DOCSLIB.ORG

Class Struggle and the Proletariat

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Class Struggle and the Proletariat chapter 12 Class Struggle and the Proletariat As mentioned in the previous chapter, class struggle is the material form of class consciousness under given material conditions and their contradictions. Class struggle occurs against the capitalist class relation which operates at dif- ferent levels: a more fundamental level, and a level at which effects of the op- eration of the logic of the class relation is manifested and produces effects in the form of low wages, unemployment, etc. The struggle against the latter, the symptoms of the operation of the class relation, is the trade union struggle, which is mistakenly often equated with class struggle as such. Class struggle, class struggle proper, is the struggle against the very relation itself. It is the struggle to abolish the class relation and to construct a new society that pre- serves the positive features of the current society but goes qualitatively beyond it. Class struggle proper is the struggle that may build on, but must go beyond, the trade union form of the struggle and its aims. Many of the conditions that further and hinder trade union struggle that were discussed in the previous chapter apply, more or less, to class struggle proper as well. Class struggle is rooted in the fundamental contradiction in class relations: labourers produce wealth together in a collective process but it is appropriated by a tiny elite, resulting in deprivation and misery for workers. According to Marx and Engels, ‘the class struggle …[is] the immediate driving force of his- tory’; it is ‘the great lever of the modern social revolution’. As theoreticians of the working class seeking to assist it in its struggle, they refused to work with anyone who did not endorse this view.1 The importance of class struggle to Marxist theory can be gauged from the fact that according to Marx and Engels: all struggles within the state, the struggle between democratic, aristo- cratic and monarchy, the struggle for the franchise etc., etc. are merely the illusory forms… in which the real struggles of the different classes are fought out among one another. marx and ENGELS, 1978: 54 1 ‘For nearly 40 years we have raised to prominence the idea of the class struggle as the imme- diate driving force of history, and particularly the class struggle between bourgeois and the proletariat as the great lever of the modern social revolution; hence, we can hardly go along with people who want to strike this class struggle from the movement. At the founding of the International, we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself’ (Marx and Engels, 1879; para 6). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi �0.��63/9789004337473_0�3 <UN> 510 chapter 12 ‘Capitalism could have been declared – and with full justice – to be “histori- cally obsolete” many decades ago’, and class consciousness may have identified capitalism as the problem to be transcended, ‘but that does not at all remove the need for a very long and very persistent struggle on the basis of capital- ism’ (Lenin, 1968: 41). The question is this: what processes promote and hinder class struggle, the struggle to abolish capitalist class relation, and not merely to receive trade unionist concessions? This is an important question in the cur- rent world conjuncture where: there is a deep contradiction between objec- tive conditions for transcendence of capitalism and for revolution on the one hand, and on the other, the preparedness of the subjective forces necessary for class struggle against capitalism. In the current conjuncture, there is wide- spread skepticism about possibilities for revolution and about the role of the working class in it. It is also worth asking whether what is usually called class struggle, i.e. trade union struggle, has itself been a barrier to the struggle for the transcendence of capitalism? This chapter is a continuation of the previous chapter, which focused on the trade unionist form of class struggle, or class struggle in its more or less spontaneous form. It begins, in Section 1, with a Marxist assessment of the idea of trade unionist or spontaneous struggle. The remainder of the chapter seeks to articulate a Marxist approach to working class struggle. Section 2 deals with the idea that trade union struggle is a subordinate part of class struggle. Sec- tion 3 deals with this question: what makes revolution – which is the highest form of struggle – necessary and possible? Section 4 examines the question of the revolutionary agent: why the petty bourgeoisie is, and is not, consistently revolutionary against capitalist class relation, and why the proletariat is the only consistently revolutionary agent, and why it is the only class which can lead all exploited and oppressed groups against the capitalist class system. Sec- tion 5 talks about the political hegemony of the proletariat as an outcome of a successful revolution. The final section summarizes the discussion presented in this and the previous chapter. 1 A Marxist Critique of Spontaneous Trade Unionist Struggle Trade unions qua trade unions are about helping workers sell their wares on best possible terms to capitalists as capitalists. Ultimately, trade unions qua trade unions can hardly do anything to undermine the ability of the employers to do good business, because without a good business, higher wages will not be possible in any long-term manner at a large enough scale (e.g. national scale). So the fundamental aim of trade unions as institutions for getting concessions <UN>.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Dictatorship of the Proletariat’
