Posted by kasama on May 23, 2012
Immigrant workers in Lumberton, North Carolina — attending a Catholic Mass animated by demands for legality. Their political struggle for justice created forms of organization and a mood of impatience that gave rise to economic strikes in the area’s plants (not the other way around).
Nat Winn, one of Kasama’s moderators,takes up a key question of our moment: As many people discuss going from resistance to revolution to a new society, what forces in society will form the core force of such a future movement?
by Nat Winn
Revolutionary change calls for strategy. Who should we base a revolutionary movement among? Who are the intermediate allies who might support radical change? What are the necessary types of organization we need and the most effective forms of resistance?
The emergence of mass resistance all over the world since the Arab Spring has brought these questions to the fore for revolutionaries. Things are complicated by a society in great flux. Here in the United States sections of the oppressed have been distanced from production and forced into the illegal economy. Those still employed have had their lives destabilized by things such as the rust belt phenomenon and the pressure to accept lower wages and benefits. Sections of the middle classes (including even many middle level managers in corporations) have felt their lives taken over by workload and insecurity – even when they have not yet literally been pushed down among the oppressed. So who do we look to in the current situation; which forces are our potential revolutionary cores?
With the emergence of the Occupy movement the hope for radical transformation has come alive. Revolutionary minded people are now dealing with the political activity of large sections of people. Many groups both old and new are beginning to think more about revolutionary agency and are provided with the opportunity to put their ideas and summation into practice around a mass movement whose orientation has been at a distance from the state and mainstream electoral politics.
In light of the new situation it is interesting to study and learn from a debate that has broken out within the Occupy movement over the radical agency. The Oakland-based Bay of Rage blog posted an anonymous article entitled Blockading the Port Is Only The First of Many Last Resorts. Geoff Bailey and Kyle Browne responded to the Bay of Rage post in “The rise of the ‘precariat’?” in the pages of the Socialist Worker .
While a communist perspective may have some disagreements with theses poles of argumentation – it is valuable that they are grappling with similar questions.
Revolutionary Subject (Some Historical background)
The working class is not some homogenous thing – unchanged by time and conditions. The young, restless, rootless class that first congealed in early factories was sometimes highly radical – but the political openness of different emerging sections of workers changed over decades. This change was marked by struggle over which sections of the oppressed had the most potential for basing a revolutionary movement around it.
Karl Marx famously argued that there was a then-new propertyless class that was emerging — exploited by the then-new capitalist class.
That propertyless class was called the proletariat (picking up a term from ancient Rome) and was defined by having “nothing to lose but its chains.” It no longer owned small means of production (as some productive farmers and artisans had previously done). And it was a rowdy, rough-hewn outlaw class – whose almost universally illegal struggles took the form of great lawless outbursts or quiet subversive conspiracies.
That proletarian working class was exploited in production – including increasingly within the capitalist industrial-factory production that increasingly took form during the 19th century. But from the beginning large sections of that class were not directly selling their labor power to exploiters – including proletarian youth not yet old enough to work, large numbers of unemployed, the retired and crippled, and of course sections of women proletarians (some of whom started to work in factories, but more of whom often still slaved in the dreary reproduction of domestic life within the working class family.)
This Marxist understanding viewed the proletariat as an often desperate class – “Free as the birds” Lenin once said, meaning free to go where there are crumbs or else free to starve.
This “nothing to lose” element was one part of what made the proletariat potentially a class basis for the most radical and revolutionary ideas.
And, at the same time, the proletariat’s connection to the most socialized and disciplined production form in history, was a second element that made them the potential organizer of a whole new system of social ownership: the socialist society with a planned economic life that could form a transition to communist classless society.
Desperation made them potentially revolutionary, socialization made them the potential carriers of a new social order.
Several arguments have stood opposed to this concept:
One rather conservative viewed the working class as important because it was able to pressure the capitalists well – from its control of economic choke-points at the point of production. Others viewed the working class as important because it “made everything” – and therefore was a kind of responsible class inherently opposed to the recklessness and destructiveness of capitalism.
