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Hi A rudimentary moral sense has been hard wired into humanity by the evolutionary process. This moral sense is a legacy from our Stone Age ancestors. But because of its rudimentary nature it is not sufficiently developed to cope adequately with modern civilisation. Consequently this modern morality has developed as a result of socio-historic developments. This helps explain how it complements the ethics of the modern working class. Stone Age people would have existed in small bands in which there was an absence of stratification and hierarchy. Because of each band’s communal character this morality would have tended to be communal in character as opposed to being Hobbesian. The Stone Age “individual” lived within a totality and was largely defined by that totality or community. The fundamental source of communist ethics under capitalism is the valorisation process. The class struggle is lodged within this process. The class struggle, together with its development, is the form by which proletarian consciousness emerges. The valorisation processes forces the working class to labour under alienated conditions. Workers, then, are forced to work in a way that is oppressive. Conditions of work subjectively entail pain and suffering for the worker. These alienating conditions within the production process drive the working class into class struggle. These subjective conditions are the source of proletarian ethics and the class struggle itself. Consequently working class ethics is born within the heart of the exploitation of labour power. Class struggle is a form of collective struggle. Within the struggle itself ethics is transformed from its bourgeois to its communist form. This is achieved through the communal interaction and relations of solidarity that build up within the struggle of the producers. Through the struggle against alienation and exploitation the system that appeared as unchangeably objective is increasingly experienced as the creation of the labouring activity of the working class. The workers increasingly realise that since they, in a sense, created the reified social system it can now be freed from its estranged character. Under these conditions the ethics of the working class develops. These struggles expose the limitations on freedom in capitalist society while simultaneously engendering class solidarity that point beyond the limits of liberal conceptions of morality.This experience furthers class solidarity and proletarian ethics. The eventual overthrow of the system involves the final transformation of proletarian ethics. We see then that ethics bears a directly political character. Ethics is concerned with the nature of political community and its economic foundation. Ethics and politics, a la Aristotle, are directly tied together. It is clear, then, that working class ethics and the communist consciousness linked to it is not a mere matter of mechanically instilling communist ethics into the working class from the outside as Lenin effectively claimed. It is collective action grounded in the labour process that generates the conditions for the emergence of proletarian ethics. The labour process is the dialectical dynamic that drives ethics. One cannot exist without the other. Struggle generates ethics. Within the class struggle the experience of the working class changes. This class experience inspires and stimulates discussion and the exchange of opinions. It is a practical melting pot by which workers generate their communist intellectualisation. The process stimulates the emergence of a variety of revolutionary organisational expressions of the class struggle. During the conflict the capitalist class increasingly reveals its class opposition to the proletariat. This growing experience forms part of the growing class awakening of workers. The “spontaneity” of the working class is inseparably connected with class consciousness. Within this process revolutionary communist parties emerge. The struggle can take off in a fragmented even opportunist way. Through experience together with the way in which events unfold the struggle can become more unified and class conscious. However general economic and political conditions are a factor in the process. The outbreak of economic crisis can significantly influence the character of the process. This can impact on conditions in such a way as to lead to communist consciousness. Since the 1905 Russian Revolution workers’ councils emerged spontaneously in periods of heightened class struggle. Workers’ councils are the organizational form by which the working class expresses itself as a unified revolutionary class. Bourgeois parliaments atomise the working class a la Hobbes. The institutions of bourgeois democracy relate to workers as abstractions.The spontaneous institutions of workers’ struggle provide a potential ethical basis from which to criticise and abolish the alienation of capitalist society. Thus, while class consciousness is, in a sense, the ‘ethics’ of the proletariat which is concretely expressed through “the party”, this ethical standpoint is itself rooted in “the spontaneous” institutions of workers’ struggle. Popular armed militias are established to defend and advance the revolution. A network of workers’ committees are set up to organise and protect the revolution at the micro level. All of these organized forms constitute an inseparable network of the class struggle. The working class through its class dynamic shifts from being the prisoner of bourgeois ethics to the exponent and creator of proletarian ethics. This class ethics has a universal character in that through seeking “happiness” as the supreme good (communism) it promotes the interests of all humanity. Communist ethics is the only ethics that successfully reconciles the “is” of the present society (capitalism) with the “ought” of the future society (communism or the good society). Bourgeois ethics cannot make this reconciliation. This is why bourgeois ethics generally creates fantasy as opposed to facticity. In this way it promotes the perpetuation of capitalism including its state. Bourgeois ethics accept the prevalent viewpoint that social reification is natural and thereby cannot be essentially changed. During class struggle the changing experience of the working class reveal that capitalism is not a nature-like objectivity. It is its discovery that it is its labouring activity that creates this objectivity in its present form and that only the working class can free it from this reified state. Class struggle is an ethics that combines both reason and desire. It is an ethics that entails the full realisation of both the individual and all humanity. Communism is the supreme good creating the “happy” society. Proletarian ethics is closer to Aristotelian ethics than it is to more modern ethics. Kantian ethics sought to create an abstract moral community through the categorical imperative. It is a morality lacking content. This is because for its bourgeoisie there is an irreconcilable contradiction between “is” and “ought.” Consequently the “ought” is only realisable in abstract reason represented by the categorical imperative. The “ought” cannot be realized socio-historically. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
