Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World (Studies in Critical Social Sciences, 103) [Lam ed.] 9789004297098, 9789004337473, 900429709X

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Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World

Studies in Critical Social Sciences Series Editor David Fasenfest (Wayne State University) Editorial Board Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (Duke University) Chris Chase-Dunn (University of California-Riverside) William Carroll (University of Victoria) Raewyn Connell (University of Sydney) Kimberlé W. Crenshaw (University of California, la, and Columbia University) Heidi Gottfried (Wayne State University) Karin Gottschall (University of Bremen) Mary Romero (Arizona State University) Alfredo Saad Filho (University of London) Chizuko Ueno (University of Tokyo) Sylvia Walby (Lancaster University)

VOLUME 103

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/scss

Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World By

Raju J. Das

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: The League of Nations (Poster), 1920. Artist: Viktor Deni (Viktor Nikolaevich Denisov (1893–1946)). The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016047651

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1573-4234 isbn 978-90-04-29709-8 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-33747-3 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents List of Figures and Tables viii Acknowledgements ix 1 Introduction 1 2 Analytical Marxist Theory of Class 22 1 Main Concepts in Analytical Marxist Theory of Class 24 2 Connecting Core Class-Concepts, and Levels of Class-Analysis 51 3 Class Analysis, Struggle for Socialism, and Socialist Strategies 54 4 Conceptual Advantages of Wright’s Theory of Class 60 5 Wright’s Class Theory in Relation to His Marxist Social Theory 65 6 Conclusion 70 3 Anti-essentialist (Post-structuralist) Marxist Theory of Class 74 1 Post-structuralist Marxist Notion of Class Relation 76 2 Class Agency/Struggle and Geography of Capitalism 83 3 Class Theory as a Part of Marxist Social Theory in Anti-essentialist Marxism: The Principle of Non-dominance 89 4 The Politics of Anti-essentialist Marxism or Class Politics of Distribution 98 5 Semiotic/Linguistic/Emotional Resistance and Intervention 106 6 Conclusion 109 4 A Critique of Theories of Class in Analytical and Anti-essentialist Marxisms 111 1 Class and Property 112 2 Class, Surplus, and Exploitation 118 3 The Primacy of Class and of Capitalist Class Relations 125 4 Problematic Conception of Class-Agency and Anti-capitalism 134 5 A Reformist View of Post-capitalist Politics 145 6 Class Character of Revisions to the Marxist Theory of Class: Theories and Interests 159 7 Conclusion 164 5 Philosophical Foundations of Class Theory 175 1 Marxist Philosophy: A Brief Statement of Basic Principles 175 2 Philosophy and Class Theory 199 3 Conclusion 208

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6 Class Theory at a Trans-historical Scale 212 1 Class in All Class Societies: Class, Property, and Exploitation 213 2 Historically Specific Form of Class: Class in Pre-capitalist Society 228 3 Objective Conditions, Class Struggle, Class Consciousenss and Transition in Class Form of Society 233 4 Class and the State: Political Oppression as a Part of Class Relation 239 5 Conclusion 243 7 Marxist Theory of Capitalism as Class: A Dialectics of Exchange, Property and Value Relations 249 1 Capitalist Class Relation as Exchange/Money Relation 252 2 Capitalist Class Relation as Property Relation 258 3 Capitalist Class Relation as a Relation of Value 262 4 Money Relation, Property Relation, and Value Relation all Internally Connected 273 5 Concrete Map of Class Relations in Capitalist Social Formation 288 6 Objective Effects of Class Relations on the Working Class: Suffering and Immiserization 306 7 Conclusion 313 8 Subsumptions of Labour by Capital: Theory of Capitalist Class Relation from an International Perspective 340 1 How is Capitalism Conceptualized? 342 2 Formal and Real Subsumptions of Labour as Forms of Capitalist Class Relation 345 3 Transition from Formal Subsumption, and the Mediation of Class Struggle 353 4 Imperialism, Subsumption of Labour under Capital, and Class 359 5 Misconceptions about Subsumption of Labour and Dominant Contradiction in Modern Society 367 6 Summary, and Theoretical and Political Implications 376 9 The Capitalist State as Constitutive of Capitalist Class Relation: Class Exploitation and Political Oppression 391 1 The Capitalist State and the Capitalist Class Relation 392 2 Democratic State Form and the Capitalist Class Relation 399 3 Capitalist Class Relations and Barrier to Working Class Access to State Power 402 4 Conclusion 409

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Dialectics of Class Consciousness 415 1 Consciousness of the Bourgeoisie 417 2 Consciousness of the Working Class and Its Multiple Forms 428 3 Capitalist Class Relation and Working Class Consciousness 438 4 Class Consciousness, Objectivism and Workers’ Struggle: Somegeneral Considerations 453 5 ‘Marxist Elitism’ and Class Consciousness 462 6 Conclusion 471

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Trade Unionist Struggle and the Proletariat 483 1 Struggle from Above and Struggle from Below 484 2 ‘Primitive’ Revolts of the Working Class 487 3 Trade Union Struggle 489 4 What Makes (Spontaneous or Trade Unionist) Struggle Necessary and Possible? 493

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Class Struggle and the Proletariat 509 1 A Marxist Critique of Spontaneous Trade Unionist Struggle 510 2 Trade Union Struggle is a (Subordinate) Part of Class Struggle 514 3 Revolution as the Ultimate Form of Class Struggle 525 4 Revolutionary Role of the Proletariat 535 5 Political Hegemony of the Proletariat 545 6 Political Vehicles for Class Struggle 550 7 Conclusion 556

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Conclusions, and Further Reflections on the Political Implications of Class Theory 566 1 Marxist Philosophy and Class Theory at a Trans-historical Level 579 2 The Totality of the Capitalist Class Relation 586 3 The Capitalist Class Relation, Internationally Speaking 605 4 The State and the (Capitalist) Class Relation 613 5 (Working) Class Consciousness and (Working) Class Power 616

Works Cited 635 Index 662

List of Figures and Tables Figures 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Wright’s view on the two-class model and the complexity in capitalist society 35 Model of Inter-connections among class structure, class formation and class struggle 52 Wright’s views on exploitation and resistance in the workplace 64 Wright’s view of the place of class theory in his Marxist social theory 65 Class processes in anti-essentialist Marxist theory 77 View of society in anti-essentialist Marxist class theory 89 Dialectics of the material and the non-material 185 Levels of generality for examining class society 205 Forms of exploitation 227 Class relations, fettering of productive forces, class struggle and crisis 236 The state as an arm of class 240 Inter-class relation and intra-class relation 301 Marx’s general formula for capital and two forms of subsumption of labour 350 History of capitalist class relation: dominance of different forms of class ­relations over time 352 Number of times ‘dispossession’ and ‘capitalism’ have been used (2008–2015) 375 Class, capitalism, and subsumption of labour 378 Capitalism, class struggle and uneven development 381 Theorizing peripheral capitalism 388 Capitalist class and capitalist state: An internal relation 393 Steps to class consciousness 429 Three strata of the working class on the basis of consciousness 453

Tables 1 2 3

Wright’s theory of multiple forms of class-exploitation 33 Contradictory class consciousness of class society 417 Forms of working class consciousness 432

Acknowledgements This book is a product of at least three years of labour. Many people have made indirect contribution to it. I was the Graduate Program Director of my academic unit at York University while writing the book. Our Graduate Program Assistant, Ms Yvonne Yim, knew what I was up to if I was, on occasion, not replying to her emails quickly. She would often make sure that I would have to worry about fewer things than I would otherwise have to. I am grateful to her for her comradely gesture. My current and past graduate students have been a great source of intellectual stimulation. Many of the ideas in the book have been tried on them in the monthly Marxist reading group meetings and in other encounters with them. In the process I have benefited from their remarks. They have heard me say such words as class, class theory, and subsumption of labour, an infinite number of times in the last three years, and yet they have affectionately tolerated me. The book contains numerous diagrams to illustrate various aspects of class and of capitalism as a class relation. A former student of mine, Ashley Chen, has produced all of these diagrams but one, based on my drawings. She has also spent much time putting page numbers for the index and helping me with the bibliography. I am immensely thankful to her. Robert Bridi, who is completing his PhD with me now, kindly produced the diagram No. 16, which is on the implications of the capitalist class relation for uneven development. As all writers know, writing is often a lonely activity, which means that time is spent away from partners and children. My experience has been this as well, so I thank my family members for their understanding. Finally, I am thankful to Professor David Fasenfest, the Book Series Editor for Brill’s Studies in Critical Social Sciences for his encouragement and patience.

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Introduction A spectre has been haunting the world. It is the spectre of class. The spectre of class has been haunting the academic world and the world of politicians. ‘What is there in Marx that is (a) valid and (b) not included in the m.i.t. graduate economics curriculum’? Paul Samuelson, a Nobel prizewinning economist, was once asked this question. His reply was: ‘The Class Struggle’ (quoted in Bhattacharya and Seda-Irizarry, 2015: 672). Class is such an important concept that, according to two influential theorists, ‘How anyone defines class shapes how social action is understood and engaged: the theoretical debate over class is a practical matter for activists no less than for social theorists’ (Resnick and Wolff, 2003: 10).1 Dahrendorf (1959: 3) opens his classic book on class with this statement: ‘The concept of class has never remained a harmless concept for very long. Particularly when applied to human beings and their social conditions it has invariably displayed a peculiar explosiveness’. Two American scholars, Lipset and Bendix, asserted that: ‘discussions of different theories of class are often academic substitutes for real conflict over political orientations’ (quoted in Edgell, 2009: 8). Geoffrey de Ste. Croix (1981) wrote his magnificent The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, where he lays out some general Marxist ideas about class and applies them to the ancient Greek society. The author recalls that: a prominent non-Marxist Roman historian reviewing his book in an academic journal asked ‘whether it was possible to find my “categories of analysis convincing without drawing disturbing inferences for contemporary society”, as I have done’ (Croix, 1984: 110; italics added). In other words, the reviewer agreed with the class theorist’s intellectual analysis but not the political implications of that. One could go on to provide evidence of the spectre of class in the academic world. In an article in Newsweek, a former British Prime Minister (Thatcher, 1992)2 said this: Class is a Communist concept. It groups people as bundles and sets them against one another. … [We should be] talking about liberty. The more 1 They go on to say that: ‘basic differences in class definition exist and have important analytical, political, and social effects’ (p. 10). 2 http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/111359.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004337473_002

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you talk about class – or even about ‘classlessness’ – the more you fix the idea in people’s minds. Here Mrs. Thatcher indirectly acknowledges that class exists but says that class is a dangerous concept. She advises that there is no need to talk about class. But as a political representative of the bourgeoisie, she, along with her American counter-part (Mr. Reagan), is widely seen as having been responsible for what is called the ‘restoration of class power’ of capitalists (Harvey, 2007) through her neoliberal (free-market) policies. Or perhaps, in discouraging class talk Mrs. Thatcher was showing that she belonged to a different generation of political representatives of the bourgeoisie. Peregrine Worsthorne, a Tory newspaper editor, put it: ‘Old-fashioned Tories say there isn’t any class war. New Tories make no bones about it: we are class warriors and we expect to be victorious’ (Jones, 2016: 48). Mr. Obama recognizes class in his own ways. In 2015, he made these remarks at the White House on the so-called resurgence of the American auto-industry, although he draws a conclusion to the liking of his audience: we rejected the false choice that either unions or businesses could succeed but not both. We said, you know what, what’s going to work for the company is also going to work for that worker, and vice versa, which means when the company is doing better, then the workers have got to get their share as well.3 These comments might have pleased the bourgeoisie, and the bourgeois union bureaucrats who oversaw a huge reduction in wages and a multi-tier wage-system. The spectre of class is also haunting the real world, the world in which capitalists operate and workers live and work. The massive inequality between the top 1% or top 10% and the rest of the population, grinding poverty, undiminishing un – and under-employment, thanks to a secular economic stagnation, and the capitalist state spending money to bail out banks while cutting support for the ordinary people, on the one hand, and regular protests and strikes in nearly all the major countries of the world on the other point to the existence of class as an objective fact and of class in terms of political action of the masses, based in, or shaped by, class antagonisms.

3 https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/01/07/remarks-president-resurgence -american-auto-industry.

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It is interesting that Economist, a traditional magazine of the big bourgeoisie, said: ‘Many commentators think that class is dying, but ordinary people are not convinced. In fact class antagonisms may even be worsening – the proportion of voters believing that there is a “class struggle” in Britain rose from around 60% in the early 1960s to 81% in the mid-1990s…although class politics in Britain probably ought to be dead, it is not. Indeed it could yet intensify’. (Economist, 1997; para 9 and para 12). In the u.s., the attitude toward strikes appears to have changed dramatically. While a 1984 poll showed that 45% of those questioned about strike situations supported management and 34% the strikers, in 1996 a nearly identical poll found a reversal of opinion as 46% sided with strikers and only 25% with management (Cohen and Moody, 1988: 113). If 40% of the total population of one of the richest countries on earth (the usa),4 and if half of the racialized minorities and close to half of the low-income population in this country, hold a negative view of capitalism (as opposed to socialism) (pew, 2011), this has something to do with the spectre of class. It is worth noting that some members of the corporate world do acknowledge class and class struggle happening. Mr. Warren Buffet, one of the richest chief executives and investors, proudly said that ‘There’s class warfare, all right but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.’5 Buffet’s view is very much in line with the ‘new Tories’ of Britain. To the extent that class is talked about outside of the academic world (e.g. by politicians, media people, etc.), it is talked about in a careful way, often with the help of a language of class compromise, or class is talked about in order to boast of a class war in which the bourgeoisie is winning, and therefore to perhaps pre-empt a class war from the masses. The academic world appears to avoid talking about class or it tends to avoid talking about it in a rigorous way. More accurately, there are three ways in which the academic world responds to the phenomenon of class, and common to all these ways is this: the Marxist notion of class is to be avoided. Firstly, the vast majority simply avoid talking about class, howsoever defined. They just ignore it. They focus their energies on society as a whole, or individuals, or on groups of individuals defined on the basis of relations other than class such as race, gender, nationality, sexuality, etc. Secondly, there are 4 It should be noted that: The us is a very unequal country. ‘The poorest American quintile has a lower level of human development than the richest quintile in Bolivia, Indonesia and Nicaragua; it falls below the luckiest 40 per cent of Brazilians and Peruvians, and stands on a level footing with the fourth quintile of Colombia, Guatemala and Paraguay’ (Therborn, 2012: 14). 5 http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html.

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people who use the language of class to talk about life style or income, or occupational categories with varying levels of skill and autonomy at work, etc. Much class talk is indeed gradational or fractionalist. This kind of gradational class talk shapes, and is shaped by, lay people’s view of class. Consider Bernie Sanders or even the occupiers: their reference is to the rich, the richest, top 1%, the billionaire class vs ‘the once-great American middle class’, etc. In the gradational approach, class can be defined as occupational categories (low skilled and highly skilled workers, etc.), i.e. in terms of skills one has which can be sold in the market. Such occupational type class analysis carefully avoids the Marxist approach as it ‘entails no theory of history according to which class conflict serves as the engine of social change’ which is led by a particular class (Goldthorpe and Marshall, 1992: 383). This type of class analysis has also ‘no theory of class exploitation’ and of class antagonism: it believes that what is to the advantage to one class may not be to the disadvantage to another (entirely or always). Class relations are a positive sum game: there can be class compromises. In this approach, there is no theory of class-base collective action, and people with a given class background may not possess a given type of class consciousness and may not engage in given class practices to further their own interest; people may act on the basis of class or religious interests or other interests (ibid.: 383–385). Much discussion on class from a gradational standpoint makes use of a combination of qualities of what a class is about, including life style, income and skills, etc. Recent developments in class analysis, particularly associated with so-called ‘cultural class analysis’ or cultural-economic class analysis, have seen associated with Pierre Bourdieu (1986). A Bourdieu-influenced class analysis moves away from the conventional concerns of class analysis with property and market relations and towards an emphasis on the multiple forms of capital seen as a resource (Savage et al., 2005). Such a reorientation dismisses or neglects the relations of power and domination founded in the economic institutions of capitalism as a crucial element of what class is (Flemmen, 2013). Partly influenced by this kind of thinking is Savage et al.’s (2013) elaborate and highly publicized research on class in Britain. It shows the existence at higher levels of class structure: of (1) an ‘elite’, whose wealth separates them from an (2) established middle class, as well as a (3) class of technical experts and (4) a class of ‘new affluent’ workers. And at lower levels are: (5) an ageing traditional working class along with (6) a ‘precariat’ characterised by very low levels of capital, and (7) a group of emergent service workers. This kind of class-thinking and its new seven-class model recognises not only class polarisation but also class fragmentation in its middle layers (in British society). What is also stressed is the fact that a person or a group can have multiple class identities/

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positions.6 So class is talked about, but it is talked about in a way that is less threatening to the system of class understood in terms of underlying relations which give rise to differences in income, occupation, lifestyle, etc., which are seen as hallmarks of class structure. Clearly, mobility on the basis of lifestyle or even income (within limits) is much more feasible and even visible than mobility between a class of large property owners and a class of wage-earners. Thirdly, there is what I will call ‘a death of class’ approach. The camp following this approach keeps writing obituaries of class, and especially, class as talked about in Marxism, which links class to questions of property ownership, production, and related matters. The talk about the death of class or its declining importance has had a long career. In fact, the theme of retreat from class is a global affair: it is in the empirical context of the global South as well as in the North, and indeed more generally in terms of social theory as such, including Marxist theory (see Chilcote, 1990; Chibber, 2006; Petras, 1998; Wood, 1998). The obituaries of class were written long before the onset of neoliberalism and before the decline of unions. This has prompted a commentator to say that: ‘Each decade we shiftily declare we have buried class; each decade the coffin stays empty’ (Richard Hoggart, quoted in Hanley, 2014). One of the earliest obituaries in the post-war period was written by Robert Nisbet, and this was as early as 1958. At the American Sociological Association conference in that year, he announced the ‘decline and fall of social class’ (Nisbet, 1959) (quoted in Hout et al., 1993: 6). According to Nisbet: the study of class is ‘nearly useless for the clarification of data on wealth, power, and social status in contemporary United States and much of western society in general’. Majority of jobs in the tertiary sectors cannot be said to be falling in any specific class category. Political power is spread among voters in an unstratified way, so class is also not important politically. A more recent round of obituaries was written in the early 1990s (Clark and Lipset, 1991; Pakulski, 1993). Class is dead or dying, and especially, class in the Marxist sense. This is because of a variety of factors. Classes are fragmented with the proliferation of small property ownership, and with large sections of the population owning shares and having money in their pension funds (Pakulski, 1993: 284). The expansion of civil rights and affirmative action for special groups (women, racial minorities) has meant that their life chances are affected by governmental action or non-market mechanisms ‘at the expense of the market-endowment-based claims, namely class position’ (p. 285). With 6 What class is a university graduate working in a call centre reading scripts from the screen, renting with friends but expecting some ‘help’ with a mortgage from their parents in later middle age? (Dorling, 2014: 453).

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globalization, capitalists and workers are forming coalitions to protect them against foreign competition, i.e. for protective tariffs to defend profits and wages/salaries. As consumers, people are interested in low costs of consumer goods and as producers, they are interested in higher wages. This kind of tension within society explains the weakening of class-party alignments (Pakulski, 1993). Under the impact of mass media, people are regarding themselves as members of imagined communities with shared concerns (e.g. environmentalists), habits (e.g. non-smokers), and tastes (e.g. vegetarians), etc. These imagined communities signify class decomposition: detachment of socio-­economic location from consumption and life styles (ibid.). With old industrial classes gone, class as understood by Marxists is gone too. In sum, the decline of class is indicated by: blurring of class boundaries, the fact that some wage-earners own stocks and have pension funds, the collapse of manufacturing, fragmentation of the working class, weakening of class identification, de-unionization, waning of working class politics, the rise of national, racial, regional and ethnic politics and indeed, the popularity of new social movements, and so on (So, 1995; Spector, 1995; Holton and Turner, 1989). If class is to be preserved, it ‘has to be radically detached from the Marxian theory and eschatology, and it has to lose its privileged status as the key sociological concept’ (Pakulski, 1993: 289). One can talk about inequality outside of a class framework, and outside of a Marxist view of class. Obviously not everyone thinks class is dead or dying. Apart from those who follow a more or less descriptive, gradational type or cultural-economic type approach to class, there is another group of scholars who talk about class. They follow some kind of Marxism. Among them are scholars who think about class as lived experience: class is about how people’s identities and perspectives are shaped by class (and other relations) (Zweig, 2004; Bannerji, 2005; Thompson, 1963; 1978).7 These scholars are critical of the ‘traditional’ Marxist view of class 7 This line of thinking (the class is about lived experience) was begun by Thompson (1963, 1978). As he wrote in the Preface to his Making of the English working class: ‘Class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition (1963: 11)’. The experience of working class ‘arises spontaneously within the social being, but it does not arise without thought’ (1978: 200). Thompson, who (privately acknowledged that he is not a systematic theorizer (Howell, 2014), thought that a stricter line should be drawn between the sociological definition of class (which tends to stress the structural conditions under which classes act and think) and the historical definition of class. He thought that the aspirations of the Luddite cropper, handloom weavers, the utopian artisan, etc. ‘were valid in terms of their own experience’ (Thompson, 1963: 13). If this were to be the case, and if the sections of the working class in a given place do not resist capitalist exploitation, then there is nothing that Marxist theory or Marxist organization could and should do about this, and that there would be no point in criticizing the conditions under which people think and act the way they do.

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in terms of property, production, and exploitation relations. People’s objective economic conditions (e.g. what do they do for living), their lifestyle or lived experience, and their collective capacity/action do not coincide. So class as a category is not important.8 To the extent that there is something called the working class, it is hard to claim that its class position entails objective interests, and that this position will eventually lead to a certain ‘pertinent’ class consciousness (Filc and Ram, 2014: 301). Whether or not one sees class as lived experience, the traditional Marxist view of class has been found wanting by many scholars who have some sympathy for Marxism. It is said that in the Third World, class categories of advanced capitalism are not relevant because of semi-feudalism, or other forms of relations than capitalism existing there.9 In the advanced world, traditional Marxism’s approach to class has lost much relevance as well. Here people are working less with hands and more with machines, or it is that people are not producing things, but engaged in services, often producing affective commodities (e.g. smiles of a flight attendant), so the working class is shrinking. The world of industrial capitalism and its model of working class as the industrial working class, is a world long gone to the dustbin of history. Indeed, how can Marx’s description of the suffering of nineteenth century factory workers be thought relevant to the vastly better conditions enjoyed by many today who would qualify on his definition as working class (Graham, 1993: 229)?10 The working class is deeply divided and fragmented on the basis of location, gender, race, etc., so on. The working class is no more likely to vote for progressive political parties, so class is not important. According to Sitton (1996), ‘the proletariat is no longer a useful abstraction’ (p. 247) and ‘class formation has been exhausted as a topic and a point of departure for socialist theory’ (p. 249). For instance, Mason (2015) who sees post-capitalism and a sharing economy already emerging in the capitalist society, asserts that, ‘The hugely expanded workforce of the world looks like a “proletariat”, but no longer thinks or behaves as it once did.’11 So there is no such thing as a working class, or at least no such thing as the working class with the kind of power that was assigned to it by Marxism. 8

Wright (1989d: 297) summarizes this argument, with which he rightly disagrees (see also Wood, 1998). 9 This is the post-colonial type argument that is subject to Chibber’s (2013) powerful and necessary criticism. 10 Since all this is happening in the advanced world, that is thought to be true about the capitalist world as a whole. 11 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jul/17/postcapitalism-end-of-capitalism -begun.

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Marx’s claim that the relation between the classes is antagonistic is exaggerated, since the normal relation is one of cooperation. Labourers now have a stake in the capitalist system, so they will not be goaded into revolutionary action by intolerable suffering as Marx had thought (Przeworski, 1985). Non-class axes of power such as political power that flows from control over a party or access to state power can be more important than class. For example, Fred Block says that the Marxist emphasis on the primacy of property relations is inferior to the ‘primacy of politics, as in Polanyi; in the latter concept, democratic states and societies subordinate markets to achieve socially progressive goals (Block, 2010). Many of the criticisms, from liberals and Leftists, of the ‘traditional’ Marxist approach to class (which has centred on questions of property, production, etc.,) are echoed by a conservative writer, the well-known Francis Fukuyama (1989) of the end of history reputation. It is useful to quote him at length. He starts by saying that the class issue, i.e. the idea that the chief contradiction is between capitalists and workers, has been resolved in the advanced countries, and therefore Marxist theory of class is useless: surely, the class issue has actually been successfully resolved in the West. … [T]he egalitarianism of modern America represents the essential achievement of the classless society envisioned by Marx. This is not to say that there are not rich people and poor people in the United States, or that the gap between them has not grown in recent years. But the root causes of economic inequality do not have to do with the underlying legal and social structure of our society, which remains fundamentally egalitarian and moderately redistributionist, so much as with the cultural and social characteristics of the groups that make it up, which are in turn the historical legacy of premodern conditions. Thus black poverty in the United States is not the inherent product of liberalism, but is rather the ‘legacy of slavery and racism’ which persisted long after the formal abolition of slavery. As a result of the receding of the class issue, the appeal of communism in the developed Western world, it is safe to say, is lower today than any time since the end of the First World War. This can be measured in any number of ways: in the declining membership and electoral pull of the major European communist parties, and their overtly revisionist programs; in the corresponding electoral success of conservative parties from Britain and Germany to the United States and Japan, which are unabashedly pro-market and anti-statist; and in an intellectual climate whose most ‘advanced’ members no longer believe that bourgeois society is something that ultimately needs to be overcome. This is not to say that the opinions of progressive intellectuals in Western countries are

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not deeply pathological in any number of ways. But those who believe that the future must inevitably be socialist tend to be very old, or very marginal to the real political discourse of their societies. So, there is inequality between the rich and the poor but such inequality has little to do with the class or relations of property, etc. Rather it has to do with the cultural factors (e.g. racism) or with factors that belong to the pre-capitalist times, and not to the current time dominated by capitalist class relation. The diminishing importance of class is indicated by receding appeal of communism which in turn is indicated by the loss of electoral support for communists and by the gain in electoral support for conservatives. To the extent that class is about class struggle, the latter is seen in terms of class struggle from below only: rise of electoral support for conservatives apparently has nothing to do with the class war from above,12 of the kind that the Buffets talk about. Now: one might ask, what is left of the Marxist approach to class? In contrast to class theories that stress gradational and occupational aspects and that treat class in terms of cultural identity, and so on, and in contrast to scholars who say class is not important or is even dying, two influential bodies of theorizing, which calls itself Marxist, have emerged: Analytical Marxism and Post-structuralist or Anti-essentialist Marxism (including a body of literature known as labour geography and working class studies). These two bodies of thinking emphasize the existence of class and say that class has some importance. They are critical not just of non – Marxist thinking but also ‘traditional’ Marxism. One may be critical of these two bodies of Marxist theorizing but one cannot ignore them at all.13 In fact, when some scholars have said that class analysis is back (McDowell, 2008; Stenning, 2008; Zweig, 2004), and that it has been possible in class analysis to find ‘ways to avoid hostilities between the “old” left and post-structuralism’ (Wills, 2008: 25), they actually refer to Post-structuralist Marxist class theory. And Analytical Marxist theory of class regularly enters into dialogue with and is recognized by non-Marxist class analyst (e.g. Goldthorpe, etc.).

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The Taft-Hartley Act passed in the us is an example of class struggle from above: it restricts organizing capacities of unions and allows state-level right to work legislation. Austerity measures are an example of class struggle from above as well. Analytical Marxism may have come and gone, but Wright’s class theory has endured. Post-structuralism/postmodernism’s heyday may be over and we may be witnessing ‘the retreat from the excesses of postmodernism’ (Fine, 2006: 151), yet the post-structuralisminfluenced class theory is indeed very influential and popular in academic circles. And as I will show, both of these bodies of literature do have something useful to say about class.

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While Ellen Wood’s (1998) excellent Retreat from class focussed on ‘new true socialists’ (Poulantzas and Althusser as well as the founders of the post-­Marxist movement), I will scrutinize a different genre of theorizing which claims to be Marxist. This body of work must be subjected to a critical scrutiny if Marxist theory of class is to be advanced. I will show in this book that the relation of these two bodies of class theorizing to Marxism is one of creative destruction. They seek to reconstruct/reinvigorate Marxist class theory, and their intention may be genuine. But they end up destroying the central tenets of Marxist class theory (and of Marxist theory as such) and creating alternatives which are impoverished alternatives to the Marxism they target. Although they appear to be mutually different (Analytical Marxism is realist while Post-structuralism is anti-realist), they remarkably, share a huge common ground when it comes to their criticisms of Marxism. The two Marxisms in question which are the focus of the book fault traditional Marxist theory on multiple grounds. As represented by Wright, Resnick and Wolff and Gibson-Graham and their followers, these two Marxisms separately, or together, say that Marxism is mistaken to treat capitalism as the dominant system of class and production, ignoring non-capitalist production activities or ignoring exploitation based in unequal access to managerial power and monopolizable skills; that it therefore abstracts from the fact that economy is fragmented which means that there is no collective unified subject of historical change; that it narrows class analysis to a prominent narrative of working-class agency; that it is industry-centric; that it limits class subject positions to workers and capitalists; that it emphasizes revolutionary politics over reformist/redistributive type politics; that it gives far too much attention to property rights/relations, ignoring appropriation of surplus. It is also capitalcentric in that it places capitalism as the defining center of economic activity. These two Marxisms say that classical Marxism has ‘a simple binary notion of capitalism versus socialism’ and abstracts from the ‘possibility of socialism’ within capitalist society, and sees ‘market transactions as such as intrinsically undesirable’. Traditional Marxism is modernist in that it sees class as the central contradiction of the society (Graham et al., 2006: 6). This view of class is outmoded. The Marxist tradition of class theory is also said to be problematic on philosophical ground in that it gives far too much importance to dialectics, and that it has conspired to situate class within a realist epistemology, that it has a determinist approach to social explanation, and an essentialist conception of identity/being’.14 14

This is a part of a broader philosophical criticism of Marxism’s multiple philosophical sins: foundationalism, reductionism, materialism, economism, structuralism, objectivism,­

Introduction

11

Traditional Marxism is also faulted because: it treats capitalist class structure as polarized when in fact there are classes in between workers and capitalists;­it abstracts from the fact that the propertyless people need not be exploited people; that capitalist relations are regulated by state policies and unions and cannot be reduced to capitalists interests; it assumes that class conflict happens between two homogenously organized class-forces and ignores alliances between classes, segments of classes, and above all, contradictory class locations (which are neither capitalists nor workers); it is too abstract to understand concrete problems (e.g. individual lives in concrete situations); it regards socialism as a society within which the working class is the ‘ruling class’ and it regards socialism as the only possible alternative to capitalism. For these Marxisms, 1917 was a great mistake: ‘attempts at revolutionary ruptures with capitalism in backward, non-industrialized countries would ultimately fail to accomplish their positive objectives’, and that ‘the collapse of Communist states is not a refutation of Marxism; it is at most a refutation of Leninist voluntarism, of the belief that by revolutionary will and organizational commitment it is possible to build socialism on inadequate material foundations’. (Wright, 1993). Given all these problems: one cannot go back to the ‘confident assurances of Marxism as a comprehensive paradigm of everything’. Although traditional Marxism does provide some insights, its reconstruction is essential (Wright, 1993; 2015). The ‘a priori belief in the primacy of class in social explanations needs to be replaced with ‘a more open stance in exploring the causal importance of class’ (ibid.). The image of two big classes locked in a big fight is outdated.15 Analytical and post-structuralist Marxists share many of their criticisms of traditional Marxism with non-Marxists and with Marxists who may not subscribe to Analytical and post-structuralist philosophies, such as David Harvey or even Daniel Bensaid or Leo Panitch, etc. One of these criticisms is that traditional Marxism treats capital-labour contradiction as the central contradiction, class is the central contradiction and the most powerful social-cleavage. Consider Daniel Bensaid. He recognizes class but not as the central contradiction: Still, the capital/labour relationship is a central one within contemporary societies. On the other hand, I wouldn’t use the term ‘main conflict’ since

15

universalism, teleologism, instrumentalism, Eurocentrism, phallocentrism, and essentialism (see Aronson, 1995; Geras, 1990; Eagleton, 2011 for a discussion on these sins). This is quite in line with Foucault (1990), who wrote this in History of sexuality: ‘there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead there is a plurality of resistances’ (95–96).

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it tends to reduce the other contradictions to a ‘secondary’ place. Rather, there are a series of contradictions that do not fall within the province of the same temporality (the same historical scale), but which are closely intertwined (or ‘overdetermined’ by the prevailing logic of capital, to borrow a term from Althusser’s lexicon): gender (or sex) relations; the relationship between nature and human society; and the relationship between the individual and the collective. The real problem is one of linking these contradictions together. bensaid, 2006; para 31

And like Bensaid, David Harvey, who has made enormous contribution to our understanding of the geographical character of capitalist accumulation, also says: ‘the labour-capital contradiction … is not … a primary contradiction to which all other contradictions are in some sense subservient’. (Harvey, 2014: 68; italics added). Harvey then draws the conclusion that the working class will not play the vanguard role assigned to it by classical Marxism but it will be a part of a larger force. This is reminiscent of Gorz’s (1982) Farewell to the working class, the kind of work that was produced when the working class in France and elsewhere was rising in revolt: ‘Any attempt to find the basis of the Marxist theory of the proletariat [as a revolutionary vanguard] is a waste of time’ (p.  21). S­ imilarly, Panitch says ‘the working class as the agency of socialist transformation needs to be problematized’ (Panitch and Gindin, 2015: 16; italics in o­ riginal) and that ‘By the end of the twentieth century, the historic defeats suffered by both socialists and trade unionists over the previous decades meant’ that ‘the proletarian identification with socialism had in fact atrophied’ and that ‘the notion of “the class itself” had become increasingly problematic’ and indeed that the idea of the working class conquering state power and u ­ sing it to c­ onstruct a class-less society is a worn-out concept (Panitch and Gindin, 2015: 16–17; 19). The views of Analytical Marxism, poststructuralist Marxism, and of the type of scholars such as Harvey, Bensaid, Panitch, etc. are, in many ways, c­ ompatible with the autonomist type thinking as well. Lazzarato, from the ­autonomist group said, says that the production of wealth exceeds the c­ apital-labour ­relationship, and one implication of this is that the logic of finance now functions according to the majoritarian principle of opinion and not according to the principle of exploitation’ and this fact ‘blurs the dividing lines between classes by establishing new divisions between those who ­profit and those who suffer from the accumulation of capital (Lazzarato, 2007: 100). In other words, what all this shows is that even if those who call themselves Marxists talk about class and capitalism, and even if they have made useful

Introduction

13

contributions to class theory (and they all have), they are skeptical of the power of class and the working class that traditional Marxism had assigned to these categories. It is paradoxical that there is a general lack of an interest in a materialist dialectical class analysis, which gives primacy to class and to the power of the working class to lead anti-capitalist struggle and to construct a genuinely humane and democratic society, when there is a class war going on, within every country and internationally, in the form of austerity measures, attack on wages and living standards and on democratic rights of the masses, and imperialist onslaught against the weaker regions of the world. It is also remarkable that while the control of the capitalist class over means of production and subsistence is so complete, when the profit motive is so pervasive, when the global working class is subjected to heightened level of exploitation and is even dispossessed of its right to sell its labour power freely, when the level of wages is so abysmally low and the insecurity of employment is so palpably visible, when the working class remains alienated from any control over the process of production and exchange, and when the authoritarian tendencies of capitalist states even in so-called democracies are so evident everywhere, when right-wing elements within the bourgeoisie are turning fascistic or making use of fascistic forces to weaken and undermine working class power, when all these things are happening, what has been a tool to understand the world in a rigorous manner and point to a viable, if difficult, political project, this tool – class theory in what is pejoratively called traditional Marxism – has been under such a vicious intellectual attack that is sometimes veiled and sometimes not so. The attack on class theory and on the working class and the attack on Marxism seem to be going on hand in hand. The current intellectual climate in radical circles is indeed immensely skeptical of a rigorous theoretical analysis of class whose objective is to understand and change the class-system which is engaged in a class war against the masses, of all genders and races and nationalities. This book is hoped to be a modest response to this intellectual-political conjuncture. Those who deny class and its significance perform a class act, for they deny that from a specific class standpoint. This book is in line with the spirit of these lines written 150 years ago which appear to be describing the current state of affairs very well. Engels said this in his Introduction to Marx’s Wage-labour and Capital: The splitting up of society into a small class, immoderately rich, and a large class of wage-laborers devoid of all property, brings it about that

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this society smothers in its own superfluity, while the great majority of its members are scarcely, or not at all, protected from extreme want. … This condition becomes every day more absurd and more unnecessary. It must be got rid of; it can be got rid of. A new social order is possible, in which the class differences of to-day will have disappeared. engels in marx, 1976: 13

Marx began his inaugural address to the working men’s international association in 1864: It is a great fact that the misery of the working masses has not diminished from 1848 to 1864, and yet this period is unrivaled for the ­development of its industry and the growth of its commerce. In Marx and Engels, 1977b: 11

Written 150 years ago, the last two lines could be said for the working class between the 1970s and 2015! Given the influence of the two Marxisms in class theory and given that their criticisms of traditional Marxism overlap with many of the criticisms made by other types of Marxists and by non-Marxists, it is important to ask: to what extent can these theories of class deal with, and respond to, the arguments against Marxist class theory, and to respond to the current political-­economic situation? If Marx and other classical writers were to articulate their ideas about class in a systematic way, and if they were to respond to what has been said about class from within these two Marxisms, what would they say? Analytical and Post-structuralist Marxisms are critical of the power of the proletariat in fighting capitalism and establishing socialism. To the extent that p ­ olitical hegemony of the proletariat as a new ruling class in the post-capitalist transitional society is defensible, one should ask: what kind of class theory is presupposed by that idea? What is to be done to address these questions and to respond to the current intellectual-political conjuncture mentioned earlier is this: a careful articulation of ideas about class in the Marxist tradition. Marx’s ideas have routinely been misrepresented and distorted, when not caricatured outright, by commentators, academic and otherwise, hostile to Marxism. Accordingly, as a recent article in Science & Society says:16 16

Published since 1936, Science & Society is the longest continuously published journal of Marxist scholarship, in any language, in the world. It has been an outlet for many articles on class theory and related issues that respect Marxist principles of dialectics and ­materialism, and that refuses to shun Marxist ideas of the 20th century that were developed in the context of, and that contributed to, 1917.

Introduction

15

one essential and unavoidable task for scholars, intellectuals and activists sympathetic to Marxism consists in the need to revisit and rearticulate Marx’s concepts, theses and views that have been misrepresented and, when appropriate, to argue for their defensibility today. llorente, 2013: 536–537

The book aims to conduct this task, albeit in a preliminary way.17 The defense of Marxist theory today is no easy task, and it never was. For many scholars who call themselves Marxists, let alone non-Marxists, Marxism’s edge has been blunted by the collapse of Soviet Union signifying the negation of 1917. Because 1989 happened, so the ideas that contributed to 1917 must have little use, it is often said. Lenin and his intellectual legacy is more or less useless. While these Marxists talk about Marx a bit, they, more or less completely, shun the Marxist tradition as developed in the 20th century around Lenin’s work. One of the intentions of this book is precisely to use the ideas that contributed to 1917: the ideas of not only Marx and Engels but also Lenin and Trotsky about class. Marxism cannot be equated to Marx’s thinking, even if doing so might appear a little flattering to the ghost of Marx. I firmly believe that Lenin and his legacy (as manifested in the ideas of Trotsky, for example) is an extension of ideas of Marx and Engels. Leon Trotsky, a very crucial figure who sought to uphold and develop Lenin’s legacy in the last century and who consistently fought against Stalinist (and social-democratic) distortion of Marxist theory and practice and who has inspired some of the best Marxist thinking in the contemporary world, says this: The straight road [to Marx] becomes increasingly difficult, for a longer and longer period now separates the rising generation from the genius of those who founded scientific socialism, Marx and Engels. Leninism is the highest embodiment and condensation of Marxism for direct revolutionary action in the epoch of the imperialist death agony of bourgeois society. trotsky, 1973: 155

The way to Marx – or at least, a most important road to Marx – is through Lenin. Surely, any discussion of Lenin’s ideas without them being rooted in Marx and Engels is unimaginable. But a Marxism without the Lenin legacy is an utterly impoverished Marxism. The book seeks to combine Marx’s central contribution (political economy of capitalist class society) with Lenin’s thinking about

17

It is preliminary relative to the enormity of the task that is nothing but overwhelming.

16

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class consciousness and class politics. One cannot exist without another. Each is incomplete without another. It is simply wrong to portray Lenin merely as a strategist and not a theoretician. One cannot blame a dead person for not seeing things that happened after his/her death. With respect to massive class differentiation fuelled by commercialization in rural areas which produced some excellent theoretical ideas about class, the imperialist form of capitalism, the various forms of working class struggle, including institutionalized reformism (e.g. social democracy and bourgeois trade unionism), and so on, the ideas developed in the Lenin legacy were something that Marx would feel proud of. Underlying the intention in this book to combine Marx and Engels’ (politicaleconomic) ideas with the Leninist legacy (in class politics), while maintaining a constantly critical attitude towards all of them,18 as a part of the single framework is the idea that class theory and political economy are internally related. The book goes beyond presenting a critique of influential bodies of class theorizing. It aims to present an alternative theoretical discussion on class to what the Analytical Marxism and Post-structuralist Marxisms offer. Class theory presented here is materialist, dialectical, and internationalist. In terms of the commitment to dialectics, the discussion is informed by the principles of internal relations and contradictory character of reality. Class is seen at multiple geographical scales, with the ultimate primacy given to the international. Taking a materialist approach to class entails an exploration of how it is that the abstract mechanisms of wealth production and crisis-prone accumulation, etc. further and/or inhibit the interests of antagonistically related classes, and shape – and are shaped by – the potential/actual class consciousness and class struggle. Class theory is, in many ways, political economy from the vantage point of class antagonisms.19 Political economy without class theory suffers from the perils of objectivism that talks about historical necessities without considering class antagonisms, while class theory without political economy can suffer from the perils of sociologism, politicism, voluntarism, and indeed reformism.20

18

19 20

This does not mean at all that the book does not talk about Marx and Engels’ views on class politics or Leninist legacy’s views on political economy mechanisms underlying class relations. Therefore it rejects the idea that ‘class theory will deem to diverge most noticeably from the tradition of accumulation theory’ (Gibson-Graham et al., 2001: 13). This point is explained in Chapters 6 and 7.

Introduction

17

A dialectical-materialist theory of class must assert the primacy of class. There is class. And there are things other than class. Class is the primary determinant of things such as whether we will live a decent, materially comfortable life with dignity and self-respect, whether we will have democratic rights, whether we will live in a society without discrimination on the basis of gender and race, and so on. Societies differ. Places differ. And there are differences between time periods. These differences can be described in terms of their political histories, cultures, level of economic development, etc. But they have a common (explanatory) basis: they are all class systems, the functioning and development of which can be subjected to an objective analysis which points to class exploitation as the essence of all these societies. All existing nationalscale societies are class societies. They are dominantly capitalist-class societies. I will assert what Julie Graham (1988: 62) pejoratively calls the Marxist illusion that class is the fundamental ground reality rather than one among many processes that affect our lives. And contra Corbridge (1993: 451; 460), I will assign a privileged position to class and the economic. Class is the dominant relation. But it is not the only social relation with potent effect on our lives. As recent research suggests (Anderson, 2010), for Marx, class was central, but ‘centrality did not mean univocality or exclusivity’, because class intersects at a concrete level, within a totality, with race and other relations (p. 244). I will defend the primacy of class, but I do so in a manner in which non-class relations such as those of race and gender are taken very seriously indeed. This is not only because dominance does not mean exclusivity but also because exploited classes suffer the most because of racial and gender oppression. It is not only important to stress non-class difference (e.g. race and gender divisions) within the totality of class. It is also important to stress how the totality of class is reproduced through intra-class differences. Class is very much about power. This is power not for its own sake, not in the Foucauldian (1990) sense, but power in the material sense: power in the sphere of exchange and production and distribution, and in the sphere of the overall management of the common affairs of society as a whole, including the exercise of coercive mechanisms. The capitalist class has power over property, the ways in which property is used in the workplace and at the level of society as a whole. The working class does not have power, or has much reduced power, in these areas. It is power for material gain. To talk about class is to talk about the unity of economic processes/relations and political power, especially at the level of large groups. Class is primarily a relation rooted in production, exchange, and property relations, and it is not primarily a subject position or the world of experience of the working class. Class analysis is about how more general mechanisms that

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shape conditions of life of specific groups of people defined in terms of their relations to property and to production, and how these mechanisms benefit one class a lot more than another class. Class is about the unity of productive forces and social-class divisions which provide the framework within which that development happens, sometimes enabled, sometimes constrained. To be defended also is the idea that property relations and attendant accumulation process shape (enable and constrain) consciousness and collective action, and are shaped, by the latter. The main point of class analysis as undertaken here is not to show how many classes a society is split into (with their identities), engaged in their local struggles or who receives how much of surplus product from whom or how some groups of people are able to increase their share of social product by putting pressure on property owners and the government, although all of these are not irrelevant. As Marx himself (Marx and Engels, 1982: 64) acknowledges, ‘no credit is due to me for discovering either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them’. The point of class analysis rather is to (a) uncover how class as a relation and as a process is dialectically intertwined with the development of productive forces, and production and accumulation of wealth and surplus product, (b) determine how class is the fundamental cause of – a necessary condition for – major world problems, and (c) see that the struggle of the masses in capitalist class society points to the need for, and under appropriate conditions, will produce proletarian rule,21 that is required to usher in a classless, democratic, humane society at multiple geographical scales, including the international. The book has 11 main chapters, apart from the introduction and the conclusion. Chapters 2–3 respectively discuss class theories of Analytical Marxism and Post-structuralist Marxism, the two most influential theorises of class in Marxism (and beyond).22 Chapter 4 is a detailed critique of these 21 22

The proletarian rule itself is a form of class struggle (as Lenin stressed in State and Revolution) (see Tabak, 2000). ‘Marxism’ is often used in the singular. However, existing literature makes use of many labels for Marxism, among which there are similarities and connections as well as very important tensions. These include (and this is a very limited list): Orthodox Marxism; Neo-Marxism; Structuralist Marxism; Hegelian Marxism; Political Marxism; Value-form Marxism; Ecological Marxism; Analytical Marxism; Rational Choice Marxism; NeoMalthusian Marxism; Neo-Smithian Marxism; Autonomist Marxism; Leninist Marxism; Revolutionary Marxism; Social democratic Marxism; Monthly Review Marxism; Overdeterminist/anti-essentialist/Post-structuralist Marxism; Post-Marxism; Geographical Marxism (historical geographical materialism); Sociological Marxism; Anti-racist Marxism;­Feminist Marxism; Frankfurt School Marxism; Regulation School Marxism;

Introduction

19

theories (and of some other related Marxist ideas, including of Harvey). I will show that while these theories keep the embers of class talk alive, their views on class are intellectually inadequate and politically unacceptable, so there is a need for return to the basics, i.e. Marxism. This is the Marxism, as Chapter 5 goes on to show, that has four components – a dialectical-material philosophy, a historical materialist social theory, a critical political economy of wealth production and exchange, and political practice aimed the abolition of class and the construction of a humane democratic society. And this is the Marxism which is rooted in a critical appropriation of ideas of Marx and Engels and Lenin and Trotsky. Chapter 5 lays out the philosophical basis for Marxist class theory, including a discussion of basic philosophical principles. It strongly argues for a class theory that is materialist and that deploys a fullblown dialectical philosophy as advanced by Marx, Lenin and recent writers. This includes full attention to internal relations and to the multiple levels of generality as a mode of abstraction as developed by Bertell Ollman, a preeminent Marxist philosopher of our time. The chapter argues that a philosophical position that is fully dialectical and materialistic will compel a thinker to ask questions about the class character of society, even if there is no oneto-one correspondence between philosophy and theoretical practice. In the light of the philosophical discussion in Chapter 5, a trans-historical theory of class in presented in Chapter 6, which includes two themes: what economic, discursive and political qualities are common to all forms of class society, and in what ways are pre-capitalist forms of class society different from the Libertarian Marxism; Liberation Theology Marxism; Existential Marxism; and Cultural Marxism. And then there are regional traditions of Marxism (regional Marxisms): AustroMarxism; Indian Marxism; Soviet/Russian Marxism; Western Marxism; British Marxism; French Marxism; American Marxism; Latin American Marxism; Asian Marxism; Italian Marxism; Anglo-Saxon Marxism; Japanese Marxism; African Marxism; and Chinese Marxism. My view of Marxism is a Marxism without a pre-fix or without any qualifier, and it refers to the ideas developed by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg, and by others who have developed their ideas, more or less. The vocabulary of the Marxism I talk about includes: private property, capitalist private property, commodity, exploitation, accumulation, subsumption of labour, economic crisis, classes, imperialism, revolution, political hegemony of the proletariat, socialism and so on. This Marxism is a critique not only of conservative and liberal thought but also a critique of Stalinism, trade unionism, socialdemocracy, bourgeois nationalism, and, philosophically speaking, of all varieties of idealism, methodological individualism, and undialectical thinking (I explain what I mean by Marxism in Chapter 2 of Das, 2014, entitled ‘Mapping the Marxist Critique of Society: Or, What Really is Marxism?’).

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­capitalism form? As well, a preliminary argument is made to widen the conceptualization of what class means to include state-class relation, rather than treating them as separate categories which then interact. The remainder of the book deals with the capitalist form of class society and is informed by the critiques of the influential Marxist class theories, and by the philosophical discussion on class theory and by the trans-­historical ideas about class, as presented in Chapters 4–6. Chapter 7, dominantly based in Marx’s political economy, talks about capitalism as a class relation, based in a complex articulation of exchange relations, property relations and control over production of value and surplus value. It deals with capitalist class relation at two ontological levels: at the level of relations/mechanisms (these include labour process encompassing production and appropriation of value and surplus value), and at the level of the effects produced by those, and experienced by the different classes. These effects include miserable conditions that the working class experiences. Chapter 8 is a continuation of Chapter 7. It talks about capitalism as a class relation from the vantage point of the much-neglected subsumption of labour, and with an eye towards the international aspect of capitalism (including the nature of capitalism in the global periphery under imperialism). This chapter, which seeks to move class theorizing beyond its advanced-country focus, argues, among other things, that the most general form of capitalist class relation is the formal subsumption of labour (i.e. exploitation of labour on the basis of long hours and low wages), and this regime of exploitation with which capitalist class relation began is an ongoing and continuous affair. It is the dominant form of capitalist class relation in the periphery under the influence of imperialism, and it coexists with real subsumption of labour in imperialist countries. Chapter 9 deals with the idea that the state-society relation is a form of relation between basic classes, that the capitalist state is a form of the power of capitalist class, even if it may have some autonomy from time to time. It argues that the working class is not only economically exploited and politically dominated in the workplace but also is it politically dominated and oppressed at the societal level. This is in the sense that it lacks effective control over the coercive mechanisms that the state wields on behalf of the capitalist class, and therefore the working class cannot use the capitalist state in its own interests. Chapter 10 talks about class consciousness, and much of the chapter is based on a close reading of Capital vol. 1. Given that society is a class society, its consciousness must be shaped by the class contradiction that defines that society. So there is a bourgeois consciousness, and there is working class consciousness. And the working class consciousness has a spontaneous form and a more developed form, although in a concrete case, a section of the working

Introduction

21

class will have sparks of both. The chapter talks about the conditions shaping the different forms of working class consciousness, and how in particular, it is shaped by capitalist class relation and the state. Chapters 11–12 talk about class struggle. Chapter 11 begins with a distinction between class struggle from above and class struggle from below. Class struggle from above is the kind of class struggle that the Warren Buffets in the us and the Tories in England talk about: class struggle on the part of the capitalist class and its state (including austerity measures). The class struggle from below is the working class struggle. It comes in more spontaneous forms: trade union (type) struggle. The trade union struggle in turn comes in both economic form (e.g. demanding a rise in wages from private employers) and political form (e.g. demanding a pro-worker legislation). Chapter 12 presents a Marxist critique of trade union struggle, which is often taken to be the only, or the main form, of working class struggle. It then discusses working class struggle proper: struggle to abolish wage-slavery or class relation itself. Deploying arguments from Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, this chapter defends the idea that revolution is the highest form of class struggle, that the proletariat, and not the petty bourgeois (old or new), is the consistently revolutionary force against capitalism, and that it is the revolutionary vanguard and must lead all other exploited and oppressed groups (e.g. small-scale self-employed producers). The proletariat must replace/‘transform’ the current state and achieve political hegemony, including having access to the coercive mechanisms of the state it controls, to completely undermine the current bourgeois dictatorship and to establish classlessness and democracy which, initially, may be the democracy for the majority of the humanity, and eventually, democracy for the entire humanity. The final chapter provides a summary of the arguments and re-asserts the strategic implications of the class theory as presented in the book.

chapter 2

Analytical Marxist Theory of Class There are diverse ways of defining the contours of Marxist theory. Some scholars distinguish what they call deterministic (or scientific) Marxism from ­voluntarist-humanistic Marxism, while others draw the line between what they call vulgar Marxism and non-reductionist Marxism (Wright, 1993: 17). These schemas analyse Marxism in terms of its epistemological/methodological commitments. In contrast, Erik Olin Wright’s preferred version of Marxism is Analytical Marxism, according to which a Marxist should be free to use ideas and methods from non-Marxist fields (e.g. neo-classical economics, analytical philosophy, etc.) (See Mayer, 1994). As laid out by Wright (1994: 181–182), there are four attributes of Analytical Marxism: commitment to conventional scientific norms, emphasis on systematic conceptualization, explication of the steps and links between concepts within the theory, and importance given to the intentional actions of individuals. For Analytical Marxists, Marxism has no distinctive methodology; it makes use of all available bourgeois methods and techniques (Wright, 1994: 191). Marxism should be identified in terms of precisely-defined substantive nodes or themes (Wright, 1993; Wright et al., 1992). These nodes are (explained later in the chapter): Marxism as class emancipation, Marxism as class analysis, and Marxism as class-history. Analytical Marxism addresses questions that traditional Marxism has asked (e.g. relation between class structure and class consciousness). But its answers may not be (exactly) those that are given in that tradition. Analytical Marxism is committed to values of freedom, equality and dignity, and to democratic socialism as a vehicle for achieving these (Wright, 1994: 192). At the heart of much analytical Marxist work is the problem of class. One thorny problem in class analysis, whether Marxist or not, has been that of the middle class which complicates class analysis: a given society has classes which are placed between the basic classes such as landlords and peasants, or capitalists and labourers. Previous work on the problem of the middle class has assumed that a given micro location within the class structure (i.e. a location filled by an individual) has to be in one class only. Thus the middle class is treated as part of the working class (a new working class), part of the petty bourgeoisie (a new petty bourgeoisie) or as an entirely new class in its own right (a professional-managerial class).1 Wright considers this assumption 1 The concept of class relation has a property or ownership relation and a possession or control relation. In Wright’s early work, these two relations, respectively, are about exploitation © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004337473_003

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problematic, so he asks: why is it not possible for some class locations – jobs actually performed by individuals – to be simultaneously located in more than one class? Managers, for example, could be viewed as simultaneously capitalists and workers: as capitalists insofar as they dominate the labour of workers and control the operation of production process, and as workers insofar as they do not own the means of production and sell their labour-power to capitalists and are dominated by capitalists (1989a: 4)? But then in this thinking, the concept of contradictory locations within the structure of class relations come to rest almost exclusively on relations of domination rather than on exploitation, which remain in background rather than being a constitutive element of the class structure (ibid.: 5). The marginalization of exploitation undermines claims that classes have ‘objective’ interests; after all, one may ask: what objective interest can possibly a dominating class have by virtue of dominating another class? Besides, all the class categories, in his previous work, are ‘either situated firmly within capitalist relations (bourgeoisie, managers, workers) or in contradictory locations involving basically precapitlist relations (semiautonomous employees, the petty bourgeoisie, small employers)’. This sort of class analysis of capitalist society cannot shed light on the analysis of postcapitalist classes (Wright, 1989a: 7). Unafraid to revise his own ideas as ever, Wright, in more recent times, has come up with what he calls an exploitation-centric view of class theory, and finally an integrated class theory from the Analytical Marxist position. This ambitious theory uses a cluster of concepts: social relations of production, class-exploitation, class interests, class structure, class consciousness, class practices, class formations, class-alliances, and class struggle. Unequal distribution of productive assets results in the exploitation by the owners of these assets of the non-owners. In any given society, there will be multiple forms of exploitation because there are multiple types of assets (land, capital, etc.). As well, a given person may be both an exploiter (because she controls a given asset) and exploited (because she does not control another asset). Social relations of production and of exploitation give rise to class structures. Class structure is the structure of social relations (of exploitation) that generates a matrix of exploitation-based interests, and class structures can vary in time and domination. Managers occupy a capitalist location within relations of control by virtue of being able to dominate workers, but they had a working class location within ownership relations because they have to sell labor power to capitalists (Wright, 1989d: 303). Experts were seen as being petty bourgeois (as they have direct control over their own labor process) but also being in the working class as they have to sell labor power to an employer in order be able to perform their labor process. Thus their contradictory class location combine elements of capitalism and petty commodity mode of production (ibid.).

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and place. Class-exploitation, which exists by virtue of class relations within a class structure, gives rise to class interests which are antagonistic, so classes engage in class struggle, often through an alliance of classes or class fractions, in order to meet their objective class interests. Wright’s aim is to arrive at a more concrete class structure than ‘a simple two-class model of traditional Marxism’ in order to shed light on the concrete aspects of capitalist societies: how a specific society changes over time, how societies are different in terms of concrete class structures, and how the concrete class structure of a country influences the lives of the individual both in terms of the material welfare and consciousness (1989d: 277–278; 323). His theory is also driven by a desire to understand (a) class relations in multiple forms of post-capitalist society2 and (b) the possibility of coalitions between segments of the middle class and the working class in existing capitalist societies for radical democratic and socialist projects, the kind of coalitions, which cannot be understood via a simple, abstract, polarized model (Wright, 1989d: 270–272). In the production of more concrete concepts, the middle class looms large because it poses difficulties in rendering concrete the more abstract concepts of mode of production and because of its salience in micro level processes that affect class formation (Wright, 1989d). The remainder of the chapter is divided into 6 sections. The first two sections discuss, respectively, the main conceptual components of Wright’s Analytical Marxist theory of class, and the inter-connections among these concepts. The third section talks about the political implications of Wright’s class theory. The fourth section deals with the conceptual advantages of this approach. The fifth section looks at the relation between his class theory and his social theory. The final section provides a summary of the chapter. A critical evaluation of Analytical Marxist theory of class is provided in Chapter 4. 1

Main Concepts in Analytical Marxist Theory of Class

Social Relations of Production In every society, production requires the deployment of a range of assets or resources (‘factors of production’) such as: land, raw materials, labor power, tools and machines, and information (Wright, 2005: 9). People participating

2 For Wright, what traditional Marxism calls socialism is not the only possibility out of capitalism.

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in production have different kinds of powers and rights3 over the use of these assets (with their varying technical and physical properties) and over the results of their use (ibid.). These rights and powers, along with the technical and physical properties of the resources, co-determine the ways in which the resources are combined and used in production. The sum total of these rights and powers constitutes the ‘social relations of production’4 (Wright, 2005: 10). The latter are relations of power in that they involve control and regulation of the activities of people engaged in production. Class Relations as Relations of Exploitation The social relations of production, which are relations of power in the realm of production, can be described as class relations when the rights/powers of people over resources that are deployed in production are unequally distributed, i.e. when some people have greater rights/powers with respect to productive resources than others and therefore control the income that accrues from the deployment of such resources.5 Class relations are a form of social relations of production. Class relations are relations of exploitation (and domination). Exploitation has a precise meaning: it exists on the basis of three principles (Wright, 2005: 23): 3 The term ‘“powers” over productive resources means ‘effective control over the use and disposition of the resources in question’. The term ‘rights’ means that ‘these powers are viewed as legitimate and enforced by the state’. The term property rights ‘means “effective powers over the use of property enforced by the state”’. Generally, ‘in a stable system of production relations there is a close connection between rights and powers, but it is possible that people have effective, durable control over resources without that control being recognized in formal legal terms as a property right.’ (Wright, 2005: 9). Presumably, customs can take the place of legal rules. 4 The ‘rights and powers over resources are attributes of social relations, not descriptions of the relationship of people to things as such’ (Wright, 2005: 10). For example, ‘to have rights and powers with respect to land… defines one’s social relationship to other people with respect to the use of the land and the appropriation of the fruits of using the land productively’ (ibid.; italics added), and not people’s relationship to land. 5 ‘The rights and powers in question are not defined with respect to the ownership or control of things in general’ (e.g. televisions sets used at home), ‘but only of resources or assets insofar as they are deployed in production’. A capitalist is not someone who merely owns machines. ‘A capitalist is someone who owns machines, deploys those machines in a production process, hires owners of labor power to use them, directs the process by which the machines are used to produce things and appropriates the profits from the use of those machines’. This implies that: ‘To count as a class relation it is therefore not sufficient that there be unequal rights and powers over the sheer possession of a resource. There must also be unequal rights and powers over the appropriation of the results [e.g. income] of that use’ (Wright, 2005: 10).

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(1) The inverse interdependent welfare principle: The material welfare of exploiters causally depends upon the material deprivations of the exploited, thus meaning that the interests of actors within such relations are not merely different, they are antagonistic: the realization of the interests of exploiters imposes harms on the exploited. (2) The exclusion principle: This inverse interdependence of the welfare of exploiters and exploited depends upon the exclusion of the exploited from access to certain productive resources. (3) The appropriation principle: Exclusion generates material advantage to exploiters because it enables them to appropriate the labor effort of the exploited. Exploitation is thus a diagnosis of the process through which the inequalities in incomes (and other conditions of living) are generated by inequalities in rights and powers over productive resources: ‘the inequalities occur, in part at least, through the ways in which exploiters, by virtue of their exclusionary rights and powers over resources, are able to appropriate surplus generated by the effort of the exploited’ (Wright, 2005: 23–24). If the first two of these principles are present, but not the third, what exists is not economic exploitation but ‘nonexploitative economic oppression’. In the latter, ‘the welfare of the advantaged group is at the expense of the disadvantaged, and this inverse relationship is itself based on the ownership and control over economic resources’. However ‘there is no appropriation of labor effort, no transfer of the fruits of labor from one group to another, so the privileged social category does not itself need the excluded category’ (2005: 24; italics added).6 ‘Economic exploitation is [then] a specific form of economic oppression’ (Wright, 1993: 32). Common to both is the fact that ‘the inequalities in question are rooted in ownership and control over productive resources’. Exploitation is linked to another concept, domination, although there is

6 ‘Consider, for example, the contrast between the treatment of indigenous people by European settlers in North American and in Southern Africa. In both places the material welfare of the white settlers was secured through a process of exclusion of the indigenous people from access to the land. The welfare of the settlers was therefore causally linked to the deprivations of the indigenous people ….The two cases differ sharply, however, on the third criterion. In South Africa white settlers depended significantly on the labor effort of indigenous people, first as tenant farmers and farm laborers and later as mineworkers. In North America the European settlers did not rely [generally] on the labor of Native Americans. This meant that in North America when resistance by Native Americans to their dispossession from the land was encountered by white settlers, a strategy of genocide could be pursued.’ (Wright, 2005: 24).

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a ­difference between them. While domination refers to the ability to control the activities of others, exploitation refers to the acquisition of economic benefits from the labour of those who are dominated. All exploitation therefore involves some kind of domination. But not all domination involves exploitation.7 Domination can increase the intensity of exploitation. For example, owning a resource means that one has the power to prevent another person from taking it and/or using it (Wright, 2005: 25; 1989a: 13). As well, employers dominate when they exercise their power to hire/fire workers and when they subject the workers to forms of subordination in the workplace such as surveillance and threats, in order to extract maximum labor effort (Wright, 2005: 25). The combined process of exploitation and domination ‘defines the central features of the structured interactions within class relations’, although class is less about domination and more about exploitation (Wright, 2005: 25). Reconstructing Roemer’s (1982) ideas about exploitation,8 Wright argues that inequalities in the distribution of productive resources are sufficient to account for transfers of labor surplus9 from those who control assets to those who do not.10 Whether a person is exploited is diagnosed on the basis of ­withdrawal rule in game theory: if a person is better off leaving a society with her/his share of the total asset of the society of a given type, then she/he is 7

8 9

10

‘The concept of domination does not itself imply any specific interest of actors. Parents dominate small children, but this does not imply that they have intrinsically opposed interests to their children’, unless parents benefit from the labor of their children (Wright, 1989a: 5). Roemer says: ‘I discard entirely the classic Marxist definition of exploitation in terms of surplus labour’ (Roemer, 1989: 11). ‘The conventional idea in the Marxist tradition is that the total social product can be divided into two parts. One part – the necessary product – is the part needed to cover all of the costs of production, including the costs of producing workers (or, as Marxists have traditionally called it, the “value of labour-power”). The surplus, then, is the difference between the total product and the necessary product. The difficulty with this definition comes in when we try to define precisely the “costs of producing labour-power”. If such costs are equated with the empirical wages of employees, then by definition, no employee can be an exploiter. If, however, wages are seen as potentially containing “rents” derived from various kinds of barriers to entry in labour markets, then wages can contain pieces of surplus’ (Wright, 1993: 30). ‘The traditional Marxist concept of exploitation is clearly a special case of the general concept. In Marxian exploitation one class appropriates the surplus labor performed by another class through various mechanisms. The income of the exploiting class comes from the labor performed by the exploited class. There is thus a straightforward causal linkage between the poverty and effort of the exploited and the affluence of the exploiter. The latter benefits at the expense of the former’ (Wright, 1989a: 8).

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exploited. ‘Classes are then defined as positions within the social relations of production derived from these relations of exploitation’ (Wright, 1989a: 13).

Multiple Types of Productive Force and Multiple Forms of Class-Exploitation While unequal distribution of productive assets gives rise to exploitation, it is the case that inequalities in different types of assets specify different systems of exploitation. There are four kinds of productive resources/assets: labour power, physical asset, organizational asset,11 and (monopolizable) skill. These four kinds of asset give rise to four systems of exploitation: feudalism, capitalism, state bureaucratic socialism, and democratic socialism.

Exploitation Based on Unequal Distribution of Labor Power In feudalism, ownership rights over labor power are unequally distribuited: ‘feudal lords have more than one unit, serfs have less than one unit’ (Wright, 1989a: 14).12 The withdrawal rule for feudal exploitation can be specified as the following: ‘leaving the feudal game with one’s per capita share of society’s assets in labor power, namely one unit’ of labor power’.13 Feudal exploitation then is ‘exploitation (transfer of labor) that results from inequalities in the distribution of assets in labor power’(Wright, 1989a: 14–15). The conventional description of feudalism is a society within which the peasants (serfs) are forced 11

12

13

‘The way the production process is organized is a productive resource independent of the expenditure of labor power, the use of means of production, or the skills of the producer. Of course there is an interrelationship between organization and these other assets, just as there is an interdependence between means of production and skills. But organization – the conditions of coordinated cooperation among producers in a complex division of labor – is a productive resource in its own right’ (Wright, 1989a: 16). ‘It is not typical of feudalism for serfs to own no labor power – they are generally not slaves divested of all ownership rights in their own labor power – but they do not have complete effective control over their persons as productive actors, and this is what it means to “own” one’s own labor power assets’ (Wright, 1989a: 14). More accurately: the withdrawal rule is leaving the feudal game with one’s personal assets (rather than one’s per capita share of total social assets). If the game is played, then feudal serfs/peasants will be freed from all obligations based on personal bondage, making them better off, and lords who own serf’s labor power (at least partly) will be worse off (Wright, 1989a: 11). If workers leave the capitalist game with their per capital share of personal asset (their labor power), they will be worse off, however. According to Roemer, when mainstream economists refer to the absence of exploitation under capitalism, they refer to the absence of feudal style exploitation of workers: extraction of surplus based on relations of personal bondage does not exist (Wright, 1989a: 11).

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to work part of each week on the land owned by the lord and are free to work the rest of the week on the land to which they have some kind of customary title. This obligation to work for the landlord means, in effect, that the lord has property rights in the serf; these rights take the form of the right to use the labor of the serf for a part of the week.14

Exploitation Based on Unequal Distribution of Physical and Financial Means of Production In capitalism, and unlike in feudalism, everyone owns one unit of labor power (meaning that the ownership of labour power is democratized). But physical and financial means of production are unequally distributed (as in feudalism). In capitalism, the fundamental contrast is between those who own means of production and those who own labor power, i.e. between capitalists and laborers, respectively, ‘since “owning” is a description of rights and powers with respect to a resource deployed in production’ (Wright, 2005: 10). Typically, the institutional form of capitalist class relations takes the form of ‘capitalists having full ownership rights in the means of production and workers [having] none’ (Wright, 1989a: 18).15 In capitalism, exploitation can be described in the following way: Unlike in feudalism surplus is not directly appropriated from workers in the form of coerced labor. Rather, it is appropriated through market exchanges: workers are paid a wage that covers the costs of production of their labor power; capitalists receive an income from the sale of the commodities produced by workers. The difference in these quantities constitutes the exploitative surplus appropriated by capitalists (1989a: 18).

14

15

‘The empirical manifestation of this unequal distribution of ownership rights over labor power in classical feudalism is the coercive extraction of labor dues from serfs. When corvee labor is commuted to rents in kind and eventually money rents, the feudal character of the exploitation relation is reflected in legal prohibitions on the movement of peasants off the land. The “flight” of a peasant to the city is, in effect, a form of theft: the peasant is stealing part of the labor power owned by the lord (Wright, 1989a: 17–18). Wright says, just as a capitalist factory owner would have the right to have the police retrieve machines stolen from the factory by workers, the feudal lord has the right to use coercive powers to retrieve labor stolen from the manor by the serf. Other possibilities have existed in history. ‘Cottage industries in early capitalism invovled workers owning some of their means of production, but not having sufficient assets to actually produce commodities without the assitance of merchant capitalists. Such workers were still being capitalistically exploited even though there was no formal labor market with wages’ (Wright, 1989a: 18).

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The claim that effective control over physical and monetary assets is a basis of capitalist exploitation amounts to saying this: laborers would be better off (and capitalists would be worse off) if laborers were to withdraw with their per capita share of physical/financial assets (or if the control over these means of production were democratized); and that by virtue of effectively controlling these means of production, laborers would control the socially produced surplus. ‘The withdrawal rule in this case – leaving the game with per capita shares of physical assets – then becomes the formal “test” of whether or not a particular social system involves capitalistic exploitation’ (Wright, 1989a: 11).

Exploitation Based on Unequal Distribution of Organizational Asset ‘The claim that effective control over organization assets is a basis of exploitation’ is to say that ‘nonmanagers would be better off and managers/bureaucrats worse off if nonmanagers were to withdraw with their per capita share of organization assets (or equivalently, if organizational control were democratized); and that by virtue of effectively controlling organization assets, managers/bureaucrats control part or all of the socially produced surplus’ (Wright, 1989a: 17). Organizational exploitation exists in capitalism (and in post-capitalist societies). Even if they own no private property in capitalism, managers can receive a wage which is higher than the cost of production of their managerial labor power16 (Wright, 1989c: 200). This is because they hold strategic jobs involving planning, coordinating, and integrating of productive activities. Even if this extra wage-money is seen as coming from capitalist profits, the fact that such exploitation can exist in the absence of private property lends some support to the claim that they should be treated as a distinct form of exploitation in capitalism (ibid.: 201).

16

About Piketty, Wright (2015a: 61) says this: ‘As Piketty himself points out, to a significant extent, the top managers of corporations have the power to set their own remuneration. This power can be viewed as an aspect of ownership…Because of this, rather than a wage, in the ordinary sense, a significant part of the earnings of top managers should be thought of as an allocation of the firm’s profits to their personal accounts. ceos’ earnings and other compensation should thus be thought of as, in part, a return on capital…It would, of course, be extremely difficult … to figure out how to divide the earnings of top managers into one component that is functionally a return on capital and another that is functionally a wage. The problem is quite similar to dividing self-employment income into a wage component and a capital component, since (as Piketty notes) the income generated by sole proprietors’ economic activity inherently mixes capital and labor’.

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Organization assets are more important in state bureaucratic socialism, a society where property in means of production has been democratized, than in capitalism. Controlling the technical division of labor, including the coordination of productive activities within and across labor processes, becomes a societal task organized at the center (Wright, 1989a: 16). Those who control this  asset are not just firm-level managers. They now include those in charge of the central organs of planning within the state. Exploitation in state bureaucratic socialism is based on bureaucratic power: ‘the control over organization assets defines the material basis for class relations and exploitations’ (Wright, 1989a: 17).17 Exploitation Based on Unequal Distribution of Skills Mere possession of a skill does not generate exploitation, for a highly trained labourer may be receiving an income which reflects the high costs of training. For a skill to be the basis of exploitation, two criteria must be satisfied: (a) ‘it has to be in some sense scarce relative to its demand’, and (b) ‘there must be a mechanism through which individual owners of scarce skills are able to translate that scarcity into higher incomes through their monopolistic control over skills’ (Wright, 1989a: 21).18 There are three mechanisms in which skills can become scarce, resulting in a skill monopoly. 1. Natural monopolization: skills require special talents that are naturally scarce in society. The possessor of scarce skills then has a monopoly over the natural talent, which is ‘a scarce genetic endowment that allows one to acquire skills’ (Wright, 1989c: 194). 2. Social restriction: access to the training needed to develop the skill may be restricted, thus limiting the supply of skilled workers. 3. Certification/credentialization: a certification system may be established that prohibits uncertified people from being employed to use the skill even if they have it (Wright,

17

18

‘This notion of organization assets bears a close relation to the problem of authority and hierarchy. The asset is organization. The activity of using that asset is coordinated decision making over a complex technical division of labor. When that asset is distributed unequally, so some positions have effective control over much more of the asset than others, then the social relation with respect to that asset takes the form of hierarchical authroity. Authority, however, is not the asset as such; organization is the asset and is controlled through a hierarchy of authority’ (Wright, 1989a: 17). ‘The mere possession of enhanced laboring capabilities acquired through training is not sufficient to generate relations exploitation, since the income of such trained labor may simply reflect the costs of acquiring the training. In such cases there is neither a transfer of surplus, nor would the untrained be better off under the game-theory specification of exploitation’ (Wright, 1989a: 21).

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1989a: 21). Exploitation happens by virtue of these three mechanisms because the skilled/certified individual receives ‘an income that is above the costs of production of the skills by virtue of the [artificially created] scarcity of the availability of the skill’ (p. 21; parenthesis added). In other words, the result of scarcity of skills is a monopoly rent component of the wage, and this discretionary income is a form of credential rent (Wright, 1989d: 332). This rent ­component is potentially a form of exploitation. Because labor is non-­ homogenous, some wage-earning labor (e.g. skilled labour) receives the product of the labor effort of other wage-earners (Wright, 1989c: 197). Of course, highly skilled people may be more productive than less skilled people but their ‘higher productivity … does not render the transfer of labour, if it occurs, nonexploitative’ (Wright, 1989c: 194). So: unequal distribution in labour power, alienable assets, and inalienable asset of two types (organization and skill) gives rise, respectively, to feudal exploitation, capitalist exploitation, and two forms of post-capitalist exploitation. And corresponding to each of the four exploitation-generating inequalities of assets, there is a set of basic classes and thus class relation: between lords and serfs in feudalism, bourgeoisie and proletariat in capitalism, managers/experts and workers in post-capitalism (Wright, 1989a: 19) (Table 1). Complexity in Class Relations The simplified, polarized model (serfs vs lords, or capitalists vs workers) captures, at an abstract level, something fundamental about the nature of class relations. Such relations do indeed generate antagonisms of interests that underlie overt conflicts. But in concrete societies located in time and space, class relations are more complex than this abstract model suggests. Two kinds of complexity are especially important. First, in most societies different kinds of class relation – relation of exploitation – coexist and are linked together in various ways such as exchange. This interlinkage is captured in the theory of articulation of modes of production (Wright, 2005: 12).19 In a ­capitalist 19

For example, apart from having more than one unit of labor power, feudal lords ‘may also have more means of production than serfs, more organizational assets, and more productive skills’, so ‘they may be exploiters with respect all these assets as well’. However, ‘What defines the society as “feudal”… is the primacy of the distinctively feudal mechanisms of exploitation’ which would be ‘the primary structural basis of class struggle’. ‘The bourgeois revolutions radically redistributed productive assets in people: everyone, at least in principle, owns one unit. This is what is meant by ‘bourgeois freedoms,’ and in this sense capitalism can be regarded as an historically progressive force. But capitalism raises the second type of exploitation, exploitation based on property relations in means of production, to an unprecedented level’ (Wright, 1989a: 18).

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Analytical Marxist Theory Of Class Table 1

Wright’s theory of multiple forms of class-exploitation (Adapted from Wright, 1989a: 19; 26)

Unequal distribution in Labour power→

Type/mechanism of exploitation

Feudal exploitation by coercive extraction of surplus labor.→ Means of production→ Capitalist exploitation by market exchanges of labour power and other commodities.→ Organization→ State bureaucraticsocialist exploitation by extraction of surplus labor due to hierarchy.→ Monopolizable skills→ Socialist expoitation by negotiated distribution of surplus to experts from workers.→

Basic classes →Lords vs. serfs →Capitalists vs workers

→Managers/bureaucrats vs other workers →Experts and other workers

Note: Principal contradictory locations associated with feudal, capitalist and state-bureaucratic exploitations are: bourgeioise; managers/beureaucrats, and experts.

s­ ociety, different kinds of exploitatve relations have indeed coexisted. This is true about both historical capitalism as well as contemporary capitalism.20 In contemporary capitalism, capitalist exploitation can/does coexist with post-capitalist exploitation based on organizational and skills assets. In 20

‘In the American South before the Civil War, for example, slave class relations and capitalist class relations coexisted. The specific dynamics and contradictions of that society came from the way these distinct principles of class relations were combined. Certain kinds of sharecropping in the United States in the early twentieth century contained striking elements of feudalism, again combined in complex ways with capitalist relations. If we are willing to describe state-bureaucratic ownership of the means production as constituting a distinctive kind of class relation, then many advanced capitalist societies today combine capitalism with such statist class relations. To fully understand the class relations of actual societies, then, requires identifying the ways in which different forms of class relations are combined’ (Wright, 2005: 12).

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contemporary capitalist society, ‘organization assets are generally controlled by managers and capitalists: managers control the organization assets within specific firms under constraints imposed by the ownership of the capital assets by capitalists. Entrepreneurial capitalists directly control both kinds of assets (and probably skill assets as well); pure rentier capitalists (“coupon clippers”) only own capital assets’ (Wright, 1989a: 16). So actually existing capitalism contains two secondary forms of exploitation, i.e. exploitation based on the control over organizational assets and one based on the ownership of monopolized skills (Wright, 1989c: 192), which are subordinated to capitalist exploitation. Therefore, capitalist society is a hybrid society, for “‘capitalist’ – whether in the context of a firm, sector, region or nation, is thus a short-hand for a more cumbersome expression such as “an economic hybrid combining capitalist, statist and socialist power relations within which capitalist relations are dominant” (Wright, 2014a: 65). The second aspect of complexity in class relations is the fact that ‘the category ‘ownership’ consists of a complex set of rights and powers’, creating the possibility that ‘these rights and powers can be broken apart, that they need not form a unitary gestalt’ (Wright, 1993: 24). People’s rights and powers are not ‘one-dimensional property rights’. Some of the rights and powers are held by the ‘owner’ and some are held by other people or collective agencies. Within a given system of production, certain rights can be socialized and others remain private (Wright, 1993: 24). A firm can therefore have a mixed ownership character. There are various ways in which the property rights and powers embodied in the idea of ‘owning the means of production’ are decomposed and redistributed. These include restrictions on workplace practices, union representation on boards of directors, employee stock-options, and delegations of power to managerial hierarchies (Wright, 2005: 13). Such redistribution of rights and powers constitutes a form of variation in class relations, i.e. in classness. Capitalists may own a machine and therefore can use it to generate profit in any way they like. But in reality, they may not have absolute rights on the machine: ‘They can only set them in motion, for example, if the machines satisfy certain safety and pollution regulations imposed by the state’ (Wright, 2005: 13). If capitalists operate in a union setting, they may only be able to hire union members to use the machines. Thus through such mechanisms as state regulations and union restrictions, ‘some dimensions of the property rights in the machines have been transferred from the capitalist to a collective agency’ (ibid.). This also means that ‘Such systems of redistributed rights and powers move class relations considerably away from the simple, abstract form of perfectly polarized relations’ and that the capitalist class structure ‘can vary considerably

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Analytical Marxist Theory Of Class The model of polarized classes and class locations is made more complex by:

Non-capitalist relations*

Mediated relations

Temporal relations

A person’s multiple class locations

Class-fractions

Partial socializations**

*These could refer to: post-capitalist exploitation based on unequal accessto organization and skills, precapitalist class relations (e.g. feudalism), and relations which involve non-exploitation (e.g. the traditional petty bourgeoisie – petty commodity producers, for example – who do not exploit nor are exploited. **This refers to regulation of the capitalists’ use of their own means of production (e.g. machinery) by unions and governments.

Figure 1  Wright’s view on the two-class model and the complexity in capitalist society

depending on the particular ways these rights and powers over productive resources are broken down, distributed and recombined’ (Wright, 2005: 13). This is the case even though the class relations are still capitalist in that capitalists control capital and command profit. In other words, capitalist class society is less polarized than what Wright calls traditional Marxism suggests. And this is not only because those who do not control physical means of production can exploit workers non-capitalistically based on their control over organization and skill, but also because capitalist exploitation can be regulated by workers and governments. Complexity in Class Locations A class relation defines class locations. Class relations are thus analytically prior to class locations.21 Class location is a micro-level concept referring to the location of individuals (and sometimes families) within class relations. ‘Class locations designate the social positions occupied by individuals within ….class relations, not simply an atomized attribute of the person’ (Wright, 2005: 14).22 21

22

Just as the location ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ can only be defined within the social relations we call ‘marriage’, so the definition of class locations presupposes a definition of the social relations that bind them together (Wright, 2006). The idea of ‘social relations’ means that ‘when people go about their lives in the world, when they make choices and act in various ways, their actions are systematically structured by their relations to other people who are also making choices and acting. “Social relation” is a way of talking about the inherently structured inter-active quality of human action. …To say that people make choices and act in structured relations with other choosing/acting individuals leaves open the best way to theorize choosing and acting. There is no implication, for example, that choices are made on the basis of some process

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When one talks about a ‘location’ within a class relation, one situates individuals ‘within structured patterns of interaction among them’ (Wright, 2005: 14). Class locations are basically jobs actually performed by individuals, within the structure of class relations.23 For example, in the capitalist class structure, the central relation is the relation between capital and labor, and from this class relation, one may determine two class locations, capitalists and workers. However, society is more complex than the simple two – class model suggests. For some problems, the two-location model may be satisfactory, but not for other problems. There are two strategies to address the complexity of society. One is to retain the two-location model, and add additional attributes such as variations in working conditions to the analysis that are not treated as complexities in class locations as such.24 Or, one can treat these variations as variations in properties of class locations themselves: that is, to treat these variations as the concrete ways in which ‘rights and powers over economic resources and activities are distributed across locations within relations’ (p. 16).25 Wright has opted

23

24

25

of rational maximization, or even that all actions are consciously chosen. There is also no implication, as methodological individualists would like to argue, that the explanation of social processes can be reduced to the attributes of the individuals choosing and acting. The relations themselves can be explanatory. The concept of social relation being used here, therefore, does not imply rational choice theory or reductionist versions of methodological individualism’ (Wright, 2005: 14). It is only for simplicity that one can ‘refer to social relations as binding together the people within the relation’, but ‘What is related within a social relation is not, strictly speaking, either a set of “positions” or a set of actual people as such, but rather a set of practices [that people engage in]: social relations link practices to each other. The capital-labor relation defines a systematic relation between the practices of capitalists and workers within that relation’ (Wright, 1989d: 302). Wright’s work ‘on class structure has treated class structures of relationally defined ‘locations’ filled by individuals in which a location [is] basically equivalent to a ‘job’ (1989d: 323). The rationale for this is that individual’s material interests are rooted in social relations of production in which their jobs are embedded. ‘Thus, for example, to understand the formation of the subjective experience of people within work we can introduce a set of concrete variations in working conditions – degrees of autonomy, closeness of supervision, levels of responsibility, cognitive complexity of tasks, physical demands of work, promotion prospects, and so on – which are relevant to understanding work experience. These would then be treated as sources of variation in experience among people occupying working class locations within class relations, where working class locations are defined in the simple binary terms of the two-location model’ (Wright, 2005: 15). ‘The degree of authority an employee has over other employees, for example, can be viewed as reflecting a specific form of distribution of the rights and powers over the process of production’ (Wright, 2005: 15).