Another historic argument is that radical change was mainly attractive to those desperate elements excluded from production: that it is the decomposing or declassed elements in society that will make up the core of the revolutionary subject. These include peasants who are becoming proletarianized through dispossession of their land or artisans losing their specialization due to machinery and mass production, or the criminal elements who gathered in the slums of the capitalist world.
The differences between these arguments have become more stark over time because of two phenomena:
First, the colonial system created a great revolutionary wave in the Third World where socialist revolution emerged closely allied to a radical agrarian revolution of the peasantry. In other words it was not the organization of industrial workers in factories that was the defining revolutionary feature – it was the alliances of the oppressed (workers and peasants) forming armies for seizing power.
Second, that same colonial system accelerated a stratification within the working class of imperialist countries. Initially a small highly skilled upper stratum of workers became politically “bourgeosified.” But over a century, this conservatization affected broader sections of the workers – in the U.S., the industrial workers in major factories developed a much more stable life in the 1950s (after the turmoil of the 1930s and the global war of the 1940s). In the U.S., the radical activity among working people shifted from the world of factories and trade unions – to the bitter conditions of slums. It was the Black Liberation struggle that stirred significant sections of proletarian people in the U.S. – drawing hundreds of thousands of Black and Latino proletarian youth toward radical politics in the 1960s (as expressed first by the great urban rebellions and “long hot summers” of that period, and then by conscious political organizations like the Black Panther Party.)
The Argument Within Occupy
Bailey and Browne from the Socialist Worker want to criticize those forces that posit the existence of a new class composition emerging with a new revolutionary subject, that some call the “Precariat”.
This class is made up of “masses of people who work in unorganized workplaces, who are unemployed or underemployed or precarious in one way or another” as described by the Bay of Rage Blockading… article. (The Bay of Rage Blockading… article does not actually use the term precariat.) This class would have emerged out of the process of neo-liberalism and de-industrialization that began in the 1970s and moved a large amount of manufacturing out of urban areas of the richest countries to developing countries and which began to take apart the social welfare apparatus that provided some stability for large sections of the working classes in the developed (imperialist) countries.
The Bay of Rage Blockading… asserts the following changes as having led to the current phase of capitalism…
“From the 1970s on, one of capital’s responses to the reproduction crisis has been to shift its focus from the sites of production to the (non)sites of circulation. Once the introduction of labor-saving technology into the production of goods no longer generated substantial profits, firms focused on speeding up and more cheaply circulating both commodity capital (in the case of the shipping, wholesaling and retailing industries) and money capital (in the case of banking). Such restructuring is a big part of what is often termed ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘globalization,’ modes of accumulation in which the shipping industry and globally-distributed supply chains assume a new primacy. The invention of the shipping container and container ship is analogous, in this way, to the reinvention of derivatives trading in the 1970s – a technical intervention which multiplies the volume of capital in circulation several times over.”
The same Bay of Rage article then asserts, for instance, that the subject of the general strike has thus shifted away from the industrialized factory worker and toward this new subject. This new subject is defined by propertylessness in juxtaposition to the working class which is supposedly defined by the fact that it works. This Oakland article posits the agency of this section of proletarians when it states:
“This is why the general strike on Nov. 2 appeared as it did, not as the voluntary withdrawal of labor from large factories and the like (where so few of us work), but rather as masses of people who work in unorganized workplaces, who are unemployed or underemployed or precarious in one way or another, converging on the chokepoints of capital flow. Where workers in large workplaces –the ports, for instance– did withdraw their labor, this occurred after the fact of an intervention by an extrinsic proletariat.”
The Bailey and Browne article argues that the so-called precariat has always existed. They assert that the increase of this new base of precarious workers has less to do with the emergence of a new class then with the results of the war perpetrated on labor by neo-liberalism in the past 40 years or so. Bailey and Browne argue that the working class as such still constitutes the revolutionary subject, detailing aspects of its current composition including the emergence of the huge service sector which includes many women and people of color. It also tries to show how strike actions in recent history only were able to effectively slow down the circulation of capital after the support of labor unions was won.
