the narrow terms of political economy.

The evolution of these two processes in the centuries-long period of “incipient capitalism” was made possible by the larger social context, increasingly receptive to or unable to resist the compelling drives, arid the harsh human relationships of capitalism—yielding, finally, a society creating and dependent upon the exploitation of and the rule over the vast majority by a tiny minority in a process of ceaseless and heedless geographic and economic expansion, fueled by the unquenchable lust of the emerging and growing capitalist class and its. allies.

Such a social formation came into being fully and first in Great Britain. The close historical ties of British to U.S. capitalist society means that what will subsequently be said of British capitalism will apply in many particulars to the states of consciousness and character in the United States as well—and most especially as regards what is called “the old Freudian self.” Viewed quantitatively, it would appear that the population of the U.S. would be less likely than that of Britain to have been dominated by that “self”—a self, it may be said, possessed predominantly in the U.S. by what came to be called “WASPs”—that is, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants. Qualitatively, however, the matter is by no means so clear; I incline toward accepting what sociologists and economic historians generally assert for at least the 19th century in the U.S.: the upper layers of both business and politics were “WASP” and, within that group at the top, heavily Episcopalian. ⁽¹¹⁾However, there were numerous and important differences between capitalist development in Great Britain and in the U.S. which need only be mentioned in passing to make the point: the dependence of the U.S. on black slavery and the racism that preceded, accompanied, and followed it; the ability of the U.S. to expand geographically on what became its “own" land, containing, moreover, the best resources for capitalist development in the world; and so on.

It was in western Europe, and there alone, that the seeds that would allow capitalism to grow were first germinated. They sprouted first in and between the commercial cities and territorial states of late medieval and renaissance Italy, stimulated and nourished by similar growths in trading and financial towns and cities in northern Europe—from England through the lowlands and much of Germany into Scandinavia. Those seeds were planted in soil made receptive by major developments in the “objective” world—for example, the cluster of technological developments in the 16th and 17th centuries in England; the vast overseas expansion and its associated explosion of trade in both new and old commodities (but most vitally of sugar and slaves), initiates; by the Spanish, but given its major boost by the Dutch in the 17th century; and, fostering, fostered, and required by all these (and, among other matters), the emerging nationstates, with their growing fiscal and military needs and counterpart possibilities. ⁽¹²⁾

None of that would have occurred at the pace it did (or, some of it, at all) had it not been for a major change in culture—a change or, better, a set of closely-related changes in thought and feeling, in consciousness and character, arising out of and accelerating the centuries-long decay of the medieval social order. Most vital in the process of decay was the decomposition of the spiritual and social, the political and ideological, powers of the Roman Catholic Church. For over a millennium, the Church stood alone as an institution commanding influence or power over all but some small portion of Europe. Testimony as to what changed as the Church's power diminished is the fact that what today we call diplomacy, the art of bargaining and negotiation between nations, does not begin its modern history until the 15th century. ⁽¹³⁾

For the social process, the Church's power had long been critical for both consciousness and character, and not least as regards conceptions of right and wrong in economic life, and how such conceptions should be determined. Controversy may rage forever on the changes in thought and feeling that transpired between the first decades of the Renaissance and the last decades of the 18th century, but there can be few who would dispute the major conclusions put forth by Tawney, probably the most astute (and certainly among the most concerned) of scholars regarding the process:

There is no place in medieval theory for economic activity which is not related to a moral end, and to found a science of society upon the assumption that the appetite for economic gain is a constant and measurable force, to be accepted, like other natural forces, as an inevitable and self-evident datum would have appeared to the medieval thinker as hardly less irrational or immoral than to make the premise of social philosophy the unrestrained operation of such necessary human attributes as pugnacity or the sexual instinct. ⁽¹⁴⁾

And, speaking of the 16th century in England:

[Whether] theologians and moralists condemned all interest, or only some interest, as contrary to morality, the assumption implicit in their very disagreement had been that economic relations belonged to the province of religion. That buying and selling, letting and hiring, lending and borrowing, and all other economic transactions were one department of ethical conduct and to be judged, like other parts of it, by ethical criteria…⁽¹⁵⁾

“The creed of the commercial classes,” as Tawney puts it, “was a doctrineless individualism.” And it was this creed which, by the close of the 17th century—a century marked by prolonged civil struggle—had in England moved decisively toward the triumph Laski succinctly characterizes:

The movement from feudalism to capitalism is a movement from a world in which individual well-being is regarded as the outcome of action socially controlled to one in which social well-being is regarded as the outcome of action individually controlled. ⁽¹⁶⁾

The movement Laski characterizes was one requiring and facilitating momentous changes in all aspects of existence and attitude, no one of which can usefully be seen as having happened “first” : changes here brought forth changes there in a reciprocating fashion, in what came out to be merely different aspects of the same process—with, however, some emerging as more important than others. Here is Marx:

In the history of primitive accumulation, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capitalist class in course of formation; but, above all, those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled as free and “unattached” proletarians on the labour-market. The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process. The history of this expropriation, in different countries, assumes different aspects, and runs through its various phases in different orders of succession, and at different periods. In England alone, which we take as our example, has it the classic form. ⁽¹⁷⁾

And, a bit later:

The spoliation of the church's property, the fraudulent alienation of the State domains, the robbery of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property, and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of reckless terrorism, were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalistic agriculture, made the soil part and parcel of capital, and created for tile town industries the necessary supply of a “free” and outlawed proletariat. ⁽¹⁸⁾

“In England alone …has it the classic form.” And there the processes referred to, and among them most notably the so-called enclosures, spread over many centuries. They started as a trickle in the 13th century, to become, as Tawney says, a “rivulet” in the 16th century—when, however, “we are among the hills from which great waters descend.” ⁽¹⁹⁾ Thus, in 16th century England, two social earthquakes in the two most traditional-bound areas of social existence: Reformation in religion, and upheaval in land tenure in agriculture. Does either of these take precedence? Or does the spread of commercialism at home and overseas occur at the behest of something else still, the authoritarian and innovative Elizabethan state? Or the vitality of the people, exhibited in the liveliness and the bawdiness of Elizabethan culture, connected to a social base broader probably than any before or since in England? Think of the self of the 19th century middle class and of its consciousness (as well as that of the working class), to say nothing of the homogenized consciousness of our own day.