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for the second strategy, drawing attention to five sources of complexity in the map of class locations (Wright, 2005: 16). Contradictory Locations within Class Relations One source of complexity in class locations is derived from complexity within the class relations themselves, as discussed above. For example, if the rights and powers associated with class relations are really complex bundles of decomposable rights and power, then they can potentially be partially unbundled and reorganized in complex ways. This can generate what he refers to as ‘contradictory locations within class relations’.26 An exploitation-centric view of these locations was discussed earlier in this chapter.27 Using this notion of differentiated mechanisms of exploitation, the ‘middle class’ could be defined as those locations in the class structure which are exploited on one mechanism of exploitation but exploiters on another (Wright, 1993: 30). The exploitation view of ‘middle class’ locations makes the problem of class interests of people occupying these locations much clearer than is the case in alternative views. Their location within class relations is defined by the nature of their material optimizing strategies (what should they do to get what they want, including increasing their level of welfare relative to toil) given the specific kinds of assets they own or control (Wright, 1989a). Historically, the principal forms of contradictory locations will vary depending upon the particular combinations of exploitation relations in a given society. The principal contradictory locations are the bourgeoisie, managers/ bureaucrats, and intellectuals/experts, respectively, under feudalism, capitalism, and state-bureaucratic socialism (Wright, 1989a: 26). The middle class locations of one mode of production becomes the ruling class of the succeeding mode of production (managers-bureaucrats of capitalism will be the new ruling class of state bureaucratic socialism (Wright, 1989d). In feudalism, the critical contradictory location is constituted by the bourgeoisie, which becomes the rising class of the successor mode of production, i.e. capitalism (Wright, 1989a: 26). Within capitalism, the central contradictory location within exploitation relations is constituted by managers and state bureaucrats. The middle 26

27

For Wright, these locations are defined by relations of domination between managers and non-managers or experts and non-experts (in his earlier – i.e. pre-mid-1980s – work) or as a relation of exploitation between these locations as in his later work. To say that someone is in a working-class class location or in a managerial class location is to claim that they are embedded in a set of microlevel interactions within capitalist class relations in which managers and workers can do, and are empowered to do, certain kinds of things (e.g. must sell labour power and obey and give orders, direct the labor process, and so on).

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class people are the wage earners who are organization and/or skill exploiters and who are exploited because they lack control over physical means of production (Wright, 1989c). They will typically hold contradictory interests with respect to the primary forms of class struggle in capitalist society, the struggle between labor and capital: like workers, they are excluded from ownership of the means of production, so they will be anti-capitalist, but they have interests opposed to workers as well, because of their effective control of organization and skill assets. People occupying middle class locations are all wage-earners, are not owners of means of production, and are distinguished by two subordinate relations of exploitation characteristic of capitalist society, which are based on unequal distribution of organization assets and skill/credential assets (Wright, 1989a: 24). Managers/bureaucrats embody a principle of class organization that is quite distinct from capitalism and that potentially poses an alternative to capitalist relations. Their specific class location helps to specify their interests both within the existing capitalist society and with respect to various kinds of alternative games (societies) to which they might want to withdraw. This is particularly true for state managers who, unlike corporate managers, are less likely to have their careers tightly integrated with the interests of the capitalist class. Finally, in state – bureaucratic socialism, the ‘intelligentsia’ broadly defined constitutes the pivotal contradictory location (ibid.: 27). There are also class locations that are neither exploiters nor exploited, that is, people who have precisely the per capita level of the relevant asset. These positions are the ‘traditional’ or ‘old’ middle class of a particular kind of class system. For example, a petty bourgeois, self-employed producer with average capital stock would be neither exploiter nor exploited within capitalist relations (Wright, 1989a: 24). Among the five sources of complexity in identifying class locations (see Figure 1 below), one source is the complexity of locations derived from complexity within the relations themselves, which was just discussed. Other four sources of complexity are:28 the possibility of one person occupying multiple class locations at the same time; the temporal aspects of locations; strata within relations; and relation between families and class relations (Wright, 2005: 16). 28

Wright now moves beyond the treatment of complexity that is created by the problem surrounding the middle class to discuss other complexities, which concern the linkage between classes and individuals-in-jobs (1989d: 323). These new complexities, in turn, may clarify the problem of the middle class.

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Multiple Class Locations of a Person29 Individuals can hold two jobs which are differently located – which are in two locations – within social relations of production. For example, a person can be a manager or a worker in a firm and self-employed in a second job; a factory worker can be also a self-employed; one person’s primary job may be in state employment and secondary job can be petty bourgeois (self-employed). Such people are simultaneously in two class locations. Furthermore, rather than having multiple jobs, many (high-earning) employees own capital in the capital market, or own stocks in the firm in which they work (so they get a return on capital investment). These people ‘occupy a different location in class structure through their jobs and through their investments’ (Wright, 1989d: 325). They do not cease to be ‘in’ working class locations within the class relations of capitalism, but they are not just in those locations: they are simultaneously in two class locations (Wright, 2005: 17; Wright, 1989d: 324). Temporality of Locations The class character of some jobs (locations) is likely to change over time. In some work organizations, for example, most managers – i.e. people occupying managerial location – begin work in non-managerial positions with the full expectation of them eventually moving into managerial positions in future (Wright, 2005: 17). Even though they initially work alongside ordinary workers, their ‘jobs’ are, from the start, connected to managerial careers. Some jobs are embedded in careers, and some careers cross class lines while other jobs do not have these properties (Wright, 1989d: 330). So, two individuals in working class jobs would have different material interests if one is certain to be promoted into a managerial position and the other is not (Wright, 1989d: 329). In the former case, the person is always in the managerial class: she does not move from a non-managerial job to a ‘managerial class’ (Wright, 1989d: 330). For many, however, the future is somewhat uncertain, so a person’s location within class relations can have a certain degree of temporal indeterminacy.

29

‘A class “location” is not “a class”; it is a location-within-relations. The number of such locations within an analysis of class structure, then, depends upon how fine-grained an account is needed for the purposes at hand. For some research questions (e.g. consciousness), a relatively fine-grained differentiation of locations within class relations is desirable…In studies on class compromise, a two-class model would be fine’ (Wright, 2005: 19).

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Many middle-class employees (managers, experts) have a sufficiently high rent component in their wage (i.e. their earnings are above what is needed to reproduce their labour-power). This allows these highly-paid employees to convert, over time, a significant amount of their savings into capital through various kinds of investment (real estate, bonds and stocks) and thus gradually to tie their class interests to those of the bourgeoisie. This does not mean that they necessarily and immediately become capitalists, but rather that their class location assumes an increasingly capitalist character over time. This is very true of managers. Managers are people with organizational abilities and have effective power within production. A purely repressive control over production will not work, so employers need to ensure loyalty and responsible exercise of authority by offering wage increases and opportunities for promotion in the managerial hierarchy. The hierarchically organized incentive structure generates ‘loyalty rents’ in wages of managers. The loyalty rents become so large that they can become full-fledged capitalists through the acquisition of capitalist property. In such cases they cease to occupy contradictory locations within class relations in spite of their normal status as an employee (Wright, 1989d: 339–340). Their class location changes over time.30 There are three temporal issues with respect to professionals. Two have been discussed: they can convert their rent payment into capital, and they can move up the managerial hierarchy. The third issue is the fact that many of them have opportunities for self-employment. They are petty bourgeois shadow class of 30

Managers – and indeed employees in general – in the state raise another issue. They operate within the state, which is responsible for much social production (education, health, etc.). So within a state-based relations of production, there is a dominant class which politically directs appropriation and allocation of surplus, acquired by the state, and there is a subordinate class that directly produces use values within the state, and there are contradictory locations within the state occupied by state managers and bureaucrats who control the activity of state workers while subordinated to the state dominant class (p. 343). As in the case of such groups as housewives and children, state employees may also have mediated relations. State workers occupy mediated locations within the capitalist working class via commodified relations of labour markets, and the state dominant class (the elite) is linked to the capitalist dominant class through a variety of mediating mechanisms (e.g. career trajectories, the ability of state elite to invest their income in capital markets, etc.) (p. 343). Some state employees (workers, as well as the elite, which is connected to the capitalist class) may be connected to the capitalist social relations more than other employees who are relatively insulated (e.g. those occupying contradictory locations within the state). The intensity of mediation – linkage – between state relations of production and capitalist relations of production can also vary across time and space: state employment is insulated from capitalist markets more in some contexts and less in other contexts (Wright, 1989d: 343–345).

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employees as in many professional occupations such as doctors as well as academics who work as independent consultants (Wright, 1989d: 334). Class Strata Another source of complexity within class locations centers on the amount of resources and attendant scope of activities subjected to quantitative variation in the rights and powers over these resources that people have. There are capitalists who own and control vast quantities of capital employing thousands of workers all over the world, while there are also capitalists who employ a small number of people in a single geographical location. Both are ‘capitalists’ in relational terms, but quantitatively, they vary tremendously in the amount of power that they wield. Among people in working class locations, workers vary in their skills and in their associated ‘market capacity’, i.e. their ability to command wages in the labor market. If their skills are sufficiently scarce, they may even be able to command a ‘rent’ component within their wages. These kinds of quantitative variations among people (capitalists, workers) who occupy a similar relational location can be referred to as strata within class locations (Wright, 2005: 18). Mediated Class Locations People’s relation to productive resources can be direct in that they are inserted into class relations through their own jobs. And it can be indirect in that it can be mediated through various non-class relations (i.e. relations other than their immediate jobs). So there are mediated relations – for example, relations of family and kinship – within class relations. One’s mediated class relation may be different from one’s direct class relation. Mediated class locations are important for understanding the class locations of children, retired people, housewives, pensioners, the unemployed, non-working students, and those living in two-earner households. Of course, the importance of mediated locations varies, depending on the importance of the non-class relation that is doing the mediating. ‘For certain categories of people in contemporary capitalism, location in the class structure is entirely constituted by mediated relations. This is most clearly the case for children.31 To say that children in a working class family are ‘in the working class’ is to make a claim about the ways in which their class interests are shaped by their mediated relations (through their families) to the system of production, rather than by their direct location’ (1989d: 325). Consider also a female typist in an office or a school teacher who is married to a corporate manager. If one is married to a capitalist, regardless 31

Wright is ignoring the fact that more than 200 million children work for living, most of them in the global South.

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of what job one has, one’s interests and choices will be partially conditioned by that marital relation (Wright, 2005: 19). A woman who is a school teacher and married to a working class man is not in the same class location as another woman school teacher married to a male ceo (1989d: 328). So the class location of husbands and wives should be treated as a function of both direct class location and their mediated location. Sometimes they can have a common class location and sometimes different. Temporality applies to mediated class relations and not just to direct class relations. The class location of a woman may change after divorce or widowhood. The usual assumption is that class structures are based on the job of the main bread-earner who is normally a male. It is also often assumed that all family members have same class interest because families are units of pooled income and consumption, even if different members bring income from different class-jobs, different class-locations (1989d: 327). Such assumptions are problematic. Overall class interests of individuals (including of married women) will be a product of ‘some kind of weighted combination of these direct and mediated relations’ (Wright, 1989d: 328). The fact of mediated class relations opens the door for a new sort of contradictory location within class relations: ‘contradictory combinations of direct and mediated locations’ (ibid.). At the concrete level ‘a class structure should be understood as consisting of the totality of direct and mediated class relations’ (Wright, 1989d: 326). Two class structures in two different places with same patterns of direct class relations but with different mediated relations, should be considered structurally different (ibid.). ‘In any case, the patterning of mediated class locations is potentially an important way in which class structures vary’ (Wright, 1993: 31). Class Structure and Class Interests We should now move from class relations and locations to class structure to class interests to class practices/agency. Class structure is a more macro-level concept than the concepts of class locations and class relations discussed thus far (Wright, 2006). The sum total of class relations [and class locations within these relations] in a given unit of analysis can be called the ‘class structure’ of that unit of analysis. One can thus speak of the class structure of a firm, of a city, of a country, perhaps of the world (Wright, 2005: 19). Class structure and class interests are connected to class consciousness, class practices, class formations and class struggle.32

32

The concepts related to agency – as opposed to analysis of class structure and relations – are particularly crucial to the understanding of variations over time and place in state policies across capitalist societies (Wright, 2005: 9).

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Class relations (and class locations within them) produce class structure. Class interests acts as a conceptual bridge between class structure/relations and class agency. Class structure designates real mechanisms (causal processes) that exist independently of the class theorist, the processes that produce specific effects (Wright, 1989d: 279). More specifically, class structure produces three kinds of effects: material interests, lived experience, and capacity for collective action (1989d: 280), and which is why class is considered relevant.33 At the macro and abstract level, the three effects tend to coincide, but for concrete micro level analysis, they do not, and Wright considers that among the three effects, the material interests are the most important in the determination of classes (ibid.). Classes have interests even if they are not aware of them, i.e. independent of their subjective understandings. Classes have material interests. These are of two types: economic power (what must they do to achieve a given level of welfare), and economic welfare (= the total package of toil-leisure-income available to a person).34 The two types of class-interest are connected through exploitation. In terms of economic welfare, there are inequalities in the distribution of such things as incomes and the real consumption packapages available to individuals, families and groups. The concept of exploitaition helps us analyze such inequalities: to describe an inequality as reflecting exploitation (and not just a form of difference) is to make the claim that there exists a particular kind of causal relation between the incomes and working conditions of different actors (Wright, 1989a). Capitalists have higher level of welfare because they have more economic power in that they control the surplus allocation (investment). The working class experiences deprivation and powerlessness because surplus is appropriated from them and because they lack control over the use of the surplus (investment decisions) (Wright, 1989d: 284; 2005: 20). So, class relations as social relations of production do not just unequally distribute economic welfare. Class relations also unequally distribute economic power, that is, control over surplus product. All classes want greater 33

34

That does not mean class can explain, without the mediation of other processes, such empirical phenomena as: how material interests are understood or how lived experience results in class formation or how people actually fight as class actors (Wright, 1989d: 280). Economic power and economic welfare are, respectively, examples of instrumental interest and intrinsic interest (Wright, 1989d: 281). Intrinsic interests refer to ‘the ends of actions, the goals that one is trying to accomplish through particular strategies’. Instrumental interests refer to ‘interests organized around the necessary means of accomplishing those ends’. While achieving a certain level of consumption package is an intrinsic interest – as it is a goal sought for its own sake – how one achieves this goal (e.g. improving one’s market position) is an instrumental interest.

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level of economic welfare (intrinsic interest) but classes differ in terms of their economic power or instrumental interests (i.e. what they need to do in order to achieve economic welfare, for example, improving market position). Fighting for socialism is the instrumental interest for workers, but fighting against it is that of capitalists, because socialism will hurt their own economic welfare. To say that individual members of a class have common objective material interests means this: given their relation to underlying mechanisms embedded in relation of production, ‘they objectively face similar dilemmas and tradeoffs in the pursuit of economic welfare [the package of toil, income and leisure] and economic power’ within contemporary society and future society (socialism) (Wright, 1989d: 282; 286; parenthesis added). The commonality of class interests is defined by ‘the common material conditions which shape the available choices and strategies with respect to these outcomes’ (Wright, 1989d: 286; Wright, 2005: 21). Sharing common material class interest means that classes share common dilemmas with respect to collective action as well as individual pursuit of welfare and power (p. 287). Both capitalists and workers have an interest in economic welfare but their choices/strategies with respect to this are different. As an individual, to be a capitalist means that her economic welfare depends on the extraction of surplus labor from workers, technological innovation, successful investment strategies, market competition and so on, while the economic welfare of an individual worker depends on successfully selling her labor power to capitalists and competing with other workers for jobs (Wright, 1989d: 287). Workers face choices between individualist market strategies (geographical mobility, skills upgrading and promotions) and collectivist strategies (unionization, etc.). They can politically intervene or free-ride on the action of others.35 Thus to talk about class interests is a way to provide the theoretical bridge between the class relations and the actions of individuals within those relations (Wright, 2005: 21). The commonality of class interests is not defined by distributional outcomes of welfare or economic power as such (because not all workers have the same level of these) (Wright, 1989d: 286). So, to say that members of a class have common interests in terms of economic welfare does not mean that they have the same level of actual economic welfare. Class interests with respect to economic welfare are determined by what a person must do to achieve a

35

When a theorist talks about common interest, she is not saying which choices/strategies are the best for a worker. All that is being said is this: because all workers have the similar location with respect to the relations of exploitation, ‘they face broadly similar structures of trade-offs with respect to these kinds of choices’ (Wright, 1989d: 287).

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given economic welfare, i.e. by the welfare-generating mechanisms, not the actual outcome. Some workers may be poorer than others. Or, two people may have the same level of economic welfare (e.g. same income) but different class interests or class positions (e.g. workers and petty bourgeois farmers). As well, two classes can have control over the same amount of surplus but in different class-mechanisms (feudal rents and profits). Class interests of one class are not just different from those of another class. There are conflicts of interests. Commonality of material interests within a class helps to explain the tendency towards conflict between classes. The commonality of another effect of class structure – lived experience – explains why members of a class actually develop a common identity, without which no class struggle is possible; common lived experience explains – or contributes to – the capacity to struggle (Wright, 1989c). The distinctive feature of the Marxist account of class relations in these terms is not simply that it gives prominence to class conflict (over the distribution of a pie), but that by identifying the antagonism of material interests generated by the exploitative character of capitalist class relations, it understands conflict as generated by inherent properties of class relations rather than simply contingent factors.36 Class Consciousness, Class Formation and Class Alliance Class consciousness is ‘the subjective awareness people have of their class interests and the conditions for advancing them’ (Wright, 2005: 21). It refers to the beliefs actors hold about class relations, class structure and their own class interests. People may have faulty beliefs about the nature of the class structure in which they live, about their location within that structure and about the

36

Some scholars think that common material interests become commonality of class membership only when they generate experiences that shape understanding of these interests. So lived experience is considered to be the central abstract content of commonality of class membership (Wright, 1989d: 288). Workers experience three lived experiences (which are linked to the alienation): having to sell labor power to survive; experience of being bossed around and dominated; and the inability to control social surplus, which produces powerlessness (Wright, 1989d: 289). Similarly, professionals and experts have specific lived experiences: because they have viable self-employment alternatives, the labour market is less coercive for them than for workers; they exercise much more control over their own work than others; and they are much more involved in decisions over the use of resources than are workers, even if they do not appropriate resources, as capitalists do. So they are overall less alienated than workers, which is why they are the middle class (Wright, 1989d: 337).

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strategies necessary to advance their class interests. In so far as this happens, one can speak of false consciousness. But the concept of consciousness is not mainly about the truth-content of class-actors’ beliefs but about the class character of those beliefs (Wright, 2006). To understand how class structure shapes ideology, one needs to conceptualize class consciousness and attitude, and to convert them into observational categories, and to gather empirical observations. Class consciousness as a mechanism is not directly measurable. Its effects (attitudes) can be seen as facts, which can be observed and measured. So, consciousness gives rise to attitudes, which are recorded in responses to survey (facts); the latter are produced under conditions of observation (Wright, 1989b: 64–65).37 ‘Class formation’ refers to the formation of collectively organized actors in pursuit of class interests (Wright, 2006; 1989d: 271). It refers to collectivities people form in order to facilitate the pursuit of class interests. These collectivities range from highly self-conscious organizations for the advance of interests such as unions, political parties, and employers’ associations, to much looser forms of collectivity such as social networks and communities (Wright, 2015: 21). All these contribute to the organized capacity of class actors to pursue their class-interests (Wright, 2006). Many class locations have complex bundles of exploitation-based class interests, so these interests constitute the material basis for a variety of potential class formations. But there is relative indeterminacy of the relationship between class structure and class formation. ‘The class structure itself does not generate a unique pattern of class formation; rather it determines the underlying probabilities of different kinds of class formations. Which among these alternatives actually occurs historically will depend on a range of factors that are structurally contingent to the class structure itself’ (Wright, 1989a: 29).38

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Wright (1997: 219) has used the following set of survey questions to tap into class consciousness and to construct a class consciousness scale, on the basis of respondents’ answers (agree, strongly agree, disagree, etc.). 1. ‘Corporations benefit owners at the expense of workers and consumers’. 2. ‘During a strike, management should be prohibited by law from hiring workers to take the place of strikers’. 3. ‘Many people receive much less income than they deserve’. 4. ‘Large corporations have too much power in … society today’. 5. ‘The non-management employees …could run things effectively without bosses’. ‘As Adam Przeworski [1977] has argued, class struggle is in the first instance a struggle over class before it is a struggle between classes. It is always problematic whether workers will be formed in a class or into some other sort of collectivity based on religion, ethnicity, region, language, nationality, trade. The class structure may define the terrain of material interests upon which attempts at class formation occur, but it does not uniquely determine the outcomes of those attempts’ (Wright, 1989a: 29).

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Class formations vary in many ways, and especially, in the extent to which (a) they are encompassing or are fractional; (b) they challenge the existing institutions (that define strategic alternatives that classes face) or accept those institutions; and (c) they involve coalitions across different kinds of class locations (Wright, 2006). Given that the concrete class structure is far from polarized, class alliances are forged, which are not only between classes but also between segments of classes, and contradictory class locations (Wright, 1989a: 29). A class alliance, which is an important aspect of class formation, is a situation ‘in which people from different class locations come together to engage in collective action against a common class enemy by reaching, in one way or another, some kind of compromise on the differences in their class interests’ (Wright, 1993: 34). ‘The pattern of class alliances … [are] the ways in which the terrain of class structure becomes transformed into class formations’ (and vary across countries and regions) (1989a: 37). Dominating exploiting classes have generally pursued class alliances with contradictory locations, at least when they are financially able to do so. Such an alliance can (a) mitigate/neutralize the threat to them from these class locations to the dominating/exploiting classes and (b) minimize potential conflicts of interest between these locations and those of the dominant exploiting class itself, and thus create ‘a stable basis for all exploiting classes to contain struggles by exploited classes’ (Wright, 1989a: 30). The alliance is forged by the fact that the interests of people in contradictory locations are tied ‘directly to those of the dominant exploiting class’. There are two ways in which such an alliance can happen. One way is to ‘make it easy for people in contradictory locations to enter the dominant class’; and another strategy is to ‘reduce the exploitation of contradictory locations by the dominant exploiting class to the point that such positions involve “net” exploitation’ by paying them extremely high salaries’ (Wright, 1989a: 30). Both strategies are forms of class-based bribing. Individuals occupying contradictory locations face three broad strategies of class alliance. They may use their position as an exploiter on the basis of organization or skill asset, to gain entry as individuals into the dominant exploiting class by converting their surplus income into capital and thus share a part of the social surplus,39 or, they may attempt to forge an alliance with the 39

‘In general, the immediate class aspiration of people in contradictory locations is to enter the dominant exploiting class by “cashing in” the fruits of their exploitation location into the dominant asset. Thus, in feudalism, the rising bourgeoisie frequently used part of the surplus acquired through capitalist exploitation to buy land and feudal titles, that is, to obtain “feudal assets.” Part of what a bourgeois revolution consists of, then, is preventing the feudalization of capitalist accumulation. Similarly, in capitalism, the exploitative transfers personally available to managers and professionals are often used to buy ­capital,

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dominant exploiting class (Wright, 1989a: 30). Alternatively, they may form an alliance with the principal exploited class (ibid.). With respect to their alliance with the dominating class, ‘There are historical moments when the middle class seems to ally strongly with the bourgeoisie’ (Wright, 1993: 34), one reason for which may be this: their careers – professional or managerial hierarchy – are tied to the profitability of capitalist accumulation. Of course, there are conflicts between the dominant class and those who occupy contradictory class locations: for example, if managers lose their jobs during economic stagnation, they may prefer a statist capitalism (state-regulated capitalism) rather than corporatist capitalism. Besides, the hegemonic strategies based on the middle classes being given extremely high salaries and therefore a slice of the social surplus can hurt long-term prospects of capitalist accumulation, and this can undermine any alliance between the capitalist-exploiting class and the highlypaid middle classes.40 In particular, ‘The erosion of the economic foundations of this alliance may generate more anti-capitalist tendencies among experts and even among managers. Particularly in the state sector, where the careers of experts and bureaucrats are less directly tied to the welfare of corporate capital, it would be expected that more “statist” views of how the economy should be managed would gain credence’ (Wright, 1989a: 30–31). With respect to the last of the three strategies (alliance with the principal exploited class), one can say this: in so far as ‘the middle class and the working class are both exploited by capitalists’ and they both depend upon the labour market for their livelihoods, they ‘share some common class interests vis-à-vis capital which constitute a basis for a class alliance’ (Wright, 1993: 34). As well, when contradictory locations are subjected to “degradation” – deskilling, proletarianization, routinization of authority, etc., people in those locations who are clearly net-exploited may see that the balance of their interests is ‘more in line with the working class’ (Wright, 1989a: 31). But there are various obstacles to such an alliance. As skill and organization exploiters, their wages contain a rent component of the surplus, and their interest is in protecting that.

40

property, stocks, and so on, in order to obtain the “unearned” income from capital ownership. Finally, in state bureaucratic socialism, experts try to use their control over knowledge as a vehicle for entering the bureaucratic apparatus and acquiring control over organization assets’ (Wright, 1989a: 30). In other words, the hegemonic strategies are expensive. ‘They require allowing large segments of contradictory locations access to significant portions of the social surplus. It has been argued by some economists that this corporate hegemonic strategy may be one of the central causes for the general tendency toward stagnation in advanced capitalist economies, and that this in turn may be undermining the viability of the strategies themselves.’ (Wright, 1989a: 30).

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‘Particularly when this component is large, people in the middle class have the capacity to capitalize their surplus and thus link their class interests directly to those of capitalists’ (Wright, 1993: 34). On the other hand, the popular exploited classes generally lack the capacity to offer significant bribes to people in contradictory locations, the kinds of bribes that exploiting classes can offer (e.g. extremely high salaries). These conflicting forces mean that the middle class will be pulled between class formations involving alliances with workers or with capitalists (Wright, 1993: 34). With respect to the working class forging an alliance with the middle classes, ‘the critical political question becomes defining the political and ideological direction of the alliance’ (Wright, 1989a:31). People occupying ‘contradictory locations are the “bearers” of certain futures to capitalism, future within which the working class would remain an exploited and dominated class’ (ibid.: 27). Then the question is: should workers support such alliances? Is it in their interest to struggle for a society within which they will remain exploited by managers and experts? Wright does not think that ‘there are general, universal answers to those questions’ (Wright, 1989a: 31). The working class can potentially form an alliance with the underclass which is a group of people with few marketable skills and weak attachment to the labour market,41 as they ‘share an interest in the state providing job training, regulating capital and increasing employment opportunities’. But there are also obstacles here. On the one hand, the labour movement tries to ‘protect the jobs of workers and increase their wages’, and thus ‘often creates barriers within labour markets which act to the disadvantage of people in the underclass’. On the other hand, the underclass has often been ‘a source of scab labour in strikes’ and has been ‘manipulated by capitalists against workers’ (Wright, 1993: 35).42 Class alliances may be harder to forge, but once forged may be more enduring since ‘conflicts of interest have been compromised rather than ignored’ (Wright, 1993: 34). This is not the case with another form of class formation: ‘multiclass movement’. This is one in which the actors agree to ignore class differences in order to form a solidaristic movement for some political 41

42

The underclass can be defined as social agents who are not stably exploited within capitalist production but who are economically oppressed in that ‘they are denied access to various kinds of productive resources, including the necessary means to acquire skills and good jobs’ (Wright, 1993: 33–34). So ‘one of the tasks of class analysis is to understand the conditions which make soli­ daristic movements combining the working class and the underclass feasible’ (Wright, 1993: 3).

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objective. National liberation movements, for example, frequently place class differences among their supporters on a back burner in the name of ‘national unity’. No real attempt is made to forge a class compromise between bourgeois, middle-class, working – class and peasant participants in the struggle’ (Wright, 1993: 34). They are united on the basis of their ‘opposition to a colonial power, but their unity is not grounded in any significant attempts at reconciling their conflicting class interests’ (ibid.).43 Multi-class movements are, in many cases, easier to form than class alliances, but they frequently flounder because of the unresolved class tensions within them. Class Practices/Struggles Class practices are ‘The activities engaged in by individuals, both as separate persons and as members of collectivities, in pursuit of class interests’ on the basis of their understanding of class relations (Wright, 2005: 21) Insofar as the interests of classes exist in antagonistic relation to each other, then class practices typically involve ‘class struggle’, i.e. the pursuit of interests of one class against those of another class (Wright, 2006). Class struggle can refer to strategies of individual workers within the labor process to reduce their level of toil (vis a vis the attempt of managers to extract more labour effort), and conflicts between highly organized collectivities of workers and capitalists over the distribution of rights and powers within production. The form of class struggle will vary depending on whether a group is subjected to economic exploitation or non-exploitative repression. What has been said above about class struggle applies mainly to the former group. But what about the latter? This group is not consistently exploited. Historically, the ­advantaged groups (e.g. Europeans in North America) have coercively dispossessed this group of their land, and in the contemporary case, there is an underclass which has been excluded from other assets (education, skills, etc.).44 43

44

‘This contrast between multiclass movements and class alliances is, of course, somewhat stylized. Many situations involve variable mixes between these two ideal types. Nevertheless, the analytical distinction is important politically and theoretically’ (Wright, 1993: 34). ‘It is perhaps controversial to amalgamate the exclusion of the contemporary urban underclass from human capital and other job resources with the exclusion of Native Americans from the land. In the latter case there was a zero-sum character to access to the resource in question and massive coercion was used to enforce the exclusion, whereas in the case of education, skills and even good jobs, it is not so obvious that the resources in question are a fixed quantity and that access is being denied through force. Thus the factual inequalities of access to these resources may not in fact be instances of coercively enforced ‘exclusion’. For present purposes, therefore, it should be viewed as a hypothesis that the underclass is ‘economically oppressed’, i.e. that there is indeed a process of morally

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‘They are thus largely expendable from the point of view of capitalist rationality’, so ‘repression is the central mode of social control directed towards them’. Their labor is not needed by the advantaged group in the production process partly because they barely have the skills that can be used for a profit. That is why: ‘Their potential power against their oppressors – their capacity to force concessions of various sorts – comes from their capacity to disrupt consumption, especially through crime and other forms of violence, not their capacity to disrupt production through their control’ (Wright 1993: 33–34). 2

Connecting Core Class-Concepts, and Levels of Class-Analysis

Marxist class analysis is ultimately about the conditions and processes of social change. This idea informs Wright’s class analysis. It has revolved around a relatively simple model of the interconnections among the core concepts of class analysis such as class structure, class formation and class struggle. The ways in which the concepts are inter-connected include the following constraints within which the class concept operates, and which make concept of class Marxist. 1. Class structure imposes limits on class formation, struggle and consciousness but do not uniquely determine these. Indeed it is class formations that select class struggles within the limits imposed by class structures. Class struggles in turn have transformative impacts on both class structures and class formations.45 2. Class structures are the essential lines of demarcation in the historical trajectories of change. Marxist class analysis is committed to a classbased structural typology of historical variations (Wright, 1989d: 315–316). 3. The ­concept of class is relational (capitalists are defined in relation to workers). 4. Social relations that define class are antagonistic and not just different. 5. The objective basis of these antagonistic interests is exploitation. 6. The fundamental basis of exploitation is social relations of production (Wright, 1989b: 49–50). It is also the case that while the overall patterning of consciousness is structurally determined by class relations, the actual level of working-class

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indictable exclusion from access occurring here, an exclusion which has the effect of benefiting certain groups of people at the expense of others. This, of course, leaves open the crucial question of who, precisely, is benefiting from this exclusion’ (Wright, 1993: 33). This implies that Marxist analysis is committed to a theoretical ordering of class concepts. For example, there is a specific theoretical ordering of class concepts such as the concepts in the trio of material interests, lived experience and capacity for collective action (Wright, 1989d: 315–316).

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consciousness in a given society and the nature of the class coalitions that are built upon those class relations are shaped by the organizational and political practices that characterize the history of class struggle (Wright, 1989a). The ways in which the different class-concepts are inter-related do not constitute a ‘purely structural model, for the conscious practices of actors – class struggles – transform the social structures’. Yet Wright’s ‘is also not an agentcentred model, for those struggles are seen as systematically constrained by the structures within which people live and act. Structures limit practices but within those limits practices transform structures’ (Wright, 1993: 28) (Figure 2). There are two basic mechanisms through which class structures limit class formation/ struggle.46 First, class structures, including relations involving middle classes and mediated and temporal class locations, shape individuals’ material interests and thus ‘make it more or less difficult to organize certain arrays of class locations into collective organizations’. Second, class structures shape the access to material resources and thus affect the kinds of resources that collective organizations within class struggles can deploy’ (Wright, 1993: 31). It is not just that different class concepts are inter-related. They are at different levels at which class is analysed, and these levels (macro and micro) are inter-connected as well. The basic concept for macro-class analysis is class structure (which are constituted by class relations, and class locations within

its

orm Tra nsf

Lim

Limits

s

ts lec

Se

Class Structure (Including relations of middle class-locations, and mediated and temporal class locations).

rm sfo

an Tr

s

Class Struggle (Including struggle involving middle class locations in relation to capital and labor).

Class Formation (Including formation of alliances involving middle class-locations in relation to capital and labor).

Figure 2  Model of inter-connections among class structure, class formation and class struggle Adapted from wright, 1993

46

At a micro level, class locations are linked to class consciousness and class practices of individuals (Wright, 1993: 28).

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class relations). Class structure produces effects on the macro unit of analysis at which class structure in defined. Usually, the nation state has been the favored unit of analysis for the study of class structure because of its importance as the institution for enforcing the pivotal rights and powers over assets that constitute the stuff of class relations. But depending on the task at hand, other units of analysis may be chosen (2005: 19–20).47 Micro-level concepts center on the lives, conditions and experiences of individuals (class location, class interests, class consciousness, class practices) (Wright, 2006). The micro-level of class analysis attempts to understand the ways in which class (locations) shape various aspects of individual lives (Wright, 2005: 20).48 Micro- and macro-levels of class analysis are mutually linked. Class structures are not some wholes which generate macro-level effects which are independent of the actions and choices of individuals: ‘macro-processes have micro-foundations’. As well, the micro-processes through which a person’s class location shapes her opportunities, consciousness and actions occur in macro-contexts which deeply affect the ways in which these micro-processes operate: ‘micro-processes are mediated by macro-contexts’ (Wright, 2005: 20). Class has specific macro-level effects. At the macro-level, class shapes ‘the functioning of a variety of institutions’, which refers to ‘whether or not the rights over the allocation and use of means of production are highly concentrated in the hands of a few people, whether or not certain of these rights have been appropriated by public authority or remain privately controlled, whether or not there are significant barriers to the acquisition of different kinds of assets by people who lack them, and so on’ (Wright, 2005: 21). 3

Class Analysis, Struggle for Socialism, and Socialist Strategies

Class analysis is supposed to shed light on prospects for social change. Anticapitalist struggles and revolutions attempt to eliminate the distinctively capitalist form of exploitation, that is, exploitation based on private ownership of 47

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The analysis of how the international mobility of capital constrains state policies is an example of a macro-level examination of class structure in relation to states, while the analysis of how the concentration or dispersion of ownership of capital affects union organizing would be a macro-level investigation of class formation (Wright, 2005: 20). ‘Analyses of labor market strategies of unskilled workers, or the effects of technological change on class consciousness, or political contributions of corporate executives would be examples of micro-level class analysis’ (Wright, 2005: 20).

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the means of production. They aim to implement the program of the nationalization of the principal means of production, which is effectively a radical equalization of ownership of capital. However, ‘these revolutions do not eliminate, and indeed may considerably strengthen and deepen, inequalities of effective control over organization assets’ (Wright, 1989a: 20). The working class and segments of the middle class may join to establish democratic socialism (which has two visions, one of which promotes democracy at the point of production), but even then skill and organizational exploitation will exist. Whereas in capitalism the control over organization assets does not extend beyond the firm, in state bureaucratic socialism, the form of society that has historically come after the anti-capitalist revolutions, ‘the coordinated integration of the division of labor extends to the whole society through institutions of central state planning’ (ibid.). This kind of society is characterized by ‘the centrally planned bureaucratic appropriation and distribution of the surplus along hierarchical principles’ (ibid.). This process has a corresponding class relation: this is between managers/bureaucrats – people who control organization assets – and non-managers. A new class society emerges. A new ruling class emerges. There will be a need for a revolutionary transformation of state bureaucratic socialism to produce ‘the equalization of effective economic control over organization assets’ i.e. the democratization of bureaucratic apparatuses of production (ibid.).49 Such a process of democratization or equalization, however, ‘would not necessarily affect exploitation based on skills/credentials’. Indeed, such exploitation would remain a central feature of socialism’, where some people because of their skills receive more than the cost of reproduction of their labour power (Wright, 1989a: 20). In this conception of socialism, ‘a socialist society is essentially a kind of democratic technocracy. Experts control their own skills and knowledge within production, and by virtue of such ­control are able to appropriate some of the surplus out of production. Given the democratization of organization assets, ‘actual planning decisions will not be made under the direct control of experts but will be made through some kind of democratic procedure’ (ibid.: 21). Therefore, ‘the actual class power 49

‘This does not imply total direct democracy, where all decisions of any consequence are directly made in democratic assemblies. There will still inevitably be delegated responsibilities, and there certainly can be representative forms of democratic control. But it does mean that the basic parameters of planning and coordinating social production are made through democratic mechanisms and that incumbency within delegated positions of responsibility does not give incumbents any personal claims on the social surplus’ (Wright, 1989a: 20).

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of a socialist technocratic exploiting class will be much weaker than the class power of exploiting classes in other class systems’. The ownership rights of this class ‘extend to only a limited part of the social surplus’ (ibid.). As well, ‘This much more limited basis of domination implied by skill-based exploitation is consistent with the spirit, if not the letter, of Marx’s claim that socialism is the “lower stage” of “communism”’ during which ‘classes are already in a partial state of dissolution in a society with only skill-based exploitation’. Communism itself, then, is to be understood as a society within which skill-based exploitation itself has ‘withered away’, that is, in which ownership rights in skills has been equalized. This does not mean that all individuals would actually possess the same skills in communism, any more than eliminating property rights in means of production implies that all individuals would actively use the same amount of physical capital. What is equalized is this: effective control over skills as a productive resource, and claims to differential incomes resulting from differential use of skills (Wright, 1989a: 21–22). In other words, capitalism does not have one future. It has multiple futures instead (state-bureaucratic socialism, democratic socialism, and communism). Then the question is how to go beyond capitalism to one or more of these post-capitalist societies? The answer to this question requires that one must abandon ‘a simple binary notion of capitalism versus socialism’. An economic structure can have a variable degree of classness: it can be ‘more or less capitalist, more or less socialist, more or less statist’ (Wright, 2014a: 65). One must try to transform ‘capitalism in a socialist direction’ and this means ‘democratising the economy’ (ibid.: 85), and in this process ‘the economic structure remains a hybrid combining capitalist, statist and socialist practices and relations, but the socialist dimension gains weight and centrality’ (p. 85). What is needed is to deepen ‘social power’, i.e. ‘the capacity to mobilise people for cooperative, voluntary collective actions’ (Wright, 2014a: 64). There are three strategies to achieve democratization of economy: interstitial, symbiotic and ruptural, which have characterised the history of anticapitalist struggles (Wright, 2014a: 86–87). Ruptural transformations have envisioned creating new emancipatory institutions through a sharp break with existing institutions and social structures. Interstitial transformations seek to build new forms of social empowerment in the niches and margins of capitalist society where possible, often where they do not seem to pose any immediate threat to dominant classes and elites. Proudhon’s idea of a cooperative alternative to capitalism within capitalism itself is a 19th century version of this perspective as exemplified by many experiments in the social economy today. Alternatives on the ground in whatever spaces are possible both serve as ‘a critical ideological function of showing that alternative ways

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of working and living are possible’, and this ‘potentially erodes the constraints on the spaces themselves’ (p. 86). Finally, symbiotic transformations (which basically signify social democracy) involve strategies which use the state to extend and deepen the institutional forms of social empowerment in ways which also solve certain practical problems faced by dominant classes and elites. A symbiotic transformation is one that seeks to expand social empowerment while still achieving an institutional configuration that contributes to an adequately well-functioning capitalism. This is what in the 1970s was called ‘non-reformist reforms’ – reforms that simultaneously make life better within the existing economic system and expand the potential for future advances of democratic power. It is also reflected in a variety of forms of civic activism in which social movements, local leaders and city governments collaborate in ways that both enhance democracy and solve problems (Wright, 2014a: 87). The basic idea here is that there are multiple institutional equilibria or configurations within capitalism, all of which are functionally compatible with capitalism (i.e. they contribute to the solution of the problems of capitalist reproduction), but some of which are better for capitalists than others and some of which involve more social empowerment than others (Wright, 2014a: 87). Extending and deepening social power in any one of these configurations may be quite compatible with maintaining the dominance of capitalism, but if it is possible to increase social power over economic life (p. 89), then the cumulative effect, quantitatively speaking, could be ‘a qualitative transformation in which socialism becomes the dominant form of relations within a complex economic hybrid, subordinating both capitalism and statism within democratised power relations’ (Wright, 2014a: 85). Wright’s preferred framework for socialism is ‘rooted in social empowerment’ which involves ‘a commitment to institutional pluralism and heterogeneity’ (Wright, 2014a: 91). Wright is opposed to ‘a unitary institutional design for transcending ­capitalism’. He rejects the revolutionary rupture option. He prefers that ‘the configurations of social empowerment open up space for a wide diversity of institutional forms’. Worker-cooperatives and local social economy projects, state-run banks and enterprises, social democratic regulation of private corporations, solidarity finance, and participatory budgeting all potentially undermine the dominance of capitalism and increase the weight of social power within the hybrid economic ecosystem. These diverse forms all increase social power, but they do not point to an integrated, comprehensive system driven by a single institutional design principle. The institutional pluralism of the destination (multiple futures of capitalism, as stated earlier) also suggests strategic pluralism in the practices of transformation (Wright, 2014a: 91). In other words,

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rights and powers over capitalists’ property can be somewhat constrained through workers’ power. In fact, Wright believes much can indeed be done now by individuals and groups to mitigate the damage to their lives created by the dominance of capitalism, and that some of the things that can be done prefigure an ‘alternative world’ (Wright, 2014b: 130). In some case, ‘to strengthen social power requires access to state power’. But other configurations can be advanced even without state power (p. 91). Enhancing social power over the economic ‘can take place with little or no state involvement; others would be greatly enhanced by various kinds of state support’ (p. 89).50 This is especially true for the social economy initiatives – workers cooperatives, community-based urban agriculture, solidarity finance, community land trusts, etc. Activists on the (radical) Left have often regarded these kinds of locally-oriented, community-based initiatives as not being very ‘political’, since they do not always involve direct confrontation with political power. This is a narrow view of politics. (Wright, 2014a: 91). Interstitial strategies to create real utopias involve showing that another world is possible by building it in the spaces available, and then pushing against the state and public policy to expand those spaces. A vision of emancipatory alternatives that is anchored in the multidimensional and multi-scalar problem of deepening democracy can encompass this wide range of strategies and projects of transformation (Wright 2014a: 91). There is no need for a revolutionary rupture. It is true that while symbiotic transformations (social democracy) help solve problems within capitalism, they often are not optimal for elites and are thus resisted. This means that a key element of ruptural strategies – confrontations between opposing organised social forces in which there are winners and losers – will be a part of any plausible trajectory of sustainable social empowerment. The purpose of such confrontations, however, is not a systemic rupture with capitalist dominance, but rather creating more space for the interplay of interstitial and symbiotic strategies (Wright, 2014a: 90). In other words, the aim will be to put pressure on the elites for reforms. Incrementalism has problems, because the elites may not like it beyond a point. But it does not follow therefore that ‘system-ruptures are actually 50

The examples of these include: peer to peer collaborative production (Wikipedia, opensource software); urban agriculture with community land trusts; community owned labs for advanced customised small-batch cooperative manufacturing; open-access intellectual property (creative commons, open source pharmaceuticals, free downloadable blueprints for 3-D printing); free publicly provided goods/services (libraries, free public transport); and unconditional basic income (Wright, 2014a: 89).

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­ ossible, that they could succeed in their stated objective of “abolishing the p institutional basis for [capitalist] dominance” (Wright, 2014b: 127). Systemruptural strategies may be wishful thinking rather than genuine answers to the question of ‘what is to be done?’: ‘I do not have an answer to the problem of what should be done in the face of the impossibility of further incremental advance, but I remain sceptical that a systemic rupture in which capitalism is effectively abolished could result in an emancipatory alternative (Wright, 2014b: 127). Wright is against the idea that ‘there is a single centre of agency and power that can be decisively destroyed and whose destruction effectively removes the main obstacle to transformation. This is, of course, the way revolutionaries have often thought about social revolution: seize state power, destroy the enemy and clear the way for building a new society “on the ashes of the old.” … [This is] an unrealistic strategy for the United States today’ (Wright, 2014b). In fact, if historical evidence is anything to go by, ‘such a strategy is not likely ever to be a plausible strategy for the purposes of creating a radically egalitarian democratic economy and society’. While ‘revolutionary ruptures have been capable of transforming state power, and they have also, in a few notable instances, been capable of abolishing the core class relations of existing economic systems’, ‘so far they have not shown any capacity to build even the rudiments of democratic egalitarian emancipatory alternatives’ (Wright, 2014b: 128). The system rupture may lead to an emancipatory alternative only under one condition: ‘the hybrid economic ecosystem’ has already ‘shifted to one in which participatory, democratic egalitarian economic relations’ have become ‘the core of the economy’ (Wright, 2014a: 69). ‘If over an extended period of time interstitial and symbiotic strategies had transformed the economy in this way, then the institution-building tasks following a rupture would be fairly modest and the chaotic processes unleashed by rupture perhaps manageable’ (Wright, 2014b: 129). But it is doubtful ‘that anti-capitalist, egalitarian and cooperative economic processes could ever reach such a threshold so long as capitalism remains a powerful component of the economic system’ (ibid.).51 We are therefore left with the conclusion that (a) a successful rupture with capitalism in which the 51

The weakness of revolutionary democratic working class movement may mean that the working class is not fundamentally opposed to the bourgeoisie, and that working class anti-capitalist politics takes social democratic or statist forms. Also, the historical records show ‘profound difficulty of any social category consistently defining a political project radically opposed to capitalism’. When such projects are articulated, they tend to embody class interests of skills and organization-based exploiters, the classes subordinated within capitalism (Wright, 1989c: 205).

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private enterprise market system is abolished and a participatory economy is established is only possible if a participatory economy has already reached near dominance within the economic ecosystem, but (b) a participatory economy cannot reach that level of development so long as capitalism is dominant. It therefore may well be true that incrementalism does not have an answer to the problem of overcoming absolute barriers to transformation. Unfortunately, the same is true for ruptural strategies: they have no answer to the problem of actually advancing a democratic egalitarian economy and society in the aftermath of a rupture (Wright, 2014b: 129). So, neither is incremental reform nor revolutionary rupture are viable options, for Wright. The rich countries and poor countries face different kinds of prospects. He suspects that ‘the time horizon before the issue of attempting a systemic rupture with capitalism in developed capitalist countries is very far in the future’ (Wright, 2014b: 130). He also suspects that ‘it is even further in the future before the issue of whether or not markets should be abolished will be on the political agenda of any democratic society’ (ibid.: 130). In advanced capitalist countries, ‘radical democratic socialism, involving the simultaneous socialization of capital and democratization of organization assets, is a viable, if very long-term, possibility’. (1989a: 31). In these countries, ‘the best prospect’ is ‘a strategic orientation mainly organised around the interplay of interstitial and symbiotic strategies, with perhaps periodic episodes involving elements of ruptural strategy’, as a Left pressure. Through interstitial strategies, activists and communities can build and strengthen real utopian economic institutions embodying democratic egalitarian principles where this is possible. Symbiotic strategies through the state can help open up greater space and support for these interstitial innovations. The interplay between interstitial and symbiotic strategies could then create a trajectory of deepening socialist elements within the hybrid capitalist economic ecosystem (Wright, 2014a: 89). Such policies (e.g. workers coops) could, over time, expand the weight of a cooperative market economy within the broader capitalist economic hybrid’ (p. 89). In contrast, in the less developed world, there may be a different prospect. ‘There are certainly circumstances in which a revolutionary state bureaucratic socialism may be in the real interests of the working class, even though workers would remain exploited in such a society. This is the case, I believe, in many Third World countries today.’ (Wright, 1989a: 31). These circumstances could include political dictatorship: ‘[I]n the case of political dictatorships a seizure of power could be capable of transforming the institutions of the state in a democratic way’, but that does not mean that, whether in rich or poor countries, ‘a seizure of power can successfully both abolish something as complex as capitalism and replace it with a participatory democratic alternative’ (Wright, 2014b: 127).

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Conceptual Advantages of Wright’s Theory of Class

Elaborating the Analytical Marxist theory of class has many theoretical payoffs. These are beyond the specific normative agenda of Marxist class analysis itself discussed below (Wright, 2005: 28–30). 1. Linking exchange and production. The Marxist class analysis explains how ‘the social relations which organize the rights and powers of individuals with respect to productive resources systematically shape their location both within exchange relations and within the process of production itself’ (2005: 28). In other words, individuals’ relationship to productive assets explains (a) their market capacity in exchange relations (the kind of things Weberians talk about),52 and (b) their location within production relations, which, respectively explain differential control over income (and other life chances) as well as over labor effort (exploitation and domination).53 Class has specific material effects on the lives of individuals and the dynamics of institutions. In fact, and at the micro-level, people’s lives are affected by their class location – i.e. by whether or not one sells one’s labor power, and if one does sell one’s labour power, whether one has ‘to pound the pavement looking for a job’ and ‘worry about making payments on bank loans to keep a farm 52

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‘The core of the difference is captured by the favourite buzzwords of each theoretical tradition: “life chances” for Weberians, and “exploitation” for Marxists’ (Wright, 2006: 65). Weberians see class in terms of market-determined life chances: the kind and quantity of resources you own affects your opportunities for income in market exchanges. ‘Opportunity’ is a description of the feasible set individuals face, the trade-offs they encounter in deciding what to do. Owning means of production (the capitalist class) gives a person different alternatives from owning skills and credentials (the ‘middle’ class), and both of these are different from simply owning unskilled labour power (the working class). Furthermore, in a market economy, access to market-derived income affects the broader array of life experiences and opportunities for oneself and one’s children. The study of the life chances of children based on parents’ market capacity is thus an integral part of the Weberian agenda of class analysis’ (Wright, 2006: 65). However, ‘the Weberian model only deals with the bargaining within exchange. In a sense, then, the Weberian strategy of class analysis is nested within the Marxist model. … This nesting of the Weberian concept of class within the Marxist means that for certain kinds of questions there will be little practical difference between Marxist and Weberian analyses. This is especially the case for micro-questions about the impact of class on the lives of individuals. Thus, for example, if one wants to explain how class location affects standards of living of people, there is no particular reason for the concept of class location used in the analysis to differ within a Marxist or a Weberian approach. Both treat the social relationship to income-generating assets, especially capital and skills, as central to the definition of class locations’ (Wright, 2005: 27).

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afloat’. One’s life is shaped by whether or not one makes ‘decisions about the allocation of investments around the world’, or whether one has the power to tell other people what to do in the labor process, whether or not one owns large amounts of capital, whether or not one possesses a legally-certified valuable credential, etc. (Wright, 2005: 21). In a more general way, Marxist class analysis points to two primary consequences of class, linked to exchange and production. (a) What one has (in terms of one’s rights and powers over productive resources) determines what one gets (i.e. one’s standard of living). (b) What one has also determines what one has to be (or to do) in order to get what one gets (p. 22). Marxist class analysis thus says that ‘the rights and powers over productive assets’, i.e. one’s class location, ‘is a systematic and significant determinant of the strategies and practices people engage in to acquire their income’. Following from these fundamental effects of class are other kinds of consequences, second order-effects. These include: voting patterns, attitudes, friendship formation, health, etc. For example, class locations shape opportunities for standards of living, and these opportunities affect political preferences, or it may be that ‘class location affects the lived experience of people within work (i.e. the experiences generated by the activities of work)’ and these in turn affect (political/voting) preferences (p. 22). Whether it is voting or income or whatever, the substantive, empirically verifiable, claim is that underlying all these is the fundamental role of class (‘the social relationship to incomegenerating assets, especially, capital and skills’), and not, for example, religion or gender or state’s welfare policy (Wright, 2005, 22–23).54 2. Conflict. Marxism ‘gives prominence to class conflict’ and it ‘understands conflict as generated by inherent properties of those relations rather than simply contingent factors’ (Wright, 2005: 28). Exploitation defines a structure of inter-dependent antagonistic interests in which advancing the interests of exploiters depends upon their capacity to impose harms on the exploited. This antagonism of interests is stronger than simple competition, and the Marxist claim is that class systems will be conflict ridden. The differential control over (a) income (and other life chances) and (b) over labor effort (exploitation and domination), which is rooted in people’s relation to productive assets within the realm of exchange and production relations), is bound to result in 54

‘Suppose that the welfare state provided a universal basic income to everyone sufficient to sustain a decent standard of living. In such a society what people get would be significantly, although not entirely, decoupled from what they own…. The sheer fact of inequalities of income or of domination and subordination within work is not proof that class counts; what has to be shown is that the rights and powers of people over productive assets has a systematic bearing on these phenomena.’ (Wright, 2005: 22–23).

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conflict, i.e. conflict over unequal distribution of income, etc. and over production (Wright, 2005: 26). 3. Power of the oppressed/exploited, and coercion and consent. It is not only the case that ‘class relations generate deeply antagonistic interests’ but also that class relations ‘give people in subordinate class locations’ some power to resist (Wright, 2005: 29). Exploitation generates antagonistic interests in the sense that it ‘pits the interests of one group against another and which requires their ongoing interactions’ (p. 25). Exploitation also ‘confers upon the disadvantaged group a real form of power with which to challenge the interests of exploiters’ (ibid.). The power of the exploited comes from two sources. One is a general source of power: human beings are conscious agents, not robots, so they always retain significant levels of real control over their expenditure of effort. Another is that because the labor of the exploited is actively required by the exploiter, i.e. since exploitation rests on the extraction of labor effort, the exploited always confront their exploiters with capacities to resist exploitation’ (Wright, 2005: 29). The power of exploited people to resist exploitation gives rise to two kinds of response from the exploiters: coercion and consent. The fact that the exploited can resist or do resist requires ‘active institutional devices’ for reproduction of those relations. It requires relations of domination, that is, social relations within which one person’s activities are directed and controlled by another. Domination, of course, begins with ownership: owning a resource gives one power to prevent other people from using it. The power exercised by employers to hire and fire workers is the clearest example of this form of domination. Domination also occurs when the appropriation of the labor effort of the exploited usually requires direct forms of control and coercion, especially within the labor process, in the form of supervision, bossing, monitoring, sanctions, surveillance, threats, etc., which are used to extract labor effort in the face of ‘the inherent capacity of people to resist their own exploitation’ (Wright, 2005: 29). Deployment of these strategies has costs, however: costs of supervision, surveillance, sanctions, etc. These costs are imposed: the exploited force the exploiters ‘to devote some of their resources to insure their ability to appropriate labor effort’ (ibid.). From the standpoint of the exploited, the ‘ability to impose such costs constitutes a form of power among the exploited’ (p. 25). The power of the exploited is thus ‘reflected in the complex counter-­ strategies [that] exploiting classes are forced to adopt through the elaboration of instruments of supervision, surveillance, monitoring, and sanctioning’ (Wright, 2005: 29). Now, purely coercively backed systems of exploitation by domination aimed at countering people’s capacity to resist exploitation will

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often not work efficiently that well since workers can often withhold diligent performance of labor effort. Exploiting classes will therefore have a tendency to seek ways of reducing those costs. One of the ways of reducing these costs of extracting labor effort is to produce the active consent of the exploited, i.e. the opposite of coercive mechanisms. The relevant strategies include: the development of internal labor markets which strengthen the identification and loyalty of workers to the firms in which they work; and the support for ideological positions which proclaim the practical and moral desirability of capitalist institutions. Such consent-producing practices, however, also have costs. So class-exploitation always involves ‘trade-offs between coercion and consent as mechanisms for extracting labor effort’55 (2005: 29) (See Figure 3 below). 4. Historical/comparative analysis. Classes are derived from the patterns of effective ownership over aspects of the forces of production (capital, skills, etc.). The different kinds of exploitation that define different kinds of classes are related to the qualitative properties of these different aspects of forces of production. And, it is the development of forces of production that imparts whatever directionality exists to ‘epochal social change’ (Wright, 1989a: 42). There is a ‘developmental tendency in class structures’ as represented by the order to the forms of society (i.e. feudalism-capitalism-state bureaucratic ­socialism-socialism-communism) (Wright, 1989a, 18, 21, 26, 42). Even if one rejects historical materialism which seeks to explain epochal change, the Marxist exploitation-centered strategy of class analysis still provides a rich menu of concepts for historical and comparative analysis. Different kinds of class relations are defined by the specific exploitative mechanisms, so variations in these mechanisms and in the specific ways in which they are combined in concrete societies (multiple class-mechanisms in a society) provide an analytically powerful road map for comparative historical (and geographical) research (Wright, 2005: 30): how a society changes over time and how societies are different. 55

‘This argument implies a specific prediction about the kinds of ideologies that are likely to emerge under conditions of exploitative class relations and conditions of non-­exploitative oppression’ (ibid.: 29). Where the advantaged group requires, not the labour effort of the disadvantaged group but only their assets, this group can be subjected to repression, so ‘The central ideological problem in such a situation is likely to be the moral qualms within the oppressive group, and thus ideologies are likely to develop to justify this repression to the oppressors, but not to the oppressed’. However, where the advantaged group does require the labor effort of the disadvantage group, ‘ideologies are more likely to attend to the problem of creating consent, and this puts pressure on ideologies to incorporate in one way or another the interests of the exploited group’ (Wright, 2005: 29–30).

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Extraction of labor effort involves costs of supervision, etc.

Exploitation always involves trade-offs between coercion and consent.

These also involve costs.

Merely coercive response will not work well.

Consent mechanisms required to reduce costs (e.g. promotion of workers’ loyalty to firms; pro-capitalist ideologies).

Figure 3  Wright’s views on exploitation and resistance in the workplace

There are two approaches to historical variation in class relations: a sequence of discrete modes of production or their inter-penetration. The shift in the account of historical variation from the first to second approach, which Wright favours, ‘suggests a parallel shift in the normative theory of class emancipation’, a shift ‘from an idealized end state’ of classlessness ‘to a variable process’ of less classness, which can be achieved through workers’ control over capitalists’ rights and powers over means of production. The underlying idea is that, for example, ‘Capitalisms vary in the degree of exploitation and inequality that characterize their class structures and in the extent to which socialist elements have interpenetrated the system of production’ (Wright, 1993: 25).56

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‘Rather than seeing the historical trajectory of capitalism primarily in terms of the ruptural division of capitalism versus socialism, this way of thinking about economic structure opens up the possibility for a much wider set of variations among capitalisms and socialisms in which different patterns of interpenetration become the salient problem for analysis. In analysing the historical development of capitalist societies, then, the issue becomes one of trying to theorize the development of different trajectories (in the plural) of such inter – penetrations of modes of production’ (Wright, 1993: 25).

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5

Wright’s Class Theory in Relation to His Marxist Social Theory

What does Wright’s class theory say about his social theory as such? He thinks that the Marxist tradition57 is built around three conceptual nodes: Marxism as class analysis, Marxism as a theory of historical trajectory, and Marxism as an emancipatory normative theory (Wright, 1993: 17) (See the Figure 4 below). Note that each node is about class. What unifies the three nodes is working-class politics, i.e. workers’ collective organization in pursuit of their class interests. The part of Marxism that is more directly associated with class (i.e. Marxism as class analysis),58 which has been discussed thus far, is, like endocrinology, Marxism as emancipation: identifies the disease

Marxism as class analysis: provides the diagnosis of causes of the disease

Marxism as the theory of history (in terms of changes in class relations): identifies the cure

Figure 4  Wright’s view of the place of class theory in his Marxist Social Theory Adapted from wright, 1993

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‘I prefer to use the expression “Marxist tradition” rather than “Marxism” precisely because the latter suggests something more like a comprehensive paradigm’ (Wright, 2009: 102). ‘Robert Brenner has argued….that “class analysis” is too narrow a characterization of the “explanatory node” of Marxism. In particular, class analysis does not adequately encompass the problem of alienation. While alienation generated inside of the capitalist labour process might be subsumed under class analysis, alienation rooted in markets and competition (also theorized under the rubric “commodity fetishism”) cannot. Such alienation would exist even if we had a market economy consisting entirely of worker-owned and run cooperatives. In Brenner’s view, market-generated alienation is as powerful an explanatory principle within Marxism as class-generated exploitation. He thus proposes substituting the concept of “social property relations” for “class analysis” as the encompassing term to capture the core explanatory logic of Marxism. Class analysis would then be one among several aspects of the analysis of social property relations. In my usage of the terms here, the analysis of market competition within capitalism is treated as one dimension of class analysis, namely the analysis of the forms of competitive interaction among agents within specific classes – labour markets for the working class and commodity markets for the capitalist class’ (Wright, 1993: 17).

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an independent-variable based study of society.59 Marxism as a theory of history (let us call it historical materialism in the narrow sense), is like oncology, a dependent – variable – oriented field. The distinctive dependent variable of ­Marxism is history, or perhaps somewhat more precisely, historical trajectory, which, broadly refers to the changes (in forms of) class relations. In its most ambitious form, this is the overall epochal trajectory of human history, from the prehistory of human civilization (classlessness), through the present and into the future. In its more modest (narrower) form, it is the trajectory of development of society dominated by capitalist class relations, from its origins within pre-capitalist feudal class societies through its dynamic development and towards its eventual demise. ‘In both cases Marxism attempts to theorize the inherent tendencies of historical change to follow a particular trajectory with a specific kind of directionality’ (Wright, 1993: 18). According to the Marxist theory of history, ‘there are inherent tendencies inside of capitalism which pose socialism as an alternative’. The version of this claim that Wright endorses is the one which says that ‘the development of capitalism simply poses the possibility (but not inevitability) of socialism, perhaps making that possibility more and more viable, but not more and more of a necessity’ (Wright, 1993: 20). Class analysis is not just a moral condemnation of capitalism rooted in its link to an emancipatory ideal (Wright, 1993: 20). It is also an empirical critique of capitalism rooted in its account of the historical generation of real alternatives. The central function of the theory of historical trajectory within Marxism is to provide a grounding for the claim that socialism – and ultimately communism – are not simply moral ideals, but empirically viable alternatives to capitalism’ (Wright, 1993: 24). Thus Marxism’s interest in explaining history has a reason: it provides the intellectual foundation for scientific socialism’ (Wright, 1993: 24). Like most contemporary Marxists, Wright takes a more modest position than classical Marxists, seeing classlessness as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for emancipation, thus opening the door for an autonomous role for gender and other nonclass issues in a project of full human emancipation (Wright, 1993: 25). According to Wright, the stuff of class is exploitation, and exploitation ‘is simultaneously an explanatory concept and a morally charged term’. As an explanatory concept, exploitation as a relation of antagonistic interests of 59

As class analysts Marxists can study virtually anything. You can do a class analysis of religion, war, poverty, taste, crime. As in endocrinology, it should not be an embarrassment to discover that class is not very important for certain problems – this, too, is an advance in our knowledge about class’ (Wright, 1993: 18).

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classes, identifies a central mechanism through which class structure explains class conflict. And involved here is ‘a moral judgement about the inequalities generated within those relations because exploitation ‘does not simply define a “transfer of labour” from one social group to another, but a transfer that is deemed unjust or illegitimate’. The claim about class relation between capital and labour based on property ownership or its lack and the claim about inequalities60 that results from this do not distinguish Marxism from other approaches. ‘The crucial property of Marxist class analysis’ is ‘its linkage to the normative problem of class emancipation and a theory of historical trajectory’, both of which are mutually linked as mentioned above. At its core, the Marxist class analysis is rooted in a set of normative commitments to a form of radical egalitarianism. This applies not only to exploitation but also to nonexploitative oppression.61 Human flourishing would be broadly enhanced by a radically egalitarian distribution of the material conditions of life, including resources, surplus and time. Marxism’s emancipatory values are egalitarianism, end of exploitation, etc. Capitalism has developed human productive capacity to such an extent that it makes the radical egalitarianism needed for human flourishing materially feasible, yet capitalist class relation also creates institutions and power relations that block the actual achievement of egalitarianism. The full realization of the radical egalitarian ideal may, of course, be a utopian fantasy. But even if ‘classlessness’ is unachievable, ‘less classness’ can be a central political objective, and this still requires challenging capitalism. Whatever else the Marxist concept of class is meant to accomplish, it is meant 60

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That does not mean that inequalities in the distribution of incomes, the real consumption packages available to individuals, families, groups are not connected to class. Indeed, the concept of class-exploitation is a particular way of analyzing such inequalities. To describe an inequality as reflecting exploitation is to say that there exists a causal relation between the incomes of different actors (Wright, 1989d). Economic oppression has also a normative content. It is not just that economic oppression requires the fact that ‘(a) the material welfare of one group of people is causally related to the material deprivations of another; it also requires that (b) the causal relation involves morally indictable coercion. Without (b), the losers in a poker game would be described as “oppressed”. Without (a), we have economically gratuitous exclusion – exclusion from resources from which no one derives material bene – fit. “Economic oppression” is thus a situation in which the material benefits of one group are acquired at the expense of another and in which unjust coercion is an essential part of the process by which this occurs. The introduction of (b), of course, renders judgements of the oppressive nature of a particular inequality highly contentious, since there will generally be disputes about the moral standing of the exclusions that back up the inequalities in question’ (Wright, 1993: 32).

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to facilitate understanding of the conditions for the pursuit of the above normative agenda. The emancipatory normative theory defines the ultimate values of radical working-class politics; the theory of history generates its broad, long-term objectives; and class analysis provides the basis for its strategies. If the point is to actively change the world, not merely interpret it, then Marxism is above all about using class analysis to understand the political processes for the realization of historically possible emancipatory goals’ (Wright, 1993: 19). And, what makes the Marxist normative commitment Marxist is ‘the commitment to classlessness as a necessary condition for the realization of’ emancipatory values (e.g. egalitarianism, end of exploitation, etc.), ‘a commitment that would be realized through working class politics’. Classlessness still remains as a utopian goal but reduction in classness remains the basis for the empirical critique of existing institutions (Wright, 1993: 25). Given the association of class analysis with the moral commitment, Wright’s concept of class has a particularly sustained critical character. Defined in terms of qualitatively distinct asset-based forms of exploitation, class provides a way of describing both the nature of class relations in a given society and the immanent possibilities for transformation posed by those relations (1989a: 42). Indeed, ‘the most fundamental pay-off of these conceptual foundations is the way it infuses class analysis with moral critique. The characterization of the mechanisms underlying class relations in terms of exploitation and domination focuses attention on the moral implications of class analysis. Exploitation and domination identify ways in which these relations are oppressive and create harms, not simply inequalities. This means that the concept needs to be linked to a theory of capitalism, not just inequality…’ (Wright, 2005: 8). Class analysis can thus function not simply as part of a scientific theory of objective interests and conflicts, but of an emancipatory theory of alternatives and social justice as well. Even if socialism is off the historical agenda, the idea of countering the exploitative logic of capitalism and reducing its class-ness is not (Wright, 2005: 30). Emancipation requires fundamental reorientations of the use of society’s material resources, surplus and time. Such projects, therefore, inevitably involve in a central way class politics – political struggles over property relations and control of the social surplus. The central task of class analysis, then, is to give greater precision to the causal structure of class phenomena and the relationship between class and other social phenomena relevant to the normative goals of Marxism (Wright, 1993: 28). It is certain that ‘class politics will continue to be a central dimension of social struggles, since the forms of ownership and control of society’s productive resources have such a pervasive impact on so many social issues’ and this means that ‘class analysis will have an important role to play in developing adequate theoretical tools for radicals’

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(Wright, 1993: 35). So, the emancipatory ideal of radical egalitarianism (ending class exploitation) is implicated in the very conceptualization of class itself’ (Wright, 1993: 20). Thus, in Marxism, alternative to capitalism is actively posed by capitalism itself (ibid.). In classical Marxism, three theoretical nodes (class emancipation, class analysis and class-history) mutually reinforce each other in an extremely tight manner, and such ‘tightness’ is something Wright does not endorse. Without class analysis and the theory of history, Marxism as class emancipation, i.e. the emancipatory critique of capitalism, ‘would simply be a moral condemnation’ and would promote ‘utopian socialism’, but ‘without the emancipatory objective, class analysis would simply be an academic speciality’ (Wright, 1993: 21). In classical Marxism, the three nodes together constitute a unitary theory in which class analysis provides the necessary and sufficient basis for the theory of historical trajectory towards an emancipatory future (ibid.: 21). This unity has been eroded, and this Wright endorses. Wright approves of the fact that ‘From a comprehensive and relatively selfcontained paradigm of social science which aspired to explain all social phenomena relevant to emancipatory social change, Marxism is moving towards a more loosely coupled conceptual framework that provides an account of a range of specific causal mechanisms that help explain those phenomena’ (1993: 21). The less rigid framework may open up new avenues of theoretical development within each of the nodes, resulting in a necessary reconstruction of Marxism (ibid.). No longer considered to have ‘the general superiority over the mainstream rivals’, the Marxist tradition is a valuable body of ideas because it successfully identifies real mechanisms that matter for a wide range of important problems (e.g. voting, income, etc.). However, this does not mean it has a monopoly on the capacity to identify such mechanisms. Marxism identifies exploitation and domination within the fundamental class division in capitalist society. It is to be contrasted to, for example, an alternative approach (opportunity hoarding) that draws attention to the exclusionary mechanisms connected to middle-class jobs, and to the stratification approach that helps to specify the individual attributes that explain which people have access to those jobs, and who is excluded from stable working-class jobs (1993: 109). These three processes operate in all capitalist societies. The differences in class structures between countries are produced by the varying inter-actions of these mechanisms, and not just by variation in exploitationdomination mechanisms (p. 110).62 62

In an integrative model, the power relations and legal rules that give people effective control over economic resources – means of production, finance, human capital – ­generate

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Another way of distinguishing the three approaches is on the basis of the metaphor of a game (Wright, 2015: x–xi). Marxist class concepts are defined at ‘the systemic level of the game’. At this level, the difference in interest between classes and class conflict are on the basis of what game to play – capitalism or socialism? Weberian class categories are defined at ‘the institutional level of the rules of the game’: class analysis talks about specific varieties of capitalism, one that is more or less regulated, for example). The micro-class or stratificational, individualist analysis defines class ‘at the situational level of moves within fixed rules in a single game’ (ibid.). 6 Conclusion In Wright’s Marxist approach to class, as in the Weberian tradition, power and legal rules which enforce social closure are important in defining the basic structure of social positions – particularly private ownership of the means of production. But according to him the critical effect of opportunity hoarding (closure or exclusion) is domination and exploitation, not simply market advantage. The central class division in capitalist society is between those who own and control the means of production – capitalists – and those hired to use  those means of production – workers. Capitalists exploit and dominate workers. Other positions within the class structure draw their specific character from their relationship to this basic division. Managers, for example, exercise many of the powers of domination, but are also subordinated to capitalists. ceos and top managers of corporations often develop significant ownership stakes in their corporations and therefore become more like capitalists. structures of social closure and opportunity hoarding connected to social positions (Wright, 2009). Opportunity hoarding then produces three streams of causal effects: f­ irstly, it shapes the micro-level processes through which individuals acquire class-relevant attributes; secondly, it shapes the structure of locations within market relations – occupations and jobs – and the associated distributional conflicts; and thirdly, it shapes the structure of relations within production, especially relations of domination and exploitation, and the associated conflicts in that sphere. The first of these causal streams in turn directs the flow of people into class locations within the market and production. ‘Jointly the class attributes of individuals and their class locations affect their levels of individual economic well-being’. It is also the case that ‘social struggles contribute to changes in the trajectory of the relations themselves’. A fully elaborated class analysis, then, combines this kind of macro-model of conflict and trans-formation with the macro–micro, multi-level model of class processes and individual lives. In such a model the key insights of stratification, Weberian and Marxist approaches can be combined’ (Wright, 2009: 110–112).

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Highly educated professionals and some technical workers have sufficient control over skills and knowledge, and this allows them to ‘maintain considerable autonomy from domination within work and significantly reduce, or even neutralize, the extent to which they are exploited’ (Wright, 2009: 108). The concrete class structure is more complicated than a two-class model with one central form of exploitation (e.g. capital-labor relation) implies. In a capitalist society, apart from capitalist exploitation proper, there are skill-based exploitation and organizational exploitation, which are based respectively on skill rents and loyalty rents. These rents are the basis for strata within classes rather than for class divisions as such. They are ‘the strata that are differentiated by varying degrees of exploitation within a common location in the social relations of production’ (Wright, 1989d: 333; 347).63 But as individuals convert their surplus income to capital, they can join the capitalist class. The middle class in capitalism is constituted by those locations which are simultaneously in the capitalist and working classes (Wright, 1989d: 347). Managers are simultaneously capitalists and workers, not because they dominate workers while being dominated by capitalists (as in Wright’s early work), but because they own capitalist property and sell labour power; they have a duality of class location (Wright, 1989d: 333). This applies to experts (most of whom eventually have supervisory and managerial duties) as well as some other members of the middle class: ‘even if their current jobs are not in managerial contradictory locations, their careers typically are’ (Wright, 1989d: 334) Class locations are based on both direct class relations within which each job is embedded and on mediated relations and temporal trajectories. Professionals and experts experience temporal trajectories. They move into management. They have the capacity to capitalize their rents. They have viable options for full time or part time self-employment. Such temporal trajectories place them in contradictory class locations or middle class even, if at a particular point in time they have not capitalized their income or are neither in managerial positions nor are self-employed. Given the relative uncertainty over career trajectories their locations can be called objectively ambiguous class locations. Their experience at work is less alienated, which gives the impression that they are middle class. With respect to state employees, their direct class location can be seen as constituted within post-capitalist statist relations of production, but conditions of production within the state are dominated by capitalist relations, so class locations of state employees are more determined by m ­ ediated 63

Just as people with discretionary income – rents – can be seen as strata within the working class, one can observe strata within the bourgeoisie, depending on the amount of surplus they appropriate (Wright, 1989d: 333).

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relations than by direct locations in the state (Wright, 1989d: 347–348). State employees are in a dualistic class location: direct locations within state classes and mediated locations within capitalist relations To say that ‘class counts’ is to claim that the distribution of rights and powers over the basic productive resources of a society has significant, systematic consequences at both the micro – and macro-levels of social analysis. The exploitation-centered concept provides a much clearer linkage to the problem of interests than the concept which privileges merely domination, and in this sense such a concept is systematically materialist (Wright 1989a: 43). And this, in turn, provides the basis for a more systematic empirical analysis of the relationship between the objective properties of class structures and the problems of class formation, class alliances, and class struggle as well as of economic welfare. His focus on class interests of workers, capitalists and middle classes points to the kind of alliances (cross-class alliances) they may seek to build. Class is a powerful causal factor because of the way in which class determines access to material resources and thus affects the use of one’s time. This is not to suggest that class is universally the most important determinant of everything social, rather that it is presumptively important for a very wide range of phenomena. Wright, 1993: 27

Class analysis must be conducted not only at macro and micro levels but also at more abstract and more concrete levels. The two – class model is relevant at an abstract level (e.g. in a study of epochal changes between feudalism and capitalism) but not useful at a more concrete and micro level. Critical of the two class-model with two main opposed classes, and utterly and consistently mindful of the necessity for analytical clarity and rigor, Wright has produced a rich repertoire of multiple class locations: contradictory locations within class relations, mediated class locations, temporarily structured class locations, objectively ambiguous class locations and dualistic class locations. Instead of a simple vision of epochal confrontation between two main classes, he has produced a picture of multiple possible coalitions of variable likelihood contending over a variety of possible futures. With a strong belief that class analysis should be about social change, he deploys his micro-level and concrete restructuring of class map of advanced capitalism, and imagines various interstitial and symbiotic strategies (mainly social-democratic type policies) that will mitigate people’s miseries and gradually weaken the salience of capitalist property relations. A ruptural strategy – a complete break with capitalism via

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seizure of state power – is neither necessary nor possible, according to him. But there is another world possible within the overall framework of capitalist property relations on which progressives can put pressure to move them in the direction of post-capitalism and to reduce the classness of existing capitalist societies.

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Anti-essentialist (Post-structuralist) Marxist Theory of Class While Analytical Marxist theory of class is realist in its philosophical orientation and accepts the principle of causality and determination, the ­anti-essentialist theory of class is post-structuralist in its inspiration. But like Analytical Marxist theory of class, anti-essentialist Marxist theory is critical of many central ­tenets of classical Marxism. Anti-essentialist Marxism rejects ‘the founding presumption that a complex reality can be analyzed to reveal a simpler reality, an essential attribute, or a set of fundamental causes at its core’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 56). Accepting Althusser’s aleatory materialism, this version of Marxism refuses ‘to reduce an event or being to a root cause or to an idea or principle’ (Gibson-Graham et al., 2000: 7). It rejects any category (e.g. the capitalist enterprise) that represents social beings unified by a common characteristic (e.g. rationality, profit-seeking, the centrality of capitalist accumulation). It is interested in difference and differentiation within categories (Gibson-Graham et al., 2001). It does not un-acknowledge sameness between things, but sameness is an epistemological effect, it is in people’s thinking. D ­ ifference has an ontological status; sameness does not1 (Gibson-Graham, et al. 2001). Its view of ontology is over-determinist. Over-determination is a provisional ontology that operates to contradict and destabilize the essentialist ontology of the dominant forms of Marxism (and indeed of the entire western intellectual lineage) (Gibson-Graham et al., 2001: 4). Over-determination is the ‘a notion of mutual constitutivity among entities’ (Resnick and Wolff, 1987: 4; Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 36). Overdetermination denotes a complex general approach to causation as a seamless web of cause and effect tying together all aspects of any society. Its predecessor term was the ‘dialectics’. Each process is different, and in this difference resides its unique effectivity. Each process existing within any particular society is both influenced by, and influences, all the other processes comprising that society. Each process has no existence other than as the site of the converging influences exerted by all the other social processes.

1 ‘We do not wish to deny that sameness is one of the conditions of meaning, but we would understand it more as an enabling belief (that we are talking about the same thing) than as an actual state of ontological or conceptual “commonality.”’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 16).

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For a given process, ‘all the other processes that combine to overdetermine it are its “conditions of existence.”’ There are no necessity, no determinacy and no structurally ordained identity, and in their place are ‘contingent efficacies of politics, including the politics of class’ (Gibson-Graham et al., 2001: 6). In the overdeterminist discourse, necessity, i.e. ‘a determinate relationship between events or objects’ is an effect of analysis rather than as an initial predication’ or a property of the world itself. ‘In this way, causation/determination becomes a specific discursive effect rather than a pre-analytical ascription of ontological privilege’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 56).2 Causation is created by conceptualization or theorization. Theory also creates terms in and through which people recognize themselves (Gibson-Graham et al., 2001: 19). Class theory offers a range of subject positions that individuals may inhabit, constituting themselves as class subjects. Theory has a more active role: it brings into being subjects (p. 19). Theory actively shapes reality rather than passively reflect it. Class knowledge produces new class reality (­Gibson-Graham et al., 2001). The anti-essentialist theory has a vison of knowledges or discourses as implicated in, and constitutive of, power as an important medium through which other social processes are constructed; knowledge is plural. (­Gibson-Graham et al., 2001). Because no cause is more important than another, no theory is more important than another; ‘it is impossible to establish a definite hierarchy of interpretations’ (Gibson-Graham et al., 2001: 5). Texts and words are ‘complex, open to multiple readings’ (ibid.). Overdetermination ‘widens the space of political effectivity’ (ibid.: 6). Anti-essentialist Marxism is suspicious of totalizing frameworks and master narratives (e.g. global capitalist economy), that attempt to embrace or locate other aspects of social life within these narratives (Gibson-Graham et al., 2001). This chapter discusses post-structuralist ideas about class by focussing on contributions from Resnick and Wolff and from Gibson-Graham,3 whom 2 Gibson-Graham draw on Latour who says: an external reality exists as ‘the consequence rather than the cause of scientific activity’ (in Rosenau, 1992: 110). 3 Gibson-Graham themselves do not have a theory of class of their own. They basically rely on Resnick and Wolff’s political economy and class theory. The only difference in terms of class theory between them and Resnick/Wolff is in terms of language. They do not use ‘­fundamental’ and ‘subsumed’, presumably because that language connotes hierarchy. They employ ‘The different terminology’ [from that of fundamental and subsumed] [which ‘­reflects our relative levels of comfort with the connotations of the two sets of terms, rather than an attempt to dissociate ourselves from the theoretical perspective of Resnick and Wolff’ (­Gibson-Graham, 2006: 54). Gibson-Graham’s main contribution is to strengthen the post-structuralist foundation, both in terms of language and content, of Resnick/Wolff’s

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­ esnick and Wolff have influenced. Also will be included in the discussion R what is known as labour geography, which has been heavily influenced by Gibson-Graham. A lot of work which appears to have something to do with class is indeed concentrated in the form of labor geography (geographies) and ‘new working class studies’ (Strangleman, 2008) to which geographers and sociologists contribute.4 The chapter have five sections. The first section focusses on post-structuralMarxist views on class as a relation/process. The second section deals with the ways in which Post-structuralist Marxism and the bodies of work it has influenced (e.g. labour geography) has looked at the question of class agency. Section three examines the relation between the post-structuralist Marxist theory of class and its theory of society. This section includes discussions on the relative dominance of class and non-class processes in society as a whole, and the relative dominance of capitalism as a part of society. Section four deals with the post-structuralist Marxists’ political agenda that flows from their theory of class. A continuation of this discussion is in the next section which is on semiotic resistance to capitalism. The final section concludes the chapter. 1

Post-structuralist Marxist Notion of Class Relation ‘Every society is assumed to require that at least some of its members interact with nature and one another to produce goods and services consumed by all members of society. This interaction is called the labour process: the expenditure of human muscles, nerves and brain power to transform objects found in nature into goods and services satisfying human needs and wants. Those members of society who do this labor are called direct producers’ (Wolff and Resnick, 2012: 152). Direct producers participate in the labour process (transforming nature) and the class process (of performing surplus labor).

The distinction between the labour process and class process is connected to two other distinctions: surplus vs necessary labour; and productive vs unproductive labour. Following Marx, Resnick and Wolff say that necessary ­labour ­theory, and to pursue non-capitalist class politics within capitalism, in theory and practice. They explicitly say that: ‘We are interested in pursuing the class analytics developed by Resnick and Wolff because of the kinds of politics it helps us envision’ (2006: 52; stress added). 4 This has prompted scholars such as Chibber (2009: 366) to say that class theory is more prominent in such fields as geography (and sociology) than in the remaining intellectual landscape.