    Revolution and the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ Vanessa Walilko DePaul University March 2004 V.I. Lenin has been accused of being “power-crazed” and “a fanatic believer in a Communist utopia” (Getzler: 464).1 To others, Lenin is considered to be the “greatest thinker to have been produced by the revolutionary working class movement since Marx” (Lukacs: 10). By still others, he is considered a “cynical authoritarian” or a “revolutionary idealist”2 (Rereading: 19). It has also been proposed that Lenin “had a compulsive need to dominate” and that he “was indeed a revolutionary fanatic” (ibid: xvii). Yet Lenin identified one reason for his writings: to clear up those aspects of Marx’s and Engels’ theories which had been “ignored and distorted3 by the opportunists” (State and Revolution: 384, Rereading: 5).4 Despite the fact that Marx and Lenin agreed on many points regarding revolution and the role the proletariat would play after they had secured power for themselves, many of Lenin’s ideas are at the same time quite distinct from the theories that Marx put down in The Communist Manifesto and The Class Struggles in France 1848-1850. This paper will address their similarities and differences in views regarding the necessity of the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx understood that the material conditions of life, particularly the political economy determined human consciousness (Theory and Revolution: 34). Marx believed that history was driven by the class struggle.5 This class antagonism eventually evolved into an open fight which “either ended in a large revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes” (Manifesto: 1).6 The revolution,7 therefore, was the catalyst for radical social change.
    [Show full text]
  • Slavery, Capitalism, and the “Proletariat”
    1 1 The Slave-Machine: Slavery, Capital- ism, and the “Proletariat” in The Black Jacobins and Capital Nick Nesbitt This essay argues that C. L. R. James’s Marxist humanism is inherently inade- quate for describing the distinction and transition between slavery and capitalism. To do so, the essay interrogates James’s famous claim in The Black Jacobins (1938) that the slaves of St. Domingue were “closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time,” by comparing James’s understand- ing of the concept of proletariat—there and in World Revolution (1937)—with Marx’s various developments of the concept across the three volumes of Capital. This analysis distinguishes James’s political and historicist deployment of the term from Marx’s analytical usage of the notion in his categorial critique of capitalism.In contrast with James’s linear, Marxist-humanist understanding of the passage from slavery to capitalism, Marx himself demarcates a well-defined delineation between these two basic categories, understood in Capital as analytically (as opposed to historically) distinct modes of production.The essay thus concludes by analyzing Marx’s conceptual differentiation of slavery and industrial capitalism in Capital, drawing on Etienne Balibar’s analysis of the concepts of mode of production and transition in Reading Capital (1965). The slaves worked on the land, and, like revolutionary peasants everywhere, they aimed at the extermination of their oppressors. But working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar-factories which covered the North Plain, they were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time, and the rising was, therefore, a thoroughly prepared and organized mass movement.
    [Show full text]
  • The Dangerous Class: the Concept of the Lumpenproletariat
    Review The dangerous class: The concept of the lumpenproletariat Clyde W. Barrow, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2020, xii+196pp., ISBN: 978-0472132249 Contemporary Political Theory (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-021-00487-9 An oft-cited description of the lumpenproletariat comes from Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The Parisian lumpenproletariat that Louis Bonaparte recruited during the French class struggles of 1848–1851 in order to defeat the proletariat and ultimately to seize state power consisted of the following: Alongside decayed roue´s with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, ma- quereaus, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars – in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohe`me (1963: 75). As self-interested hustlers whose services are for sale to the highest bidder, the lumpenproletariat – a term Marx and Engels created – is typically co-opted, as Bonaparte demonstrates, by reactionary movements. However, Marx’s taxonomy indicates the difficulty of locating a synthesized and explanatory definition for a term presented here as an ‘indefinite’ alterity with no clear framework of composition. The term has seemed, to some commentators, incoherent or reflective of scorn toward the disreputable or poor (Bussard, 1987; Draper, 1972; Hardt and Negri, 2004). Others – typically literary and cultural critics (Stallybrass, 1990; Mills, 2017) – have approached it as the discursive trace of a complex social scene that escapes full schematization by class relations.