It was the change from the early 16th to the late 18th century that swallowed up the old world and spewed forth the new capitalist social order. A society which was largely traditional in nature with growing elements of commercialism in it had become a commercial society with barely lingering traces of tradition. In the first decades of the 19th century, as Polanyi has emphasized, even labor and the land, both so much the strongholds of tradition in prior centuries, became unencumbered commodities. ⁽²⁰⁾

That could not have occurred without the accompanying development and acceptance of possessive individualism as a “social philosophy,” a development in which philosophical and analytical foundations were established most obviously by Locke and Adam Smith—both of whom we may assume would have viewed the developments of the 19th century and subsequently as obscene caricatures of what they believed and intended. When they wrote, however, they argued as though the people who would occupy and preside over their social systems were people whose character and consciousness had not been leached of what both of them saw as the desirable elements of tradition, those that allowed for social balance; nor did they anticipate the virulent forms of rapacity that would emerge to dominate society once the glue of tradition had dissolved. Locke and Smith were both reformers, seeking to lessen the hold of various forms of tyranny; neither was a reckless experimenter, but the ideas of both were used to dignify the social cruelties of the capitalist epoch.⁽²¹⁾

It was, of course, the growing and rising middle class in town and country who most quickly and enthusiastically embraced and applied the developing ideology of capitalism in its incipient period. For the actual working producers of foodstuffs and industrial commodities, it was a different matter—different as Sweezy has argued, not only from the middle class but also as between the workers of the 17th-18th centuries and those of industrial capitalism. It is important to distinguish between Sweezy's “craft consciousness” and the Marxian “class consciousness” of workers in the period of the industrial revolution, when the machine technology fully displaced the earlier handicraft (“manufacture”) technology. Class consciousness tends toward a revolutionary solution to the workers' needs; not so, craft consciousness:

The skilled handworker tended to be bigoted, proud, undisciplined, contentious, capable of waging a bitter and often violent struggle against the constraints of [early] capitalist production and the employer who imposed them upon him. But his vision was necessarily limited: he could not see the system as a whole nor understanding his place in it, and he was therefore incapable of sustained revolutionary activity to change it. ⁽²²⁾

Those who comprised the industrial working class of the full capitalist system of 19th century Great Britain were the descendants of the independent farmers and artisans of the 16th through the 18th centuries—of course. Throughout that entire period, the patriarchal family, whether in agriculture or handicraft industry, was the basic productive and the basic social unit; it remained so up through the 19th century, not to weaken until the 20th century was well under way. (In this century, as will be developed later, the family was battered by the hammer blows of both the failures and achievements of advanced capitalist society: its depressions, wars, and related tensions, on the one hand, its stepped-up geographic and social mobility, its greater powers to “manage minds” and its lesser needs for sexual repression and abstinence—among other developments—on the other.)

But it is necessary to pose a distinction in the function of the patriarchal family as it shaped the character of those in the working class as compared with those above them in status, income, and power. The impact of the family for the working class was principally on attitudes toward authority: authoritarian relationships produced and reproduced in the family were transposed into the labor process (and, probably, vice versa), enhancing the essential process of exploitation created and sustained otherwise in earlier processes—e.g., by enclosures, the State, etc. Aiding in this was the tendency for state-run education to take hold from mid-19th century on. The compulsory schooling for working class children had as its purpose, as Lazonick puts it, “the moral preparation of future workers for the world of wage-labour.” ⁽²³⁾The working class did not have to be taught to abstain from consumption, given its subsistence wages; what appears to have been the lesser hold of bourgeois sexual morality on them may well connect with that.

The role of authority was strengthened through the family for the middle class, also; for it, however, the patriarchal family served more numerous functions. Such people could reasonably see themselves as beneficiaries of the capitalist process and fulsomely embrace all aspects of its ideology. That was not so for the working class which, throughout the 19th century, at least, resisted or resented capitalist ideology in one way and in one degree or another—consciously or not, effectively or not.

What the working class had to fight against was what made capitalism possible, what made it tick: exploitation, expansion, and oligarchic rule; all of them at the expense of the powerless people within and outside both in Great Britain and the U.S. Now it is time to turn to the functioning of that system and to examine “the old Freudian self” brought to culmination in the process (especially for the middle class) the self which was the carrier of character and consciousness in the competitive capitalist era in the two countries.

(B) Competitive Capitalism, Competitive People

The nature and the functioning of competitive capitalism in both Britain and the U.S. have of course been treated exhaustively in the literature, and it need not be reiterated. What does require exploration here is the manner in which the main aspects of that system depended upon and helped to mold selves, character, and consciousness. In turn, this requires integrating such matters with the ruling characteristics of capitalist society: exploitation, expansion, and oligarchic rule.

The old Freudian self was both formed and deformed by the processes of capitalist development. “Selves” are, of course, shaped by influences emanating from outside as well as inside the family, including influences that impact well after adolescence. But the importance of infancy and childhood in establishing what we may call characterological predispositions seems difficult to dispute; and it was the family that provided the vital influences, if only completely in the middle class.