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‘is the time-measured expenditure of human brain and muscle required to reproduce the performers of surplus labor’. Surplus labour is the amount of brain and muscle energy (the amount of work), that performers of labour are induced to produce over and above the necessary labour. The amount of necessary labor performed changes over time because it presupposes historically variable social standards for the reproduction of those who perform surplus labor (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 93–94). In terms of productive and unproductive labour: productive labour, under capitalism, involves labour that produces commodities for sale for profit. Unproductive labour involves labour that is a condition of existence for productive labour. It is the labour involved in merchanting, financing, education, government, etc. This is a process which does not create new value. Classes are defined as ‘groups of persons who share the common social position of performing surplus labor or of appropriating it from the performers or of obtaining distributed shares of surplus from the appropriators’ (­Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 119). There are two kinds of class process, fundamental and subsumed (see Figure  5 below), which form the class structure (Wolff and Resnick, 2012). The fundamental class process is in the sphere of productive

The production of surplus in: Fundamental (sphere of productive labor) The appropriation of produced surplus in:

Capitalist society (e.g. toy making workers) Non-capitalist society Capitalist society(e.g. by board of directors of a toy company) Non-capitalist society

Class Process

Subsumed (sphere of unproductive labor)

Figure 5

Directing of subsumed class process by people who receive a part of the surplus produced elsewhere, in:

Working for the directors of subsumed class process

Class processes in anti-essentialist Marxist Theory

Capitalist society (e.g. managers of Walmart) Non-capitalist society In capitalist society (e.g. workers in Walmart) Non-capitalist society

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labour. It involves the production/appropriation of surplus labor. It gives rise to two fundamental classes: producers (or performers) and appropriators (or extractors),5 of surplus labour. The self-expansion of capital resides in the consumption of labor power – the unique and defining function of the fundamental capitalist class (ibid.: 109). The purchase of constant capital and variable capital is an exchange process, not a fundamental class process. Fundamental class process can be exploitative or non-exploitative. In other words: there is no necessary connection between class process and exploitation. In exploitative fundamental class process, someone else other than the direct producer, who produces surplus, appropriates the surplus (ibid.). Sometimes direct producers can appropriate surplus themselves, collectively (as in communal production), or as individuals (as in peasant production or an independent producer of software). In such cases, direct producers perform both necessary and surplus labour for themselves (Wolff and Resnick, 2012). And if the direct producer is legally free (she is not owned by the capitalist) and is employed by the capitalist, the system is capitalist. In non-exploitative fundamental class process, a given individual or group of individuals is involved in both production and the appropriation of the surplus. While the fundamental class process (both in its exploitative and nonexploitative forms) is in the realm of productive labour, the subsumed class process is in the realm of unproductive labour, and refers to the distribution of surplus labor from its appropriators to others (Resnick and Wolff, 2012: 19).6 It defines two subsumed classes: distributors, and recipients, of surplus labor. Any individual may occupy all, none, or any combination of these class positions (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 130). The subsumed class process directly concerns surplus labor and its fruits, so it is a class process. It is called subsumed because the distribution of the surplus occurs after its production, which is the fundamental class process (Resnick and Wolff, 2012). Subsumed class process is motivated by the appropriators’ aim to continue the fundamental class process and their position in it. It is the way appropriators pay for the performance of certain nonclass processes without which the fundamental class process could not exist. Subsumed ­classes obtain a distribution of the surplus for providing economic, political and ­cultural conditions of existence for the reproduction of that surplus (Wolff and Resnick, 2012: 159). 5 The capitalists are those who appropriate the surplus: they are, for example, the board of directors (Resnick and Wolff, 2003: 19). 6 Gibson-Graham call the fundamental and subsumed class processes by another name: ­appropriative (or exploitative) and distributive.

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There are two basic types of subsumed class and class process. Type 1 subsumed class process comprises the directors of social processes which are conditions of existence for the capitalist fundamental class process. The processes directed by ­different Type 1 subsumed classes produce no commodities, no values, and they involve no extraction of surplus value from their direct performers. Direct performers in subsumed class process comprise Type 2 subsumed class (Resnick and Wolff, 2006). The wage and non-wage costs necessary to their performance are paid for out of the surplus value produced in, and distributed from, the capitalist fundamental class process. They may function as employees of the capitalist class itself or of the Type 1 subsumed class (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 99). What determines their subsumed class position is not who their employer is but rather the relation between the social process they perform and the capitalist class process of extracting surplus value. Once again, subsumed classes do not perform or extract surplus labor. ­Persons belonging to these classes carry out certain social functions, which provide certain economic and non-economic conditions of existence of the fundamental class process. The subsumed classes ‘sustain themselves by means of shares of extracted surplus labor distributed to them by one or a­ nother fundamental extracting class’. That is, the condition of existence of subsumed classes is a certain amount of extracted surplus labor, without which they cannot reproduce themselves. Fundamental and subsumed classes determine and depend upon one another. Merchants are a type 1 subsumed class (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 96).7 They possess a quantum of money (merchants’ capital), and serve the capitalists by immediately buying their outputs. Merchants ‘direct the circulation of commodities, the process of realizing the surplus value from the capitalist fundamental class process’ (p. 96). Realization (and hence circulation) is a condition of existence for the capitalist fundamental class process. The realization process is performed by Type 2 subsumed classes as well. They include the clerk of the merchant (as well as a salesman directly employed by a capitalist producing commodities). The unproductive labor of a merchant’s clerk requires the distribution of a share of capitalists’ surplus value to merchant’s profit. Wages to merchants’ clerks come from that surplus value. In return, this u ­ nproductive labor makes possible ‘an increased capacity for productive capital to extract 7 Resnick and Wolff say that competitive accumulation by capitalists necessitates their ability to sell commodities as fast as they are produced. Delays caused by efforts to locate final purchasers interrupt or slow the production process and also reduce the turnover rate of capital as well as the annualized rate of profit and thereby worsen the competitive position of any capitalists facing such delays. Hence the role of merchanting, as a subsumed class process.

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surplus value per unit of time’. Similarly, the unproductive labor of municipal employees, say, teachers and firefighters, involves distribution of surplus value via taxation. Yet, these unproductive laborers provide certain conditions of existence for surplus value extraction (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 106). Fire fighters contribute to productive laborers’ use-value productivity, and they contribute to the diminution of losses of productive capital from fire (ibid.: 106–107). Landlords are another Type 1 subsumed class. The rent they receive is a cut from the surplus value. Relying on Marx, Resnick and Wolff argue that landlords’ control of access to land provides certain conditions of existence of the capitalist fundamental class process: ‘exclusive private ownership of land effectively denies to proletarians the access which would give them the option to cease being proletarians, and secondly, that exclusive ownership also limits capitalists’ access to land’. Resnick and Wolff (2006: 97) broaden Marx’s notion of landlords to include other subsumed classes who function analogously: proprietors of patents, copyrights and trademarks. Capitalists may also seek and gain a monopoly of some capital goods, thereby adding to the surplus labor they extract directly a transferred portion of other capitalists’ extractions. They obtain such transfers by virtue of their monopoly, that is, of the subsumed class position they occupy in relation to those other capitalists (p. 97). Developing insights into joint stock companies from Marx, Resnick and Wolff argue that shareholders are another Type 1 subsumed class (p. 97). When surplus value is extracted in joint-stock companies by means of capital owned by shareholders, then provision of such capital, such as means of production, to such companies, has itself become a condition of existence of the capitalistic fundamental class process. As a subsumed class, shareholders’ dividends represent their payment out of extracted surplus value for the condition of existence they direct: the process of providing capital for production (pp. 97–98). Conditions of existence for fundamental class process are not only economic (e.g. role of merchanting in facilitating realization or the role of bankers who extend credit to capitalists) but also non-economic (political and cultural). For example, ‘Supervision, as distinguished from technical coordination, of productive laborers is a process of providing political conditions of existence of the capitalist fundamental class process’. To avoid rebellion from subordinate classes, surplus appropriators may spend a part of the surplus to hire supervisors to keep an eye on these classes, to police them and to set up educational institutions to teach these classes that it is futile to rebel (Wolff and Resnick, 2012: 158). Political conditions of existence also include decision-activities of

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‘top levels of state-run police, military, administrative, legislative, and ­judicial organizations’ (p. 98). Their contribution is political in that they produce ordered social behavior whereby private property and contracts are secured (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 98). Similarly, corporate personnel managers perform specific political processes of governing the group behavior of productive laborers such as designing and enforcing work discipline. Both discipline (a political process) and property as well as credit (economic processes) are only the conditions of existence of the production/ appropriation of surplus value. To secure them, the appropriators of the surplus distribute portions of surplus value to managers (salaries), owners (dividends), and bankers (interest): the latter thereby enter into the subsumed class process as recipients of surplus (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 131). Subsumed class processes also include the provision of cultural conditions of existence of fundamental class processes: ‘Belief in and thinking by means of specific conceptual frameworks’, and ‘are as important as ... [the] economic and political conditions of existence’ of the capitalist class process (ibid.: 99). The Type 1 subsumed class of directors of cultural or ideological processes encompasses the administrators of state-run free education, state-run free cultural programs, and corporate counseling programs for employees. This class produces ‘concepts of justice, society, work, individuality, suffering, etc.’, and determines ‘how individuals construct and construe their “experiences.”’ (p.  98). The work of this class is financed by the distribution of the surplus value extracted by capitalists from productive workers (p. 99). The Type 1 subsumed class also includes directors of religious institutions which perform various rituals and instruct the faithful in moral living. If and when such religious activities shape the willingness of productive laborers to produce surplus, they may be funded by capitalists out of their surpluses. By virtue of performing certain religious (non-class) processes, these religious activities can and do enter into the subsumed class process (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 32). A given actor can be involved in economic, political and cultural class processes. For example: state functionaries, comprising Type 1 and 2 subsumed classes, administer and carry out economic processes (control of money supply, regulation of commerce, maintenance of public roads, etc.), cultural ­processes (free public education, support of research, free public libraries, etc.) and political processes (passing of, administering and ruling on laws, protecting property, etc.). These subsumed classes within the state, and various social processes which they perform, exist on the basis of the tax payments which are distributions from surplus value. In turn, these tax revenues give rise to state’s demands for commodities, thereby affecting the markets for both labor power and materials (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 110).

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In any given place, societies will likely exhibit more than one form of class process (both capitalist and non-capitalist and both fundamental and subsumed capitalist class process), at any time and hence more than one set of corresponding pairs of fundamental classes (ibid.: 93). A capitalist society ‘denotes one in which the capitalist form of the fundamental class process prevails over other forms existing within it’ (ibid.: 94). Also, a typical capitalist corporation will itself display a complex class structure with internal conflicts between people occupying different class positions. Besides the fundamental capitalist class, there will be various Type 1 subsumed classes in a corporation (e.g. shareholders and the directors of merchanting, personnel, supervision, advertising, bookkeeping, security, legal services, lobbying, etc.), and their respective Type 2 subordinates. A particular individual may occupy the fundamental class position (of capitalist extractor) as well as one or more Type 1 subsumed class position. Only the subsumed class payment to managers for purchasing means of production and labor power (simple and/ or expanded reproduction) makes available to the capitalist the commodities needed to extract surplus value. In any capitalist enterprise, the fundamental class of capitalists may also manage this purchasing. If so, they also occupy a subsumed class position and receive a share of the surplus they extract to purchase constant and variable capital and their own means of consumption (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 109). Type 1 subsumed class processes may be organized in privately – owned enterprises requiring private capital investment or outside of these. Merchants and bankers, for example, must in general receive a sufficient portion of the capitalists’ surplus value. Such unproductive capital outlays must earn the average rate of profit, or else, they will cease to be made. If they do, realization may be in danger and thereby the capitalist fundamental class process itself. Those Type 1 subsumed classes that are not organized in privately – owned enterprises subject to the competitive flows of investible funds fare differently. They dispose of no unproductive capital; they earn no rate of profit. Rather, church, public education, police, military, and other similar administrations (e.g. perhaps, the ngo bureaucracy) receive, in general, portions of surplus value (extracted by productive capital elsewhere) just sufficient to cover the wage, salary, and materials cost associated with their particular processes. The mechanisms for transferring surplus value to these Type 1 subsumed classes include taxation and direct contributions. Finally, those Type 1 subsumed classes directly employed by capitalists – managers of sales, advertising, personnel, etc. – require outlays for their salaries and associated materials costs. These are distributions from their employing capitalists’ extracted surplus values; these are conceptually similar to the taxes and contributions mentioned above (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 99).

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Unproductive laborers are all Type 2 subsumed classes (Resnick and Wolff, 2006). Such a general definition encompasses Marx’s treatment of unproductive laborers hired by merchants and moneylenders. This category also includes the hired laborers providing all the other economic, political, and cultural conditions of existence of the capitalist fundamental class process (p. 101). Laborers performing surplus labor in non-capitalist fundamental class processes and laborers subsumed to such processes are sharply distinguished from the unproductive laborers subsumed to the capitalist fundamental class process (ibid.: 102). Resnick and Wolff differ from Wright and others in recognizing the difference between productive and productive labour. They also refuse to not only conceptualize the working class as either inclusive or exclusive of unproductive laborers (p. 104) but also to presume that an actual historical working class comprising both productive and unproductive laborers is either necessary or impossible at any level. The ‘working class’ has to be conceived of as a variable alliance of distinct classes – including productive and unproductive labour and including labour in capitalist and in non-capitalist class processes – changing continuously through history. Within capitalist social formations, such alliances might involve the fundamental class of productive laborers together with the Type 2 subsumed classes of unproductive laborers. They might also involve the performers of surplus labor within the noncapitalist fundamental class processes present in the capitalist social formation as well as perhaps certain of their subsumed classes (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 103). 2

Class Agency/Struggle and Geography of Capitalism

Class struggle is struggle over the class process; the adjective ‘class’ refers to the object of the struggle, namely, the fundamental and/or subsumed class processes (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 115). Fundamental and subsumed classes condition each other’s existence and their mutual relationship. Surplus value extraction is the site of particular contradictions (e.g. among and between capitalists and productive laborers) resulting from the fact that it is overdetermined by the subsumed class process and all other non-class processes in the social formation. The subsumed class process is the site of its particular contradictions (e.g. among and between capitalists and both Type 1 and Type 2 subsumed classes) (ibid.). The goal of class struggles may involve quantitative and/or qualitative changes in the extraction and/or distribution of surplus labor. For example, capitalist fundamental class struggles may focus on a quantitative change in the extraction of surplus value, say, by altering the length of the working day

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and/or the wage rate. Alternatively, such a struggle may focus on a qualitative change in the form of extracting surplus labor, say, a change from the capitalist to a different (e.g. non-capitalist) fundamental class process (p. 116). Similarly, the rise in taxes, costs of rearing children, interest charges to capitalists, and monopoly prices on means of production and wage commodities can set off a number of conflicts between and among the different subsumed and fundamental classes (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 113). Thus struggle between and among individuals holding various fundamental and subsumed class positions is always a possibility, but never an inevitability. It is possible to see the emergence of a complex class alliance, against the state, of certain capitalists, money-lenders, monopolists, as well as ­child-rearing spouses and productive laborers. Such an alliance might demand a cut in taxes with the same state services or even, if necessary, a cut in services as well. ­Different fundamental and subsumed classes ally against state elites, who are a subsumed class, to make them the scapegoat. Capital joins the alliance to protect its surplus value, the wage-good monopolist joins the alliance to protect its privileged, unequal exchange position, and the other subsumed classes join to protect their cuts out of surplus value at the expense of the scapegoated subsumed class (the state elites) (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 114). Were this alliance to force state functionaries to provide the same processes at lower costs, then capitalists would benefit most if wages fell by the amount of the associated tax reduction (p. 114). If one conceives of the working class as being a complicated alliance of productive workers and Type 2 subsumed classes, then conflict over taxes could easily form a barrier to the formation of such a working class8 (p. 114). Struggles over conditions of existence of surplus labor extraction (i.e. struggles over subsumed class processes) are not equivalent to, or necessarily  productive of, struggle over the extraction of surplus itself. For example, the ­struggle over processes of schooling among administrators, teachers, and students, and the struggle over the distribution of surplus value between capitalists and their bankers have differential effectivities on the fundamental class process. In different ways, both struggles change the fundamental class process (pp. 116–117). Even if there were no struggle over the extraction of surplus labor, there still might be subsumed class struggles which might contribute to the condition necessary to set in motion fundamental class struggles. To ignore subsumed class struggles, theoretically and/or politically, is to miss this opportunity for social change (p. 117). 8 Presumably, lower taxes mean less money in the hands of the government, which in turn means reduced employment opportunities in the state sector for workers who are a subsumed Type 2 class.

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Non-class struggles refer to objects of struggle within all social processes (economic, political, cultural, etc.) other than the fundamental or subsumed class processes. These non-class processes also define non-class positions which individuals occupy in varying patterns. In summary, struggles in and over any social process will, in any case, involve individuals who occupy a variety of class and non-class positions. It follows that the object of any struggle (class or otherwise) cannot serve as a sufficient condition to determine the class positions of the individuals struggling. A person’s class position is defined by his/her participation in class processes, not by the attitude of such individuals toward struggles within the class or non-class processes occurring within the social formation. By the same logic, a person’s attitude toward class struggle is overdetermined and thus not reducible to his/her class position. Class struggle is about bringing about changes in society. When capitalism is represented as a unified system coextensive with the nation or even the world, when it is portrayed as crowding out all other economic forms, when it is allowed to define entire societies, it becomes something that can only be defeated and replaced by a mass collective movement (or by a process of systemic dissolution that such a movement might assist). The revolutionary task of replacing capitalism now seems outmoded and unrealistic, yet we do not seem to have an alternative conception of class transformation to take its place. The old political economic ‘systems’ and ‘structures’ that call forth a vision of revolution as systemic replacement still seem to be dominant in the Marxist political imagination. (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 263). It might not necessarily invoke the emancipatory agency of a mass collective subject unified around a set of shared ‘interests’ but could arise out of momentary and partial identifications between subjects constituted at the intersection of very different class and nonclass processes and positions (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 53–54). Class struggles do not necessarily take place between groups of people whose identities are constituted by the objective reality and subjective consciousness of a particular location in a social structure. Rather, they take place whenever there is an attempt to change the way in which surplus labor is produced, appropriated, or distributed. Given that the distinction between necessary and surplus labour is just an accounting device and is in imagination,9 a desire to move the boundary can move it. Since class processes of ­exploitation 9 Gibson-Graham have this to say about the necessary-surplus labour distinction. ‘The necessary/surplus labour distinction cannot be grounded in the ostensibly reality of the body’s “basic needs” for subsistence but must be seen as a particular way of fixing meaning. What is necessary and what is surplus is not pre-determined … but is established relationally at the moment of appropriation itself. The boundary is an accounting device’ (Gibson-Graham et al., 2001: 7; stress added).

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and surplus distribution take place in all sites where work is performed – households,10 family businesses, communal or collective enterprises, churches, schools, capitalist firms and all the other sites of economic activity that are generally subsumed under the umbrella of capitalism – class struggle over surplus can take place in all these places (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 17). Class relations are malleable and unfixed which is why they see plenty of ‘opportunities for strategic games between liberties’. Power is seen as shaping class processes, even at a very local scale or even inside the family which can be a site of strategic action of a housewife convening family members to participate in the communal production and distribution of domestic surplus labour when she seeks a job outside of home (Gibson-Graham et al., 2000). Or a union can enlist and enrol members (bodies) who will exert power so that wages are increased (and the boundary between necessary and surplus labour is shifted). These acts marshal bodies and materials, and thus affect the flows of surplus labour and in the process, constitute power, class and subjects (Gibson-Graham et al., 2000). The body of work that is called labour geography is influenced by GibsonGraham’s thinking, including the idea that an outside of capitalism is possible within capitalism through unions or civil society actions and the like. The economic is contingent and differentiated, not autonomous (Gibson-Graham, et al., 2001). It can be shaped in many ways by human action, but the sphere of the economy is not to be seen as a sphere where actors are large-scale actors. Much as Gibson-Graham (1996) has argued that capitalism should not be seen as an all-or-nothing system and that different types of economic and social relations coexist under it, so, too we should not think that all landscapes created under capitalism are necessarily those favoured by a hegemonic capital and have been developed in its own image. To think in such terms would portray labour as always outmaneuvered by capital, no matter what workers manage to achieve ‘on the ground’ through their struggles. At the same time, it would portray capital in the infinitely flexible and adaptive terms that Gibson-Graham rightly criticizes’. herod, 2001: 65; stress added

10

‘The (white) heterosexual household in industrial social formations has often been a locus of what we have called a feudal domestic class process (see Chapter 9), in which a woman produces surplus labor in the form of use values that considerably exceed what she would produce if she were living by herself. When her partner eats his meals, showers in a clean bathroom, and puts on ironed clothes, he is appropriating her labor in use value form’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 66).

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Labour geography began as a critique of early (1970s; 1980s) Marxist/radical work (Smith, Harvey, Peet, etc.) on the basis that that work had a ‘capital logic’ approach which paid insufficient attention to the active role of workers in the making of the economic landscapes.11 In contrast, influenced by an anticapital logic approach of Gibson Graham, labour geography had stressed the active agency of workers. Herod offers what can be called four central tenets of labour geography (1997: 16–18). 1.

2.

3.

4.

11

The ‘production of the geography of capitalism is not always the prerogative of capital’. Labour plays an active role in creating this geography. Labour’s agency is restricted, so is capital’s. In some places and times, capital is not even the most significant actor. Active agency of workers is related to ‘their desire to implement in the physical landscape their own spatial visions of a geography of capitalism’, which enables ‘their own self-reproduction and social survival’. Like capital, labour resorts to spatial fixes (in that it makes use of geography/ location). It does so in its own interests which are different for different groups of workers depending on, for example, their location. These fixes may or may not coincide with those that are favoured by capital. This means that the production of space is a politically contested process, and that processes of class formation and inter- and intra- class relations are geographical processes. Workers (through their organizations) produce landscapes which increase their power and reduce that of capital, and which contribute to their own reproduction. Workers produce scales which impact their own agency and capital’s. Workers’ ability to win wage increases and shorter hours help determine the size and functional integrity of travel to work areas and thus the urban scale. Unionized workers’ abilities to create regional and national contracts in order to equalize conditions across areas signifies the c­ reation New working class studies (nws) – the most important foundation for which are labour history and (the cultural approach to) labour studies (p. 2) – stresses the centrality of cultural representations as sources of understanding working class experience’ (Russo and Linkon, 2005: 1). nws works with multiple definitions of class and does not privilege ‘class over other aspects of identity or social processes’ (ibid.: 11–12). nws is known for its inter-disciplinarity – hence it is said to include contributions from labour geography (p. 8). It has a clear focus on ‘the lived experience and voices of working class people’, and on how class connects to race, ethnicity, gender, place (p. 114). nws talks about how class works for people at work, at home, and in the community, how class unites and divides the wage- and salary-earning people whether they are white collar or blue collar workers. It shows class shapes and is shaped by race, gender, ethnicity, and place.

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of scales which in turn impacts patterns of economic development by making it difficult for employers to play one locality against another. Herod says ‘nonessentialist’ approaches to race, class and gender suggest that these categories are not internally coherent, that ‘racial, gender and other identities may overwhelm any sense of class solidarity that workers may share. In this approach, workers from varying geographical contexts (e.g. whether they live in an area where investment is moving away from or in an area where new investment is taking place) have different interests and pursue different agendas (p. 269). Rather than seeing labour as a spatially homogenous category and in essentialist terms, labour geography examines how ‘different groups of workers face different challenges – and thus seek to construct different types of geographies within which they wish to live’. It emphasizes that workers’ interests vary geographically (and according to race and gender): how might different groups with different sets of interest seek to manipulate … the geographical organization [of capitalism] to their own benefit and to the disadvantage of those with whom they may be in conflict?’ (Herod, 2001: xii). An analysis rooted in the geography of workers’ agency shows that ‘particular groups of workers gain more in real terms [jobs] by organizing around spatial concerns than around class ones’.12 Interests of workers and capital are location-bound, and in the face of a threat to these place-bound interests, sections of workers and capital may come together in  cross-class  alliance  to  ­protest their interest (attracting inward investment). ‘Many workers see such cross-class coalitions as very real opportunities to shape local economic geographies and engage in local boosterist activities … out of a genuine conviction that this best serves their own interests. In the process they… play

12

When there was a threat of job loss due to containerization at the New York port, the dock workers union fought to reserve for its members the right to do certain kinds of work [e.g. packing and unpacking] on the piers thereby limiting relocation of that work to cheaper inland warehouses (Herod, 2001: 71). At the urban scale, and in another context, while industrialists may wish to relocate to suburban locations, central city workers may prefer factories remain in urban areas: ‘suburban capitalists may not want urban firms to relocate [to suburbs] for fear that labour scarcities will drive up wages. Also, such a relocation would mean that, for example, central city workers may lose while suburban workers may gain. The point is that ‘different groups of social actors may prefer to see quite different economic landscapes put in place, such that much of the political and economic conflict between them revolves around questions of whose preferred spatial fix will be implemented and how. This will, in turn, be challenged by those with competing visions….’ All of this shows that capital and labour can have quite different visions for how they would like the economic landscape to evolve.

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an active role in shaping the landscape of capitalism’ (p. 67). Aspatial class analysis mistakenly portrays this as false consciousness, says Herod. 3

Class Theory as a Part of Marxist Social Theory in Anti-essentialist Marxism: The Principle of Non-dominance

This section discusses the Anti-essentialist13 Marxist view of: the inter-­ connection between class and non-class processes and the relative dominance of each; r­elative dominance of different aspects of class; and relative dominance of capitalist class and non-capitalist class processes; and class subjects in relation to material class positions. The deployment of an anti-essentialist way of knowing produces a specific type of class theory. Class analysis – where class is seen as process and relation of appropriation and distribution of surplus – is precisely the effort to think about society by focusing upon which people occupy which class positions and with what social effects (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 130). Appropriation of surplus labor is social theft, and Marxism calls for a society to condemn social theft through laws, morals, teachings and customs (Wolff and Resnick, 2012: 134). Marxism recognizes that capitalist society has produced ideas, politics and economic structures that repress knowledge of exploitation as social theft (ibid.).14 In the anti-essentialist view, society is constituted by class processes and non-class processes (Figure  6 below). Class processes are exploitative and CLASS PROCESSES

EXPLOITATIVE

CAPITALIST

&

NON-CLASS PROCESSES

NONEXPLOITATIVE

NON-CAPITALIST

Figure 6  View of society in anti-essentialist Marxist Class Theory 13 14

Some followers of this tendency use ‘non-essentialist’. Following Latour, Gibson-Graham say: power is not vested in any place or thing – ­market, state, property, companies etc. ‘We are left with contingencies of power in all social sites’. There is no single class process such as capitalist exploitation. That is economic monism. (­Gibson-Graham et al., 2000: 13).

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­ on-exploitative. Exploitative class processes are capitalist or non-capitalist. n Class processes (the extraction of surplus labor as the fundamental class process and the distribution of surplus labor as the subsumed class process) ­co-exist with non-class processes, including natural and social processes. Non-class processes include those that transform nature, as well as processes of exerting and obeying authority among people, and processes of language (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 93). The conditions of existence of the class process in society are all the other, non-class processes, without whose particular characteristics, the class process could not and would not exist. In turn, the class process is a condition of existence of each and every other social process. Class is an indispensable concept for analyzing society (p. 118).15 But class is only one distinct process among the many that constitute life. Class does not dominate nor is it dominated by non-class processes. As well, while ­Anti-essentialist Marxists see class as a relation of appropriation/distribution of surplus, they do not ‘wish to subordinate or subsume class to other social aspects such as power or property or consciousness or agency or struggle’.16 Property ownership or non-ownership does not signal class process. They ‘theorize class as a process without an essence’; there is ‘no core or condition of existence that governs their development more closely than any other and to which they can be ultimately reduced’. By this we mean that we “think” the existence of class and of particular class processes by initially presuming overdetermination rather than by positing a necessary or privileged association between exploitation and some set of social processes (such as control over the labor process or consciousness or struggle or ownership, to rename the familiar few). Gibson-Graham, 2006: 55

Each class and non-class process is in a process of contradictory change. Any particular social process, then, is the overdetermined result (site) of all these influences. Further, each constituent influence propels the social process in different (contradictory) directions (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 115). As a result, 15

16

Many scholars, including Dahrendorf, Wright, Giddens, and Hindess and Hirst (and to a large extent, Callinicos), define class in terms of property ownership (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 124). Class is overdetermined, rather than defined, by property ownership and other sorts of social relations, according to Gibson-Graham. This means that property ownership might be one form of leverage that groups use to promote non-capitalist class relations, but it would not by itself signal the existence of such relations.

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any individual occupying one or more class positions is understood to be subject to, partly constituted by, the contradictions and changes characterizing such positions (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 115). One cannot reduce one’s particular definition of class to an effect of other, more fundamental, aspects of society. One cannot make one’s notion of class into the key cause while the rest of society is reduced to its effect. ‘Reductionism has in our view, contributed to disastrous theoretical and political consequences as changes in one social factor – the presumed “most effective cause” [e.g. changes in property-ownership] – have been expected to usher in all manner of necessary effects which never materialized’ (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 122; parenthesis added). In the non-reductionist perspective, class can be understood as the effect of many different social aspects with none of them playing the role of ‘most fundamental’ determinant. Similarly, class can also be understood as itself a cause affecting all the other aspects of society. Class is one among many causes of social structure and history. It need not be seen reductively as the cause (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 122). Such a class theory neither requires nor permits an assertion that class is the central moving force of social history. Rather, class exists as the effect of all the non-class aspects of the social totality. And at the same time, its existence has constitutive effects on all of those non-class aspects. Thus, power, property, technology, and consciousness are irreducibly different from one another and from the class process. There are complex, mutually constitutive relations between the class and non-class processes (ibid.: 131). If the processes of power, property, surplus labor production and distribution, consciousness and so on are different, then calling them all ‘class’ conflates and confuses what would better be kept clearly distinct. A change in any one of these processes leaves open the question of just how that change will impact upon the other processes. For example, a change in power processes, say toward more democratic control over the state, may or may not alter the fundamental and subsumed class processes from a capitalist to a communist form. A change in laborers’ consciousness can affect processes of property in different ways depending on all the other processes comprising the full social context of the change in consciousness. A transition from private to socialized property in the means of production may or may not change the class processes (i.e. nature of surplus production, appropriation, and distribution) from capitalist to communist; that depends on all the other processes in the society at the time of such transition (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 132). This theoretical framework asks about the impact of nationalization or socialization of property (as in post-1917 Russia) upon what it calls class processes. Nationalization or socialization of property does not lead to classless-ness. One must ask:

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‘under what conditions will nationalization or socialization lead toward rather than away from a strengthened capitalist class structure? Such a question is as urgent for us as it is remote for property theorists of class’ (p. 133). Is a change from capitalist to communist class processes possible without certain changes in the configuration of non-class processes within a society? The answer must be ‘no.’ For example, specific changes in social processes concerned with gender relationships may contribute to a change in the class processes of Western capitalist societies today. Capitalist class processes can be jeopardized by a change in popular consciousness about what ‘male’ and ‘female’ means (i.e. a change in certain cultural processes) alongside a change in the authority distribution process within families (a change in political or power processes) combined with the fact that women sell more of their labor power as a commodity (a change in the economic process of exchange). These and many other similar changes ‘might provide the conditions of existence for a revolutionary change to a new social system including a different class structure’ (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 134–135). Such an approach allows for unity among ‘current movements for basic change to a more just society’. If class is one among several processes or if class is to be seen as a relation/ process of surplus production/appropriation/distribution, why should one talk about class at all or how does one justify certain approaches to the relation between class and non-class processes and the relation between different aspect of class (surplus, property, power, etc.)? The answer is epistemological: entry point. Choosing to take a class approach to society or indeed to take a particular view of class is a matter of one’s entry point and is unconstrained by what exists in the world, an entry point being an analytical starting place that reflects the concerns and preoccupations of a particular knower’17 (GibsonGraham, 2006: 55–56). Anti-essentialists’ preference for the surplus labor definition ‘reflects our appreciation of Marx’s unique contribution in discovering a distinctive social process’: i.e. class qua surplus labor (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 131). It is not that the surplus labor definition of class is somehow right while alternative definitions are wrong. To collapse what they call class process into processes of power or property or consciousness ‘would then precisely lose the specific difference and unique contribution of this theory and of Marx’s original insight’ (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 132). All theories are partial (Wolff 17

‘Such a presumption represents an epistemological choice on our part rather than an ontological commitment. We make no claims that class, or overdetermination, is implicated in the nature of being. But we are interested in operating within a discursive field in which essentialisms are not presumed as given in any sense. This reflects our political interest in creating space for thinking and enacting change in all social dimensions’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 55).

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and Resnick, 2012: 150), and different theories are partial in different ways, ­because their entry points to analyze a multidimensional society are different (p. 151).18 They say that: ‘Marxian theory is a class theory’ (p. 133). The goal of the anti-essentialist class theory is to: ‘affirm and integrate class processes into the conception of the social totality to be changed; it is not to deny, denigrate, or subordinate the social effectivity of non-class processes’ (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 32). In some cases: class has no causal force. It can occur within a particular relationship whose constituent processes include neither a fundamental nor a subsumed class process. Alternatively, it can occur within a particular relationship whose constituent processes do include either one or the other class process. For example, educating children is a distinct, non-class process, but it is also one condition of existence of any form of the fundamental class process (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 94). Class cannot be ‘the principal axis of antagonism in a unified capitalist space. The different forms of class processes are merely part of an “economy” that encompasses innumerable other processes – exchange, speculation, waste, production, plunder, consumption, hoarding, innovation, competition, predation – none of which can be said (outside of a particular discursive or political context) to be less important or consequential than exploitation. Situating and specifying class (and differentiating the many noncapitalist forms of class relations) is a theoretical process that involves discursively constructing the connections and contradictions between class and other social processes and relations, over small or great spans of space and time’. Gibson-Graham, 2006: 20

Any particular relationship between persons may, but need not always, include the class process. Individuals may participate in multiple class processes at any one time (or in and over their life spans), all of which may (or may not) contribute to a class identity (ibid.: 10).19 In fact, ‘class can no longer be understood 18

19

For neoclassical economics, the entry points include individual preferences; Keynesian entry points include social structures, uncertainty, etc. For Marxism, the entry point is class. Any individual may occupy several different class positions depending on the social processes in which he or she participates (Resnick and Wolff, 2003). For example, an individual who participates at one and the same time in the processes of appropriating surplus value, managing the corporation as a ceo, and owning means of production in the form of shares of common stock occupies three different class positions. In one, he or she is a productive capitalist (who exploits workers as a receiver of their produced surplus value)

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as the organizing center of individual and collective identity’ (Gibson-Graham et al., 2000: 9).20 None of the multiple classes processes (e.g. processes in a family, in a communal space, capitalist firm, etc.) has a privilege in terms of fixing the person’s class identity or establishing a common cause with others. Whatever political activity he/she may engage in (e.g. union organizing, species protection, rural boosterism, etc) it is no more influenced by class relations than by race, gender, age, spirituality, etc. (ibid.).21 Thus far we have looked at the interconnection between class and nonclass relations in the post-structuralist Marxist approach. What about capitalist and non-capitalist aspects of society? Gibson-Graham quite correctly define capitalism as a social relation, or as a class process, one in which nonproducers appropriate surplus labor in value form from free wage laborers

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and in the two others an unproductive capitalist (who receives distributed shares of that surplus value in the form of a salary for securing management, and dividends for providing access to owned means of production). A female small business owner may appropriate her own surplus labour in an independent class process, and appropriate surplus value from her employees who work alongside her, and in the evening and weekends, she may produce surplus labour that is appropriated by her partner in a feudal domestic labour process. (Resnick and Wolff, 2003). For example, consider a married manual labourer in a rural mining enterprise who spends his weekend hunting for game that is consumed by his family and also sold through a marketing coop. This person may participate in the capitalist class process at work and a communal class process at home and in independent class process (where he/ she appropriates and distributes their own surplus labour) (Gibson-Graham et al., 2000: 10). In the context of a capitalist monolith, where class is reduced to two fundamental class positions, sometimes supplemented by intermediate or ambiguous class locations, individuals are often seen as members of an objectively defined or subjectively identified social grouping that constitutes their ‘class.’ In the discursive space of diverse class processes, on the other hand, individuals may participate in a variety of class processes at one moment and over time. Their class identities are therefore potentially multiple and shifting. Their class struggles (over exploitation, or over the distribution of its fruits) may be interpersonal and may not necessarily involve affiliation with a group. What this means for a politics of class transformation is interesting but of course uncertain. For example, a person may appropriate surplus labor from a partner at home, produce surplus labor at a capitalist place of work, and both produce and appropriate surplus labor as a self-employed entrepreneur. None of these class positions confers a fixed or singular class identity. Within one individual, multiple class identities will overdetermine and contradict one another, as well as other positions of the subject. ‘[A] young woman worker in an export processing zone factory is [not just] a proletarian (with all the expectations of a workerist subjectivity that accompany this designation). She can now be seen to occupy a class position within a domestic class process, perhaps another class position within a more extended or distant family-based class process’ ­(Gibson-Graham and Ruccio, 2001: 174).

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(­Gibson-Graham, 2006). They are also right in insisting that capitalism is not the same as commodity production. However, what they call capitalism – like everything else in society – has no essence, nor dominance. In their approach, society is ­characterized by disunity because there is dominance neither of capitalism nor of non-capitalism: ‘no system or unified economy covers the social space and thus necessarily dominates other forms of economy’ (­Gibson-Graham, 2006: xiv).22 Is the essence of capitalism the accumulation imperative: that capitalists must reinvest a part of their surplus? No. Accumulation is not to be seen as having a priori and privileged claim on appropriated surplus, because there are unlimited and ever changing set of surplus distributions that are potentially subject to a range of claimants…For example: environmentalists can make a claim on surplus distribution to clean up the environment… forcing the firms to use environmental-friendly technologies)’ (Gibson-Graham et al., 2001: 13). Given that no social process is more important than any other, accumulation is no more or no less important than, say, the supervision of capital; all are conditions of existence of the extraction of surplus value. This means that the accumulation imperative that essentialist Marxists talk about is not a barrier to semiotic and other type of resistance. What about profitability: that capitalists (firms) have to remain profitable?23 That is also not the essence of capitalist class relation. For ‘the investment and lending activity undertaken by the industry can be seen as an unruly generative force that is not entirely disciplined by the imperative of capitalist reproduction’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 18). Therefore can the simplest attack on profits as a motive be also the most destructive? Entrepreneurs, like anyone else, have a host of personal motives. Profit is one, perhaps, but they are also interested in sex, food, and saving souls as well. Nor is capitalism’s tendency to be crisis-prone an essence of capitalism.

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The authors see a class in terms of how different class processes ‘are complexly interrelated rather than subsumed within a unity’ (Gibson-Graham et al., 2001: 14). ‘The ultimate path of corporate action can be seen as the complex result of many interacting and contradictory tendencies within an organization, and not as the working out of a dominant imperative or dynamic. ‘A capitalist company is not ‘governed by a dominant principle or centered upon a fundamental process’. ‘Conceived as an overdetermined site, no one of the enterprise’s economic processes (say, the economic process of accumulating productive capital in the example of a capitalist industrial enterprise) is more important, more essential than any other process in governing its development. (Resnick and Wolff, 1987: 168 quoted in Gibson-Graham, 2006: 188) An anti-essentialist discourse of the enterprise and profitability yields a very different knowledge of profit as a discursive artifact produced within different regimes of accounting’.

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Within what is called capitalist industry there are production relations that are non-capitalist. Besides, the revenues that are accrued by the industry can be viewed as having entirely heterogeneous sources (some are distributions of surplus value in the form of interest payments from capitalist enterprises; some come from noncapitalist enterprises including independent producers, sites of enslavement and sites of collective or communal surplus appropriation; some are consumer interest payments, that is, revenues that are neither capitalist nor noncapitalist). A firm may also receive ‘nonclass-based revenue flows from property speculation or money market transactions that counterbalance the loss of class-based revenue and maintain the enterprise in the black’. ‘Alternatively a firm may run at a permanent loss in terms of class-based revenues and survive by drawing upon cultural or family loyalties and commitments’ (ibid.: 191). Capitalism has no essence, and therefore it has no dominance. If the social formation is identified as capitalist, that identification signifies the presumed numerical predominance of capitalist class relations rather than the co-extensiveness of a systemic economy with a given social space’ (GibsonGraham et al., 2001: 14). Capitalism does not have the dominance that Marxists traditionally assign it, because there is a significant amount of labor (much of it performed by women) expended on unpaid and non-market-oriented activities such as housework, volunteering, child-rearing, and care for the elderly and infirm and because many people are involved in informal economies of both “less” and “more” developed nations’. The fact that all these non-capitalist processes are going on can ‘unleash the creative forces and subjects of economic experimentation. Gibson-Graham, 2006: xii24

Coming from a feminist angle, Gibson-Graham (2006: 261) draw attention to ‘the household in so-called advanced capitalist societies’ [which is] … a major locus of production’. They say that in terms of both the value of output and the numbers of people involved, the household sector can hardly be called mar24

‘[I]n the United States, [there are a] … a huge state sector (incorporating a variety of forms of appropriation of surplus labor), a very large sector of self-employed and family-based producers (most noncapitalist), a huge household sector (again, quite various in terms of forms of exploitation, with some households moving towards communal or collective appropriation and others operating in a traditional mode in which one adult appropriates surplus labor from another). None of these things is easy to see or to theorize as consequential in so-called capitalist social formations’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 263).

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ginal. In fact, it can arguably be seen as equivalent to, or more important, than the capitalist sector. Certainly more people are involved in household production than are involved in capitalist production. We must therefore seek to understand the discursive marginalization of the household sector as a complex effect which is not produced as a simple reflection of the marginal and residual status of the household economy itself (ibid.). The household is a major site of class processes, sometimes incorporating a ‘feudal’ domestic class process in which one partner produces surplus labor. If we can grant that nonmarket transactions (both within and outside the household) account for a substantial portion of transactions and that therefore what we have blithely called a capitalist economy in the United States is certainly not wholly or even predominantly a market economy, perhaps we can also look within and behind the market to see the differences concealed there (ibid.). Non-capitalist, non-market household based production is no less significant, no less productive than capitalist labour process (Gibson-Graham et al., 2000: 13). They say that ‘in both rich and poor countries the bottom two-thirds’ of all those who engage in economic activities of account ‘for well over 50 percent of economic activity’, so ‘we cannot help but be struck by the discursive violence enacted through familiar references to “capitalist” economies and societies’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: xiii).25 This kind of activity ‘engages more people for more hours of the day over more years of their lives than any other’. Feudalisms, slaveries, independent forms of commodity production, nonmarket household economic relations, communal, and other types of economy ‘may be seen as coexisting in a plural economic space, articulated with, and overdetermining, various capitalisms, rather than necessarily subordinated or subsumed to a dominant self-identical being’ (ibid.: 14). In this conception, then, an ‘advanced’ industrial social formation is not a coherent and stable unity centered on capitalist class relations. It is a decentered, fragmented, and complexly structured totality in which class and other processes are unevenly developed and diverse. An industrialized social formation may be the site of a rich proliferation of class processes and a wide variety of class positions – producer, appropriator, distributor, or receiver of surplus labor in a variety of forms. Class processes are not restricted to the industrial or even the capitalist economy. They occur wherever surplus labor is produced, appropriated, or distributed. If it is the case that there is ‘no system or unified economy’ that ‘covers the social space and thus necessarily dominates other forms of economy’ (­Gibson-Graham, 2006: xiv), and therefore, if capitalism is not dominant’, then 25

‘On the exploitative side, slave modes of producing and appropriating surplus where workers lack freedom of contract are arguably growing’ and this can be promoted (­Gibson-Graham, 2006: xiii).

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it must follow that the proletariat as a revolutionary agency is not necessary (­Gibson-Graham, 2006). In slaying the ‘capitalist monster’, Gibson-Graham have eliminated as well the subject position of its opponent (read: revolutionary working class). They are against ‘the ubiquitous view that noncapitalist economic sites, if they exist at all, must inhabit the social margins’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 3). For them, ‘Representing the diverse economy  is  a  deconstructive  process  that displaces the binary hierarchies of market/nonmarket and capitalism/noncapitalism, turning singular generalities into multiple particularities, and yielding a radically heterogeneous economic landscape’ ­(Gibson-Graham, 2006: xiv). 4

The Politics of Anti-essentialist Marxism or Class Politics of Distribution

The surplus-based notion of class in Post-structural Marxism, one that abstracts from power- or property-based views of class, claims to produce a new emancipatory politics around democracy at the workplace (Wolff, 2012a). Wolff (and I am assuming Resnick) stress this as a part of their agenda of economic democracy and ecological sanity. They are rightly critical of the fact that states as owners of enterprises in the ussr type societies concentrated too much power in their hands. From this critique, they then ‘wish to go beyond the binaries between “private and public ownership and between markets and planning” (Wolff, 2012: 180). Wolff proposes that “Wherever production [of goods and services] occurs, the workers must become collectively their own bosses, their own board of directors”, everyone will work shorter hours and will spend time participating in the decision-making in the enterprises and governments at all levels’ (pp. 180–181). Workplace democracy will intertwine with community democracy in the residential areas. Worker-controlled enterprises will provide daycare, elder care and other supportive services (p. 182) and will take care to minimize environmental degradation, and will not move jobs overseas to search for higher profits. These enterprises will be set up with help from the state: there should be a new kind of public works program. This would not give dole to the unemployed but help them set up worker – controlled enterprises (p. 183). The political implication of Resnick and Wolff’s theoretical ideas about class is presented by two admirers of Resnick and Wolff quite well: [The] epistemological openness and unique ­class-focus made them ­critical of the etatism that pervaded Marxian politics in the twentieth century. The Marxian political imagination in the twentieth century had been

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dominated by the figure of the state as the ultimate instrument in the hands of the ruling class. Resnick and Wolff’s approach highlighted the problematic character of this reductionist and centered idea of the state. On the contrary, they argued that the state is pulled and pushed in different contradictory directions by the complex social totality. Hence, intervening in individual social processes cumulatively could have as much, if not more, of a transformative effect on the state as any political practice targeted at the state. Thus, Resnick and Wolff strived to make visible the opportunity and the reality of class struggles at individual social sites and their transformative effect on the society at large. bhattacharya and seda-irizarry, 2015: 676

What about Gibson-Graham? Their approach is ‘a new economic politics’, ‘an innovative and transformative economic politics’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: ix). They imagine ‘realistic possibilities for an economic activism (­Gibson-Graham et al., 2000: 13–14). People should experiment with alternatives within the capitalist society. Their aim is to ‘enact’ and to ‘create or reveal landscapes of economic difference’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: ix). They are for ‘fostering positive i­ nteractions between things than in knowing which are bad or dominant’. (Gibson-Graham, 2006: xvii). Alternatives – alternative economies – refer to non-capitalist processes within capitalist society, for them. They are for ‘deliberate attempts to develop noncapitalist economic practices and institutions’ that ‘must take place in the social ­interstices, in the realm of experiment, or in a visionary space of revolutionary social replacement’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 3). They wish ‘to imagine [and]… to strengthen and build noncapitalist enterprises and spaces’ (GibsonGraham, 2006: ix). However, they also say that they do not ‘blithely condone all nonmarket transactions (including theft) or celebrate noncapitalist forms of exploitation (like indentured servitude, a form of slavery)’ but they are also not willing to ‘prejudge the ways that such practices may be enrolled in projects of community’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: xxxii). They distinguish between ‘analytical practice of looking for good or hopeful things in the noncapitalist sector’ and ‘the embracing moral judgment that the noncapitalist sector is good’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: xxx). A vision of non-capitalist alternative is ‘a vision of the “community economy” as an ethical and political space of becoming’. Their major interest is in ‘the diverse economies/community economies project’ as Postcapitalist Politics (Gibson-Graham, 2006). They ‘have conceptualized the construction of community economies under the rubric of “collective action,” a concept that rests on a reworking of familiar understandings of both collectivity and ­agency’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: xvii).

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There are various examples of what diverse economy or community economy might look like. The idea of the diverse or community economy, for example, recognizes the contemporary prevalence of indentured labor as a form of remunerated labor, and theft as a mode of transaction. The rationale for this is that ‘we must necessarily “start where we are” to build ethical economies’; ‘what is the usefulness of simply judging such practices for their ­divergence from certain values?’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: xxxii). Or, ‘A community might decide that theft is a legitimate mode of redistribution when it involves reclaiming a commons that has been unlawfully taken, as in land, mineral or maritime resources, or intellectual property’, or that ‘indentured labor is not simply to be condemned and eradicated…, but is also a resource for generating surplus and mobilizing subjects to build community enterprises back home’ (­ibid.). If this is the case, they ask: ‘On what basis might we preemptively exclude or include such activities in strategies of building community economies?’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: xxxii). Other alternatives within capitalism that Anti-essentialist Marxism (that of Gibson-Graham in particular) envisions include: cooperatives, local ­currencies, community credit institutions, and commons restoration. The alternatives such as these and the cooperatives are ‘no longer simply jottings in the margins of a central’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: vi). Such alternatives are important, and one indication of this is the fact that: ‘Research grants are being won, articles written, books published, conferences convened’ (ibid.: viii). This project is supported by the World Social Form, and is called movement of movements. It is epitomized by Zapatista uprisings26(ibid.). The postmodern Marxist politics is about putting pressure on the directors of capitalist enterprise so that surplus is used to improve local conditions under which capitalism works or which is used for noncapitalist class process. Promoting diverse economies can and must happen at the local scale. If one can divorce our ideas of class from systemic social conceptions, and simultaneously divorce ideas of class transformation from projects of systemic transformation, we may be able to envision local and proximate socialisms. What is required are not large-scale actors or millennial struggle. Much rather, they prefer small-scale collective action, not class action. They add: ‘A “politics of collective action” is what we have called our conscious and combined efforts to build a new kind of economic reality’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: xvii). This politics of collective action to build community economy ‘can be engaged here 26

‘As a movement, the Zapatistas have distinguished themselves by the constructive content of their actions, their ongoing ethical project of self-transformation, their continual search for ways to exercise power, and their freedom to act, which arises from practices of autonomy and self-determination’. (Gibson-Graham, 2006: viii).

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and now, in any place or context (Gibson-Graham, 2006). They wish to ‘liberate class politics from’ traditional Marxism’s restrictive yet privileged scenarios which accord too much importance to production and ‘systemic upheaval’, and they ‘wish to understand society as a complex disunity in which class may take multiple and diverse forms’ (2006: 58). Gibson-Graham define ‘socialism as the communal production, appropriation and distribution of surplus labor, we could encounter and construct it at home, at work, at large’, and people could do this, perform this socialism, ‘on a daily basis’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 264).27 The object – target – of what they call socialist politics is not capitalism. Rather there is ‘a different object of socialist politics’ such as ‘the exploitation and surplus distribution that go on around us in so many forms and in which we participate in various ways’, including ‘in the household, in the so-called workplace, in the community’. At these sites, ‘surplus labor is produced, appropriated, and distributed every day by ourselves and by others’ (and this is something that Marx made visible but ‘they have been obscured by the discourse of Capitalism, with its vision of two great classes locked in millennial struggle’) (ibid.). Gibson-Graham’s aim is not to eradicate capitalism but to control it: ‘our vision of a noncapitalist future is not predicated on the general eradication of capitalism but simply involves the acknowledged coexistence of capitalist and noncapitalist economic forms’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 179). Championing economic difference and diverse economies, they are for a peaceful coexistence of different forms of exploitation: ‘The coextensiveness of diverse forms of class process intimates the possibility of creating non-exploitative class relations’. (Gibson-Graham et al., 2001: 15). In other words, it is a vision of economic heterogeneity rather than of an alternative (noncapitalist) homogeneity’ (ibid.). They say: ‘the eradication of capitalism may not be the object of such political projects’ they are associated with (p. 20). To repeat, they are not opposed to capitalism or production of capital. It is just that it has to be socially controlled a bit. Given that there is no structural imperative of accumulation and profitability, such control is possible. ‘If there  is no underlying commonality among capitalist instances, no essence 27

Gibson-Graham are critical of the fact and the argument that local scales are ‘subsumed within the global order of neoliberal capitalism’, that there is ‘a hierarchy of scales from global to local, mapped onto a hierarchy of power in which macro forces operate to constrain everyday practices’, and that ‘Change that does not address the top of the hierarchy is ultimately contained’ and that ‘local initiatives “scale up” before they can be seen as transformative’. All these are ideas are ‘limiting’. They are for ‘expanding political possibility’ and for ‘flat ontologies that do not presume nested scales and hierarchies of power’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: xxvi).

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of capitalism like expansionism or property ownership or power.28 profitability or capital accumulation, then capitalism must adapt to (be constituted by) other forms of economy just as they must adapt to (be constituted by) it’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 14). If capitalism does have a ‘constitutive outside… [then] the logic of capital, far from dictating the laws of movement in every area of social development, is itself contingent, since it depends on processes and transformations which escape its control’ (Laclau 1990, 23 in GibsonGraham, 2006: xxiv). If capitalism takes up the available social space, there’s no room for anything else. If capitalism cannot coexist, there’s no possibility of anything 28

‘However subtle and varied the gradations in property ownership informing any such class-qua-property analysis, the problem of power remains as a critical opening for the alternative theorists of class whose entry-point is the social distribution of power. The ­latter might stress, for example, the difference between a legal right to own property and the actual control over its disposition (Cutler et al., 1977: 243–251). An infant may legally own considerable property, but a guardian may effectively control the use of that property. In this situation, defining a class structure in terms of who owns what would give a different and, for class-as-power critics, a misleading picture of the class nature of a society and hence of that society generally. The same logic applies if we substitute stockowners and boards of directors of modern capitalist corporations for the infant and the guardian in this example’ (Resnick and Wolff, 2003: 12). ‘Power definitions of class and their applications to social analysis also display gradations and subtleties. Between the all-powerful and the utterly powerless lie intermediate positions, the ‘middle’ classes for the power theorists: people who both wield power over others and have some wielded over them. While the non-owning guardian of our previous example may control the use of the infant’s legally owned means of production (for example, shares of common stock in a capitalist corporation), the guardian will not control most of the activities of that corporation (including the direction and supervision of its workers). Power to order the behavior of workers usually rests in the hands of the corporation’s directors and/or the managers they hire. Typically, neither directors nor managers own significant shares of stock’ (p. 12). ‘The power theorist may well pursue a class analysis focused on the relatively propertyless directors and managers, and only secondarily, if at all, on the shareowners (or their guardians). It follows that while property theorists would designate as ‘the capitalists’ those who own corporations’ shares; the power theorists rather designate the corporations’ boards of directors, those with mass of power in and over corporate affairs. Power theorists often build their class analyses around struggles over power among corporate directors and top state officials (a ‘ruling’ class or classes that give orders), a professionalmanagerial ‘intermediate’ class (that both gives and takes orders), and the wage-earners (a ‘ruled class’ that takes orders). Many Marxists have found variations of such a power theory very attractive, while others have tried to combine together such power theorizations with a property notion into a singular composite theory of a corporate capitalist class (Baran and Sweezy 1966: 34–35)’ (p. 13).

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else. If capitalism is large, other things appear small and ­inconsequential. If capitalism functions as a unity, it cannot be partially or locally replaced.29 gibson-graham, 2006: 263

In order to make this sort of argument, they deploy Marx. Quoting Spivak, they say that: Marx is not talking about the nongeneration [non-production] of capital but the nonutilization of capital for capitalism. It’s like the difference between starving and dieting. You can agree to the production of capital, but restrict it (by common consent) so that it can’t be appropriated by one group of people but becomes a dynamic for social redistribution. If that kind of Marxist analysis is digested, it becomes the active core of the global grassroots movements rather than a mere model for bureaucratic state capitalism that claims a particular name. Such is the case in the new social movements of the South – ‘globe-girdling’ rather than international movements. They operate with the real goal of redistributing generated capital… This wrench between capitalism and socialism, the self and the other, between rights and responsibilities, appropriation and redistribution, taking and giving – this is extremely fundamental. spivak and plotke 1995: 7–8

They also support entering into alliances with capitalist appropriators (­Gibson-Graham and Ruccio, 2001: 178). They imagine new sorts of alliances between managers and unions in capitalist firms, who might have common interests in reducing distributions of surplus value to financiers and instituting an Employee Stock Ownership Plan or other arrangement through which 29

‘We may no more assume that a capitalist firm is interested in maximizing profits or exploitation than we may assume that an individual woman wants to bear and raise children, or that an American is interested in making money. When we refer to an economywide imperative of capital accumulation, we stand on the same unsafe ground (in the context of the anti-essentialist presumption of overdetermination) that we tread when we refer to a maternal instinct or a human drive to acquisition. If we define capitalist sites as involving the appropriation or distribution of surplus value, we cannot make any invariant associations between this process and particular structures of ownership, or distributions of power (or anything else), just as when we identify women by the wearing of dresses, we cannot draw any necessary conclusions about what’s in the mind or under the skirt. When Capitalism gives way to an array of capitalist differences, its noncapitalist other is released from singularity and subjection, becoming potentially visible as a differentiated multiplicity’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 16).

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distributions to both unionized and non-unionized employees would be increased. They are interested in more modest intervention as opposed to what they called ‘superhuman effort’ that would be necessary to imagine viable noncapitalist practices (Gibson-Graham and Ruccio, 2001: 168). Both on the enterprise level and at the level of the economy as a whole, a decentered and disunified vision of the economic entity could free distribution from its traditional position of subordination to exploitation and investment/ accumulation. Such a vision has the potential to liberate multiple economic subjectivities now trapped within the circumscribed domain of the universal calculating subject. Then the question is: how might the abandonment of a centered economic totality and of an essentialist conception of economic dynamics and subjectivity allow for a less constrained role for distributional struggles? Gibson-Graham are opposed to the idea that the focus on the enterprise should talk about exploitation and accumulation. What is necessary is a decentered approach to the firm. This offers surplus distribution as a field for (class) politics of the enterprise (Gibson-Graham et al., 2001). A vision of the firm as the decentered site of emptying and dispersal suggests the realistic possibility of an enterprise-focused politics of distribution, one that engenders and expresses new sorts of rights and claims (say, of workers and community groups) to distributed shares of appropriated surplus value. But the academic, popular and political discourses of what they have called economic centeredness constitute a major barrier to the creation of such an enterprise-oriented language and politics of distribution. Enterprise politics – class politics of distribution of surplus – is the struggle between capital and labour over the relative size of surplus over the pool of appropriated surplus that is destined to be distributed to a wide variety of class publics and constituencies to an open ended list of social destinations. Many individuals and institutions – advertisers, managers, labor unions, local and national governments, banks, financiers, local communities, charities, accounting firms, etc. – make claims upon the surplus value and other funds distributed by capitalist enterprises. A politics of distribution targeting the enterprise need not be disempowered by corporate and state representations of profitability as the bottom line. ‘Economic narratives that emphasize the indeterminacy and contingencies of change, the decenteredness of economic ­subjectivity and the constitutive nature of politics and discourse allow for development of many alternative accounting frameworks’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 204). In these frameworks, different distributive flows (for instance to noncapitalist class processes, economic diversity, ecological sustainability, indigenous peoples’ development, or non-masculinist industrial development)

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and ‘rights’ to them are privileged with legitimacy at the enterprise level. ‘While such a distributionist politics could orient itself toward the state in its familiar roles as a collection point of social wealth and as the traditional origin and agent of redistribution, it could also innovatively focus on the capitalist enterprise as a point of condensation of appropriated surplus value, all of which will eventually be distributed’ (ibid.). Like the community economy projects, the politics of distribution of surplus must be at the local scale as well. Their new politics of redistribution which are different from traditional trade union struggles represents the ‘new movements’, that are ‘liberated to experiment with wealth distribution in ways that the more traditional movements generally are not’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 179). This is contrasted with ‘a more established politics of distribution that hinges on capitalist/labor relations and state redistribution’ (ibid.). Their new politics of distribution ‘draws upon alternative discourses of rights and alternative visions of development, specifically challenging private property rights and the goal of economic growth’ (ibid.). It is the case that ‘relatively marginal and quite local movements for stakeholders’ rights, aboriginal land rights and sustainable development pose some of the interesting possibilities for a politics of distribution – one that could conceivably be linked to a politics of class transformation – while well developed and formally registered union, labor, and social democratic movements are complicit and acquiescent with respect both to capitalism and to redistribution’ (ibid.). The anti-essentialists are champions of social democracy. They ‘have attempted to theorize social democracy as a transitional or mixed form of economy’ and have thus ‘encountered serious resistance from a Marxism which sees the welfare state as ultimately subsumed to or necessarily hegemonized by capitalism’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 258). They are critical of ‘both mainstream and left discussions of social and economic policy, where we are told that we may have democracy, or a pared-down welfare state, or prosperity, but only in the context of the [global capitalist] economy and what it will permit’ (2006: 14). ‘Though not couched within any specifically revolutionary rhetoric, they quietly offer the opportunity to contemplate different and even noncapitalist futures’ (2006: 179). Gibson-Graham wish to ‘explicitly divorce class from structural or hegemonic conceptions of capitalist society because of the ways in which such conceptions discourage a politics of local and continual class transformation and make it difficult to imagine or enact social diversity in the dimension of class’ (2006: 58). In their thinking, capitalist exploitation (the appropriation of surplus labor in value form) recedes as the privileged focus of class politics. Class relations of exploitation have traditionally been the unquestioned target of a politics

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of class transformation, while issues of (re)distribution have more often been relegated to a politics of social democratic reform. This is a dualism that bears investigation as both forms of politics slide out of public view. The privileging of exploitation over distribution as the truly legitimate focus of class politics reveals an essentialist vision of the economic totality as centered upon a core economic relation (between capital and labor) and a key flow of resources (the appropriation of surplus value) which, if changed, would revolutionize the whole. In this vision, any intervention in relations not at this center may be socially just and worthwhile but could not fundamentally transform the economic system. gibson-graham, 2006: 174

They add: The classic class goal is the elimination of exploitation via, for example, the socialization of production. Whether such a change would not just reshape the ways in which surplus labor was produced, appropriated and distributed (by instating a different class process involving, for example, communal appropriation) rather than eliminate exploitation per se is a matter of theoretical and political speculation (ibid.). Their project is one of class transformation which they define as ‘the bringing into existence or strengthening of noncapitalist class processes of surplus appropriation’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 175). They imagine ‘a class politics of distribution that explicitly addresses the possibilities of class transformation’. They say that ‘Rather than simply working for a reinvigorated but more equitable capitalism, distributive politics may conceivably contribute to a diverse economic landscape in which noncapitalist class processes are engendered by and coexist with capitalist class processes’ (p. 175). This project bears almost no resemblance to the specification of socialist distributional goals of Analytical Marxists such as Roemer. 5

Semiotic/Linguistic/Emotional Resistance and Intervention

The aim of Post-structuralist Marxists is ‘deconstructing the hegemony of capitalism to open up a discursive space for the prevalence and diversity of noncapitalist economic activity worldwide’. (Gibson-Graham, 2006). Their ­intent is to ‘help create the discursive conditions under which socialist or other ­noncapitalist construction becomes a “realistic” ­present activity rather than

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a ­ludicrous or Utopian future goal’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 263). Such an approach is enabled by the idea that economy is ‘only discursively colonized by capitalist rhetoric’ (ibid.). Language plays an important role in their brand of socialist politics. They are interested in modifying political economies through semiotic resistance’ (Gibson-Graham and Ruccio, 2001: 169). It is not possible to fix class identity as essential or unchanging. And subjects are not united by presumed commonalities. When class identity is unmoored from a capitalist totality the productive contingencies of politics come to the fore. Politics is no longer about reforming or transforming capitalism. It is about the production of economic difference. Class politics becomes a field of openness and experimentation including with non-capitalist activity (Gibson-Graham et al., 2001). Indeed, anyone who opposes capitalism cannot theorize it, ‘as all-embracing, leaving nothing outside it’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: xxiii). They ‘have attempted to deal with this by now familiar problem by cutting capitalism down to size (theoretically) and refusing to endow it with excessive power’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: xxiv). Ontology of becoming is made use of: their aim is to ‘disarm and dislocate the naturalized dominance of the capitalist economy and make a space for new economic becomings’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: xii). There is a need to ‘produce a noncapitalist economic imaginary in the absence of desire (or in the presence of multiple and contradictory desires)’ (ibid.: 21). ‘we may “desire” the “capitalist totality” because of the powerful antagonistic sentiments we feel in its vicinity’, but ‘we may not want to live with it’. ‘We may want instead a landscape of economic difference, in the presence of which paradoxically we feel no desire’. The process of social representation calls forth and constitutes desiring subjects – persons with economic, professional, sexual, political, and innumerable other compulsions and desires. Their interest is in encouraging people to ‘become not merely opponents of capitalism, but subjects who can desire and create “noncapitalism”?’ (GibsonGraham, 2006: 21). They say that ‘Second-wave feminism transformed and continues to transform lives and livelihoods around the world to different degrees and in ­different ways, rendering the life experiences of many women literally unrecognizable in the terms of a generation ago’. They admit that ‘the politics of feminism bears little resemblance to revolutionary politics as it is traditionally practiced’. For them, ‘Feminism linked feminists emotionally and semiotically, rather than primarily through organizational ties’. (Gibson-Graham, 2006: xxvii). They are for ‘cultivating subjects (ourselves and others) who can desire and inhabit noncapitalist economic spaces’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: x). They are against ‘the familiar structural vision of capitalism with its already identified and interested subjects’. Class identity becomes legible as a potential effect of

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politics rather than merely its origin or ground (Gibson-Graham et al., 2001: 19). Commonality and community may be seen as produced, not simply expressed, through political mobilization (Gibson-Graham et al., 2001). They offer a view of subjects as constructed under particular social and discursive conditions rather than as individual representatives of universal humanity or as agents of an overarching system/project (Gibson-Graham et al., 2001). These discourses continue to be extremely important in creating alternative emotions, desires and moralities that inspire movements of economic redistribution. Rather than continuing to suffer the personal and collective sense of pain and guilt inspired by dominant rationalist and centered economic narratives we see glimpses of a class politics of distribution that will constitute the ‘rights’ of different and noncapitalist class processes in an economic future of diversity. Gibson-Graham, 2006: 204

Gibson-Graham further note: As a history-making practice, the project of building an alternative economy also involves new practices of the self, producing different economic subjects through a micropolitics or ethics of self-transformation. gibson-graham, 2006: xvi

The New World Order is often represented as political fragmentation founded upon economic unification. In this vision the economy appears as the last stronghold of unity and singularity in a world of diversity and plurality. But why can’t the economy be fragmented too? (p. 263). The unity of capitalism for them is ‘a fantasy’. Their intervention is ‘an alternative conception of class that could help render instances of capitalism, smaller, more fragmented’ ­(Gibson-Graham and Ruccio, 2001: 169). One needs a new language of resistance: such terms as contesting and interrupting capitalism are abound as is thinking about and experimenting with alternatives to conventional capitalism.30 Disarm, dislocate, destabilize (­Gibson-Graham, 2006). They are for ‘producing a language of economic difference to enlarge the economic imaginary, rendering visible and intelligible the diverse and proliferating practices that the preoccupation with capitalism has obscured; we see this language as a necessary contribution to a politics of economic innovation’. 30

This kind of work happens at the Centre for Alternative Organisation Studies (caos) at the University of Leicester Management School (Gibson-Graham, 2006).

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(Gibson-Graham, 2006: x). They seek to produce ‘a class knowledge that is one among many forms of knowledge and not a privileged instrument of social reconstruction’. They ‘also have an interest in posing alternative economic ­futures. Towards this end we argue that a new knowledge of class may contribute to a revitalized politics of class transformation’ (p. 71).31 6 Conclusion Anti-essentialists recognize that there are different conceptions of class but they think that none of them is right or wrong. Each class discourse has different implications and effects. Class exists when: individuals produce more than is necessary to sustain them at a socially adequate level, and their ‘surplus labor’ is appropriated, in a variety of forms, by other individuals and groups (sometimes including the performer of surplus labor her self or himself). By offering a ‘bare bones’ definition of class as a social process of surplus labor appropriation and distribution, they hope to counteract an intellectual tendency that emphasizes the social effectivity of property ownership, domination, and consciousness while ignoring exploitation as they see it. The Postmodern-Marxist project has three core elements: ‘a politics of language – developing new, richer local languages of economy and of economic possibility; a politics of the subject – cultivating ourselves and others as subjects of noncapitalist development; and a politics of collective action – ­working collaboratively to produce alternative economic organizations and spaces in place’.32 (Gibson-Graham, 2006: x). Their political and theoretical agenda is to create an ‘alternative (and potentially emancipatory) economic futures in which class diversity can flourish. ‘Elaborating a vision of the “diverse ­economy” is one of our strategic moves against the subordination of local subjects to the discourse of (capitalist economic) globalization’ (­Gibson-Graham, 2006: xiv).

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‘We do not wish to contribute to another Marxist knowledge that justifies itself by claiming that class is more fundamental or influential than other aspects of society and that, therefore, a knowledge of class has more explanatory power than other knowledges. Historically, such attempts to marginalize or demote other social processes and perspectives have created irresolvable conflicts and antagonisms between Marxism and other discourses of social transformation’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 55). They advocate for a conception of class that is not limited to structural positions and functional roles in a capitalist totality’ and that offers one way to destabilize the equivalence between capitalism and economy’ (Gibson-Graham et al., 2000: 13).

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They want to promote ‘different politics of class activism and social innovation. Such a politics might not be concerned to eradicate all or even specifically capitalist forms of exploitation but might instead be focused on transforming the extent, type, and conditions of exploitation in particular settings, or on changing its emotional components or its social effects’. Such a politics ‘might not necessarily invoke the emancipatory agency of a mass collective subject unified around a set of shared “interests”’, but it ‘could arise out of momentary and partial identifications between subjects constituted at the intersection of very different class and nonclass processes and positions’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 53–54). Though concepts of class and exploitation have tended to be associated with capitalism, Marx and Marxists have identified a variety of noncapitalist forms of exploitation including ancient, primitive communist, feudal, slave, and communal class processes. They distinguish, in addition, two distinctive moments within any class process. These are: the exploitative class process, where surplus labor is produced and appropriated, and the distributive class process, where appropriated surplus labor is distributed to a variety of social destinations. Class relations as such have no more causal significance than non-class relations, and capitalism has no more dominance among class relations than noncapitalist relations. There is mere coexistence of class and non-class processes/ relations, and of capitalist and non-capitalist relations/processes. This is the essence of anti-essentialist class theory, from one angle. The anti-essentialist Marxist theory aims to add two basic ideas to the thinking of social movements: (a) class is a distinct process of surplus labor production/distribution which is different from the important processes of power, property, consciousness, etc., and (b) the analytical method of linking distinct processes together into a social totality is overdetermination rather than reductionism. These ideas form a basis for unity within current social movements and thereby enhance their chances for success.

chapter 4

A Critique of Theories of Class in Analytical and Anti-essentialist Marxisms The Analytical Marxist theory of class as presented by Wright has several advantages. It has analytical clarity. Its theoretical ambition is to explain the empirical reality of class on the basis of carefully designed concepts. It gives thoughtful considerations towards the problems of measurement. It takes a realist stance: class structures designate real mechanisms, the causal processes that exist independently of the class theorist, which produce specific effects (Wright, 1989d: 279). Wright is often ready to rethink his ideas in the light of criticisms (or self-criticisms), even if he does so within severe limits. His thinking has indeed gone through three stages: a domination-oriented view of class; exploitation-oriented view of class, and what can be called a ­complexity-oriented, integrated view of class. In spite of the attempts on the part of many, including post-structuralisminfluenced scholars, to see class as merely a mental construct (class merely as identity) (see Strangleman, 2008; Dowling, 2008), the anti-essentialist Marxism of Resnick and Wolff and Gibson-Graham has generally resisted taking that direction: it has stressed the objective importance of ‘exploitation’ to the conceptualization of class: class exploitation does exist independently of how classes think. Of course, how important class exploitation is, in their view, and how they conceptualize this, are separate matters. While both forms of Marxism emphasize exploitation, their view of exploitation is not necessarily the same. Resnick and Wolff do pay (some) attention to labour theory of value. Wright almost ignores it, as Analytical Marxism as such does (see Roemer, 1986). Both forms of Marxism seek to connect class theory to class politics, although in different ways. While Analytical Marxism is critical of post-structuralist Marxism, both have given up on the systemic analysis of capitalism, and on the fact that capitalism’s systemic character is an enormous obstacle to significant long-term reforms of the capitalist class relation. For post-structuralist Marxists, class or capitalism is just one of several possible entry points with which to analyze society, and therefore capitalism does not have the sort of dominance that Marxism has usually assigned it. Similarly, Wright’s Analytical Marxism as well trims the theoretical ambition of Marxist class theory. It indeed makes substantive arguments to show that much of the problem of inequality, etc. is only partly to do with capitalist © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004337473_005

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e­ xploitation, because it coexists with other important forms of exploitation in capitalist society. In other words, while the two forms of Marxism are among the most influential contributions to class theory within Marxism, and indeed beyond Marxism, they both suffer from several problems. The totality of these revisionist forms of Marxism has not received the critical attention that is due. This chapter will therefore focus on the problems these two Marxisms have in order to set the context for presenting an alternative theory of class in the subsequent chapters. The Section 1 discusses the ways in which they conceptualize property. Analytical Marxism conceptualizes class in terms of property relations, but its view of property is very problematic, while post-structuralist Marxism completely divorces the matter of class from that of property. Section 2 examines how they both conceptualize exploitation and surplus, while Section 3 focusses on their views on the primacy of class and capitalism. Section 4 looks at the question of agency of the working class and the issue of the struggle against capitalism, as they are discussed in these Marxisms. Section 5 points to the reformist political implications of the ideas about class in these two Marxisms. Section 6 situates these ideas in the context of the tradition of revisionist thinking and reflects on the potential connection between these ideas and the underlying class interests in society. Section 7 provides a summary. 1

Class and Property

There is a fundamental mis-conceptualization of the connection between class and property, or more accurately, of the property aspect of class. Antiessentialists dismiss the internal relation between class and property, the idea that property is a part of what class is. And Analytical Marxism has a conception of property which will be called chaotic1 in critical realist philosophical terms. There is also the problem of conflation of levels of generality/abstraction in relation to the property question. Analytical Marxism sees organizational asset and credentialized (monopolizable) skills as property – as means of production – in the same way as factories or farms are. Therefore, for analytical Marxism, unequal ownership of such resources as organizational asset and skills gives rise to class relations around these forms of property. Those who control these resources exploit those who 1 This is chaotic in the sense that x is separated from Y, when in fact X cannot be separated (Sayer, 1992: 138–139).

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do not. These class relations are independent of the capitalist class relation. These are post-capitalist forms of exploitation within capitalist society. Ownership as a social practice is a characteristic of many societies. In all societies, people own certain things. It is what is owned and how that matters. Effective ownership of means of production (e.g. land, factories, machines, etc.) and whether one has control over one’s own labour power define class. In what sense is the effective ownership of factory similar to the ownership of organizational asset? Should the latter ownership be treated as a separate category from the ownership of means of production? Is organizational asset like a factory or a machine that one owns? What is indeed a set of social relations – relations of authority, coordination, etc. – is being given the name of a thing (it is called an asset). It is then treated as a thing the way a factory or a machine is treated as a thing, as a property. Not just that. It is treated as the most dominant property in the immediately post-capitalist society that follows capitalism in the event of a successful replacement of capitalist property relations. The underlying assumption is that the post-capitalist society must inevitably be a state bureaucratic socialist society. Lurking behind Wright’s treatment of the organizational asset is the following: the people who own a factory or a bank are not necessarily the people who direct the labour process or make investment decisions. From this relevant fact, however, what does not follow is the fact that organizational abilities/ work are a different asset. Class is about relations of effective control – not just nominal ownership – of productive resources such as farms, factories and banks, etc. Control over organization is an inherent aspect of that control over productive resource (Carchedi, 1989: 110). There is a class which monopolizes effective control over means of production, and there is a division of labour within this class. The property owner instead of herself doing the act of directing the labour process or finding out where raw material will come from or the next computer software will be designed has assigned that work to someone else. Both those who own means of production and those who are involved in the day to day management of these assets on their behalf belong to the same class, by virtue of different aspects of effective control over the means of production. And to the extent that this is true, there is little basis for treating managers in a capitalist enterprise with the power to decide accumulation strategies and hiring and firing as a separate class from that of those who own money-capital and factories. And there is little basis for treating these managers on the same basis as treating bureaucrats in a post-capitalist society with no private property in means of production. Such an approach makes the elimination of property rights in means of production irrelevant.

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Similarly, why is skill – a monopolizable skill – a productive force which is considered to be separate from labour power as such? Because Wright would have little to do with the distinction between concrete and abstract labour power, or between average simple labour and more complex labour, he can treat skill as a separate productive force. That is the problem.2 The analytical Marxist treatment of labour power is akin to the concept of labour as human resource as in neo-classical economics, with which analytical Marxism has much close affinity (see Lebowitz, 2009: Ch. 4). For Marx, labour power refers to the ‘expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles and sense organs’ (Marx, 1977: 164). A highly skilled worker is a worker. A monopolizable skill is a skill which is a form of labour power. Certainly, those with monopolizable skills may receive more than other workers because of the scarcity of that skill in the labour market but is that extra quantity of income in itself so qualitatively different that monopolizable skill becomes a basis for a class cleavage? Wright seeks to offer a theory of class that applies to different forms of class society. This ambition is not necessarily the problem. Indeed, a part of class theory must be trans-historical in some sense, i.e. it must apply to all class societies.3 Following the dialectical principle, one must see differences and ­similarities between class-based societies. While Wright seeks to show some similarity between different class societies, he does not seek to show how they are different. He loses sight of the specificity of property in different class societies. His theory is undialectical not only because he does not see both similarities and differences. It is also undialectical because, as mentioned earlier, he treats what are social relations (i.e. relations of authority or effective control) as things in the same way that land and factory are things (which become capital only under certain conditions). To the extent that Wright tries to construct a class theory that applies to all class societies, the basis for such construction (the so-called withdrawal rule in his Analytical Marxism) is problematic. Capitalist class society is not just any form of class society. It represents the highest form of class society. It is so in the following sense. It is a society where class-ness is the most complete, that is, where the absence of control over property is most complete, and where there is alienation from different aspects of life, including from labour process, from social product, etc., in the most complete manner possible. It is also a society that is associated with an extra-ordinarily high level of development

2 Interestingly, the idea in Wright’s work about skills being a productive force has close affinity in postmodern work on knowledge as a productive force. 3 See the next chapter where I present precisely a view of class that applies to different class societies, and the philosophical justification for such a view.

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of productive forces, including skills of people. In spite of this, basic needs of millions remain unfulfilled, and lives of the majority are insecure. In no other class society can the gap between how people can live their lives (that is, what their level of welfare can be) and how they do live their lives be more stark as under capitalism. The specificity of capitalist class society cannot be dissolved in the generality of all class society. Wright is able to dissolve this partly by treating skills and organizational ‘work’ as assets the way land and machines are. His assumption is that different types of asset as such produces different types of class relation. For Marx, the nature of the means of production (their productivity) combined with the forms of appropriation of surplus labour explain different forms of class relation. Wright himself is troubled by the ‘asymmetry in the treatment of organization assets [and skills] in the analysis of class and exploitation’ (1989a: 23). It is the case that ‘feudal lords have ownership rights in their serfs; capitalists owns the means of production; experts own their skills (or at least their credentials)’. However, as he himself admits, ‘it does not seem appropriate to describe managers or bureaucrats as “owning” organizational assets’. While it may still be the case that their effective control over these assets is a basis for the exploitation, such control [over organizational asset] is quite different from the ownership relations of other assets and may call into questions the argument that such control is the basis for a dimension of class relations. wright, 1989a: 23

A fundamental thesis in Marxism is that there will be contradiction between property relations and development of productive forces, leading to economic crises, which will in turn contribute towards the radicalization of the masses who suffer because of the crises and who will therefore revolt against the system. But Wright is skeptical of all that: Consider this. The thesis of the long-term nonreproducibility of capitalism – the ­inherent, endogenous tendency towards deepening, and eventually catastrophic, crises rooted in the falling rate of profit – is certainly problematic, as is the claim that capitalism produces a sufficiently homogeneous class of proletarians to constitute its gravediggers. wright, 1993: 23

While Analytical Marxism over-extends the concept of property and thus makes it incoherent, Anti-essentialist Marxism goes to the other extreme: according to it, property – the fact that some own property and others do not – is

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not the basis for conceptualizing class at all. It says that: ‘the ownership of ­property (whether in means of production or more generally) is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the wielding of power and vice versa’ (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 119).4 According to the anti-essentialist discourse, much of the Marxist tradition has argued reductively that class structure (‘the base’) determines social structure (‘the superstructure’) and that class struggle determines historical change (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 122). This reductionism is considered by it to be problematic because of its a priori presumption that some causes must outweigh others in determining an effect. ‘Reductionism has in our view, contributed to disastrous theoretical and political consequences as changes in one social factor – the presumed “most effective cause” – have been expected to usher in all manner of necessary effects which never materialized’ (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 122). The anti-essentialists think that the traditional class analysis mistakenly sees ‘ownership of the means of production [i.e. ownership of property] … as ultimately …constraining the exercise of power by workers vis a vis capital’ (Gibson-Graham et al., 2001: 12; parenthesis added). Thus Anti-essentialist Marxism ignores Marx’s justified claims in Capital that monopolization in the distribution of property is a pre-condition for exploitation, that there are two kinds of private property (one based on one’s labour and another is based on the exploitation of other people’s labour), and that the initial unequal distribution of property is constantly reproduced through the appropriation of surplus (value) in capitalist class society.5 But how can one deny the importance of property relations, the issue of who controls property, because it is precisely because some control property and others do not that the latter have to surrender their surplus labour or product of surplus labour to 4 ‘To own property in a particular society need not empower the owner to employ another human being or to participate in state decisions; that would depend, for example, on ideological and political conditions in that society. To be propertyless need not require a person to sell labor power; that would depend, for example, on whether propertyless persons had socially recognized access to income from other sources. To wield state powers of all sorts need not require ownership of property; that would depend on the social rules whereby power is granted to individuals’ (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 119). 5 It is interesting that even a very insightful scholar like Carchedi (1989) under-stresses the importance of unequal distribution of property in the conceptualization of class. Criticizing Wright’s view of class, Carchedi says that some people having more or less skills than others is about distribution and not production. However, such criticism of Wright itself is problematic: after all, distribution of means of production is a part of production, as Marx says (in Grundrisse, and in Capital one): unequal distribution of productive resources when it specifically leads to a condition of monopolization over those resources is an aspect of class relation by virtue of being a relation of distribution, but this distribution is not of income or consumption items but of property, of productive resources.

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those who control. Writing on the General rules of the International Working Men’s Association, Marx said this: the economical subjection of the man of labor to the monopolizer of the means of labor, that is, the sources of life, lies at the bottom of servitude in all its forms, of all social misery, mental degradation, and political dependence. marx and engels, 1977b: 19

Yet, changes in who control property does not solve all problems. If the point of Post-structuralist and Analytical Marxisms is that mere changes in property relations are not enough for a changes in class relations, that point is well taken. In fact, it was none other than Trotsky, the co-architect of the Russian revolution with Lenin, who has made the point forcefully, and more forcefully than Post-structuralist and Analytical Marxists have, and from a standpoint that sees class in a more dialectical-holistic manner, and in a way that does not divorce class from production of wealth. In order to become social, private property must as inevitably pass through the state stage as the caterpillar in order to become a butterfly must pass through the pupal stage. But the pupa is not a butterfly. Myriads of pupae perish without ever becoming butterflies. State property becomes the property of ‘the whole people’ only to the degree that social privilege and differentiation disappear, and therewith the necessity of the state. In other words: state property is converted into socialist property in proportion as it ceases to be state property. And the contrary is true: the higher the Soviet state rises above the people, and the more fiercely it opposes itself as the guardian of property to the people as its squanderer, the more obviously does it testify against the socialist character of this state property.6 trotsky, 1991: 201–202

6 Also consider these lines: ‘From the point of view of property in the means of production, the differences between a marshal and a servant girl, the head of a trust and a day laborer, the son of a people’s commissar and a homeless child, seem not to exist at all. Nevertheless, the former occupy lordly apartments, enjoy several summer homes in various parts of the country, have the best automobiles at their disposal, and have long ago forgotten how to shine their own shoes. The latter live in wooden barracks often without partitions, lead a half-hungry existence, and do not shine their own shoes only because they go barefoot. To the bureaucrat this difference does not seem worthy of attention. To the day laborer, however, it seems, not without reason, very essential’ (p. 203).

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It is widely recognized by those whom these Marxisms call traditional Marxists that: changes in property relations are necessary to remove exploitation and improve welfare of the direct producers but not sufficient; that bureaucrats in a post-capitalist society can exploit workers, and that a political struggle is necessary to democratize the actual control over the use of productive resources and indeed control over other aspects of society. 2

Class, Surplus, and Exploitation

Not only does Anti-essentialist Marxism divorce the question of property from that of class. It also eliminates the symmetrical internal relation between class and exploitation: class processes do not have to involve exploitation, although exploitation involves class. Anti-essentialists place distribution of surplus (subsumed class or distributive class process) alongside appropriation of surplus (exploitation). Anti-essentialist Marxism is correct to emphasize the surplus aspect of exploitation but its conceptualization of surplus is ahistorical. Once again, levels of generality are conflated. Anti-essentialists think of surplus either in purely technical or in purely ‘social sense’. For it classlessness means ‘societies in which the distinctions between necessary and surplus labor would have disappeared as would the surplus itself’ (Wolff and Resnick, 2012: 163). Here it refers to the surplus in purely social sense and ignores the material/technical aspect of surplus. ­Anti-essentialism seems to forget that: all societies require the production of surplus (i.e. all societies need to produce more than what it needs to consume at a given time), the surplus, out of which, and on the basis of which, the usedup means of production are replenished at a greater level,7 and those who ‘Superficial “theoreticians” can comfort themselves, of course, that the distribution of wealth is a factor secondary to its production. The dialectic of interaction, however, retains here all its force. The destiny of the state-appropriated means of production will be decided in the long run according as these differences in personal existence evolve in one direction or the other. If a ship is declared collective property, but the passengers continue to be divided into first, second and third class, it is clear that, for the third-class passengers, differences in the conditions of life will have infinitely more importance than that juridical change in proprietorship. The first-class passengers, on the other hand, will propound, together with their coffee and cigars, the thought that collective ownership is everything and a comfortable cabin nothing at all. Antagonisms growing out of this may well explode the unstable collective’ (p. 203). 7 The phrase ‘greater level’ refers to the fact that a society’s surplus is used to create a greater magnitude of means of production in year 2 than in year 1 (e.g. to construct bridges or embankments where there were none).