    [Show full text]
  • Class Structure and Political Ideology
    CLASS STRUCTURE AND POLITICAL IDEOLOGY Val Burris Marxist theorists have devoted much eVort recently to the clari cation of the concept of class and the elaboration of alternative models of class structure. The main focus of this theorizing has been the class position of salaried intermediaries and their role in the class struggle. With a few exceptions, most Marxists today recognize the existence in advanced capitalist society of a signi cant group of people who cannot be included in the working class, even though they work for a salary or wage. Various names have been applied, to this group—“new middle class,” “new petty bourgeoisie,” or “professional-managerial class”—and com- peting theories have been advanced to explain the nature and signi cance of these positions within the class structure. Disagreements over how to conceptualize intermediate class positions have prompted extensive debates over the basic principles of Marxist class analysis and the application of those principles to modern capitalist society. Three issues have been central to this debate. First is the de nitional question of specifying the boundaries of classes—especially the bound- ary which separates intermediate class positions from the working class. Second is the conceptual issue of clarifying the nature and identity of these intermediate class positions. Do they qualify as a “class” in the full sense of the term? lf so, do they constitute a new class within advanced capitalism or the evolution of some earlier intermediate class? Third is the political question of predicting the alignment of this group in the struggle between capital and labor.
    [Show full text]
  • Petty Bourgeoisie’
    Comments on the Term ‘Petty Bourgeoisie’ (S.H. — 4/28/19) Introduction First, I apologize for the length of this essay; as I got into the issue I kept thinking of additional aspects and related topics that should be mentioned. (Of course there are no doubt many more aspects not mentioned here!) And of necessity a discussion about how the petty bourgeoisie is defined must also discuss just how the proletariat and the bourgeoisie should be defined. These are not totally separate issues. Second, in this discussion I am not going to make any distinction between the various English and French spellings: I am taking the most common English term, ‘petty bourgeoisie’ to be the same thing as the ‘petit bourgeoisie’ and the ‘petite bourgeoisie’. Third, it is certainly true that the term ‘petty bourgeoisie’ is used in different ways by different people; i.e., it means different things to different people. Although some other conceptions will be mentioned, I am not setting out to catalog all the many different conceptions and to treat them all with equal validity, as a general lexicographical study would do in creating entries in a standard (bourgeois!) general-purpose dictionary. Instead, I am setting out to say 1) how I think the term has been used within Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theory, and 2) how I think it should be used within that theory in the U.S. today. In other words, I am setting out to define a technical term within MLM theory, but to also talk about a number of additional issues that come up in this regard.
    [Show full text]
  • Keywords—Marxism 101 Session 1 Bourgeoisie
    Keywords—Marxism 101 Session 1 Bourgeoisie: the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labour. Capital: an asset (including money) owned by an individual as wealth used to realize a fnancial proft, and to create additional wealth. Capital exists within the process of economic exchange and grows out of the process of circulation. Capital is the basis of the economic system of capitalism. Capitalism: a mode of production in which capital in its various forms is the principal means of production. Capital can take the form of money or credit for the purchase of labour power and materials of production; of physical machinery; or of stocks of fnished goods or work in progress. Whatever the form, it is the private ownership of capital in the hands of the class of capitalists to the exclusion of the mass of the population. Class: social stratifcation defned by a person's relationship to the means of production. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Pyramid_of_Capitalist_System.png Class struggle: an antagonism that exists within a society, catalyzed by competing socioeconomic interests and central to revolutionary change. Communism: 1) a political movement of the working class in capitalist society, committed to the abolition of capitalism 2) a form of society which the working class, through its struggle, would bring into existence through abolition of classes and of the capitalist division of labor. Dictatorship of the Proletariat: the idea that the proletariat (the working class) has control over political power in the process of changing the ownership of the means of production from private to collective ownership as part of a socialist transition to communism.
