John Quiggin | Marxism without revolution: Class
John Quiggin | Marxism without revolution: Class
As Cohen puts it, the revolutionary working class postulated by Marx had to satisfy four conditions:
1) They constitute the majority of society;
2) they produce the wealth of society;
3) they are the exploited people in society;
4) they are the needy people in society.
To quote this summary from the Directionless Bones blog, 1. and 2. give the proletariat the capacity to revolutionise society, and 3. and 4. give them the reason to do so.
[...]
Coming back to Cohen’s conditions, the case to be made against the top 1 per cent is that:
1) They constitute a tiny minority of society
2) they consume far more of the wealth of society than they actually contribute
3) they exploit their control over capital for their own benefit
4) they are the primary obstacle to meeting a wide range of social needs
In a Marxist analysis, it would be natural at this point to use the term “ruling class”, and to stress, even more than I have done, the point that much of what passes for political debate consists of little more than rearrangements of an executive committee derived from, and largely driven by this class. There is a lot to be said for this analysis, but in the absence of any prospect of revolutionary overthrow of the ruling class, it doesn’t seem to lead anywhere, except perhaps to defeatism.
And, in some parts of the academic left, defeatism seems to be seen as positively desirable. Once a critical analysis has been performed, demonstrating the hopelessness of any particular attempt to change existing structures without a revolution, the necessary work has been done, and it’s time for a well-earned cafe latte.
More commonly, perhaps, leftists continue to work on projects of reform and resistance with an implicit assumption that no fundamental change is going to take place, while maintaining a non-operational faith in the ultimate possibility or even inevitability of revolution.
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It seems clear, as Cohen says, that no sensible definition of the working class is going to satisfy all four conditions.
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Comment by: Jose
Jun 19th 2011 at 13:06
Is’t the real problem that the class struggle is defined by the capitalist system? That is the ruling class tries to maximise its share, the organised working class (through the labour movement) tries to shoft more capital in their direction. The possibility of changing the motor of the system, the exchange and accumulation of capital, has been dismissed as hazardous, after the Soviet experiment and alternative systems of exchange are not credible (e.g. LETS, etc.. The idea of socila and community enterprises gaining hegemony over private enterprises is not really promoted or developed as a political concept. The issue of community self-management, that is so crucial to real revolutionary experiences, is played down in favour of state control models that eventually go nowhere. The point is class strugle and revolution need to be re-defined in terms of grass roots control of resources and democracy, to get it out of the smoke and mirrors that most (?) current applications of “marxism” have dead-ended in.