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c­ annot work (pregnant women, children, people who are not able to work) are supported. In society which produces surplus but has no classes is a society where surplus will be ‘transferred’ from producers of surplus to consumers of surplus, and these two categories are the same. In such a society, there is control over surplus but such control does not give rise to classes because the production and distribution of surplus will be democratically controlled by the collective of associated producers-cum-consumers. In Anti-essentialist Marxism, there is no distinction between surplus production for direct consumption in a family and surplus production as property in means of social production.8 In this view, if a spouse performs surplus labour (that is, if he/she performs labour which is more than what is necessary for his/her own reproduction), this is no different from a worker in capitalism producing surplus for the capitalist or from a member of a commune under communism performing surplus labour which can be used to support those who are unable to work or indeed to enhance the quality of productive forces in order to increase social productivity of labour, which would allow people to spend more time on, for example, the pursuit of art and to satisfy their curiosity to know how nature or society works. Communal producers, family ­members, factory workers in a capitalist factory, serfs, and slaves are all seen as performing surplus labour of the same type, and all are involved in class relations, although they are not all involved in exploitation. The Marxist notion of exploitation centers on the distinction between necessary and surplus labour, and that while what is necessary labour is somewhat variable, over the long term, there is a limit to the increase in what labour 8 Underlying such conflation is the conflation of different views of the social. The family is a social thing, and so is a network of productive units producing use-values as a part of the division of labour, one in which products produced in one unit are exchanged/shared with those in another. The social character of the family has a much narrower basis than that of the network of productive units, i.e. economic sphere of social production. Production of conditions of production is different from producing food in the kitchen to eat, although both are social acts. But they are not equally social. Ultimately, production at the scale beyond, and above the family, and such units, sets a limit within which productive activities (including cooking food or ironing clothes) within the family occur. If there is a conflation of different views of the social in Anti-essentialist Marxism, which is generally anti-dialectical (note that mere recognition of ‘reciprocal interaction’ does not make a view dialectical, and that too, one in which no process has primacy over any), what is underlying such conflation is another conflation, which is based on the abstraction from the dialectical law of quantity and quality: water at 12 degrees is warm (relative to water at 5 degrees), and so is water at 37 degrees. But if one needs to bathe in warm water, water at 12 degrees is as good as water that is not warm and therefore useless. Scale of social activity matters.

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can receive as a compensation for necessary labour, and therefore, there is a limit to the reduction in surplus labour. Gibson-Graham have this to say about the necessary-surplus labour distinction, however, which is idealistic in philosophical terms. The necessary/surplus labour distinction cannot be grounded in the ostensibly reality of the body’s ‘basic needs’ for subsistence but must be seen as a particular way of fixing meaning. What is necessary and what is surplus is not pre-determined … but is established relationally at the moment of appropriation itself. The boundary is an accounting device. gibson-graham et al., 2001: 7; stress added

So the distinction between the two forms of labour and therefore the very existence of surplus labour and class is a matter of fixing meaning and attendant micro-politics. Anti-essentialist theory divorces class from surplus appropriation. In this view, in the processes in which subsumed classes are involved, the processes in which new value is not produced, there is class, but there is no exploitation. So, in this view, a Walmart worker does not produce surplus labour for Walmart company. This theory also divorces class from the fact of ownership of means of production and accumulation issues, thus producing a class theory that is insufficiently social and material. It ignores the fact that: the ownership-relation [as an aspect of class relation] calls into realized existence one of its potentialities, the accumulation of capital, and the latter becomes the realized condition of … (extended) reproduction [of capitalist class relation]. carchedi, 2012: 15; parenthesis added

Not only is the matter of ownership divorced from class. The matters of accumulation and production are outside of the scope of their class theory. Without a grasp of Marx’s use of history and the role of production, you will not understand the significance he attaches to those concepts so often used and so often abused – the concepts of class and of revolution. james, c.l.r, 1962; para 7; italics added

Analytical Marxism’s view of surplus is also problematic. It even does not recognize that the value of the surplus product is necessarily determined by socially necessary abstract labour time. For Wright, in capitalism surplus is

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appropriated through market exchanges: workers are paid a wage that covers the costs of production of their labor power, and capitalists receive an income from the sale of the commodities produced by workers. So surplus is merely a market difference between commodity prices. One does not need to look at the production of surplus in the sphere of commodity production itself; looking at the apprpropriation of surplus in the market is enough. That is why Chibber (2009: 359), a former graduate student of Wright, could maintain that analysing labour process is not conceptually necessary for class analysis: ‘there is nothing in the concept of [class] exploitaion that necessarily leads to an examination of the labour process. The connection is based on an empirical fact about capitalism’.9 Roemer, who has influenced Wright, makes this point: ‘the fundamental feature of capitalist exploitation is not what happens in the labor process, but the differential ownership of productive assets’ (1982: 94–95) in a context of market exchanges. Analytical Marxism’s model of class and exploitation is based on circulation: exchange of things. This is true only from one vantage point: when productive resources are unequally distributed those who do not control these will perform surplus labour for those who do. But this says little about production and appropriation of surplus in specific societies, including capitalism. Given unequal distribution of productive resources, the ways in which surplus is appropriated – the forms of surplus itself and consequently forms of exploitation – are different in different class societies. This is Marx’s point. But this is not the point of Analytical Marxism (or indeed of Anti-essentialist Marxism), which claim some connection to Marx. One may argue that Wright is among those scholars who often ‘attempt to explain away the contradictions of capitalist process of production by dissolving the relations between persons engaged in that process of production into the simple relations arising out of the circulation of commodities’ (Marx, 1977: 209). It is true that ‘The production and circulation of commodities are… phenomena which are to be found in the most diverse modes of production’ (ibid.). But: ‘If we are only familiar with the abstract categories of circulation, which are common to all of them, we cannot know anything of their differentia specificia…’ (ibid.). There is commodity production and there is commodity circulation in capitalism. While it is true that capitalist class relation cannot exist without circulation, it is also true that it cannot exist merely within it.

9 Unfortunately, whatever little work there is on labor process aspect of class has fallen for more fashionable culturalist concerns, almost banishing the element of material-political antagonism from the sphere of work.

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Consider Wright’s notion of skill exploitation again. From the treatment of skills as an asset/property, it is a short step to treating it as a basis of exploitation. Wright himself notices that ‘The skills exploitation approach is based on the problematic claim that the surplus appropriated by skills/credential owners necessarily constitutes exploitation of others, and this undermines the relational character of the class category built around skills’ (1989d: 331). The theorization of skill in class terms was based on the intuition that these people are not working class people (ibid.: 332). Wright draws a parallel between land fertility differential and talent differential. One form of monopolization over skills is rooted in natural talent. Another, more important part, is in credentials. The result is a monopoly rent component of the wage. This component is potentially a form of exploitation. It is not clear why this constitutes exploitation of workers. Skilled wage-labour does not enter into an exchange or productive relation with unskilled wagelabour. Besides, when wages are far above the value of labour power, i.e. when wages are ‘super-wages’, one can explain this in terms of the distinction between simple average labour and complex average labour as a coefficient of simple average labour, supply and demand conditions in the labour market, a rent component (natural talent) and similar other factors. The distinction between skilled and unskilled labour is not unimportant (e.g. when it comes to explaining economic and cultural differences between groups of working people), but from the standpoint of defining the basic class character of labour and of society, it is much less important than Analytical Marxism would make us believe. Here is why: human labour… is the expenditure of simple labour power, i.e., of the labour power possessed in his bodily organism by every ordinary man, on the average, without being developed in any special way. Simple average labour…varies in character in different countries and at different cultural epochs, but in a particular society it is given. More complex labour [or skilled labour] counts only as intensified, or rather, multiplied simple labour, so that a smaller quantity of complex labour is considered equal to a larger quantity of simple labour. Experience shows that this reduction is constantly being made. A commodity may be the outcome of the most complicated [skilled] labour, but through its value it is posited as equal to the product of simple [unskilled] labour, hence it represents only a specific quantity of simple labour. marx, 1977, 135; parentheses added

There is no doubt that people with monopolizable skills earn a lot more than ordinary workers. Those who receive super-wages are, objectively, and ­generally

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speaking, still a part of the working class (whether intuitively they appear to be that or not), although it is the case that in part because of the quantitative difference between their wages and the wage of the average member of the working class, those who receive super wages act and think differently than the rest of the working class. And when such wage differentials allow these people to hire others (movie stars setting up studios hiring assistants and other cultural workers), they effectively transform themselves into members of the bourgeois class, small or big. To his credit, Wright himself admits that the problem exists, and he does in a characteristically succinct manner: While the ownership of skill assets, particularly when institutionalized in the form of credentials, may constitute a basis for exploitation, it is much less clear that it should be treated as the basis for a class relation (except insofar as skills or credentials might enable one to gain access to other kinds of assets). In each of the other types of assets – labor power, physical capital, organization – there is a clear correspondence between the distribution of the asset and a particular form of social relation – lordserf relations, capitalist-employee relations, manager-worker relations. In the case of skill/credential assets there is no such correspondence: experts and nonexperts do not exist in the same kind of well-defined social relation as lords and serfs or capitalists and employees. Experts may thus have distinct interests from nonexperts, but they are not clearly constituted as a class in relation to nonexperts. wright, 1989a: 22

From this excellent self-criticism he draws equally excellent conclusion: what this relative vagueness in the link between skill exploitation and class relations may imply is that the expert-versus-nonexpert distinction should perhaps be treated as a form of stratification within classes rather than a class relation itself. This could, for example, define a type of class fraction within particular classes. (1989a: 23). Exactly. But in spite of these difficulties, he treats ‘skill/credential assets as the basis for a dimension of class relations’. Wright himself is not sure about his own argument that skilled workers exploit other workers via the mechanism of monopoly rent. He himself realizes that since a skilled wage earner is also contributing to the social surplus, this need not imply that he/she is appropriating the labour of anyone else. He may be appropriating their own surplus. Wright also says that it is not easy to establish whether this rent component of the wage is sufficiently large to constitute a genuine transfer of surplus to

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skill-owners, and thus to constitute exploitation. Yet, he abstracts from all these difficulties. The reason is that ‘this will be particularly useful in rethinking the problem of middle classes’. He adds: ‘I will thus provisionally ignore the ambiguities in class analysis posed by the problem of skills’ (1989a: 23). No, in actual fact, he does not ignore his own self-criticism provisionally. He ignores it permanently. Besides, Analytical Marxism also ignores the wider capitalist character of the skills problem. Is it not the case that the ideological division between manual and mental labour, which the phenomenon of monopolizable skill presupposes, is, as a material relation and as an idea, in many ways a creation of bourgeois society? Is it not the case that the monopolizable skills phenomenon is dominantly because of the lack of democratization of opportunities for technical and professional education among wider masses, a lack that is caused by the operation of the capitalist system including the capitalist state (it fails to adequately subsidize such education)? And is it also not the case that to the extent that there is scarcity in certain skills in a country, it is because of the system of capitalist nation-states which control the movement of labour (but such states hardly control the movement of capital in its different forms). In other words, if one considers the capitalist-class context of monopolizable skills, it is much less clear that such skills can be a basis of exploitation that is independent of capitalist exploitation as such. What the two Marxisms in question ignore is this: while in class societies, surplus labour is appropriated, the nature of surplus in capitalism – and therefore nature of exploitation – is different from that in pre-capitalist societies, including where commodities are exchanged. The difference does not lie merely in the fact that surplus in capitalism has a different word for it: surplus value. The content of the surplus or surplus labour is different, and therefore, the concept of the surplus itself, which is the mental reflection of the content. That means that capitalist class exploitation is similar to, and different from, exploitation in pre-capitalist class societies as well as in ‘socialist class society’.10 In all societies and in all class societies, as mentioned above, surplus will be produced, but its mechanisms will be different, as Marx notes in Capital 1: 10

A socialist society may retain some characteristics of capitalist class society for a period of time. These include, on the political front, a state working on behalf of the majority, for the first time in history, whose job is to stop the overthrown classes from returning to power, and the existence of such a state, which is necessary, is indicative of the existence of classes even if capitalist property relations are abolished; and on the economic front, the payment of compensation based on the amount/quality of work performed and not on the basis of need.

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in any economic formation of society where the use-value rather than the exchange -value of the product predominates, surplus-labour will be restricted by a more or less confined set of needs, and that no boundless thirst for surplus labour will arise from the character of production itself marx, 1977: 345

Analytical and Anti-essentialist Marxisms’ stress is on who has how much of the social product. The question is: if capitalists return a part or whole of what is appropriated from workers (directly in the form of higher wages, or though government taxation, or through donation from private companies), will that change the class character of workers, i.e. their ability to decide what to produce and how (Carchedi, 1989: 108)? 3

The Primacy of Class and of Capitalist Class Relations

Both Anti-essentialist and Analytical Marxism clip the wings of the power of class (and thus of Marxism itself). This happens through various strategies. I will call these: over-determination; over-fragmentation; over-concretization (and attendant dilution of contradiction); and autonomization. Over-determination This is the idea that one process is determined by many other processes (Resnick and Wolff, 1987: 4; Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 36). So everything is ­over-determined. In the anti-essentialist approach, causation is in theory (it is a discursive effect) and not in the world as such.11 It follows that even ­over-determination is in theory, and not in the world itself. Correspondingly, no theory is more important than another: there can be no ‘hierarchy of interpretations’ (Gibson-Graham et al., 2001: 5). Therefore, class as a cause of any event/process is as important as any other cause. And, an article on class published in a news magazine outlining the erasure of class differences because of widespread use of cell phone and the like, a fascist theory that it is not class but race and immigration that represent the main division in society, GibsonGraham’s theory of class, and the theory of class in a Lenin or a Marx, all these are would be of equal importance in Anti-essentialist Marxism. If this is so, then: why take the anti-essentialist theory of class (or anything) seriously at 11

In this view, in the real world, being unemployed has nothing to do with being poor, because being poor is caused by many factors, including, perhaps, the fact that some people may just choose to remain poor.

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all?; why study (or do) anything at all, if ­certain things are no more important than other things?;12 why study class at all; why at all take the class process as an ‘entry point’? (Wolff and Resnick, 2002: 11–152). The answer is: either the author thinks that class is important or that some other and person with a certain amount of intellectual authority (e.g. Marx) thinks that class is important.13 So, the importance of class – the truth about class – is because someone thinks or some theory argues that it is important, i.e. it is merely because of the power of someone wielding intellectual authority. Class may exist independently of how an individual thinks about it but whether class has any power, any significant impact on life, that is up to an individual judgement. This is like saying I can accept that gravity empirically exists but whether gravity can explain me falling from the top of a high-rise building is a mental construct. So if class is the entry point for analyzing society in Anti-essentialist Marxism, it is because of an epistemological reason. There is nothing in their class theory to suggest that class is the most causally significant social relation. In this view, class is important not because class actually determines people’s suffering and fighting abilities but on grounds which are idealistic. If class is one among several processes and has no necessary primacy, how does one know when it has significance and when it does not? The importance of class is not contingent. It is not the case that: it is possible that class will affect other things (the important things that shape the possibility of living a good life) but not necessary. Associated with an over-determination approach is a view that denies totality and therefore the need for a totalizing framework, centered around class. Although Analytical Marxism will not accept ­over-determination, for it also, class has much less primacy than Marxism has assigned it. The post-structuralist way of thinking about class – i.e. concrete situations are a product of the sum of impacts of, for example, class process and n ­ on-class 12

13

If eating is no more important than not eating, why would one eat? Or to take another example: a given hair-colour and a healthy heart are not equally necessary for a body to function properly. This has a general implication for the study of society: if no one talks about a given topic, that topic is not important; or, if lots of people talk about a particular topic, that topic becomes important (and if lots of people think about a topic in a certain way, that way of thinking becomes important). Or, sometimes, interestingly, if no one talks about a certain topic, that topic can be seen as worth studying, whether or not it is a significant materialpolitical issue (the idea is to always produce something new to sell in the market of ideas and grant money). In all these cases, epistemology – whether or not and how thinking happens – determines the substantive significance of an issue. This way of thinking is precisely behind fashionable trends in academia, which are divorced from the real contradictions of life (more this process of divorce later).

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processes such as those of gender and race – is based on an un-­dialectical view of the world which says that the world is ontologically fragmented (and not stratified14), and the whole is not more than the sum of the parts, and that there is no ontological primacy.15 Of course, class, gender and race are interconnected and that gender and race relations are extremely important in so far as they affect the lives of working people. But what is the theory – the logic – of that inter-connection?16 Because of a lack of such a theory of inter-­connection, the importance that class has, in the view of a­ nti-essentialist Marxists, is merely up to the personal whim of the scholar, and in many cases, it ends up actually playing a minimal – token – presence. The wings of class are clipped. Saying that class is over-determined by non-class relations such as those of race and gender, and that the non-class relations have their own independence vis a vis class17 opens up the political possibility, in the view of Anti-essential Marxism, for an alliance between what is in their view a ‘class-based movement’ and movements based on race and gender and other such relations. But the question is: what benefits does such alliance produce for the project of the abolition of class? An anti-over-determination approach that gives ‘primacy’ to certain social processes (in this context, class) does allow for interaction between class relations and relations based on race and gender. However, there is interaction and there is interaction. What class interacts with is not race as such or gender as such. Class interacts with race and gender relations as they are already colored by class. Non-class social relations do not exist independently of class and then interact with class. ‘The main contribution of Stephen Resnick (in his works with Richard Wolff) was to place epistemological considerations and class exploitation at the heart of Marxian theory and to produce a thinner but analytically more distinctive Marxian theory’ (Bhattacharya and Seda-Irizarry, 2015: 670). This is exactly right. And this is exactly Wright’s idea of Marxism as well. Both forms of Marxism, once again, have sought to clip the wings of Marxism, making it much less ambitious than the classical tradition has imagined Marxism to be. 14

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I am referring to the stratification of the world into, for example, social relations; mechanisms emanating from these relations; the ways in which these mechanisms are actually played out in concrete cases (i.e. forms of the mechanisms or social relations); and the effects of the exercise of these mechanisms and their forms on people. Following the over-determination approach, one can say that: poverty (P) is due to the sum of impacts of class (C), gender (G), race (R) such that: P = C + G + R. You can also add to the equation interaction terms indicating how class intersects with race, etc. (e.g. C*G, meaning ‘C multiplied by G’). The so-called ‘inter-sectionality’ is becoming a growth industry (McCall, 2008). Analytical Marxism of Wright also believes in this.

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Fragmentation The category of class is seen through the lense of difference or fragmentation in Anti-essentialist Marxism. This is in various ways. For example, in the writings on labour agency (e.g. labour geography) that is heavily influenced by Anti-essentialist Marxism, workers’ interests are seen as varying geographically. What is stressed is not the fact that workers have common interests. They are seen as having different interests. A proponent of labour geography, Herod, writes: ‘depending on where workers are located, workers may have very different visions of how landscapes should be made’ (p. 101). But do all workers not have the same interest in a secure job with an inflation-indexed living wage and safe working conditions? What if workers everywhere have access to well-paying jobs, so there is no competition among workers from different locations or sectors (Llorente, 2013)? The fact that they do not is caused by the capitalist class relation, and not by where they live. So an underlying condition for so-called different location-specific interests of workers is class relation. This fragmented and empiricist view of the working class underlies an agentic, voluntarist view of the working class and therefore of class as a concept:18 workers can merely struggle to satisfy their locationspecific interests.19 Fractions of the working class do have location specific and group-specific interests at a concrete level. Where a group of people lives does have an impact

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Voluntarism, empircism and an emphasis on fragmentation or difference: all these tend to go together. It should be noted that fractions of the working class do have location specific and group-specific interests at a concrete level. But one cannot divorce a consideration of this fact from the unity of what class is about, and from the fact that class exists regardless of a given level/form of action at a point in time. Besides, in place of class and class-fractional categories (a la Poulantzas), we have such categories in the literature as the following, thanks to the influence of anti-essentialism (and similar approaches) that abstract from the totality (of class relations): ‘people’, ‘poor’, ‘women’, ‘immigrants’, ‘refugees’, ‘tribals’, ‘subaltern’, ‘youth’, ‘mentally ill’, ‘disabled’, precariat; multitude; the excluded, etc. These categories may denote material realities experienced by empirical segments of the working (or capitalist) class but are not deployed as class-fractional concepts as such in the literature. Categories such as these are used, thanks to the influence of anti-essentialism (and similar approaches), in ways that abstract from the totality, and especially, the totality of class relations. Correspondingly, instead of such class-processes as exploitation, alienation and proletarianisation, there are such concepts as what Bebbington (1999) call ‘livelihood’, ‘livelihood strategies’, and ‘economic empowerment’, and so on.

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on their class experience, including access to jobs.20 But one cannot divorce consideration of this truth about geographical fragmentation from the truth about the unity, i.e. from the fact that ‘Many fundamental social relations are, at the highest level of abstraction, aspatial: the capital-labour relation is one such. These relations are ubiquitous. They operate at and within every scale: the capital-labour relation operates and is constructed within each scale from workplaces to the globe.’ (Gough, 2004: 187). Similarly, the capitalist class is seen in terms of difference/fragmentation and not in terms of the dialectical category of identity and difference. In Antiessentialist Marxism, the categories that describe what is the capitalist are: fundamental class one, subsumed class one, and various sub-categories within the latter. Much of the corpus of thinking in Anti-essentialist Marxism is an exercise in division of labour (which group of people does what) and is typological and much less about class relations as such.21 If this form of Marxism did consider the ways in which the capitalist class society works, ‘the workings of its inner mechanism’, it would realize that its so-called class theory had very little to do with those mechanisms. Marx does not ignore the class-fractions of the capitalist class (one fraction extracts surplus value and shares a part of it with another fraction, and so on) but he treats capitalist class as a whole, capital itself as a social power. He treats ‘the capitalist producer as owner of the entire surplus-value, or, perhaps better, as the representative of all those who will share the booty with him’ (Marx, 1977: 710). No such appropriately totalizing framework is evident, especially in anti-essentialist Marxism. The fact remains that the anti-essentialist approach violently abstracts from the following idea in Marx: In so far as accumulation actually takes place, the capitalist must have succeeded in selling his commodities, and in reconverting the money shaken loose from them into capital. Moreover, the break-up of surplusvalue into various fragments does not affect either its nature or the conditions under which it becomes an element in accumulation. Whatever the proportion of surplus-value which the capitalist producer retains for himself, or yields up to others, he is the one who in the first instance 20

21

Women workers with the burden of household work and without a car living in areas without public transportation can have a very difficult time finding decent work, but women workers living in areas with public transportation may have a different experience. Analytical Marxism also takes a fractionalist approach to ownership of means of production: ownership of alienable assets, of organizational asset, and so on.

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appropriates it… [So] we assume no more than is assumed by the ­actual process of accumulation itself. On the other hand, the simple fundamental form of the process of accumulation is obscured both by the ­splitting-up of surplus-value and by the mediating movement of circulation. An exact analysis of the process, therefore, demands that we should, for a time, disregard all phenomena that conceal the workings of its inner mechanism. marx, 1977: 710

Concretization This leads us to a related problem. To shed light on the concrete features of society in terms of class, there are two models. In one model, one has a simple class structure (capital and labour, or landlords and peasants, for example) and then add the role of the state and ideology, class-fractions of basic classes, etc. in order to explain concrete things such as class politics, class conflict and social change. Or, one has a more concrete class map itself. Such a map would have more classes than the two basic classes.22 Wright prefers the second model and seeks to develop it. The simple model with its abstract class concept, Wright says, can tell us about modes of production such as capitalism and feudalism but it is less powerful when it comes to explaining concrete events, because such a model will need to be supplemented with such things as the state and ideology, etc. The concrete model as Wright advances is superior in his view because it: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

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clarifies the status of non-proletarian employees; makes it possible to explain geographical variation in class structure and in state policies across countries and places and over time; sheds light on the historical reality of post-capitalist class structures; enhances the explanatory power of class structure by representing more complex class interests (complexities of the middle class).23 explains coalitions between proletarian and non-proletarian employees; and, helps one study how class affects individual lives (1989d: 277–278; 323).

These additional classes may include the classes which share qualities of both the basic classes or classes which are defined on the basis of a principle which is not the same as that which defines the basic classes. In the production of more concrete concepts, the middle class looms large because it poses difficulty in rendering concrete the more abstract concepts of mode of production and because of its salience in micro level processes that affect class formation.

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There are several problems with this attempted concretization. Consider the fact that the aim of concretization, for Wright, is to shed light on individual class behaviour. But in Marxism, class relations, and individuals who are ­bearers of class relations, are different ontological entities. That is, mechanisms at the level of social relations and at the level of individuals are different, even if there is some similarity. Social relations set the limit within which individuals, exhibit their specificities, and individual members of classes do not create class relations. So there is a philosophical difficulty with the expectation that a concrete level theory will tell us directly about individuals (or about groups of individuals on the basis of principles other than those of class), without the mediation of the defensible statements about abstract level mechanisms. A concrete level theory is still theory. It cannot directly explain individual level actions and thinking. From a less philosophical angle: Every Marxist knows that classes are distinct, even though individuals may move freely from one class to another; similarly, trends in political life are distinct in spite of the fact that individuals may change freely from one trend to another, and in spite of all attempts and efforts to amalgamate trends.24 lenin, 1977b: 54; italics added

The basic unit of the proletariat in capitalist production is not any individual but the collective worker (or at least a large group of workers involved in the production of a product for exchange), a collective which comprises individual proletarians or groups of proletarians making different parts of a commodity. Class must be conceptualized at the level of the totality (or at least, significant parts – subtotalities – of that totality). Wright sees the matter upside down. It is not the two-class view that is less powerful; it is his more concrete class theory that weakens the general class theory in Marxism because such concrete class theory dilutes the central significance of relations of property and exploitation between the basic classes. He forgets that: the additional ‘variables’25 are not un-influenced by class. He calls these ‘variables’ non-class mechanisms (1989d: 269). The state and ideology are not non-class processes, unless one restricts, epistemologically, the power of class to shape the state and ideology. In fact, that is exactly what is

24 25

Naturally, at times individuals unconsciously drift from the social-chauvinist to the ‘Centrist’ position, and vice versa. These include such things as the state and ideology, which he thinks the abstract model needs in order to explain its explanandum.

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the objective effect of Wright’s thinking about class, which is focussed on pigeonholing which individual or group of individuals is in which class. He fails to adequately adequately appreciate the fact that: individuals’ lives are shaped by (a) relations between basic classes and the processes that such relations give rise to; (b) processes/relations indicative of divisions within classes, (c) processes/relations (e.g. state, ideology, including that concerning mental and manual labour) that are shaped by, and internally related to, class processes/ relations, and, (d) processes/relations which are somewhat independent of, although hardly un-influenced by, class. Wright’s analytical Marxist view of pure class society is also problematic. In this view, if the use of a machine is regulated by the state or unions in a society, then this fact represents socialization of property rights. Underlying this thinking is the view of a pure capitalism. There is pure capitalism, and there is regulated capitalism. But what he forgets is that both these capitalisms are capitalism. Wright is also critical of classical Marxism for having a view of pure capitalist class relation, a simple view of capitalism, one without concreteness. It is in fact, he who has a view of pure capitalism, which he distinguishes from the impure (regulated) capitalism. A dialectical Marxism (which is advanced in this book) has – and needs – both a view of pure capitalism as an abstraction, and a view of capitalism which is relatively concrete (i.e. a regulated capitalism) and which is subordinated to the view of pure capitalism. Primacy is assigned to the latter view, and to the mechanism that view unpacks. Capitalism has always been interfered with by the state, whether from the standpoint of the capitalist or from the proletarian/semi-proletarian vantage points, or both. Underlying such interference is the kind of mechanisms (e.g. competition, exploitation, crisis-proneness, production of the reserve army, and so on)26 that the two-class pure model talks about, which Wright thinks is not powerful enough explanatorily. Marx’s model of capitalism in Capital 1 is pure capitalism and one that was shaped by class struggle (e.g. over the working day) and by various government regulations. And these regulations were partly a result of such struggles, and they existed partly because of the long-term interests of capital-as-a-whole. For Marxism, even if unions or the state regulate the capitalists, there is still capitalist class relation. Class struggle occurs against both pure and impure capitalism. The state, the state of the capitalist class and capitalist society, is

26

As discussed in Chapter 6, when one talks about these abstract mechanisms specifically from the standpoint of the objective interests of classes and from the standpoint of potential/actual consciousness/struggle of classes, one is in the realm of class theory.

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there in both pure and impure capitalism. The impure – concrete capitalism – is at the same time pure, in the sense that it is characterized by the mechanisms which the ‘pure model’ talks about. There has to be a pure capitalist class relation for it to be modified or regulated. Regulation does not reduce the primacy of the mechanisms of pure capitalist class relation. Indeed, regulation of pure capitalism itself is a function of the capitalist class relation: the state is an aspect of class relation, and unions represent some aspect of working class power. We also cannot abstract from the fact that increasingly, unions are tools of the capitalist class, especially given the power of the members of that class to move around the globe and to extract concessions from the working class in particular locations.27 The operation of the state regulation – even nationalization of property by the bourgeois class to save factories from crisis or to respond to a massive wave of anti-capitalist resistance – does not make capitalism any less capitalist in terms of the fundamental class relations, any more than an increase in wages causes a fundamental alteration of class relation between capital and labour, other than feeding the wage-slave a little better for a time. Capital is a massive social power, and therefore, often-reversible regulation of it is quantitatively inadequate to cause any significant qualitative alteration in its fundamental class relations, i.e. in terms of control over property, labour process, and social wealth, including surplus value. There is no reason at all why class theory cannot have a polarized class structure with two basic classes and divisions within these classes. There is no reason why such a model cannot consider the role of the capitalist state and capitalist ideology/consciousness, which, along with processes that are contingently connected to class relations (e.g. gender, religion, race, etc.)28 as well as unique individual biographies explain such things as class conflict, collective organization, and social change (see Meiksins, 1989: 183). Autonomization Although Wright has some misgivings himself about skill and organizationbased view of exploitation, he is not sure that such form of ‘exploitation’ can be entirely seen in terms of mechanisms of capitalism: ‘skills exploitation in capitalism is deeply structured and constrained by capitalism, but this does not demonstrate that it is no more than an effect or reflection of capitalist exploitation’ (Wright, 1989d: 195). Wright thinks that skill-based exploitation 27 28

This is in a situation where the profit rate has had a tendency to fall and the ‘attendant’ crisis of over-accumulation. Note that even these accidental or contingent factors are not un-affected by class relations but to the extent that they maintain their relative independence they do have an impact on class relations.

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is not capitalist exploitation. Similarly, organization-based exploitation is also not capitalist: the class of managers and bureaucrats is based on a class organization that is distinct from capitalism. Managers, professionals and bureaucrats can, in fact, pose a non-proletarian challenge to capitalism. It is very problematic when Wright treats organizational exploitation as autonomous of capitalist exploitation. The basis of class relation under capitalism is not the sum of ownership over things and control over labour process and decision-making. Both are part of the same process: control over means of production, as mentioned earlier. Similarly, in Anti-essentialist Marxism, capitalism is not dominant because capitalist class relation coexists with non-capitalist class relations and nonclass relations of gender, race, etc. Because the latter relations exist, they do not exist in any subordinate status in relation to capitalism. In this form of Marxism, ontology of things denies the possibility of the ontology of primacy. If X and Y exist, the possibility of Y being subordinated to X does not exist. Implicit in this view is the view of external relation between X and Y, and not an internal relation: the idea that X’s existence requires Y’s subordination to X is ruled out. 4

Problematic Conception of Class-Agency and Anti-capitalism

Wright is skeptical of anti-capitalist revolutions. He says: Anticapitalist revolutions attempt to eliminate the distinctively capitalist form of exploitation, exploitation based on private ownership of the means of production. The nationalization of the principal means of production is, in effect, a radical equalization of ownership of capital: everyone owns one citizen-share. … Such equalization [ownership of capital], however, would not necessarily affect exploitation based on skills/credentials. Such exploitation would remain a central feature of socialism. wright, 1989a: 20

Whereas in capitalism the control over organization assets does not extend beyond the firm, in state bureaucratic socialism the coordinated integration of the division of labor extends to the whole society through institutions of central state planning. The mechanism by which this generates exploitative transfers of surplus involves the centrally planned

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b­ ureaucratic appropriation and distribution of the surplus along hierarchical principles. (ibid.) So Wright’s Analytical Marxism rejects the revolutionary alternative to capitalism. Echoing post-structuralists’ criticism of the agenda of an all-out attack on capitalism, Wright says this: The central image is very much that of a war in which ultimately victory depends on the decisive defeat of the enemy in a direct confrontation. The result of victory is a radical disjuncture in which existing institutions are destroyed and new ones built in a fairly rapid way. In most versions, this revolutionary scenario involves seizing state power, rapidly transforming state structures and then using these new apparatuses of state power to destroy the power of the dominant class within the economy. wright, 2014a: 86

Wright’s rejection of the traditional Marxist idea of ruptural transformations and sharp sharp break with existing institutions and social structures goes with his rejection of the status of the proletariat as a revolutionary agent that traditional Marxism has assigned to it. Historically, it has not been quite like that. And there is no reason why it will be like that in future, and why the proletariat will not be satisfied with reforms. Wright is explicit that: One of the upshots of [his] … reconceptualization of the middle class is that it is no longer axiomatic that the proletariat is the unique, or perhaps even the central, rival to the capitalist class for class power in capitalist society. wright, 1989a: 27

What this means is that, for Wright, the political power of a class to contest another class is not really rooted in the dominant exploitative relation that binds these classes. The proletariat is exploited by the capitalist class but that does not give it any special political power to overthrow the capitalist class. Exploitation of the proletariat: yes. Political power of the proletariat to remove the conditions for such exploitation: No. The working class, in this view, is merely a suffering class whose level of material wellbeing is less than that of others but it is not necessarily a revolutionary, fighting class. The political power to seriously contest the capitalist class belongs not to the class that is really exploited, but to the managers and experts, with whom the working class may join.

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In Analytical Marxism, a fundamental motivation for the model two of class theory (as discussed above) is that the theorist looks for popular alliance between the working class and other class elements (e.g. non-proletarian employees) which are indeed antagonistically related to the working class. In both Anti-essentialist Marxism and Analytical Marxism, what was contingent (a Bonapartist bureaucracy’s power in post-1917 ussr, and the attendant absence of workers’ control over production and surplus),29 is taken to be necessary, and what is necessary (proletarians’ revolutionary role, the need for democratic control over surplus as a defining moment of a new social relation) is taken to be contingent. The Analytical Marxist elevation of the Bonapartist bureaucracy to the status of a distinct class in the post-capitalist society and the attribution by it of a distinct historical role to the bureaucracy complements its inadequate view of class and its dismissal of the working class as a revolutionary force. If the Bonapartist riff-raff is a class this means that it is not an abortion but a viable child of history. If its marauding parasitism is ‘exploitation’ in the scientific sense of the term, this means that the bureaucracy possesses a historical future as the ruling class indispensable to the given system of economy. trotsky, 1995: 78

Further as Trotsky elaborates, rejecting the argument that the post-capitalist bureaucracy necessarily represents a ruling class of a new type:30 The class has an exceptionally important and moreover a scientifically restricted meaning to a Marxist. A class is defined not by its participation 29

30

Thanks to the strategic interventions made by Lenin and Trotsky and others, who acted on the structural conditions confronting a backward country representing the weakest link in the imperialistic chain, the socialist revolution occurred, but it got confined within a national boundary because of the failure of what was supposed to be a world-revolution to spread to advanced countries. A forced attempt was made by the prevailing bureaucracy to build socialism in one country, which flew in the face of Marxist theory of internationalism. The development of the bureaucracy and other such problems was because of the failure of the world-revolution against world-capitalism. Therefore, it is futile to blame these problems on the anti-capitalist revolution itself or indeed on its underlying theory. This was formulated by many people including someone called Laurat, a French social democrat, according to whom: the bureaucracy rules over the proletariat politically and exploits it economically, devouring the surplus value which the bourgeoisie had earlier enjoyed (reported in Trotsky, 1933, ibid.).

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in the distribution of the national income alone, but by its independent role in the general structure of economy and by its independent roots in the economic foundations of society…. The bureaucracy lacks all these social traits. It has no independent position in the process of production and distribution. It has no independent property roots. Its functions relate basically to the political technique of class rule…. … It devours, wastes, and embezzles a considerable portion of the national income… …[it does have] the biggest apartments, the juiciest steaks, and even Rolls Royces [but these] are not enough to transform the bureaucracy into an independent ruling class. …the bureaucracy derives its privileges not from any special property relations, peculiar to it as a ‘class’, but from those property relations [transitional property relations which are neither capitalist nor socialist] which have been created by the October revolution… …insofar as the bureaucracy robs the people (and this is done in various ways by every bureaucracy), we have to deal not with class exploitation, in the scientific sense of the word, but with social parasitism, although on a very large scale. During the middle ages the clergy constituted a class or an estate, insofar as its rule depended upon a specific system of land property and forced labor. The present day church constitutes not an exploiting class but a parasitic corporation. It would be silly to actually speak of the American clergy as a special ruling class; yet, it is indubitable that the priests of the different colors and denominations devour in the United States a big portion of the surplus value. In its traits of parasitism, the bureaucracy, as well as the clergy, approximates to the lumpen-proletariat, which likewise does not represent, as is well known, an independent ‘class’. trotsky, 1933: paras 13, 16, 18–19

Once again, the bureaucracy that Wright talks about as inevitable post revolution was derived from the transitional property relations, and from economic scarcity (including in consumption items which need to be regulated) in a condition of overall backwardness of the post-1917 ussr within the context of the absence of an international socialist revolution. Wright says that in every class society, its current middle class becomes the new ruling class of the new class society that follows it. This was true about feudalism whose middle class – the bourgeoisie – became the ruling class of capitalist society. So the middle class of capitalist society – managers and ­super-rich skilled workers – will become the new ruling class of post-capitalist society (e.g. ‘state bureaucratic socialism’). So the working class hardly has a

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chance, if at all, to be the new ruling class for a long period of post-capitalist society. In fact, in his class theory there is no necessary relation between anticapitalist revolution and the abolition of class: ‘Anti-capitalist revolutions … do not eliminate, and indeed may considerably strengthen and deepen’ class relations defined around control over organization assets’ (1989a: 21). Wright correctly wants to see the future [socialism] in capitalism but he is mistaken in his search when he finds organizational asset exploiters in capitalism as the group of people who will be the new ruling class (1989d: 338). This makes sense to him because managers might have ‘a material interest in a statist organization of production’ that is anti-capitalist.31 For anti-essentialists, class is an adjective not a noun. Class is not about large groups of people: ‘there is no entity, no group of persons, that can be properly designated as a class’ (Resnick and Wolff, 1987: 161). They are critical of the prevailing notions of class that focus on the struggles over who owns property and controls power in capitalist society (Resnick and Wolff, 2006: 119). They deploy Marx in their support saying that Marx’s reference to class is not about two opposing groups (the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie) but the ‘process of producing surplus labour’ (Resnick and Wolff, 1987: 110). Is it not the case that if you want to attack an enemy, you need to identify it, denoted by a noun. But then for post-structuralist Marxists, an all-out proletarian attack is not a good idea: the idea of the proletariat as class agency fighting for class-lessness on a massive scale that would be necessary is too military style, too masculinist, too big (= grand) of a project, and it ignores affect and other finer aspects of life. As a member of the post-structuralist Marxist movement says echoing Gibson-Graham and Resnick and Wolff: class ‘is understood as neither foundational nor totalizing, necessitating fundamental systemic change to transform it. Rather, it is one little slice in life among the ensemble of relations in which people engage, contradictorily conditioning identities and struggles. The point of class struggle, in this view, is not mass systemic revolution against relations of capitalist property, production, exchange and exploitation, but rather a struggle within capitalism to change the mode of surplus extraction and distribution toward more democratic and collectively fair forms’. arvidson, 1999: 140

Everything is fragmented, and this includes the economic. And of the economic is fragmented, then there is no collective unified subject. 31

Although he has become critical of this position and thinks that ‘this assertion seems implausible as best’ (Wright, 1989d: 338), he still holds on to organizational exploitation.

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It might not necessarily invoke the emancipatory agency of a mass collective subject unified around a set of shared ‘interests’ but could arise out of momentary and partial identifications between subjects constituted at the intersection of very different class and nonclass processes and positions. gibson-graham, 2006: 53–54; italics added

What we have before us is something as massive as the capitalist structure, a system, that subordinates all aspects of our life in every part of the planet in  almost a complete and enduring manner. And yet, the post-structuralists say that to fight it, all we need is some sort of action that is momentary and partial. In the Marxism i defend, the Marxism that is labelled traditional by these two Marxisms, class is partly about – class partly refers to – groups of people. Therefore, for Marxists, it is hard to accept the anti-essentialist idea that no group of people can be designated as a class. It is hard to accept the idea that classes as large groups of people do not exist, and that they do not exist because persons are bound up with many social relations and have multiple identities (Gibson-Graham, 1992). From here, within a very short distance, there is another conclusion: the working class as a large group of people, representing certain massive determinate social processes and relations, is not the dominant subject of history in contemporary times, in the fight against capitalist class relations.32 Something should be said about what is more or less a ‘progeny’ of ­ anti-essentialist, over-determinist, class analysis, especially, that of ­Gibson-Graham: this takes the form of labour geography (or working class studies) type approach to society. This literature is also consistent with Analytical Marxist faith in working class organization being able to considerably reduce the classness of capitalist society. The labour geography type literature talks about how workers, by winning concessions here and there through the deployment of a geographical strategy of struggle, make the uneven ­geography of capitalism. The keyword is ‘labour’s spatial fix’ (Herod, 1997), or perhaps even a ‘scalar fix’, which parallels capital’s spatial fix. This body of 32

Of course, numerous scholars think along these lines (see Gorz, 1982). One is reminded of Wood’s comment here: ‘Marxist theory of class is no longer designed to enhance working class unity by dispelling capitalist mystifications that stand in its way. These mystifications have been incorporated into postmarxist theory of class, which is no longer about class formation or class struggle but about how to establish a ground for alliances within and between classes to obtain political power or actually public office’ (Wood, 1998: 14). This comment would apply to Analytical Marxism as well.

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work – which has become a cottage industry – is problematic in many ways. It is first of all less about class33 as such and more about one kind of class (working class people – or groups of workers located here or there). So the internal relation between classes is lost sight of. And to the extent that that work is about one class (i.e. labour), it is often dominantly about only one aspect of this class, labor’s agency34 and not about labour as such as a class. The concept of (class) agency itself, a very complex category, as Anderson (1980), Callinicos (2005), among others, have shown, essentially remains un-problematized by ­anti-essentialists.35 Agency (of labour) is not something one can just go and see, any more than one can see anything adequately without a prior concept which is consciously created through hard intellectual labour.36 A non-­ commonsensical, rigorous, un-playful production of ideas about society is not like the work of a bee or a spider.37 A part of the quasi-empirical approach to agency that is symptomatic of labour geography type anti-essentialist Marxism is its ‘labor-centrism’ which is to be counter-posed to what it calls capitalcentrism of its bete noire: ‘traditional’ Marxism. Labour-centrism shapes the content of labour geography type thinking, which pays little attention not only to the capitalist class and its organization (because that has been apparently the main domain of capital-centrism), but also to the class character of the labor organization and of the labor bureaucracy. Are Stalinist, social democratic, anarchic, autonomist, syndicalist, or revolutionary organizations/perspectives on labour (agency) all the same? Can a strike organized by a social democratic or a rightwing labor organization,38 even if succeeds, be the same as a strike 33 34 35 36

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Indeed, a major problem with voluntarist work (e.g. labour geography type work) is the adoption of crippling ‘anti-essentialist’ notions about class’ (Johns and Vural, 2000: 1210). This much has been acknowledged by some practitioners of the field (Castree, 2007; Tufts and Savage, 2009), but they and others, more or less, carry on with their business-as-usual. Thankfully, this problem is being realized recently (see Cumbers, 2010), but there is as yet so sign of it being addressed successfully. See Althusser’s discussion on Generalities i, ii and iii (Althusser, 2005/1969). Observations are always theory- or concept-laden, if not theory- or concept-determined (Sayer, 2000: 47). Much rather it, to some extent, mimics the material labour process that human beings engage in and must engage in to reproduce their life, a labour process that involves prior conceptual design. ‘A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax [i.e. in reality]’ (Marx, 1977: 284; parenthesis added). Consider Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (Indian Workers’ Union), the largest trade union in India with 10 million members. It is affiliated to a right-wing Hindu-nationalist ‘cultural’ organization.

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organized by a revolutionary organization, even if it fails? Can a strike by workers without any class consciousness or with merely trade union consciousness be the same as the strike by class conscious workers who consider economic struggles as a part of struggle for socialism and to end the wage-slavery itself? What exactly is the connection between trade union struggle that the agencyfocused literature constantly talks about and the struggle to abolish wage-­ slavery: how does the former further and/or hinder the latter, and why? What the labour-agency-focused, over-determinist and anti-essentialist mode of thinking ignores is precisely this: interpenetration of opposites, a fundamental principle of dialectics, which concerns how anything appears/­ functions is due, to a large degree, to its surrounding conditions, which are contradictory.39 Besides, labor agency, self-activity, cannot be reduced to making – or contributing to – geography – of capitalism. Capital’s goal is to make that geography. It is legitimate, from capital’s standpoint. But labor has a different – antagonistically different – agenda. Labor’s real interest is in the unmaking of the geography of capitalism, including in its fight for transitional or radical demands such as a living wage, reduction in working hours without a loss of pay, access to transportation and culture, free health-care, etc.40 So, a focus on picket lines for small economic concessions is not necessarily the best place to look for what labour’s real interests are, and what its level of class consciousness is, although picket-lines are not unimportant places. The view

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‘These conditioning factors apply to both objects and the persons perceiving them. As regards the former, for example, it is only because a machine is owned by capitalists that it is used to exploit workers. In the hands of a consumer or of a self-employed operator, that is, conditioned by another set of factors, operating under different imperatives, it would not function in this way’ (Ollman, 2003: 16). Therefore, the contradiction-ridden conditions influence the effect of the functioning of a machine. In other words, a machine embodies the influence of the inter-penetration of opposites. Now, with respect to the persons observing the contradictory conditions, the following can be said: ‘when someone conditioned as a capitalist looks at a machine, he sees a commodity he has bought on the market, perhaps even the price he has paid for it, and something that is going to make him a profit. When someone conditioned as a worker, on the other hand, looks at the same machine he only sees an instrument that will determine his movements in the production process’ (Ollman, 2003: 16). Arguably, one may say that: among those who are studying labour, those who have a trade unionist type and reformist consciousness see in a strike different things than those scholars with a class consciousness. Radical demands are the demands – transitional demands – that are based on the real material and cultural needs of the majority of people, the working masses, whether or not the system (says it) can afford to meet them. But the politics of the anti-essentialist type class analysis is about anything but transcending class.

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of agency in labour geography type thinking is firmly within what I will call the ‘reproductive agenda’ of the type Giddens et al., approve: social relations are reproduced through human agency. But agency is surely about transcendence of class and other oppressive relations as well, and not just about reproduction of class in a modified manner. Besides, while in some cases and to a limited extent unions do shape the geography of employment and production in opposition to the interests of capital, it is increasingly the case that unions share with the companies a common interest: profitability.41 What the agency literature lacks is the view of the totality of struggle, i.e. the multi-pronged struggle against the totality of capitalist economic and political system, a struggle of which trade union struggle is only a part (for more on this topic, see Chapter 12). The collateral damage caused by the focus on agency is the materiality of labour’s life, or what Timpanaro (1980) calls passivity of experience. Production and its exploitative effects on labourers’ life and bodies are not the priority agenda in this voluntaristic and quasi-empiricist literature. Labour is there in the literature. But labour in relation to capital, its exploitative other, (and in relation to the capitalist state which acts as a most coercive force with respect to labor), is more or less left out. This type of work is oblivious of the fact that ‘capital presupposes wage-labour; wage-labour presupposes capital. They reciprocally condition each other’s existence’ (Marx, 1977: 724). To the extent that the materiality of labour does appear in this largely politicist, voluntarist, and under-theorized body of work, much emphasis is on the labor market – the realm of exchange relations between capital and labour and state regulation (or lack thereof) (see Peck, 1996). What Marx calls in Capital vol. 1 the hidden abode of production remains, more or less, hidden. The surface relations are on the surface. There is little discussion of the various ways in 41

Many companies make new investments after decades-long collaboration of unions in plant closures, layoffs and bankruptcies that produce major cuts to wages, benefits and pensions. In fact, the wave of mergers, acquisitions and the subsequent layoffs and plant closures that we observe is generally the intended outcome of the unions’ decades-long campaign to keep production profitable in given countries where unions operate. By offering companies innovative wage and benefit concessions, unions keep them profitable within a country at the expense of the workers in that country and workers elsewhere. While workers are basically an international class, what unions do is to couple their antiworker perspective with nationalist chauvinism, which produces the effect of lining the workers behind trade war against competitors of a given country in which the unions work (usa vs China). So yes, so-called agency of workers has geographical effects, but these effects are in reality and for most part and increasingly in line with capitalists’ agency in the production of space.

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which workers are exploited and dominated at work.42 There is little interest in the connection between class and labour process. Thus the labor geography type literature influenced by anti-essentialism, reproduces the problems of its cousin, ­labor history, and this problem it shares with Analytical Marxism, as mentioned earlier. Whenever the issues of labour process as an aspect of class relation are raised, the discussion, shaped as it is by post-structuralist idealism,43 is immediately drowned (de-materialized), in the discussion of identity, culture, sexual conduct, and related things.44 The interest in the class aspect of labor process – the materiality of labour’s life – is often more rhetorical and superficial and less substantive and serious.45 42

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Such discussion is central to Marxism, as Marx and Engels showed in their historical work for a primarily industrial working class, as Lenin (1989) and Kautsky (1988) showed for an agricultural working class, and Huws (1999) for a contemporary digitized service sector working class. This is one of the most important tools in the hands of those seeking to revise Marxism’s basic tenets. This is a part of a larger epistemological trend: it is as if one cannot discuss economic issues now-a-days without embedding these in, and covering these up, with the cloud of culturalist issues. The economy is not so much ignored as ‘culturalized’ and even aestheticized (see Callinicos, 1989). A part of the same trend is social constructionism which is a combination of sub-trends (depending on who is using it): thinking about an entity or a process creates it, and/or merely action on the part of individuals or a group of individuals who share very little structural relation – usually small-scale action – creates the reality, as if there is no passivity of experience. This kind of thinking empties out the real – serious – content of the cultural and the imaginative. Although Gibson-Graham, thankfully, do not talk much about class identity as a topic, it is omnipresent in the intellectual landscape of such fields as Human Geography, apparently one of the sexiest disciplines (in Terry Eagleton’s view) and elsewhere. It is exported to ‘class analysis’. Existence and importance of class and working class are judged on the basis of class identity and subjective experience. Class is just an aspect of identity as a lived experience (Dowling, 2009: 833). Here is another set of conflations to complement the set just noted above. Class = identity. And, identity = lived experience. Therefore, class = lived experience. Reviewing the class literature, Dowling can say that ‘two categories of class [are] middle – class identities and working class identities’. So, classes are merely identities? If workers do not feel or think they are workers, then they are not workers? And much of this genre of work – feelings and attitude – is about privileged layers of wage- or salary- earners. Also, because it is thought that class structure does not determine class identity (a worker does not necessarily think she is a worker with an antagonistic relation with her boss), class structure therefore is only one of several things that affect one’s identity, and that class identity is merely one of several identities, just as there are different food items on a restaurant menu from which to choose depending on the mood of the hour. One wonders whether Marx’s famous point in the preface to the

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This voluntarist literature says that Marxists treat ‘capital as the primary maker of the geography of capitalism’, leaving out workers’ struggles which are somewhat secondary to the process of producing (Herod, 1997: 9–10). Herod says: ‘The heritage of Marx’s own work was responsible for the work that prioritized capital as actor’.46 In other words, workers are not seen in the Marxist view to produce the landscape of capitalism; if anything, they are only capable of modifying it. Now the question is: what is wrong with the Marxist view? Are capital and labour equally powerful in creating the landscape of capitalism? If that were the case, capital would not be capital, and labour would not be what it is: labour. The fact of capital’s dominance does not exclude labour’s agency.47 To say that economic landscape is not entirely created by capital is one thing. To deny capital’s dominance is another.48 It is also implicitly accepted that labour is organized labour (in advanced countries) (see Wills, 2008). So here is an implicit nod to the ‘social constructionist view’ of class, albeit one that is a little politically informed and a little less subjectivist than usual: in this view, class exists and matters when the (working) class is politically organized. And to the extent that this body of work is (claimed to be) about class, the further implication is that the concept of organized labour stands for the concept of class. So: it is almost the case that labour = organized labour = class. This is a mistaken conflation. All in all, politicism and voluntarism in class analysis influenced by anti-essentialism seem to go together. One reason for voluntarism in this form of class analysis is its geographical parochialism with respect to labour (struggle). There is little class analysis – and labour struggle – of the less developed world, where the majority

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critique of political economy that social being conditions social consciousness (identity, etc.), has ceased to make sense, because he said this so long ago. Or perhaps it is a traditional Marxist position which must therefore be reductionist and false. And Herod says this on the basis of the opinion of Professor Stanley Aronowitz, who is a founding editor of Social Text which is an academic journal of postmodernism and cultural studies and which had published the Sokal Hoax. The Sokal hoax was a publishing hoax by Alan Sokal, a physics professor (Sokal, 2010). Professor Sokal submitted an article to Social Text with the precise intention of conducting a hoax: he wanted to test whether the journal would accept an article liberally strewn with nonsense if it sounded good and if it agreed with the editors’ postmodernist predilections. The journal did. Dialectically speaking: to be bald, one does not have lose all of one’s hair. Strictly speaking, the very attempt to build and ‘institutionalize’ a sub-discipline of labor geography (and labour history, etc.) is against the very motive and spirit of class approach to society. If a sub-discipline is needed, it should be geography or sociology or history of class, of which studies on labor (agency) can be a part.

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of world’s proletarian and semi-proletarian men, women and children live and suffer from capitalism (including its excesses) and from other forms of class relation. The vast majority of the working class in the world is outside the scope of the sanguine analysis of labour agency as conducted in the labour geography type work. Indeed, as in other areas of social science knowledge, much of the food for the labor-oriented literature, often masquerading as class analysis, comes from (what is written in and about) the richer, imperialist, countries. Like much of other forms of class analysis, including Analytical Marxism, this anti-essentialist, voluntarist literature abstracts from imperialism and from conditions in peripheral capitalism.49 How the coercive apparatus of the state and even coercive apparatus possessed by the ruling classes themselves (e.g. goons of capitalists and landowners, including their private armies), violently responds to organization and actions of the proletarian (and semi-proletarian) masses,50 does not get registered on its radar. Is it possible to fetishize the few success stories of labour strikes in advanced capitalism and produce a general theory about how labour constructs the capitalist landscape, without considering imperialism: how imperialist transfer of surplus and how imperialist protection of national markets makes some gains possible, especially for a layer of the working class, including labour aristocracy? It may be politically frustrating for voluntarists that capital is seen in traditional Marxism as the dominant producer of the landscape of income and employment opportunities, etc. and that capital indeed is just that. When one emphasizes workers’ struggling to reproduce themselves as sellers of commodity on a little better terms – as better-fed wage-slaves – why is this not politically frustrating? 5

A Reformist View of Post-capitalist Politics

The Analytical Marxism of Wright argues for an alliance between workers and non-proletarians. If the working class is not sufficiently class conscious 49

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One implication of this is that: the so-called class analysis in labor geography type and similar literature obviously does not think of semi-proletarians (i.e. peasants working as tenants and/or as wage-workers) as a class worth considering – possibly because they are not encountered in rich countries. Whatever little work there is on class in the periphery these days, it is more likely to be about such things as subalterns, undifferentiated peasantry as a source of some authentic culture, and middle class subjectivities (see Jeffrey, 2008; Bebbington, 1999) with very little engagement with class exploitation. Subjectivities are surely worth talking about. But are ‘middle class’ people’s lives only/mainly about subjectivities: what do they do for living? The state does not often shy away from creating states of exception (Agamben, 2005).

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to take on capitalism, what makes Wright think that the non-proletarian groups – middle class people – will possess that consciousness? Apparently, and as mentioned earlier, managers might have ‘a material interest’ in an ­anti-capitalist ‘statist organization of production’. Wright imagines a new society, a ­post-capitalist society, where capitalist exploitation is superseded by exploitation based on organization and skills. Experts, managers and bureaucrats may prefer a state-controlled capitalism.51 As Meiksins (1989) asks: why would they want capitalism to go, and why would they not want slightly modified capitalism? Skill differential is really not a threat to capitalism. Some skill differentiation allows capital to control the labor force easily, so it is an ideological tool in support of the capitalist class relation; skill differentiation fosters individualism (people believe that doing hard work and attaining skills will lead to success) (Meiksins, 1989). Wright’s class theory says that capitalism has multiple futures, and not one, i.e. socialism. The transition from capitalism can only be to another class society based on the organization exploitation, and not to socialism (as a pathway to communism). Here is Lenin in his Tasks of the proletariat in our revolution: From capitalism mankind can pass directly only to socialism, i.e., to the social ownership of the means of production and the distribution of products according to the amount of work performed by each i­ndividual‘… [And] socialism must inevitably evolve gradually into communism, upon the banner of which is inscribed the motto, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”’. lenin, 1977b: 60

Analytical Marxism, which disagrees with anti-essentialists on ontological and epistemological grounds, however, argues along similar lines too: for permanent ir-revolution and against revolutionary rupture. Apart from capital’s power and state power, there is something called social power (the power of civil society, power of workers, etc.,) which can push against capital’s power, in the interest of workers. Here is a form of what can be called ‘social syndicalism’. This is different from, but which can include, trade union syndicalism. Wright’s argument is that bourgeois relations grew within feudalism, so the bourgeoisie could take control of this growth. It could build up its social ­relations gradually within the womb of feudalism, and attain economic power 51

In fact, Wright himself has cast doubt on this view treating it as ‘implausible as best’ (Wright, 1989d: 338–339).

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within the framework of old society before it was able to take power. It used its economic power to take final control over the state. Similarly, a new ruling class within the bourgeoisie – managers – will fight against capitalism and democratize property ownership and establish what he calls bureaucratic socialism. This theory is counterposed to the ‘traditional Marxist’ idea that the world proletariat will overthrow capitalism through a world-revolution and it will build a society of democratic control over property and production process at the world scale. For a traditional Marxist, the working class cannot inseminate its own system of economic power in the old society. It must take power and use it to effect economic transformation, sometimes gradually and sometimes quickly. In contrast, the bourgeois property owner won political power from feudal property owners as the effect of its own economic power. The proletarian situation is different: first political (state power) and then economic power. The mistaken argument is not just that the proletariat is not the main revolutionary agent against capitalist private property in Analytical Marxism (and in Anti-essentialist Marxism). The obverse of that argument is that there can be socialization of property rights by government regulations and union pressure. Capitalists may own a machine and therefore can use it to generate profit in any way they like. But in reality, they may not have absolute rights on the machine: ‘They can only set them in motion, for example, if the machines satisfy certain safety and pollution regulations imposed by the state’ (Wright, 2005: 13). If there is a union, the capitalist may only be able to hire union members to use the machines. These examples suggest to Wright that through state regulations and union restrictions ‘some dimensions of the property rights in the machines have been transferred from the capitalist to a collective agency’ (ibid.). This also means that ‘Such systems of redistributed rights and powers move class relations considerably away from the simple, abstract form of perfectly polarized relations’ that traditional Marxism talks about. This is wrong. The fact that in some places unions, etc. have an impact on how machines are used or saving jobs here or there, or that coops may have some impact on the lives of people does not mean that class structures are not polarized: the machine which is regulated, is still a capitalist machine, which does the job of absorbing surplus labour. As argued before, a working day which is regulated is still a capitalist working day during which surplus value is appropriated and produced, without workers having guaranteed, permanent control over labour process. A machine does not have to be totally controlled by the capitalist for there to be a polarized class structure. A working day does not have to be 14 or 18 hours and completely unregulated for there to be class relation of exploitation. A capitalist society does not have to be totally free from government regulation for it to be to be fundamentally capitalist in terms of its class character. Indeed, to argue otherwise is to argue that the state is a neutral agent or can

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significantly satisfy the fundamental needs of the working class within capitalism in a long-term manner. The ‘regulationist’ thinking appears to neglect the fact that long-term regulation of capitalism as long as it exists is a very difficult affair: an ‘all-embracing and far-sighted control over the production’ of things ‘is in fact incompatible, by and large, with the laws of capitalist production, and hence remains forever a pious wish’ (Marx, 1981: 215). As well, there can occur redistribution of surplus, and/or people can keep much of the social surplus through small-scale production, cooperatives, etc., as in Anti-essentialist Marxism. In other words, what is in the interest of the proletariat can be inseminated within capitalism to enhance its economic power, without the proletariat taking power. Analytical Marxism such as that of Wright is a variant of democratic socialism. Its adherents, as Engels says in Principles of communism (in Marx and Engels, 1977a), favor some of the same measures that the communists advocate which may weaken the basis of capitalism, but ‘not as means for a transition to communism’, but as measures which will be sufficient to abolish ‘the misery and ills of present-day society’. These scholars understand proletarian conditions but not from a Marxist standpoint. They speak on behalf of the petty bourgeoisie or the middle class people, a class which, prior to the achievement of democracy and the socialist measures to which it gives rise, ‘has in many respects identical interests with the proletariat’. There is always a danger that these socialists can ‘enter into the service of the ruling bourgeoisie and attack the communists’ (pp. 95–96). This danger, in my view, is realized in the field of theory-as-class-struggle: in the form of their criticisms of what they call traditional Marxism, which reflects the interests of world working class. In contrast to the Marxist arguments about the necessarily alienating impacts of the market, Wright says: What is undesirable [about the markets] are two things that are generally strongly linked to markets: first, the ways in which markets can enable people and organisations with specific kinds of power to gain advantages over others, and second, the way markets, if inadequately regulated, generate all sorts of destructive externalities and harms on people. But if those problems are minimised through various mechanisms, then the sheer fact of buyers and sellers of goods and services agreeing to exchange things at a mutually agreed-upon price is not, in and of itself, objectionable. wright, 2014a: 82

Wright speaks on behalf of what he calls neo-Marxists: ‘Rather than seeing the absence of private ownership of capital as the core problem, we argued that it was the absence of workers’ democracy’ (Wright, 1993: 22). What he wants to

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see is a continuation of the market relation, which, to him, is not objectionable. This is a part of his overall agenda: to see capitalism continue, in a less objectionable, or non-objectionable form. This is very clear from his universal basic income (ubi) proposal which, he thinks, breaks the connection between workers’ separation from the means of production and their separation from the means of subsistence. ubi will also generate more equality between workers doing crummy work, which they can potentially refuse to do, and those doing more enjoyable work. ubi also decreases poverty (Burawoy and Wright, 2002: 481). The decision to work for a wage therefore becomes much more voluntary. Capitalism between consenting adults is much less objectionable than capitalism between employers and workers with little choice but to work for wages. By increasing the capacity of workers to refuse employment, basic income generates a much more egalitarian distribution of real freedom than ordinary capitalism (ibid.). Wright is not opposed to the continuation of the capitalist class relation but he wants to see a capitalism that is a little different from ordinary capitalism. Varies of capitalism are possible, as things in a super-market, and one can choose which capitalism one likes. Once anti-capitalism is detached from the political economy of capitalism including its economic non-reproducibility, and from class struggle, a capitalism that is different from ordinary capitalism is the outcome. This is exactly what Post-structuralist Marxists such as Resnick and Wolf would and do say. For them, the abolition of private property is indeed not on the agenda: because the abolition of private property is neither necessary nor sufficient for the democratic control over production.52 The post-structuralist position, which is generally located to the right of Analytical Marxism on fundamental issues concerning class and society, is that none of the social processes including class has any primacy as far as the explanation of the major problems of the humanity is concerned and as far as the project of the transcendence of contemporary class society is concerned. So an unmistakeable conclusion follows: what this position sees as class-based movement (i.e. the movement to increase the share of surplus-producers in the surplus product) must ally itself with movements that are independent of class (e.g. race and gender-based movements).

52

If having pills to cure a disease is necessary but not sufficient because one has to do physical exercises as well, it does not mean taking pills is not a good idea.

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With their intellectual focus on the distribution of surplus, they treat that as a potential object of political battles as well. They see revolutionary possibilities in the present moment. No one will be opposed to the principle of seeing revolutionary possibilities in the present moment. Every process has a past, present and future. But in its search for the future, Anti-essentialist Marxism looks in the wrong places and in the wrong way. It therefore argues for what are effectively permanent reforms within capitalism, whose objectively existing dominance it discursively denies. They are for social democratic reforms. They wish to end the capitalism as they know it and as they know it, and not as the capitalism that exists independently of what they know about it and as it is experienced by the majority of the humanity who are exploited and oppressed by it. It is worth repeating these lines from anti-essentialists say: If capitalism takes up the available social space, there’s no room for anything else. If capitalism cannot coexist, there’s no possibility of anything else. If capitalism is large, other things appear small and inconsequential. If capitalism functions as a unity, it cannot be partially or locally replaced. gibson-graham, 2006: 203

So because other things are not to be seen as small, capitalism must not be seen as large. Because reforms are to be seen as achievable, capitalism must not be seen as unity. The politics of Anti-essentialist Marxists is essentially social-democratic. They are among those ‘Those who have attempted to theorize social democracy as a transitional or mixed form of economy’ and who have ‘encountered ­serious resistance from a Marxism which sees the welfare state as ultimately subsumed to or necessarily hegemonized by capitalism’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 258). They add: ‘We see this today in both mainstream and left discussions of social and economic policy, where we are told that we may have democracy, or a pared-down welfare state, or prosperity, but only in the context of the [global capitalist] economy and what it will permit’ (ibid.: 14). GibsonGraham are for (2006: 179) ‘new forms of distributional politics’ that are ‘quite different from the more established politics of distribution that focus upon the wage/profit shares and mechanisms of state redistribution’. For Post-structuralist Marxists, when capitalism is represented in traditional Marxism as a unified system coextensive with the nation or even the world, when it is portrayed as having a tendency to crowd out all other economic forms, when it is allowed to define entire societies, it becomes something that can only be defeated and replaced by a mass collective movement

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(or by a process of systemic dissolution that such a movement might assist). The ­revolutionary task of replacing capitalism now seems outmoded and unrealistic, yet post-structuralists do not seem to have an alternative conception of class transformation to take its place. The old political economic ‘systems’ and ‘structures’ that call forth a vision of revolution as systemic replacement seem to be dominant in the traditional Marxist political imagination (GibsonGraham, 2006: 263). They says that by virtue of the centrality that traditional Marxists accord to production, they identify the politics of class as the ‘structural politics’ of the singular social. In the familiar script for class politics of traditional Marxism, the unified and coherent society can be ameliorated and reformed through everyday political activities but can only be transformed through systemic ­upheaval (for example, the breakdown of a social logic or structure in the context of a coordinated transformative struggle). In order to liberate class politics from these restrictive yet privileged scenarios, post-structuralists wish to understand society as a complex disunity in which class may take multiple forms. Primitive communist, independent, slave, feudal, capitalist, and communal class processes can, and often do, coexist. In this conception, then, an ‘advanced’ industrial social formation is not a coherent and stable unity c­ entered on capitalist class relations. It is a decentered, fragmented, and complexly structured totality in which class and other processes are unevenly developed and diverse. An industrialized social formation may be the site of a rich proliferation of class processes and a wide variety of class positions – producer, appropriator, distributor, or receiver of surplus labor in a variety of forms. The reformism of such theory as Anti-essentialist Marxism, including in the form of the labour geography type literature, takes an explicit form of localism. It is first of all ontologically opposed to the idea that there can be a hierarchy of scales within which the local is subordinated to the higher scales.53 This is the geographical – scalar version of over-determination: neither any social process nor any spatial scale is more important than another. An obsession with the local scale and a disavowal of any strong epistemological-causal commitment to class theory at the level of capitalism with its globally-operating law of value, are two sides of the same coin. If the Stalinist ‘socialism in one country’ was 53

It is to be noted that I am not rejecting the notion of scalar constitution of social activity/ relations. It is the case that: ‘at a somewhat more concrete level, one finds that particular social processes are carried out (partially) over particular distances or organised across territories of particular scale and these distances and scales enter into their construction’ (Gough, 2004: 187; Cox, 1998). The point is what conceptual conclusion one draws from this.

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a caricature of – and indeed repudiation of – Marxism, in the 20th century, ‘radical’ reformism in one locality, at the local scale, represents a double denial: the denial of multi-scalar, and especially global, mechanisms underlying social problems, and the denial of the necessity for multi-scalar, and especially, international, working class action against those mechanisms. If Marx was right that a time comes, when reforms of the parts require an entire overhaul of the totality itself, then we can say with him this: radically changing things at the local scale require radically changing things at all scales, and including internationally. Much of the class literature that Anti-essentialist Marxism has promoted is also informed by identity politics (divorced from class politics). The ‘new language of class’ is ‘a means of forging identity politics’ (Dowling, 2009: 838) in a manner in which it is also sensitive to contingent class identities, including middle class identities. Identity politics is compatible with a view of class in which the explanatory power of class – and of the working class – has been curtailed. If anti-essentialists and Analytical Marxists believe in all this – that ­government regulation of capitalism can make capitalist class relation more socialized and less polarized and that through civil society type action social surplus can be in the hands of ordinary working people – they must also believe in what people such as Stigliz say: ‘that the rapid growth of social inequality is not the inexorable outcome of the workings of the capitalist system as such, but is the product of political decisions that can be reversed, provided the ruling elites are sufficiently convinced of the errors of their ways and understand that greater social equality will ultimately prove beneficial for them as well’ (quoted in Beams, 2014). Major economic problems of the world, including massive inequality between the top 1 and the bottom 80% or so, is fundamentally not due to what the government (or civil society or the nonprofit sector) does or fails to do, it is not fundamentally due to a given nature of regulation or its absence. The fundamental problems lie in the class character of the economy and the state’s defense of that, and not in state’s economic policies (or policies of civil society agencies or the non-profit sector), although government policies reflect, and reinforce, relations of exploitation (while sometimes ­mitigating the harshest impacts).54 To explain fundamental ills merely/mainly in terms of economic policies (their presence or absence) is to suggest that better p ­ olicies can make things better.55 This is, of course, 54 55

I am abstracting from state’s defense of private property without which exploitation cannot exist. Post-structuralism (including anti-essentialist Marxism), analytical Marxism, social science that is critical of neoliberalism, including social democracy, liberalism and left lib-

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­traditional social democracy: ­regulation by the state or ngo-type things to influence the distribution of the surplus will make matters better. To the extent that regulation is about politics (with big P or small p), the inference is that politics determines the economic (in the sense of major economic problems). Engels argues against any theory (including that of anarchists) that ‘regards the state as the main evil’ and that does not regard capital, i.e. the class antagonism between capitalists and wage workers which has arisen through social development, … as the main evil to be abolished. engels in a letter to cuno, in marx and engels, 1982: 257

What Marx said about a group of socialists (and ‘panacea-mongers’) of his time describes the objective implications of anti-essentialist and analytical Marxist views of class: they leave wage labour and hence capitalist production in existence and try to bamboozle themselves or the world into believing that [e.g.] by transforming rent of land into a tax payable to the state all the evils of capitalist production would vanish of themselves. The whole thing is thus simply a socialistically decked-out attempt to save capitalist rule and actually re-establish it on an even wider basis than its present one. marx’s letter to Sorge in marx and engels, 1982: 323

In all bodies of work, including the two Marxisms in question, that seek to revise what they call traditional Marxism, class is not the fundamental, essential, cause of major world problems.56 And indeed, given the (assumed) possibility of local-level challenge to damages done by capitalism, it is even possible for them to say that world problems are not inevitable effects of class relations of capitalism. Problems may exist perhaps because of lack of agency: we do not fight enough. The world has problems because we are the problem. Both anti-essentialist and analytical Marxisms are very ‘humanitarian’. Like that of other humanitarians of their ilk, their thinking sympathizes, as Marx says in Poverty of Philosophy, with ‘the bad side of present-day production relations. It seeks … to palliate even slightly the real contrasts; it sincerely deplores

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eralism, and the like put a lot of reformist hope in the ability of the present – in the form of the state with a little push from below – to create a viable democratic future where ordinary people control property and how it is used. X is a fundamental cause of Y when without X, Y will not happen (in the usual way and form it happens), or X sets limit within which form and nature of Y vary.

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the distress of the proletariat, the unbridled competition of the bourgeois among themselves; it counsels the workers to be “sober”…. [and] it advises the bourgeois to put a judicious ardour into production’ (Marx, 1987: 108). Besides, for anti-essentialists, a bourgeois has also other needs and desires than just making money, so perhaps these desires can be relied on to obtain some benefit from their surplus. Gibson-Graham argue against ‘an essentialist discourse of profitability that constitutes a singular and centered enterprise’, the idea that there is anything called the capitalist firm, ‘the dominant discourse of profit maximization with enviable economy and efficiency’. They argue in support of ‘the suppressed or marginalized subjectivities that reside within the corporation’ (2006: 187–189). Further: We can argue that entrepreneurs, like anyone else, have a host of personal motives. Profit is one, perhaps, but they are also interested in sex, food, and saving souls. … [It] it is not easy to see how to devise a theory of the firm in anything approximating its present form (or even with its present goals). cyert and march 1992: 9 approvingly quoted in gibson-graham, 2006: 187

What is the implication of all this? Both on the enterprise level and at the level of the economy as a whole, a decentered and disunified vision of the economic entity could free distribution from its traditional position of subordination to exploitation and investment/accumulation. Such a vision has the potential to liberate multiple economic subjectivities now trapped within the circumscribed domain of the universal calculating subject. Our question becomes, how might the abandonment of a centered economic totality and of an essentialist conception of economic dynamics and subjectivity allow for a less constrained role for distributional struggles. gibson-graham, 2006: 189

All the elaborate treatise on essentialism in Marxist economic thought, multiple positionalities, etc. is really about creating a discursive ground for the ­argument and the practice that capitalist exploitation does not subordinate distributional, reformist thinking and practice. Just fight here and there; or perhaps one can even have spaces of ‘communism’ or post-capitalism (e.g. coops, non-profit production, small-scale production, community kitchen, etc.) within the total landscape of capitalism. Their focus on distributional

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politics which abstracts from conditions of production, forgets the point Marx makes in his Critique of the Gotha Programme: Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself. The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of non-workers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labour power. If the elements of production are so distributed, then the present-day distribution of the means of consumption results automatically. If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one. Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. marx in marx and engels, 1977c: 19–20

Under certain conditions coops can help workers. But what the two forms of Marxism do not seem realize is that, as Marx said in his inaugural address of the working men’s international association: co-operative labor, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries. marx in marx and engels, 1977b: 17

To have any effect, the coops movement needs to be developed at the national scale, and a political struggle has to happen to make that possible. But this is not how coops are seen in the two Marxisms. To save the industrious masses, co-operative labor ought to be d­ eveloped to national dimensions, and, consequently, to be fostered by national means. Yet the lords of the land and the lords of capital will always use  their political privileges for the defense and perpetuation of their

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economic monopolies. So far from promoting, they will continue to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emancipation of labor (ibid.). Anti-essentialist Marxism, which abstracts from the imperative of capitalist profitability logic, to the extent it talks about socialism, wants capitalism but not perhaps capitalists. There is a long history of thinking along these lines, and such thinking is erroneous because, as Marx’s Grundrisse says: capital in its being-for-itself is the capitalist. Of course, socialists sometimes say, we need capital, but not the capitalist. Then capital appears as a pure thing, not as a relation of production which, reflected in itself, is precisely the capitalist. I may well separate capital from a given individual capitalist, and it can be transferred to another. But, in losing capital, he loses the quality of being a capitalist. Thus capital is indeed separable from an individual capitalist, but not from the capitalist, who, as such, confronts the worker. Thus also the individual worker can cease to be the being-for-itself of labour; he may inherit or steal money etc. But then he ceases to be a worker. As a worker he is nothing more than labour in its being-for-itself. marx, 1973: 303–304

To the extent that Anti-essentialist Marxism – and analytical Marxism – talks about socialism, it is a form of vulgar socialism. The focus on distribution politics, concomitantly, means that the problems, and especially, major economic-environmental problems, are because of inadequate political action or inadequate regulation. Because the anti-essentialist Marxist theorists of class deny necessity in the world, so they deny, in the words of Marx’s Poverty of philosophy, ‘the necessity of antagonism’ (Marx, 1987: 108). Non-antagonism and non-dominance of capitalism ‘become idealized reality’. These people want to retain the categories which express bourgeois relations, without the antagonism which constitutes them and is inseparable from them. They think they are seriously fighting bourgeois practice, and they are more bourgeois than the others. marx, 1987: 108

Anti-essentialist and Analytical Marxist theorizing of class has a distinct politics, a distinct view of what they call socialism. Their views on socialism are a

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combination of attributes of what Marx and Engels called reactionary socialists, bourgeois socialists, and democratic socialists. Anti-essentialist Marxism seeks to make non-dominance57 of capitalism a discursive effect of its thinking and to promote such thing as small-scale production as non-capitalist forms of production.58 What is called capitalism, like everything else in society, has no essence, nor dominance. Is the essence of capitalism the accumulation imperative: that capitalists must reinvest a part of their surplus? No. The anti-essentialist narrative ‘differs from traditional Marxist views of the (re)production of the capitalist system as the “laws of motion” associated with the ongoing exploitation of the working class by those who own the means of production’ (Gibson-Graham et al., 2001: 1–2). They do not see accumulation ‘as having a priori and privileged claim on a­ ppropriated surplus, because there are unlimited and ever changing set of surplus distributions that are potentially subject to a range of claimants… For example: environmentalists can make a claim on surplus distribution to clean up the environment’ (Gibson-Graham et al., 2001: 13), forcing the firms to use environmentalfriendly technologies. The accumulation imperative that traditional Marxists talk about is a barrier to what essentialists call semiotic and other type of resistance needed to achieve what is desired. Nor is capitalism’s tendency to be crisis-prone an essence of capitalism (Wright also agrees with this). What about the profitability: that capitalists (firms) have to remain profitable. That is also not the essence of capitalist class relation. The discourse of profitability, they say, dominates many Marxian political economic representations of the capitalist economy where it becomes essentialized as a structural ‘logic.’ In particular it is drawn upon in the classical Marxian formulation of the crisis tendency within capitalism, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. The ‘logic’ of profitability constitutes, in traditional Marxism, the core contradiction in the capitalist system (the source of its dynamism, its crises and restructurings), subordinating and discursively defusing the myriad other contradictions that might be seen to challenge capitalist reproduction. 57

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Dominance of capitalist class relation can be seen in different ways, including in terms of the logic of value: in the world economy as in peripheral capitalism, property owners producing for the market using hired labor who not able to cut costs can go out of ­business, sooner or later (of course there are counter-acting tendencies which can slow down such a process, and these include the use of income from the sale of labour by a part of the household to keep a losing enterprise afloat). Small-scale production, both that which happens on a commercial basis and that which is mainly for subsistence, is mainly, if not entirely, a pre-capitalist characteristic, although capitalism constantly gives rise to, and allows, small-scale production, while also undermining it.

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Anti-essentialists correctly note that commodity relations cannot be equated to capitalist class relations as such. They then go on to say incorrectly that production based on commodity exchange which is not capitalist is a viable mode of post-capitalist politics alongside capitalist production. That is, their idea – like that of Proudhon – is to make everyone a commodity producer. This is indicative of their ‘cleverness’ that marks their attempt to ‘abolish capitalist property – by enforcing the eternal laws of property which are themselves based on commodity production’ (Marx, 1977: 734).59 Fetishization of small-scale production as a viable non-capitalist process of production is only possible if one violently – chaotically – abstracts from the very essence of capitalism, that is, from the value relations operating at international (as well as national and regional) scales and from the systemic imperative of profitmaking. Commodities are exchanged on the basis of socially necessary average labour time, and small scale production can produce commodities at a value which will be above the social value, and therefore are always in danger of going out of business. Engels’ comments on Proudhon in his Housing question make sense here. ‘The petty-bourgeois’ people, who can only think about a solution to the ills of capitalism in terms of small-scale production, demand: a world in which each person turns out a separate and independent product that is immediately consumable and exchangeable in the market. Then, as long as each person only receives back the full value of his labour in the form of another product, ‘eternal justice’ is satisfied and the best possible world created. engels, in marx and engels, 1977b: 312

It is not clear how small-scale production’s existence can be explained except in relation to capitalist class relation. It is partly because wages in the capitalist sector are so low and jobs are so insecure that many people are driven into the so-called small-scale production, including the informal sector. If wages are high and jobs are secure, much of the small scale production that GibsonGraham think is an alternative to capitalism, will itself disappear. The smallscale production also grows out of capitalism when capitalists lose their c­ apital due to competition within the capitalist class. Therefore, existence of smallscale production is not illustrative of choice or power on the part of people but of the exploitive character of the capitalist society itself. The two parts of society are mutually connected.

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Such a view while recognizing the enabling view of market ignores its coercive character (Wood, 1994).

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Marxists have for long criticized petty bourgeois ideas such as those of Proudhon and those who nowadays follow him, consciously or not. Marxists are critical of petty-bourgeois production, but not petty-bourgeois producers as people. This kind of petty bourgeois ideas are ‘still the great arsenal from which the middle-class radicals and pseudo-socialists…procure the phrases with which they lull the workers to sleep’ (Engels’ letter to Mesa in Marx and Engels, 1982: 408). There are some who call themselves socialists and who find virtue in this system of production. Anti-essentialist Marxists such as GibsonGraham are the modern day version of reactionary socialists who support small-scale production, on the ground that it is free from evils of capitalism, that it is resilient, that it is post-capitalistic, etc. They shed tears for the poor proletarians, and especially proletarians of female gender and groups with vulnerable status, but they are absolutely against a rational planned society (communism), on the ground that communism is impossible to achieve. These scholars show their true colours and make a ‘common cause with the bourgeoisie against the proletarit as soon as ‘the proletariat becomes revolutionary and communist’. In the realm of theory – which is an arena of class struggle – they do make common cause, in the face of attack from Marxists whose ideas express the interests of the working class, with the idea of petty-bourgeois and bourgeois classes. Anti-essentialist and Analytical Marxism share views of those ‘adherents of present-day society who have been frightened for its future by the evils to which it necessarily gives rise’ and who want ‘to maintain this society while getting rid of the evils which are an inherent part of it’. They propose ‘welfare measures’ and various ‘grandiose systems of reform’ which, ‘under the pretense of re-organizing society, are in fact intended to preserve the foundations, and hence the life, of existing society’. They are bourgeois socialists. 6

Class Character of Revisions to the Marxist Theory of Class: Theories and Interests

We can see that Analytical and post-structuralist Marxist class theories seek to inject massive revisions into what they both call traditional Marxism. The question is: what is the class character of these revisionist class theories? As mentioned, theory, more or less, reflects existing conditions, which exist independently of the theorist.60 These conditions include the material conditions (class exploitation, inequalities, etc.) and also the ways in which ordinary 60

Analytical Marxism actually believes in this realist view.