    [Show full text]
  • Critical Realist Arguments in Marx's Capital
    Critical Realist Arguments in Marx’s Capital Hans G. Ehrbar Published 2002 Contents Note iii 3 Critical Realist Arguments in Marx’s Capital 1 3.1 From Hegel to Bhaskar ............................ 1 3.2 Marx’s opening moves ............................ 4 3.3 Surface and core of the economy ....................... 6 3.4 From surface to core ............................. 13 3.5 The double character of labour ........................ 14 3.6 From core to surface ............................. 16 3.7 The fetish-like character of commodities ................... 19 i Contents 3.8 The exchange process ............................. 22 3.9 The curse of money .............................. 24 3.10 Does critical realism make a difference? ................... 28 ii Note This essay was published as chapter 3 in [BFR02]. This collection was published by Routledge; c 2002 selection and editorial matter, An- drew Brown, Steve Fleetwood and John Michael Roberts; individual chapters, the contribu- tors. The print edition of the book says: All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now knows or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. ISBN 0-415-25012-9 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-25013-7 (pbk) iii Note iv 3 Critical Realist Arguments in Marx’s Capital 3.1 From Hegel to Bhaskar <43> In Capital, Marx uses Hegelian concepts and terminology extensively. For instance, shortly after the beginning of the first chapter, Marx concludes that the exchange value of commodities must be the ‘form of appearance’ of some ‘substance’, called ‘value’, which is different from exchange value itself.
    [Show full text]
  • The Political and Social Thought of Lewis Corey
    70-13,988 BROWN, David Evan, 19 33- THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL THOUGHT OF LEWIS COREY. The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1969 Political Science, general University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED THE POLITICAL AND SOCIAL THOUGHT OF LEWIS COREY DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By David Evan Brown, B.A, ******* The Ohio State University 1969 Approved by Adviser Department of Political Science PREFACE On December 2 3 , 1952, Lewis Corey was served with a warrant for his arrest by officers of the U, S, Department of Justice. He was, so the warrant read, subject to deportation under the "Act of October 16 , 1 9 1 8 , as amended, for the reason that you have been prior to entry a member of the following class: an alien who is a member of an organi­ zation which was the direct predecessor of the Communist Party of the United States, to wit The Communist Party of America."^ A hearing, originally arranged for April 7» 1953» but delayed until July 27 because of Corey's poor health, was held; but a ruling was not handed down at that time. The Special Inquiry Officer in charge of the case adjourned the hearing pending the receipt of a full report of Corey's activities o during the previous ten years. [The testimony during the hearing had focused primarily on Corey's early writings and political activities.] The hearing was not reconvened, and the question of the defendant's guilt or innocence, as charged, was never formally settled.
    [Show full text]
  • FRANTZ FANON and the "LUMPENPROLETARIAT" Peter
    FRANTZ FANON AND THE "LUMPENPROLETARIAT" Peter Worsley IN 1960, I attended the All-African People's Congress in Accra, Ghana. The proceedings consisted mainly of speeches by leaders of African nationalism from all over the continent, few of whom said anything notable. When, therefore, the representative of the Algerian Revolutionary Provisional Government, their Ambassador to Ghana, stood up to speak for his country, I prepared myself for an address by a diplomat-not usually an experience to set the pulses racing. Instead, I found myself electrified by a contribution that was remarkable not only for its analytical power, but delivered, too, with a passion and brilliance that is all too rare. I discovered that the Ambassador was a man named Frantz Fanon. During his talk, at one point, he almost appeared to break down. I asked him afterwards what had happened. He replied that he had suddenly felt emotionally overcome at the thought that he had to stand there, before the assembled representatives of African nationalist movements, to try and persuade them that the Algerian cause was important, at a time when men were dying and being tortured in his own country for a cause whose justice ought to command automatic support from rational and progressive human beings. I think this incident reflects one special quality that is characteristic of Fanon's writing also : its passion. It is also ruthlessly honest and highly intellectual, if not always worked-through. It is this special blend of intellect and passion that stamps Fanon's work as the pro- duct of a unique and powerful mind.
