notes on class, struggle and class struggle (2005)

The working class is not weak because it is divided –
it is divided because it is weak

Yet we reject the dismissal of the continued central importance of class struggle in social change. This dismissal is now a commonplace amongst mainstream media commentators – expressing an often unconscious fear that the past may come back to haunt them in the form of a sustained resurgence of struggle that threatens this society. In Britain the Winter of Discontent is most often the spectre/bogeyman referred to. But this rejection is also made by:

1) older, often former, (ultra) leftists who, once having put “the proletariat”/“working class” on a pedestal as the great saviours of society, in their disillusionment now fear that their god has failed and turn against it, with blame and condemnation (conveniently excusing and excluding themselves from any responsibility or blame).

2) those younger activists who have no experience or memory of a time when the class struggle was of central importance, an unresolved social question daily contested, and was recognised as such by all sides involved.

3) those who want to flatten out categories of class relations to reduce the world to a picture of a tiny group of nasty capitalist exploiters opposed by the rest of humanity. This is usually a response by professionals, particularly lefty/ultra-lefty academics, who, having faced pressures from bosses for increased productivity, now want to be counted as exploited workers like the rest. But this deliberately sidesteps the question of who and what the middle class and its professions now is, what their relationship to other classes is, how its function for Capital has been changed. It ignores the hierarchy in the division of labour, simplifying everything into an equality of alienation. It is conveniently blind to the fact that some ‘intellectual labour’ is certainly more proletarianised, and far less ideological, than others (e.g. teaching a foreign language, which in some parts of the world is extremely badly paid), whereas much of it is just plain middle class – i.e. it is work that clearly reproduces the hierarchical division of labour both in the nature of the authority roles and the ideology developed. The role of the intellectual section of the middle class is to develop ideologies that implicitly or explicitly justify their own definitions of themselves as having a consciousness of being objective and detached – ‘scientific’ rather than an unenlightened self-interested career move. If such people are to contribute to a radical opposition to this society they are going to have to take the risk of subverting these roles and ideologies, along with the rest of us – though it’ll probably take us who are lower in the hierarchy to first of all challenge the absurdity of their position.**

But while we reject these views (and comment on them here and there in some of the articles on our site) we do see the need for a re-assessment of class and struggle, its changing forms and content. We’d have to be blind not to be aware that the working class is not exactly the same as the one that fought its past struggles, and that its conditions of existence have in many ways been changed by the defeat of those struggles. We do not want to go into crude sociological definitions here, but it will be clear in some of our writings that we do have opinions as to who are and aren’t class friends and enemies; old class boundaries have both streched and shrunk. But there is still a working class, a middle class and a ruling class. The ‘petit-bourgeois’ small trader still exists alongside the ‘self-employed’ (at least in tax category) proletarian. There are perhaps more grey areas now; for example, some professions have had their work conditions more proletarianised while other aspects of their social status and function still keep them in a middle class role.

We also recognise that there are many people, as individuals and communities, from diverse backgrounds and situations, who are heartily sick of this society. Obviously a minority of the relatively privileged also find this society unbearable for reasons of non-economic poverty, such as the misery and boredom of their social relations. Equally a minority of the most exploited will actively defend this society in the most divisive manner – as scabs, fascists, racists etc.

The working class can only end this society by abolishing itself as a class – and thereby destroying the social relations that maintain a class society. So obviously putting “the proletariat” on a pedestal as our heroic vanguard and fetishising/glorifying all things working class is a pointless stupidity; like a slave hugging his chains. And it’s a way of seeing “the proletariat” as out there, separate, something we have to intervene in. We’ll leave that to the populists (if there’s any left). Strengths and weaknesses must be reassessed – our own and that of the history of struggle. In not struggling to find practical experiments and risks against the unresolved contradictions that keep us divided from our common best interests, we participate in and reinforce our own weakness and division:
“…As has often been pointed out, the working class is not weak because it is divided; on the contrary, it is divided because it is weak. And the reason why the proletariat ought to seek new ways is that the enemy has strength of such a kind that the old methods are ineffectual. The working class will not secure these ways by magic, but through a great effort, deep reflection, through the clash of divergent opinions and the conflict of impassioned ideas. It is incumbent upon it to find its own way, and precisely therein is the raison d’etre of the internal differences and conflicts. It is forced to renounce outmoded ideas and old chimeras, and it is indeed the difficulty of this task that engenders such big divisions.”– Anton Pannekoek.