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people (those who are not theorizing) think about these material conditions, their current level of consciousness. Revisions to theory – Marxist theory in this case – reflect these conditions. There is a history of those revisions. The revisions to Marxism have taken many forms which are based on criticisms against Marxism, a Marxism which is very different from Analytical and poststructuralist Marxisms, and which says, as Lenin noted in his Marxism and revisionism: 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

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that one must adopt a materialist – as opposed to – an idealistic world view; that there is a tendency towards concentration and centralization of means of production in the hands of a few; that small-scale producers can exist in a relation of competition with large-scale enterprises (mainly) on the basis of ‘self-exploitation’ in a capitalist market (e.g. by denying themselves what decent living requires),61 that economic positions between the capitalist and proletarian class positions will arise and weaken (albeit unevenly over time and space) and therefore non-capitalist small-scale production under capitalism as a long-term reproduction or development strategy is not viable (given limits to self-exploitation and given the dominance of the law of value); that the capitalist class-system is inherently prone to regular bouts of economic crisis; that the state – whether it is democratic or not – is inherently a tool of oppression against subordinate classes, and

Revisionists systematically paint ‘a rose-coloured picture of modern small-scale production’ (Lenin, 1977a: 52). They did so during Lenin’s time. They – e.g. anti-essentialist Marxists and modern day populists of various hue (e.g. Vandana Shiva of eco-feminism genre) – do so now. ‘The technical and commercial superiority of large-scale production over small-scale production not only in industry, but also in agriculture, is proved by irrefutable facts. … Small-scale production maintains itself on the ruins of natural economy by constant worsening of diet, by chronic starvation, by lengthening of the working day, by deterioration in the quality and the care of cattle, in a word, by the very methods whereby handicraft production maintained itself against capitalist manufacture. Every advance in science and technology inevitably and relentlessly undermines the foundations of smallscale production in capitalist society; and it is the task of socialist political economy to investigate this process in all its forms, often complicated and intricate, and to demonstrate to the small producer the impossibility of his holding his own under capitalism, the hopelessness of peasant farming under capitalism, and the necessity for the peasant to adopt the standpoint of the proletarian’ (Lenin, 1977a: 52).

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that there is a need for a revolutionary rupture as there are significant limits to reforms within capitalism (whether these reforms come from the government, unions or civil society) (Lenin, 1977a).

These are core ideas in Marxism, the Marxism defended in this book (i.e. revolutionary Marxism), which includes the Marxist theory of class. What objective class interests, once again, are represented by revisions to these ideas, which are being tried in many circles, and not just in analytical and anti-essentialist Marxisms?62 Often revision to Marxism reflects material conditions in the sphere of class relations, and more specifically, the economic rise (and dissolution) of groups of people as members of the ‘middle class’ which is between the two basic classes and which includes: small-scale property owners, some of whom may have to perform wage-work, and those who are well-paid, highly educated members of the working class, including highly paid union and government officials as well as non-managerial private sector employees. There is a dialectics of capitalist class relation and middle class positions (including those in small-scale production that anti-essentialist Marxist talks about and those performing highly-paid skilled labour, whose role analytical Marxism emphasizes). One side of this dialectics is as follows: ‘Capitalism arose and is constantly arising out of small scale production’ (Lenin, 1977a: 55). Another side is that capitalism gives rise to the middle strata: A number of new ‘middle strata’ are inevitably brought into existence again and again by capitalism (appendages to the factory, work at home, small workshops scattered all over the country to meet the requirements of big industries, such as the bicycle and automobile industries, etc.). These new small producers are just as inevitably being cast again into the ranks of the proletariat. It is quite natural that the petty-bourgeois world-outlook should again and again crop up in the ranks of the broad workers’ parties. It is quite natural that this should be so and always will be so, right up to the changes of fortune that will take place in the proletarian revolution. Lenin, 1977a: 55–5663

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One really also wonders in what sense are they Marxism? ‘Complete proletarianization under capitalism may never happen nor is it even a necessity for the overthrow of capitalism’ (Lenin, 1977a: 56). The Marxist thesis that capitalist class relation dominates cannot be seen as saying that it is the only class relation in the modern world.

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Under these conditions of the constant rise and sinking of middle strata, a petty bourgeois world outlook crops up, and this is manifested in various criticisms of, and attempted revisions to, ‘traditional’ Marxist theory of class. The totality of revisions that Analytical and Anti-essentialist Marxisms (and similar trends) seek to inject into ‘traditional Marxism’ is of this nature, more or less. They reflect real, contradictory material conditions, even if theorists might consciously deny this. We may recall Marx when he says in Capital 1 that it is wrong to deny that in theories of society ‘existing social antagonisms and contradictions are formulated’, and that theories ‘are not the ideal product of the real economic movement, but on the contrary, that the real antagonisms of capitalist production… are the result of the theories’ (Marx, 1977: 705–706). What does all this mean for the two Marxist theories of class in question? Wright correctly states that ‘the explanatory capacity of the theories we construct depends to an important extent on the coherence of concepts we deploy within them’ (Wright, 1989d: 272). While rightly emphasizing the necessity for coherence, his own intellectual practice (methodological thinking and class theory) is incoherent: his methodological thinking does not cohere with his class theory thinking. Not only is it the case that in spite of his denunciation of skill and organizational exploitation in his work, he still deploys these ideas in his class theory, but also does he still draw problematic political conclusions for socialism – post-capitalist politics – from his incoherent class theory. It is important to quote him again when he provides an epistemological justification for ignoring the problem in his conceptual thinking about organizational and skills asset: Abstract discussions of concepts are continually plagued with loose ends, ambiguities, inconsistencies. At some point it is necessary to set aside these difficulties and explore the implications of the concepts under discussion for concrete empirical and theoretical problems (1989a: 23; italics added). In spite of the various problems with his concept of middle classes, some of which he himself recognizes, he still continues to use them and indeed thinks that we need not wait until we have completely coherent concepts (ibid.: 272). The attempt to create a symmetrical concept of class across qualitatively distinct class systems may in the end be both unnecessary and unhelpful. Nevertheless, I will provisionally continue to treat organization assets and the corresponding forms of exploitation and class relations in a manner parallel to the treatment of labor power, capital, and skill assets (1989a: 23).

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Ideas somehow reflect interests (in howsoever mediated way that relation occurs). That is why: ‘if geometrical axioms affected human interests attempts would certainly be made to refute them’ (Lenin, 1977a: 49). Then the question is: which class interests might the revisions to Marxist class theory, however incoherent and problematic those revisions may be, objectively, reflect? The Post-structuralist Marxists appear to express the interests of ideas of certain sections of the propertied class, including the philanthropic capitalists, small-scale producers, entrepreneurial women, as well as interests of ‘middle class intellectuals’. The post-structuralist class research on finding alternatives to capitalism within capitalism is lucrative: after all, in the cottage industry producing research on this topic, ‘Research grants are being won, articles written, books published, conferences convened’ (­Gibson-Graham, 2006: viii). Anti-essentialists, and especially, Gibson-Graham and their followers talk much about small-scale producers. Their ideas reflect the interests of these producers. In fact, much radical thinking takes up the cause of small-scale producers, abstracting from the class logic of reproduction of small-scale producers, including the fact that capitalism precisely grows out of the system of smallscale production, although capitalism also oppresses small-scale producers, which is why they attract sympathy of radicals such as ­anti-essentialists. They advocate for all kinds of social arrangements within capitalism to help smallscale producers. In Class struggles in France, Marx talks about a tendency of thinking that aspires for socialism in a peaceful manner – utopian or petty bourgeois socialism,64 in relation to small-scale or petty producers: Capital hounds this class chiefly as its creditor, so it [petty bourgeois socialism] demands credit institutions; capital crushes it by competition, so it demands associations supported by the state; capital overwhelms it by concentration, so it demands progressive taxes, limitations on inheritance, taking over of large construction projects by the state, and other measures that forcibly stem the growth of capital. … While this utopian, doctrinaire Socialism, which subordinates the total movement to one of its stages, which puts in place of common social production the brainwork of individual pedants and, above all, in fantasy does away with the revolutionary struggle of the classes and its requirements by small conjurers’ tricks or great sentimentality, while this doctrinaire Socialism, which at bottom only idealizes present society, takes a

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This kind of thinking originally developed as ‘the theoretical expression of the proletariat only as long as it had not yet developed further into a free historical movement of its own’ (Marx, 1964: 125).

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picture of it without shadows, and wants to achieve its ideal athwart the realities of present society… marx, 1964: 125

7 Conclusion There is no doubt that Analytical and Post-structuralist Marxisms have kept alive the discussion on class in the academic world which has been skeptical of Marxist type ideas about class, and in the world beyond. They have also offered some criticisms of the capitalist class society and of many writers’ inadequate views about class. Analytical Marxism of Wright points to, what are according it, new forms of class relationship based on unequal ownership of organizational asset and monopolizable skill. But it is not clear – including to Wright himself – that these, as forms of property, are sufficiently different from what are the means of production and labour in Marxism in order to count as new bases for the definition of classes and class relations. And for anti-essentialists, property ownership/control is neither necessary nor sufficient for defining class. Given that these two Marxisms define class on the basis of processes that cut across class societies (control over assets or appropriation of surplus labour), it is not clear how in their view the capitalist class is a special form of class society. In other words, they have a-historical view of class. In the two Marxisms, surplus is inadequately conceptualized. Surplus is merely a matter of exchange relations or a matter of fixing meaning or political power relations between surplus appropriators and surplus producers (given enough pressure on surplus appropriators, the surplus appropriation can be enormously reduced).65 Surplus remains an undifferentiated category. More specifically, the post-structuralist Marxist assumption is that surplus labour performed at home = surplus labour performed in a factory. Their assumption is also that: surplus in a slave society = surplus in capitalism = surplus in communism. In Analytical Marxism as well, the mechanisms of surplus appropriation are basically the same across class societies: unequal distribution of assets. Thus there is a totally ahistorical view of surplus and therefore exploitation and class. There is little attention to the production of surplus itself in both the Marxisms, so surplus remains more or less a distributive category. This means that class theory is divorced from its materiality, and is reduced 65

They forget that value and surplus value cannot be merely seen as ‘the mode of existence of the class struggle’ for that view reduces the essence of the capital-labour relation to ‘a political relation of power. (Kicillof and Starosta, 2007: 28; see also Fine, 2001b).

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to sociologism (merely relations between social groups). It is not clear how ownership of organizational asset and monopolizable skills is itself a source of surplus appropriation that is autonomous of capitalist surplus appropriation, as in Analytical Marxism. Given the inattention to property and to labour process, in ­Anti-essentialist Marxism, class relation becomes a matter of who gets how much of the social product, and not about who has effective control66 over the process of production of value and surplus value and over the means of production. For both of the Marxisms, the importance of class is contingent. Class is one among several forces affecting our lives (especially, in anti-essentialist thought). Both the Marxisms practice a fractionalist and typological approach to class (divisions within classes): they stress difference at the expense of the unity (=the relation between the basic classes). The dilution of the relation between basic classes is the objective effect of Wright’s intention to concretize classes by its single-minded focus on middle classes, and to determine who belongs to which classes, beyond the two-class model. Both the Marxisms focus too much on who owns assets or who appropriates surplus from whom, and as a result neglects the wider influence of class itself: how it affects different aspects of society, including politics and consciousness. Both the Marxisms are skeptical of large scale class struggle against capitalism and for socialism. What is common to both anti-essentialist (including the labour geography type thinking) and analytical Marxist class theory is a sense of provincialization,67 an undialectical one-sidedness, in relation to class and society. Their theory of class is immensely inadequate. They are skeptical of the working class – and they actually reject it – as the revolutionary vanguard of struggle against capitalism. Thus they contribute to the existing wider skepticism about class. For the two Marxisms, the working class has to enter into an alliance with middle class people and/or with non-class movements, in order to obtain significant concessions. Revolution against capitalist property relations has not done any good in the view of the two Marxisms, and it will, according to Wright, inevitably deepen class inequality in new forms. So struggle against capitalist property rights is not quite on the agenda. In a post-capitalist society, it is not the proletariat but the bureaucracy that will inevitably be the new ruling class. Analytical and Anti-essentialist Marxisms, essentially, and on the basis of their analytical arguments, are social-democratic. Their arguments and political 66

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This control is different from political pressure that these Marxisms talk about which is in the sense of the political pressure on employers to increase wages or to spend some of their profit in local economies, and so on. This is in the sense of narrowing the scope of operation of class.

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proposals are sympathetic towards small-scale producers and middle classes. They are not against entering into alliance with the (sections of) the capitalist class, appealing to their good sense, so independent political mobilization of the working class, which is an important aspect of Marxism is not in their thinking. They endorse various forms of voluntarism (including in the form of labour struggles being able to inevitably win significant concessions, suggesting that capital is not necessarily the dominant agent). Putting political pressure on the capitalist class is possible because, for these Marxisms, there is no systemic logic of profitability or economic crisis, etc. or that such a logic is not that potent, nor is there any class which has an interest in overcoming capitalism in its own interest. Consider Wright once again: The thesis of the long-term nonreproducibility of capitalism – the ­inherent, endogenous tendency towards deepening, and eventually catastrophic, crises rooted in the falling rate of profit – is certainly problematic, as is the claim that capitalism produces a sufficiently homogeneous class of proletarians to constitute its gravediggers (1993: 23). In other words, capitalism is not as problematic as Marxism has thought (it is not that crisis-prone, and even if it is, it can overcome its problems) and there is not an agent which is able to challenge it at its root. This sort of thinking strikes at the root of Marxist theory of capitalism. Of course, there are problems of exploitation and inequality. But the amount of surplus that can be appropriated is a matter of pressure on the capitalist class. Anti-essentialists specifically argue that social democratic pressure can be brought to bear on entrepreneurs for a greater share of the surplus: the idea is not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. To quote, once again, a member of the post-structuralist camp, Spivak, who Gibson-Graham treat as an ally and who utterly mistakenly deploys Marx to advance social-democracy (Marx, who ended his Capital Vol. 1 with a call for the expropriation of capitalist private property-owners, would reserve his most strong criticisms social democracy): Marx is not talking about the nongeneration [non-production] of capital but the nonutilization of capital for capitalism. It’s like the difference between starving and dieting. You can agree to the production of capital, but restrict it (by common consent) so that it can’t be appropriated by one group of people but becomes a dynamic for social redistribution. spivak and plotke 1995: 7–8

To the extent that theoretical practice contributes to the reproduction of a system, it is the case that ultimately, theoretical practice of Analytical Marxism

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and Post-stucturalist Marxism concerning class contributes to the reproduction of the capitalist class system. To the extent that they are critical of existing class society and of some of the authors who write about such society, their criticisms are system-supporting. More precisely, their criticisms are in the nature of: the oppositional criticism [that] is nothing more than a safety valve for mass dissatisfaction, a condition of the stability of the social structure. Such in principle, for example, was the significance acquired by the ­social-democratic criticism. trotsky, 2008: xvi

Analytical and Post-structuralist Marxisms have contributed to class-based thinking: they, at least, do not say that class is a mental creation, that if people are not conscious of their class position then class does not exist. They do stress class as an important form of inequality. However, their service to class theory is rather limited. It is not enough to say that class exists. It is necessary to say that class exists and that without understanding class, one will not adequately understand the fundamental causes of the humanity’s major problems. These Marxisms do not say that. All those who deny the fundamental significance of class, including in its capitalist form, can be invited to live without going to work for a wage/salary, or to start demanding the full worth of the commodity, the production of which their working day contributes, or to demand that they and their co-workers collectively control what happens at the site of production (whether a factory or a hotel), or start a petition to abolish private property and the capitalist state, insisting on the control over the state from below by working masses organized in councils and residential committees. To say that class empirically exists and then to say that class is merely one of several processes that affect our lives is plain wrong. It is vacuous to assert that class exists but that the theoretical statements about what the existence of class is caused by or what it affects and how much it affects, are more or less arbitrary social constructions. If the science – theory – of class was merely an arbitrary social construction, what is the point of writing about class and what is the point of criticizing this or that view on it? If class is one among several processes and has no necessary primacy, or if the significance of class is only contingent on what it is that we are talking about, how does one know, at a theoretical level, when it has significance and when it does not? The importance of class, which is a systemic process/­relation, cannot be contingent. It is not the case that: it is possible that class will affect other things but not necessary. I will in fact argue that class necessarily affects

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these other things. These other things mean not whether it will rain tomorrow or if I will go out to eat with my friend X or what game I will play tomorrow or whether the us will win x number of gold medals at the next Olympics. The other things in question refer to causally important things that affect whether we will live a materially comfortable life with dignity and self-respect, with democratic rights and ecological sustainability, more precisely. The other things include: secure and enjoyable work; decent compensation; decent shelter; access to medical facilities; a good physical environment; access to cultural resources, including education and good quality theatres; a city or a village without the fear of being killed on the street or raped; and so on. The question is: is it, or is it not, that class is the single most determinant of these things? The two Marxisms will say: class is not. They show some engagement with Marx, but that is relatively superficial, turning Marx to a mere sociologist or an economist, etc. and that too, a sociologist or an economist whose insights were quite inadequate, overall. They claim to engage with Marx more than they actually do.68 The actual content of Marxism, of Marx and Engels, for example, is surprisingly very little in the theoretical discussion of Gibson-Graham and their followers who call themselves Marxists; there is very little discussion in their work on, for example, accumulation, profitability, economic crisis, wealth production, etc. Their main focus is on surplus distribution and appropriation, the qualities that capitalism shares with pre-capitalism, so capitalism’s specific class ­character is, once again, left out. Both the Marxisms engage very little with the rich class analysis of Marx and Engels; they completely ignore the rich class analysis that was developed in theory and practice by Lenin, Trotsky (or Luxemburg),69 etc. and those who develop, in more recent times, the legacy of these writers.70 It is

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Bensaid (2006) approvingly quotes Derrida as saying: ‘“No future without Marx.” With, against or beyond – but not “without”. I would argue: most of the post-structuralist thinking, and especially anti-essentialist Marxist class theory which is a slightly qualified form of post-structuralism (Mavroudeas, 2006: 501), is actually against Marx and it is beyond Marx, so much so that it is as good as being without Marx (given the law of transformation of quantity into quality). Luxemburg (2004: Chapter 9), like Lenin, incidentally, has a lot to say about class and gender. I am not suggesting that these writers, who take Marx and the revolutionary Marxist tradition seriously, even if not equally so, all subscribe to the same political agenda, nor am I saying that I necessarily agree with all of them on everything, including the political agenda. But it would be indefensible to ignore a writer just because one might not agree with them on the political ground.

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perhaps thought that these writers who created ‘traditional Marxism’ lived in different times and places, and are hardly relevant now.71 This is a form of intellectual abstention-ism and myopia. And, of course, according to revisionist views, class in the sense of relations between the basic classes has very little substantive and direct connection to consciousness and political power, including state power. The revisionist argument is either that the relation between basic classes is too abstract to shape power and consciousness (as in Analytical Marxism) or that such a relation cannot be allowed to exist epistemologically.72 The relation between class and the state does not receive any attention at all except for the assertion that state policies can somehow help the working masses. Class stays in a little province of the world of thinking. According to the revisionist thinking, class theory explains less than what it calls traditional Marxism thinks it can. The emphasis in Anti-essentialist Marxism on over-determination and localism suggests that much of the so-called new class analysis (including labour geography/ies) is still broadly within the discursive framework characterized by the ‘post-modernization’ of intellect that was responsible for the onslaught on class in the first place, a framework in which the material life has no privileged status, ontologically or scientifically. The class society – whether in the core or the periphery – has little problem accommodating this kind of leftsounding approach, which banishes the prime significance of class but flirts with it as changing academic fashions demand. And the kind of rejection of central tenets of Marxism that is on display in these Marxisms, and especially, in the work of Resnick and Wolff and Gibson-Graham, was indicated earlier by the founders of so-called post-Marxism: Is it not the case that, in scaling down the pretensions and the area of validity of Marxist theory, we are breaking with something deeply inherent in that theory: namely, its monist aspiration to capture with its categories the essence or underlying meaning of History? The answer can only be 71

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As if there is no distinction between the abstract and the concrete (see Sayer, 2000). Is it not possible that scholars living in particular times and places may make relatively abstract comments which may reasonably apply to different times and places. Is Marx to be faulted because he happened to be born so long ago?! How one understands c­ lass – ­capital and labour – in a critical and politically relevant manner without understanding Marx (and I am not referring to textual devotion to Marx but a critical appreciation of his ideas) is difficult to understand. It would be too reductionist to say that class position can in any way shape thinking or power.

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in the affirmative. Only if we renounce any epistemological prerogative based upon the ontologically privileged position of a ‘universal class’ will it be possible seriously to discuss the present degree of the validity of the Marxist categories. At this point we should state quite plainly that we are now situated in a post-Marxist terrain. It is no longer possible to maintain the conception of subjectivity and classes elaborated by Marxism, nor its vision of the historical course of capitalist development, nor, of course, the conception of communism as a transparent society from which antagonisms have disappeared. laclau and mouffe, 1985: 4–5

The denial of capitalism’s dominance defines the political essence of Antiessentialist Marxism, which is to fetishize difference, opening up spaces for localist, reformist, social-democratic type action. More specifically, it is the politics of the feasible. Incidentally: the post-structuralist conceptualization of class, which is based on its critique of traditional Marxism for its emphasis on the logic of capitalist accumulation, property rights, etc. and which is keen to emphasize that people have multiple identities/relations, and that therefore class or capitalist relation need not be the dominant relation, is in line with one that Harvey endorses, even if he is eager to distinguish himself from the ­post-structuralist, anti-capital-centric approaches such as that of Gibson-Graham. Harvey argues for a need to: broaden somewhat the conventional Marxian definition of ‘class’ (or, more exactly, of ‘class relation’) under capitalism to mean positionality in relation to capital circulation and accumulation. Marx often fixed this relation in terms of property rights over the means of production (including, in the laborer’s case, property rights to his or her own body), but I want to argue that this definition is too narrow to capture the content even of Marx’s own analyses …[W]ith such a definition of ‘positionality with respect to capital circulation and accumulation’ we can better articulate the internal contradictions of multiple positionalities within which human beings operate. The laborer [just like Gibson = Graham’s entrepreneur] as person is a worker, consumer, saver, lover, and bearer of culture, and can even be an occasional employer and landed proprietor, whereas the laborer as an economic role – the category Marx analyses in Capital – is singular. harvey 2000: 102; parenthesis added

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The post-structuralist approach dismisses the working class as a revolutionary agent partly on the ground that that idea was based on capitalism as industrial capitalism and on the idea that capitalism is the dominant relation: From our perspective, what has died or been demobilized is the fiction of the working class and its mission that was produced as part of a ­hegemonic conception of industrial capitalist development. As this conception has been devalued by criticism and other historical processes, and as m ­ ultiple social ‘centers’ and contending forces have seized the historical stage, the ‘working class’ has been peripheralized and demoted. Discursive moves to displace the economic essence of society have ­displaced as well its agents of transformation. Now the militaristic image of a massive collectivity of workers all defined by a similar relation to industrial capital is part of a receding social conception and politics of change. However, that does not mean class is not important in revisionist Marxisms. Class is important even if the working class is not the dominant agent of social change in capitalist society. So Post-structuralist Marxism like its Analytical cousin, divorces class from the conditions and powers of the working class. Despite the waning theoretical and political fortunes of the ‘working class,’ class itself may still be theorized as present and pervasive. Monolithic images of the ‘working class’ associated with craft unionism and Fordist industries may no longer be recognized by social theorists or those who labor. They may not work to mobilize resistance and impulses toward social transformation or play a leading role on the stage of social theory. But class is not thereby necessarily diminished as an intelligible constituent of social development and political change. Instead, the role of class as a social process may be recast in different social and theoretical settings, ones in which new political opportunities may emerge. gibson-graham, 2006: 69–70; italics added

Interestingly, this is also the kind of argument that David Harvey makes, including the argument against traditional Marxism assigning the prominent role to the proletariat as the revolutionary vanguard.73 Harvey’s Left socialdemocratic belief is that small quantities of push will lead to a qualitative transformation (e.g. a new New Deal). He continues: ‘the classic left-wing 73

This paragraph is based on Das (2017).

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c­ onfigurations… have a problem… Their notion of the factory worker as the vanguard proletarian figure that is going to make the revolution, I don’t think that works; I don’t think it ever really worked very well’. He rejects what he calls a narrow view of the proletariat as ‘factory workers’. He insists on a definition of class based on concrete labour, saying that the term should include ‘all those who facilitate the reproduction of daily life: the care givers and teachers, the sewer and subway repair men’, etc. He says, ‘You have to have a broader notion of an alliance of forces in which the conventional proletariat is an important element, but not necessarily an element that has a leadership role’ (Harvey and Rivera, 2010; italics added).74 A major problem with the two Marxist theories in question is that they do not take materialist dialectics or dialectical materialism seriously. They in fact reject central tenets of such a philosophy, including the epistemological principle of the levels of generality (discussed in the next chapter).75 Without dialectical materialism, Marxist theory (of class) and Marxist political practice are impossible. Consider the Analytical Marxists who say that the systematic dialectical methodology utilized by Marx is outdated and that ‘the central insights of Marx are so valuable that we would do him a disservice were we to accept en bloc the methodology in which they are embedded’ (Elster, 1985: 4–5). They reject the ‘claim that Marxism possesses valuable intellectual methods of its own’ and they argue for the ‘appropriation of a rich mainstream methodology that Marxism, to its detriment, had shunned’ (Cohen, 2000: xvii). And it is precisely the Analytical Marxists who have a vision of ‘anti’-capitalist politics which is anything but anti-capitalist in any real sense: there is little trace of proletarian international revolutionary socialism that can strike at the root of the profit-system as an alternative organizing principle of society that Marxism-without-qualifiers has argued for. Similarly, Post-structuralist Marxist theorists of class who have a poor view of dialectics (their preferred term is over-determination, which is actually no-determination) and who deny the power of systemic thinking, end up being social-democratic apologetics of capitalism. One is reminded of these lines from Lenin’s article called ‘On the significance of militant materialism’: 74

75

Harvey has been thinking along these lines for long: in 2003, he said: ‘To view the proletariat as the unique agent of historical transformation ignored social movements such as feminism and environmentalism’, and this ‘single-minded concentration of much of the Marxist- and communist-inspired left on proletarian struggles to the exclusion of all else was a fatal mistake’ (Harvey, 2003: 171). Even if Harvey adopts certain dialectical principles (e.g. internal relation), he fails to deploy the principle of levels of generality.

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One has only to recall the vast majority of the fashionable philosophical trends that arise so frequently in European countries [one should add North America now] … to gain an idea of the connection between the class interests and the class position of the bourgeoisie …. on the one hand, and the ideological content of the fashionable philosophical trends on the other. lenin, 1977c: 600

Talking about all those who ignore Marxist philosophy, Lenin said this in Materialism and empirio-criticism, which can apply to the adherents of the two Marxisms in question: All these people could not have been ignorant of the fact that Marx and Engels scores of times termed their philosophical views dialectical materialism. Yet all these people, who, despite the sharp divergence of their political views, are united in their hostility towards dialectical materialism, at the same time claim to be Marxists in philosophy! lenin, 1962: 19

To conclude the chapter, the totality of Analytical and post-structuralist Marxist thinking on class is an Odyssey of numerous negatives, of numerous ‘nos’: 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

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no to the fact that: capitalist class relation is the dominant form of class relation and of social relation; no to the fact that: capital-labour relation is the dominant social cleavage/contradiction, and the dominant cause of the humanity’s fundamental problems; no to the fact that: there is such a thing called a system and a capitalist system; no to the fact that: there is such a thing called systemic logic, including the logic of profitability, economic crisis,76 of ­concentration-centralization of means of production, and class differentiation among commodity producers; no to the fact that: classes are large groups of people and are large-scale potential actors; no to the fact that: distributionist politics and trade unionist politics will not solve the humanity’s problems in any long-term and significant Such a crisis is rooted, ultimately, in long-term tendencies towards the rate of profit to fall, caused by the contradiction between productive forces and property relations.

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manner in the absence of the majority having democratic control over production; 7. no to the fact that: there can be no localist reformism, or indeed any successful localist action against capitalism; 8. no to the fact that: the state is the fundamental protector of the capitalist class relation and cannot be expected to regulate capitalism in the longterm interests of the masses; 9. no to the fact that: the capitalist property relations must be eliminated, along with other aspects of capitalist class relation, as it cannot be reformed; 10. no to the fact that: there is a need for a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist society on the basis of the conscious political organization of the only class that can lead such a revolution, the class of industrial and non-industrial workers, a revolution that can only succeed when organized and effected internationally, and so on. Basically, for the left-leaning scholars such as those following Analytical and post-structuralist Marxisms: class exists, but class is not the main cause of humanity’s problems, so there is no need to overthrow class. Marx and Engels would say the following to, and about these left-leaning people: the overthrow of the capitalist system is [unattainably remote]…, and therefore is of absolutely no importance in present-day practical politics; one can mediate, compromise and philanthropise to one’s heart’s content. It is just the same with the class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie. It is recognised on paper because its existence can no longer be denied, but in practice it is hushed up, diluted, attenuated. marx and engels’ letter to bebel et al., in marx and engels, 1982: 305

Given all these problems, which constitute nothing short of an impasse in class theory, what is therefore needed is an argument for a return to the basics, for an alternative framework based in the first principles, emanating from what these so-called Marxists reject, traditional Marxism. There is indeed only one way out of the impasse: to critically and as fully as possible, re-articulate, reassert, and where necessary, refine/develop and enhance the rigour of, the fundamental ideas of revolutionary Marxism, including those of Marx and Engels, on class, in its economic, discursive and political dimensions. That is the task of the remainder of this book.

chapter 5

Philosophical Foundations of Class Theory Marxist class theory is rooted in Marxist philosophy of knowledge and the knowable world. This is a philosophy that is dialectical and materialist.1 Before presenting the Marxist class theory, it will be useful to briefly state the major principles of this philosophy, including both ontological and epistemological principles. Marxist philosophy provides the tools to treat class, materially and dialectically, including at multiple levels of generality.2 In this chapter, there are two major sections. The first one is a statement – a re-articulation – of some basic principles of Marxist philosophy, which are used in this chapter and in subsequent chapters. Section 2 talks about the relation between philosophy and class theory. It lays the Marxist ontological and epistemological foundation for Marxist class theory. 1

Marxist Philosophy: A Brief Statement of Basic Principles

1. The world is made up of things and processes/relations. Processes and relations are expressed as things; and things are produced by processes and ­relations. What one thing is, it is because of its relations to many other things (potentially, everything is connected to everything else in the world). Of course, some relations are more fundamental than others in that they have primacy over other relations: these are the relations without which, a given thing will not be what it (normally) is.3 Some relations are those of identity, and others are those of difference. Two things or two processes can be similar and connected, and they may have different qualities. 2. Things and processes have forms which need to be distinguished from what they are forms of. The form of something is its mode of existence (Gunn, 1 On this topic, apart from Marx and Engels’s philosophical writings, see: Arthur (2002); Brown et al., 2002; Callinicos (1985; 2006); Carchedi, 2012 (Chapter 1); Collier (1994; 2004); Harvey (1995; 1996: Chs 2 and 4); Lenin (1962; 1961); Lewontin and Levins (1987); Plekhanov (1971); Ollman (2003; 2014), Paolucci (2007); Rees (1998); Sayer (1992; 2000); Timpanaro (1980); and Trotsky (1995). 2 Critical realists would call these levels of abstraction (e.g. Sayer, 2000). It should be noted that there is some tension between critical realism and dialectics. Arguably, some of these can be easily avoided (see Cox, 2013; Roberts, 2014; Ollman, 2003: Chapter 10). 3 Of course, the boundary between what are essential and what are non-essential for a given object to be or to work in certain ways changes over time due to human action, etc. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004337473_006

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1992; Holloway, 2015; Cox, 2013). A lump of clay takes the form of, and is to be distinguished from, a clay-pot. Both the content and its forms are constitutive of the reality. They affect each other. For example, only in certain societies, it is the case that wealth appears in the commodity form, and that what direct producers receive for their own reproduction takes the form of wage. The dialectical method of enquiry of an object, as Marx says in a preface to Capital volume 1, in which he practices this method, is ‘to analyse its different forms of development and to track down their inner connection’ (Marx, 1977: 102).4 Dialectical thinking in the form of content-form analysis helps one arrive at ‘closer approximations’ and ‘concretizations’ of things. Capitalism is, of course, capitalism, but capitalism comes to exist in – develops into – specific forms (e.g. developed or backward capitalism). Underlying the idea of the level of abstraction or concretization (the idea that things have more specific/­concrete or more general/abstract forms), is the idea that things change, and that a thing existing at time T2 is a specific form of the thing existing at time T1. However, when a thing is expressed in a specific form, the form does not contain – ­express – e­ verything that is the content. Form can contradict content. That 4 The form-content analysis in formal logic is different from that in dialectical logic. ‘Theories based on formal logic analyze a concrete form by separating what repeats itself from what does not in order to arrive at a certain characteristic’. For example, all cases of capitalist production which make use of female labour have something in common: capitalist character of production. ‘In turn, this common attribute makes possible the mental construction of a definition of that concrete form as that which has this or that attribute’. However, ‘dialectical thought analyses a concrete form by, first of all, facing it as embodying a qualitative potentiality for transformation [of the content of which a given form is a form]’. Second, by grasping that qualitative potentiality as the concrete form in which a more abstract form realizes its own qualitative potentiality, i.e., its real necessity. Thus the dialectical ideal appropriation of the universe of different real forms does not proceed through an identification of the distinctiveness of forms on the basis of the degree of repetition of certain attributes. Rather, it analytically separates the different forms by discovering as immanent in a particular concrete form the realized potentiality of another real form, which is abstract with respect to the first one, but concrete with respect to another form of which it is the realized potentiality. Hence, while formal – logical analysis grasps the general determination of real forms as immediate affirmations – hence self-subsistent entities – the distinctive mark of the process of analysis in dialectical research is to grasp, in the same analytic movement, both the concrete form under scrutiny and the more abstract one of which the former is the developed mode of existence (Starosta, 2008: 304–305). The idea that capitalism can take the form of statedmediated capitalism or a capitalism based on the use of racial labour is an empiricist form analysis, while the idea that wealth under capitalism takes the form of commodity or that capitalism can take the form of advanced capitalism or imperialist capitalism is a part of dialectical analysis form.

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which ­exists in the mode of being denied exists in-against-and-beyond the form that denies: it misfits, it struggles (Holloway, 2015). The content of something can overflow its form (Holloway, 2015: 24).5 3. Relations among things and processes make the totality. There can be very ‘big totalities’ such as society or natural world, or small-scale totality, e.g. a stream, a university or a union. The totality has parts, but the totality is much more than the sum of its parts. The whole dominates over the parts, and parts reproduce and undermine the totality. The nature of the totality is reflected in that of the parts. The parts within a totality interact. The totality is internally uneven/differentiated in that some parts dominate or contradict other parts. A given part is impacted by, and impacts, other parts as well as the whole. A part is what it is, because of its relations not only to other parts but also to the whole. Parts have properties because they are parts of wholes, connected to other parts.6 The totality (e.g. society) is not reducible to parts/individuals, and the latter are not reducible to the totality. Some processes/relations as parts may support the totality, and others may undermine it. The totality has ontological primacy over parts. The starting point of analysis is that: the totality. In the dialectical (in contrast to the Cartesian) perspective, parts have no prior independent existence as parts…. Marx’s starting point, accordingly, is to develop an understanding of society as a ‘connected whole,’ as an organic system; it is to trace the intrinsic connections and to reveal the ‘obscure structure of the bourgeois economic system,’ the ‘inner core, which is essential but concealed’ on the surface of society…. Only then does Marx proceed to explore what is real within this structure for the individual agents of production [i.e. parts] and how things necessarily appear to them. lebowitz, 2009: 43; parenthesis added

5 ‘All the social forms are processes of forming a recalcitrant content, and these contents simply do not fit into their respective forms: wealth does not fit into the commodity-form, usevalue does not fit into the value-form, concrete labour does not fit into abstract labour, the capacity to work does not fit into the commodity labour-power, the forces of production do not fit into the capital-form, and so on. These forms are so many Procrustean beds, but Procrustean beds that are inherently faulty, that are incapable of totally shaping their contents. In each case the content overflows its form, exists not only in but also against and beyond its form’ (Holloway, 2015: 24). 6 As individuals we cannot fly. But when we become a part of a totality which include aeroplanes, fuel, engineers, pilots and a social organization that makes all these possible, we can fly (Rees, 1998: 5).

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4. The totality and its parts are geographical entities: they operate at multiple geographical scales (local, regional, national and global). And operating – or having to operate – at a given scale shapes the ways in which they operate. The totality and the parts are also geographically stretched: they are constituted by different areas in which social processes unfold. They do not exist on the head of a pin. Geographical relations/processes – geographical separation/distance or proximity, geographical mobility and immobility, diffusion of things/ideas from a center/node to surrounding areas, spatial distribution of things and processes, spatial unevenness, etc. – are produced by human action (in conjunction with forces of nature) within given social relations/processes and can in turn shape social relations/processes (of class, etc.).7 Objectively existing things, and processes/relations have powers which can be realized in specific historical-geographical conditions, i.e. here/now but not there/then. 5. The totality, and its parts, change over time. Dialectical thinking ‘regards every historically developed social form as being in a fluid state, in motion, and therefore grasps its transient aspect as well’ (Marx, 1977: 103). It is similar to, and different from, vulgar thinking in this regard: Dialectical thinking is related to vulgar thinking in the same way that a motion picture is related to a still photograph. The motion picture [that dialectical thinking produces] does not outlaw the still photograph but combines a series of them according to the laws of motion. trotsky, 1995: 119; parenthesis added

Dialectics emphasizes ‘the doctrine of development in its fullest, deepest and most comprehensive form’ (Lenin, 1977a: 45). In fact, change or motion is the most basic characteristic of mode of existence of things. Things come

7 There is a large amount of literature on the reciprocal interaction between spatial and social relations (Gregory and Urry, 1985; Jessop et al., 2008) and on the spatial character of capitalist class relation itself (Harvey, 2001, 1996; 1995; Gough, 1992), an overview of which is in Das (2009). I agree that space – spatiality – is crucial, and especially so at a more concrete level. But I do not endorse spatial-fetishistic views that capitalism has survived by ‘occupying space, by producing a space’ (Lefevre, 1976: 21) and that it will ossify and fall into disarray and stagnate without spatial fixes (Harvey, 2014: 147; 161). In my view: if capitalism has survived, it has done so fundamentally through (super-) exploitation of workers, dispossession of smallscale producers, re-commodification of natural and social commons, wars (which kill ordinary people in the battle-field and via cut in welfare needed to fight wars) and capitalist-state repression, and less through spatial mechanisms as such, although capitalism’s class-based mechanisms of survival are spatially mediated and have spatial effects (see Das, 2017).

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into ­being, remain and pass away. Everything has a past. Everything changes.8 When it goes, it leaves its trace.9 The transient character of things results in historical periods. When historical/temporal and geographical/spatial approaches to society combine, an interesting conclusion results: uneven and uneven development of social ­processes and relations. Here is Trotsky (2007: 5) from History of Russian Revolution: ‘Unevenness, the most general law of the historic process’, from which is derived ‘the law of combined development’ indicating the coexistence of the past and the present in a given time-place (this will be explained in Chapter 8 further). 6. Change happens through contradiction. The contradiction is internal to the object which is changing (e.g. a given society or a part of it). As Lenin says in his Philosophical Note books, one may see a ‘thing (phenomenon, etc.) as the sum and unity of opposites’ (Lenin, 1961: 221). ‘The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts… is the essence …of dialectics’ (Lenin, 1961:359).10 Contradiction in a dialectical sense arises when two things that support/need each other also undermine each other, and they develop in opposite directions.11 Change is partial (pertaining to parts of a totality) and systemic (pertaining to the whole/totality/system). Systemic change sets limit on partial change, and a time comes when the whole has to be changed for the parts to be changed in any significant sense. And change is both gradual and sudden. Change or ‘Motion… is [to be] regarded from the standpoint, not only of the past’. It is wrong to see change merely in an evolutionary sense, in the sense of gradual or molecular change. Change is also dialectical in which case: ‘in developments of such magnitude 20 years are no more than a day’ (Marx quoted in Lenin, 1977a:40). Dialectical change happens when small quantitative changes can result in a sudden massive qualitative change. This is the law of quantitative change turning into 8 9 10

11

‘The only thing that’s changed is everything’. This is an Apple company advertisement published in New York Times. The concept of survival in Althusser (2005: 114–115) is relevant in this content. An approach to knowledge, including one that claims to be critical, is mistaken if it ‘dispenses with the study of this real movement [of both sides of an internally contradictory entity] which forms the whole in order to be able to declare that it… is above both extremes of the antithesis’, and it is mistaken to believe that the work of abstraction which has created the contradictory entity can ‘abolish the abstraction of which it is the maker’. ‘Contradiction is understood here as the incompatible development of different elements within the same relation, which is to say between elements that are also dependent on one another’ (Ollman, 2003: 17).

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qualitative change. Five dollars cannot be capital acting to employ labour, but a million dollars can be. Dialectical thinking analyzes all things and phenomena in their continuous change, while determining in the material conditions of those changes that critical limit beyond which “A” ceases to be “A”, a workers’ state ceases to be a workers’ state…. “Common sense” is characterized by the fact that it systematically exceeds dialectical “tolerance.” [A has ceased being A but it still thinks it is A].12 trotsky, 1995: 118–119

Or to give another example: police may arrest a few more black suspects, or it may be that a recent conviction by an all white jury is merely the latest in a long line, but it proves to be the incident that sparks a riot (Rees, 1998: 117). The idea of revolutionary change is crucial to materialist-dialectical thinking: Whoever has come to understand that evolution proceeds through the struggle of antagonistic forces; that a slow accumulation of changes at a certain moment explodes the old shell and brings about a catastrophe, revolution; whoever has learned finally to apply the general laws of evolution to thinking itself, he is a dialectician, as distinguished from vulgar evolutionists. Dialectic training of the mind, as necessary to a revolutionary fighter as finger exercises to a pianist, demands approaching all problems as processes and not as motionless categories. trotsky, 1995: 123

Change happens when contradiction is combined with quantitative change: gradual quantitative changes in the balance between opposed elements ­suddenly result in a rapid and complete change in the situation. The law of quantity-quality has an implication for understanding society. For example, being a little critical of capitalism does not make one a critical scholar, let alone a Marxist, or a few little criticisms of Marxist theory of class do not produce 12

One can see that underlying the idea of quantitative change becoming qualitative change is another related idea: ‘change of possibility into inevitability’ (Trotsky, 1995: 119). Arguably, a given amount of quantitative conditions may make a given result only possible at a given point in time but when the amount changes (e.g. balance of class forces) beyond a level of tolerance, a given result which was earlier possible may become inevitable.

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an alternative to Marxism, any more than a few counts of hair make one hairyheaded, or a minor health care policy of a President makes him/her a socialist. And change via contradiction takes the form of negation of negation: a new situation out of contradictory conditions results in aspects of the old situation being transformed in the new situation. Thus things and processes change from simple to complex forms (scattered private property being negated by capitalist private property which is turn can be negated by socialist property, which preserves the achievements based on capitalist property). When a tree develops out of a seed, the tree negates the seed but also preserves its attributes. 7. The philosophy of Marxism is not just dialectical, one that stresses relations in the world, totality and change via contradiction. ‘The philosophy of Marxism is materialism’ as well (Lenin, 1977a: 45). As Marx (1977: 102) explains in the preface to the second edition of Capital vol.1: My dialectic method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly opposite to it. For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject, under the name of ‘the Idea’, is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the idea. With me, the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought. In fact, in his Materialism and empirio criticism, Lenin emphasizes that ‘Matter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them’.13 There is a reality that is independent of the thinking mind, which then reacts back on the reality: ‘the existence of the thing reflected independent of the reflector (the independence of the external world from the mind) is a fundamental tenet of materialism’ (Lenin, 1962: 123).14 ‘Recognising the existence of objective reality, i.e., matter in motion, independently of our mind, materialism must also inevitably recognise the objective reality of time and space’ (p. 175). Materialism is to be

13 14

‘To regard our sensations as images of the external world, to recognise objective truth, to hold the materialist theory of knowledge – these are all one and the same thing’. ‘For the materialist, sensations are images of the sole and ultimate objective reality, ultimate not in the sense that it has already been explored to the end, but in the sense that there is not and cannot be any other’ (Lenin, 1962: 129).

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contrasted to the ‘opposite doctrine (idealism)’ which ‘claims that objects do not exist “without the mind”’ (p. 26).15 The reality that we seek to know and that exists independently of the thinking mind at a given point in time is internally heterogeneous and marked by a certain ordering: the natural world (which is ordered into the physical-­ chemical-biological world)16 and then life, which is followed by the human world, with its social relations, and thinking (conscious and unconscious). The ordering is based on chronological priority and also substantive/causal priority (Collier, 1994). It is clear that materialism of sciences does not exhaust that of human sciences. Materialism in the Marxist sense includes not only the physical environment but also human beings – human bodies – as a part of nature. Human beings have material needs (for food, shelter, health-care, etc.). These needs require things (both material and ‘immaterial’) that must be produced by human labour. And such production can only happen through certain social relations among people, which exist independently of individuals’ thinking, and on the basis of interaction with nature, which exists independently of how we see it. Therefore, these social relations and interaction with nature have primacy over human thinking and such other things as politics, etc. It is the case that: mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.17 engels’ speech at the graveside of marx, in marx and engels, 1977c: 162

15

16

17

‘Whether nature, matter, the physical, the external world should be taken as primary, and consciousness, mind, sensation (experience – as the widespread terminology of our time has it), the psychical, etc., should be regarded as secondary – that is the root question which in fact continues to divide the philosophers into two great camps’(Lenin, 1962: 335–336). Materialism says that ‘the physical world exists independently of humanity and of human experience, that the physical world existed at a time when no “sociality” and no “organisation” of human experience was possible, and so forth’ (Lenin, 1962: 124). Just as man’s knowledge reflects nature (i.e., developing matter), which exists independently of him, so man’s social knowledge (i.e., his various views and doctrines – ­philosophical, religious, political and so forth) reflects the economic system of society (Lenin, 1977a: 45–46).

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Abstract materialism neglects human practice as it focusses on things.18 Marxist materialism is about things (environment and the things we need to satisfy needs, and so on). It is also very much about material social practice and about objectively existing social relations: it is about what human beings do to, and with, material things, in order to produce the conditions of life, under definite social relations.19 Marxist materialism emphasizes the fact that our relations to nature, as mediated by such things as technology, the direct process of production of conditions of life we are involved in, the social relations under which we do so, and the mental concepts that flow from all these are all important considerations to understand society. Every history of ideas, including religious ideas, ‘that is written in abstraction from this material basis is uncritical’ in that it fails to uncover ‘the earthly kernel of the misty creations’ of the mind (Marx, 1977: 493–494). A dialectician must ‘do the opposite, i.e. to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms in which these have been apotheosized’, and the ‘The latter method is the only materialist, and therefore the only scientific one’ (ibid.). To repeat: the material in Marxist theory refers to things: natural objects such as land and rivers, and the human body, including its physiologically and neurologically given tendency to be sick and die, and to be happy and sad. The material also refers to a social process of the production of things through labour (in its material and ‘immaterial’ form)20 on the basis of two kinds of relations mentioned above (relations with natural objects, and relations among people which mediate the former relation). These material things and relations have primacy over thinking: they influence thinking more than they are influenced by it. By materialism we understand above all acknowledgement of the priority of nature over ‘mind’, or if you like, of the physical level over the 18

19 20

Marx’s first thesis on Feuerbach says: ‘The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism … is that the thing, reality… is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively.’ (Marx and Engels, 1977a: 13). He further writes in a long footnote in Capital 1: ‘The weakness of the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism which excludes the historical process, are immediately evident from the abstract and the ideological concepts expressed by its spokesmen whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality’ (Marx, 1977: 493–494; parentheses added). Things are material in the sense that they exist independently of the thinking mind, and they are material in terms of their composition (matter and energy as a form of matter). See Sayers (2007; 2011) on the discussion on the material and immaterial forms of labour and on the validity of the distinction. See Kangal (2017) for a critical discussion on the topic.

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biological level, and of the biological level over the socio-economic and cultural level; both in the sense of chronological priority (the very long time which supervened before life appeared on earth, and between the origin of life and the origin of man), and in the sense of the conditioning which nature still exercises on man and will continue to exercise at least for the foreseeable future. … Cognitively, therefore, the materialist maintains that experience cannot be reduced either to a production of reality by a subject (however such production is conceived) or to a reciprocal implication of subject and object. We cannot, in other words, deny or evade the element of ­passivity in experience: the external situation which we do not create but which imposes itself on us. timpanaro, 1980: 34

Materialism reminds us of its presence when we feel sad to hear that someone we love has fallen sick because of a viral attack or lost their job because the stock market crashes. Passivity of experience is an important aspect of the material world: it could be nature or ‘blind’ economic forces working like natural forces. Passivity of experience is a condition for thought and action/ experience. 8. Just as a dialectical view has to be materialist, so a materialist view has to be dialectical and not one-sided. A Marxist materialist view is dialectical partly because it seeks to connect processes/things or ways of thinking between which rigid boundaries are drawn, but in way that insists on the primacy of certain processes and ways of knowing. For one, Marxist philosophy looks at the connection between the material and the non-material, while insisting on the primacy of the material. Life (society) is like a circle within which the two aspects interact (Figure 7 below). In the study of human society, the material includes economic conditions or relations: it is about how people earn their livelihood by transforming their physical and geographical environment within specific social relations. The economic conditions or relations21 are then shaped by non-economic 21

Engels writes this to someone called Borgius: ‘By economic relations [also translated as economic conditions], which we regard as the determining basis of the history of society, we understand the manner in which men in a given society produce their means of subsistence and exchange the products (in so far as division of labour exists). They comprise therefore the entire technique of production and transport. According to our conception this technique also determines the mode of exchange and, further more, of the distribution of products and hence also…the division [of society] into classes, and consequently

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Life/Society

Material Conditions/Relations

NonMaterial Conditions/ Relations

Note: The thicker arrow signifies primacy of the material over the non-material.

Figure 7

Dialectics of the material and the non-material

­conditions/relations. The latter concern consciousness (e.g. ideas, imagination; desires; language), and that which, more or less, exist independently of thinking, at a given point in time (e.g. state; political organizations), and some aspects of non-economic conditions are absolutely crucial to the very constitution of economic conditions (e.g. relation between the state and class relations).22 The political conditions, and ‘indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one’: among all the aspects of society, ‘the economic ones are ultimately decisive’ (Engels in Marx and Engels, 1982: 395). It is therefore not enough the invert the relation

22

the relations of lordship and servitude and consequently the state, politics, law, etc. The economic relations comprise also the geographical basis on which they operate and those remnants of earlier stages of economic development which have actually been transmitted and have survived – often only as a result of tradition or inertia; and of course also the external milieu which surrounds this form of society’ (in Marx and Engels, 1982: 441; parentheses added). ‘The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure – political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflections of all these real struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas – also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form in particular’ (Engels’ letter to Konigsberg, in Marx and Engels, 1982: 395).

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between the material and the discursive (consciousness) insisting on the primacy of the former. There is indeed a need for another inversion: the material itself is inverted in that economic structure or class structure dominates political relations/processes, and not the other way around (Althusser, 2005: 11–116). The realm of the material and the realm of the non-material are shot through contradictions, the most important of which are class contradictions. A materialist view does not at all ignore human or class consciousness. In fact, it appreciates consciousness in terms of how it is rooted in material conditions and its contradictions and how it in turn shapes those conditions, and sometimes, very powerfully. It is the social being (including our bodily needs for pleasure and need to avoid pain and death; production of things and its objective social relations) that determines (i.e. shapes, sets limit on, governs, ­enables/constrains) consciousness23 (which includes everyday thinking, and also, importantly, social consciousness in the form of formal concepts of law, science, politics, fiction, etc.) and political action. And social consciousness and political action, in turn, shape the social being (Marx, in Marx and E ­ ngels, 1977a: 503; Engels’s letter to Konigsberg in Marx and Engels, 1982: 394–396). A materialist philosophy does not encourage fetishization of economic conditions. According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Neither Marx nor I have ever asserted more than this. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic factor is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.24 engels’s letter to Konigsberg in marx and engels, 1982: 394

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Theory as a form of consciousness which is conditioned by the objective conditions and by practical action aimed at changing these conditions mediates the relation between objective conditions and how people think about these conditions. ‘Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the main principle vis-à-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction. But when it came to presenting a section of history, that is, to making a practical application, it was a different matter and there no error was permissible. Unfortunately, however, it happens only too often that people think they have fully understood a new theory and can apply it without more ado from the moment they have assimilated its main principles, and even those not always correctly. And I cannot exempt many of the more recent “Marxists” from this reproach, for the most amazing stuff has been produced in this quarter, too’ (Engels’ letter to Kongsberg in Marx and Engels, 1982: 396).

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However, it is the case that, as Marx says in his famous Preface to the Critique of Political economy: Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production. marx in marx and engels, 1977a: 504

A materialist view which is also dialectical does not reify structures and ignore the role of human agency either, while it insists on the role of structures and structural necessity. Human beings do intervene in history. People make their own history, but, ‘in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions’ and under conditions they do not have much control over.25 In this philosophy, the social comprises structures of relations, the structures which are more than, and which are a condition for, the inter-individual relations and individual actions/experiences. Structures are conditions for, and outcomes of, actions which may or may not be conscious and which may be at an individual-level or collective. When I sell my labour power, my explicit intention is to earn a wage. But when millions of people like me do so, we together reproduce a class structure based on the sale of wage-labour. Properties of a social structure exist objectively and are not reducible to actions and intentions/consciousness of agents, at a given point in time. Yet, it is people who reproduce and transform these structures.

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Engels writes: ‘history proceeds in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, and every one of them is in turn made into what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant – the historical event. This may in its turn again be regarded as the product of a power which operates as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one intended. Thus history has proceeded hitherto in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of individuals – each of whom desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general) – do not achieve what they want, but are merged into an aggregate mean, a common resultant, it must not be concluded that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it’ (Engels to Konigsberg in Marx and Engels, 1982: 395–396).

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Objective conditions of a certain type must exist in the first place for new objective conditions to exist through the interventions of human agency (and for people to develop some consciousness of it). Objective conditions exist, more or less, independently of our ideas about them (and indeed of our actions in relation to them) at a given point in time. One type of objective conditions – one that is less adequate – gets transformed into another, and the proximate reason for which is human action informed by certain forms of consciousness. It cannot be over-emphasized that transformation of existing objective conditions happens because of the combination of human consciousness and action, within the context of these objective conditions. While Marxist philosophy emphasizes structures and structural necessity, it does not ignore the accidental, or the realm of the contingent, i.e. the ways in which the underlying mechanisms are expressed in contingent forms.26 While it is true that what a thing is depends on its relations to other things in the world, some of the relations – the ones which are vital and the subject of theorizing – are necessary, and others are contingent27 (or accidental), although the latter can have a significant impact on the issue at hand in specific historical-geographic contexts. It is the realm of the necessary that ultimately subordinates the contingent and the accidental.28 It is also the case that the 26

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For Marx, ‘labor is the essence of private property’ and only by seeing labour and private property in these terms can one understand the concreteness of economic processes ­(Ollman, 2003: 80). Labor seen by Marx as ‘the particular kind of productive activity that goes on in capitalism, not only brings private property into existence but gives it its most distinctive qualities, and hence is essential to what it is’ (ibid.), and which makes private property in capitalism different from that in pre-capitalist class society. ‘It is only by going beyond the apparent thing like qualities of private property, only by seizing its essence in labor… that we can truly grasp private property and the capitalist mode of production in which it plays such a crucial part’ (ibid.). Lenin provides another example: ‘Here already we have the contingent and the necessary, the phenomenon and the essence; for when we say: John is a man, Fido is a dog, this is a leaf of a tree, etc., we disregard a number of attributes as contingent; we separate the essence from the appearance, and counterpose the one to the other’ (Lenin, 1961: 361). The relation between A and B is contingent when it is the case that given A, B is neither necessary nor impossible (Sayer, 2000: 12), and in this case, A can exist without B and vice versa (p. 16). A and B can, of course, influence each other causally if they happen to be in contact with each other, although it is not necessary that that will happen. What is contingent is not uncaused. ‘There is an interaction of all these elements [economic and non-economic elements] in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, and neglect it), the economic movement is finally bound to assert itself. Otherwise the

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boundary between what is necessary and what is contingent (or between what is essential and what belongs to the realm of appearances) is not fixed and frozen, and abstractions or units of analysis may contain what is essential and what is an appearance.29 9. Marxist philosophy also has an epistemological part. It claims that ‘all science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence’ (Marx, 1981: 956).30 The concrete world is very messy, so we need abstractions (concepts), without which we cannot study the (messy) world. As Marx says in Grundrisse: ‘The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse’ (Marx, 1973: 101). Whether complex or not, the world does not deliver itself as a platter: mere sense impressions are not the guarantor of knowledge of what lies behind the surface appearances. In the process of abstraction, we focus on certain aspects of an object and isolate other aspects. Often we separate what are essential aspects of an o­ bject

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application of the theory to any period of history would be [very easy]’ (Engels’ letter to Konigsberg, in Marx and Engels, 1982: 395). With respect to accidents (in relation necessity – which is ultimately economic necessity), Engels adds: ‘The further the particular sphere which we are investigating is removed from the economic sphere and approaches that of pure abstract ideology, the more shall we find it exhibiting accidents in its development, the more will its curve run in a zig-zag. So also you will find that the axis of this curve will approach more and more nearly parallel to the axis of the curve of economic development the longer the period considered and the wider the field dealt with’ (Engels’ letter to Borgius in Marx and Engels, 1982: 442–443). A and B do not have to interact, but they do, new mechanisms may necessarily be come to exist. A few football players and fans can get together and form a team, but it is contingent whether this team becomes ‘amateur or professional’; however, if these people decide to make it professional, ‘then new conditions and demands necessarily come into being, such as increased need for income to cover the pay of its employees, whether it be from “gate-money”, spectators, gifts or advertising’ (Sayer, 2000: 16). Further: ‘it is contingent whether it raises money by becoming a public company, but if it does, then according to the rules governing shareholders’ rights, it becomes susceptible to the influence of shareholders and the threat of takeovers’ (ibid.). ‘Scientific truth is always a paradox, if judged by everyday experience, which catches only the delusive appearance of things’ (Marx, 1976: 37). Also: ‘The finished configuration of economic relations, as these are visible on the surface in their actual existence and therefore in the notions with which the bearers and agents of these relations seek to gain an understanding of them, is very different from the configuration of their inner core, which is essential but concealed, and the concept corresponding to it. It is in fact the very reverse and antithesis of it’ (1981: 311).

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from those that are not essential (the world of appearances) or between what is necessary and what is contingent.31 We also often abstract an abject from the specific forms it assumes (labour process vs capitalist form of it). The method of abstraction is discussed in further details below in the context of class theory itself. It is sufficient to mention here that Marx employs different methods, including: abstraction of extension (or how far into any entity’s relations in space and changes over time …[a scholar] travels in drawing its provisional boundaries); abstraction of level of generality (or what ‘slice’ of history, as determined by the degree of generality of its qualities – essentially, how many people and conditions, how large of a space, and how long of a 31

While it is true that what a thing is depends on its relations to all the rest in the world, some of the relations – the ones which are vital and the subject of theorizing – are necessary and others are contingent (or accidental), although the latter can have a significant impact on the issue at hand in specific historical-geographic contexts. ‘There is an interaction of all these elements [economic and non-economic elements] in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, and neglect it), the economic movement is finally bound to assert itself. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be [very easy]’ (Engels’ letter to Konigsberg, in Marx and Engels, 1982: 395). With respect to accidents (in relation necessity – which is ultimately economic necessity), Engels adds: ‘The further the particular sphere which we are investigating is removed from the economic sphere and approaches that of pure abstract ideology, the more shall we find it exhibiting accidents in its development, the more will its curve run in a zig-zag. So also you will find that the axis of this curve will approach more and more nearly parallel to the axis of the curve of economic development the longer the period considered and the wider the field dealt with’ (Engels’ letter to Borgius in Marx and Engels, 1982: 442–443). The boundary between what is necessary and what is contingent (or between what is essential and what belongs to the realm of appearances) is not fixed and frozen, and abstractions or units of analysis may contain what is essential and what is an appearance. For Marx, ‘labor is the essence of private property’ and only by seeing labour and private property in these terms can one understand the concreteness of economic processes (Ollman, 2003: 80). Labor seen by Marx as ‘the particular kind of productive activity that goes on in capitalism, not only brings private property into existence but gives it its most distinctive qualities, and hence is essential to what it is’ (ibid.), and which makes private property in capitalism different from that in pre-capitalist class society. ‘It is only by going beyond the apparent thing like qualities of private property, only by seizing its essence in labor… that we can truly grasp private property and the capitalist mode of production in which it plays such a crucial part’ (ibid.).

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period – he brings into focus to study the distinctive interaction between the entities that fall on each level); and abstraction of vantage point (or the place from which … [a scholar] begins a study of any cluster of relations and the perspective that gives him on the rest). ollman, 2014, 575

Marxist philosophy provides us with tools to find – to discover – causes of things. Causal relation can take many forms. Often causes become effects and effects become causes, although X is said to be a cause of Y because X affects Y more than Y does X. It is also the case that what are called causes and what are called effects are parts of – are internal to – an organic whole, a totality, so causes and effects, although they appear to be separate categories, are not externally connected because they are both parts of the same thing, a totality. Cause can mean setting limit to: as in X setting limit within which Y can take many qualitative forms or within which the quantitative magnitude/dimension of Y can change. X as a cause of Y can be its necessary condition: without X, Y will not exist in the form in which it exists now. A causal relation can be a mediated causal relation when: the ways in which X shapes Y are influenced by Z. As well: X can be said to cause Y when X (the determinant) mobilizes Y (the determined) in its own (X’s) reproduction. To quote Carchedi again: [T]he determinant phenomenon calls into existence the determined one as its own conditions of reproduction or supersession. The determined phenomenon, in its turn, becomes the realized condition of the determinant phenomenon’s reproduction or supersession. For example, the ownership-relation [as an aspect of class relation] calls into realized existence one of its potentialities, the accumulation of capital, and the ­latter becomes the realized condition of … (extended) reproduction [of the capitalist class relation]. carchedi, 2012: 15; parenthesis added

The aim of theorizing an object (e.g. class) is to find its cause and effect. Marxists see an object of analysis as an ensemble of relationships. They explore how certain social relations, which may be internally contradictory, set up some mechanisms which produce some effects under certain conditions. Thus, the conditions, mechanisms, social relations and the object in question are all parts of an ensemble of relationship. The essence of an object – what it is without which, for example, a computer will not be an elephant – does not lie in itself but in the ensemble of relations of which it is a necessary part. However, Marxist dialectics makes no claim to arrive at an absolute truth in

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most cases. Dialectics emphasizes ‘the doctrine of the relativity of the human knowledge that provides us with a reflection of eternally developing matter’ (Lenin, 1977a: 45). Engels says in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy: Truth… mounts from lower to ever higher levels of knowledge without ever reaching, by discovering so-called absolute truth, a point at which it can proceed no further. engels, in marx and engels, 1977c: 339

The world is changing. Therefore, our view of it must reflect that fact. But change in the world happens at different levels: at the relatively more fundamental level and at the level of appearance.32 While the more fundamental aspects of an object are less likely to change as long as the object exists, its less-essential aspects – the concrete forms in which the object exists – can change, and this must be reflected in the way we think. If thinking about the change in the appearance of an object is allowed to change one’s view about the fundamental aspects of an object, this can lead to opportunism and eclecticism.33 However, there is another source of change in one’s view: even if the fundamental aspects of an object have not changed, one can still produce a new way of thinking about it, on the basis of the critique of existing/past thinking and practice. In dialectics, theorizing or analyzing the world is always an unfinished business, because the world is not a finished product. Dialectical-materialist theorizing is marked by ‘the endless process of the deepening of man’s knowledge of the thing, of phenomena, processes, etc., from appearance to essence and from less profound to more profound essence’ (Lenin, 1961: 222).34 It is marked by ‘the endless process of the discovery of new sides, relations,…’, by ‘the union 32

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Capitalism as a relation of capital and labour, and its geographical form (e.g. globalized capitalism) or social-political form (e.g. neoliberal vs social-democratic capitalism) are two levels. Appropriation of surplus value, and appropriation of surplus value on the basis of information technology are also two different levels. In fact, this type of conflation is abound. Many people think that capitalism has changed so fundamentally that many central ideas of – and political strategies suggested by – Marx and Lenin are not valid anymore, so they need to be replaced or combined with non-Marxist sources in an eclectic manner. ‘Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into

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of analysis and synthesis – the break-down of the separate parts and the totality, the summation of these parts’ (ibid.). 10. Finally, there is an internal connection between theoretical knowledge (both in its philosophical and theoretical senses) and practice (both intellectual practice, the practice involved in the production of knowledge, and political practice, the practice involved in changing the world). Theoretical knowledge contributes to practice in both its senses,35 and practice, in both its senses, ‘confirms’ or ‘refutes’ the truth status of knowledge.36 An important question that is often asked it: how do we know what we know is true? An answer is: practice is the criterion of truth. Marx’s second thesis on Feuerbach says: The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. In practice man must prove the truth…The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question. marx, 1977a: 13; see also mao, 1937

Or as Lenin explains: ‘The standpoint of life, of practice, should be first and fundamental in the theory of knowledge. And it inevitably leads to materialism, brushing aside the endless fabrications of professorial scholasticism… If what our practice confirms is the sole, ultimate and objective truth, then from this must follow the recognition that the only path to this truth is the path of science, which holds the materialist point of view’ (Lenin, 1962: 142–143). In fact, ‘Theory is not a note which you can present at any moment to reality for payment. If a theory proves mistaken, we must revise it or fill out its gaps’ (Trotsky, 1991: 93). More accurately, we acquire truth about the world – with reasonable amount of certainty that our knowledge reflects what is outside of our mind at a given point in time – by a combination of reasoned, coherent argument and evidence obtained by sensations produced by practice (e.g. experiments in laboratories;

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clerical­obscurantism (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes)’ (Lenin, 1961: 363). Given that the reality is theory-laden, one can hardly understand it without the help of prior concepts. In this sense knowledge contributes to practice in the sense of theoretical practice. There are two kinds of union of theory and practice. One is in theoretical practice. Another is in political practice (e.g. fusion of Marxist theory and the working class movement), which Althusser admittedly neglected (2005: 15).

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speaking to people in society; going to pubs, temples and churches; joining a strike; writing a political exposure for a workers’ movement; teaching; attending festivals, and just going about the daily business of living and interacting with people and nature). While checking theory against practice (including actual historical developments in the word existing independently of the theory in question), however, we must not forget that the criterion of practice can never, in the nature of things, either confirm or refute any human idea completely. This criterion also is sufficiently “indefinite” not to allow human knowledge to become “absolute,” but at the same time it is sufficiently definite to wage a ruthless fight on all varieties of idealism and agnosticism.37 lenin, 1962: 142–143

Now: knowledge can be useful when it is true in the sense of being relatively practically adequate, i.e. ‘in terms of the extent to which it generates expectations about the world and about the results of our actions which are actually realised’ (Sayer, 2000: 43). The idea that I can walk on water because I think so or that I can significantly weaken capitalism by building community kitchens or by producing vegetables in my backyard for my consumption is palpably not practically adequate: it generates expectations which cannot be realized. It is not true. So it is not useful. Knowledge can be useful biologically, useful in human practice, useful for the preservation of life, for the preservation of the species, only when it reflects objective truth, truth which is independent of man. For the materialist the “success” of human practice proves the correspondence between our ideas and the objective nature of the things we perceive. lenin, 1962: 139–140

Living our daily life requires consciousness and true consciousness. Or, as Lukacs put it: The most primitive kind of work, such as the quarrying of stones by primeval man, implies a correct reflection of the reality he is concerned with. For no purposive activity can be carried out in the absence of an 37

This problem – that a theory cannot be solely refuted on the basis of practice – arises partly because a mechanism that the theory posits may exist without it being exercised or even if it is exercised, its theorized effects may not be realized and visible (see Sayer, 1992: 137–151, for a discussion on verification of theory).

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image, however crude, of the practical reality involved. Practice can only be a fulfilment and a criterion of theory when it is based on what is held to be a correct reflection of reality. lukacs, 1971: xxv

Following the dialectical materialist philosophy and Marxist science of society based on this, one seeks to produce an accurate understanding of the world: inasmuch as the criterion of practice, i.e., the course of development of all capitalist countries…, proves only the objective truth of Marx’s whole social and economic theory in general, and not merely of one or other of its parts, formulations, etc., it is clear that to talk of the “dogmatism” of the Marxists is to make an unpardonable concession to bourgeois [thinking]…. [B]y following the path of Marxist theory we shall draw closer and closer to objective truth (without ever exhausting it); but by following any other path we shall arrive at nothing but confusion and lies. lenin, 1962: 143

Dialectical method prompts us to maintain the connection between theory on the one hand and the intention and actual political practice involved in changing the world on the other. Marx says that ‘Science must not be a selfish pleasure’, and ‘Those who have the good fortune to be able to devote themselves to scientific pursuits must be the first to place their knowledge at the service of humanity’ (Lafargue, 1890: para 6). Marx indeed believed that his ideas would ‘allow of…concerted action by the workers, and give direct nourishment and impetus to the requirements of the class struggle and the organization of the workers into a class’ (Marx’s letter to Kugelmann in Marx and Engels, 1982: 171–172). In another context Marx (1866) said: ‘I consider that what I am doing through this work [his theoretical work for Capital] is far more important for the working class than anything I might be able to do personally [e.g. politically, at a working class gathering]’.38 The political importance of theoretical work – or intellectual work, more generally, including the concrete analysis  of the concrete situation – cannot be denied at all.39 A part of the intellectual work is critique. As a process of seeking to understand and change 38 39

http://marx.libcom.org/works/1866/letters/66_08_23.htm. John Saul notes: ‘we begin as Marxists with capitalism itself because we consider an understanding of its logic to be the crucial first step in our understanding of the world and we begin as socialists with the struggle to overthrow capitalism because we consider that overthrow to be a necessary (if not sufficient) condition of human emancipation’ (2003: 352).

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the world, the Marxist task therefore ‘must be one of criticism’, of explaining the ­theoretical and political mistakes of various kinds of reformists (and ultraleftists) (Lenin, 1977b: 42) are fading. The purpose of this task as a part of the intellectual work is to help the masses to be conscious of their ‘petty-bourgeois intoxication’. Of course, one can belittle Marxist criticisms of class-society, of non-Marxist ideas and of the ideological backwardness of the masses as mere propaganda. But ‘in reality’, Marxist critique, which may be seen as propaganda, ‘is most practical revolutionary work’ (ibid.). This is especially so in a situation in which masses possess unreasoning trust in the system. How else would one convince the majority of the masses of the value of the Marxist perspective on what is happening and what is to be done? And without the vast majority being thus convinced, large-scale anti-capitalist, social-political change and self-­emancipation of the masses would not be possible. Lenin says in his The Tasks of the proletariat in the present revolution: Only by overcoming this unreasoning trust (and we can and should overcome it only ideologically, by comradely persuasion, by pointing to the lessons of experience) can we set ourselves free from the prevailing orgy of revolutionary phrase-mongering and really stimulate the consciousness both of the proletariat and of the mass in general, as well as their bold and determined initiative in the localities – the independent realisation, development and consolidation of liberties, democracy, and the principle of people’s ownership of all the land [and so on]. lenin, 1977b: 42

Philosophy is always the analysis of the presuppositions of the concepts deployed in sciences (Callinicos, 1985), including political economy and class theory. So philosophy, in addition to science, can guide political practice. ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’ (Marx and Engels, 1977a: 15).40 Or, as Trotsky puts it with respect to science: ‘the significance of science lies precisely in this: to know in order to foresee’ and ‘To know [is to know] so that we may foresee and act’ (Trotsky, 1973: 209–210). However, there is some justification for saying that there is ‘no one-to-one mapping between a particular (Marxist) political practice, a particular (Marxist) theory and a particular (dialectical materialist) philosophy’ (Brown et al., 2002: 2; 40

It is important that theory be politically engaged. The question is (as Fracchia, 2013 asks in the context of Lukacs): what is the politics of one’s theory and what is one’s theory of politics?

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italics in original). Philosophy can only inform theory and practice; it cannot determine the latter. Similarly, a theory of society informed by a given philosophy such as dialectical materialism does not guarantee that one will know the world. The reality is theory-laden but not theory-determined. The concept of money will not allow us to actually see or experience money where it does not exist. Or: consider Lukacs, a foremost philosopher of the western world. He stressed the importance of method and of totality. He advocated for the need to ‘investigate the philosophical connections between economics and dialectics’. He thought that ‘it is demonstrable that it is the materialist view of nature that brings about the really radical separation of the bourgeois and socialist outlooks’ (Lukacs, 1971:xvii). And yet, he could be a supporter of Stalinism: he said ‘In the debates of the Russian Party I agreed with Stalin about the necessity for socialism in one country and this shows very clearly the start of a new epoch in my thought’. But the absence of one-to-one relation is not to be conflated with the presence of no-significant relation. Marx’s idea that philosophers should not only understand but also change the world implicitly acknowledges that (a) philosophy – and knowledge in general – has a potential contribution to make towards changing the world, that (b) if that world is contradiction-ridden which is why it needs to be changed, then philosophy, and the science it will inform, will reflect that contradiction,41 and that (c) the process of engaging in the changing of the world is productive of intellectual insights into the world, suggesting that knowledge production in isolation from practical engagement is very problematic.42 Because dialectics sees everything as changing and because therefore it ‘does not let itself be impressed by anything’, dialectics is ‘in its very essence critical and revolutionary’ (Marx, 1977: 103). It is true that philosophy cannot determine what we will know about the world and how we will change it. But it can certainly inform scientific theory and practice, and without it both our knowledge and practice will remain inadequate. ‘Everything that happens in philosophy has, in the last instance, not only political consequences in theory, but also political consequences in politics: in the political class struggle’43 (Althusser, 1976). That is why ‘one must 41 42

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Hence there is a bourgeois outlook and there is a Marxist outlook. It is lamentable that scholars forget about the link between understanding the world and intervening in it. As Ollman (2003: 12) notes: ‘The age-old link between knowledge and action has been severed, so that scholars can deny all responsibility for their wares while taking pride in knowing more and more about less and less’. This is also true about scientific understanding of things. ‘Throughout the civilised world the teachings of Marx evoke the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both

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not fail to see the struggle of parties in philosophy, a struggle which in the last analysis reflects the tendencies and ideology of the antagonistic classes in modern society’ (Lenin, 1962: 358). Philosophy indeed plays a powerful role in thinking about society. If it is possible to place a given person’s general type of thought on the basis of his relation to concrete practical problems, it is also possible to predict approximately, knowing his general type of thought, how a given individual will approach one or another practical question. That is the incomparable educational value of the dialectical method of thought. trotsky, 1995: 116

‘The willingness for revolutionary action is a precondition for mastering the Marxist dialectic. The one cannot live without the other. Marxism [is] the theoretical tool of revolutionary action’ (Trotsky, 1973: 115). ‘Marx’s philosophy is a consummate philosophical materialism which has provided mankind, and especially the working class, with powerful instruments of knowledge’.44 Given

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official and liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of “pernicious sect”. And no other attitude is to be expected, for there can be no “impartial” social science in a society based on class struggle. In one way or another, all official and liberal science defends wageslavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery. To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as foolishly naïve as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers’ wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital’ (Lenin, 1977a: 44). For in modern society the latter is as much a partisan science as is epistemology. ‘Taken as a whole, the professors of economics are nothing but learned salesmen of the capitalist class, while the professors of philosophy are learned salesmen of the theologians’ (Lenin, 1962: 342–343). ‘Marx’s philosophical materialism alone has shown the proletariat the way out of the spiritual slavery in which all oppressed classes have hitherto languished. Marx’s economic theory alone has explained the true position of the proletariat in the general system of capitalism’ (Lenin, 1977a: 48). It is no wonder that ‘The enemies of democracy have, therefore, always exerted all their efforts to “refute”, undermine and defame [the philosophy of Marxism as] materialism, and have advocated various forms of philosophical idealism’ (Lenin, 1977a: 45). ‘Once you deny objective reality, given us in sensation, you have already lost every one of your weapons against fideism, for you have slipped into agnosticism or subjectivism – and that is all fideism wants. If the perceptual world is objective reality, then the door is closed to every other “reality” or quasi-reality … If the world is matter in motion, matter can and must be infinitely studied in the infinitely complex and detailed manifestations and ramifications of this motion, the motion of this matter; but beyond it, beyond the “physical,” external world, with which everyone is familiar, there can be nothing’ (Lenin, 1962: 344).

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the importance of Marxist philosophy and Marxist science informed by it, it is not surprising that ‘a philosophical struggle against the [materialist] dialectic’ often completes itself over time ‘with a political struggle against the socialist revolution’. There are numerous philosophical trends such as Analytical and Post-structuralist Marxisms that call Marxism – the Marxism that is rooted in the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky (mellt) and the mellt legacy – orthodox Marxism (or conventional or traditional Marxism).45 They deploy such labelling strategy to allow themselves to have some affinity with the intellectual prestige Marxism and yet to jettison the central tenets of Marxism. A major problem with these trends is their antagonism towards Marxist materialism and/or Marxist dialectics. Returning to Lukacs, perhaps it could be argued that his philosophy was faulty, and therefore this fact partly explains why he engaged in faulty scientific practice and in inadequate politics. Actually, Lukacs (1971: xx) himself admitted that he was mistaken to ‘put the totality in the centre of the system, overriding the priority of economics’. He mistakenly thought that: ‘It is not the primacy of economic motives in historical ­explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois science, but the point of view of totality’. In other words, his philosophy was dialectical, but it was not materialist enough. 2

Philosophy and Class Theory

To sum up: Marxist philosophy is dialectical materialism, and dialectical materialism has four crucial ontological elements: ‘materiality’  +  ‘sociality’ (social relationships)  +  system/totality (including relationships between parts) + change-via-contradiction. Marxist philosophy emphasizes the material conditions of human life and social character of human beings. It treats

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‘Orthodox Marxism…does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the “belief” in this or that thesis, not the exegesis of a “sacred” book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical Marxism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders. It is the conviction, moreover, that all attempts to surpass or “improve” it have led and must lead to oversimplification, triviality and eclecticism.’ (Lukacs, 1971: xxvi). Consider also Lebowitz when he says: ‘I do not count Marxism as among my influences; nor do I call myself some kind of a Marxist…. The qualifications involved in such statements are inappropriate. Simply put, I am a Marxist economist…. [This] means a focus on the method and approach of Marx’ (Lebowitz, 2003: 1). The question is: what is that method? That method is dialectical materialism or materialist dialectics.

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the human being and society as irreducibly material.46 It treats it as irreducibly socially: it is a product of an ensemble of social (and social-ecological) relationships, some of which are more global and others more local. And the Marxist philosophy emphasizes the systemic, or the totalizing, nature, of the reality in which what one thing is depends on its relations to other things, although some of these relations are essential and fundamental but not others. The totality, which must be the starting point of any analysis, is seen as more than sum of the parts inside it. Marxist philosophy sees change in everything and everything as changing, through contradictions inside it, and between it and its social (social-ecological) environment. These contradictions are, more or less, registered in consciousness which, in turn, responds to these contradictions. Marxist philosophy explores things/relations as they are and as they develop into their specific forms in which they are expressed. A philosophical way of thinking that is permeated by the four elements discussed above – materiality, sociality or social-relationality, totality (including relationships between parts/individuals) and contradiction-ridden changeability – has specific implications for a scientific understanding of society. More precisely: one’s analysis of society will inevitably/necessarily be from the vantage point of class, and class-vantage point will not be merely one of several entry-points or one of several things. A dialectical-materialist way of thinking will compel an analyst to ask the question about class: where does one stand on the question of property and labour? This question leads to a series of specific questions. How do people have access to, and control over – lose control over – society’s productive resources and the social surplus that is produced on the basis of the deployment of these resources and labour?47 How are these resources deployed and transformed in the labour process, for what purpose and in whose interest? How does the cleavage (class cleavage) based on the contradictory relation between those who own/control society’s

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It is irreducibly material once again, in that it has material needs, which can be satisfied only through material things which can be transformed to create new things on the basis of labour and interaction with nature, within a context of objectively existing social relations, and it has vulnerabilities (it will fall sick, it will be tired, it will die, etc.) that emerge from the materiality of the human body as a part of nature. In a class-less society, one can define the surplus as the difference between the total social product and what the whole society takes to produce it. In a class-less society, surplus is the total social product minus the sum of what the direct producers need to reproduce themselves and the cost of things (various inputs) needed to produce the social product, and that difference is appropriated by the ruling classes whose reproduction needs are met from the surplus.

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productive resources and social surplus and those who do not, shape (and are shaped by) other cleavages? A materialist philosophy that is at once dialectical ignores neither consciousness nor does it fetishize structures, neglecting agency. In this philosophy, human beings from different classes have objective interests and live under objective conditions/relations, independent of whether they are fully conscious of them and independent of how well they politically or otherwise fight for their interests. Consciousness of a class, including in its theoretical form (which is a more developed form of consciousness than simple elementary consciousness people acquire through the business of living their daily lives), can never create things for which material conditions do not ­exist. ­Theory – social consciousness in its developed form – cannot create social being or objective conditions, out of nothing. In asserting all this, Marxist philosophy takes an objective view of society. It sees society as in motion but it is also mindful of the dual perils of objectivism, i.e. hyper-optimism or hyperpessimism: the idea, respectively, that objective conditions by themselves will result in desired changes or inhibit these changes in society. Marxist philosophy avoids an objectivist approach and instead takes a materialist approach to society, an approach that is, and can only be, a class approach, because such an approach reflects existing class contradictions. In his Economic content of Narodism, Lenin makes the distinction between the two approaches: The objectivist speaks of the necessity of a given historical process; the materialist gives an exact picture of the given social-economic formation and of the antagonistic relations to which it gives rise. When demonstrating the necessity for a given series of facts [that nothing will happen or everything will happen on its own, given objective conditions], the objectivist always runs the risk of becoming an apologist for these facts: the materialist discloses the class contradictions and in so doing defines his standpoint. The objectivist speaks of “insurmountable historical tendencies”; the materialist speaks of the class which “directs” the given economic system, giving rise to such and such forms of counteraction by other classes. Thus, on the one hand, the materialist is more consistent than the objectivist, and gives profounder and fuller effect to his objectivism. He does not limit himself to speaking of the necessity of a process, but ascertains exactly what social-economic formation gives the process its content, exactly what class determines this necessity. …[T]he materialist would not content himself with stating the “insurmountable historical tendencies,” but would point to the existence of certain classes, which determine the content of the given system and preclude the possibility­

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of any solution except by the action of the producers themselves. … [M]aterialism includes partisanship, so to speak, and enjoins the direct and open adoption of the standpoint of a definite social group in any assessment of events. lenin, 1963a: 400–401

And this is the standpoint of the exploited classes in all class societies. This standpoint is a crucial ingredient in the development of class consciousness. If objective conditions exist independently of consciousness and action as a given point, then the question is: how does consciousness develop and what role does it play in understanding (and then changing of) the objective conditions? One may answer by saying this: given the material conditions’ internal ­contradictions, how new things (e.g. desired changes) can happen can be quickened because of the intervention of theory, that is, a theory that correctly reflects objective conditions of a class society, in terms of their past, present and future direction of change, and therefore it can advance – contribute towards – exploited classes’ consciousness by making make them aware of what they can do to obtain the changes in the objective conditions in their own interests. There is an objective world including its contradictions, and a given level of consciousness emerges from it. This consciousness can be of two types: that which supports the reproduction of the conditions (including in slightly modified forms) and that which seeks to transcend the existing contradictionridden conditions (more developed consciousness or Marxist-theoretical consciousness). The latter requires special effort to develop it: it requires intervention of agency (in the form of ‘specialized’ intellectual work) to advance what is more directly political agency (action on the part of the masses).48 Objective conditions and their contradictions do not automatically get registered in consciousness except in a purely elementary manner. Objective conditions do not offer themselves on a platter to human consciousness for people to reflect on these conditions. Mere sense perception or experience of life – whether it is conducive to class consciousness or not – is no guarantee for a proper understanding of the reality, although our understanding is rooted in – and it emerges from – these. No objective conditions can impact consciousness directly, i.e. unmediated by consciousness. There are two reasons. One is more 48

The degree of development of theoretical clarification and consciousness that is possible depends on the degree of development of productive forces, and social relations and their contradiction between the two; it is difficult to imagine socialism on the basis of contradiction between slaves and slave-owners and on the basis of contradiction between slavery and the development of productive forces under slavery.