The most important connecting link in this respect was between the particular characteristics of the patriarchal family and the accumulation (expansion, investment, growth) needs and possibilities of the era without which there probably never would have been a “Freudian self.” The family was the primary agent of socialization for the young in the period. (It should go without saying that for most people in Britain and the U.S., whether “free” or slave, the primary “socializing agent” was of another sort: powerlessness and the whip of hunger.)

Central to the ideology of capitalism were the principles of political and legal freedom for the individual, and the laissez-faire or minimal state: principles whose installation in practice required the violent elimination of earlier social constraints and protections. The functioning of the competitive market—Smith's “invisible hand”—was the central mechanism not only for the production and distribution of the social product but became, as well, the basis for the whole of social existence in capitalist society: a society at once competitive, hierarchical, exploitative and oppressive, and self-denying, with consequent deformations of character and consciousness.

The fundamental need for expansion of capitalism, over both time and space, in the competitive era revolved around the process of private capital accumulation for private profit, the location of what Marx saw as the primary contradiction of capitalism. By today's standards, the 19th century was an era of small business (more so in Britain than in the U.S.), even after introduction of general incorporation. Investment funds were drawn indirectly from harsh labor exploitation and directly from savings within the business or “nearby.” What thus became the most acceptable as well as the most penetrating ideas in the culture of competitive capitalism were those of abstinence and economic growth. For the middle class these ideas translated themselves voluntarily into all aspects of life; for the rest of the people there was no abstention but there was considerable going without: it was they who “paid” for the growth, more than the saving class.

Puritanical living in personal life was thus harmoniously related to the larger economic process, in ways qualitatively different in both origin and consequence as between classes. The whole notion of individual behavior was in principle dominated by discipline, self-control, and abstinence. Sexual life was considered moral only within the confines of the family and only for the reproduction of the species. Saving and having were the ideal, an ideal which worked its way into the psychological bone marrow of the middle class in the 19th century (as borrowing and having do now for almost everyone in both countries). The meaning of this tendency, most desirable both for incipient and full capitalism, was discerned profoundly by Marx (as paraphrased by 0llman):

People no longer feel drives to see, hear, love and think, but only to have, to own what is seen, heard, loved and thought about. Ownership, with all it entails in the way of greed, status, rights to use and abuse, has become the only adequate expression of man's powers at this stage in their development. ⁽²⁴⁾

The processes of human alienation thus suggested were far enough along for Marx to have seen all that a century ago; as matters stand today, if there has been any change, it is that the alienation is deeper and broader, and that the impulse to “own” (in an era of disposable everythings) is being displaced by the impulse merely to use: to use what is seen, heard, loved and thought about; to consume everything within reach of eye, ear, and hand; but not to produce.

In the competitive era, to waste or to spend easily was to be sinful. The working class was seen as being sinful both in its presumed sexual and consuming habits: its wretched economic condition was viewed as a consequence of both—neither the first nor by any means the last instance of “blaming the victim.” For middle class people who had the ability to save and the inclination to invest, the need to accumulate became a second nature, virtually indistinguishable from human nature. G. D. H. Cole has put the point forcefully:

Exploiting almost without competition in many trades the vast markets of a developing world, the capitalist could profitably use in the expansion of his business every penny he could lay hands on .…[The] tendency of trade was to more and more rapid expansion, and it was all manufacturers could do to accumulate enough fresh capital to enable them to keep pace with the growth of demand. Thus, every rise of wages presented itself as a subtraction of so much sorely needed capital from productive use, and its diversion to mere unnecessary consumption by the wage-earning class. In these circumstances, thrift came to be regarded as the paramount virtue, and the accumulation of wealth as a moral duty. The enforced abstinence of the workers was set side by side with the voluntary abstinence of the capitalist as the twin beacon light of national prosperity. ⁽²⁵⁾

For the children arid the adults of the middle class, the long years of infancy and childhood and its schooling in controlling impulses and delaying gratification provided by the stern, uncompromising, and unquestioned patriarchal family could not have suited the needs of the capitalist system better had they been designed—as many thought they were—by the hand of God.

Of the three essential qualities of the capitalist system, only one, expansion, could claim support throughout all layers of the population: whatever else it means, it is the source of jobs and wages for the working class, as well as the salaries and property incomes of the middle and top strata of the bourgeoisie. On the other hand, what has most divided the population have been capitalism's other fundamental needs, for an exploitable and exploited labor force and for oligarchic rule. It is from these requirements that conflict emerged most strongly in the 19th century; in these respects character and consciousness were acutely relevant. Elaboration is in order.

Capitalism encourages and draws forth the individualistic, egoistic, and materialistic side of human nature; in doing so it tends at the same time to override and crush its social humanitarian side, thus alienating the self from its humanity, from other human beings and from what Marx called our “species-being.” This anti-humanitarian and anti-solidaristic tendency of capitalism is required and produced by competition, the essential socio-psychological as well as economic relationship of the marketplace. Competitive relationships are the institutional patterns that evolve out of the way power is used in the system. Of the three fundamentals of the economic and political system, the relationships of exploitation and oligarchic rule are forms of competition. Oligarchic rule is the centralized process by which decisions are made that enable the expansion of the economy and the capitalist oligarchs to make their gains and keep (or enhance) their power. This ability to make the vital economic decisions comes from their control over the means of production, which enables and requires them to exploit—which, in turn, is the power to make profits in a system that is expanding.

Decision-making processes have been and must be centralized in a capitalist society, and the more so over time. Although a capitalist society functions most smoothly when it is democratic in form, it cannot function economically if it is democratic in fact, that is, if the power to make decisions is dispersed evenly throughout the population. If it were fully democratic, the society would ipso facto have ceased to be capitalist. Meaningful democracy is impossible in a society where the economic bases of power are unequally distributed.