Class Composition
On May First, Brooklyn High School students raised the chant “We make history everyday! By what we do and what we say!” Their struggle and grievances rose from the conditions of Black working people — but hardly in ways confined to the production or circulation of commodities.
Bailey and Browne pose that changes in the working class are essentially changes of scale and that they are attributable not so much to the emergence of a new class but to the class struggle and the victories of the capitalists in weakening the position of labor since the era of neo-liberalism.
The pull of the SW argument is to look for those areas where the capitalism looks like it did in its 19th century industrial phase and to look at these spaces as the points where there is the most potential for radical activity that can serve as the basis for societal transformation. In this regard the growth of industrial production is sited as well as the move of industrial production in the US from the Midwest to the Southeast. They also mention the huge service sector as an important part of the working class and posit it against the notion that the proletariat is mostly precarious and also to emphasize what it sees as the still primary role of the working class and trade unions (at a time when one of the largest trade unions in the country is the service workers union SEIU).
The tendency to look at those sections of the proletariat which seem the most disciplined and organized and possess a position in the economy which seem to give it a type of power over the stability of capital flow is an approach precisely that targets the more conservative sectors of the working class. It is a method of class analysis that looks for where things have remained similar to old analysis and it does not adjust and develop its analysis to what is changing, what is emerging and the opportunities for new forms of resistance as capitalism evolves and transforms.
Thus Bailey and Browne can look at the immigrant day laborer as proof that the precariousness of work is nothing new, though it fails to mention how the uncertainty and novelty of being uprooted from the countryside and sucked into meatpacking plants and hotels, being exposed to the wealth around them while still being superexploited can serve as a potentially radicalizing dynamic.
Blockading… on the other hand says that:
”We find it helpful here to distinguish between the working class and the proletariat. Though many of us are both members of the working class and proletarians, these terms do not necessarily mean the same thing. The working class is defined by work, by the fact that it works. It is defined by the wage, on the one hand, and its capacity to produce value on the other. But the proletariat is defined by propertylessness. In Rome, proletarius was the name for someone who owned no property save his own offspring and himself, and frequently sold both into slavery as a result. Proletarians are those who are ‘without reserves’ and therefore dependent upon the wage and capital. They have ‘nothing to sell except their own skins.’ The important point to make here is that not all proletarians are working-class, since not all proletarians work for a wage.”
There is not much to gain by fighting over semantics, but in a communist view, large sections of the “working class” have always been unemployed and unpaid. And it seems a bit pedantic to assume that only people who “work for a wage” are working class.
For example, retired or disabled auto workers are working class. They don’t become part of some OTHER class when they lose the ability to work. The daughter of a coal miner is working class – even if it was often difficult for many girls to find wage work in much of the U.S. coalfields. Many immigrant women and even immigrant children work for wages or piece rates in the fields – and they are clearly working class by anyone’s definitions. But women who are part of a family of migrant ranch hands are part of the working class – even if some of them are not paid by the cattle ranch, and spends their time in massive unpaid work raising a garden, making food, scrubbing clothes, raising kids, etc. Even most prisoners and people on welfare should be considered part of the working class (as their class of origin and their general property-less state).
Which Precariat?
It is clear that key changes with the advent of neo-liberalism have altered the composition of the working class in the past four decades particularly within the metro-poles themselves. Because of the opening up markets internationally along with deregulation of constraints on financial and commodity mobility, it has been possible for capital to take back some of the crumbs it had historically given to its privileged working class sections. Thus wages have been driven down, unemployment and non-regular employment have gone up and the quantitative rise in the precarious section of the proletariat has become a fixed part of capital relations in all the more developed capitalist countries.
It is also true that the current global economic crisis we find ourselves in has led to a wave of resistance across the world and that the key elements within this wave have been this precarious element. Part of this precarious element have been young people who traditionally would have been part of the more privileged middle classes but cannot find work due to new constraints on capital investment due to the current crisis.