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philosophical, and this has got to do with the stratification of the reality. If society exists at two broad ontological levels – the level of relations/structures and mechanisms, and the level of effects and experience – then consciousness of society has to exist at these levels. Correspondingly, and as indicated above, there is consciousness with respect to the content or underlying relations and mechanisms (theoretical consciousness) and there is consciousness with respect to the form of these (more elementary consciousness).49 These two levels or forms of consciousness are not of same ontological significance. It is often the case that what is real and what appears to be the real are not the same. There is often a contradiction. Conscious intervention – theory as a developed form of humanity’s consciousness and more specifically in its dialectical-materialist form – is necessary to go behind the veil. The problem that stratification of reality poses is compounded by increasing complexity of a given class society such as generalized commodity production or capitalist commodity and property relations. In all social formations of any complexity – and in the capitalist social formation in particular – people in their intercourse are not conscious of what kind of social relations are being formed, in accordance with what laws they develop, etc. For instance, a peasant when he sells his grain enters into ‘intercourse’ with the world producers of grain in the world market, but he is not conscious of it; nor is he conscious of what kind of social relations are formed on the basis of exchange. Social consciousness reflects social being – that is Marx’s teaching. A reflection may be an approximately true copy of the reflected, but to speak of identity is absurd. Theorizing class must be based on not only Marxist ontological principles as mentioned above but also Marxist theory of theorizing, i.e. Marxist epistemological method. In terms of the method of abstraction as extension (Ollman, 2003; 2013, 2014) (extension of class as a concept), one must examine the following questions. How big must the conceptual space of the category of class be, i.e. what are the things it should include (control over property?, control over surplus? control over labour power? consciousness of class interests, etc.), and what is outside of the boundary of the scope of class as a concept? Where one draws one’s boundary partly depends on the specific conceptual and political tasks at hand, within the limits of a dialectical and materialist way of thinking. Although traditionally class relation is seen as an economic (and 49

Form is in two senses: form of expression of something; and the ways in which a process is played out (Ollman, 2003).

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­ olitical) relation between classes, I extend the scope of the concept of class p to include state-class relation and treating the state as a form of the exploiting class. This is discussed below in the section on the state and in Chapter 8 on the state under capitalism. One may stress the exchange relations as well as production relations aspects of class, as I do in Chapter 7, bearing in mind that production and exchange relations exist within a system of class relations and that ultimately production relations have a primacy within that system. A class in the abstract may not have a specific form of consciousness or it may not engage in revolutionary politics. So more concrete aspects of class – e.g. working class with trade union consciousness and engaging in trade union politics vs the working class with socialist consciousness and engaging in socialist politics – are discussed in Chapters 10–12. Once one has arrived at a given extension of class (once one has decided what the concept includes), one then applies the abstraction of the vantage point. For example, class relations and processes must be seen spatially (e.g. in terms of the rural–urban and regional differences/connections) as well as at multiple scales, including internationally, and in relation to such things as, say, community, etc. Different vantage points may be deployed because class is a very complex form of social relation, but not all of them are equally important. The abstraction of generality is crucial to class theory. Briefly, applying this method of abstraction entails analyzing class at various levels of generality.50 Class societies share some common attributes with non-class societies. These are attributes of society – or human beings – as such. That is the first level, where considerations are given to the fact that all societies must produce and reproduce material conditions of existence through mutual social interaction and communication. This level must be in the background of class analysis (although this is not a part of class analysis proper). Then there is a level at which one examines the common attributes of all class societies. Following this, one examines historically specific forms of class society. One understands the specific differences between, for example, capitalist and non- or pre-capitalist class societies. Then one looks at the capitalist class society, the most modern form of class society, which represents the highest degree of development of classness of class society. One considers capitalist class relation at different levels of generality: capitalist society in general, a modern form of capitalism and capitalist society in a given historically-geographically specific context (Figure 8 below).

50

It is easy to confuse levels of abstraction (or generality) with geographical scales (see Cox and Mair, 1989).

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Class society (Level 4)

Less Abstract

More Abstract

Human society (Level 5)

Capitalism in general as a form of class society (Level 3). A historically specific form of capitalism (e.g. ‘modern’ version of capitalism) (Level 2) Capitalist society in a given time and place (Level 1)

Note: Based on Ollman (2014; 2003).

Figure 8

Levels of generality for examining class society

With respect to human society (level 5),51 one must consider what is common to all the human beings (the material nature of their body-mind complex, etc.) and the ecological (natural) conditions under which human beings must live and interact with. And the first level – capitalist society in a given time and place – is the most concrete level, based on ‘a collection of qualities that are unique to the people and conditions that exist at any given time’ and place (Ollman, 2014: 575). With respect to level 2, the idea is that ‘capitalism goes through stages during the era of its dominance, changing in some respects while retaining most of its basic structures’ (Ollman, 2014: 575).52 Marx’s main 51

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This level is characterized by the fact that: ‘Whatever may be the social form of production, laborers and means of production always remain factors of it…. The special manner in which this union [i. e. the union between laborers and means of production] is accomplished distinguishes the different economic epochs ... from one another [i.e. different forms of class society]’ (Marx, 1885, ch 1, section 2, para 6). For Ollman, this level is the level of modern capitalism at the time that a writer writes about it. For me, this level would also include a form of capitalism which is characterized by uneven and combined development and specifically, by a relatively lower level of development of productive forces (‘backward’ or peripheral capitalism). That is the topic of discussion in chapter 8. A modern form of capitalism cannot be equated to a recent form; backward capitalism, which is not that modern, is very recent as well, when we see capitalism internationally. Capitalist class relation associated with a higher level

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emphasis was on level 3 (capitalism in the abstract), but he kept in mind the fact that the different levels interact. A given level is more or less concrete, or more or less abstract, in relation to other levels.53 For example, Level 3 is more concrete in relation to level 4 and more abstract in relation to level 2. A class society at a given level acquires qualities of society that precedes it. For example, class society at level 1 contains qualities of class society at level 2, 3, etc. Developing an appropriate class theory must deal with level 2–4, keeping in the background both level 5 and 1. This is what is attempted in this book. ­Discussion on class at level 4 is below in this chapter but mainly in the next chapter: at level 4, qualities that are common to all class societies are included. Discussion on class at level 3 (capitalism as a form of class society) is in Chapter 7 and Chapter 9. Chapter 9 in the book also deals with capitalism partly in terms of class at level 2 (i.e. capitalism in its specific historically existing forms). It should be re-emphasized that the starting point – and a presupposition of – class theory must be a consideration of ‘the general, abstract determinants which obtain in more or less all forms of society’. These determinants include the fact that human beings must interact with nature and they must interact and communicate with one another to produce the material things that they need to satisfy the nature-imposed needs that their material bodies have. Class theory must then include the categories which make up the inner structure of class society, including bourgeois class society, the categories on which the ideas about classes and their inter-connection rest. In political-­ economic analysis, as Marx explains in Grundrisse: It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, … with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population [human society] is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc. [in a capitalist society: Level 3 in the

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of development­of productive forces and capitalist class relations associated with a lower level of development of productive forces do not belong to different levels of generality; in reality they are the two sides of the same coin and therefore epistemologically, they belong to the same level of generality. With respect to capitalist society, Marx says in Grundrisse: ‘the simplest economic category, say e.g., exchange-value, presupposes population, moreover a population producing in specific [class/social] relations…It can never exist other than as an abstract, one-sided relation within an already given, concrete, living whole’ (Marx, 1973: 101).

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­ receding diagram]. These latter in turn presuppose [such tendencies/ p mechanisms as] exchange, division of labour, prices, etc.54 marx, 1973: 100; ­italics and parentheses added

So examining a country or its population or indeed sub-groups of the population such as immigrants or women or racial minorities or people from a province of a country – i.e. ‘the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation … and conception’ – requires an examination of the classes and the categories (the processes/relations expressed as concepts) the system of classes rests on, this is a part of the scientific method of studying society. Such a method helps one to arrive at the concrete as ‘the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse’. This applies to not just population or society as such but also to ‘all class societies’ or indeed all ‘capitalist class societies’. To arrive at an understanding of these, one must understand the relatively concrete concepts. We should bear in mind that: ‘the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind’, but this is not how ‘the concrete itself comes into being’ (Marx, 1973: 101). If the latter was the case, the concrete would be a creation of the mind. As mentioned above, class society exists in different historically specific forms. These forms share something common with one another (relation of identity); they also have unique qualities (relation of difference). And to the extent that multiple forms of class society share some common qualities, some of these qualities may be more common than other qualities. For example, if all pre-capitalist class societies are characterized by extra-economic coercion (as discussed in Chapter 6 below), the degree of extra-economic coercion may vary from one such society to another: Production in general is an abstraction, but a rational abstraction [while population is not] in so far as it really brings out and fixes the common element and thus saves us repetition. Still, this general category, this common element sifted out by comparison, is itself segmented many times over and splits into different determinations. Some determinations 54

Marx goes to add: ‘For example, capital is nothing without wage labour…[And capital is nothing] without value, money, price etc. Thus, if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception… of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts…, from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations’ (ibid.: parenthesis added).

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b­ elong to all epochs, others only to a few. [Some] determinations will be shared by the most modern epoch and the most ancient. No production will be thinkable without them.55 marx, 1973: 85

Because dialectics allows us to examine how an object develops into certain forms, and one form develops into another form, dialectics also allows us to discover ‘a basis for the scientific classification of human societies’. Given that dialectical change happens materially, such classification (classification of historical forms of society) is grounded ‘in the development of their productive forces and the structure of the relations of ownership which constitute the anatomy of society. Marxism substituted for the vulgar descriptive classification of societies and states, which even up to now still flourishes in the universities, a materialistic dialectical classification’ (Trotsky, 1995: 120–121). 3 Conclusion Marxist philosophy is dialectical materialism. It has four crucial ontological elements: ‘materiality’; ‘sociality’ (social relationships); system/totality (including relationships between parts) and change-via-contradiction. Marxist philosophy is materialist because it says that there is a reality which, more or less, exists independently of how it is thought to be and acted on (by individuals or groups) at a given point in time and in a given place.56 The reality refers to 55

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Marx adds: ‘even though the most developed languages have laws and characteristics in common with the least developed, nevertheless, just those things which determine their development, i.e. the elements which are not general and common, must be separated out from the determinations valid for production as such, so that in their unity – which arises already from the identity of the subject, humanity, and of the object, nature – their essential difference is not forgotten’ (Marx, 1973: 85). It is true that human beings have created much of what we see and experience. But at a given point in time, there is a social reality which is independent of our actions and thinking, and to the extent that the social world is not independent of knowledge, that knowledge is usually ‘past knowledge than that of contemporary researchers’ (Sayer, 2000: 11). With respect to the human body, which is a part of nature, it is clear that it exists as an independent reality which imposes certain needs (one must eat before one can think). My hands and head even exist independent of my thinking about them. It is true that if I am engaged in the material act of making a pot, I am also thinking about it at the same time; my intention to make a pot and my ideas about how to make it are all important. But that thinking is directly subordinated to the act of actually making the pot. And that thinking is based on the act of making pots that has happened in the past, the material act which has created ideas about how pots are to be successfully made, the ideas that are relatively

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the physical matter and objective social-economic relations which – or many of which (those which are very powerful) – people enter into independent of their will or subjective thinking.57 In its more concrete aspects, the material refers to nature and to production and reproduction of conditions of life, including through humans beings’ relations with nature and through the deployment of power of the body-mind complex (labour power in its mental and manual dimensions). Consciousness, including class consciousness, emerges from, and reflects, material conditions, although it cannot be reduced to material conditions. The reality cannot be perceived except through ideas, but there has to be reality in the first place for it to be perceived.58 The material conditions influence, and are influenced by, individual and social consciousness (including false consciousness), within a whole, a totality,59 in which material conditions have an ultimate primacy (in the sense that it affects consciousness more than it is affected by it and that it sets the limits within which the nature/ forms of consciousness vary).60

57

58 59

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practically adequate. The ideas that matter are the ideas that are in conformity with the world of matter (or the world of social processes that are more or less independent of thinking about these at a point in time). It is also the case that thinking about pot-making, whether it happens during or after or before pot-making, requires material activities at the level of neurons in my brain. Thinking presupposes material activities and relations at the level of the body. No matter how one sees thinking in relation to the materiality of life, the two are mutually connected in a system in which the materiality is the dominant element. Lukacs (1971: xxxvi) draws attention to Marx’s statement that objectivity is ‘the primary material attribute of all things and relations’. While relations become things in all societies, the form of that transformation and its implications are, say, for exploitation and alienation, historically specific. Lukacs (1971: ibid.) says: ‘the objectification is a natural means by which man masters the world and as such it can be either a positive or a negative fact. By contrast, alienation is a special variant of that activity that becomes operative in definite social conditions. This completely shattered the theoretical foundations of what had been the particular achievement of History and Class Consciousness’. Someone who has defective eyes may need spectacles to see things but that does not mean that what is there to see is determined by the spectacles. Once again, this totality can be relatively small or relatively large (e.g. an urban neighbourhood, publishing industry; electoral system, capitalist economic system of a country, European Union or indeed the entire world-society). This idea is true even at the level of the body (or body-brain complex): modern neuro-­ science (see Davidson, 2012) says that consciousness can affect physical-chemical changes in the body including in the brain, but no thought can be thought or can exist without it emerging from – being rooted in – a certain part of the physical brain. The material is a condition for consciousness but the latter cannot be reduced to – and can indeed impact – the material. This principle, more or less, applies to an individual and to wider society.

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Dialectics shows that what one thing/process is it is because of its connections to other things/processes. Some of these connections are of course more fundamental to the nature of the thing/process in question than other connections. And in dialectics, there are similarities and connections between things/ processes and there are differences. However, with respect to the difference aspect, it should be noted that it is not absolute. In his Poverty of Philosophy, for example, Marx shows his disagreement with any theory which ‘rests on interminable distinctions’ whether these are ‘between theory and practice’, or ‘between principles and results, ­between ideas and application, between content and form, between essence and reality, between law and fact, between the good side and the bad side’ and so on (Marx, 1987: 108). Dialectical thinking absolutely emphasizes changing character of things by deploying laws of ‘change of quantity into quality, development through contradictions, conflict of content and form, interruption of continuity, change of possibility into inevitability, etc., which are just as important for theoretical thought as is the simple syllogism for more elementary tasks’ (Trotsky, 1995: 119). And the processes that are subjected to these laws are material processes, they concern things material. A materialist dialectical philosophy does point to class theory. Society is class divided, and because of class contradictions, changes happen in society. This philosophy prompts one to see class as a material process/relation. And class as a social antagonism: a class society is not harmonious, nor is it static. In fact: ‘The whole profundity of those modern economists who demonstrate the eternity and harmoniousness of the existing social relations lies in this forgetting’ (Marx, 1973: 85). A dialectical materialist approach to class will also say that: thinking about class does not create class; however, thinking about class, especially when it grips the minds of the masses (i.e. when many people think about their class position in certain ways) and engage in political struggles, can have an effect on the system of classes (producing over conflicts). This is why class theory is treated as politically threatening and is shunned or diluted. And dialectical materialism helps one think about class at multiple levels of generality and thus explore the immense complexity of class. The philosophical principles briefly presented here will inform the discussion in the remainder of the book. In the next chapter, these principles will be deployed to consider class materially and as a social contradiction, at relatively general levels: class as whole, and class as historically specific, with a focus on bringing out the general differences between the pre-capitalist form of class and the capitalist form of class. The discussion of these ideas will be firmly rooted in the writings of Marx and Engels (and of Lenin and Trotsky, etc.). But it will be mindful of the fact

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that not all opinions of Marx (or indeed of any other writer) have, and should have, equal epistemological status. If there is ontological stratification in the world (e.g. there are relations and mechanisms which are different from the effects they produce under specific conditions), then there are some statements that coherently pertain to more abstract aspects of the world (they concern relations, mechanisms, and tendencies), and other statements that are about more concrete aspects, which apply only to specific times and places. One must distinguish between statements pointing to mechanisms that exist widely, in terms of time and space, and statements which are time-and placespecific, even if an author, including Marx, might sometime (mistakenly) think that more concrete statements apply more generally. Marx made both types of statements. He himself says: events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by using as one’s master key a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical. marx’s letter to Editor of the Otecestvenniye Zapisky, in marx and engels, 1982: 294

So one cannot give equal epistemological weightage to empirical and theoretical statements. With respect to the theoretical statements, there is also variability. Granting that not all abstract statements are equally causally valid/ potent and that some abstract statements are more abstract than other such statements, it is possible to discover a central tendency of Marx’s thought (and that of others who think like him), which has a reasonable level of internal coherence at the core and which can explain a large chunk of history better than other competing bodies of work and be a better guide to action. Without such a core, a body of work cannot be called Marxist.61 There is a central tendency with respect to which (a) deviations from that core can be determined (in terms of theory and evidence), and (b) the grounds, including political grounds, for a critique of Marx/Marxism can be produced by a Marxist, with an explicit intention to strengthen the core and to contribute to the political practice that such a core points to. 61

See Chapter 2 entitled ‘Mapping the Marxist Critique of Society: Or, What Really is Marxism?’ in Das, 2014. See also the discussion on Marxism and revisionism in Chapter 4 of this book.

chapter 6

Class Theory at a Trans-historical Scale Armed with a materialist and dialectical way of thinking about society, a Marxist looks at social relations from the standpoint of class relations. What this means is this: class relations are not just about conflicts between groups of people, in abstraction from the process of production of wealth in its value or non-value forms. Class relations are also about social relations of production and distribution of wealth, including wealth in its surplus product form, which in turn takes value and non-value forms. The question is: how does the theory of production of wealth (political economy), which is an important component of Marxist theory, intersect with Marxist theory of class? Political economy talks about relatively abstracts mechanisms of wealth production such as: use-value; exchange value; commodity; commodification; value; abstract and concrete labour; form of labour (self-employed labour and wage-labour); labour process; forms of property; subsumptions of labour; forms of surplus value; accumulation (reinvestment of surplus); geographical expansion of accumulation, state policies; and so on. These processes can be seen as abstract mechanisms at the level of a mode of production (e.g. feudalism or capitalism, etc.) or society as such. Their quantitative magnitudes can be measured to show their historical and geographical variation. But when these processes are seen from the vantage point of classes, then political economy becomes transformed into class theory. That is: when one explores how these abstract mechanisms of wealth production/ distribution and accumulation further/inhibit interests (material, cultural and political) of determinate classes (e.g. property owners or property-less classes) and further/inhibit – and are influenced by – the potential or actual class consciousness and class struggle (whether in their trade unionist or socialist forms), then one is in the realm of class theory. Class theory is political economy from the vantage point of class antagonisms. Political economy without class theory can suffer from the perils of ­objectivism. Such perils are indicated by the fact that a merely objectivist approach to society can speak of only the necessity of given historically existing political-economic facts and become an apologist for these facts as what Lenin calls ‘insurmountable historical tendencies’ (Lenin, 1963a: 401). And class theory without political economy can suffer from the perils of sociologism, politicism, voluntarism, and indeed reformism. Thus it can suffer from a consequent

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a­ bstraction (a) from the material conditions (i.e. processes/relations of wealth production and distribution, including in its value and non-value forms) without which social relations, political actions and consciousness have little effect or meaning, and (b) from the possibilities for classlessness lurking inside the contradiction-ridden, crisis-prone material conditions, and (c) from the identification of the main class agents who can fight for classlessness. Grounded in Marxist philosophy as well as Marxist political economy and social theory, Marxist theory of class treats class at multiple levels of generality. Starting trans-historically with a consideration of common characteristics of all societies, whether class-divided or classless, it offers insights into qualities that all class societies share, and draws out their specificities. All class societies are characterized by the fact that effective control over means of production is in the hands of a minority which takes control over the social surplus (total social product minus what it takes to produce it) and alienates direct producers from it. The actual ways in which this happens varies from pre-capitalist to capitalist class societies. In this chapter, section one addresses the question of what class theory really means, and discusses the common attributes of all forms of class society. Section  2 is concerned with the qualities of pre-capitalist class society; the purpose of doing this is to allow us to see the specificity of capitalist class society in the next chapter. Section 3 looks at how the contradictory character of objective class-conditions, class consciousness and class struggle are interconnected. It also deals with the contradiction-driven dynamics of transition from one form of class society to another. Section 4 deals with the generallyneglected but inherently political character of class: the state. It presents the idea that the dominant class and the state are two forms of the class relation, rather than being two separate and interacting aspects of the social totality. This section extends the scope of the concept of class to argue that: the direct producers are not only excluded from control over means of production and are economically exploited; they are also excluded from political power and are politically oppressed. The final section provides a detailed summary of the elements of Marxist theory of class at the most general level, one that is informed by dialectical materialism. 1

Class in All Class Societies: Class, Property, and Exploitation

As mentioned in the last chapter, all societies, class divided or not, have this in common: they must produce and continue to produce the things, they need,

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including the need to reproduce their bodily existence.1 All human beings, whether or not they live in a class society, need food, clothes, shelter, etc. They need to engage in labour process to produce these.2 Marx explains the transhistorical character of labour process in Capital 1 like this: The labour process … is purposeful activity aimed at the production of use-values. It is an appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements of man. It is the universal condition for the metabolic ­interaction … between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence, and it is therefore independent of every form of that existence, or rather, it is common to all forms of society in which human beings live. marx, 1977: 290; italics added

To produce things, people have to enter into determinate relations with one another, i.e. social relations of production. That is, as people develop their productive forces, they develop certain relations with one another (and with nature): ‘In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will’ (Marx, in Marx and ­Engels, 1977a: 503).3 These relations which ‘correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces’, constitute ‘the economic structure of society’4 (ibid.). Thus: in producing what they need, ‘human beings work not only upon nature, but also upon one another. They produce only by working together in a specified manner and reciprocally exchanging their activities’ (Marx, 1976: 28). Production happens within social relations. ­Production is always a social activity as it involves people interacting with one another. Here is Marx from Grundrisse: 1 The things people need are both means of subsistence and means of production. Means of subsistence are both material (e.g. food, shelter, etc.) and cultural (e.g. a movie), which also presuppose production of material things. 2 Labour process has a dual discursive dimension. It involves an active discursive aspect in the sense of intentionality: it requires ideas about how to use existing means of production to produce a use-value. It also involves a passive discursive aspect in that one (e.g. a theoretician or a worker herself) can reflect on his own or others’ labour process and draw general conclusions. Often, drawing general conclusions about labour processes is not always possible on the part of those who are directly involved in labour process, i.e. on the part of workers qua workers, which is why organic intellectuals have an important role. 3 This is a reason why it is a material activity. 4 These relations are relations between classes and relations between groups of members of a class (class-fractions) as they are fundamentally shaped by relations between classes.

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Production by an isolated individual outside society – a rare exception which may well occur when a civilized person in whom the social forces are already dynamically present is cast by accident into the wilderness – is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other (1993: 84). All societies have then these two properties: social relations of production, and productive forces (means of production and labour); these two constitute the basis of the mode of production. While it is true that all society must produce the conditions of life and that they must engage in the labor process, it is however not clear that by merely looking at a site of production one can say anything much about the social relations of production. Indeed: ‘the taste of the porridge does not tell us who grew the oats’; in other words, merely looking at the production of a thing does not say much about the conditions – the class relations – ‘under which it takes place’, i.e. whether it happens ‘under the slave-owner’s brutal lash or the anxious eye of the capitalist’ (Marx, 1977: 290). Things could be produced under social relations of production that are based on class relations or under class-less social relations of production. When productivity of labour improves and thus production of things expands under given social relations of production, this allows the production of a surplus (i.e. when society produces more than it needs for its material reproduction), social relations of production transforms themselves into class relations, and the latter tend to promote further development of productive forces ­(until the time they turn into its fetters).5 The development of productive forces ­beyond a point makes the production of surplus and thus class relations possible.6 Engels says in Socialism: Utopian and scientific: The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is ­dependent 5 The relation between productive forces and relations of production is the subject of much discussion (see Chibber, 2011; Milonakis, 1993–1994; Carling, 1993; Cohen, 2000; Wright et al., 1992). 6 Engels says in his Anti-Dühring: ‘From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange’ (Marx and Engels, 1977c: 133).

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upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged… engels in marx and engels, 1977c: 133; italics added

There is a reason why development of productive forces and development of class relations (or more broadly inter- and intra-class relations) go together. It is the development of productive forces that allows surplus to be produced and a surplus-appropriating stratum of society – a ruling or exploiting class – to exist. If the worker needs to use all his time to produce the necessary means of subsistence for himself and his family, he has no time left in which to perform unpaid labour for other people. Unless labour has attained a certain level of productivity, the worker will have no such free time at his disposal, and without superfluous time there can be no surplus-labour, hence no capitalists, as also no slave-owners, no feudal barons…. marx, 1977: 646–647

But the fact that development of productivity makes surplus production possible does not mean that surplus will be produced or that it will be available for use (for further production and/or for consumption on the part of the class which controls means of production).7 Surplus is not produced automatically. Once the development of productive forces allows surplus production, the ­ruling class, through various mechanisms of control, must make the direct ­producers produce the surplus, which is then appropriated by that class. The production aspect of surplus means that the class of direct producers has non-existent or limited power to autonomously decide how production as such happens and/or what is to be done with the surplus produced. Because a part of the surplus is ploughed into production, if one has limited control over surplus, one has limited control over production itself. Class – both as a concept and as reality – is a combined product of social relations and productive forces. Marxism examines the class structure of society as a historically conditioned form of the development of the productive forces; Marxism ­deduces from the productive forces of society the interrelations between human society and surrounding nature, and these in turn are determined at each historical stage by man’s technology, his instruments and 7 In fact, surplus can be produced and destroyed by direct producers as a sign of resistance against surplus appropriation, unless they are controlled.

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­ eapons, his capacities and methods for struggle with nature. Precisely w this objective approach arms Marxism with the insuperable power of historical foresight trotsky, 1973: 280

Social relations and productive forces are trans-historical categories relative to class. The act of producing conditions of life (including producing a surplus) takes a social form: it takes a class form. Class relation is a form of social relations of production, i.e. the relations human beings must enter into in order to perform productive activity in a condition in which the right over the use of productive forces is unequally distributed. All class relations are social relations of production, although not all social relations of production (e.g. those in communist societies) are class relations. Social relations of production do not have to be class relations any more than labour process in its general form (labour process, pure and simple) is an inherently exploitative labour process. There are aspects of labour process that are independent of the particular form it assumes under given social conditions. Class relations are relations of exploitation. But mere existence of a surplus is not a necessary indicator of class. Surplus, in the context of class exploitation, is that part of the total product which is (a) surplus above what is necessary consumption, and whose production is made possible by a given set of social relations of production, and (b) which is appropriated by the class which, more or less, controls the means of production and/or labour. Surplus is not merely a mathematical entity: it is not merely a difference between total product and what people need for their material reproduction. Rather, surplus in a class society is that part of the product of labour of an individual or a large group of people, which they do not directly enjoy the fruit of and the immediate benefits of which are reserved for others. Surplus characterizes all societies post primitive communism. Surplus can be appropriated by private individuals, or it can be appropriated by society as a whole which it can then decide to set aside for common goals (e.g. feasts, to create new means of production such as a bridge or a new machine, to support the well-being of members of society such as children and older and physically impaired people). A person or a society may produce surplus of one product and exchange it for the surplus of another product with someone else or another society. Once again, surplus in class society exists when the direct producer who has limited control over the mode of production and property, is obliged to – whether they are conscious or not – surrender the surplus under economic or n ­ on-economic compulsion, and without receiving an equivalent in exchange, to another individual or group who does not perform surplus labour and who controls

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the means of production. Control over property and control over surplus are internally connected. In the process of producing wealth, the exploited class enriches the exploiter class, which controls property. A most general theory of class is this: whenever the effective control over the means of production is so unequal that a small minority has a monopolistic control over the use of means of production, then the majority will have to perform surplus labour for the minority, and thus a class division arises. Marx says in Capital 1 that: Wherever a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the worker, free or unfree, must add to the labour time necessary for his own maintenance an extra quantity of labour-time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owner of the means of production, whether this proprietor be … a slave owner … or a modern landlord or a capitalist (1977: 344). Further: The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs [feudalism, slavery, capitalism, etc.]. But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. marx and engels, 1975: 73

To theorize class is to ask at least three inter-related questions, apart from the issue of productive forces:8 the property question (who controls society’s productive resources), the labour process question (who controls whose labour and the deployment of the power to perform labour), and the labour-processcum-exploitation question (who appropriates surplus labour from whom, and how).9 Class is first of all a r­ elation of inequality in the ownership/control of 8 As mentioned before, it is only a high level of the development of productive forces that makes the existence of surplus possible, a surplus that, in turn, contributes to further development of existing productive forces under appropriate social relations via reinvestment of that surplus. 9 The latter is the process of the property-less (or those having inferior property rights or limited quantity of property relative to their reproduction need) performing surplus labor ­(‘extra quantity of labor-time’) for the propertied. This is linked to the process of production of wealth and surplus. It should be noted that in some form of class society, direct producers may have some control over labour process and some amount of property. Apart from these questions, there is the question of the state as discussed below.

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means of production. Unequal ­distribution of means of production makes class – class exploitation, i.e. appropriation of surplus – possible. The degree of control over the means of production shapes choices.10 If you do not own productive assets, you may have to work for someone for a wage or work for a landlord as a tenant, and if you have a lot of money in the bank, you may just write checks or fill out direct deposit forms to pay your bills. It is the control over property that leads to some people (landowners; factory owners) being able to make a claim on the labor of others (peasants; workers), i.e. claim on the surplus labor. The work necessary for social reproduction is performed by the propertyless, and the propertied class extracts surplus labor. What matters is not mere unequal distribution: it is only when the degree of inequality reaches beyond a point when some property owners are able to control the labour of others (those who do not own any or own little) that the result is the existence of classes. Class as a relation exists, and classes as a groups of people exist, when some people do not control society’s productive forces and production process,11 while other people do. ‘Classes are characterised by their position in the social system of economy, and primarily by their relation to the means of production’ (Trotsky, 1991: 210). Here is a fundamental definition of class which is given by Lenin in his A Great Beginning: Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means 10 11

What you have determines what you (may) have to do for a living, as Wright rightly says. These are the resources that are required to produce things that people need either as means of production (e.g. machines) or means of direct consumption (e.g. food). Marxist theory of class is based on a fundamental distinction between production and consumption (which along with exchange and distribution form a totality, in which production and its relations have ultimate primacy). Production produces things (which may go through some transformation as when wheat flour is made into bread at home or in a community kitchen) for direct consumption, and in which some people may work longer than other people. Consumption and the work that it presupposes (e.g. making of bread out of flour at home) is a social process, but it is not social in the same way that production of wheat on a farm is, which is exchanged for corn produced on another farm or for clothes produced in a factory far away. The social character of consumption, including transformation of things to directly edible items, must be explained in terms of social character of production (along with many other things). ‘Classes … are understood in terms of a relation to the means of production and not to the means of consumption or income’ (Andrew, 1990: 269). Besides, ‘A mere description of income differentials does not explain the source of the difference which, for Marx, pertains to ownership of the factors of production’ (ibid.).

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of production [and labor], by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labour of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy. lenin, 1965: 421

Class, as a word, is un-mistakeably a noun. There is no denying that class, conceptually, refers to a group of people.12 Class is not merely an adjective referring to – qualifying – a relation or a process. And classes are relatively large groups of people at that. These groups are different from one another in multiple inter-connected ways. They are different from one another on the basis of relation to the means of production: some own/control these and others do not. They are different one from another on the basis of their place in social production, their role in the social organisation of labour: some perform labour in social production and others do not or do not have to, for their material reproduction and social needs. And quite fundamentally, classes are large groups of people one of which is able to appropriate the labour of another group owing to all these attributes, e.g. the different places they occupy in social production. And as a result, classes are different as well on the basis of the differing share of social wealth coming out of social production. Their different role in social production signify their different modes of acquiring their share of social wealth. Thus class, for Lenin, refers to relationship and to ‘groups of people’, defined in specific ways, whose powers and vulnerabilities are governed by this relationship. Mao also had a similar view (Healy, 2008).13 12

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Classes are large groups of people but all groups of people are not obviously classes. The concept of group in itself ‘is still too indefinite and arbitrary: religious, ethnographical, political, juridical and other phenomena may also be considered as criteria distinguishing “groups.” There is no firm token by which particular “groups” in each of these spheres can be distinguished. The theory of the class struggle, however, represents a tremendous acquisition for social science for the very reason that it lays down the methods by which the individual can be reduced to the social with the utmost precision and definiteness. …[This] theory worked out the concept of the social-economic formation. Taking as its starting-point a fact that is fundamental to all human society, namely, the mode of procuring the means of subsistence, it connected up with this the relations between people formed under the influence of the given modes of procuring the means of subsistence, and showed that this system of relations (“relations of production,” to use Marx’s terminology) is the basis of society, which clothes itself in political and legal forms and in definite trends of social thought’. Lenin, 1963a: 410; italics in original). It should be stressed again that: ‘social classes …[are the] basic groupings of individuals in a society, opposed to one another by virtue of the role they play in the productive process,

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Class is not to be defined solely in terms of relations to means of production. Otherwise, slaves, free hired workers, and landless peasants will belong to the same class. ‘Legal’ position is important because it affects the type and intensity of exploitation (Croix, 1981: 68). Whether one has control over one’s own self is an important aspect of class.14 If class is central to society, exploitation is central to class. It is also the case that the relation or process of exploitation produces – is expressed in the form of – (large) ‘groups’ or ‘masses of people’: the exploited classes (e.g. poor peasants; workers) and exploiting classes (e.g. landlords; capitalists) (and some in between). Class is essentially the ways in which exploitation is reflected in a social structure (Croix, 1981). Class is the collective social expression of the fact of the unequal control over property in means of production and the fact of exploitation. When practices, relations and processes of unequal control over property and exploitation are congealed – objectified or materialized – in the form of groups or take the form of interaction between groups of people, we have classes, and we have class relations. The study of classes-as-groups is the study of class structure, a class map. Class is an internal relation: the character of one class is shaped by its relation to another class, and vice versa. What one class is or does or suffers from depends on what another class is, does or experiences: ‘An isolated class is not a theoretical object, but a nonsense’ (Bensaid, 2002: 111). What one class is cannot be understood in abstraction from another class. A peasant-tenant cannot pay rent to herself; she is internally – necessarily – connected to the landlord. Class relations, as Marx emphasizes in Poverty of Philosophy, are ‘social relations based on class antagonism’. ‘These relations are not relations between individual and individual, but between [classes]’, although class relations do shape relations between individuals as individuals. That is, they are relations between ‘worker and capitalist, between farmer and landlord, etc. Wipe out these relations and you annihilate all society’ (Marx, 1987: 87). What individuals as individuals do is important. But they do what they do in specific social context which is dominantly a class context, and more or less as individuals shaped by class relations, as bearers of these relations.

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from the point of view of the relations they establish among themselves in the organization of labor and in respect of property. Then, the elements of the concept of classes may be broken down, on the general and abstract level, into: (1) group of individuals (2) basic in society (3) opposed to one another (4) with respect to their function in the productive process in respect of: (a) labor relations (b) property’ (Dos Santos, 1970: 188). Note that Lenin defines class in terms of relations to means of production only. The relation to one’s own labour power is also important: slaves – and unfree labour in capitalism – not only do not own/control the means of production but also they do not control their labour power (Croix, 1981).

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I do not by any means depict the capitalist and the landowner in rosy colours. But individuals are dealt with here only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, the bearers of particular classrelations and [class] interests. My standpoint…can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them. marx, 1977: 92

Individuals and groups of individuals within classes have an interest in increasing their level of welfare but they have different strategic interests.15 Material welfare includes access to free time (leisure) and access to the means of subsistence such as food, housing, health-care, culture, etc. (whether directly, or through increased personal income). Welfare should be defined not just in terms of subsistence needs. Interests must include socially developed interests, luxury. In a letter to Lavrov, Engels says: ‘At a certain stage the production of man attains such a high-level that not only necessaries but also luxuries, although at first, only for a minority, are produced’ (in Marx and Engels, 1982: 284). Apart from material welfare/needs, all members of classes have an interest in increased self-respect, dignity, a sense of autonomy vis a vis oppression, etc., i.e. cultural welfare. With respect to the proletariat, for example, Marx wrote that, perhaps slightly exaggeratingly: it needs ‘its self-esteem, its pride, and its sense of independence more than its bread’ (Marx quoted in Elster 1985: 506). A higher level of cultural welfare comes with the higher level of material welfare, but cannot be reduced to that. With respect to how to satisfy their interests in a given level of welfare, i.e. welfare interests, different classes have different strategic interests, however. 15

Interests as a concept is crucial in class analysis. Classes are seen as having class-interests. Of course, one can say that classes are made up of individuals and it is individuals who have interests which are private interests. Such a view would be a-social. Marx says in Grundrisse: ‘private interest is itself already a socially determined interest, which can be achieved only within the conditions laid down by society and with the means provided by society; hence it is bound to the reproduction of these conditions and means. It is the interest of private persons; but its content, as well as the form and means of its realization, is given by social conditions independent of all’ (Marx 1971: 156). In fact, this follows if we situate Marx’s following point in its class-social context: ‘The essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations’ and that ‘Man is no abstract being encamped outside the world’, that ‘we must avoid postulating “society” again as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual. The individual is the social being’.

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Let us call them economic strategies of classes: one class will seek to increase rent or profit and another class will seek to increase the direct compensation one receives for one’s work.16 This antagonism in relation to material welfare is not just over subsistence needs. It is also with respect to luxury, even though it is agreed that like subsistence needs, what are luxury needs are also socially produced and vary from one place and time to another. So at a certain stage, ‘The struggle for existence’ is ‘transformed into a struggle for pleasures’ and not just only ‘mere means of subsistence’ but for ‘socially produced means of development’, and ‘to this stage the categories derived from the animal kingdom’ which concern merely bodily existence ‘are no longer applicable’ (Engels in Marx and Engels, 1982: 284). And, then with respect to how to achieve these economic strategic interests, classes deploy political strategies: these basically boil down to the antagonistically-­related classes seeking to control property, the ways in which it is used in production process, and the surplus that results, in their own respective interests. Both exploited classes and exploiting classes engage in class struggle: class struggle from below and class struggle from above, respective. The respective aims of such struggle is to reduce or eliminate class exploitation and increase/sustain exploitation. While all classes have a common interest from one vantage point, that is, from the vantage point of the higher level of material and cultural welfare, their interests are different and antagonistic, from the vantage point of economic and political strategies. In terms of the economic strategy, their interests are antagonistic: one class benefits at the expense of – at the cost of the labor effort of – another class.17 In terms of economic strategy, workers’ interests are in increased wages, more secure employment, safer working conditions, etc., which vary from one trade to another and because they vary and are variable, these are subjected to trade union practice. In terms of the political strategy (or revolutionary practice), their interests are even more antagonistic,18 as they 16

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In a class society, what one receives depends on one’s control over property and one’s survival needs rather than on the amount of work performed or one’s socially defined material and cultural needs. Laborers or capitalists are not classes merely because their sources of income – market chances – are different (sale of labour power or obtaining a profit). It should also be noted that: in the secondary sphere of exploitation, i.e. exploitation outside of the sphere of production, economic antagonism may be in between direct producers and users/ bankers/merchants. While it is possible to reduce the ratio of the society’s wealth that goes to the propertied classes to that which goes to the subordinated classes, the antagonism in relation to the

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concern the very nature of the mode of production and defense/protection of private property and the attendant imperative of the direct producers having to work under the control of property owners (wage-slavery) or having to surrender the surplus. Antagonism has another attribute: when we say that class interests are antagonistic, it means that: as long as the main system of class relations persists, the interests cannot be reconciled in any sustainable/irreversible, long-term manner, at a large geographical scale (e.g. a country, a group of countries and the world). However this antagonism at the level of economic and political strategies need not be expressed in realm of politics, i.e. subordinate classes may not be fully politically aware of their economic and political interests19 and may not be engaged in an open political battle with the ruling classes on the basis of that consciousness.20 While all members of a class have a common interest in increased level of material and cultural welfare, a class is not a sum of individuals, neither is class antagonism the sum of antagonisms between individuals of a class. Factors governing behavior of classes are different from that of individuals or indeed states. The behaviour of a class as such (of people as members of a class) may well be inexplicable in terms we can legitimately apply to their behaviour as individuals. A given individual – or a set of individuals – may behave as a constituent part of a class in a way that is quite different from the behavior we expect of him/them as individuals qua individuals (Croix, 1984). In a class society, a fundamental characteristic of which is that ‘a part of society possesses a monopoly of the means of production’, and that therefore the direct producer ‘must add to the labour time necessary for his [or her] own maintenance an extra quantity of labour-time in order to produce the

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control over property itself is more qualitative and less amenable to quantitative amelioration within a given mode of production. ‘The individuals constituting a given class may or may not be wholly or partly conscious of their own identity and common interests as a class, and they may or may not feel antagonism towards members of other classes as such. Class conflict (class struggle) is essentially the fundamental relationship between classes, involving exploitation and resistance to it, but not necessarily either class consciousness or collective activity in common, political or otherwise, although these features are likely to supervene when a class has reached a certain stage of development and become what Marx once (using a Hegelian idiom) called “a class for itself”….[In all class societies] the relationship [between classes] is specifically a class relationship, involving class conflict, the essence of which is exploitation, the appropriation of a surplus from the primary producer: proletarian, serf or slave. That is the essence of class’ (Croix, 1984: 100–101). However, the micro-political battles between classes – e.g. inside the sphere of production – always go on.

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means of subsistence for the owner of the means of production’ (Marx, 1977), there is also a monopoly of the means of free time (leisure). Some members (those who have an enormous amount of control over property and surplus) have a lot more free time than others. This does not mean that the former do not work. However, whether a property owner has to work alongside the direct producer (e.g. worker) is beside the point, unless they work to live because the amount of exploitation they subject their workers to is limited (Croix, 1981). To the extent that the propertied class works, what it gets for its own labour as a ratio of its share of the social product (e.g. its total income) is very small. Of course, the ratio varies from one member of the propertied class to another, leading to the gradation within the propertied class: some members’ income may be more due to their own labour than others. ‘The propertied classes… are those who can, if they wish, live without actually working for their daily livelihood: they may work or not, but they do not have to’ (Croix, 1984: 107). Thinking about class as a relation of exploitation and in terms of large groups of people has important implications for understanding a class society as a whole (Croix, 1981). Even if the class of direct producers turns out to be the minority of the population of a society, but if such a minority produces the surplus that is appropriated by the class of non-producers, i.e. if the surplus they produce is the surplus that is appropriated, then we still live in an exploitative class-­society. This means that even if in a society, small-scale independent producers (who are not exploited by anyone) outnumber a class of direct producers who give up the surplus they produce, that is a class society.21 21

If these direct producers are wage-labourers in that society, that is a capitalist class society. A system of exploitation dominates qualitatively when its logic (logic of ­reproduction – for example, logic of competitive profit making) determines all kinds of economic activity. Its domination also takes quantitative forms. In concrete societies, there can be a numerical – quantitative – dominance of small-scale producers (including even in nonprofit sector). In other words, what they produce may be a large – or even a dominant part of – the total social product. But that does not mean that that society is dominantly a small-scale producer society (e.g. a peasant society). Indeed, as de Ste. Croix points out: ‘the nature of a given mode of production is decided, not according to who does most of the work of production, but according to the method of surplus-appropriation, the way in which the dominant classes extract their surplus from the primary producers.’ (1984: 107). In a society, it is possible that, for example, small-scale producers who are not tied to a propertied class in any relation of extra-economic dependence produce the bulk of production, but if the propertied classes may obtain the great bulk of their regular surplus from a different type of labour (e.g. unfree labour), then society’s class relation will be one that is based on unfree labour. A society where the major part of production is

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Thus far we have discussed exploitation in general terms. We now need to see this in terms of its more concrete forms. There are two major forms of class exploitation. The first form is direct: this is the exploitation of wage-labourers, slaves, serfs and debt bondsmen, etc. and also of tenants and ordinary debtors, by particular employers, masters, landowners or moneylenders (Croix, 1984). One form of direct exploitation happens in the realm of production (landlords’ exploitation of peasants; capitalists’ exploitation of workers), and another form happens in exchange relations: exploitation of debtors by money-lenders or of peasants and workers by merchants, etc. Direct exploitation can be based on extra-economic coercion (pre-capitalism) or economic coercion (as in capitalism): i.e. based on whether or not direct producers are forced to work for a certain member of the exploiting class. Exploitation can be indirect: this is when the community or the state which claims to represent the community, but which actually represents primarily the interests of a superior class or classes, imposes burdens disproportionately upon a particular subject class or classes (de Ste. Croix, 1984). These burdens divide up conveniently under three headings: taxation, military conscription, and forced labour or personal services. Different forms of exploitation are represented in the Figure 9 below. As already mentioned, class society is to be seen in terms of antagonism between two basic classes, i.e. between those who own society’s productive resources and control their deployment and are exploiters, and those who who lack such ownership/control and are exploited. This is the two-class model. At a more concrete level, there exist in class theory, apart from fractions of the basic classes, other classes than the two basic classes. At a concrete level, class relations are also reproduced through, and feed into, relations which are not based in class: these are relations based on gender, race and sexuality, etc. Differences based in race and gender existed in pre-class society. But it is only with the class ­division, the ­‘division between those who produce wealth and those who direct its production’ that race and gender-based differences ‘become the basis for the performed by people who are not workers working for a capitalist but where the bulk of the surplus that is appropriated by a non-producing class is in the form of surplus value, is dominantly a capitalist society, and therefore the main line of class conflict is between capitalist and working classes. And such dominance will be the case even if direct or small-scale producers produce a surplus which they keep in their bank accounts or in a community fund controlled by all. A non-antagonistic transfer of surplus or a temporal transfer of surplus (one person producing surplus and taking it) does not signify class relation, because the latter is is a relation of social antagonism.

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Forms of exploitation

DIRECT

EXCHANGE

PRODUCTION

PRECAPITALIST

EXTRA ECONOMIC COERCION

INDIRECT

PRECAPITALIST

CAPITALIST

CAPITALIST

ECONOMIC COERCION

APPROPRIATION OF ABSOLUTE SURPLUS VALUE

APPROPRIATION OF RELATIVE SURPLUS VALUE

Figure 9  Forms of exploitation

distinctive forms of oppression associated with racism and patriarchy’. Associated with class contradictions are ‘mutual indifference replacing the mutual concern that was characteristic of’ the pre-class society. With ‘the creation of a growing surplus that everyone wishes to possess (because no one has enough)’, what happens is that: ‘all manner of oppressions based on both the existing and new divisions of society become possible’. Such oppressions become useful for the ruling economic class. ‘Racism, patriarchy, religion, nationalism, etc. become the most effective ways of rationalizing these oppressive economic practices, whose underlying conditions they help over time to reproduce’. And ‘Upon frequent repetition, they also sink deep roots into people’s minds and emotions and acquire a relative autonomy from the situation in which they originated, which makes it increasingly difficult for those a­ ffected to recognize the crucial economic role that these different oppressions continue to play’ (Ollman, 2003).

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Historically Specific Form of Class: Class in Pre-capitalist Society

So, class is about exploitation. Class – class exploitation – exists at two different scales of analysis: trans-historical class society, and specific forms of class society (e.g. feudalism; capitalism). This means that: class cannot be reduced to capital(ism). ‘Capital did not invent surplus labour’, Marx (1977: 344) says. Exploitation and class predate capital (in its productive form).22 What was discussed in the previous section concerns class at a more general level of analysis, at which class is about property and appropriation of the results of the ways in which property is used in social production (i.e. production and appropriation of surplus). A class relation, relation of exploitation, results from a qualitatively vast unequal distribution of powers over means of production and of labor. But the forms that surplus labor and property rights in means of production take vary historically. There is a fundamental distinction between pre-capitalist forms and the capitalist form, as between pre-capitalist forms themselves. To understand these we have to move from class analysis at the first level which identifies class with a general mechanism of exploitation rooted in unequal rights over property (and coercive relation between groups, with their different relations to property) to the second level of class analysis: to the specific forms of class society, i.e. to ‘specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers’ (Marx, 1981: 927). Marx elaborates this point further. While it is the case that ‘social relations between the producers will naturally vary according to the character of the means of production’, i.e. their productivity (Marx, 1976: 28; italics added), it is also the case that these social relations (class relations) will vary according to the character of the forms in which surplus is appropriated when the means of production are put to use. Marx explains in Capital 1: What distinguishes the various economic formations of society – the ­distinction between for example a society based on slave labour and a ­society based on wage labour – is the form in which this surplus labour is in each case extorted from the immediate producer, the worker (1977: 325).

22

Indeed, Gibson-Graham are right that Marx’s language of class includes both capitalist and non-capitalist class processes (Gibson-Graham, Resnick and Wolff, 2000:5), but Marx conceptualizes these processes differently than they do: for Marx, in a given society, a given set of class relations dominates over – and colours – others.

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In other words, the process of exploitation that defines class is a heterogeneous process. It is characterized by difference. One form of this difference is: whether coercion deployed in exploitation is extra-economic or economic. In pre-capitalist societies, exploitation at the point of production happens dominantly through extra-economic coercion (Wood, 1995; Brenner 1986). In feudalism, direct producers, the toiling masses, have a certain degree of property rights in that they have direct access to the means of production and subsistence. (But their access is not absolute, neither are property rights of, for example, feudal landlords). Peasant-serfs had personal relations of dependence on lords. Serfs are commodity owners only partly: The serf sells only a portion of his labour-power. It is not he who receives wages from the owner of the land; it is rather the owner of the land who receives a tribute from him. The serf belongs to the soil, and to the lord of the soil he brings its fruit. The free labourer, on the other hand, sells his very self, and that by fractions…to the capitalist (ibid. p. 20). As Lenin notes: ‘The feudal organisation of social labour rested on the discipline of the bludgeon, while the working people, robbed and tyrannised by a handful of landowners, were utterly ignorant and downtrodden. The capitalist organisation of social labour rested on the discipline of hunger’ (Lenin, 1965: 419). What about slavery? Marx says in Wage labour and capital: The slave did not sell his labour-power to the slave-owner, any more than the ox sells his labour to the farmer. The slave, together with his labourpower, was sold to his owner once for all. He is a commodity that can pass from the hand of one owner to that of another. He himself is a commodity, but his labour-power is not his commodity. marx, 1976: 19–20

If the slave is a commodity, they cannot own that commodity. They cannot own their labour power. They have to be owned. Their own ability to work belongs to someone else. And because ability to work cannot be separated from one’s body, i.e. one’s own person, therefore the slave as a person belongs to someone else, just like the coal in the earth. Under slavery, the slave-owner was obliged to feed their property-less slaves even when they had no work for the owner, and the salves were obliged to work for the owner and surrender the entire surplus. Slavery as a class society is based on extra-economic coercion. Connected to the fact that pre-capitalist class relations are extra-economic and capitalist class relations are based on economic coercion (i.e. capitalist

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r­elations use nominally free labourers) is the fact that there are important geographical differences between them. Under feudalism, peasants work for a few days on their own land to reproduce the equivalent of the means subsistence they need, and they are forced to work for a few days for the landlords for free (i.e. they provide labor services for free). Their access to means of production and therefore to their subsistence is conditional upon their performance of surplus labour for landlords, which is akin to the fact that wage labourers’ access to means of subsistence depends on their performance of surplus labour for their employers. In the labor process, serfs as direct producers have a certain degree of autonomy (they have some amount of power to decide how to produce with what technology and so on). Here there is a geographical separation between sites of labor performed (i.e. sites of necessary labor and surplus labor): labor performed for one’s self/family and labor performed for the reproduction of the ruling class, respectively. Surplus labor takes the form of forced labor:23 Suppose the working day consists of 6 hours of necessary labour, and 6 hours of surplus-labour. … The necessary labour which [an unfree peasant] performs for his own maintenance is distinctly marked off from his surplus-labour…. The one he does on his own field, the other on the seignorial estate. Both parts of the labour-time exist independently, side by side one with the other. In the corvée the surplus-labour is accurately marked off from the necessary labour. However, this clearly alters nothing in the quantitative relation of surplus-labour to necessary labour. Three days’ surplus-labour in the week remain three days that yield no equivalent to the worker himself, whether the surplus labour is called corvée or wage-labour. marx, 1977: 344

Marx explains further in Capital 1: Under the corvée system…the labour of the serf for himself and his compulsory labour for the lord of the land, are demarcated very clearly both in space and time. In slave labour, even the part of the working day in which the slave is only replacing the value of his own means of existence, in which he therefore actually works for himself alone, appears as labour 23

It can take the form of product of labor, or money-rent extracted by virtue of extra economic means.

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for his master. All his labour appears as unpaid labour. In wage labour, on the contrary, even surplus-labour, or unpaid labour, appears as paid. In one case, the property-relation conceals the slave’s labour for himself; in the other case, the money-relation conceals the uncompensated labour of the wage labourer.24 marx, 1977: 680

There is another difference between pre-capitalist and capitalist class relations. In some pre-capitalist class context, one form of private property is based in individual labour: the private property of petty commodity producers. This form of private property was negated by capitalist private property, which is based on the exploitation of wage labour. Surplus labour pumped by capitalists out of direct producers is converted into capitalist private property. Towards the end of Capital 1 Marx says this about private property, which is a fulcrum of class relations: ‘Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labour and the external conditions of labour belong to private individuals’ (Marx, 1977: 927). But the nature of private property varies, depending on whether ‘private individuals are workers or non-workers, private property has a different character’ (ibid.): ‘Private property which is personally earned’ is based ‘on the fusing together of the isolated, independent working individual with the conditions of his labour’ (p. 928). This form is ‘supplanted by capitalist private property, which rests on exploitation of the alien, but formally free labour’ (ibid.). In terms of access to property, there are interesting differences between pre-capitalist direct producers (serf-workers) and capitalist direct producers (nominally free wage-workers). In his Principles of communism, Engels draws a sharp distinction between them: ‘The serf has the possession and use of an instrument of production, a strip of land, in return for which he hands over a portion of the yield or performs work [free services for his lord]’ (Marx and Engels 1977a: 84). In contrast, under capitalist class relations: ‘The p ­ roletarian works with the instruments of production belonging to another for this other in return for a portion of the yield’ (ibid.; italics). Further: ‘The serf gives, the proletarian is given. The serf has a guaranteed existence, the proletarian

24

‘The wage form thus extinguishes every trace of the division of the working day into necessary labour and surplus-labour, into paid and unpaid labour. All labour appears as paid labour’ (Marx, 1977: 680).

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has not. The serf stands outside of competition, the proletarian stands in it’ (ibid.).25 In addition, pre-capitalist class relations are characterized by a relatively lower degree of socialization (=the degree of inter-dependency among units of material production such as peasant households). Geographically speaking, they are much more localized. Pre-capitalist class relations are based on localized production. The class power of the feudal landlord class, relative to that of the capitalist class, is much more localized, i.e. geographically circumscribed, and geographically circumscribed character allows the exercise of extra-­economic coercion. It is important to talk about the differences between pre-capitalism and capitalism so one can appreciate the progressive character of capitalist class relation. Capitalist class relation is progressive in relation to what has gone on before it, and regressive in comparison to what is necessary and possible in place of it (i.e. a society where there is democratic control over resources and over the state). The fact that class exploitation takes different forms in different types of class society gives rise to different logics of reproduction, and different sets of relationship between the economic and the political (more on which is blow). Feudal class structure is different from capitalistic class structure. These have different kinds of classes (and class-fractions). So they are different kinds of societies, economically, politically, culturally as well as geographically.26 Places with different kinds of class structure are reproduced differently: they have different levels of development influenced by class relations. Thus the vantage point of class allows one to differentiate between (groups of) individuals, time periods, places and sectors of economic activity (e.g. pre-capitalist agriculture vs capitalist factory production).

25

26

As well: as Engels says in Principles of communism: ‘The serf frees himself either by running away to the town and there becoming a handicraftsman or by giving his landlord money instead of labour and products, thereby becoming a free leaseholder; or by driving his feudal lord away and himself becoming a proprietor, in short, by entering in one way or another the ranks of the possessing class and competition. The proletarian frees himself by abolishing competition, private property, and all class distinctions’ (Marx and Engels, 1977a: 84). They also vary ecologically (in terms of the use of the environment).

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233

Objective Conditions, Class Struggle, Class Consciousenss and Transition in Class Form of Society

Class relations as a form of social relations of production are in motion, so they change over time. Summarizing Marx’s ideas, Lenin says: ‘all classes and all countries are regarded, not statistically, but dynamically – i.e., not in a state of immobility – but in motion (whose laws are determined by the economic conditions of existence of each class)’ (Lenin, 1977a: 40). As argued before: particular forms of relations and particular stages in the development of productive forces are combined: The relations of production in their totality constitute what is called the social relations, society, and, moreover, a society at a definite stage of historical development, a society with peculiar, distinctive characteristics. Ancient society, feudal society, bourgeois (or capitalist) society, are such totalities of relations of production, each of which denotes a particular stage of [economic] development in the history of mankind.27 marx, 1976: 29; italics in original

The social relations within which individuals produce are transformed, with the change and development of the material means of production, of the forces of production. These social relations, and thus class relations and classes, change as material aspects of production, including techniques and productivity change. As Marx (1976: 28) explains: these social relations and ‘the conditions under which they exchange their activities and share in the total act of production’, all these ‘will naturally vary according to the character of the means of production’.28 The new ways of production should not be merely seen in terms of things, however. It is not as if new class relations are a direct response to what are merely new techniques or new ways of producing things. The new ways of producing should be seen in relation to social relations of production. When new, more efficient, modes of producing wealth arise, production of surplus 27 28

The interaction between forces and relations is a trans-historic phenomenon. See Smith (1992) for a discussion on this interaction in the pre-capitalist class context. Marx provides an example from outside of production (i.e. army): ‘With the discovery of a new instrument of warfare, the firearm, the whole internal organization of the army was necessarily altered, the relations within which individuals compose an army and can work as an army were transformed, and the relation of different armies to another was likewise changed’ (Marx, 1976: 28).

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expands, as more work is done every hour/day. This gives rise to the possibility for greater amount of surplus appropriation, and with this, new manner – new form – of surplus appropriation. Indeed, it is true to a large extent that often new ways of production are developed as a direct means of expanding surplus to be appropriated. Both productive forces and class relations change. The change in productive forces is more regular and continuous relative to the change in class relations. It is not simply the fact that productive forces change and class relations change in tandem. Underlying this change is a contradiction between the two: ‘every revolution in property relations is the essential result of the creation of new productive forces which no longer correspond to the old property relations’ (Marx and Engels, 1977a: 88). Or, as Marx put it famously in his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy: At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression for the same thing – with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. marx and engels, 1977a: 503–504

As Marx also explains in Poverty of Philosophy: the relations in which productive forces are developed [i.e. the class relations] are anything but eternal laws [and that] they correspond to a definite development of men and of their productive forces, and that a change in man’s productive forces necessarily brings about a change in their relations of production… As the main thing is not to be deprived of the fruits of civilization, of the acquired productive forces, the traditional forms in which they were produced must be smashed. From this moment, the revolutionary class becomes conservative.29 marx, 1987: 106

29

A trans-historical reason why social relations (inter-class and intra-class relations) are contradicted by the development of productive forces is provided here: once the humanity is used to certain ways of producing (and consuming), it will not settle for a lower level. Once we are used to typing on a laptop or a desktop, we may not generally like to write using an ink-pen.

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Engels provides a historical example to illustrate the mechanism, in his Principles of Communism: when, towards the end of the Middle Ages, a new mode of production was introduced in the form of manufacture, which was then incompatible with the then existing feudal and guild property, manufacture, which had outgrown the old property relations, created a new property form of ownership – private ownership. marx and engels, 1977a: 88

Major epochal transformation – of one kind of society to another – presupposes contradictions within the sphere of objective conditions. An ordinary contradiction between productive forces and class (and intra-class) relations will not work. It must be a contradiction that cannot be resolved within the framework of existing class (and intra-class) relations, nor is it one that people can resolve whenever they want. No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new and higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. marx, in marx and engels, 1977a: 504

It is such extra-ordinary contradiction between productive forces and class relations that set the context within which people’s will and action are performed and within which they imagine a new future. Marx continues: ‘mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve’; and ‘the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation’ (Marx in Marx and Engels, 1977a: 504). Class relations promote the development of productive forces which results in production of surplus. And class relations allow the appropriation of surplus. Class relations can also fetter development of productive forces, which can cause a crisis of production and relative scarcity of means of subsistence. Such crisis, combined with class struggle caused by exploitation and unequal distribution of wealth, and by the effects of the crisis, lead to changes in one form of class society to another, although there is no inevitability (See Figure 10). Thus, two mechanisms underlie the change-via-contradiction in class society explaining how one form of class society may replace another. One is the contradiction between productive forces and class relations, including ­intra-class relations through which class relations as such are reproduced.

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Promote development of productive forces which in turn make possible surplus production.

Class Relations Fetter development of productive forces, which can lead to a crisis in surplus production; and the crisis combined with class struggle caused by class relations of exploitation can lead to changes in one form of class society to another.

Allow the appropriation of surplus.

Figure 10  Class relations, fettering of productive forces, class struggle and crisis

­ nother, a more proximate cause of change, is the contradiction between A classes as agents working in their own class interests: as the development of surplus progresses, with it the struggle over surplus (i.e. as class struggle) also develops. As a result, class society begins to differentiate: different kinds – forms – of class society emerges. It is not easy to talk about objective conditions and class struggle in ­abstraction from class consciousness. As discussed in the last chapter, people’s consciousness does not determine their existence, although consciousness, usually that which is achieved from a previous time, does have some influence on their existence. Sometimes, this influence can be enormous. There exist at least three vantage points from which to examine the relation between ­objective conditions and consciousness, in a class context. The first vantage point is that: there is no such thing as objective interests. Interest are what they are on the basis of how they are perceived. Chantal Mouffe writes: ‘How can it be maintained that economic agents can have interests defined at the

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economic level which would be represented a posteriori at the political and ideological levels?…that amounts to stating that interests can exist prior to the discourse in which they are formulated and articulated’ (Mouffe, 1983: 21).  This  is  ­unalloyed idealism. When oppressed classes struggle (slaves or peasants or ­wage-workers) struggle, they may not always clearly perceive what their interests are. The second and the third vantage points acknowledge objective interests but draw different conclusions. One is ‘hyper-optimism’: objective conditions will inevitably produce class consciousness. Another is hyper-pessimism: objective conditions in class societies impede class consciousness of exploited classes. And this fact combined with the fact that ‘the dominant ideology of every society is the ideology of the dominant class’ which keeps the exploited class subordinated through its ideas, can lead to hyper-pessimism (see ­Marcuse, 1991). Both ­hyper-optimism and hyper-pessimism are problematic. Mere sense perception or experience of life – whether it is conducive to class consciousness or not – is no guarantee for a proper understanding of the reality, although our understanding is rooted in – and it emerges from – these. One’s approach must be dialectical-­materialist, encompassing an objective view of the world, and it must avoid objectivism according to which objective conditions are sufficient to either ensure class struggle and class consciousness or to hinder it.30 If objective conditions exist independently of consciousness, then the question is: what role does consciousness play in the changing of objective conditions. One may answer by saying this: given the material conditions’ internal contradictions, how new things can happen can be quickened because of the intervention of theory (correct consciousness), that is, a theory that correctly reflects objective conditions (of a class society such as capitalism), in terms of their past, present and future direction of change. The theory can advance people’s consciousness by making make them aware of what they can do to obtain the changes in the objective conditions in their own interest. Consciousness including in its theoretical form can never create things for which material conditions do not exist. Theory – i.e. the more-or-less correct social 30

Lenin says in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: ‘The fact that you live and conduct your business, beget children, produce products and exchange them, gives rise to an objectively necessary chain of development, which is independent of your social consciousness, and is never grasped by the latter completely. The highest task of humanity is to comprehend this objective logic of economic evolution (the evolution of social life) in its general and fundamental features, so that it may be possible to adapt to it one’s social consciousness and the consciousness of the advanced classes of all capitalist countries in as definite, clear and critical fashion as possible’. (Lenin, 1962: 325).

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c­ onsciousness – cannot create social being, out of nothing. The recognition that the emergence of genuine class consciousness (and the socialist movement) has an objective foundation does not diminish the importance of the struggle to develop that consciousness. Objective conditions and their contradictions do not automatically get registered in consciousness except in a purely elementary manner. Changing the objective conditions requires conscious clarification of objective conditions, although without a given set of objective conditions it is not possible to develop a certain form of consciousness that is required to launch class struggle to change the existing conditions.31 Objective conditions are not automatically amenable to human consciousness for people to adequately reflect on these conditions. There are two reasons. One is more philosophical, and this has got to do with the stratification of the reality. If society exists at two broad ontological levels – the level of relations/structures and mechanisms, and the level of effects and experience – then consciousness of society has to exist at these levels. Correspondingly, there is consciousness with respect to the content and there is consciousness with respect to the form, of social relations.32 These two levels or forms of consciousness are not of same ontological significance. It is often the case that what is real and what appears to be the real are not the same. There is often a contradiction. Conscious intervention is necessary to go behind the veil. In general, the reality has two components: underlying mechanisms that are hidden and the surface appearance. The problem that stratification of reality poses is compounded by increasing complexity of a given class society such as capitalism. In all social formations of any complexity – and in the capitalist social formation in particular – people in their intercourse are not conscious of what kind of social relations are being formed, in accordance with what laws they develop, etc. For instance, a peasant when he sells his grain enters into ‘intercourse’ with the world producers of grain in the world market, but he is not conscious of it; nor is he conscious of what kind of

31

32

The degree of development of theoretical clarification and consciousness that is possible depends on the degree of development of productive forces, and social relations and their contradiction between the two; it is difficult to imagine socialism on the basis of contradiction between slaves and save owners and on the basis of contradiction between slavery and development of productive forces under slavery. Form is in two senses: form of expression of something and in the sense of the ways in which a process is played out (Ollman, 2003).

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social relations are formed on the basis of exchange. Social consciousness reflects social being.33 lenin, 1962: 323

4

Class and the State: Political Oppression as a Part of Class Relation

There is an additional aspect of class society. It is about the state. The state and class are generally, treated as separate and as inter-acting. But there is a different and more adequate way in which their relation can be seen. Class and state (i.e. political power as it is concentrated in the state) are internally (i.e. necessarily) connected, and this relation is a symmetrical one. One cannot exist without another. There is a reciprocal interaction. As Engels says in his Origin of the Family, private property and the state: Because the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check, but because it [also] arose, at the same time, in the midst of the conflict [between] … these classes, it is, as a rule, the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class, which through the medium of the state, becomes also the politically dominant class, and thus acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class. The state of antiquity was above all the state of the slave-owners for the purpose of holding down the slaves, as the feudal state was the organ of the nobility for holding down the peasant serfs and bondsmen, and the modern representative state is an instrument for exploiting wage-labor by capital. in marx and engels, 1977c: 327

The state makes it possible for class exploitation to exist and continue. ‘[The] exploiters inevitably transform the state… into an instrument of the rule of their class, the exploiters, over the exploited’, whether the state is democratic or not (Lenin, 1977c: 34). If the state just existed and impacted class, without any necessary interest in protecting class interests, then one could fight against class exploitation and significantly reduce the problems caused by class. If class was merely about economic exploitation of the majority by a tiny minority, about control over property, over the fruits of labour, over surplus labour, and so on, a struggle against the class which controls property and surplus could diminish,

33

Lenin goes on to add: ‘A reflection may be an approximately true copy of the reflected, but to speak of identity is absurd’ (ibid.).

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and with some difficulty perhaps, remove the structure of class relations. In fact, the belief that such a thing is possible is at the heart of much of thinking about class, whether in Analytical Marxism or in ­Post-structuralist Marxism. To remove the structure of class relations, one must remove the state, without which class structure – including private property relations – cannot exist and be reproduced. The direct producers are not just economically exploited and excluded from control over private property; they are simultaneously also politically oppressed. They are politically oppressed in that they lack control not only over property, production process and the surplus but also over state power, which ensures the continuation of that lack. They are powerless in two senses therefore: economic and political. That is: they are powerless in terms of production and exchange, and in terms of the overall management/regulation of the common affairs of society as a whole. The structure of class has a necessarily political character: the state and class are two arms of class relationship (see the Figure 11 below). One arm signifies economic exploitation and exclusion, and another arm signifies political oppression (and also exploitation via taxation, forced labour, etc.). It is the case that, as Marx says in German Ideology: every class which is struggling for mastery, even when its domination… postulates the abolition of the old form of society in its entirety and of domination itself, must first conquer for itself political power in order to represent its interest in turn as the general interest (1978: 54). Then this means that that class lacks political power. Powerless-ness is a hallmark of classness. The class that controls means of production and its use is the class that controls political power, including its ideological and coercive

Dominant Class

State

Class Relationships

Figure 11  The state as an arm of class

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apparatuses. The class that lacks control over property and its surplus is the class that lacks control over state power and must therefore achieve it for it to gain control over the economic aspects of class structure of society (i.e. property, production, surplus, etc.). In so far as the state fundamentally and necessarily influences the direct relationship between owners and non-owners of property, the state is a part of theory of class. That is: if the relation based on control over property and surplus defines the direct relationship between classes, the state defines what can be called the indirect class relationship, and this must be a part of class theory.34 If class theory is not only about the existence of class relations but also about possibility and necessity of its abolition, and if the state is the biggest obstacle to such abolition, then class theory sans the class character of the state and the political character of class is undialectical, and therefore, uncritical and inadequate. While the state makes it possible for class relations to exist, the actual ways in which the state enters into the very constitution of class is different in different class societies and historical-geographical contexts within a class society. Sometimes, the relation between the state and class will be a little more autonomous than in other societies (or contexts). In pre-capitalist societies, economic exploitation is more directly effected through political power (via decentralized form of state power), and in capitalist class society, things are a little different: the state does not ordinarily force members of the working class to go work for given members of the capitalist class. It does not have to. Dispossessed of property, workers are forced to work for a capitalist for a wage. While it is true that class societies are different one from another on the basis of ‘the mode in which this surplus-labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer’, what is common to all class society is that surplus labour is extracted. A presupposition of the latter is that effective control over property is in the hands of a minority. And this is not possible without the state: in all class society, the state executes the defense of private property. Of course, the actual ways in which the state executes its functions and relates to classes and class-fractions are different in different contexts. This ­difference is determined by the forms in which surplus is actually extracted,35 34

35

How class relationships influence the state and how the relatively autonomous state elites react to the pressures of class and act in their own interests as well belong to what is called state theory. And these are different not only between pre-capitalist and capitalist forms of class society (as discussed in this chapter) but also within the capitalist form of class society, as we will see in the next two chapters.

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along with various empirical conditions such as race, environmental factors, the historical ‘survivals’ of a place, all of which are contingently connected to the class context. In a brilliant passage in Capital volume 3, Marx says: The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of domination and servitude, as this grows directly out of production itself and reacts back on it as determinant. On this is based the entire configuration of the economic community arising from the actual relations of production, and hence also its specific political form. It is in each case the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate producers – a relation whose particular form naturally corresponds always to a certain level of development of the type and manner of labour and hence, to its social productive power – in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice and hence also the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the specific form of the state in each case. This does not prevent the same economic basis – the same in its major conditions – from displaying ­endless variations and gradation in its appearance, as the result of innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural conditions, racial relations, external influences acting from outside, etc., and these can only be understood by analysing these empirically given conditions.36 marx 1991: 927–928

It is now possible to extend the scope of class. At a very general level, class has at least the following inter-related elements. The political oppression element is shaped by the labour-process and exploitation elements,37 which are not possible without the property relations element.38 The exploitation aspect of class and its oppression aspect are mediated by class struggle. A basic problem of production in a class society is how to extract surplus product and to protect the monopolistic control over property. The problem exists because: the exploited class tends to resist not only the fact that they do not control p ­ roperty 36

37 38

Class contradictions between capital and labour (as between other basic classes) are always ‘overdetermined’ by the state, religion, political movements, national past, local customs, world context, etc., and this over-determination – ‘overdetermined contradiction’ between basic classes – may be overdetermined in the direction of ‘revolutionary rupture’ or ‘historical inhibition’ (Althusser, 2005: 106). Exploitation happens inside national boundaries and across national boundaries (exploitation of workers in imperialized countries by imperialist capital). In the capitalist class society, an additional element is added: exchange relations, the mechanisms that determine classes’ relation to property and means of subsistence and through which exploitation is effected.

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but also the fact that they have to perform surplus labour which does not benefit them but benefits another class.39 Exploitation is a coercive affair and means of coercion are ultimately in the hands of the state. Exploitation – and economic oppression (separation of workers from means of production and subsistence, a separation that continues in new forms of primitive accumulation or dispossession, including through neoliberal austerity) compels the exploited class to resist and revolt against the exploiter class. Therefore, political oppression is simultaneously necessary. It is not an epiphenomenon. Political power is an essential aspect of class relation. Indeed, the state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms exist and are irreconcilable. 5 Conclusion Common to all class societies is the fact that a social surplus exists due to the on-going, contradiction-ridden, development of productive forces beyond the level prevalent in the original class-less society. As production methods develop gradually, as therefore the amount of surplus expands (as a society with the ability to produce surplus starts producing a surplus and therefore becomes a qualitatively different society), social relations of production take a leap: they become class relations. So the appearance of class is a progressive act: it furthers the development of productive forces. Common to all class societies is also the fact that that surplus is appropriated by a small minority class and therefore the class which produces the surplus is not able to (fully) enjoy it. Often it even does not have access to the things it absolutely needs for its reproduction. That is the negative side of class. Class society represents the inter-­penetration of these two opposites. Relatively harmonious relations among human beings become the opposite: antagonistic class relations. Antagonistic relations are expressed in the form of antagonistic class consciousness and antagonistic class struggle, of varying intensity and of varying degree of covertness, over time and space. Class theory must help one show how class relations constitute the framework within which production happens, and which shapes production, sometimes fettering it, and sometimes promoting it. In Poverty of Philosophy, Marx says: It must be shown how wealth was produced within this antagonism, how the productive forces were developed at the same time as class antagonism, how one of the classes, the bad side, the drawback of society, 39

This shows that coercion and persuasion do not always work.

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went on growing until the material conditions for its emancipation had attained full maturity. marx, 1987: 106

Class is both a thing and not a thing. It is a ‘thing’ in the sense of being a structure (e.g. a group of people). It is also a relation/process. It is a relation between classes. It is a process of interaction between them and between class fractions. The essence of a class is not an abstraction inherent in a single class. It is an ensemble of relations between/among classes, and between classes and the state, which is the necessary condition of existence of class. Each class is connected with every other class. Class relations are relations of identity and difference: there is some common ground between classes,40 and classes have mutually different – antagonistic – interests. The different classes and class-fractions – their relationships – along with other relations make the totality of the class-divided society. Particular classes and their fractions interact with one another and with non-class groups. What a class does (e.g. its political action in its own interests) and thinks is determined by this totality, including the logic of its own reproduction. The class totality is more than the sum of individual classes, some of which dominate over others. At the same time, both the class totality and individual classes have their own irreducible autonomy: the totality is not reduced to individual classes or classfractions, and the individual classes or fractions or indeed individual members of a class are not reducible to the totality. Yet, and to repeat, much of what each class or class fraction or member of a class does or think, more or less, reflects the dynamics of the totality as a whole. The totality that the system of classes is a totality that is constituted by interpenetration of, struggle, of opposites. And this struggle of opposites must be, before it is anything else, the conflict between basic classes, at the level of the societal whole (see Slaughter, 1975). Class relations are antagonistic because one class surrenders the fruits of its labour to another class and is alienated as well from full control over property (whether in means of production or in labour or both). So class relations have a potential to give rise to class conflict, in the realms of consciousness41 and politics. Class conflict in the real world is sometimes overt and sometimes covert and which is sometimes localized and sometimes not so. Further, class relations (along with intra-class relations of competition which class relations 40 41

For example, capitalists and workers may both be against feudal landlords. Althusser says: ‘the ideological struggle is an organic part of the class struggle’ (Althusser, 2005: 12). It is in ideology that people become conscious of objective class contradictions and fight those out.

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shape) promote the development of productive forces. After productive forces develop beyond a point, the extant class relations become a fetter on the further development of productive forces, leading to a crisis in the sphere of production and exchange, the crisis that contributes to further deepening of class struggle, which is always endemic to the class-society. So one form of class society changes into another (e.g. feudal to capitalistic) because of the combined effect of the contradiction between productive forces and class relations (structural contradiction in a class society) and because of the class struggle (political contradiction between classes). Class relations have different temporal horizons. The major epoch-changing structural contradiction (one which leads to changes in one form of class society to another) operates in a longer time horizon, while struggle over changes within a class society can be more regular and happen in a shorter time horizon. Small-scale crisis is more frequent than large-scale crisis. The different class societies (slavery, feudalism, etc.) are different forms of a given content, class relation (control over property in means of production and labour). A new class society developing from the wombs of the previous class society represents a negation of this society. It preserves and develops further some elements of the old society and negates other elements. Class relations based on private property in the means of production and in one’s labour are negated by capitalist class relations where private property in means of production is based on the exploitation of other people’s labour. Capitalist class relations will tend to be negated by transitional (socialist) class relations, where private property develops in the direction of becoming collective property. Class relations are a deeply materialist affair. Private property in means of production, control over production and appropriation of surplus, and the state defense of private property, all these exist independently of how classes and class-fractions think about these things at a given point in time, and gradually class consciousness starts reacting on existing material conditions of class society and shaping class relations. The material aspects of class, including relations of production and exchange and the crisis-ridden accumulation of wealth, and class consciousness, interact with each other within the totality of class, a totality within which the material aspects have ultimate primacy.42 Class consciousness – consciousness of a class about its 42

Ollman says that it is mistaken to believe that class or for that matter the individual or species quality has any ontological priority in Marx and that his thinking ‘has places – levels of generality – for individuals, classes, and the human species’. Ollman says: ‘The very idea of attributing an ontological priority to either individuals, class, or the species

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own ­material and political interests, about what promotes its own welfare and what is needed to achieve this – always develops in stages, and is shaped by, apart from class relations, a variety of non-class processes which are related to class, albeit contingently. Classes – class fractions and individual members of class – act and think, and this has an impact on the totality. But they act and think in conditions they do not generally or effectively choose. There is an element of passivity of everyday, and not so-everyday, experience of class.43 A dialectical-materialist class theory always pays attention to the reciprocal and ­contradiction-ridden, interaction between class relations (relations of control over the means of production and labour) on the one hand and our bodies (including our bodily needs and power to perform labour) and the means of production/subsistence, and how the bodily powers and means of production are used, on the other hand. Ordinary material things such as coal, computers, money, land, etc. take on a social role and social form under given class relations. Coal or a computer become capital – act as capital only under capitalist class relations, and land becomes a feudal title or feudal property under feudal class relations, for example. The things that are general conditions of human existence – the need to fight a disease or to protect a village against recurring floods – take on specific class colour as well. So to theorize class is to say: that there are economic and political relations between classes, that the forms of class relation change over time, that these relations give rise to certain mechanisms (e.g. appropriation of surplus labour; competition between classes and class fractions, etc.), the mechanisms which may have historically specific forms; that these mechanisms operate under certain conditions44 and produce certain concrete effects (e.g. income inequality or ecological degradation), which vary historically and geographically and

43

44

assumes an absolute separation between them that is belied by Marx’s conception of man as a Relation with qualities that fall on different levels of generality. None of these ways of thinking about human beings is more real or more fundamental than the others. If, despite this, class remains Marx’s preferred abstraction for treating human beings, it is only because of its necessary ties to the kind, range, and above all levels of generality of the phenomena he seeks to explain.’ (Ollman, 2003: 92). In my view: there does not have to be absolute separation between class and the individual, for class to have ontological primacy. When Ollman says that ‘None of these ways of thinking about human beings is more real or more fundamental than the others’, he appears to be dangerously – if unwittingly – close to epistemological relativism of post-structuralism. ‘We cannot, in other words, deny or evade the element of passivity in experience: the external situation which we do not create but which imposes itself on us’ (Timpanaro, 1980: 34). Class theory – as opposed to concrete class analysis – may not be able to theorize these.

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which in turn react back on class relations. Class theory is deeply connected to class practices, including subordinate classes’ struggle against exploitation and political oppression, which in turn inform class theory and which indeed empirically test given elements of class theory. Marxist theory of class is basically a theory of negation of – absenting the presence of – the dominant class of a given class society, and ultimately, it is a theory of the (tendency toward the) negation of economic and political conditions of the class system as such. Marxist theory is the doctrine of class relations and of class struggle against all forms of class relations, and, it is the doctrine of classlessness. Marxist theory clearly states that: in any given society, the striving of some of its members conflict with the strivings of others, that social life is full of contradictions, and that history reveals a struggle between nations and societies, as well as within nations and societies…. Marxism has provided the guidance – i.e., the theory of the class struggle – for the discovery of the laws governing this seeming maze and chaos. It is only a study of the sum of the strivings of all the members of a given society or group of societies that can lead to a scientific definition of the result of those strivings. Now the conflicting strivings stem from the difference in the position and mode of life of the classes into which each society is divided. lenin, 1977a: 25

Class theory is about the abstract – general – processes of wealth creation, distribution and accumulation. These processes can be seen as abstract mechanisms at the level of a given class society as a whole (e.g. feudalism or capitalism, etc.) as in ‘pure political economy’. But when these processes are seen from the vantage point of classes, then political economy becomes class theory. A class theorist qua class theorist explores how these abstract mechanisms of wealth production/distribution and accumulation a) further/inhibit interests (material, cultural and political) of determinate classes (e.g. property owners or property-less classes) and b) further/inhibit – and are influenced by – the potential or actual class consciousness and class struggle (whether in their trade unionist or socialist forms). Class theory is political economy from the vantage point of class antagonisms. Political economy without class theory can suffer from the twin perils of objectivism (the idea that objective conditions as such will inevitably lead to class struggle and consciousness or they will not). And class theory without political e­ conomy can suffer from the perils of sociologism, politicism, voluntarism, and indeed reformism. Class theory rooted in political economy examines the material conditions (i.e. processes/relations

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of wealth production and ­distribution, including in its value and non-value forms), and that allows us to understand: a) political actions and consciousness of classes, (b) the possibilities for, and obstacles to, classlessness lurking inside the contradiction-ridden, crisis-prone material conditions, and (c) the main agents who can fight for classlessness. So Marxist theory of class and class struggle explores the dialectical and internal relation between class relations and class struggle which seeks to negate class relations. A necessary condition for such negation is the development a specific type of class relation, capitalism. Capitalism represents the highest and most complex form of class society. Not surprisingly capitalist class society has received the most attention from Marxist class theory of Marx, Lenin and others. The next six chapters will examine class relations, class consciousness and class struggle in capitalist society in general.

chapter 7

Marxist Theory of Capitalism as Class: A Dialectics of Exchange, Property and Value Relations Marx and Engels declare in the opening pages of the Communist Manifesto that the bourgeois society that has ‘sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms’. Much rather, that society ‘has but established new classes’ (Marx and Engels, 1975: 41). These new classes are: the  bourgeoisie, the class of ‘owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor’ and a class which must sell its labour power to live (ibid.: 40). This chapter provides a detailed theoretical analysis of the multi-­dimen­ sional forms and aspects of the capitalist class relation/process, ­keeping in mind the general qualities of class society discussed earlier. This chapter is based in the discussions in the previous chapters (and sets the context for a discussion on consciousness and politics in subsequent chapters, which rely more on Lenin and his legacy). More specifically, the theoretical analysis presented here is closely informed by the principles of dialectical materialism briefly laid out in Chapter 5 and the ideas presented in Chapter 6 about the trans-historical class analysis including specificities of pre-capitalist form of class relation. In the background are also the criticisms of existing class theory presented in Chapter 4. The theoretical analysis of capitalism as a class relation presented in this chapter (and to be continued in the next) is firmly based on a fundamental principle asserted in the previous chapter. The principle concerns the internal relation between class theory and theory of production and accumulation of wealth. When one discusses abstract mechanisms through which a class society works – commodification, multiple forms of exploitation, capitalist accumulation, economic crisis formation, etc. – from the vantage-point of the interests of antagonistically-related classes, one is in the realm of class theory. And Capital 1 (and indeed all the three volumes) tend to do that, while also presenting abstract mechanisms as such. It is my fundamental belief that class theory must avoid ‘sociologism’, ‘politicism’, ‘voluntarism’, and ‘reformism’, and if class theory has to avoid these problems, it cannot divorce itself from the dynamics of production and accumulation. Reflections on accumulation not as an abstract process but from the vantage point of the antagonistic interests of the capitalist and working classes and from the vantage point of their m ­ utual © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004337473_008

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struggle, potential or real, makes accumulation an object of class theory. This principle applies to other abstract processes (e.g. commodification, exchange relations; division of labour, labour process, introduction of machinery). To theoretically reflect on how an abstract process such as accumulation affects and is affected by the interests of antagonistically-related classes and how it ­affects and is affected by the reality or the possibility of class practice (consciousness, struggle, organization, etc.) is to engage in class theory. Class theory ­without a consistent, rigorous consideration of underlying accumulation processes becomes an approach to society which explains things merely in terms of ‘social relations’ (sociologism). For the same reason, it also becomes an approach to society which gives far too much importance to politics and to action (‘resistance’), and correspondingly to the possibilities of reform of class relations. Thus such an approach becomes vulnerable to politicism, voluntarism, and reformism, which bedevil much existing class theorizing. The chapter argues: that capitalism is a form of class relation which is associated with and normally promotes a rather high level of development of productive forces relative to pre-capitalist class forms, that such a relation is a dialectical articulation of processes involving exchange (of labour power and means of subsistence, among other things), control over property or means of production, and production-appropriation of value/surplus-­value, with the effects on the capitalist and working classes that are irreconcilably different and antagonistic, and that such class relation of unity gives rise to, and is reproduced through, a massive amount of fragmentation/ d­ ifference/divisions within the classes. A class theory of capitalism can only be a grand theory of capitalism, matching, contrary to existing class theories, the extremely ambitious nature of Marxist theory as such. And contrary to existing class theories of the type we have discussed, which claim to be Marxist, such a theory of capitalism not only unpacks the fundamental mechanisms of the capitalist class relation but also points to the possibility and necessity of its abolition. This chapter (and the next) is a protracted (and still incomplete) process of a combing operation in relation to political-economic ideas of Marx and Engels (and to some extent Lenin and others) in order to articulate and re-articulate what I think is a defensible theory of class at a relatively concrete level: a theory that is valid for the capitalist form of class society. Marx’s thinking in Capital (and especially, Capital vol. 1) about abstract mechanisms of capitalism are fundamental to the articulation of class theory of capitalism. In a letter to a friend (Johann Becker of Geneva), Marx (1867; para 1) said this about his work on political economy, and about his Capital. The whole work will appear in 3 volumes. The title is Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. The first volume comprises the First Book: ‘The P­ rocess

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of Production of Capital’. It is without question the most terrible missile that has yet been hurled at the heads of the bourgeoisie (landowners included). Capital is about both capitalist and working classes, and therefore the accusation hurled at Capital that it says not much about the working class is almost useless. As Engels (1868; para 1) said reviewing Marx’s Capital 1: As long as there have been capitalists and workers on earth no book has appeared which is of as much importance for the workers as the one before us. The relation between capital and labour, the axis on which our entire present system of society turns, is here treated scientifically for the first time (italics added). This work remains unsurpassed as far as the treatment of capitalism as a class relation at an abstract level is concerned. Marx’s Capital is arguably an exercise in the class theory of capitalism, and is not just a discussion of abstract mechanisms of accumulation, etc. playing out at the level of a society as a whole. And it is a very powerful exercise in that theory. The first three sections discuss capitalist class relation as relations of exchange, of property and of value (production), respectively. The fourth ­section examines the ways in which these relations – which represent different forms of the capitalist class relation – are inter-connected. Section 5 looks at class conceptually at a more concrete level, i.e. at the level of capitalist social formation, focusing on class and intra-class differentiation. Underlying the concrete class map that this section presents are six different processes of differentiation: (a) differentiation at the level of class relations as such (this refers to multiple forms of class relation such as capitalism, feudalism, etc.); (b) differentiation among commodity owners-producers; (c) differentiation within the bourgeoisie (i.e. in terms of the size of capital, and division of labour, etc.); (d) differentiation within the working class (in terms of autonomy in labour process, income/wages, etc.); (e) inter-national differentiation centered on imperialism splitting the world-classes into their national forms (e.g. the working class of the periphery and the working class of imperialist countries), and (f) social-cultural differentiation of the basic classes. Section 6 is based on the idea that there is an ontological distinction between class and effects of class. So the objective effects of class relations on the working class in terms of its suffering and immiserization are discussed in this section. Class relations produce, and are reproduced though, these effects and the ways in which class relations are experienced. The last section summarizes the discussion in the chapter and connects it to the selected wider literature.