The fact that the social relationships of capitalist society require fractional ownership and control over the means of life (and vice versa) realistically implies that the relationships of production will always in some degree be exploitative. There will be those who involuntarily produce more than they consume and those who consume and invest more than they produce: the existence of exploitation (that is, unpaid labor) is a necessary condition if profit is to be made under normal conditions in a competitive economy.

Thus the power to rule oligarchically and the power to exploit are bound together, the complementary uses of power by those with much against those with little power. Capitalism condones, encourages, and requires the use of nature and of human beings as mere resources to be plundered and—as is said of “nature” but not of human beings exploited. The basic concept of “using” in this context is not thought of as either a cruel or a kind form of human treatment; it is seen as a fundamental fact that in this economic system, one human being in capitalist culture gains by using others.

In such a system, with a minority ruling over the majority, the need for authority is paramount. During the competitive era, obedience to overt authority was considered a virtue. At the same time, individual competitive success was the main and approved of aim of the middle class business culture; as such, it was a prime determinant of self value: “Each for himself and God for all,” a slogan that would have been seen as either ludicrous or obscene even a century after the Protestant Reformation, came to be seen as a profundity in the era of competitive capitalism (as it occasionally is still in business and political circles presumed to know better).

Competitive capitalism generated an excessive need to compete, which has a neurotic quality to it. It was a compulsive drive aimed not at satisfaction but at security. The need to strive for power over others isolated people from others; the failure of others could be seen as one's own success. Interpersonal isolation and alienation from others were unavoidable consequences of the successful functioning of the person and the system; hostility toward others and self-alienation became an ingrained part of the character and the consciousness of the population, in one variation or another determined by class, location, etc.

As the competitive capitalist system itself was increasingly transformed by technological and organizational change within and between capitalist nations toward the close of the 19th century—an age of developing cartels, finance capitalism, and imperialism—the Freudian self that was bred to fit an earlier and relatively purer form of capitalist society tended also to be deformed and eroded, as it made the kinds of compromises with its integrity that were necessary in order to get along in a ruthlessly competitive and increasingly unstable world. In significant degree, we may say that “the old Freudian self” was always compromised by the need to betray its natural and internalized human needs in favor of the dehumanizing values required by the marketplace.

Earlier a distinction was made between the character and the consciousness of working class as compared with middle class people, as they developed in both pre-capitalist and industrial capitalist society. A further point and distinction may now be noted. The shaping of the bourgeois family not only achieved the kind of morality system already discussed, but also contributed to the shaping of a “materialistic” outlook and way of life. This meant that consciousness (and the perception and thought connecting with it) became increasingly a matter of attentiveness to the quantitative aspects of social existence, with an attendant narrowing of life aims and a vitiation of the quality of life. Perception, thought, consciousness, and, therefore, feeling as well, over a very long period that continues to and intensifies in the present came to be masked; life and its study and its living came to be in hermetically-sealed compartments marked “economic,” “political,” “emotional,” “ethical," “mental,” and so on. Science came to be seen as “measurement.” Education came to be training. Training came to be shaped to occupation. Material success and the protection of one's family (narrowly defined, also) leached or pushed out of sight anything else or more that might be meant by “life.” Thus, did the middle class beneficiaries of capitalism participate in their own alienation.

For the working class in the competitive capitalist era, it was a different matter that emerged from the same process. Workers had to be “materialistic” in order to survive; they had to focus steadily on the conditions and the wages for their work, on the downward pressures on their consumption that were the main meaning to them of the accumulation process. But that necessity also led to a foreshortening of their consciousness, aided and abetted by pressures coming from the working class, also authoritarian, family. As Perry Anderson has put it, the working class was subjected to a “siege experience,” which “fixed an attitude to the outside world which has persisted to this day.” Its main result, positively viewed, was the strong pressure toward union organization, the main means by which workers could defend and enhance their short-term material needs; negatively viewed, the main outcome of this “siege experience” was a constrained vision of long-term needs and possibilities. ⁽²⁶⁾

As Anderson sees it, the working class has been “a corporate class,” which “pursues its own ends within a social totality whose global determination lies outside it,” as contrasted with what would be essential if the working class were to become a revolutionary class, namely, “a hegemonic class …which imposes its own ends and its own vision on society as a whole.” The harshness of workers' lives in 19th century Britain and the U.S. gave them little choice but to live within the vision of the ruling class. Today, ruling class hegemony is maintained not so much by the harshness of economic life under monopoly capitalism as by the ability and the need of advanced industrial capitalism to provide a high percentage of its population with a material existence undreamed of by most as recently as the interwar period; and to persuade the entire population that those particular quantities represent in themselves what can best be meant by a good quality of life. Having reached this stage of the analysis, some tentative conclusions will now be drawn.

Conclusions and Epilogue

In the years just after World War I many Marxists (among others) had already begun to raise and to restate the kinds of questions dealt with above, if in different ways. Lukacs began his half century or more of studies of consciousness and related matters; Gramsci, especially after his imprisonment by the Italian fascists in 1926 (which ended his life in 1937) pursued his inquiries of the ideological “hegemony” of the capitalist class (that is, the “spontaneous consent” given by the masses to the general direction imposed on social life under capitalism). Reich, a direct observer of the early triumph of the Nazis and, like Gramsci, a Communist, shocked by the victory of fascism rather than socialism despite (and because of) deep capitalist crisis, sought to find explanations emphasizing the role of repressed sexuality in the development of character and thus of consciousness. His was not only the first major attempt to bring together Marx and Freud, but also a work still of great relevance. ⁽²⁷⁾

For even the least optimistic of those on the Left the breakdown of competitive capitalism (and the decades-long crisis stretching from before World War I through the economic stagnation and political turbulence of the interwar period and the enormous physical and social damage of World War II) most certainly should have produced an effective socialist movement and the overthrow of capitalism. Given the tenets of classical Marxism, if it did not, what would?