We also believe that most of the new definitions of who or what is the new “revolutionary subject” are unconvincing – whether they be the new breed of anti-globalisation/anti- capitalist political protesters/campaigners or trendy buzzwords such as the “precariat”. Yet they do express partial truths about aspects of real opposition and changing conditions for the exploited. The new wave of anti-capitalist activists have varying degrees of understanding of what capitalism really is and how it can be abolished – many see capitalism as only an external force, merely existing as some bad institutions in need of reform, not seeing it as a social relation we all continue to reproduce in our daily activity. But despite these limitations, the ‘anti-capitalists’ have at least partially recalled to public awareness the question of a different kind of society. Unlike the traditional left – who merely want to reform the administration of existing society via the progressive conquest of various existing institutions – the less ideological and programmatic of the ‘anti-capitalists’ have a more vague, less precise but also less dogmatic, more open-ended approach to the possibilities of radical social change. (e.g. in the confused but nevertheless partly radical slogan “The world is not for sale”, which in other countries is usually “The world is not a commodity”, or in the simple openness of some of their gatherings). At the same time its sad weakness is that it is too open – many of them tolerate liberal journalists like George Monbiot (an ideological authority with a reformist eco-political agenda who has a wide influence across this spectrum of politics). This toleration of professional middle class experts by those lower in the ‘anti-capitalist’ hierarchy is supported by an ideology that denies the fundamental question of class, the fundamental question of hierarchy.    It is tempting to see the “precariat” as the latest social subject thought up by autonomist marxist ideologues on a particularly rainy day at university, whilst pondering on why all their previous announced subjects (the ‘mass worker’, ‘socialised worker’) failed them in their historic destiny (typically, these paid ‘thinkers’ pretend they have something new to say merely by inventing a new word). It is true that most proletarians (and other types of worker) have been forced into more precarious conditions of existence. But this does not merit the implied renaming of a class, as if we were once the ‘securiat’. Trendy formulations and their formulators come and go – but proletarians we remain, some massively more precarious than others. How do the ‘common interests’ of a casualised university cleaner and a ‘marxist’ Professor – who unrealistically claims him/herself part of the same precariat/proletariat – compare with the massive differences in their status, income, housing, job security, pension etc? (It’s also worth noting that – whether for reasons of prejudice, anti-intellectualism or whatever – such often clumsily translated words rarely become naturalised in common English – for example, after over 150 years of socialist usage ‘proletariat’ is still a fairly exotic, specialist term.)

We cannot convincingly disprove the claim that the working class may have missed the boat on its revolutionary potential, that it may have become a weakened organism without sufficient vitality to make that great leap towards creating a new world (some suggest it never possessed this potential – even harder to prove). Immediate appearances would certainly suggest this – but one of the better insights of radical theory is its historical perspective which gives the ability to see beyond the immediate surface of things and grasp their larger historical significance. Even under the most totalitarian of regimes resistance and revolt occur. And if we,the proles, the producers and consumers convincing ourselves we’re not at the bottom of the pile, are no longer the crucial social force of change – then we see no other likely candidates in sight (Classless eco-warrior angels floating above real social relations? Marxist extra-terrestials?………………….??? – fill the gap).

Some say that ‘workers’ are merely a category – as are ‘women’. For example, the Bhopal declaration of the World Social Forum says that the WSF “must make space…for workers, peasants, indigenous peoples… women…minorities, immigrants…” etc.etc. This kind of reified reduction of proletarians to a constituency is clearly an insult to every ‘category’ of proletarian. Clearly it’s an insult to women and the working class, and especially working class women, an insult to their particular differences, as well as what is common, in their experience of alienation. The struggle of women is inseparable from the class struggle: the struggle of the women in mining areas during the ’84-5 miners strike is just one obvious example of how self-defeating it is to separate the struggle against the division of labour into ‘feminism’ v. ‘class struggle’. Though it’s often been pointed out that the struggle against the oppression of women is as much against the women who have taken on the modern rôle of class oppressor as against the old mainly male oppressors, it’s not so often pointed out that this struggle was and is also dependent on a struggle against the masculine/feminine division of labour amongst the proletariat itself, a division which in periods of intense struggle clearly breaks down and reveals the interconnectedness of all forms of hierarchical power and conditioning. And if there is to be a clear global community of struggle it is primarily on the basis of class identity, not gender (or any other) identity, although challenging the particular experience of alienation that is associated with some identitiy or other is often the starting point for recognising a general class identity (e.g. gays recognising that dominant morality, and its hierarchical mode of judging behaviour, has its base in the private property of sexual relations, which is one of the means of repressing individuality in this society). However, compartmentalisation of proletarians into a narrow identity is often pushed quite consciously by sections of capital – e.g. the Ford Foundation – within the World Social Forum and the NGOs, for example, to stop the spread of any possible class identity. This is not the same as subsuming the question of the separation between men and women, for example, into the class struggle but is, on the contrary, a way of understanding this separation also in class terms; in terms of the division of labour and the way this hierarchy has changed with the development of feminised aspects of capitalism.

If a distinction is sometimes made between proletariat and working class, it is so as to distinguish different aspects of the same class at different times in its history; the proletariat being the class for itself , consciously and actively challenging its allotted role in bourgeois society, while the working class simply exists passively as a functioning component of class society. Of course in practice this is a somewhat artificial division, the two roles are necessarily intermingled and subversion springs from this contradiction being played out in people’s real lives; but at any one time, and sometimes for long periods (as at present), one tendency tends to dominate.