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Capitalist Class Relation as Exchange/Money Relation

Marx (1977) opens Capital with a statement about the dialectics of commodity and wealth, i.e. wealth seen as ‘the universality of human needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange’.1 Marx says that in capitalism, wealth – which is a product of both nature and labour – takes the form of commodities. In Wage-labour and capital, where he ­summarizes some of his theoretical findings in Capital, he goes on to say that capital ‘is not only a sum of material products, it is a sum of commodities, of exchange values’2 (Marx, 1976: 29; italics added). In other words, in the capitalist form of class society, wealth takes the form of commodities, whether material or not. To be emphasized here is a connection between the two social forms – form of class society and form of wealth: only in the capitalist form of class society does wealth assume the form of commodities and rules over us in that capacity. Broadly, the commodities in question in the class relationship are of two forms: means of subsistence, and ability to work.3 The class relationship between the capitalist and the working class is about a relation of buying and selling. It is a money relation.4 As Marx says in Capital volume 2 (Chapter 1: para 28): the capitalist class buys the commodity labour power which is sold by the working class: ‘the owner of money and the owner of labour-power enter 1 Biernacki (2001: 198) notes, Marx did not start with the institutions of wage labor or class but only from the form of commodity. According to Holloway (2015: 24), ‘it simply is not true that Marx starts from the commodity: he starts from wealth’. He writes that this is how most commentators think (e.g. Harvey, 2010; Cleaver, 1979; Postone, 1996; Heinrich, 2012; see also Starosta, 2008). Holloway continues: ‘It is not a question of forcing him [Marx] to say what we would like him to say. There it is in black and white. Marx starts from wealth’ (p. 24) as the richness of human life. My own view is that: Marx starts neither with commodity as such nor with wealth as such. He starts with the dialectics of commodity and wealth, the class implication of which is gradually unearthed. 2 Things appear to have exchange values inherently. But one may toss and turn a thing but may not find exchange value in it. ‘So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange value either in a pearl or a diamond’ (Marx, 1977: 177). 3 Abstracted from here is the fact that the reproduction of this ability to work necessitates the operation of non-commodities in the sphere of social reproduction: family labour – often mainly women’s labour – is used to convert the commodity-form of means of subsistence to actual consumable items (e.g. raw vegetables have to be cooked); some of the means of subsistence may be produced on the family’s land. The relevant literature concerns domestic labour (see Vogel, 2013; Hensman, 2011). 4 On Marx’s notion of money, see Lapatsioras and Milios (2012) and Paulani, 2014.

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only into the relation of buyer and seller. In this respect they enter merely into a money-relation’.5 The capitalist class is not just a buyer. It is also a seller: it sells means of subsistence to the working class. The working class is not just a seller (a seller of commodity labour power). It is also a buyer. It buys means of subsistence in their commodity form. To reproduce the only commodity it has, the working class has to have access to means of subsistence in their commodity-form from the market by means of the sale of its own commodity. The working class, or the proletariat, is: ‘that class in society which procures its means of livelihood entirely from the sale of its labor [power] and not from the profit derived from some capital’ (Engels in Principles of communism in Marx and Engels, 1977a: 81). The working class people ‘must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition’ and ‘to all the fluctuations of the market’ (Marx and Engels, 1975: 51). The relation between the capitalist class and the working class is played out then in two market places: the market for labour power, and the market for means of subsistence. These market-places exist at multiple geographical scales, the most local of which is the urban or metropolitan or a rural labour market (Cox and Mair, 1988; Harvey, 1982), within which labour power and means of subsistence are bought and exchange relations aspects of class are reproduced. The market for labour power is, of course, being an increasingly global market, with labour migration happening on a large scale in response to uneven development of capitalism at the international scale (Rosewarne, 2010; Lysandrou, 2005). The working class in capitalist class society is a different kind of working class than that which existed in earlier class societies. The slave-worker does ‘not sell his labour-power to the slave-owner’, and the serf ‘sells only a portion of his labour-power’ (Marx, 1976: 20). The working class in capitalist society (almost) completely sells his ability to work for a wage. And it sells that commodity in a way that is nominally free. The historical conditions of … [capitalist] existence are by no means given with the mere circulation of money and commodities. It arises only when the owner of the means of production and subsistence finds the free worker available, on the market, as the seller of his own labourpower. And this one historical pre-condition comprises a world’s history. marx, 1977: 274; parenthesis added

5 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch01.htm.

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Individual members of the working class are free ‘in the double sense’. Firstly, they do not own the means of production unlike self-­employed peasant proprietors. They are indeed ‘free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own’ (Marx, 1977: 874). Secondly, freed from the ownership of the commodities as the means of production, individual members of the working class, generally, face no restriction on who they will work for. There are usually without any extra-economic mechanisms forcing them to work for definite members of the capitalist class. They do not ‘form part of the means of production themselves, as would be the case with slaves, serfs, etc.’. They are not tied to a given member of the owning class. Like the capitalists, workers enjoy some freedom in the market: ‘The worker leaves the capitalist, to whom he has sold himself, as often as he chooses, and the capitalist discharges him as often as he sees fit, as soon as he no longer gets any use, or not the required use, out of him’ (Marx, 1976: 20). While the totality of the ability to work has become a commodity, the working class sells that ability part by part and not for life, and thus retains some control over entry into and exit from the labour market: ‘The free labourer… sells his very self, and that by fractions. He auctions off eight, ten, twelve, fifteen hours of his life, one day like the next, to the highest bidder, to the owner of raw materials, tools, and the means of life – i.e., to the capitalist’. (ibid.). Individual members of the working class sell ‘the particular expenditure of force to a particular capitalist’, whom they confront ‘as an independent individual’ (Marx, 1973: 464): in this way everything touching on the individual, real person leaves him a wide field of choice, of arbitrary will, and hence of formal freedom. … The totality of the free worker’s labour capacity appears to …[the capitalist] as his property, as one of his moments, over which he, as subject, exercises domination, and which he maintains by expending it.6 (ibid.; parenthesis added) Thus the class relation between capitalists and workers is a monetary relation and not a relation of personal dependence. In the capitalist form of class society, diverse forms of bondage and personal dependence are generally ­replaced 6 In contrast: ‘In the slave relation, he belongs to the individual, particular owner, and is his labouring machine. As a totality of force-expenditure, as labour capacity, he is a thing belonging to another, and hence does not relate as subject to his particular expenditure of force, nor to the act of living labour. In the serf relation he appears as a moment of property in land itself, is an appendage of the soil, exactly like draught-cattle. In the slave relation the worker is nothing but a living labour-machine, which therefore has a value for others, or rather is a value.’(ibid.).

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by impersonal transactions in the purchase and sale of labour-power. The money relationship is an advance over the extra-economic relation characteristic of other forms of class society. The fact that individual workers can leave given employers gives them some power over such employers. In fact, not only can members of the working class sell their labour power to whoever they want to, they are also generally free to buy their means of subsistence from whomever they want to. The freedom of the working class coexists with its opposite: unfreedom. This is in two senses. 1. The so-called freedom in the labour market applies to individual members of the working class or groups of members, and not to the class as a whole. With respect to the capitalist class as a whole, the laboring class as a whole is not free. Marx writes in Grundrisse: ‘It is clear that this [i.e. the freedom of the working class] is not his relation to the existence of capital as capital, i.e. to the capitalist class’ (1973: 464). This unfreedom at the level of the working class as a whole is the opposite side of the freedom, the ‘freedom’ from the ownership of property just discussed. Given that their ‘only source of income is the sale of his labour-power’, because they do not own/ control means of production, ‘they cannot leave the whole class of buyers, i.e., the capitalist class’. It is true that the worker ‘does not belong to this or that capitalist’, but it belongs to ‘the capitalist class [as a whole]’ (Marx, 1976: 20). 2. The working class also experiences unfreedom in that it has no control over whether or not it will sell itself (its labour power). It has also little control over the conditions under which it will sell (part-time or full-time, the level of wages, etc.). A worker can sell her labour power to whoever she wants to. But the freedom to do so presupposes economic unfreedom (i.e. reliance on the capitalist class for livelihood). A worker has the power to perform wage-work but whether in fact she does exercise that power depends on whether she is needed by capital, whether she finds a capitalist to sell their commodity to. It is for every individual member of the working class to find a buyer from the capitalist class (Marx, 1976: 20), and she can starve if she does not find one.7 The proletariat’s ‘weal and woe’, its ‘life and death’, and its ‘whole existence depend on the demand for labor [power]’ (Engels in Principles of communism in Marx and Engels, 1977a: 81). This is a class which lives ‘only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital’ or lives on crumbs thrown by a miserly government or kind member of the exploiting class or some member of the better-off section of the working class. While ‘The Roman slave was held by chains’, ‘the wage-labourer is bound to his owner by invisible threads’ (Marx, 1977: 719). 7 This is increasingly true for millions of workers, who do not find regular employment with a decent wage. Many become what is known as the precariat.

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So the class relationship between capital and labour that is mediated by, and based in, the market is an economically coercive relationship. Someone in want cannot exercise much choice; they cannot be free. The fact that every member of the working class – and the class as a whole – is dependent on this or that employer for a living, even if every worker can potentially choose which person to work for, is a major reason for the relative lack of power of the working class. Such relative lack of power in the labour market becomes visible when the capitalist class seeks to outwait striking workers who are often forced to return to work because the alternative to working for lower wages is starvation.8 The worker knows that if they do not find their employer, they are likely to starve, so they must not only offer themselves to someone, they also have to generally offer themselves on terms that the employer agrees to. One can sell one’s labour power, and still one’s needs may not be met, because the conditions for sale of labour power (e.g. level of wages) are not necessarily chosen by the seller. The so-called freedom or independence that the working class enjoys is indeed apparent: such ‘appearance of independence is maintained by a constant change in the person of the individual employer, and by the legal fiction of a contract’ (p.719). More accurately, the economic bondage or unfreedom of the working class ‘is at once mediated through, and concealed by, the periodic renewal of the act by which he sells himself, his change of masters, and [by] the oscillations in the market price of his labour [power]’ (ibid.: 723–724). 3. There is still another form of unfreedom. This is effected in ways which include extra-economic coercion that the members of the capitalist class actually seek to impose on individual members of the working class. ‘Direct extra-­ economic force is still of course used’, but Marx somewhat mistakenly thought it is used ‘only in exceptional cases’ (Marx, 1977: 899). Extra-economic compulsion is a constant – and not exceptional – fate of millions of members of the working class (and especially in the less developed parts of the global capitalist system), signifying a counter-tendency to the nominal freedom of the working class. Members of the working class can suffer unfreedom in economic ways, and this is an important part of the working class’s relation with the capitalist class. 8 Hence, the asymmetrical structure of the capitalist labor market establishes an unequal bargaining position between laborers and capitalists. Quite simply, capitalists are in a position to out-wait workers and to strike a more favorable bargain in the negotiation of wage contracts because they own the means of production. In this respect, labor markets constitute ‘the most significant feature of capitalist social structures’ because they are a ‘power-generating mode of interaction that leads to a relatively stable and consistent matrix of social power’ within capitalist societies (Offe, 1984: 2).

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Specific members of the capitalist class can and do make nominally free members of the working class unfree: employers take away workers’ freedom to sell their commodity to whoever they wish to and for however long they wish to.9 They do so in order to reduce compensation and to weaken the ­resistance of the working class. Both economic force and extra-economic force, including arrangements for tying labour to specific employers, are deployed, although the former tends to generally dominate. An unfree labour enters the labour market, gets paid, and generally in money-form, but does not sell his/her commodity personally and freely and does not have the freedom to exit the labour market when they want to. In this sense, a part of the proletariat is actually de-proletarianized, as Brass says. The existence of de-proletarianized proletarians – unfree labor – is not merely compatible with modern capitalism, but may actually be preferred in particular circumstances (Brass, 2011). For example when unfreedom occurs in the form of debt bondage, debt operates as ‘class-based form of power that disciplines’ workers who are indebted. Unfree labour is introduced, reproduced or re-introduced by members of the capitalist class as ‘a crucial part of the class struggle involving capital and labor. As such it enables capitalist producers to depoliticize, cheapen, or discipline their workforce’ (Brass, 2014: 291) and convert a part of the working class into a precariat (Brass, 2015). Unfreedom of the working class has been a fundamental aspect of capitalism, I argue, not at a general level, but at a more concrete level of the capitalist class relation, i.e. the capitalist class relation as it operates at a given time and place (Das, 2014: chapter 5). The realm of exchange relations, as an aspect of class relation, is nonetheless marked by a certain amount of freedom. This is also true about realm of consumption which is connected to exchange. While it is true that ‘The maintenance and reproduction of the working-class remains a necessary condition to the reproduction of capital’, the capitalist class ‘may safely leave this to the worker’s drives for self-preservation and propagation’, for all the capitalist class cares for is to ‘reduce the worker’s individual consumption to the necessary minimum’ (Marx, 1977: 718). Of course, this sphere of self-preservation and propagation’ is not as natural as the word ‘drives’ suggests. This sphere includes the sphere of family-based individualized reproduction within which a part of the oppression of non-bourgeois women through a forced division of labour 9 Consider workers indebted to their employers not being able to change their employers. Consider also how many migrant workers’ freedom to change their employers is severely restricted through political means (e.g. surrender of passports in case of international migrants; entry barriers for migrant workers inside a country where locals are prioritized over migrants). As Hayter (2001) says, migrants are often stigmatized.

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occurs10 and within which ideologies that support capitalist class relation are reproduced such as those of hard work, obedience to authority and private property. The capitalist class and the working class are ‘market subjects’. This is so in that they enter into a buying/selling relation with one another. But they are unequal market subjects: the former class is an efficient or self-sufficient market subject (it has the market resources to buy from the market what it needs for its own reproduction). The working class is not. 2

Capitalist Class Relation as Property Relation

The class relationship between capital and labour is expressed partly in the form of the money relation as just discussed. This is only one vantage point from which to examine the capitalist class relationship. From another vantage point, this is not an ordinary money relation. Marx says in Capital volume 2, this is a relation of ‘purchase and sale in which the buyer is assumed to be a capitalist and the seller a wage-laborer’, and this is a relation which ‘is not a natural or an eternal one’. The class relation between money-owner and labourer – the market encounter between money-owner and owner of labour power as commodity owners – is produced socially and historically.11 It is not produced by nature: ‘nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or ­commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power’ (Marx, 1977: 273). The only commodity that the working class has and freely sells to the capitalist class was not always a commodity. People’s ability to work did not appear in the form of wage-labour (commodity labour power) in all historical epochs, nor did the things people need to live their lives appear in commodity-form always. In the context of the labour power as a commodity, the relation between the group of people that buys and the group that sells is that the buying group is the capitalist class and the selling group is the working class. Such a relation emerges out of the fact that the conditions required for the realisation of labour-power – means of subsistence and means of production – are separated 10 11

Such oppression includes the fact that these women are overburdened by reproductive work. ‘This relation has no basis in natural history, nor does it have a social basis common to all periods of human history. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.’(Marx, 1977: 273).

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from the owner of labour-power, and are the property of the capitalist class. The buyer of labour power (i.e. the capitalist class) is not just a buyer; it is also the owner/controller of property (the means of production) which the seller of labour power does not own/control. Property in the sense of control of things needed in production, over time, finds legal expressions and it comes in many forms. A pre-capitalist form of private property is one that is founded on personal labour whereas capitalist private property ‘rests on the exploitation of alien, but formally free, labour’ (Marx, 1977: 928). Marx says in Capital 1: capitalist private property ‘turns out to be the right’, on the part of the capitalist class, ‘to appropriate the unpaid labour’ of the working class’ which is then converted into private property. This fact presupposes ‘The separation of property [means of production] from labour’ and therefore implies the impossibility of the working class appropriating the fruits of its own labour. As emphasized in the previous chapter, the story of class relation in societies, pre-capitalist and capitalist, is the story of changing property relations. One form of property is negated by another form. Capitalist class relation signifies negation of one form of private property, the private property of the direct producer (the self-employed worker), by another, the private property of persons who do not have to be involved in productive work. The capitalist class relation is based in private property of a specific type. From the vantage point of the form of capitalist class relation expressed in the form of property relations, capitalists are those who own/control private property, and workers are generally without ownership/control over private property. Property is not just means of production (and labour power). Property is also what is produced when these are used in production: means of subsistence. And the capitalist class not only owns property in the means of production; it also has the command over the means of subsistence which need to be produced and which the working class needs but does not have. The system of private property is an internally contradictory process: it means that some people (workers) are separated from control over property and that others control private property. These two groups are separate one from another, with contradictory interests: ‘A division between the product of labour and labour itself, between the objective conditions of labour [which the product of labour becomes] and subjective labour-power’ is ‘the real foundation’, and ‘the starting point of the process’ of production under the rule of capitalist class relation (Marx, 1977: 716). The vast majority of the working population in the world and in nearly each country – white and blue collar workers, manual and non-manual workers, industrial and service sector workers, male and female workers, and white,

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brown and black workers – all are, more or less, separated from the means of production through the process of primitive accumulation of capital, i.e. ‘the path by which’, Marx describes in a letter, ‘the capitalist order of economy emerged from the womb of the feudal order of economy’ in, for example, Western Europe (Marx and Engels, 1975a: 293). This path is the process in which the worker is divorced from the ownership of the conditions of her own labour. It is a violent state-mediated process ‘which operates two transformations’. One is that ‘the social means of subsistence and production are turned into capital’. And the other process is one in which ‘the immediate producers are turned into wage-labourers’. Thus the so-called primitive accumulation of capital which ‘creates the capital-relation’ is ‘the historic process which by divorcing the producers from their means of production converts them into wage workers (proletarians in the modern sense of the word) while it converts the owners of the means of production into capitalists’. This process was accomplished unevenly, even in western Europe of Marx’s times (Marx and Engels, 1975a: 293). It appears as ‘primitive’, because it forms the pre-history of capital and of the mode of production corresponding to it (Marx, 1977: 874–875). The process of separation of property from own labour is a long process. The transformation of scattered private property resting on the personal labour of the individuals themselves into capitalist private property is naturally an incomparably more protracted, violent and difficult process than the transformation of the capitalist private property … into social property. marx, 1977: 929–930

Its annihilation, the transformation of the individualised and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, of the pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence, and from the means of labour, this fearful and painful expropriation of the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital. And such a process of separation of property from labour, i.e. from the ability to objectify one’s labour in one’s product, continues till today. This is for several reasons which point to the fact that polarization of the market for commodities is not complete. Relative to the accumulation needs of global capital, there still exists a massive class of petty commodity producers (and petty producers of things in non-commodity forms including in aboriginal communities) who are able to combine their own labour with their own means of production. There also exists a stratum of people who have access to means

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of subsistence in a non-commodity form (people who have occupied public property or some form of communal resource). Then partly because of struggle from below in different forms, there came to exist state-provision of means of subsistence (e.g. public housing, health-care and education; subsidized nutrition program), and state-directed/owned productive enterprises, including in ex-‘communist’ countries or in post-colonial societies. These means of subsistence or means of  production (enterprise) are partly or wholly in the form of non-­commodities. They form the social commons akin to communal means of subsistence in pre-capitalist societies and contributed to partial ‘de-proletarianization’,12 and therefore offer opportunities for primitive accumulation in contemporary times via their privatization and transfer to the hands of the capitalist class. This Marx did not quite encounter. Such a modern form of primitive accumulation ensures that a class of property-less direct producers, separated from means of production and subsistence, continues to exist, and this ensures uninterrupted sale and purchase of labour power as a commodity.13 In any case, the fact of the matter is that to the extent that a nation starts her journey on a capitalist path, that journey will ‘not succeed without [the nation] having first transformed a good part of her’ direct producers ‘into proletarians’ (Marx’s letter in Marx and Engels, 1975a: 293). Apart from forcible methods of expropriation of property from direct producers, there is another method in which the class of property-less workers emerges in a commodityproducing society. It is through a process of class differentiation among independent commodity producers (this is discussed below). The bourgeois class produces its wealth ‘only by continually annihilating the wealth of the

12

13

This is in the sense that people who have access to state-provided means of subsistence in the commodity or part-commodity form or who worked in the state-controlled enterprises with some security of tenure and benefits are a little less coerced by the commodity logic of capitalist class relation: their reliance on the market for means of subsistence and the labour market was a little weakened to the detriment of the interest of the global capitalist class. It is not enough that at a point in time a proletariat comes to exist. Its existence in a condition of separation from the means of production and subsistence, its proletarian status, must be continuously reproduced. The need for reproduction occurs because of the second aspect of Polanyi’s double movement: social struggles countering marketization of things (see Selwyn and Mayamura, 2014). A group of people may be proletarianized today through primitive accumulation, and they may, through their struggle, come to access non-commodity form of means of subsistence tomorrow. That is not good for the capitalist class!

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i­ ndividual members of this class and by producing an ever-growing proletariat’ (Marx, 1987: 107). So the relation between the capitalist class and the working class is not just one of exchange, it is not just based on the fact that these classes buy and sell. Concurrent with the money relation between the two classes is another relation, one that is based in the fact that the capitalist class as the buyer is also an owner of means of production. ‘The class relation between capitalist and wagelaborer therefore … is presupposed from the moment the two face each other in the act M – L (L – M on the part of the laborer). It is a purchase and sale, a money-relation, but a purchase and sale in which the buyer is assumed to be a capitalist and the seller a wage-laborer.’ (Marx, 1885, Chapter 2, para 27; italics added). And ‘these means of production are in opposition to the owner of the labour-power, being property of another’, and have been divorced from, and continues to be divorced from, the working class. 3

Capitalist Class Relation as a Relation of Value

The relationship between the capitalist class and the working class is based in exchange in a context of capitalist property relations. But this is not entirely an exchange relation. It could never be. Mere exchange and mere property relations will not produce the totality of capitalist class society. Exchange relations and property relations are not the only forms of the class relation between capital and labour. In Grundrisse, Marx (1973: 324) says: The only thing which can make him into a capitalist is not exchange, but rather a process through which he obtains objectified labour time, i.e. value, without exchange. Half the working day costs capital nothing; it thus obtains a value for which it has given no equivalent. And the multiplication of values can take place only if a value in excess of the equivalent has been obtained, hence created. So, in addition to exchange and property relations, the relationship between the two basic classes in capitalism is a relationship of production, of value, and of surplus value. Capital ‘consists of … means of subsistence, instruments of labor, and raw materials’. The capitalist class is the owner of all these. But capital is not just things. It is a social relation of production and reproduction of these thingsas-property and as commodities. The director of that relation is the capitalist class. Marx explains in Wage-labour and capital:

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Capital [is] also … a social relation of production. It is a bourgeois relation of production, a relation of production of bourgeois society. The means of subsistence, the instruments of labor, the raw materials, of which capital consists [are]… produced and accumulated under given social conditions, within definite social relations…they [are]… employed for new production, under given social conditions, within definite social relations…. And … this definite social character stamp[s] the products which serve for new production as capital… marx, 1976: 29; italics in original

In common sense and in mainstream scholarly thinking, capital is often ahistorically and fetishistically associated with raw materials, energy, machines, etc.14 But in fact none of these is to be automatically associated with the capitalist class relationship. Just as labour becomes wage-labour, and things that people need become commodities, so things do not have to exist in the form of capital: ‘A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain conditions does it become capital. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold by itself is money, or as sugar is the price of sugar’ (Marx, 1976: 28). When money and the things needed for production that are bought with that money are used to make more money than initially invested, then only the money and the things become – function as – ­capital. The director of the process of production of capital and the owner of the money and the things becomes the capitalist. One is mistake when one treats means of production as ‘capital under all circumstances, even where they are its exact opposite’ (1977: 933). In fact, ‘the means of production and subsistence, while they remain the property of the immediate producer’ or are communally controlled and deployed, ‘are not capital’ (ibid.). They only become capital under circumstances in which they serve at the same time as means of exploitation of, domination over, the worker’ (ibid.). Capital is more than about owning things. To be a capitalist one has to own things, one has to have property in the means of production. But one 14

This kind of thinking leads to a typology in which social relations and culture are social capital and cultural capital (as in Putnam, 1990 and Bourdieu, 1986) (see Das, 2006, Fine, 2001a; Hean et al., 2003 for a critical discussion of the concept from a Marxist standpoint). Nature and physical things (Bebbington, 1999) and even skin colour and beauty are seen as forms of capital. Even if sometimes ‘capital’ is used metaphorically, it is forgotten that language can contribute to the reinforcement of a certain kind of thinking (e.g. ahistorical thinking; non-assignment of causal primacy to actual capital vis a vis metaphorical capital) which can feed into a certain type of practice (e.g. enthusiastic promotion of metaphorical capital to address social problems).

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has to own these things-as-capital. The process that makes things capital is the same process that makes a person or a group of persons belong to the capitalist class. Once again: things and money become capital: It is only the dominion of past, accumulated, materialised labor [e.g. ­machines which are products of past labor] over immediate living labor that stamps the accumulated labor with the character of capital. Capital does not consist in the fact that accumulated labor serves ­living labor as a means for new production. It consists in the fact that l­ iving labor serves accumulated labor as the means of preserving and multiplying its exchange value. marx, 1976: 30; italics in original

Capital as a process/relationship and the capitalist as a class are not identified merely on the basis of the materiality of the things that are produced in this relation/process. One does not become more or less capitalist by virtue of the differing material form of the product one produces: Capital remains the same whether we put cotton in the place of wool, rice in the place of wheat, steamships in the place of railroads, provided only that the cotton, the rice, the steamships – the body of capital – have the same exchange value, the same price, as the wool, the wheat, the railroads, in which it was previously embodied. The bodily form of capital may transform itself continually, while capital does not suffer the least alteration. marx, 1976: 29; italics added

Indeed: the capitalist class ‘knows that all commodities, however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money’ and production of such things is ‘a wonderful means whereby out of money to make more money.’ A capitalist who produces the smelly gases (e.g. ethanethiol)15 or has a business which cleans stinky and polluted Ganges is a capitalist just as much as a capitalist who produces beautiful roses. The character of whether a production relation is based on the capitalist class process has little to do with the material character of work capital gets the worker to perform: ‘The useful quality of labour-power, by virtue of which it makes [things]….were to the capitalist merely the necessary condition for his activity’. This is because ‘in order to create value, labour must be expended in a useful manner’. Capital 15

Ethanethiol (ethyl mercaptan), a stench gas, is released into underground mines as an early warning system to alert mine workers during an emergency.

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only cares about this: ‘the specific use-value which this commodity possesses of being a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself’. This is indeed ‘the special service that the capitalist class expects from the class that owns labour-power, and in this transaction he acts in accordance with the ‘eternal laws’ of commodity-exchange’ (Marx, 1977: 300–301). So at the level of capitalism as a class relation, this relation is not one between industrial worker and industrial capitalist, nor is capitalist class relation about any specific things such as machines. The laboring class also does the same: whether it produces toys or guns for the capitalist class is immaterial. Working is a means to an end: survival. Unlike a craftsman, the worker ‘is absolutely indifferent to the specificity of his labour’. The specific character of his labour is of interest to him ‘only in as much as it is in fact …a use value for capital. It is therefore his economic character that he is the carrier of labour as such – i.e. of labour as use value for capital; he is a worker, in opposition to the capitalist’ (Marx, 1973: 297). The mere fact that a person has the ability to work means nothing, and owner of that ability is nothing unless it is something out of which a capitalist can make money. From one angle, capital is capital because it can appropriate (surplus) value. And, labour is labour because it can potentially create (surplus) value. Here is Marx in Grundrisse: As against capital, labour is the merely abstract form, the mere possibility of value-positing activity, which exists only as a capacity, as a resource in the bodiliness of the worker. But when it is made into a real activity through contact with capital – it cannot do this by itself, since it is without object – then it becomes a really value-positing, productive activity. marx, 1973: 298; italics added

If capital is the personification of capital, the personification of the incessant drive for accumulation-for accumulation-sake, then labour is the personification of time spent and not of the actual work it performs: i.e. labour is time personified. The length of that time is important, not its content. Unsurprisingly, members of the labouring class are often called a permanent or a temp (temporary), etc.16

16

In capitalist class society, ‘the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed of two locomotives …one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcass. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything; hour for hour, day for day’ (Marx, 1987: 48).

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At the level of capitalist class relation as such, Marxist class theory abstracts from whether production is, for example, industrial or not, although Marxist class theory has useful things to say about class relations in specific arenas of production (manufacturing, service sector, agriculture, etc.). In this discussion class theory will not be dealt with at that level. It is not just that the capitalist class abstracts from the materiality of what is produced. The development and existence of capitalist class relation, and therefore, the existence of some people as capitalists and others as workers, presuppose a higher level of the development of productive forces, which creates surplus and the appropriation of surplus value. This, once again, signifies the close inter-connection between capitalist class relations on the one hand and the materiality of life in the sense of the development of productive forces, and the accumulation of wealth in value form, on the other. If the level of development of productive forces is at such a low level and that therefore ‘If one day’s work were necessary in order to keep one worker alive for one day, then capital would not exist, because the working day would then exchange for its own product, so that capital could not realize itself and hence could not maintain itself as capital’ (Marx, 1973: 324). The level of surplus would not allow the capitalist to live without having to engage in work: ‘If capital also had to work in order to live, then it would not maintain itself as capital but as labour’ (ibid.). And if that is the case, then the property in things (e.g. raw materials and instruments of labour) that capitalist class owns ‘would be merely nominal; economically they would belong to the worker as much as to the capitalist, since they would create value for the capitalist only in so far as he himself were a worker’ (ibid.). The capitalist ‘would relate to them therefore not as capital, but as simple material and means of labour, like the worker himself does in the production process’, as simple things. However, if the development of productive forces has reached such a high level and therefore if, say, ‘only half a working day is necessary in order to keep one worker alive one whole day, then the surplus value of the product is self-evident’. This is because ‘the capitalist has paid the price of only half a working day but has obtained a whole day objectified in the product’, and in the process, the capitalist ‘has exchanged nothing for the second half of the work day’ (Marx, 1973: 324). Of course, that does not mean that capitalists do not work. They do work. But they do not have to work. Their income and property are disproportionately more than what they would be if they were based merely in their own labour. As already indicated, the most fundamental aspect of class relation between capital and labour is that of exploitation of wage-labour, a relationship that is rooted in the capitalist control over the means of production and the process of production. Divorced from the means of production and subsistence, the

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seller of labour power ‘faces its buyer’ in the realm of production, and does ‘his bidding’, and is ‘integrated into his capital, in order that it may really become productive capital’ (Marx, 1885, Chapter 2, para 27). Exploitation takes primary and secondary forms. The primary form of exploitation happens in the process of capitalist production or labour process. All societies must engage in labour process: transform things, derived directly or otherwise, from nature into useful things. This general form of labour process that characterizes all society is turned into a capitalistic labour process, the process by which the capitalist class consumes the labour-power of the working class. This happens when: First, the worker works under the control of the capitalist to whom his labour belongs; the capitalist takes good care that the work is done in a proper manner, and that the means of production are applied directly to the purpose, so that the raw material is not wasted, and the instruments of labour are… only worn to the extent necessitated by their use in the work…. Secondly, the product is the property of the capitalist and not that of the worker, its immediate producer. marx, 1977: 291–292

There is a reason why the capitalist labour process is the way it is. Suppose that a capitalist pays for a day’s worth of labour-power, then the right to use that power for a day belongs to him… The use of commodity belongs to its purchaser, and the seller of labour-power, by giving his labour, does no more, in reality, than part with the use-value he has sold. From the instant he steps into the workshop, the use-value of his labourpower, and therefore also its use, which is labour, belongs to the capitalist. By the purchase of labour-power, the capitalist incorporates labour, as a living agent of fermentation into the lifeless constituents of the product, which also belongs to him. marx, 1977: 291–292

The capitalist class relations are borne by the materiality17 of the production process. The production process – and the outcome of that process, i.e. the 17

The materiality of the production process means this: it involves material things, the things which are made up of matter (and its ‘invisible’ form – energy) and which exist independent of the mind (independent of the thinker), and which are transformed into new things which also exist independent of the mind, although the process of transformation does involve the operations of the mind (and not just the body).

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product – becomes stamped with the character of capitalist class relations, and this is in the following senses. The product belongs to the capitalist class, not to the class of workers. Then, ‘the value of this product includes, apart from the value of the capital advanced, a surplus-value’, and the latter costs the working class labour but it costs nothing to the capitalist class, although it becomes the legitimate property of the capitalist class’ (Marx, 1977: 731) Because the working class does not own property, it has to sell its commodity (labour power) to the capitalist class in return for which it receives a wage which, on average, equals the cost of production of that commodity. In a ­manner that is consistent with the law of exchange according to which commodities, including labour power, are paid at their value,18 they are compelled to give up a large part of the product of their labour to owners of means of production without anything in return. Class is a hard rock of a coercive relation between large groups of people. Even if workers receive a wage that allows them to pay their bills, they are compelled to give to capital a lot more than what they get. This signifies a class-based metabolic rift, or what I will call ‘a labour metabolic rift’, akin to an environmental metabolic rift of the type John Bellamy Foster (1999) talks about. As Engels says in his introduction to Marx’s Wage-labour and capital: the working class alone produces all values. For value is only another expression for … the amount of socially necessary labor embodied in a particular commodity. But these values produced by the workers do not belong to the workers. They belong to the owners of the raw materials, machines, tools, and money, which enable them to buy the labor-power of the working class. Hence, the working class gets back only a part of the entire mass of products produced by it. And…the other portion… the capitalist class retains…. In marx, 1976: 12

The crux of exploitation – defining aspect of class relation – is this: ‘the value of labour-power, and the value which that labour-power valorizes in the labour process, are two entirely different magnitudes’ (Marx, 1977: 300). On the surface the money relation between the two classes is based on the laws of commodity exchange. But in reality, below the surface appearance, there is a massive inequality as represented by labour metabolic rift just mentioned. This also includes the fact that the worker is often paid below the value of labour power 18

This is especially true about the working masses in the periphery where there is a relative absence of state-provided welfare, and in the low-income areas and racialized workers, in the core countries.

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(super-exploitation) and the fact that the worker is subjected to overwork and bodily and mental injuries which adversely affect the quality and length of life and for which there is little adequate compensation. Capital is indeed ‘an independent social power’. It is ‘the power of a part of society’ and it ‘preserves itself and multiplies by exchange with direct, living labor-power’ (Marx, 1976: 30). What is in my view the best sentence in Capital volume 1 gives away the secret of class exploitation and of the very content of class under capitalism: ‘The fact that half a day’s labor is necessary to keep the laborer alive during 24 hours does not in any way prevent him from working a whole day.’ (Marx, 1977: 300; italics added). Class simply signifies daily robbery, daily violence, carried out in every space of work, large and small, every minute of every day.19 ‘Capital is dead labour, that vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the worker works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labourpower he has bought from him’ (Marx, 1977: 342). Labor process as an aspect of class under capitalism includes: all the different ways in which capital pumps out surplus labor (e.g. making workers work long hours for a given wage, using productivity-enhancing technology, making workers cooperate, formation of work-teams, and so on).20 Labor process as an aspect of class also includes the ways in which the capitalist class controls the working class in order to extra more and more labour effort from individual workers. It seeks to create consent in the minds of the members of the working class who resist the exploitative and coercive labor process in overt and covert ways.21 The capitalist class also seeks to control and dominate labour,22 the aim 19

20 21

22

‘Suppose the working day consists of 6 hours of necessary labour and 6 hours of surplus labour. Then the free worker gives the capitalist 6 × 6 or 36 hours of surplus-labour every week. It is the same as if he worked 3 days in the week for himself and 3 days in the week gratis for the capitalist’. However, ‘this is not evident on the surface. Surplus labour and necessary labour are mingled together. I can therefore express the same relation by saying for instance that in every minute the worker works 30 seconds for himself and 30 seconds for the capitalist, etc.’ (Marx, 1977: 345–346). Here the two forms of exploitation corresponding to formal and real subsumptions are crucial and will be discussed in Chapter 8. It is unfortunate that many scholars reduce labor process merely to labor control (see Chibber, 2008: 359) – thus seeing labour process as merely a political or power relation, and they often reduce the issue of labor control to how people are controlled outside of work-place. Underlying such a vague notion of labour control are (a) the dilution of the primacy of production and class relation of production and (b) the implicit equation of the category of the working class to that of regulated human beings who have some power to resist as human beings. This is partly through deskilling, as Braverman, 1974 suggested (See Spencer, 2000; Lewis, 1995; D’Mello, 1992; Thompson, 2010).

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of such control and domination is a class aim: it is precisely to ensure ‘the greatest possible production of surplus-value, hence, the greatest possible exploitation of labour-power by the capitalist’ (Marx, 1977: 449). The hidden abode of production, the territory where the sovereignty and dictatorship of the capitalist class prevails, acquires the command over labour, i.e., over functioning labour-power or the labourer himself. The regime of capitalist class relation is a regime of discipline and punish: ‘the capitalist formulates his autocratic power over his workers like a private legislator and purely as an emanation of his own will’. In the workplace (e.g. a factory or a call center), ‘Masses of labourers… are organised like soldiers’, as ‘privates of the industrial army’. They are ‘placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants’. They ‘are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois [owner] himself’. What emerges is ‘An industrial army of workmen, under the command of a capitalist, requires, like a real army, officers (managers), and sergeants (foremen, overlookers), who, while the work is being done, command in the name of the capitalist. The work of supervision becomes their established and exclusive function’. A despotic regime in the workplace is the outcome. And such despotism is not merely about some ‘power’ relation between the two classes, without a material gain as its underlying purpose. It is not power for its own sake. It is about material gain, about more and more surplus value to be appropriated with less and less resistance to it. That is why: ‘The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is’ (Marx and Engels, 1975b: 52).23 The workplace is the place where the drama of capitalist class relation is performed. It is a crucial embodiment and, location, of the capitalist class relation. The workplace code has more universal as well as historical aspects. From one vantage point, the workplace code is a historical form of something universal in that it ‘is merely the capitalistic caricature of the social regulation of the labour-process which becomes necessary’ whenever there occur ­‘co-­operation 23

‘Hence the connexion existing between their various labours appears to them, ideally, in the shape of a preconceived plan of the capitalist, and practically in the shape of the authority of the same capitalist, in the shape of the powerful will of another, who subjects their activity to his aims. If, then, the control of the capitalist is in substance twofold by reason of the twofold nature of the process of production itself, – which, on the one hand, is a social process for producing use-values, on the other, a process for creating surplusvalue – in form that control is despotic. As co-operation extends its scale, this despotism takes forms peculiar to itself. Just as at first the capitalist is relieved from actual labour so soon as his capital has reached that minimum amount with which capitalist production, as such begins, so now, he hands over the work of direct and constant supervision of the individual workmen, and groups of workmen, to a special kind of wage labourer.’

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on a large scale, and … the employment in common of instruments of labour and especially of machinery’. Some form of overseeing and coordination in the workplace is universally necessary. But what is more universal takes a historically specific form under capitalist class relation: The fact that the working class must produce not only things (use-values) but also expand capital (i.e. add new value to what is invested by performing surplus labour and to which labour resists) is indicative of a process, which, in terms of class agency, is marked by a certain despotism. The latter takes not only the form of direct supervision by the capitalist but also by the fact that relieved from actual labour himself, the capitalist hands over immediate supervision to an organized band of officers, who themselves are wage-labourers of capital. The capitalist is the capital personified. And as such, the capitalist acquires ‘command over labour, i.e., over self-activating labouring-power’, i.e. ‘the worker himself’ and ‘takes care that the worker does his work regularly and with the proper degree of intensity’ (Marx, 1977: 424). Capital also [has] developed into a coercive relation, and this compels the working class to do more work than would be required by the narrow circle of its own needs. As an agent in producing the activity of others, as an extractor of surplus labour and an exploiter of labour-power, it surpasses all earlier systems of production…, in its energy and its quality of unbounded and ruthless activity (ibid.: 424–425). From a more historical angle, the workplace code is modern counterpart of something similar from bygone days in that the bourgeois ‘overseer’s book of penalties replaces the slave-driver’s lash’. Under the rule of capital, ‘All punishments naturally resolve themselves into fines and deductions from wages’, which become an extra source of profit for the capitalist class. (Marx, 1977: 549–550). The power relation in capitalist workplace literally takes the form of discipline and punish. Workers have no power to decide what to produce, how, when, how to invest and where to invest (e.g. villages or cities or at their interface). Laborers have little autonomy over their work. This is the case with them whether some are paid less or more, whether they have a greater or lesser share of the net social product, whether they are paid a time wage or piece wage, whether they are paid daily or monthly or whether they wear a dirty cloth cap or ride to work in a car or a bike or just walk, whether some are men and others are women, whether some are whites and others are blacks/browns, and so on.24 Workers 24

Marx’s idea of class struggle and class relations of antagonism is not based on distinction between dirt splattered horny handed blue collared toilers and clean shirted paper

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are subjected to managerial control which workers cannot generally veto or appeal against and who have no role in their appointment. It is not just that an individual member of the working class gives unpaid labour to the capitalist class. When many members of the working class work together and cooperate with one another, the productiveness that results, which is more than the sum of individual productiveness, i.e. the productiveness of the cooperative labour of the working class, is also appropriated by the capitalist class: ‘As co-operators, as members of a working organism, they merely form a particular mode of existence of capital. Hence, the productive power developed by the worker socially is the productive power of capital’ (Marx, 1977: 451). This power ‘develops as a free gift to capital whenever the workers are placed under certain conditions, and it is capital that places them under such conditions’ (ibid.). Such productive power – like powers of nature or of a genius conducting scientific research with profitable impacts on capitalist industry – ‘costs capital nothing’ but it is appropriated by owners of capital (ibid.). Class relation is internally and closely connected to, and cannot be understood in abstraction, from, the mechanisms of accumulation. In capitalism, such mechanisms reproduce an important aspect of class relations, i.e. separation from property on the part of labour. The working class produces value and surplus value. But it is separated from these and from the means of production of value and surplus value (which take on, in turn, the form of the means of production and private property, more generally). Such separation continues to reproduce the working class as the working class, i.e. as the class separated from private property. Capitalist production requires, and ‘reproduces the separation between labour-power and the conditions of labour. It thereby reproduces and perpetuates the conditions under which the worker is exploited’ (Marx, 1977: 723). Capitalist production, seen as a continuous connected process, is a process of reproduction in that it ‘produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value [profit], but it also produces and reproduces the capitalrelation itself’. It reproduces two classes: ‘on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer’ (Marx, 1977: 724). Under the rule of the capitalist class, production does not stop at the alienation and expropriation of the laborer. As Marx says in Capital vol 3, the ­capitalist class counts the squandering of the life and health of the worker, and the depression of his conditions of existence [as] a means for raising the rate of profit’ (Marx, 1981: 179). The class relation of exploitation between capital ­ anipulators (Draper, 1977: 34–35). Conceptualization of class based on life styles (the m kind of work in the Bourdieu tradition) is very bourgeois. If the working class people suddenly wear better shirts, will class exploitation decrease?

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and labour is mediated by capital’s impact on the working class body, which ­becomes a means of accumulation. In a normal situation of exploitation, with an average rate of exploitation, the working class body is recouped through the consumption of things that is made possible through a wage that reflects the value of labour power. Yet, capital attacks the working bodies in different ways. One is when workers are paid below the value of labour power, and when workers are subjected to overwork. Capital also attacks the working bodies by cutting costs of providing a safe working environment.25 No matter how economical the capitalist class is in other respects, ‘it is thoroughly wasteful with human material [human life]’ (ibid.), which, while it may benefit individual members of the capitalist class, adversely affects long-term conditions for capitalist exploitation. Indeed, ‘The same blind desire for profit that in the one case exhausted the soil had in the other case seized hold of the vital force of the nation at its roots’ (Marx, 1977: 348), a process that is manifested in, for example, periodical epidemics and stunted growth of ordinary members of the working class. The social relation between the working and the capitalist classes – between the sentient bearer of living labour seeking to meet its needs and the vampire-like bearer of capital in unceasing pursuit of wealth in the abstract – is very much a bodily relation indeed. 4

Money Relation, Property Relation, and Value Relation all Internally Connected

The working class experiences dull economic compulsion. This means that it does not own means of production or means of subsistence, as it has been forcibly separated from these and continues to be separated from these through economic mechanisms. Therefore, it has to enter into a commodity relation: that is, it has to sell its commodity (labour power) to the capitalist class. It receives a wage with which to buy its means of subsistence. Such a wage, on average, equals the cost of production of that commodity (i.e. cost of its maintenance and future reproduction) of the entire class, of the entire ‘race’ of workers.26 25

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To save costs, the capitalist class crowds ‘workers into confined and unhealthy premises’, a practice that is seen as a ‘saving on buildings’; it ‘squeezes dangerous machines into the same premises’ and dispenses with ‘means of protection against these dangers’ and it neglects ‘precautionary measures in those production processes whose very nature is harmful to health or involves risk’ (ibid.: 180). The relation of wage must be seen quantitatively and qualitatively. Qualitatively, given that workers are separated from the means of production, they must sell their labour power for a wage. But the level of wages is also important: the quantitative difference

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To be able to exchange, classes must own something. The fact that the capitalist class owns means of production and subsistence and that the working class owns its labour power as a commodity is a condition for exchange between these two classes. The ‘top’ layer of class relationship is exchange, underlying which is the relation of property ownership, which has come about through forcible methods as well as differentiation among commodity producers. The capitalist class deals in commodities: it is a buyer of labour power as a commodity, it is a buyer and seller of other commodities. It is an owner of property. It is as well a director of the process of production and appropriation of surplus value. In other words: the capitalist class relation stands for the inter-penetration of commodity, property and value relations. Capital, which is monopolized by the capitalist class, can be seen from multiple vantage points. Capital ‘is a thing’: it is a thing in that it ‘consists of … means of subsistence’ as well as instruments of labor, including physical and biological technologies, scientific knowledge, and raw materials and energy. The capitalist class is the class that is the owner of all these things. But capital is not just things or products, so it is not enough to say that the capitalist class is the owner of things. Why? What makes the capitalist class that class is not capital as a thing because ‘capital is not a thing, it is a definite social relation of production pertaining to a particular historical social formation, which simply takes the form of a thing and gives this thing a specific social character’ (Marx, 1981: 953). What makes the capitalist class that class is not the fact that he/she owns means of production because ‘Capital is not the sum of the material and produced means of production. Capital is the means of production transformed into capital’ (ibid.). Means of production are not always capital. They become capital. This means that the capitalist class goes through a process of becoming. This happens when means of production come to be ‘monopolized by a certain section of society’, confronting living labour-power as ‘the products and conditions of activity of labour power’ which are ‘personified in capital’ in an antagonistic manner (ibid.). The monopolization as a form of existence of things as means of production is an important aspect of thingsas-capital: this aspect is connected to Marx’s conceptualization of class relation in relatively abstract terms which we discussed in the previous chapter.27

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between an annual wage of, say, $10 million dollars and an annual wage of $100,000 can get transformed into a qualitative difference. A person receiving $10 million dollars can convert the wages into capital, and thus reduce their reliance on the employer; they can even fully join the capitalist class. To quote Marx again: ‘Wherever a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the worker, free or unfree, must add to the labour time necessary for his

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Things come to exist in the form of monopolization and in the form of separation: some people monopolize over things, and other people are separated from things. A capitalist is not merely an owner of private property, which is transferred from one generation to another, thus reproducing the control over capital by a given group of people. They are a large owner of private property. This largeness has class-implications. A large owner does not have to work for a living. A large owner is able to use the labour power of a large number of workers in order to extract their cooperative power. Capitalist production only really begins… when each individual capital simultaneously employs a comparatively large number of workers; and when as a result the labour-process is carried on an extensive scale and yields relatively large quantities of products. A greater number of workers working together, at the same time, in one place (or, if you like, in the same field of labour), in order to produce the same sort of commodity under the command of the same capitalist, constitutes the starting-point of capitalist production. marx, 1977: 439

When an owner is able to employ a large number of people, the large quantity of surplus value produced releases the owner from having to work for their living. Indeed it requires them not to work but to supervise the large number of workers or to be able to hire people to do the work of supervision, which is stamped with class character.28 It is only when an owner is released from having to work does he/she become a capitalist in the real sense. It is also the case that when a large number of labourers are employed, this guarantees that the employer gets real average labour and real average profit rate. Indeed, the law of surplus-value fully works for the individual owner only when he/she produces as a capitalist, employing many labourers at the same time. A society that is ruled by capitalist class relation is a society that is ruled by capital-ascommodities, for ‘All products of which’ capital ‘consists are commodities’. This is a commodity society, one that is characterized by the fact that things society needs are bought and sold. And things are bought and sold for a profit

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own maintenance an extra quantity of labour-time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owner of the means of production, whether this proprietor be … a slave owner … or a modern landlord or a capitalist’ (1977: 344). This is in the sense that its aim is to appropriate more and more surplus value and to reduce potential and actual resistance to exploitation.

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by the capitalist which owns money (‘moneybags’).29 But the capitalist class does not only own money, and it just does not engage in mere buying and selling. It also owns the things (commodities) which include means of subsistence, that the working class needs but does not have, and means of production. So concurrent with the money relation between the two classes is another relation, one that is based in the fact that the capitalist class, to quote Marx again, as ‘the buyer appears also from the outset in the capacity of an owner of means of production, which are the material conditions for the productive expenditure of labour-power by its owner… The class relation between capitalist and wage-laborer therefore exists, is presupposed from the moment the two face each other in the act M – L (L – M on the part of the laborer). It is a purchase and sale, a money-relation, but a purchase and sale in which the buyer is assumed to be a capitalist and the seller a wage-laborer.’ (Marx, 1885, Chapter 2, para 27; italics added). And ‘these means of production are in opposition to the owner of the labour-power, being property of another’. The seller of labour power ‘faces its buyer as labour-power of another which must be made to do his bidding, must be integrated into his capital, in order that it may really become productive capital’ (ibid.). It is clear that that aspect of the class relation between the two classes which is rooted in production presupposes a relation which is prior to, and which is a precondition for, the production relation; the act of circulation – money relation itself – will not result in a class relation for ‘It is not money which by its nature creates this relation; it is rather the existence of this relation’ between the two classes ‘which permits of the transformation of a mere money-function into a capital-function’ (ibid.: para 28). Partly because the different aspects of the class relation are internally connected, the capitalist class is able to kill ‘two birds with one stone’. It profits by what it receives from the working class in the sphere of production, i.e. surplus value. It also profits by what it gives to the working class in the sphere of exchange. This is in the sense that: ‘The capital given in return for labour-power is converted into means of subsistence which have to be consumed to reproduce the muscles, nerves, bones, and brains of existing workers, and to bring new workers into existence. Within the limits of what is absolutely necessary, therefore, the individual consumption of the working class is the reconversion of the means of subsistence given by capital in return for labour-power into fresh labour-power which capital is then again able to exploit. It is the p ­ roduction and reproduction of the capitalist’s most indispensable means of production: 29

See Hoca (2012) on the notion of capital as commodity.

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the worker’ (Marx, 1977: 717–718).30 The exchange relationship – and the freedom of exchange (including dull economic compulsion) – as an aspect of class relationship cannot be explained in terms of exchange itself. The class relation is not just a relation based on commodity exchange and it is not just a relation of ownership/control of means of production as commodities. This relation is a social relation, based in social-material interaction between owners of capital and owners of labour power. It is a relation, and it is in many ways a sheer bodily relation, of appropriation of value or of wealth in value-form. The director of this relation is the capitalist class; the working class is directed by that class. The class relationship is rooted in, but is beyond, the exchange relation, firstly because: given that the working class has been separated from means of production, it has to work for someone for a wage and it has little/no control over how long they will work, and how, and what they will get in return. ‘The silent [or dull] compulsion of economic relations’, the fact that the working class is economically compelled to work for a wage, ‘sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker’ (Marx, 1977: 899). Surely, the capitalist class relation in/of production presupposes the class relation rooted in circulation: ‘The capital-relation during the process of production arises only because it is inherent in the act of circulation, in the different fundamental economic conditions in which buyer and seller confront each other, in their class relation’ (Marx, 1885, Ch. 2, para 28; stress added). ‘Direct extra-­economic force’ is not normally used to make people perform wage work; ordinarily ‘it is possible to rely on’ the ‘dependence on capital’ of the working class for a living (Marx, 1977: 899). After all, the working class does not have direct – ­non-market-mediated – access to means of production. As far as the relation between the capitalist and working classes is a money relation, this relation is potentially a relation based on the exchange of equivalents (assuming that wages received reflect the value of labour power). This is in the following sense: measured in terms of value (i.e. socially necessary average labour time), what the working class receives from the capitalist class is less than what the working class produces at a given point in time; what it receives from the capitalist class is actually its own product, the product of its own labour performed at a previous point in time but appropriated by the capitalist class. So what is potentially a relation of equivalents (i.e. labour power 30

In fact, the capitalist class can be seen as killing three birds, if one includes secondary exploitation to be discussed later, a form of exploitation in which the capitalist class makes money in exchange relations.

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sold to, and a bundle of commodities received from, the capitalist class), which is marked by freedom that such exchange signifies31 is turned into its opposite. The class relation becomes a unity of opposites, one that is based on a violent separation between form of class relation and the content of that relation, as well: ‘the laws of …private property, laws based on the production and circulation of commodities, become changed into their direct opposite through their own internal and inexorable dialectic. The exchange of equivalents… is now turned around in such a way that there is only an apparent exchange’ (Marx, 1977: 729). This is owing to two facts. Firstly, ‘the capital which is exchanged for ­labour-power is itself merely a portion of the product of the labour of others … appropriated without an equivalent’. And secondly, ‘this capital must not only be replaced by its producer, the worker, but replaced together with an added surplus’ (ibid.). It is a fact that there is ‘The relation of exchange between capitalist and worker becomes a mere semblance belonging only to the process of circulation, it becomes a mere form, which is alien to content of the transaction itself and merely mystifies it’ (729–730). If we see capitalist class relation in exchange as an uninterrupted process, it is clear that: ‘The constant sale and purchase of labour-power is the form’ and ‘the content is the constant appropriation by the capitalist, without equivalent, of a portion of the labour of others’ (p. 730). Of course, this is not how things are generally seen. What is not seen is the fact that: while the working class ‘is converting a portion of the means of production into products, a portion of [its] former product is being turned into money’ for the capitalist class. (Marx, 1977: 713) In fact, the class experience of the working class can be best described in the language of alienation: workers are alienated (separated) from not only property but also the ways in which the property is used and the product of the labor process in which property is used, and indeed such product of her labour converted into capital in turn rules over her. The relation between the capitalist and working classes from the vantage point of production is not only a labour-process, a process of production of use-values but also a process of creating surplus-value, and in this same dual process of production of use-values and value, it is not the working class that employs the means of ­production, but the reverse’ (p. 548). The working class is an appendage of capital. This is both in the sphere of production,32 and outside of production. The 31 32

Freedom in the sense that members of the working class can sell their commodity to whoever they want to. This is true even in the so-called knowledge-industry, including it industry, where workers apparently have some autonomy and enjoy flexi hours. As soon as the demand for

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­ orking-class, ‘even when it stands outside the direct labour process, is just as w much an appendage of capital as the lifeless instruments of labour are’ (Marx, 1977: 719). The worker is not just a producer but also a self-conscious consumer. But ‘Even its individual consumption is, within certain limits, a mere aspect of the process of capital’s reproduction’ (ibid.). While workers’ individual consumption provides the means for their maintenance and reproduction, it also secures their ‘continued reappearance on the labour-market’ (ibid.).33 But the notion of freedom in the realm of consumption is apparent. Workers’ freedom to consume what they need to live with the wages they receive is not (entirely) outside of the scope of the control of capital. The individual consumption of the worker, whether it occurs inside or outside of the workshop, inside or outside of the labour process, remains an aspect of the production and reproduction of capital, just as the cleaning of machinery does, whether it be done during the labour process or when intervals in that process permit. The fact that the worker performs acts of individual consumption in his own interest, and not to please the capitalist, is something entirely irrelevant to the capitalist. marx, 1977: 718

The relation between capital and labour is not just between property-owner and non-owner. The fact that the class relation under capitalism is alienation is clear: the production process incessantly converts material wealth into capital, into the capitalist’s means of enjoyment and his means of valorization.

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what they are producing drops or their cost is above average, they, either as homeworkers or as a collective worker sitting in an office, lose their jobs, and with this, their autonomy. ‘Hence both the capitalist and his ideologist, the political economist, consider only that part of the worker’s individual consumption to be productive which is required for the perpetuation of the working class, and which therefore must take place in order that the capitalist may have labour-power to consume. What the worker consumes over and above that minimum for his own pleasure is seen as unproductive consumption’ (Marx, 1977: 718). Marx adds: ‘If the accumulation of capital were to cause a rise of wages and an increase in the worker’s consumption unaccompanied by an increase in the consumption of labour-power by capital, the additional capital would be consumed unproductively. In reality, the individual consumption of the worker is unproductive even from his own point of view, for it simply reproduces the needy individual; it is productive to the capitalist and to the state, since it is the production of a force which produces wealth for other people (ibid.).

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On the other hand, the worker always leaves the process in the same state as he entered it – a personal source of wealth, but deprived of any means of making that wealth a reality for himself. Since, before he enters the process, his own labour has already been alienated from him, appropriated by the capitalist, and incorporated with capital, it now, in the course of the process, constantly objectifies itself so that it becomes a product alien to him (ibid.: 716; italics added). The process of capitalist production is also the process by which the capitalist productively consumes labour-power, the product of the labourer is incessantly converted into commodities. It is also converted into capital, ‘that sucks up the worker’s value-creating power’ (ibid.). That is, the product of labour is converted into ‘means of subsistence that actually purchase human beings, and into means of production that employ [the workers]’ (ibid.). The worker himself constantly produces objective wealth, in the form of capital, an alien power that dominates and exploits him; and the capitalist just as constantly produces labour-power, in the form of a subjective source of wealth which is abstract, exists merely in the physical body of the worker…; in short, the capitalist produces the worker as a wage-­ labourer. (p. 716) Now, this incessant reproduction, this perpetuation of the labourer, is the sine quâ non of production under capitalist class relation. While on the one hand the working class is excluded from property in that it does not own/control it, on the other hand, it is in constant bodily touch with property; after all the labor power of the working class bathes the instruments and raw materials with its fire, without which no value and surplus value will be produced: ‘the instrument of labour confronts the labourer, during the labourprocess, in the shape of capital, of dead labour, that dominates, and pumps dry, living labour-power’. Modern capitalist class relations is characterized by ‘The separation of the intellectual powers of production from the manual labour, and the conversion of those powers into the might of capital over labour’. What results is the ‘technical subordination of the workman to the uniform motion of the instruments of labour’, giving rise to ‘a barrack discipline, which is elaborated into a complete system’ in the workplace (e.g. factory or call center, etc.). But such eternal constant touch between dead labour and living labour just referred to which are two moments of capitalist class relation can also pose a danger for the capitalist class: what if the working class starts converting that touch into real political control? That this possibility is not too far-fetched is seen in factory occupations that happen again and again.

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In capitalist class society, relative to other class societies, there is a deeper connection between the way exploitation happens and unequal distribution of control over property. Unequal distribution of property attains a unique character in the capitalist form of class society. Under capitalism, it is not just the initial unequal distribution of property (means of production)34 that is the stuff of class as in other societies, although this is important. It is not just that under capitalism, extra-economic coercion is not the dominant norm. The point is that the initial inequality in distribution of means of production – workers dispossessed of effective control over property through violent means and capitalists monopolizing it, in a process of primitive accumulation, is constantly reproduced through class relation of exploitation at the point of production. Unequal distribution of means of production (but not distribution of products for direct consumption) – i.e. the idea that some enjoy ownership/ control over means of production and others do not – is truly an aspect of production relation, and therefore of class relation.35 Because labor is separated from means of production, it must work for a wage for capital. And once the sale of labour power has happened, it loses all control over its material conditions for reproduction of its life; it must surrender a large part of what it produces to capital in the workplace. Every day labour produces things which it surrenders to capital in the form of value and surplus value and from which it remains separated, a process that reproduces its alienation and dependence on the capitalist class.36 34 35

36

This is what analytical Marxists (Wright, Roemer, etc.) and scholars influenced by them (e.g. the geographer, Corbridge, 1993) focus on. That this is the case can be understood from the following comments in Grundrisse: ‘before distribution can be the distribution of products, it is: (1) the distribution of the ­instruments of production, and (2), which is a further specification of the same relation, the distribution of the members of the society [agents] among the different kinds of production. …[unlike] distribution of products….distribution of the agents of production it is itself a moment of production’ (Marx, 1973: 96). I am abstracting from the controversial topic concerning the distinction between productive labour (labour involved in production of commodities and surplus value for the capitalist) and unproductive labour. While some argue that productive and unproductive labour share common grounds and constitute together the working class (Braverman, 1974; Wright, 1979), others think that there is a class boundary that separate the two (Poulantzas, 1975). Many argue that all labor in the capitalist mode of production is productive because it all contributes to surplus value production albeit in different ways, direct and indirect. There is a massive literature on this topic (Brooks, 2005; Cockshott and Zachariah, 2006; Durand and Lege, 2014; Hunt, 1979; Marginson, 1998; Smith, 1993). David Laibman says that the debate on productive and unproductive labour is unproductive (personal communication).

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Capitalism is not then just about production. It is also about reproduction (of conditions of production), of a relation, a relation of class. Class does not just exist. It is constantly reproduced. Capitalism produces not only commodities, which satisfy material or cultural needs and which some may have more and others less. Capitalism not only produces surplus value, which is pumped out of workers. It also produces, and reproduces, the capital-labour relation, which is another name for class. It reproduces ‘one the one hand the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer’ (Marx, 1977: 724; parentheses added). There is a dialectics here: unequal distribution and control of property leads to unequal control over surplus (i.e. some people have control over it and others do not), and the surplus once appropriated from direct producers is then converted into property and thus feeds into increased inequality in the distribution of property in the form of capital. The relation between the capitalist and working classes has an interesting identity, producing some potentially ‘common interest’, which stems partly from the fact that both are commodity owners, that both have something to sell and to sell with economic freedom. As well, both need each other. To exist as a class, the working class needs the capitalist class which is seen as an employer. And the capitalist class also needs the working class. Many people actually believe: the interest of the capitalist and of the labourer is the same. And in fact, so they are! The worker perishes if capital does not keep him busy. Capital perishes if it does not exploit labour-power, which, in order to exploit, it must buy. The more quickly the capital destined for production – the productive capital – increases, the more prosperous industry is, the more the bourgeoisie enriches itself, the better business gets, so many more workers does the capitalist need, so much the dearer does the worker sell himself. The fastest possible growth of productive capital is, therefore, the indispensable condition for a tolerable life to the labourer. marx, 1976: 32

There is therefore a sense in which the worker and the capitalist have some common interest (rapid economic growth, growth of capital): ‘the more speedily the worker augments the wealth of the capitalist, the larger will be the crumbs which fall to him’ (Marx, 1976: 39), and this is so in a direct sense (workers will be employed by the capitalist class) and indirectly in that capitalist economic growth may increase the tax base of the state so it can afford some welfare benefits (public wage) for the working class. It is this objective

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fact of identity of interests between the classes that underlies all the talk about ­economic growth being good for everyone and which is therefore idolized in the contemporary neoliberal-capitalist world. And it is this that is at least partly the basis of the notion that it is better for people to be exploited, than not exploited, by capital.37 But given the rules of private property, such common interest is transformed into its opposite, i.e. antagonism.38 Growth of productive capital (which is partly captured in economic growth) means nothing but these: ‘Growth of the power of accumulated labour over living labour; growth of the rule of the bourgeoisie over the working class’ (Marx, 1976: 32). The working class ‘produces the alien wealth dominating it, the power hostile to it, capital’ and when this happens, ‘there flow back to it its means of employment – i.e., its means of subsistence’ and this occurs ‘under the condition that it again become a part of capital, that is become again the lever whereby capital is to be forced into an accelerated expansive movement’ (ibid.). To say that the interests of capital and the interests of the workers are identical, signifies only this: that capital and wage-labour are two sides, very unequal sides, of one and the same relation. The one conditions the other in the same way that the usurer and the borrower condition each other. ‘Capital therefore presupposes wage-labour; wage-labour presupposes capital. They condition each other; each brings the other into existence’ (Marx, 1976: 32; italics in original). ‘As long as the wage-labourer remains a wage-labourer, his lot is dependent upon capital’ (ibid.: 33); it has no right to determine conditions of reproduction of its own life. ‘That is what the boasted community of interests between worker and capitalists amounts to’ (ibid.). In Grundrisse, says Marx (1973: 458): ‘The result of the process of production and realization is, above all, the reproduction and new production of the relation of capital and labour itself, of capitalist and worker’. This social relation, production relation or the class relation, ‘appears in fact as an even more important result of the process than its material results’. And more particularly: 37 38

For example, we often hear that it is better for poor workers in Mexico’s maquila zone to be exploited than not to be exploited by capitalists from the us, etc. In early 2011, the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party (vcp) decided to allow private business owners to join its membership, in order to boost the country’s pro-business image. Vietnam’s business elite welcomed this new policy. Vu Duy Hai, the chairman of Ho Chi Minh City-based trading company Vinacam Joint-Stock Co. told Bloomberg that the new policy would justify the profitable exploitation of workers. According to Vu, ‘Calling that exploitation is not correct’ and this is because, ‘When they [workers] work for us, their lives improve.’ (Rupasingha, 2011).

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within this process the worker produces himself as labour capacity, as well as the capital confronting him, while at the same time the capitalist produces himself as capital as well as the living labour capacity confronting him. Each reproduces itself, by reproducing its other, its negation. The capitalist produces labour as alien; labour produces the product as alien. The capitalist produces the worker, and the worker the capitalist etc. marx, 1973: 458

Once again: the working class produces not just this or that commodity. It ‘produces capital’ which dominates labor’ and it ‘produces values which serve anew to command [its] … work and to create by means of it new values’ (Marx, 1976: 32) Capitalist production ‘incessantly forces’ individual members of the working class to sell their ‘labour-power in order to live’, and enables the capitalist class ‘to purchase labour-power in order’ to enrich itself, with the property and its monetary expression that the working class produces (Marx, 1977: 723). Given the continued separation of the working class from property, ‘It is no longer a mere accident, that capitalist and labourer confront each other in the market as buyer and seller’ (ibid.). Such process incessantly throws back the labourer on to ‘the market as a seller of his labour-power’, and it ‘continually transforms his own product into a means by which another man can purchase him’. The means of subsistence that the working class must consume to remain in a position to offer its services to the capitalist class belong to that class. So, ‘In reality, the worker belongs to capital before he has sold himself to capital’ (ibid.). The class relation between the two classes must be seen in terms of an uninterrupted process, and not a one-time process. Regardless of how workers and capitalists think, it is the case that ‘The means of production, with which the additional labour-power is incorporated, as well as the necessaries with which the labourers are sustained’ are only ‘component parts of the surplus product, of the tribute annually exacted from the working class by the capitalist class’. The wages that the working class receives today are from the surplus value produced by it yesterday.39 Even though the capitalist class ‘with a portion of that tribute purchases the additional labour-power… at its full price, so that equivalent is exchanged for equivalent, yet the transaction is for all that only the old dodge of every conquerer who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has robbed them of’. On the surface, the equivalence of exchange appears to hold between individual capitalists and workers 39

One can also say that wages received by some members of the world working class here are from the surplus value that other members of this class produce there.

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and ­between ­commodity owners as such but: ‘the matter assumes an entirely different aspect when we look upon capitalist production in the uninterrupted flow of its reproduction, and when we consider the capitalist class as a whole and its antagonist, the working class, instead of the individual capitalist and the individual labourer’ (stress added). ‘But in so doing’, i.e. in applying the standard of a class perspective on production and exchange, ‘we should be applying standards entirely foreign to commodity production’ (Marx, 1977: 732). Given that different aspects of class relations are inter-connected, we have a fuller conceptualization of the two basic classes now. The proletariat is ‘the class of modern wage-laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor-power in order to live’ (Marx and Engels, 1975: 40). The proletariat is the propertyless class, ‘who are obliged to sell their labor to the bourgeoisie in order to get, in exchange, the means of subsistence for their support’ and who must work under the control of the bourgeoisie directly or its appointed managers and who must surrender a large part of what it produces. Of course, there have always been poor and working classes; and the working class people have mostly been poor. But there have not always been workers and poor people living under [proletarian] conditions (Engels in Marx and Engels, 1977a: 81).40 Conversely, the bourgeoisie is the class that is ‘already in almost exclusive possession of all the means of subsistence and of the instruments (machines, factories) and materials necessary for the production of the means of subsistence’, which buys the labour power of the proletariat and which directs the process in which the proletariat works on and with means of production of goods and services and which appropriates surplus value from the proletarians. 40

‘By proletariat is meant the modern class of wage- or salary-earning people whose lack of ownership of sufficiently significant means of production of their own results in their being forced, for a significant proportion of their lives, to offer their labour power for sale, if they are to live at an average, reasonable standard of living in the prevailing historical circumstances without engaging in specifiably exceptional or dangerous alternative activities, as well as people who are, in specifiable ways, directly dependent for their own livelihood on members of the proletariat as defined’ (Graham, 1993: 228–229). Given such a definition, it is correct that the proletariat are ‘those who work in factories at manual tasks or something similar. When we consider which individuals provide concrete instantiations of the structural requirement, a wider range will do so than would be the case with other definitions…. People as diverse as teachers, managers, writers, singers and clowns are explicitly described as members of the working class’ (p. 229). Similarly: ‘The essential feature would be not the mere ownership of capital, but ownership to such a degree as not to need to sell one’s labour power in order to enjoy an average standard of living, etc.’ (p. 229).

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Before we leave this section we should note two additional aspect of class relation to indicate a connection between class relation rooted in exchange, property and value relations, and other aspects of exploitation: (a) secondary exploitation and (b) auxiliary attributes of class that are connected to property relations. The working class, because it does not own means of subsistence, is subjected to secondary exploitation: i.e. outside of the sphere of production. This occurs, Marx says in Capital vol 3, when, for example: ‘the working class is swindled’ by the retail dealer, who sells them means of subsistence, and by usurious capital (Marx, 1981: 745).41 Secondary exploitation ‘proceeds alongside the original exploitation that takes place directly within the production process itself. The distinction between selling and lending is … completely immaterial and formal…’ (ibid.). In fact, as the Communist Manifesto notes, ‘No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer’ in the workplace comes to an end and ‘he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.’ (Marx and Engels, 1975: 53).42 Trotsky reinforces this point by saying that apart from having to deal with the basic antagonism with the capitalist class in the realm of production, ‘On the question of housing’, for example, the worker has to ‘deal with the landlord, and finally, as a consumer’, the worker has to deal with ‘the exploiting merchant’. In other words, ‘within the limited sphere of his everyday life, and starting from 41

42

Primary and secondary exploitation are connected: ‘In every country where the capitalist mode of production prevails, it is the custom not to pay for labour-power until it has been exercised for the period fixed by the contract, for example, at the end of each week. In all cases, therefore, the worker advances the use-value of his labour-power to the capitalist. He lets the buyer consume it before he receives payment of the price. Everywhere the worker allows credit to the capitalist. That this credit is no mere fiction is shown not only by the occasional loss of the wages the worker has already advanced, when a capitalist goes bankrupt, but also by a series of more long-lasting consequences’[of the capitalist system] (Marx, 1977: 278). The fact that the sections of the working class receive wages lower than what is necessary for their daily sustenance implies that workers have little savings from previous months’ wages and the fact that wages are paid after work, in 2 weeks or 4 weeks, these facts in the sphere of primary exploitation mean that workers depend on credit from mercantile capitalists or from the usurer, operating in secondary exploitation. Consider payday loans in North America. The financial institutions in the us granting payday loans charge an interest rate which is as high as 300%, which is a lot higher than the highest rates of usurious rates prevalent in areas of backward agriculture in the global periphery. People who borrow money against their paychecks are generally supposed to pay it back within two weeks, with substantial fees piled on. According to a recent New York Times article: ‘A customer who borrows $500 would typically owe around $575, at an annual percentage rate of 391 percent. But most borrowers routinely roll the loan over into a new one, becoming less likely to ever emerge from the debt.’ (Cowley, 2016).

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his workplace first of all’, the worker encounters ‘the class enemy in all its hypostases, in all its manifestations’ (Trotsky 1973: 380). Vast sections of the working class, including the reserve army, have been subjected to exploitation in the consumer credit market where the interest rates are extremely high. It is not just the working class which is subjected to the secondary form of exploitation. Also subjected to such exploitation are other direct producers (e.g. petty commodity producers such as peasants or small-scale proprietors in cities from which many members of the working class eventually come). They are exploited in the credit market (consider home-loans, and usurious moneylending, in poor countries) and in the consumer market (retail/mercantile capital). There is also secondary exploitation in the form of private appropriation of knowledge in the form of intellectual property monopolies and its commercial valorization. In this process, income (rent) based on such property titles (e.g. in biotechnology) has become an important form of the appropriation of resources and thus accumulation by dispossession of small-scale-producers and communal producers, including in indigenous communities (Zeller, 2008; Prudham, 2007). In the sphere of primary exploitation, Moneybags purchase labor-power, generally, at its value (at least, that is the Marxist assumption), while generating more value merely from the use-value of that commodity, but in the financial form of secondary exploitation, in which workers and (smallproducers) are subjected to exploitation and expropriation, money itself can beget money.43 There can be secondary exploitation in the land market when self-employed tenants (small-scale producers), including part-time wage-workers, pay a rent to have access to land. In the cities, workers needing a dwelling pay a rent to landlords. In fact, letting out has become a big business (Christophers, 2010). Workers are also indirectly exploited by having to pay taxes (especially if much of this money is spent on corporate welfare by the state rather than on free or subsidized education and health-care). In fact, in a way, exploitation of petty producers such as peasants, many of whom are semi-proletarians and are on their way to becoming proletarians, ‘differs only in form from the exploitation’ of the urban proletariat class (Marx, 1964: 119). ‘The exploiter is the same: capital. The individual c­ apitalists exploit the individual peasants through mortgages and usury, the capitalist class exploits the peasant class through the state taxes’ (ibid.: 119–120). The small-scale ­owners’ title to property is ‘the talisman by which capital’ holds them under its spell; property-ownership is the pretext under which capital sets the small-scale property owners against the propertyless 43

It is as if the same Moneybags is able, in all good conscience, to acquire other people’s ability to make promises and to be believed while somehow becoming more credible in the process (Ascher, 2016; Fine, 2010; Foley, 2013).

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proletariat (ibid.: 120).44 This means that other things constant, where land or natural resource are involved, the proletarian and semi-proletarian classes are subjected to combined exploitation by the capitalist-landlord classes. Classes have class attributes. They also have auxiliary or non-essential attributes which can play a very important role in reproduction of class or its undermining. These are basically constitutive of their lived experience. Class relations are not merely economic matters, although they are dominantly so. It is not just that the capitalist class is economically dominant and exploitative (it has the ability to buy labour power, it controls property and production process, etc.) and that the working class is economically dominated and exploited. Generations of people who objectively belong to the bourgeois and landlord classes lead a better life because of their superior education and habits, while the majority-class, the exploited, lack access to education and cultural products, relatively speaking. The dominant class not only has money and wealth; with their money and wealth, come their other ‘great practical advantages’ such as their connections and ‘refined’ habits as well. They have organizational and management skills; they have ‘close connections with the higher technical personnel (who live and think like the bourgeoisie)’. They also have ‘incomparably greater experience in the art of war (this is very important), and so on and so forth’ (Lenin, 1977c: 37). Many people who are capitalists have qualities which are not intrinsically capitalist in terms of class, although such qualities reproduce the capitalist character of those people: being technicians and organizers of production process. It is the case that most of ‘the organisers and first-class technicians of really large-scale and giant enterprises, trusts or other establishments belong to the capitalist class’, while workers lack such qualities and will continue to lack such qualities in socialism for years and decades (Lenin, 1918; Section 5).45 5

Concrete Map of Class Relations in Capitalist Social Formation

As discussed thus far, the Marxist class theory is a two-class model, at a more abstract level. Or, more adequately, one could say that it is a ­three-class 44

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Sometimes, some families may own some property but the monetary value of the property may be less than the debt owed, so in real terms, they are in a worse situation than the property-less. In a post-capitalist, socialist society undergoing transition towards communism, it is ­conceivable – and it really did happen in post Lenin’s Russia – that, as Lenin notes in Leftwing childishness: ‘“management” is entrusted’ by the socialist state to capitalists not as capitalists, but as technicians or organisers for higher salaries’ (ibid.).

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model. ‘The owners of mere labour-power, the owners of capital and the land-­ owners…in other words, wage-labourers, capitalists and land owners... form the three great classes of modern society based upon the capitalist mode of production’ (Marx, 1981: 1025). Their ‘respective sources of income are wages, profit and ground-rent’, although the fact that these sources of income exist is not the hallmark of class. But Marxist theory also has a more concrete class model. Underlying the concrete class map – class relations in the capitalist social formation rather than in the capitalist mode of production – are six different processes of differentiation: (a) at the level of class relations as such;46 (b) among commodity producers; (c) within the bourgeoisie (i.e. in terms of the size of capital, specialization, etc.); (d) within the working class (in terms of autonomy in labour process, ­income/wages, etc.); (e) on the basis of imperialism splitting the world-classes into their national forms, and (f) within classes on the basis of socio-cultural relations (e.g. race, gender, etc.). These processes are briefly discussed below. An important thought in the following discussion is this: there are basic tendencies towards the society splitting up into a small minority of the capitalist class and a large majority of the wage-earning class, and thus simplifying the class configuration in capitalist society, that these tendencies will encounter counter-tendencies, that the balance of weight between tendencies towards differentiation and counter-­ tendencies will vary over space and over time, but that over a large amount of area and over a long period of time, the tendencies towards simplification will prevail over the counter-tendencies, even though there will always be a middle stratum between the basic classes. What is important is not how many classes and class fractions exist but what processes underlying however many classes or class fractions exist at a concrete level.47

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This refers to multiple forms of class relation such as capitalism, feudalism, etc. ‘Marxism requires of us a strictly exact and objectively verifiable analysis of the relations of classes and of the concrete features peculiar to each historical situation’ (Lenin, 1917: para 6).

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a) Differentiation at the Level of Class Relations This refers to the coexistence of capitalist class relations with class relations that are non- or pre-capitalist. In any given country (and especially, if it is ­geographically vast and varied) different kinds of class relations may coexist in different regions, where ‘different types of socio-economic structures are ­intermingled, giving rise to the coexistence of multiple class relations from different modes of production, including transitional ones (e.g. “semi-­feudalism”). This is what constitutes the specific features of the situation.’ (Lenin, 1918: Section 3).48 A capitalist class society never appears in a pure form. Such a society may contain commodity production which does not involve the capitalist form of production, for example. That is partly why ‘in every capitalist country, side by side with the proletariat, there are always broad strata of the petty bourgeoisie, small proprietors’ (Lenin, 1977a: 55). They are petty commodity producers who buy and sell things but do not produce commodities as capitalists. ‘Capitalism arose and is constantly arising out of small production’. Conversely, and as mentioned before, ‘a number of new “middle strata” are inevitably brought into existence again and again by capitalism’ (Lenin, 1977a: 55; parenthesis added). Unsurpris­ingly, ‘Middle and transitional levels [or intermediate strata] always conceal the boundaries’, as Marx writes in his unfinished chapter on classes in Capital vol 3 (Marx 1991: 1025; parenthesis added). Indeed, ‘Capitalism would not be capitalism if the proletariat pur sang were not surrounded by a large number of exceedingly motley types intermediate between the proletarian and the ­semi-proletarian (who earns his livelihood in part by the sale of his labour-­power), between the semi-proletarian’ and the self-­employed producers’ ­(Lenin, 1968: 59). It is generally the case that where capitalist class relations come to exist, these relations make the transition from being subordinated to other relations to the status of the dominant form of class relations.49 ‘In all forms of society 48

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For example, in the post-1917 Russia, there were these class relations: (1) patriarchal, i.e., to a considerable extent natural, peasant farming; (2) small commodity production (this includes the majority of those peasants who sell their grain); (3) private capitalism; (4) state capitalism; (5) socialism (understood as transitional ‘class relations’ between the overthrown classes and the victorious direct producers), with conflicts between 2,3 vs 4,5 (ibid.). According to Mandel, in the capitalist world economy exist capitalist, semi-capitalist and pre-capitalist relations of production, which are linked to each other by capitalist relations of exchange and which are dominated by the capitalist world market (van der ­Linden, and Stutje, 2007). See: Foster-Carter, 1978; Wolpe, 1980; Marx, 1965; Richards, 1986; Donaldson, 2012.