On top of all that, the years since World War II have appeared to produce not the approach but the departure of prospects for socialism in the advanced industrial capitalist nations, giving even greater urgency to the questions raised by Reich and the others. Those matters have been examined under the headings of consciousness and character; it is useful now to bring together some conclusions under the heading of “alienation”—and in doing so to seek a unification of the classic Marxian tradition with the work of recent years, some of which has sought to enrich Marxism through the selective adaptation of Freudian insights.

Marx's treatment of alienation is both profound and essential for the understanding of life in the capitalist world; we believe it is also inadequate not because he emphasizes the relations of production as the sources of alienation, but because he goes no further than that. Although they did confine their work almost entirely to the “base," to the neglect of the “superstructure,” it was not because Marx and Engels did not know better; however, neither (to my knowledge) ever indicated that a specific analysis of character formation was necessary.

Be that as it may, in recent decades, subsequent Marxists in rising numbers have revived Marx's concern with alienation; and, not least because of the obvious concern of the capitalist class for the manipulation of character and consciousness, have seen the need to pay respectful attention to the earlier much-maligned Freud. Lichtman neatly summarizes the hard core of what can be learned from the combination of Marx and Freud:

From Freud we can derive an understanding of how the process [producing alienation and false consciousness] noted in Marx's account is reproduced internally in the psyche of the laborers, and from Marx's side we acquire illumination about the social circumstances around which the renunciation of instinctual desire is originally created.⁽²⁸⁾

Marx saw alienation as a human condition endemic to the species from its beginnings—caused initially by the battle to survive the harshness of nature, but exacerbated in the historic period (and especially in our era) by the alienating relationships of ownership and control in the process of production. Marx saw our “life activity” as being work, the means to survival, and the loss of control over the means of production as being loss of control over life itself. The result was people alienated not only from nature, as in the “beginning,” but from their fellow workers (with whom they are in job competition), from their work (and its products) and, finally with most importance, from their “species-being”—that is, from what it does and could mean to be a human being, creating and fulfilling human needs and possibilities in an endless flow.

But if the separation of the worker from control over the means of life is the cause of her/his alienated existence, the cure suggests itself: given the numbers of the workers, a clear and overwhelming social majority, their needs and their rationality will combine with the organizational and economic consequences of developing capitalism to produce a determined working class, able and inclined to bring harmony back into their lives. That this has not happened may be interpreted in many ways, one of which is to question the rationality of the working class. When Marx saw workers as being irrational it was because they were living in an irrational social system, within the framework of a mystifying ideology—from which, however, they could find escape.

Marx appears to have posited an analytical impasse: the rationality of the working class is its means of liberation, but the process of capitalist development is alienating, that is, dehumanizing, and it produces false consciousness and irrationality. Ollman focuses in on this point well, when he points out that:

It was only because Marx believed that workers wanted (or were on the verge of wanting) what they needed, and that they were conscious (or were on the verge of becoming so) of their real conditions and interests that he remained forever optimistic regarding a socialist revolution. For even if material conditions are exactly as Marx describes, there is no necessity for workers to respond as he says they will unless they bring to their situation such qualities as render this response likely. These are the qualities assembled by Thorstein Veblen as the “ability to calculate advantages,” and Marx believed the proletariat to possess this ability whatever their degree of alienation .…It is important to note that Marx never saw the destruction of human characteristics in the workers as complete but as almost complete… ⁽²⁹⁾

The working class in Britain and elsewhere in Marx's time and subsequently developed and applied class consciousness in some ways and in some degree. But did it develop the consciousness expected by Marx? If we accept Lukacs's understanding of class consciousness, the answer must be negative. After pointing to the conflict in “proletarian class consciousness” between “momentary interest” (as in trade union demands) and “ultimate goal,” Lukacs goes on to say,

The existence of this conflict enables us to perceive that class consciousness is identical with neither the psychological consciousness of individual members of the proletariat, nor with the (mass-psychological) consciousness of the proletariat as a whole; but it is, on the contrary, the sense, become conscious, of the historical role of the class. ⁽³⁰⁾(His emphasis.)

And, somewhat later:

…if the proletariat finds the economic inhumanity to which it is subjected easier to understand than the political, and the political easier than the cultural, then all these separations point to the extent of the still unconquered power of capitalist forms of life in the proletariat itself. ⁽³¹⁾

Saying which, Lukacs is anticipating Gramsci's concern with hegemony, and the need of the working class, if it is ever to effect a socialist revolution, to “impose its own ends and its own visions on society as a whole.” To do so, of course, would require having developed such ends and such a vision, to have thought such matters through and organized around them. It should go without saying that in both Britain and the U.S., despite the hell and high water of the 20th century, competitive capitalism, first, and chaotic capitalism later, managed to persist without ever having to face, let alone to defeat, an effectively developed working class movement equipped and powered by “class consciousness” of the sort posited by, among others, Lukacs, Gramsci, Reich, or…Marx. The breakdown of competitive capitalism did not usher in socialism; instead what arose from its ashes was monopoly capitalism—made possible in part by the deformed character and consciousness of the population, leading in our time to a still greater flattening (“one-dimensionality”) of selves mixed with a further smogging of consciousness. As Baran put it,

…people steeped in the culture of monopoly capitalism do not want what they need, and do not need what they want. ⁽³²⁾

Or, as Lichtman says, “people have come to want what is destructive of their nature.”  ⁽³³⁾

