Where Is the "Working Class"

I ought to elaborate a bit on my simplistic depiction of the inevitable rise of the revolutionary proletariat, according to certain Marxist treatments.

I’m still working from the Adam Przeworski (‘AP’) book I’ve been talking about. One bit that I was unaware of is that certain prominent texts by Marx himself did not become available until well after the first world war, if not much later. According to AP, that elevated Karl Kautsky’s “The Class Struggle” to the top ranks of influence. It fortifies my distinction between the Marxism provided by contemporary, advanced thinkers and the Marxism that informed the socialist movements prior to the first world war.

I keep referring to the pre-war period as exemplary in contrast to the Marx promulgated by devotees of Vladimir Lenin and those who came after in the Soviet Union. Whatever you think of it, Bolshevism was a one-off. The Bolshevik revolution happened where, per at least some takes on Marx, conditions for it were not ripe, and it did not happen where they were. Thus it has ever been.

The politics of the old German Social-Democratic Party and its imitators throughout Europe have endured. As AP notes, it is social-democracy that has been the proving ground, notwithstanding its deficiencies and reversals, for reform that benefits the working class. I have to laugh when my ultra-left comrades complain that it “hasn’t worked!” What has “worked”?

As AP notes, it is a poor theory of history that explains repeated failures of radical socialist transformation by betrayals of the working class. Or repression under capitalism. Or imperialist intervention. That all goes with the territory. Any theory of history that repeatedly fails to prove out cannot be a satisfactory theory.

One scenario that complicates the inevitability notion is that economic changes spur organization of the working class, but short of rebellion. That requires the intervention of a self-conscious revolutionary intelligentsia, in the form of a revolutionary party. The inevitability is limited to the development of the economic ‘base.’ Even so, that does not seem to have unfolded.

An interesting idea that AP pulls out of the history is that the working class is not something you find, like the car keys, but it is constructed, both by its struggles and by the interventions of organized socialists. This matches up with a point raised by Sassoon, that support for socialist parties in Europe did not necessarily correspond to orthodox definitions of the working class. In a completely perverse turn, our own modern Democratic Party is deconstructing the working class.

Perhaps the biggest factor not foreseen by the original Marxists has been the export of manufacturing and its workers to far-flung locales in the Global South. This dispersal discourages organization in the original industrialized nations. We could note that in the Global South, we still fail to see the organization foretold by some classical Marxist texts. There is no lack of immiseration, but the consciousness is missing. The politics are a mess. Perhaps the brightest spots can be found in South America, though progressive regimes there seem to come and go.

Consequently the modern working class looks very different from the middle of the 19th Century, as peasants were driven off their land into urban industrial hell-holes and competition from productive factories destroyed independent artisans. We can hardly blame socialists of that period for predicting the division of society into two more-or-less starkly demarcated classes — proletariat and capitalist.

These days of course, things are not so simple, and not just because of economic distinctions. The headspace of the working class has become a howling wilderness, and there remains diverse social strata between low-paid workers and the rich.

The working class organizations we do observe are obliged, given the views of their members, to transact with capitalists and their political allies. Nobody is promising to smash capitalist rule. Then you have the more explicit political erosion typified by the Teamster Union diddling with Republicans, which of course goes back to the 1980s.

It still follows for me at any rate that the “scientific” pretensions of Marxism are susceptible to skepticism. It was easier to believe in the 19th Century, with the burgeoning of revolutions in the hard sciences, as well as the social upheavals noted elsewhere in this post. Why shouldn’t experts be able to diagnose historical development as well?