    [Show full text]
  • 1 Modes of Production in a Materialist Conception of History 2.1. The
    Modes of Production in a Materialist Conception of History …the extremely dubious speculative juggling, with the concepts and terms of the materialist method, which has under the pens of some of our Marxists transplanted the methods of formalism into the domain of the materialist dialectic; which has led to reducing the task to rendering defi nitions and classifi cations more precise and to splitting empty abstractions into four equally empty parts; in short, has adulterated Marxism by means of the indecently elegant mannerisms of Kantian epigones. It is a silly thing indeed endlessly to sharpen or resharpen an instrument, to chip away Marxist steel when the task is to apply the instrument in working over the raw material! (Leon Trotsky) 2.1. The retreat into historical formalism In his polemic with Dühring, Engels described the theory of surplus-value and the materialistic conception of history as the ‘two great discoveries’ of Marx, through which were established the scientific foundations of socialism. Modern materialism, wrote Engels, characterised history as a ‘process of evolution’ and set itself the task of discovering its ‘laws of motion’.1 In one of the best reviews of Capital to appear at that time, a bourgeois economist Kaufmann repeated the point to Marx’s approval: Marx treats the social movement ‘as a process of natural history governed by laws’.2 In a famous resumé of his conception of history, written closer to our time, Braudel describes Marx as the originator of ‘historical models’.3 In their own way, these writers implied, in a language borrowed from the sciences of their time, that social phenomena like the phenomena of nature are scientifi cally penetrable, and that we owe the recognition of this fact to the work of Marx.
    [Show full text]
  • The History of the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels
    University of Central Florida STARS PRISM: Political & Rights Issues & Social Movements 1-1-1938 The history of the Communist manifesto of Marx and Engels Vladimir Viktorovich Adoratsky Find similar works at: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/prism University of Central Florida Libraries http://library.ucf.edu This Book is brought to you for free and open access by STARS. It has been accepted for inclusion in PRISM: Political & Rights Issues & Social Movements by an authorized administrator of STARS. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Recommended Citation Adoratsky, Vladimir Viktorovich, "The history of the Communist manifesto of Marx and Engels" (1938). PRISM: Political & Rights Issues & Social Movements. 491. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/prism/491 The History of the . COMMUNIST MANI FESTO of MARXand ENGELS The History of the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO of MARX and ENGELS By V. ADORATSKY Director, Marx- Engels - Lenin Institute INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS NEW YORK CONTENTS Ii. HI~RICALBACKGROUND ......... g The League of the Just; Criticism of Kriege's ~cntalSocialism; The Struggle Against Karl Gh; Events Leading to the Manifem. IV. SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCEAND MEANINGTODAY ... 27 1938 All Rightz Reserved PRINTED-- IN THE usa. THE HISTORY OF THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO OF MARX AND ENGELS THEManifesto of #he Communist Parry (the Cornmimid Mrmif*) saw the light of day shortly More the February Revolution of 1848. In this brilliant work written ninety years ago-seventy years More the victory won in 19x7 by the great socialist revolution-Marx and Engels announced the oncoming proletarian revolution, gave strictly scientific pun& for its historic necessity, and foretold the inevitable downfall of the bourgeoisie and the viaory of the proletariat.
    [Show full text]
  • Leon Trotsky
    Chapter Seventeen Foreword to Karl Marx, Parizhskaya Kommuna (December 1905) Leon Trotsky Leon Trotsky’s foreword to Marx’s account of the Paris Commune1 marks an important break with the naïve economic determinism that often characterised Second-International Marxism. In this article, even more than in his previous writings on permanent revolution, Trotsky emphasised the interaction bet- ween economic conditions and revolutionary con- sciousness. In 1871, he noted, the workers of Paris did not seize power because economic circumstances suddenly ‘matured’ at some particular moment; on the contrary, it was the logic of class struggle that dictated a revolutionary course of events. The French bourgeoisie betrayed the nation because it feared arming the proletariat more than it feared the armies of Bismarck: 1 St. Petersburg (Knigoizdatel’stvo Molot’, 1906). See Marx 1871. [Of special signifi cance is Engels’s concluding paragraph to his 1891 Introduction on the 20th Anniversary of the Paris Commune: ‘Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been fi lled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.’ Frederick Engels, London, on the 20th anniversary of the Paris Commune, 18 March, 1891 (CW, Vol. 27: 179–191, p. 191)]. 498 • Leon Trotsky The proletariat saw that the hour had come when it must save the country and become master of its own destiny. It could not avoid seizing power; it was compelled to do so by a series of political events.
    [Show full text]