Ollman has located the fatal flaw in classic Marxism to be in its failure to anticipate the existence and persistence of personal (as distinct from social) irrationality. To account for it, he says, he:

would introduce into Marx's conceptual framework the idea of character structure, understood as the internalization of early behavior patterns, as organized habit. Such characterological hardening of the arteries derives whence character derives, but is a product apart, exercising a separate influence on how we will respond to future events and conditions .…[It] stands between conditions and response, between needs and wants, between objective interests and subjective interests and between activity and consciousness, something into and through which the one must be translated to become the other…, [as] both a product of alienation and…a contributing cause of alienation .…Workers must be viewed not only as prisoners of their conditions but as prisoners of themselves. ⁽³⁴⁾

As was observed earlier, although the bourgeois self of the competitive capitalist era was wholly developed and adopted only in the ranges of the middle class family, that aspect of it which strengthened the hand of authority in the family, the school, the factory, and in the larger society became part also of the working class experience. Veblen has captured the meaning of this better than any other, in his concept of  “emulation.”

Veblen saw “the underlying population” as seeking not to overthrow but to be like those above it in income, wealth, power, and not least of all in prestige and status. We need not accept the entirety of his analysis, going back into the period of savagery and beyond, to acknowledge that the bottom strata of the population may well have its emotions stirred by envy (if also mixed with hate) of the conditions of the upper strata so much that it finds neither the time nor the morale to think of or work toward a society in which such strata would cease to exist. ⁽³⁵⁾

The authority and prestige of the dominant groups in capitalist society appear to have produced more in the nature of emulative than revolutionary inclinations among the working population—as manifested increasingly in the 20th century by what Veblen called (in 1899) “conspicuous consumption.” The respect and fear for authority instilled in childhood has still another and, if anything, even more ominous consequence: patriotism, and the acceptance of war. Until Vietnam, at least, there was an almost universal unquestioning support for the welfare of the capitalist powers—despite what it meant for the mass of the population as regards their living standards, their political vitality (or its loss), and their own and loved ones' lives.

The German Social Democrats before World War I were then (unlike now) a socialist movement, and the largest in the world. Veblen's comments on them touch well on some of the meaning of both emulation and patriotism to that movement—and, by implication, to such movements in the other advanced capitalist countries. Writing in 1907, he observed:

In Germany, as elsewhere, the growth of the capitalistic system presently brought on trade-unionism; that is to say, it brought on an organized attempt on the part of the workmen to deal with the questions of capitalistic production and distribution by business methods, to settle the problems of working-class employment and livelihood by a system of non-political, businesslike bargains. But the great point of all socialist aspiration and endeavor is the abolition of all business and all bargaining. ⁽³⁶⁾

And on patriotism:

The socialist spokesmen…set out with a round opposition to any considerable military establishment…But with the passage of time and the habituation to warlike politics and military discipline, the infection of jingoism had gradually permeated the body of Social Democrats, until they have now reached such a pitch of enthusiastic loyalty as they would not patiently hear a truthful characterization of .…The relative importance of the national and the international ideas in German socialist professions has been reversed since the seventies .…The Social Democrats have come to be German patriots first and socialists second, which comes to saying that they are a political party working for the maintenance of the existing order, with modifications. ⁽³⁷⁾

By our day, it was not the socialism of the working class which came to be vitiated by its patriotism, but even its ability to function effectively as trade unions.

Much more would have to be said, and has been said by others, to provide a persuasive analysis as to why class consciousness did not develop as hoped for in the competitive capitalist era, and does not now; and a very great part of what remains to be said would be found not directly in the realms of character and consciousness but in the “objective” processes of capitalist development over the past century or so. Thus, and only by way of suggestion, the very problems (or contradictions) faced by capitalism have created not only challenges but opportunities, have lubricated the process of organizational and technological change (of which they have also been an outcome), including the changes associated with the major wars of the century—and capitalism, though often precariously, has been strengthened in the process, for a while. Thus, the Superstate quality of the United States since World War II may be seen as made possible by the disintegration of the older balance of power and the weakening of all but the U.S. by the attendant wars; and the existence and functioning of monopoly capitalism, of the multinational corporation, and a great deal associated with them, not least the heightened real incomes of the past thirty years, may be understood (in part) as depending upon the relatively supreme power of the U.S. in the capitalist global economy. Similarly, the threat posed by the strength and ideological challenge of the Soviet Union, of China, and of Cuba was an essential ingredient of the politically and economically indispensable Cold War—in turn a key ingredient of the successful emergence of monopoly capitalism. ⁽³⁸⁾

The era of monopoly capitalism has continued and deepened the processes of alienation, throughout all segments of the population and affecting all aspects of life. This system is still capitalist, but in many ways it is qualitatively different from its competitive capitalist predecessor, and able to be so in critical part because of its ability (and its need) to “deliver” quantitatively. Capitalism still requires, creates, and lives by its essential triad of exploitation, expansion, and oligarchic rule—if anything, it does so even more.

To the exploitation that takes place “at the point of production,” which occupied Marx, we must now add the exploitation and the oppression and the “mind management” that camouflages it and much more made possible and required by the large-scale units of business and by the massive state: we are squeezed on the job, and in the market, and by the taxes and expenditures of the state. All this occurs in an era of developing “consumerism,” an era in which the capitalist problem is not so much of developing a surplus as absorbing it; an era in which that absorption occurs through the increasingly unnecessary consumption of the masses of the rich counties (while vital needs there and especially elsewhere go unmet), the wasteful expenditures of corporations and of governments at all levels, with it all typified in the most dangerous and wasteful pattern of all, military expenditures (eleven trillion dollars by 1999—in 1992 dollars).