It is also true however that there are sections of the proletariat who do not work or are underemployed or otherwise thrown into volatile and desperate situations who have not fallen from the ranks of the middle class. One can think of African American people in urban areas who are in a state of near permanent poverty and unemployment and whose struggle for survival drive some into the informal economy. There are also the undocumented and their children( who are very acculturated into US society yet are kept out of participating in society both legally and culturally). What about poor proletarians who may live in trailer homes and are caught up in a stark sense that they have less and less chance of a way out?
It is a fact then that even among the jobless and underemployed sections of the proletariat there are distinctions to be made and analysis to be done among which sections of the people have the potential to make up a core of a revolutionary movement.
Lenin once famously wrote in the middle of World War 1:
“Neither we nor anyone else can calculate precisely what portion of the proletariat is following and will follow the social-chauvinists and opportunists. This will be revealed only by the struggle, it will be definitely decided only by the socialist revolution. But we know for certain that the ‘defenders of the fatherland’ in the imperialist war represent only a minority. And it is therefore our duty, if we wish to remain socialists to go down lower and deeper, to the real masses; this is the whole meaning and the whole purport of the struggle against opportunism.”
This suggestion “to go down lower and deeper, to the real masses” is something we should take to heart today – when it is even more important and necessary than a century ago.
From a certain view it seems that there is actually a similarity in the positions of Bailey and Browne article and those forces that speak of the precariat as a new potential revolutionary agent.
The similarity rests in the argument that there are sections of the working class who are currently or were “better off” that will become radicalized once their privileges are taken away.
This point may have validity however radicalism does not always go in a progressive direction, and it would be interesting to look at the way in which these formerly privileged sections of the workers or declassed elements of the middle strata actually become radicalized.
Often the anger coming out of such sections is not so radical. We hear calls to go “back to the good old days”, or to “buy American.” Movements such as the Tea Party come to mind or at best a call for some kind of a new New Deal. Often these patriotic sentiments emerge out of different sections of the people in general terms. For instance bourgeoisfied workers who are losing their privileges may be attracted to a new New Deal, where small business people and retired military lifer make up the base of the Tea Party.
One could argue that a section of college grads who have no immediate potential for employment and have accumulated massive amounts of debt has gravitated to a more progressive form of radicalism embodied in its association with the Occupy Movement. This is a fair point and deserves more investigation.
Disrupting Capital Flow or Organizing for Revolution?
In the Bay of Rage Blockading… and the Socialist Worker’s Bailey and Browne articles there is a contention on whether the new capitalist relations warrant organizing resistance at the point of production or the point of circulation.
This seems like a false dichotomy. Is political resistance really wedded mainly to competing points in economic life? Doesn’t politics generally, the struggle over power (and revolutionary politics in particular) have a life that is relatively autonomous from economics, from both the production and circulation of goods? There is a subtle assumption in the articles that because a certain section of the proletariat is positioned either at the point of production or circulation that this dictate in a strategic sense how we might determine particular forms of resistance. Too much emphasis is put in both articles about disrupting capital flow. What tactics we might use to do so or what section of the people can do so most effectively?
In short making revolution is not about disrupting capital flow.
We have talked on Kasama about a conjunctural view of class struggle versus a view that is merely structural.
The notion that we organize a section of the proletariat simply because of where it is positioned in relation to capital flow is a structural argument. It sees the class struggle as being decided in the realm of economics.
A conjunctural view sees the class struggle being decided ultimately in the realm of politics. We base our ideas on what peoples have the greatest potential to be a core revolutionary force on the way its role in society affects its overall world outlook in general terms.
We contend that the revolution will not be won through our effectiveness in merely stopping the flow of capital. It is necessary to organize a revolutionary core for fighting to defeat the capitalist class politically through mass struggle and ultimately war. It is necessary that in the process of this struggle that this revolutionary force develop its ability to run society and lead society on a communist road.