But for the processes of monopoly capitalism, as for all of the social processes, change is continuous, multi-faceted, and dialectical. For present purposes it will suffice to end, if inconclusively, by drawing attention to one such development which encourages hope.

I have pointed to the erosion of the patriarchal family, and therefore to all for which it stood, including its contribution to the uses and the strengthening of authority throughout the society. As the family erodes in its meaning and the self it created tends to vanish, the meaning of the family for the preservation of conservative institutions must dwindle. It has been argued that social movements of the past have been weakened, and deflected from pursuing their participants' real needs, by the characterological inclination to rebel against the primal father—and thus to reproduce rather than to revolutionize, to repeat in different form the content of old. ⁽³⁹⁾

To which may be added that it seems clear that the selves of the capitalist era have been created principally in the family circle; and as that circle loosens its hold, selves, if they are to have any durable character at all must be created by the individuals who will have them—in conjunction, cooperation, and even in solidarity with other such “developing adults.” Such selves need not be confined to this, that, or the other occupation, income level, color, sex, or class; nor have they been.

It is monopoly capitalism's deadly power and quality that it has the need and the ability to intrude into and exercise influence over every nook and cranny of our existence; in doing so it unintentionally makes it easier for us to see the unity in our existence. It is the system's own Achilles heel that its intended ability to manipulate consciousness and character has also facilitated to some unknown degree the development of a “radical social consciousness,” which not only cuts through all segments of the population, but which (and for the same reasons) seeks and begins to find the manner in which all aspects of social existence are but different facets of the same society, and to teach that if anything important is to be changed for the better, so must everything. Because the system uses the media so much, the media willy-nilly provide information that can be used; and because the system no longer thrives on abstinence and repression, but needs consumption and license, it unwittingly opens up a way to life formerly blocked.

And where there's life, there's hope.

References

1. P. Anderson, “Origins of the Present Crisis,” in P. Anderson and R. Blackburn, eds., Towards Socialism, Ithaca 1966.

2. __________, Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism, London 1974.

3. __________, Lineages of the Absolute State, London 1974.

4. S. Aronowitz, False Promises, New York 1973.

5. P. A. Baran, The Longer View, New York 1969.

6. P. Baran and P. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, New York 1966.

7. C. Bay, The Structure of Freedom, Stanford 1968.

8. C. Boggs, Gramsci's Marxism, London 1976.

9. R. Brady, Business as a System o f Power, New York 1943.

10. H. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, New York 1974.

11. G. D. H. Cole, A Short History o f the British Working Class Movement, London 1948.

12. G. Debord, Society o f the Spectacle, Detroit 1970.

13. D. Dowd, The Twisted Dream, Cambridge 1974.

14. __________, “Accumulation and Crisis in U.S. Capitalism,” Socialist Revolution, No. 24, June 1975, 5, 7-44.

15. __________, “Stagflation and the Political Economy of Decadent Monopoly Capitalism,” Monthly Review, October 1976, 28,14-29.

16. S. Freud, The Ego and the Id, New York 1960.

17. E. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, New York 1941.

18. __________, Man for Himself, Greenwich 1947.

19. __________, The Sane Society, Greenwich 1955.

20. R. A. Gordon, Business Leadership in the Large Corporation, Washington, D.C. 1945.

21. J. Henry, Culture Against Man, New York 1963.

22. C. Hill, Century of Revolution, 1603-1714, New York 1961.

23. __________, Reformation to Industrial Revolution, New York 1967.

24. Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith, eds., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, New York 1971.

25. S. Hollander, The Economics of Adam Smith, Toronto 1973.

26. R. Jacoby, Social Amnesia, Boston 1975.

27. H. J. Laski, The Rise of European Liberation, London 1936.

28. W. Lazonick, “The Subjugation of Labor to Capital: The Rise of Capitalist System,” The Review of Radical Political Economics, Spring 1976, 10, 1-31.

29. H. Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, New York 1971.

30. R. Lichtman, “Marx and Freud,” Socialist Revolution, No. 30, Oct-Dec 1976, No. 33, May-June 1977, No. 36, Nov-Dec 1977.

31. R. J. Lifton, The Life of the Self, New York 1976.

32. G. Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, Cambridge 1971.

33. H. M. Lynd, On Shame and the Search for Identity, New York 1958.

34. C. B. Macpherson, ,The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke, Oxford 1962.

35. H. Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, Boston 1964.

36. K. Marx, Capital, Vol. I., New York 1967.

37. G. Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, London 1955.

38. C. W. Mills, White Collar, New York 1951.

39. __________, The Power Elite, New York 1956.

40. J. U. Nef, “Prices and Industrial Capitalism in France and England, 1540-1640,” Economic History Review, VII, May 1937, 155-185.

41. B. Ollman, Alienation, Cambridge 1971.

42. , “The Marxism of Wilhelm Reich: The Social Function of Sexual Repression,” in D. Howard and K. E. Klare, eds., The Unknown Dimension, New York 1972.

43. K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Boston 1957.

44. D. M. Potter, People o f Plenty, Chicago 1954.

45. W. Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, New York 1970.

46. __________, “What is Class Consciousness?”, reprinted in Liberation, Oct. 1971.

47. D. Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, New Haven 1950.

48. R. Sennett and J. Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class, New York 1977.

49. P. Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness, Boston 1970.

50. M. Stein, et al., Identity and Anxiety, Glencoe 1960.

51. P. M. Sweezy, “Marx and the Proletariat,” in Monthly Review, December 1967.

52. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, New York 1954.

53. __________, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, New York 1960.

54. __________, A Discourse Upon Usury, London 1962.

55. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, New York 1966.

56. T. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, New York and London 1899.

57. __________, The Instinct of Workmanship, New York 1914.

58. __________, “The Socialist Economics of Karl Marx, II,” The Place of Science in Modern Civilization, New York 1919.

59. __________, “The Barbarian Status of Women,” in Essays in Our Changing Order, New York 1934.

60. I. Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, Vol. I, New York 1974.

61. R. Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950, New York 1959.

62. __________ , “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Culture Theory,” New Left Review, Nov.-Dec. 1973, 82, 3-16.

63. E. Zaretskv, Capitalism, The Family, and Personal Life, New York 1967. Appeared first in essay form in Socialist Revolution, Nos. 13, 14 and 15, 1973.

Notes

1. R. Williams, [61], approaches the “wide and general movement in thought and feeling which is the focus of his book in ways compatible with, though very different from what follows here. Return

2.  The phrase is Wilhelm Reich's, from his The Sexual Revolution,  New York 1970, p. 74, as quoted by R. Lichtman in the first of his illuminating series of essays, [30]. Lichtman is quoted from several times throughout this paper, but the dependence upon his essays goes well beyond that explicitly noted. Return

3.  From the opening words in Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, available in many and varied editions. Return

4.  See the probing essay of R. Williams, [62].Return

5.  In his essay “Marxism and Psychoanalysis,” brought together with many others in P.A. Baran [ 5: p. 101] ; published earlier in Monthly Review, October 1959. Return

6.  Marx developed these ideas first in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and with Engels in The Holy Family and The German ideology (1845-46), all of which are easily available in many editions; but his notions of needs and possibilities and alienation permeate the entirety of his work, to one degree or another. If nowhere in those works may be found an interpretation exactly like mine, nonetheless, it was Marx who made the interpretation possible. Return

7.  T. Veblen, [57]. Return

8.  R. Lichtman, [30; p. 14]. Return

9.  Except in terms of its historical origins (as distinct from its  psychological consequences). Veblen saw women as  the first form of property, the trophies of military conquest, enslaved, badges of prowess, etc., with a status determined by  the meniality and enforced nature of their work. See, e.g., [ 59]. Return

10.  The analytical insistence on “globality” and the use of  “core” and related terminology has recently come to be associated with the work in progress of 1. Wallerstein, [60],  whose first of a planned four volumes is most pertinent to my argument. P. Anderson's two volumes, [2] [3] are of equally great importance, their stress being not on the economic but on the socio-political background of capitalism. Return

11.  See, for example, C. W. Mills, [39] or R. A. Gordon, [20]. Return

12.  See J. Net, [40], for the technological developments. For the sweep of developments in trade, industry, government and the rest, the best reference work is to be found in the multivolumed Cambridge Economic History of Europe, which goes back to ancient times and up through the industrial capitalist period, and which has a definitive bibliography.Return

13.  See G. Mattingly, [37]. Return

14.  R. Tawney, [ 52; p. 35] . Return

15.  R. Tawney, in his introduction to Thomas Wilson, [54; p. 170]. Return

16.  H. Laski, [27; p. 28]. Return

17.  K. Marx, [36; p. 716]. Return

18.  Ibid., pp. 732-33. Return

19.  R. Tawney, [ 53; p. 403 ] . Return

20.  K. Polany, [43]. Return

21.  For astute commentaries on these seminal figures and their time, see C. B. Macpherson, [34] and S. Hollander, [25]. Return

22.  P. Sweezy, [51; pp. 29-30]. Return

23.  W. Lazonick, [28; p. 10]. In this valuable essay, sparked evidently by its author's belief that Marx neglected “the role of cultural and political development in reinforcing and reproducing” the domination of labor by capital, Lazonick makes many useful observations including some about the persistence of the patriarchal family, which I have adapted here -but his own conception of culture and of consciousness seems to me to be much too narrow. Return

24.  B. Ollman. [41; p. 92]. Return

25.  G. D. H. Cole, [11; pp. 123-24]. Return

26.  See P. Anderson, [1], for these comments and a penetrating analysis of the evolution and nature of class structure in Great Britain. Return

27. The essay of B. Ollman, [42], in addition to being valuable in its own right, provides in passing what is in effect an annotated bibliography of Reich's most relevant writings. See especially, Reich's famous essay, [46], and his book, [45]. For Lukacs, see [32]. The most pertinent selections from Gramsci's works are to be found in [24]. The application of Gramsci's ideas to the contemporary U.S. scene is well-developed in C. Boggs, [8]. Return

28.  R. Lichtman, [30; p. 37]. Return

29. B. Ollman, [41; pp. 245-46]. Return

30.  30. G. Lukacs, [32; p. 73]. Return

31.  Ibid., pp. 76-77. Return

32.  Quoted by Lichtman, op. cit., p. 7, from an article by Baran in Monthly Review, October 1959. Return

33.  Ibid., p. 8. Return

34.  B. Ollman, [ 41; pp. 24 8-49 ]. Return

35.  Veblen's notion of emulation is found principally in and may be thought of as constituting the analytical spine of The Theory of the Leisure Class. Return

36.  From the essay contained in Veblen, [58; p. 449]. Return

37.  Ibid., pp. 453-54. Return

38.  The evolution, nature, and current problems and processes of monopoly capitalism are treated at least generally in two essays by Dowd, [14] and [15]. There, and throughout Chapters Two through Eight of Dowd, [13], these matters are developed and the appropriate literature indicated. Return

39.  This point was emphasized for me in private correspondence from Fred Block who, along with Lam Hirschhorn, is doing promising work along lines I seek also to pursue. I have learned from their (to my knowledge) unpublished essay. “New Productive Forces and the Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism,” In that essay, the notion of  “developmental adulthood” appears and I have used it. Return

May 16, 2000