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there is one specific kind of production’ and therefore there is one specific kind of relation of production, the class relation, that ‘predominates over the rest’, and that dominant class relations ‘assign rank and influence to the others’. The dominant class relations are ‘a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity’. They form ‘a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it’. (Marx, 1973: 106–107). Even when capitalist class relations conserve other relations, the other relations are, generally, conserved in the interest of capitalist relations where/where the latter are dominant. When capitalist class relation achieves dominance, simplification of class relations begins to occur. For example, over time the society of three (or four) main classes – capitalists, workers and landlords and peasants – becomes one of two main classes: as Marx notes in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, ‘the distinction between capitalist and land rentier, like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory worker, disappears and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes – property owners and propertyless workers’ (Marx, 1974: 66). b) Differentiation among Commodity Owners/Producers The stratum of (petty) commodity producers undergoes change. It is an unstable category. They tend to be subjected to proletarianization: majority of them become property-less. Classes between basic classes (capitalists and workers) exist because of the gradation in the ownership of property and investible surplus: this is the fact that some families may own limited amount of means of production relative to the average family labour and investment. All members of a subordinate class do not have to be completely property-less for the capitalist class relation to exist:50 it may be that relative to a family/person’s average need for its material reproduction, some own a limited amount of means of production, which is why they must work for others in order to have access to means of subsistence. To the extent that class position can be determined at the family scale, a family’s class position is a function of the following apart from its ownership of property:51 available quantity of family labour deployed in ­production; ­quantity of work the family does for other members of society for a wage (which could vary between zero and a given positive number); and 50

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As well: ‘it would be a profound mistake to think that the “complete” proletarianisation of the majority of the population is essential for bringing about …a [proletarian] revolution’ (Lenin, 1977a: 56). I am abstracting from the work needed for reproduction (e.g. cooking, child-care, etc.).

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the quantity of work other members of society perform for the family (Patnaik, 1999). Given these conditions, there can be: landlords who appropriate ground rent from capitalists or from self-employed workers; capitalists (who do not perform manual labour); proto-capitalists – i.e. property-owners who do perform manual labour and whose main source of income lies in the surplus appropriated from wage-workers they hire); self-employed property owners working in family-owned enterprises, including rented property and who generally do not hire much wage-labour, if any at all; semi-proletarians (who spend most of their working-time performing wage-work); and proletarians.52 Among the independent producers, some become less efficient than others as they cannot produce at a socially average cost,53 and therefore start losing 52

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These can be seen as aggregates of actual people or economic actors, and as positions. If seen as positions, a given family can possess two positions: where some members of a family work/live as self-employed property-owning workers working on the family land or in a family-owned non-farm enterprise, while other members work for a wage (in rural, urban or semi-urban areas), and where the income from the two different sources is pooled; sometimes income from the family business supports the wage-worker in the city (at least in the initial stages of the journey) and sometimes the income of the latter is invested in the family business. A given individual may also occupy more than one position at different points in time in a year or indeed in his/her life cycle. It is not unimportant to know the latter aspect of class (i.e. class position of a person); otherwise, one may be wasting a lot of time giving a big lecture on why class must be abolished to a group of people who are all in the position of the bourgeoisie. However, the phenomenon of class should be seen more in terms of positions – as markers or embodiments of class relations and class processes – and the relations between the positions, in society as a whole, and less in terms of which person occupies which position at which point in time. It is also the case that even when a person or a group of persons experience multiple class positions, it is usually the case that the person’s standard of living (and consciousness, etc.) is dominantly influenced by one class position than another. Whether they have a cost-cutting mentality or behaviour is beside the point (cf. Wood, 2002). When commodity production is prevalent as in small-scale commodity producing society, which is post natural economy and which exists before generalized commodity production under capitalist class relations, even if labour power is not a commodity, commodity producers still try to minimize labour and non-labour costs: the lower the costs of the commodities of a given producer relative to the costs of commodities produced by another, the higher will be their revenue, and therefore the higher will be their standard of living and leisure time. In fact, in many pre-capitalist commodity producing societies, with an advanced division of labour and where things were being exchanged, there was an advanced system of accounting in terms of labour hours developed (Mandel, 1974: 14–15), and underlying such a system was producers’ desire for ‘striking material gains’ by means of exchange (p. 17). Yet the basis for such cost cutting is not as objective as it is under capitalism

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their means of production to others. In terms of the quantitative variation in property, a critical point is reached when the amount of property is so limited that one has to work for others to survive or when the amount of property is so much that one is able to hire other people to deploy the property for production of things for a profit. ‘Undoubtedly, the emergence of property inequality is the starting-point of the whole process [of differentiation], but the process is not at all confined to property “differentiation.”’ (Lenin, 1964a: 174).54 The class of property owners does not only differentiate. It also gets dissolved; it ceases to exist (ibid.). This class is ousted by absolutely new types of property owners, ‘types that are the basis of a society in which commodity economy and capitalist production prevail’. These types are the class of property-owners which employs wage-labourers, and a class of wage-labourers. In the process, a class of proletarians is produced from the ‘class’ of independent producers (ibid.). One type of property-owner is transformed into another: The lower strata of the middle class – the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants – all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population [marx in manifesto]. These middle class strata form a transitional class,55 which tends to be in the process of shrinking, as the dominant system of class relations (e.g. capitalism) develops. It is the case that:

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because labour power is not yet a commodity; besides, the scope for e­ xchange is still localized, so the class relations underlying commodity production are localized. None of this should suggest that capitalism is a mere continuation of pre-­capitalist small-scale commodity production. But no intellectual purchase is achieved by denying the cost-cutting behaviour to non-capitalist commodity producers. Proletarianization through marketbased competition is too slow a process to account for the massive world capitalism as it has come to emerge. Violent separation of direct producers from direct access to property must be a dominant class-based mechanism for the emergence of capitalist class relation. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1899/dcr8ii/ii8xiii.htm. A transitional class may not disappear but transform itself. In fact, one of the ways in which capitalism impacts pre-capitalist relations is that the old landlord economy turns capitalist; erstwhile feudal landlords become capitalists. There is another way: peasant differentiation which results in capitalism.

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the constant tendency and law of development of the capitalist mode of production [is] to divorce the means of production ever more from [selfemployed] labour and to concentrate the fragmented means of production more and more into large groups, i.e. to transform [self-employed] labour into wage-labour and the means of production into capital.56 marx, 1981: 1025

So an important aspect of the concrete map of class relations is the fact that relative to the needs of reproduction of the family, some property owners accumulate wealth more than others: some property owners are larger than ­others, some property owners begin to employ wage labour and others do not, and some employ more wage labour than others do. While the general tendency is towards the independent commodity producers to be differentiated into proletarians and capitalists, the process can be slow partly because many commodity owners can hang on to their property through super-exploitation of their family labour (i.e. the cost of self-reproduction is pushed below the average level that is prevent in a society) and because of subsidies provided by the state and similar actors57 (Das, 2013). The capitalist class relation is not based only on the following fact: that some people happen to own property while others do not own any property or less property. In fact, the latter category comes out of the former, however slowly. The modern capitalist industry: annihilates the bulwark of the old society, the ‘peasant’, and substitutes for him the wage-labourer. Thus the need for social transformation, and the antagonism of the classes, reaches the same level in the countryside as it has attained in the towns.58 marx, 1977: 637; italics added

Differentiation within the Bourgeoisie (in Terms of Size of Capital and Division of Labour, etc.) In the early history of capitalism, capitalists used to be small masters. Often ‘The smaller capitals …crowd into spheres of production which Modern In-

c)

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‘And to this tendency, on the other hand, corresponds the independent separation of landed property from capital and labour, or the transformation of all landed property into the form of landed property corresponding to the capitalist mode of production’. This also applies to small-scale capitalists discussed below. Of course, the mere separation of property from the class of direct producers will not always guarantee the development of capitalist class relation, and corresponding economic development, as the dispossessed people can be converted into slaves.

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dustry has only sporadically or incompletely got hold of’, as in rural areas and smaller towns. Small masters include owners who also work: they are ‘only a hybrid between capitalist and labourer’ and may not possess the minimum sum of capital to ‘carry on a business under normal conditions’, a sum that tends to increase as the capitalist production develops. This is the minimum sum that must be commanded in order to act like a capitalist, one i) who is able to devote the whole of the time during which he functions as a capitalist, i.e., as personified capital, to the appropriation, and therefore, control of the labour of others, and to the selling of the products of this labour and ii) who does not have to work and who lives better than a labourer. To not have to work and to live better than workers, the capitalist has to employ many people. Doing so requires a large amount of capital. Smaller capitalists come from below and from top. Capitalist class relation is reproduced through competition which ‘rages in direct proportion to the number, and in inverse proportion to the magnitudes, of the antagonistic capitals’. Competition ‘always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hand of their conquerors, partly vanish’ (Marx, 1977: 777). Some small masters may have been erstwhile proletarians as well: some proletarians mobilize their savings from higher salaries accruing from educated employment and convert them into capital for investment.59 One way in which simplification of class structure happens is the fact that some weaker/smaller capitalists are outcompeted by stronger/bigger capitalists and become proletarians. A quality of small masters is that they face competition from their big brothers (bigger capitalists) and partly derived from this quality is the fact that they are ‘the most unscrupulous and grasping exploiters of hired labour’ (Lenin, 1977c: 57). The capitalist class relation is not only a threat to independent self-­employed commodity producers but also a threat to itself, at least to its weaker comrades. The logic of the relation (via competition) ‘is bound to impoverish a larger body of small capitalists, and to augment in increasing proportion the numbers of the class who live by labour alone, thus considerably enlarging the mass of labour to be employed’ (Engels). Thus quantitative differentiation in terms of size of capital within the bourgeoisie beyond a limit gives rise to a qualitative result: proletarianization of the bourgeoisie. To be noted also is the fact that many smaller capitalists are directly connected to larger capitalists through subcontracting operations. Such linkages between members of the capitalist class reproduce their relations: they reproduce bigger capitalists as bigger capitalists who are able to avoid higher costs and labour troubles, and they reproduce smaller capitalists as smaller capitalists. In any case, it is wrong 59

Some also convert remittance from migrant family members into capital.

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to say that ‘the small masters [are] not … a class (who invented that pernicious theory of the class struggle?) but … single individuals, exploiters who “live and feel quite like proletarians”’ (Lenin, 1977c: 57). The property-owning, labour-hiring class is not just differentiated on the basis of the size of operation. It is also differentiated on the basis of many other features. One is whether some of its members directly appropriate surplus value or not.60 ‘The capitalist who produces surplus-value – i.e., who extracts unpaid labour directly from the workers and fixes it in commodities, is admittedly the first appropriator of this surplus value’, but he/she is ‘by no means the ultimate proprietror’ of this surplus-value (Marx, 1977: 709). This is because they have to ‘share it afterwards with capitalists who fulfil other functions’ in social production taken as a whole. The first appropriator of surplus value shares it with others such as those selling the finished commodities (merchant capital), providing land (landed capital), and making available loans (financial capital). So ‘Surplus-value is …split up into various parts. Its fragments fall to various categories’ of property-owners such as those who control ‘profit, interest, gains made through trade, ground rent, etc.’ (Marx, 1977: 709). d) Differentiation within the Working Class This is in terms of processes such as autonomy in labour process, wages or standard of living, and geographical movement (e.g. migration). The working class is also divided according to detailed division of labour within the labour process. It is divided ‘into workmen who are actually employed on the machines (among whom are included a few who look after the engine), and those who merely attend them (almost exclusively children) of these workmen’, who  ­include those who ‘supply the machines with the material to be worked’ (Marx, 1977: 545). Then there is ‘a superior class of workers’. The latter are those ‘whose occupation it is to look after the whole of the machinery and repair it from time to time’ such as engineers, mechanics, and joiners (ibid.). Some of these people are ‘scientifically educated’, and others are brought up to a trade. Struggle by the working class is a major reason for technical changes in the workplace, which are then reflected in, and produce, divisions within the working class. This in turn dampens their spirit of struggle. The outcome of the technical changes is a division of labour within the workplace which necessitates, as we have seen, ‘a barrack discipline’: some members of the working class specialize in the labour of overlooking, thereby dividing the workpeople

60

This is the kind of stuff that is the focus of the Post-structuralist Marxist class theory.

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into manual labourers and overlookers’, into soldiers and sergeants of an ­industrial army (Marx, 1977: 549). Among the fragments of the working class are those which directly produce value and those who do not: the extraordinary increase in the productivity of large-scale industry, accompanied as it is by both a more extensive and a more intense exploitation of labour-power in all other spheres of production, permits a larger and larger part of the working class to be employed unproductively. Hence it is possible to reproduce the ancient domestic slaves, on a constantly extending scale, under the name of a servant class, including men-­servants, women-servants, lackeys, etc.61 marx, 1977: 574

Then there are: the ‘ideological’ classes, such as government officials, priests, lawyers and soldiers. There are also workers (e.g. commercial workers) who do not produce value directly. Their price of labour power is determined by its value and hence by its costs of production, while the application of their labour-power, its ‘exertion, 61

Marx writes in Grundrisse: ‘Labour as mere performance of services for the satisfaction of immediate needs has nothing whatever to do with capital, since that is not capital’s concern. If a capitalist hires a woodcutter to chop wood to roast his mutton over, then not only does the wood-cutter relate to the capitalist, but also the capitalist to the wood-­ cutter, in the relation of simple exchange. The woodcutter gives him his service, a use value, which does not increase capital; rather, capital consumes itself in it; and the capitalist gives him another commodity for it in the form of money. The same relation holds for all services which workers exchange directly for the money of other persons, and which are consumed by these persons. This is consumption of revenue, which, as such, always falls within simple circulation; it is not consumption of capital. Since one of the contracting parties does not confront the other as a capitalist, this performance of a service cannot fall under the category of productive labour. From whore to pope, there is a mass of such rabble. But the honest and “working” lumpenproletariat belongs here as well; e.g. the great mob of porters etc. who render service in seaport cities etc. He who represents money in this relation demands the service only for its use value, which immediately vanishes for him; but the porter demands money, and since the party with money is concerned with the commodity and the party with the commodity, with money, it follows that they represent to one another no more than the two sides of simple circulation; goes without saying that the porter, as the party concerned with money, hence directly with the general form of wealth, tries to enrich himself at the expense of his improvised friend, thus injuring the latter’s self-esteem, all the more so because he, a hard calculator, has need of the service not qua capitalist but as a result of his ordinary human frailty’ (Marx, 1973: 272–273).

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expenditure of energy, and wear and tear it involves’ is no more limited by the value of his labour-power than it is in the case of any other wage-labourer’ (Marx, 1981: 414). Their wage ‘does not stand in any necessary relationship to the amount of profit that he helps the capitalist to realize’. What they cost the capitalist is different from what they bring in for him. They create no direct surplus-value, but they add to the capitalist’s income by his ‘assistance in reducing the cost of realising surplus-value’ by virtue of the fact that they perform unpaid labour (ibid.). Many commercial workers belong ‘to the better-paid class of wage-labourer’: they are those ‘whose labour is skilled labour, above average labour’. Yet their wage tends to fall, ‘even in relation to average labour’, as the capitalist mode of production advances’. This happens for various reasons.62 The working class is differentiated on the basis of income and living standards, resulting in: better paid (‘labour aristocrats’) (Foster, 2010) and worst paid sections of the working class. The working class is also geographically split: different sections of the wage- and salary-earning class live in different areas within a city (Ljunggren and Andersen, 2015; see Walker, 1985). It is split into those who work generally inside a country and those who are migrants, temporary or permanent (Rosewarne, 2010), suggesting, as mentioned earlier, the gradual emergence of a global labour market and ever more globalized labour-power. The working class is also split into the currently employed and the reserve army (including its various forms). The capitalist s­ ystem of class relations and accumulation indeed require a reserve army for its reproduction (Marx, 1977; Basu, 2013) to act as a lever of wage determination and to allow the capitalist class to pump out more and more surplus value from those sections of the working class that are currently employed.

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The first reason, Marx writes in Capital vol 3, is ‘the division of labour in the commercial office means that only a one-sided development of ability need be produced and that much of the cost of producing this ability to work is free for the capitalist’. Secondly, wages tend to fall ‘because basic skills, knowledge of commerce and languages, etc., are reproduced ever more quickly, easily, generally and cheaply, the more the capitalist mode of production adapts teaching methods, etc. to practical purposes. The general extension of popular education permits this variety of labour to be recruited from classes which were formerly excluded from it and were accustomed to a lower standard of living. This also increases supply, and with it competition. With a few exceptions, therefore, the labour-power of these people is devalued with the advance of capitalist production; their wages fall, and whereas their working ability increases. The capitalist [class] increases the number of these workers’, if there is “more value and profit to realize”. The increase in this labour is always an effect of the increase in surplus-value, and never a cause of it’ (1981: 414–415).

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Then there are paupers, vagabonds, and criminals or lumpen elements in the proletariat,63 etc. and such differentiation reproduces the totality of class relations, including relation between capital and the currently employed. As well, some members of the working class have a lot more autonomy than others. Many of these workers (those with greater earnings and greater autonomy), ‘the new middle class’ (or call it by another name), are often trustworthy allies of the capitalist class; some of them even elevate themselves to the status of the capitalist class by investing their surplus income in accumulating capitalist property.64 The division within the working class on the basis of mental labour (white collar work) or intellectual work and manual labour is a major one. In what is called cognitive capitalism, mental labour is growing in importance, with science increasingly being a productive force. People’s ability to do science, including that which is naturally given (consider ‘the genius’), is unequally distributed. This fact, in a context of unequal distribution of resources needed to develop scientific expertise, can be the basis for accumulation of alienable property in the hands of some (e.g. engineers owning start-up tech-firms) over time and then their ability to employ wage labour on that basis.65 The division between mental and manual labour is a division that ‘started before capitalism, with the first steps of the development of class society and culture; since that time, the task of management has become ever more bound up with mental labor and is operated through various categories of mental labor’ (Trotsky, 1973: 179). Capitalist class has made use of, and further deepened that division: apart from the class division, ‘the main curse of capitalist society consisted in the division between mental and physical labor’ (ibid.), which somewhat coincides with the rural urban division as well. Capitalism puts mental and physical labor in the greatest contradiction, raising the division to an extraordinary degree of tension. Capitalism transforms physical labor into repellent, automatic labor, and raises ­mental labor, at the highest level of generalization, into idealistic abstraction and mystical scholasticism. trotsky, 1973: 179

63 64 65

See Thoburn (2002) on the lumpen elements. A lot of academic work (Analytical Marxism) has been done on demarcating these groups from capital and labor. Many of the owners of these firms start as highly-skilled, highly-paid workers, who convert some of their savings into capital.

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The fact that the capitalist and working classes are involved in multiple aspects of class relation – as buyer/seller of commodity labour power, as buyer/seller of means of subsistence – divides the working class. The relation between an individual capitalist and an individual worker is a relation of a producer vs consumer, and it is a relation of class. While a given capitalist relates to his/her worker as a worker (i.e. in terms of class relation), she/he relates to the worker of another capitalist as a consumer. This fact shows ‘every capitalist’s illusion, but alters nothing in the relation of capital in general to labour’. Every capitalist knows this about his worker, that he does not relate to him as producer to consumer, and wishes to restrict his consumption, i.e. his ability to exchange, his wage, as much as possible. Of course he would like the workers of other capitalists to be the greatest consumers possible of his own commodity. But the relation of every capitalist to his own workers is the relation as such of capital and labour, the essential relation. But this is just how the illusion arises…that apart from his workers the whole remaining working class confronts him as consumer and participant in exchange, as money-spender, and not as worker. marx, 1973: 420

Similarly, one individual worker relates to another worker as a competitor in the job market.66 At a concrete level, there are inter-class and intra-class relations (Figure 12). The working class, like the capitalist class, as a totality is reproduced through the existence of mutually competing fractions of that class. In other words: the content of class is reproduced in the form of class-fractions: class fractions take the form of class. One must also bear in mind the fact that the form influences the very content, which is another way of saying that the existence of parts of the working class and their mutual relationship to the fractions of capitalist class – i.e. the fact that the working class exists in the form of parts of the working class (individual workers or groups of workers) – influences the totality of the working class, its conditions of existence, its daily robbery, its pain and ­suffering. The fractions exist not just in the sense of seekers of work ­competing with one another but also in the sense that: some fractions of the working class, here and now, may be paid below the value of labour power, and other fractions then and there may be paid above the value.

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Members of specific sections of the working class may also compete in the sphere of consumption: who has how many cars, or modern tv sets, etc.

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Marxist Theory of Capitalism as Class Member of the capitalist class 1

Member of the working class 1

Member of the capitalist class 2

Member of the working class 2

Member of the capitalist class 3

Member of the working class 3

Member of the capitalist class n

Member of the working class n

The capitalist class as a whole

The working class as a whole

Relations of competition within a class Relations of exchange and relation of exploitation Relation of exploitation: at the point of production Relation of exploitation: in the markets (mortgage, etc.) Relation of mediation between competition and exploitation

Figure 12 Inter-class relation and intra-class relation

While the working class appears to be internally differentiated in many ways, including the fact that its members do different kinds of work, there is always an opposite tendency: labour is increasingly losing its specificity, and is merely a usevalue for capital and a means of survival for labour. Proletarians are increasingly becoming bearers of abstract labour.67 This economic relation – the character which capitalist and worker have as the extremes of a single relation of production – … develops more purely and adequately in proportion as labour loses all the characteristics of art; as its particular skill becomes something more and more abstract 67

In a capitalist class society, ‘the value of a commodity represents human labour pure and simple, the expenditure of human labour in general’. It is ‘the expenditure of simple labour-power, i.e., of the labour power possessed in his bodily organism by every ordinary man, on the average, without being developed in any special way’. Of course, what is simple average labour varies in character across times and places. However: ‘in a particular society it is given’. Skilled or complex labour ‘counts only as intensified, or rather multiplied simple labour, sothat a smaller quantity of complex labour is considered equal to a larger quantity of simple labour. Experience shows that this reduction is constantly being made. A commodity may be the outcome of the most complicated labour, but through its value, it is posited as equal to the product of simple [unskilled] labour’ (Marx, 1977: 135). This of course means that there is a difference in income, etc. between those who perform simple average labour (which is mainly manual labour or which involves little mental exertion) and those who perform more skilled work, at least partly because it takes more labour time to produce and reproduce complex labour than simple labour, and because of supply and demand conditions in the labour market.

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and irrelevant, and as it becomes more and more a purely abstract activity, a purely mechanical activity, hence indifferent to its particular form; a merely formal activity, or, what is the same, a merely material…activity, activity pure and simple, regardless of its form. marx, 1973: 297

Given the race to the bottom, happening at national and international scales, workers in different sectors and areas are increasingly experiencing similar – lower – standard of living, a trend that is marked by the gradual shrinkage of what is known as the middle class (higher-income earners among the working class) in advanced countries and a rise of a middle-income group in some of the major countries in the periphery. Of course, such equalization in living standards of the working class is an unequal process, which means that considerable inter-national differences do exist. Imperialism Further Complicates the Concrete Character of Class Map Class process and class struggle must be seen as socio-geographical processes, and, in particular, multi-scalar processes, with the ontological and political priority to be given to the world-scale. Labor and labor power of each member of the working class is a small part of the total global labour and of global labour power of the global working class, respectively. And this points to the deficiency in any sort of localist conceptualization of class and working class politics, although it is also true that class processes – exchange, property and value relations between the two basic classes are played out – at local and regional scales within a nation. Given the widening and deepening impact of the law of value, the ­working class, like the capitalist class, is potentially and increasingly in reality the world class, irrespective of the current low levels of internationalism in their consciousness and action. In this sense: imperialism, the modern form of capitalism, is a class process at the world-scale, i.e. a process of: of (a) intensified exploitation of the working class in the periphery, including its superexploitation,68 and (b) dispossession of small-scale commodity producers and communal producers (creating fresh conditions for capitalist exploitation in e)

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‘The drive to extra-surplus value through the super-exploitation of labour-power is a general and necessary tendency of capitalism that becomes predominant in the imperialist stage of capitalism’ (Higginbottom, 2012: 266). Millions of workers – including those who are officially defined as working poor included – in rich countries are also super-exploited in this sense.

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primary and secondary forms).69 Capitalism has a definite tendency towards imperialism, which signifies ‘an immense accumulation of money capital in a few countries’. And imperialism has interesting implication for the configuration of class relations. First of all, given that imperialism – world-scale accumulation and exchange – connects workers and capitalists of different countries in one network though the operation of a globalized law of value (Amin, 2010), it produces not only global commodities but also global classes: world capitalist class and world-workers. Then imperialism produces specific nationally-based fractions within these classes. Within the bourgeoisie, it produces coupon clippers. Imperialism produces ‘the extraordinary growth of a class, or rather, of a category, of bondholders (rentiers), i.e., people who live by “clipping coupons”, who take no part in any enterprise whatever, whose profession is idleness’ (Lenin, 1939: 100). Besides, imperialism also results in the fact that: ‘committees of the millionaires, known as governments… are equipped with armies and navies… [these governments] provide the sons and brothers of the millionaires with jobs’ in the imperialized countries as ‘officials of all kinds [e.g. ambassadors and makers of trade deals], clergymen, and other leeches [e.g. world bank officials, new middle class advisors indigenously developed in the global periphery]’ (Lenin, 1915: para 6; parentheses added).70 Within the working class, imperialism also results in objective divisions: between workers of imperialized and those of imperialist countries. Imperialist partitioning of the world into spheres of geopolitical influence, and the exploitation of workers and peasants of imperialized countries, ‘means high monopoly profits for a handful of very rich countries’ (Lenin, 1939: 104).71 This makes it economically possible to bribe the upper strata of the proletariat, and thereby fosters, gives shape to, and strengthens, opportunism. It is also the case that exploitation and social oppression of large segments of the working class in imperialist countries r­esult in working class anger there, and therefore, ­imperialist domination – war or aggression – is deployed as a fix, because such aggression produces a false psychological unity between workers and 69

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The secondary form of exploitation refers to, among other things, taking over the land of non-capitalist petty producers/owners and using it for speculation. Big businesses also take over their land to set up new enterprises at a cheaper cost (because land value is cheap). https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/aug/23.htm. The bribing can also happen on the basis of protection of jobs in imperialist countries competing with poorer economies: i.e. when an imperialist country uses protectionist measures to restrict the export of goods/services from poorer countries and thus to protect jobs in order to benefit a section of its own working class.

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capitalists of imperialist countries on the basis of nationalism (and racism). In turn, overseas aggression ensures super profit; it also results in protected sources of raw materials, energy and markets, which feed into capitalist accumulation in imperialist countries, creating jobs for sections of its working class. Through these measures, the imperialist capitalist class buys off sections of its own working class (even if temporarily).72 Of course, such bribing is not just ­restricted to workers in advanced countries. Also bribed are the allies of imperialism located in imperialized countries (the political elites, educated elites, members of the bourgeoisie and landed classes, etc.) through whom imperialism does its dirty job. Finally, class relations, at a concrete level, feed into (support), and are supported/reproduced by, non-class social practices/relations such as those based on race, caste, religion and gender, etc. (and ideas associated with these). This gives rise to divisions within the property-owning class (e.g. black and white bourgeoisies, high-caste and low-caste bourgeoisies, and male and female CEOs, etc.) and the working class (e.g. white workers and black workers; male workers and female workers, and low-caste and high-caste workers). The nonclass practices and ideas can acquire a life of their own and become somewhat autonomous. Class processes/relations and the effects of the operation of those processes/relations are ontologically different. While all social strata are subjected to class processes/relations, their effects are distributed unequally depending on one’s gender, racial, caste, etc. background. Suffering and precarity created by capitalist class relations, including effects of economic recession – are unevenly distributed along lines of race, gender, caste and other such relations of social identity. Class practices, at a concrete level (i.e. as they are experienced by people), are gendered and racialized. Property is concentrated in the hands of adult males and more dominant ethnic and racial groups. Among those who do low-paid and precarious work and those who are unemployed or underemployed, women and racial minorities tend to be disproportionately represented. Women and minorities are often subjected to violence by men and by the majority ethnic/racial/religious group, respectively, and suffer from physical and moral injuries. But this suffering is not fundamentally caused by gender and race/ethnicity. If women are 72

Cecil Rhodes wrote (quoted in Lenin): ‘Owing to the growing difficulties of life which weigh not only on the masses of the workers, but also on the middle classes, impatience, irritation and hatred are accumulating in all the countries of the old civilisation and are becoming a menace to public order; employment must be found for the energy which is being hurled out of the definite class channel; it must be given an outlet abroad in order to avert an explosion at home’ (Lenin, 1939: 84–85).

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more likely to be in poverty than men, if in spite of their improved educational status, women’s economic mobility is still limited relative to men (McDowell, 2008: 22), the fundamental cause of this is not in the gender identity of sections of the working class, even if gender-bias does play a part. Similarly, the fundamental cause of the 2008 economic crisis, which has adversely affected blacks more than whites in the usa, does not lie in racial inequality, even if racial bias is not unimportant. It is the women workers, it is the aboriginal workers, it is the workers of racial minority background – and not women as such, or ethnic minorities as such – that suffer the most from the ways in which capitalist class relations make use of race and gender to both increase the rate of exploitation and keep the working class as a whole divided politically and disciplined.73 No one eats race (see Fields, 1990). No one eats gender. The capitalist class makes use of race and gender to justify and increase the level of exploitation. The discrimination against women is dominantly the effect of relations between genders, determined by the way in which capitalist class relations (e.g. absence of a living-wage; absence of universal socialized childcare) are articulated with the organization of physical and social reproduction among the working class people (Giminez, 2005). The racial identity of white workers – and their racism – is partly rooted in the fact that in compensation for low wages, they receive a sort of what Du Bois calls ‘public and psychological wage’ (Callinicos, 1993; see also Fields, 1990). This wage is derived from their membership of what Marx calls the ‘ruling nation’, the nation of white workers and capitalists. As well, when members of the working class have to compete for jobs and skilled work, they tend to make use of racial, caste-based, and gender-based divisions within the working class to increase their chances in the labour market. So not just capitalists class but also the working class succumb to undemocratic ideas and practices based on gender and race, etc. Thus their undemocratic ideas and practices reproduce divisions within the working class and support the capitalist class system itself. Social-cultural differentiation of the working class is a material-political need of capital, and therefore it also becomes a tool in the hands of sections of the working class in the interest of their self-reproduction within the limits set by the capitalist class system. Divisions based on race, gender, etc. exist not because some ‘people’ are bad (e.g. men are bad; white people hate black people), but because these divisions support, and help in the reproduction of, the capitalist class system through the actions of members of the capitalist 73

Gendered and racialized categories of people are treated as less than human, i.e. as people who hold less than one unit of labour power and who are less than full citizens.

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and working classes. One cannot deny that specific capitalists or specific ­laborers as individuals may be racists and patriarchal, and so on, just as they ­(capitalists) can be compassionate towards the poor sections of the working class and may champion the rights of women, sexual and racialized minorities, etc.74 But there is a logic to the unequal relations of gender and race, etc., which is rooted, more or less, if not entirely, in the capitalist class system. 6

Objective Effects of Class Relations on the Working Class: Suffering and Immiserization

Class relations form the structure of capitalist class-society, and produce specific mechanisms which in turn result in certain effects that people belonging to particular classes and living in particular contexts, experience.75 Class relations are ontologically different from the effects on the working class as well as (weaker) sections of the capitalist class, produced by those relations. Class relations produce, and are reproduced though, these effects and the ways in which they are experienced. Income difference or economic inequality cannot be reduced to, although it is rooted in, class differences. Within the working class, there are income differences because some perform more labour than others; some have more children than others, some are married and others are not, some are more educated and have more connections than others, some happen to have access to inheritance and others do not, and so on. As a form of the labour class, the modern working class is generally free of personal bondage vis a vis the class which controls property. This is an advancement relative to the situation of bondage in pre-capitalist class societies. The direct producers (proletarians) of capitalism is also materially better off than those of pre-capitalist societies.76 Yet, the modern proletariat is a suffering class. The working class is deprived of living a materially comfortable life of economic security and a life of dignity. It is deprived of the ability to control the conditions which govern its life. These conditions include the fact that the working class is separated from property and has no control over its effective use. It does not control how production happens and how the social surplus 74 75 76

Sections of the capitalist class may even fight for animal rights. The class experience could include: low wages, unemployment, going out of business, enjoying super-profits, etc. Average life expectancy now in advanced capitalist countries is more than double the life expectancy in late pre-capitalist times (e.g. 17th century England).

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is used. Then emanating from its alienation and from exploitation is the fact that it cannot meet its material and cultural needs. Indeed: the capitalist class relations have a dual and mutually contradictory character: in the selfsame relations in which wealth is produced, poverty is also produced; that in the selfsame relations in which there is a development of the productive forces, there is also a force producing repression [of that development]’ (Marx, 1987: 107). Subsistence needs of the working class remain unmet or are met inadequately, causing the class to suffer while resources to satisfy these needs do exist, the resources that have been created by the working class under the rule of the capitalist class. These needs are not only subsistence needs. They are also luxury needs, which are produced by capitalist development and influence the level of the needs of the working class. But the capitalist class system fails to satisfy these needs of large sections of the working class as well. In a capitalist society, money is an abstract commodity with which to buy the things people need to live. For the working class, money comes in the form of a wage. So let us return to the wage question in order to look at the objective effects of the capitalist class system on the working class. The cost of ­production of simple labour-power amounts to the cost of the existence and propagation of the worker. The price of this cost of existence and propagation constitutes wages. The wages thus determined are called the minimum of wages. This minimum wage, like the determination of the price of commodities in general by cost of production, does not hold good for the single individual, but only for the ‘race’ – i.e. entire mass – of workers. While ‘the wages of the whole working class adjust themselves, within the limits of their fluctuations, to this minimum’, it is the case that millions of workers ‘do not receive enough to be able to exist and to propagate themselves’ (Marx, 1976: 27); indeed majority of wage workers in poor countries and large sections of the working class in rich countries ‘do not receive enough to be able to exist and propagate themselves’. Millions experience hunger, whether it is ‘the hunger [that is] gratified by cooked meat eaten with a knife and fork’ or it is of different type of hunger ‘which bolts down raw meat with the aid of hand, nail and tooth’ (Marx, 1973: 92). The working class can enjoy a rise in wages, nominal or real. But relative wages?77 And even if nominal and real wages rise, such rise is temporary and 77

It is true that ‘a fall in the value of labor-power may be accompanied by a rise in the level of real wages’ (Lapides,1997: 234). Marx says: ‘The value of labour-power is determined by the value of a given quantity of necessaries’. With the rise in labour productivity causing more goods and services to be produced in less time, what falls is ‘the value and not the mass of these necessaries’, and ‘both the labourer and the capitalist may simultaneously be able to appropriate a greater quantity of these necessaries, without any change

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within limits. The law of production occurring under the capitalist class relation reduces itself simply to this: the correlation between accumulation of capital in the hands of the propertied class and rate of wages obtained by the working class is nothing else than the correlation between the unpaid labour that is pumped out of the working class and then transformed into capital, and ‘the additional paid labour necessary for the setting in motion of this additional capital’ (Marx, 1977: 771). ‘If the quantity of unpaid labour supplied by the working-class, and accumulated by the capitalist class, increases so rapidly that its conversion into capital requires an extraordinary addition of paid labour, then wages rise, and, all other circumstances remaining equal, the unpaid labour diminishes in proportion’ (ibid.). And when wages rise, the working class can save a little and buy things to satisfy its need for some luxury. However, all this can happen only within limits, and only for a given time, because: as soon as the diminution of unpaid labour, of surplus labour, ‘touches the point at which the surplus-labour that nourishes capital is no longer supplied in normal quantity, a reaction sets in: a smaller part of revenue is capitalised, accumulation slows down, and the rising movement of wages comes up against an obstacle’ (Marx, 1977: 771). It is therefore generally the case that the ‘rise of wages is confined within limits that not only leave intact the foundations of the capitalistic system, but also secure its reproduction on an increasing scale’ (ibid.). The living standard of the working class, and whether and to what extent its needs are met are determined by the law of capitalistic accumulation, which works in a context of capital-labour relation and intra-class relation (relation of competition within the two basic classes). This law ‘merely states that the very nature of accumulation excludes every diminution in the degree of exploitation of labour, and every rise in the price of labour, which could seriously imperil the continual reproduction, on an ever enlarging scale, of the capitalistic relation’. How can it be otherwise in a mode of production that is under the rule of capitalist class relations, one in which the working class ‘exists to satisfy the needs of self-expansion of existing values, instead of on the contrary, ­material wealth existing to satisfy the needs of development on the part of’ that class? Indeed, if in the sphere of religion, ‘man is governed in the price of labour-power or in surplus value’. So ‘with an increasing productiveness of labour’, the price of labour-power may ‘keep on falling, and yet this fall may be ‘accompanied by a constant growth in the mass of the labourer’s means of subsistence’. ‘But even in such a case, the fall in the value of labour-power would cause a corresponding rise of surplus-value, and thus the abyss between the labourer’s position and that of the capitalist would keep widening’ (in Lapides, 1997: 235).

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by the products of his own brain’, then in that of capitalistic production, they are governed by the products of their labour. In good times wages can increase and in bad times wages can drop. However, on an average, the working class of the world will get no more for their labor than is necessary for the purpose of creating surplus value of a normal quantity for the capitalist class; the price of labor power, or ‘the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life’.78 Needs of people, including of workers, are social.79 A rise in the level of living of workers requires a rise in the growth of capital and therefore a rapid growth of wealth and luxury. Workers may live a better life but capitalists who control wealth-creation live much better. So in relative terms, workers do not get better off (relative to the capitalist class and sections of the working closely connected to that class). Their nominal wages and even real wages may rise but not their relative wages, i.e. their wages relative to capitalist profits.80 ‘An appreciable rise in wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive capital’. And ‘A rapid growth of capital is synonymous with a rapid growth of profits’. Two consequences follow from these. One is that: ‘Rapid growth of productive capital’ which causes a rise in profits, ‘calls forth just as rapid a growth of wealth, of luxury, of social needs and social pleasures’ (Marx, 1976: 33). This means that ­‘although the pleasures of the labourer have increased, the social gratification which they afford has fallen in comparison with the increased pleasures of the capitalist, which are inaccessible to the worker, in comparison with the stage of development of society in general’ (ibid.).81 Besides, with the rapid rise of capital and 78

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‘This economic law of wages will come to be more stringently applied the more all branches of labour are taken over by large-scale industry’ (Engels in Marx and Engels, 1977a: 83). ‘A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.’ (Marx, 1976: 33). Now it is clear that: impoverishment is a relative notion for Marx. This suggests that ‘Marx does not believe that workers must remain at the level of wretchedness which he witnessed in nineteenth century Britain, or that they cannot increase their material well-being as compared with some earlier time’ (Graham, 1993: 230). Relative wages have fallen in the richest countries in 1963–1996 (Carter, 2007). ‘Our wants and pleasures have their origin in society; we therefore measure them in relation to society; we do not measure them in relation to the objects which serve for their

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intensified accumulation, profits grow and wages may rise but ‘Profits can grow rapidly only when the [relative] price of labour [power] – the relative wages – decrease just as rapidly. Relative wages may fall, although real wages rise simultaneously with nominal wages, with the money value of labour, provided only that the real wage does not rise in the same proportion as the profit’ (Marx, 1976: 39). This explains why the working class cannot meet its socially determined needs. So even if the income of the working class rises ‘with the rapid growth of capital’, ‘a widening of the social chasm that divides the worker from the capitalist, and increase in the power of capital over labour, a greater dependence of labour upon capital’ can happen at the same time (ibid.). Even the most favourable circumstance, i.e. when economic growth – growth of capital – happens and wages rise, ‘does not abolish the antagonism between’ the interests of the working class and those of the capitalist class. Profit and wages are always in inverse proportion. It is true that if capital grows rapidly, then wages may rise. However, ‘the profit of capital rises disproportionately faster’ (ibid.). ‘The material position of the worker has improved, but at the cost of his social position. Once again, the social chasm that separates him from the capitalist has widened.’ (ibid.: 40). The antagonism between the two classes is not just a matter of declining relative wages. Even if it is the case that the working class experiences the most favorable condition when there is the fastest growth of capital, what this means is this: ‘the quicker the working class multiplies and augments the power inimical to it’, which is the power of the wealth of the capitalist class, ‘the more favorable will be the conditions under which it will be permitted to toil anew at the multiplication of’ that wealth; the working class is just ‘content thus to forge for itself the golden chains by which the bourgeoisie drags it in its train’ (Marx, 1976: 40). Also, low wages prompt members of the working class to work longer hours and/or to do more work every hour (e.g. to increase piece wage). This means that one person does the work of, say, two, in a given number of days, further lowing the wages for everyone, so: the more a person works, the more they compete against other members of the class, and to offer themselves on the same wretched conditions as the person does; ‘so that, in the last analysis, he competes against himself as a member of the working class’ (Marx, 1976: 45) When the capitalist class, driven by the industrial war among its members (i.e. by relations among fractions of the capitalist class through which the relation between that class and the working classes functions), introduces gratification. Since they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature.’ (Marx, 1976: 33).

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machinery, it has ‘the same effects, but upon a much larger scale’: ‘It supplants skilled labourers by unskilled, men by women, adults by children; where newly introduced, it throws workers upon the streets in great masses; and as it becomes more highly developed and more productive it discards them in additional though smaller numbers.’ (ibid.). So, ‘the industrial war’ within the capitalist class is effected through a war against the working class, a war that is: ‘won less by recruiting than by discharging the army of workers’. In this war, the generals are the capitalists, who ‘vie with one another as to who can discharge the greatest number of industrial soldiers’ (ibid.). As workers compete for shrinking work, their wages fall. This is happening within countries and at an international scale. Many members of the working class are employed hourly or on a daily basis, and increasingly so. They are subjected to super-exploitation. They get paid below the value of labour power, deepening the normal labour metabolic rift. If the hour’s wage is fixed in such a way that the capitalist does not bind himself to pay a day’s or a week’s wage, but only to pay wages for the hours during which he chooses to employ the labourer, he can employ him for a shorter time than that which is originally the basis of the calculation of the wages for the hour, or the unit of measurement of the price of labour. Since this unit is determined by the ratio of daily value of labour-power to the working-day of a given number of hours, it naturally loses all meaning as soon as the working day ceases to contain a definite number of hours. The connexion between the paid and the unpaid labour is destroyed. The capitalist can now wring from the worker a certain quantity of surplus labour without allowing him the labour-time necessary for his own subsistence.82 marx, 1977: 686

Interests of the capitalist and working classes are irreconcilable, and therefore any identity of interests between them is only apparent, superficial and ­conjunctural. The capitalist class appropriates the surplus value that is produced by the workers in the production process and because the amount of this surplus is inversely related to the wages (and non-wage benefits such as 82

‘He can annihilate all regularity of employment, and according to his own convenience, caprice, and the interest of the moment, make the most frightful over-work alternate with relative or absolute cessation of work. He can abnormally lenghthen the working day without giving the worker any corresponding compensation to the labourer, under the pretense of paying ‘the normal price of labour’’ (Marx, 1977: 686).

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safety, access to free education and health-care, etc.) (Wesolowski, 1990: 167). So, even if wages rise, what remains is the fundamental character of capitalist class relation – the profit logic, dependence of workers on capital, alienation, lack of control over means of production, and how it is used. ‘The more or less favourable circumstances in which the wage-labourers support and multiply themselves, in no way alter the fundamental character of capitalist production’ (Marx, 1977: 763). Indeed, just as ‘better clothing, food, and treatment, and a larger peculium’, do not do away with the exploitation of the slave, so little do they the exploitation of the wage-worker (Marx, 1977: 769). When wages do rise – and with it any increase in the standard of living and diminution of misery of the working masses occur – as a consequence of accumulation of capital, that only means, in fact, that ‘the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-worker has already forged for himself, allow it to be loosened somewhat’ (ibid.). Any increase in wages, beyond a limit83 will go against the fundamental logic of the class system and not rectify a major fault of the capitalist economic system: alienation, including lack of workers’ satisfaction with work, which leaves the worker as an appendage of the a machine.84 As capitalism develops, poverty and destitution develop among the workers, and wealth and culture among the non-workers, according to Marx. ­Absolute immiserization among some workers, and relative immiserization for the working class as a whole, generally speaking, over a long time horizon, is what is characteristic of modern class society. The amount of surplus that the working class produces and the capitalist class retains, as Engels says in his introduction to Marx’s book, ‘is increasing with every new discovery and invention, while the share which falls to the working class (per capita) rises but little and very slowly, or not at all, and under certain conditions it may even fall’ (in Marx, 1976: 12). Immiserization is the fate of the working class especially during economic crises which are endemic: the working class suffers for reasons for which it has absolutely no responsibility. It is not just that needs of the currently employed members of the working class remain unmet. The system of class relations leads to massive ­unemployment: unemployed workers are the working class not in the sense that they have an actual money relation (they do not as they do not sell their 83 84

This is a case of the materialization of the law of transformation quantity into quality as discussed in the previous chapter. An increase in wages can coexist with growing relative immiserization (this refers to the fact that as production expands and new things get produced, new needs also arise in society, but as far as workers are concerned, they will not necessarily be met by increased wages; and the fact that the gap between capitalists’ profit and workers’ disposable income – and their relative standard of living – increases) (ibid.: 208–209).

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labour power), nor do they have a relation based on value because their labour power is not directly productively consumed. Indeed: The great beauty of capitalist production consists in this, that it not only constantly reproduces the wage-labourer as a wage-labourer, but also always produces a relative surplus population of wage-labourers in proportion to the accumulation of capital. Thus the law of supply and demand as applied to labour is kept on the right lines, the oscillation of wages is confined within limits satisfactory to capitalist exploitation, and lastly, the social dependence of the worker on the capitalist, which is indispensable, is secured’. marx, 1977: 935

7 Conclusion The capitalist class relation is a system of three internally related processes: exchange, property, and value/production.85 It represents transformations in four trans-historical aspects of society: wealth, property, labour, and labour process. These take specific forms in capitalist class rule. In each of the three spheres of class relation, there is a conflict of class interest. The conflict between the capitalist class and the working class is not merely that workers receive low wages and capitalists make high profits, although this is true. The real conflict is the fact that capitalists have the right to make a profit from workers’ labour while workers do not have the right to control the process of production and exchange and therefore they do not have the right to live a life of economic security. And that conflict will be there even if workers receive a wage that covers their usual cost of reproduction. The conflict is not merely over the quantity – proportion – of the social product that is received by workers. The conflict is over the fact that they have to offer themselves for sale to a class of people who control the means of production and exchange, and the way they are used. The capitalist class relation is an exchange relation, a relation of commodification of conditions of life, and their recommodification. Wealth, considered as things, whether material or cultural, that satisfy our needs appears as, or exists in the form of, commodities, in the societies where capitalist class rules. Not only do things become commodities. Even the ability to produce things (i.e. labour power) becomes a commodity, so labour, which is a transhistorical category, becomes wage-labour. It is bought and sold, like groceries or currencies. 85

The issue of the state is being abstracted from here.

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Production of wealth, when wealth appears in the form of commodities or value, is, fundamentally, in the interest of the capitalist class, and not in the interest of the working class, although both the classes experience wealth in this form. That is why the fact that wealth appears in the form of commodities86 is a class process. In all societies wealth is necessary. But when the aim of production of wealth is not to directly satisfy needs but to produce exchange values, the production of wealth becomes a class process, a capitalist class process. The relation between the capitalist and working classes is a money relation, a relation of exchange, a commodity relation. Both buy and sell things. The relation between these two classes is played out then in two market places: the market for labour power, and the market for means of subsistence and production. These market-places exist at multiple geographical scales, including the most local labour market (e.g. urban or metropolitan or a rural labour market) (Cox and Mair, 1988; Harvey, 1982), within which labour power and means of subsistence are bought/sold, and exchange relations aspects of class are reproduced. These market places are also being increasingly global, with labour migration happening on a large scale in response to uneven development of capitalism at the international scale (Rosewarne, 2010; Lysandrou, 2005). The relation between the two basic classes, the capitalists and the workers, is a monetary relation and not a relation of personal dependence. In the capitalist form of class society, diverse forms of bondage and personal dependence are replaced by impersonal transactions in the purchase and sale of labourpower. The money relationship is an advance over the extra-economic relation 86

These include cognitive commodities. In fact, connected to the distinction between mental and manual labour is the one between those who produce physical commodities and those who produce cognitive commodities. Cognitive commodities have a peculiar cost structure: the production of the first article generally entails enormously high initial fixed costs in the form of massive R&D investments, whereas the cost of ‘reproduction’ of subsequent units pales into insignificance (Vercellone, 2004a, 69). More generally, cognitive commodities have such qualities as costless reproducibility, indivisibility, non-rivalry, etc. (e.g. software). These are the ‘commodities for which the knowledge mobilized and objectified in their production predominates over the direct manufacturing labor required for the actual fabrication of its material support, which will act as “carrier” of that predominantly “ideal” content constituting their usevalue’ (Vercellone, 2007: 29; Starosta, 2012: 366–367). In the context of cognitive commodities, the principal source of value is apparently knowledge embodied in and mobilized by living labour and not capital or material labour, according Vercellone. Some mistakenly argue that the importance of cognitive labour contributes to the obsolescence of the Marxian law of value, and this is an issue that is not discussed here (see Starosta, 2012).

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characteristic of other forms of class society. In fact, not only can members of the working class sell their labour power to whoever they want to, they are also generally free to buy their means of subsistence from whomever they want to. Yet, the relation is one of unfreedom: workers are not free not to work for a wage, and they are generally not free to choose the terms of sale of their labour power beyond a very narrow limit (e.g. level of wages, etc.).87 The capitalist class relationship is not just an exchange relationship, however. It is also a relationship of property in the means of production. The class relation between money-owner and labourer – the market encounter between the money-owner and the owner of labour power, both being commodity ­owners – is produced socially and historically. Such relation emerges out of the fact that the conditions required for the realisation of labour-power – means of subsistence and means of production – are separated from the owner of labour-power, and are the property of the capitalist class. In fact, the story of class relations in societies, pre-capitalist and capitalist, is the story of changing property relations.88 Just as the form of wealth changes under capitalism in that it takes the form of commodities, so does the form of property change: it changes from the private property based in one’s own labor or family labour (or property in more or less communal form) in preor non-capitalist class society to ‘capitalist private property’, a form of private property which rests on the exploitation of alien, but formally free, labour. Capitalist class relation is based on the negation of a form of property based in own l­abour, and capitalist property relation awaits its own negation, as a definite necessary pre-supposition for classlessness. This is a process of primitive accumulation.89 Often the process of separation of pre- or non-capitalist property from direct producers is a violent process.90 This round of primitive 87 88

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Wages, etc. will vary within limits set by the capitalist need for profitability. For a Hegelian-philosophical discussion of property in (early) Marx, see Chitty (2013). On the historical nature of Marx’s concept of property, see Cahan (1994): in Marx’s thinking, property has a dual character as it begins by being a non-legal, socioeconomic phenomenon/practice, but usually evolves into being a complex legal institution as well. This, we may recall, is a process in which pre- or non-capitalist property – self-earned private property and indeed commons (either ‘old commons’ – collective property from precapitalist times or ‘new commons’ in the form of social benefits provided by the state) – is separated from direct producers and becomes the property of the capitalist class. Such property then becomes a means of sucking up surplus labour from workers. Before capitalism, access to means of production and access to means of subsistence were parts of the same process: direct producers grew food-for-consumption on the land of their own. Under capitalism, direct producers have to buy food with the money received from the sale of labour power. They are separated from the access to means of production

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­accumulation is now experienced by the working class (and other direct producers) while the original primitive accumulation was the experience of the direct producers (e.g. peasants; communal producers) who had access to means of production. Primitive accumulation is a class process signifying changes in property relations: its object – the groups who are subjected to it – are now not only owners of self-earned private property but also the wage-earning working class. This implies that: class analysis cannot be just about exploitation, etc. of an already existing class of wage workers. It must be about capital’s relation to a working-class-in the process of formation, i.e. dispossession of direct producers. Primitive accumulation is a class issue also in that it is a potential object of class struggle between the capitalist class and the working class when the latter struggles against, for example, re-commodifcation of means of subsistence (e.g. social commons), and not just a class struggle between the capitalist class and the class of independent producers (private or communal) over dispossession of the latter’s property. Of course, that does not mean that primitive accumulation is the main contradiction in contemporary capitalism, as Harvey mistakenly thinks, a topic we will return to in Chapter 8. Apart from the forcible methods of expropriation of property from direct producers, there is another method in which the class of property-less workers emerges in a commodity-producing society. It is through a process of class differentiation among independent commodity producers, and indeed among capitalists themselves. The bourgeois class produces its wealth only by continually annihilating the wealth of the individual members of this class, a process which expands the proletariat. The ‘top’ layer of capitalist class relationship is exchange, underlying which is the relation of property ownership, which has come about through forcible methods as well as differentiation among commodity producers. Merely being able to buy and sell and merely owning property will not produce surplus value. A capitalist class society is one in which means of production are owned and controlled by a small minority of private individuals who hire workers to produce goods/services for sale in the market for a profit, which is based, ­fundamentally, on the appropriation of surplus labour from workers. The capitalist class does not only own money, and it just does not engage in mere b­ uying and selling. It also owns the things (commodities) which include and subsistence. With this separation is the possibility of emergence of the commons in the means of subsistence (e.g. subsidized food; welfare benefits, etc.), while the means of production remain in private hands. And, as we have seen, with this is, in turn, the possibility of privatization of those commons as a new round of privatization – primitive accumulation.

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means of subsistence, that the working class needs but does not have, and means of production. So exchange relations and property relations are not the only forms of the class relation between capital and labour. Additionally, the relationship between the two classes is a relationship of production, of value, and of surplus value. It is a relation of accumulation: the capitalist class not only does not buy and sell, it is not just a class which owns property. It is also a class which invests money in production to make more money employing a class of nominally free women and men from which it appropriates surplus labour, the origin of profit. Production of wealth under capitalism and its accumulation is a class relation/process. Capital produces and accumulates wealth by virtue of the labor of the working class. And by taking away a portion of the worker’s product in the form of profit leaving her only with values sufficient – if that all – to reproduce her labor power, capital reproduces the working class. This does not mean to say that the standard of living of the working class does not improve. But what is understood to be an acceptable standard of living changes over time, so if it does improve, it cannot be generally at the expense of the accumulation fund for capital.91 Just as under the capitalist class relation, wealth, including what is consumed directly and what is invested to produce things, takes a specific form (it  takes the form of commodities), just as labour takes the form of wage-­ labour, and just as (private) property takes a specific form (it becomes capitalist ­private property), so labour process also takes a specific form (it becomes capitalist labour process). All societies must engage in labour process: they transform things, derived directly or otherwise, from nature into useful things. This general form of labour process that characterizes all society is turned into a capitalistic labour process, the process by which the capitalist class consumes the labour-power of the working class. The labour process becomes capitalist labour process in the sense that: the working class works under the control of the capitalist class to whom its labour belongs, and what is produced by the working class becomes the property of the capitalist class. The labour process is the sphere where the working class produces more value than it receives.92 91

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To the extent that it is, it can only be very, short term, for a reduction in profitability will generate changes in investment behavior which serve to discipline the pretensions of the working class, and this is the case whether or not the capitalist class threatens to move its investment overseas (Cox, 2004: 31). This points to the fact that class theory and value theory are always inter-connected: value theory is ‘about reconstructing the class-based production processes of capitalism, through to their consequences in the broader economic and social fabric, and suggesting how they can be transformed through mass action’ (Fine and Saad-Filho, 2009: 206). Emptying class theory of the content of accumulation and value will mean that one forgets

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The capitalist class appropriates the extra value and converts that into private property. Labor process as an aspect of class thus connects to, and presupposes, a specific form of the distribution of means of production, which makes exploitation within labor process possible: it is the fact that the capitalist class has monopoly in the distribution of means of production.93 It is not just that things exist in the form of commodities. Things as commodities exist in the form of capital. Capital is a thing in that it consists of  means of subsistence and production, including mechanical and biological technologies, scientific knowledge, etc. The capitalist class is the class that is the owner of all these things. But capital is not just things, and so it is not enough to say that the capitalist class is the owner of things, of property.94 Capital exists in the form of valorized labor and thus determines the social form of capitalist class society. It is not ‘some-thing’. It describes the functioning of a social totality as a whole (Lotz, 2015). Capital is neither a thing nor even a mere resource, economic or cultural (whether social contacts or lifestyle or education, credentials, social prestige, etc.). Whether it is the Bourdieu type non-economic conceptualization of capital or it is the Pickety type economic

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that class struggle is not effective as long as productive forces can be developed within the womb of current class relations. Economic crisis is the context of class struggle; and neither crisis nor struggle can be fully understood without an understanding of how wealth is produced in value forms. It is unfortunate that much class theory abstracts from labour process (see Carter, 1995). According to Piketty, capital can be defined in three major respects. The first aspect is related to wealth: capital is defined as the sum total of nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market. Capital includes residential estate as well as financial and professional capital (plants, infrastructure, machinery, patents, and so on) used by firms and government agencies (in Lotz, 2015: 377). Capital in the second aspect includes all forms of wealth that individuals (or groups of individuals) can own and that can be transferred or traded through the market on a permanent basis (p. 46). The third aspect of capital is related to accumulation: [c]apital is a stock. It corresponds to the total wealth owned at a given point in time. This stock comes from the wealth appropriated or accumulated in all prior years combined. Piketty’s three-fold definition of capital as accumulated wealth that individuals or groups of individuals can own is opposed to a Marxian inspired philosophical concept of capital in several ways: [1] it remains naturalistic, since, according to Piketty’s assumptions, capital can also be found in societies other than capitalist societies, [2] it remains positivistic, since capital is here understood as the sum of all entities that social agents ‘have’ and possess, and [3] it is a-social, since, according to Piketty, it exists independently from commodity circulation before it enters the market. As such, in Piketty’s world capital has a thing like quality that stands outside of relations, exists in tangible form (which would also include immaterial things, such as intellectual property), and is ‘naturally’ connected to private property. (Lotz, 2015: 377).

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notion of capital, both are mistaken. And therefore any theoretical discussion on class based in these notions of capital will be faulty.95 The capitalist class relation is a material social process, existing independently of the will of individuals, and yet capital as a process/relationship and the capitalist as a class are not identified merely on the basis of the materiality of the things that are produced in this relation/process. One does not become more or less capitalist by virtue of the differing material form of the product one produces: to paraphrase Marx, capital remains the same whether we put cotton in the place of wool, steamships in the place of railroads or software, or the genetic code. The laboring class also does the same: whether it produces toys or guns or software for the capitalist class is immaterial. Working is a means to an end: survival. Unlike a craftsman, the worker ‘is absolutely indifferent to the specificity of his labour’. At the level of capitalist class relation as such, Marxist class theory abstracts from whether production is industrial or whatever, although Marxist class theory has useful things to say about class relations in specific arenas of production (manufacturing, services,96 agriculture, etc.).97 The things that capital owns must be such that surplus labour can be sucked up by capital. Means of production exist not just as commodities or property under the control of the capitalist class or as things which can be used to produce other useful things. They exist as things that absorb surplus labour. Even the importance of what workers consume is seen in relation to them existing to reproduce their labour power which could then be employed to produce profit. Their life in their dining rooms or kitchens mimics the life of a horse that is fed to move things on a farm, or is like an engine being refueled in a ­factory. When money and the things needed for production that are bought with that 95

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Note that the forms of capital in non-Marxist analysis such as that pursued by Bourdieu and his followers (Bourdieu, 1986; Flemmen, 2013; see also Savage et al., 2013) are not the forms of capital in Marxism, where capital, not matter in what form it is, appropriates surplus value directly or indirectly from the working class (in primary and secondary exploitation). No such notion of exploitation is a necessary aspect of the multiple forms of capital framework, which also makes use of a vague, a historical, view of capital that neoclassical economists and laypeople make use of. See Taylor and Bain (2005) on labour process in call centers; also Huws, 2014 on digital labour. David Harvey says – and he is not alone in holding this view – that Marxism, including Marx’s theory in Capital, is (dominantly) about industrial workers (see Harvey and Rivera, 2010). This is largely a mistaken view. Marx merely provides examples from the lives of the industrial worker to illustrate his theory which is generally at a more abstract level than a specific material-social form of capitalist class relation, i.e industrial capitalism.

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money are used to make more money than initially invested, it only then, and it is only in that process as such, that the money and the things become – ­function as – capital. The director of the process of production of capital and the owner of the money and the things becomes the capitalist. The most ­fundamental aspect of class relation between capital and labour is that of exploitation of wage-labour: surplus labour – exploitation of the working class – drives the class system. Exploitation takes primary and secondary forms. The primary form of exploitation happens in the process of capitalist production or labour process. Exploitation – and therefore the existence of some people as capitalists and others as workers in the sphere of production – presupposes not just commodification and private property but also a given level of the development of productive forces, which makes the production of the surplus and its appropriation possible. In the absence of a higher level of development of productive forces, the property in raw materials and instruments of labour that capitalist class owns would be, as Marx says, merely nominal: economically they would belong to the working class as much as to the capitalist class, since they would create value for the capitalist only in so far as the capitalist himself/herself were a worker. The capitalist class would relate to the means of production not as capital, but as simple material and means of labour, like the working class itself does in the production process. This fact, once again, signifies the close inter-connection between capitalist class relation on the one hand and the materiality of life in the sense of the development of productive forces, and the accumulation of wealth in value form, on the other. In a capitalist class relation, the persons who are capitalists do not have to work, and they are not merely owner of things but owner of things-as-capital. It is not just that the question of the capitalist class relation – the question of how capitalist class exploitation happens – cannot be divorced from the question of accumulation; it also cannot be divorced from the question of the control over private property. So thinking about class merely in terms of surplus labour and in abstraction from control over property is a chaotic conception of class in that it separates things that cannot be separated. In fact, it is by virtue of the fact that the capitalist class has control over property that this class has control over the social surplus produced by the labour of the working class. Because of dull economic compulsion, i.e. because the working class does not own means of production or means of subsistence, it has to sell its commodity (labour power) to the capitalist class, and such a situation has been created, and continues to be created, in a class-driven process (primitive accumulation including its on-going form). The problem for the working class is not just that it has to constantly beg for a higher proportion of the

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social product it itself produces; its problem is also that it lacks control over the means of production. The working class receives a wage with which to buy its means of subsistence. Such a wage, on average, equals the cost of production of that commodity (i.e. cost of its maintenance and future reproduction) of the entire class, of the entire ‘race’ of workers. Generally, the wage is equal to the cost of production/reproduction of the commodity (labour power) being bought/sold, but this is not the case with millions, and generally, the conditions of the working class worsen relative to those of the owners of means of production and of the strata that are closely associated with the owners (their managers, ideological spokespersons, legal defenders, army generals, etc.). Thinking about class merely in terms of surplus labour is problematic in another way. Mere performance of surplus labour – labour beyond what is required to reproduce oneself – does not necessarily result in exploitation any more than a thing is a capital. Forms of labor and things become what they are under determinate social relations. In socialism, people will perform surplus labour to meet communal needs.98 But no individual of a country or no country of the world will have the right to appropriate the fruit of surplus of others by virtue of any special control over production through private property rights, except at the direction of the community as a whole or its world government. Performance of surplus labour becomes a class process when there is private property in means of production and when direct producers have no democratic control over the purpose and dynamics of production. The labour process is not only the sphere of exploitation, and the working class does not just perform surplus labour. Labour process is also the sphere where the working class is dominated by the capitalist class: the working class has no power to decide how production happens and for what purpose. Labour process is a sphere where the productive power developed by the working class becomes the productive power of the capitalist class, and where the working class, separated from property, experiences separation from the product of its labour. It is through such separation that capitalist production, seen as a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value; it also produces, and reproduces, the capital-relation itself. It reproduces two 98

These needs include: caring for the young and the old; saving resources for investment to replenish physical conditions of society’s material reproduction; producing new and better built environments; giving back to nature what is being taken out of it in the form of, say, plantation of trees; provide resources, possibly at an above-average level, for certain oppressed groups or areas who have been historically deprived of these, investment of resources to remove the conditions which compel working class women to engage in drudgery in the homes, and so on.

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classes: the capitalist and the working classes. There is, once again, an internal relation between production and accumulation of wealth in its value form and reproduction of the relation between the capitalist and working classes. Thus private property owners’ control over property is a political act. This is so in three ways: at the point of production and at the level of society as a whole and in relation to the state.99 In a system of production based on class relations, goods and services are produced according to the demand/desire of a narrow elite (to satisfy their needs) and/or according to a societal logic (market-logic of profit), which then also satisfies the interest (i.e. wealth in the abstract – in its value form) of a narrow elite. The control over private property is codified, protected and defended by a coercive state. So class relation is not merely about what happens in the labour market (e.g. the fact that, for example, minimum wages are not paid) or in the sphere of production (workers get less than they produce or experience unsafe working conditions, or that skilled workers and supervisors have more power and earnings, and so on). The class relation is a totality, it is about the entire social order. It is about the entire system of economic and political (and discursive100) relationship between the entire capitalist class and the entire working class and other classes, a system supported by the capitalist state. Of course, the capitalist class owns property, and the working class does not, and because of this the capitalist class has access to a vastly more quantity of means of subsistence, including luxury, than the working class. But: The fundamental evil of the capitalist system is not the extravagance of the possessing classes, however disgusting that may be in itself, but the fact that in order to guarantee its right to extravagance the bourgeoisie maintains its private ownership of the means of production, thus condemning the economic system to anarchy and decay. trotsky, 1991: 16–17

The capitalist class relation is based in the interconnections among the commodity relation, property relation and production/value relation. The capitalist class relation grows out of exchange/money relation, but is not reducible to  these. The relationship between the capitalist and the working classes is a relation based in private property, and is not just about control over ­private property. Capital relates to labour in terms of the property question and the 99 The issue of the state is discussed separately in chapter 9. 100 The political aspects are discussed in Chapters 9 and 11–12, and the discursive aspect in ­Chapter 10.

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labour question. The capitalist class relation is not just about exploitation, however; it is also about the constant separation of labour from property, and the capitalist class denying the working class control over the labour process. The value-form, the commodity-form, the money-form and the capital-form (Holloway, 2015: 23) are all inter-connected in class theory as in: commodityform→value-form→money-form→capital-form. We must see class relations at each level of these forms: class in the sense that working class must sell its ability to work in the commodity form, that the compensation it receives will be shaped by the value form, that it has no market-unmediated control over the commodities which it produces or which it needs access to for its reproduction, that it has no control over production of value and its transformation into money form (prices) and over the surplus which takes the form of capital, and so on. These different forms and their respective class-ness are internally connected.101 Production is primary, and exchange is secondary.102 So the production relation aspect of class (exploitation in production) is primary, and exchange relations (exploitation in exchange) aspect are secondary, relative to production. In terms of class theory as articulated here, the different forms of exploitation are parts of the totality of capitalist class relations, within which primary exploitation has ultimate primacy. Class relation must always be seen as existing as a process in which production and exchange are inter-connected, and this has important implications for a spatial view – a ‘distanciated’ (explained below) way, of thinking about class. Capitalist class exploitation is both local and non-local. It is the case that class relations are always constituted locally hence (Cox, 2001). Yet, it is non-local, distanciated, because relations between capital and labour in a work-place or a set of workplaces in a place, is mediated by wider-scale, increasingly global-scale relations of exchange expressed as the law of value. If we think about social surplus ‘solely in terms of labour activity expended in production’ then we ‘inevitably restrict the context of exploitation to relations of domination that particular people exercise over others under specific conditions and in a specific location’ ­(Lysandrou, 2000). But if we see social surplus ‘on the basis of both the production and pricing actions of agents’, then ‘the context of exploitation’ becomes one ‘that can transcend any 101 One cannot have money without capital; commodity without money, and so on: ‘The different forms fit together tightly to form a totality. If we stop there, then we have an analysis which suggests that the only way to break this totality is to do it as a whole, that attempts to break particular aspects are doomed to failure because of the integrating power of the whole’ (Holloway, 2015: 23). 102 There is much discussion on this (Fine and Saad-Filho, 2008; Kincaid, 2007; Brenner, 1977).

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spatial moorings, and in which personal relations of association are subsumed under, dissolved into, the impersonal social pressures of the market’ which increasingly operate globally’. The term ‘distanciation’ designates ‘this mingling of presence and absence in the specifically capitalist form of exploitation. This is ‘the fact that the material goods produced by the workers employed by capitalists do not directly yield the surplus that actually accrue to them, but are only a means of access to a share in the social surplus for which all workers are responsible but which, in the main, individual capitalists need not know or have any connection with whatsoever’. ‘Distanciation… implies the possibility of a directly collective form of exploitation under capitalism’ (Lysandrou, 2000: 332). Capitalist class exploitation must presuppose exchange relations, but exchange relations cannot guarantee capitalist relation of exploitation, either at the origin of capitalist class relations or now. Exchange relations – including commodification of labour power and other things – are a part of class relations even if exchange relations are subordinated to relations/processes of ­accumulation of wealth (in value-form) and exploitation of the working class. Workers, whether they work in a car-factory or in a financial company which is a part of, or connected to, the car company, are vulnerable to changes in their monthly premium on their consumer credit as they are to changes in the terms of their employment (Ascher, 2016: 18).103 They are also vulnerable to violent changes in the stock market, in which their pension funds are invested, whose performance will ‘determine their share of the global surplus – a surplus to which’ workers in a particular place and their peers elsewhere ‘will themselves have contributed by their past labors’ (Ascher, 2016: 19) While Polanyi stresses commodification of labour power and other things and ignores class exploitation (see Selwyn and Mayamura, 2014), Marxist class theory includes both, and therefore much more comprehensive, dialectical and therefore much more critical. Polanyi deliberately uses the term “market society” instead of “capitalism” as a way of distancing himself from the associations that come from the Marxist use of the term (Burawoy, 2003). If Polanyi’s stress on commodification is associated with his ‘critical concept of the always embedded market economy’ (Block, 2003: 299), a concept that ‘challenges the economic essentialism of both market liberals and Marxists that has come to dominate our society’s common sense’, the Marxist theory advanced here stresses class as it is associated with what I will call always exploitative market 103 Soedrberg (2012; 2013) examines the state-assisted extension of consumer credit to the growing number of (informal sector) workers who comprise the relative surplus population, within what she calls cannibalistic capitalism.

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economy and is a counter-challenge to Polanyianism and ‘the varieties of capitalism’ type literature it has spawned.104 A Polanyian single-minded emphasis on increasing commodification in contemporary capitalism can lead one to focus on capitalism as neoliberalism which can then be seen as restoration of class power of capitalist class, and this is indeed how Harvey (2003; 2005) and Dumenil and Levy (2005) see things. Such a view using the language of restoration assumes that in a capitalist society where there is less commodification, the working class necessarily has more power and the capitalist class has less power. Such a Polanyian view immensely down plays the true nature of capitalist class relation, which is rooted in property and value relations, and not just in relations of exchange. If increased access to use-values via a rise in wages from employers can only lead a relaxation of the golden chain around the neck of the working class, so increased public wage (access to social commons) can only have a similar effect as well, without the working class having control over the means of production and their use and over the very purpose of production of wealth (satisfaction of need vs incessant accumulation of wealth in the abstract). The capitalist class relation seen as an exchange relation appears to be an equal harmonious process characterized by freedom. The so-called freedom for individual members of the working class is not as expansive as it appears. Such freedom presupposes economic bondage (reliance on the capitalist class for livelihood). Indeed, the class relationship between capital and labour that is mediated by, and based in, the market is a coercive relationship. In the first instance, there is economic coercion: it is for every individual member of the working class to find a buyer from the capitalist class, and they can starve if they do not. This is increasingly true for millions of workers, who do not find regular employment with a decent wage. Many become what is known as the precariat. The capitalist class relation is also an unequal process in that the working class receives much less than what it produces, although all of its labour performed in a day appears to be paid. It is an unequal process when millions do not even get paid enough to sustain themselves, and when workers pushed to working long working days die prematurely, a process indicating that they give to the capitalist class, say, 50 years’ worth of work when they get paid for 30 years. 104 ‘The concept of the always embedded economy… begins with the premise that any favorable economic dynamic has to be understood as flowing from the interaction among self-interested agents, the actions of the state, and forms of social regulation’ (Block, 2003: 299). So in this view agents are not class-agents, the state is not class state, and regulation is not capitalist regulation.

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Then there is the matter of labour unfreedom, including through extraeconomic coercion, that the members of the capitalist class actually seek to impose on individual members of the working class. Although Marx stressed the free nature of the working class members in the labour market, class theory must stress the nominality aspect of such freedom: i.e. labour unfreedom, which Bhandari (2008), Brass (2003; 2011), Banaji (2012), Rao (1999) and others have differently stressed.105 The existence of deproletarianized working class signifies this: ‘the initial presence of casual labor that is free (= thesis) is then transformed by “from above” class struggle (= antithesis) into a workforce of casuals who are now unfree (= synthesis)’ (Brass, 2014: 299–300). ‘Labor-power is neither always and everywhere free, nor is it always and everywhere unfree’ (Brass, 2011: 271). Dispossession from property, a common condition of production, in other words, enclosure, is an important aspect of class in capitalist society. ‘Massive unemployment caused by dispossession plus shrinkage of limited benefits and social protection ‘have anchored deepening power inequalities between employers and workers, as owners of capital call the shots over the substantively unfree, i.e. those who have no choice but to continually (re)enter the dynamics of wage labour, however exploitative and oppressive those terms’ (LeBaron and Ayers, 2013: 888). Thus the capitalist class relation involves much unfreedom: this is when the right to sell labour power freely is taken away from the working class. Thus the approach taken towards capitalist property relations in this chapter differs from that in political Marxism.106 These days there is a lot of talk about inequality. Much of this is relatively inadequate: it does not touch the real content of inequality. It talks about 105 Banaji conceptualizes all historical working arrangements simply as ‘disguised’ wagelabour that is free, a view, Brass (2003) argues, ignores the fact that unfree workers get paid and also appear in the labour market, but not as sellers of their own commodity. Rao (1999) thinks that concepts of unfree and free employment relations are based on the incommensurable categories of negative freedom and self-determination. Nor can any clear separation be sustained between labour subject to ‘non-economic’ coercion versus labour subject exclusively to ‘economic’ coercion. Tomba (2015: 80) writes: ‘the capitalist temporality of production generally conflicts with the temporality of reproduction and violently synchronises the latter according to the pace of the former. Although the capitalist mode of production has to be grasped within the interpenetration of circulation, production and reproduction, the point of view of each of these spheres is neither equivalent nor interchangeable. Marx utilises the term ‘tanning’ to show how capitalist production consumes not only labour-power, but, likewise, the body, life and soul of the worker’ (ibid.: 79). 106 Political Marxism generally ignores the extra-economic coercion or unfreedom element in the capitalist class relation.

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i­ nequality from the standpoint of the possibility of improving inequality under capitalist class relation. But the exploiter and the exploited cannot be equal. Class equality is an oxymoron. Indeed, ‘there can be no real, actual equality until all possibility of the exploitation of one class by another has been totally destroyed’ (Lenin, 1977c: 36). Indeed, ‘There can be no equality between the exploiters – who for many generations have been better off because of their education, conditions of wealthy life, and habits – and the exploited, the majority of whom even in the most advanced and most democratic bourgeois republics are downtrodden, backward, ignorant, intimidated and disunited’ (ibid.). On the surface the money relation between the two classes is based on the laws of commodity exchange. But in reality, below the surface appearance, there is a massive inequality. It is true that in circulation ‘equal’ legal subjects bargain while in production neither are those subjects equal nor their relations symmetrical. But even in circulation workers are not equal subjects with capitalists. They have less money to buy what they need, even if they are free to buy what they want. While qualitatively, both capitalists and workers must go to the market to gain access to means of subsistence, quantitatively, one class has the means with which to get what it needs and another class does not. Besides, there is labour metabolic rift: the working class receives only a part of the net product it produces, even if its wages cover its cost of maintenance. This also includes the fact that the sections of the working class are often paid below the value of labour power and the fact that the worker is subjected to overwork and bodily and mental injuries which adversely affect the quality and length of life and for which there is little adequate compensation. There is the possibility of some members of the working class converting themselves to members of the capitalist class (via savings transformed into capital, for example). This fact points to a general idea that ‘Classes are historical; they can become what they are not’ (Andrew, 1990: 266). However, there is a limit to such mobility across class boundaries: if all workers become property owners who will perform surplus labour? And though there is a great deal of class mobility where ‘class’ is used in some far narrower sense than Marx’s, there is far less mobility in terms of the wider meaning of class: it is comparatively rare for someone who is a worker in Marx’s sense to become a capitalist in his sense (Graham 1993: 232). In some ways, relative to the lash of the slave owner or of the feudal landlord, the capitalist class is less violent. But the capitalist class relation must be assessed not just relative to pre-capitalist class relation (i.e. its past) but also relative to its future (post-capitalism). Relative to what is possible given the development of productive forces and their socialization made possible on the basis of the collective labour of the world working class within the capitalist

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class relation, the latter is a deeply violent and unequal process. The class relationship is a violent process: it is not just in the sense of all the suffering and immiserization processes (including massive absolute and relative poverty and hunger, etc.) that the working class experiences as the objective effects of the operation of the capitalist class system ruled by the logic of commodification. It is also a violent process in that the means of production and subsistence were divorced, and continue to be divorced, from direct producers in a violent way. It is a violent process when thanks to exchange and value relations, bodily needs of large sections of the working class remain unmet, and they have to work under physically unsafe conditions. It is a violent process because any resistance to capitalist commodification and exploitation and their effects on the body meets with violence from the ruling class and its state. The commodity that the working class owns, labour-power is a peculiar commodity in that it is attached to the body of the worker: no wage can repay the impoverishment, mutilation, and consumption of the body of the worker (Arruzza, 2015). Production under capitalist class relation converts the laboring body into a crippled monstrosity. There can be simply no monetary compensation for the physical and mental pain the working class is inflicted on: what is the monetary value of depression or loss of limbs people suffer from because they work under the juggernaut of the capitalist system? And even if some compensation is paid for, say, accidents at work or toward the stress leave, such compensation ultimate comes from what the working class has itself produced. The capitalist class can give nothing to the working class that is its own and that is not made by the working class. The capitalist class relation is simply a painful bodily experience for the majority of the humanity. Marxist class theory is and must, therefore, be a discourse on the body of the working class. Consider Marx’s references to the ‘shrunken flesh of the women, undermined by labour and poverty’, the ‘children crawling about in the dirt’, and ‘deformity resulting from excessive labour in the monotonous mechanical operations of the factories’ (Arruzza, 2015). Capitalist class relation ‘obliges a part of humankind to consume itself in the many-hours-a-day prison of wage labour’ (Tomba, 2015: 83). Capital’s time and labour’s time – capital’s reproduction temporality (its turnover time) and workers’ temporarily (both daily bodily reproduction and production of human beings) – are not in sync. The map of a concrete class society is much more complicated than what is suggested if one assumes the existence of two basic homogenous classes (the capitalist class and the working class). A concrete map of class society will have the following interacting features: dynamics of the basic class relations based in primary exploitation in capitalism  +  classes based in non-primary

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exploitation (e.g. merchants)  +  residuals from past  +  border classes (small scale commodity producers) + non-class features shaping class + embryonic future class relations (e.g. relations of production in worker-owned units; worker-owned consumer coops)107. Underlying the concrete class map – class relations in a social formation rather than in a mode of production – are six differentiation processes: (a) differentiation at the level of class relations as such (this refers to multiple forms of class relation such as capitalism, feudalism, etc.); (b) differentiation among commodity owners-producers; (c) differentiation within the bourgeoisie (i.e. in terms of the size of capital, and division of labour, etc.); (d) differentiation within the working class (in terms of autonomy in labour process, income/wages, etc.); (e) imperialism splitting the world-classes into their national forms (e.g. the working class of the periphery and the working class of imperialist countries), and (f) social-cultural differentiation of the basic classes. In a concrete class society, there is a geographically and temporary varying co-presence of various forms of class relations (with various level of development of productive forces): pre-capitalist, capitalist, non-capitalist relations, but in a system of class relations and their corresponding cases (capitalists and workers landlords and peasants, etc.) within which one form generally tends to be dominant, and that form is capitalism now.108 To understand the class character of a place requires knowledge of abstract ideas and the concrete situation.109 As Lenin says in a preface to his The Development of Capitalism in Russia: A concrete analysis of the status and the interests of the different classes must serve as a means of defining the precise significance of this truth when applied to this or that problem. lenin, 1964a: 32

107 These can actually work, within limits, as tools of working class organization against capitalism. 108 The fact that one may not like this dominance cannot negate the fact of dominance, the fact that dominance exists. It should also be noted that: one cannot arrive at the concrete class relations of a place or a time merely from abstract ideas about a two-class model or about primary class exploitation in production. 109 In the absence of the combination of both these approaches, one commits ‘the Bukharin error’. As Lenin says in Leftwing Childishness, like Bukharin, one can be ‘extremely wellread Marxist economist’ but like him, one can, at the same time, go astray because one does not ‘go deep enough into the specific features of the situation’ in a place and at a given point in time (Lenin, 1918; Section 5).

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Marxism requires of us a strictly exact and objectively verifiable analysis of the relations of classes and of the concrete features peculiar to each historical situation. lenin, 1917; para 1

Differentiation/polarization tendency in capitalism results in the ‘simplified class antagonisms’ (Marx and Engels, 1975: 41). In fact, ‘Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat’ (ibid.). So: basic classes are both whole classes and have subdivisions or class-fractions, which are based on specific division of labour (agriculture and industry, detailed division of labour, etc.), income, etc. However, the processes leading to the simplification of class antagonisms does not mean that intermediate classes all ­disappear: ‘Polarization operates, but without reducing the spectrum of positions, statuses and intermediate classes that complicate the class front’ (Bensaid, 2002: 109). Once again: capitalism would not be capitalism if the proletariat were not surrounded by various intermediate strata, including those between the proletarian and the semi-proletarian, between the semi-proletarian and the self-employed producers, and so on. Not only is the society split into two basic classes. Each of these classes is also split. The capitalist class is split in various ways including between those who directly appropriate surplus value and those who do not. It is split on the basis of size of capital, different areas/countries in which capitalists operate, on the basis of different forms of capital (e.g. farming or industry or finance, etc.) and so on.110 Similarly, the working class is split into different segments, based not only on the fact that capitalist production and exchange happen in different sectors and areas but also on the basis of differences in education, employment status (causal or permanent), income level, and so on. It is true that living standards of the members of the working class differ. The division within the working class on the basis of mental labour (white collar work) or intellectual work and manual labour is a major one. In what is called cognitive capitalism, mental labour is growing in importance, with science increasingly being a productive force.111 110 Note that the forms of capital that Marxism recognizes – agrarian, industrial, financial mercantile, etc. – have little to do with the forms of capital in the Bourdieu type analysis. 111 In the sixteenth and seventieth centuries, the expansion of commodity production brought about scientific revolutions and increased division between manual labour and mental labour. A similar effect was produced under Taylorism and Fordism in the early part of the twentieth century. Some argue that under what is called cognitive capitalism, which

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The working class is split into those who are locals and the migrants,112 including international migrants.113 The making of a new class of migrant ­workers, principally as temporary or undocumented workers concentrated in semi- and low-skilled occupations, is a distinctive development. Such workers can be distinguished from other wage workers who enjoy a more comprehensive freedom in their right to sell their ability to labour. The objectification of these workers’ labour may be regarded as being more substantive than that of the classic wage worker. The process of commodification is indeed more exaggerated. rosewarne, 2010: 107

Another division is between the currently employed and the reserve army. The capitalist system of class relations and accumulation require a reserve army for its reproduction (Marx, 1977; Basu, 2013). By constantly keeping a part of the labor force unemployed or under-employed but potentially available for capital to draw on if needed, the reserve army of labor maintains the viability of capital accumulation by inflicting enormous costs on the working class as a whole (McIntyre and Nast, 2011; Foster, McChesney, and Jonna, 2011; Magdoff, and Magdoff, 2004).114 And much of the reserve army in the advanced capitalist countries belongs to racialized ­minorities there. is a more advanced form of capitalism, grounded on affluence and abundance of commodity production, and which no longer needs the hordes of manual labour, ‘comes to trash out that age-old division, not, of course, by making the division between manual labour and intellectual labour completely irrelevant (that would be situated in a classless society, to refer back to the work of Sohn-Rethel), but by making immaterial labour the dominant form of labour – dominant in the sense that immaterial labour organises society as if … that form is the only in existence, as if it is in the majority, as if everything else is irrelevant, as if the whole of the society needs to conform to its demands…’ (Tsogas, 2012: 387). 112 ‘The making of a new class of migrant workers, principally as temporary or undocumented workers concentrated in semi- and low-skilled occupations, is a distinctive development. Such workers can be distinguished from other wage workers who enjoy a more comprehensive freedom in their right to sell their ability to labour. The objectification of these workers’ labour may be regarded as being more substantive than that of the classic wage worker. The process of commodification is indeed more exaggerated’. (Rosewarne, 2010: 107). 113 The fact of the enormous amount of differences in wages across countries caused by capitalist uneven development at the world-scale, to which we will return in Chapter 8, is the basis on which a new global political issue of migration has emerged (Milanovic, 2012). 114 In the postwar u.s. economy, the reserve army has increased from about 5–6 million in the early 1950s to around 25–30 million in the late 2000s (Basu, 2013).

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The non-class practices and ideas can acquire a life of their own and become  somewhat autonomous.115 Class processes/relations and the effects of the operation of those processes/relations are ontologically different. While all social strata are subjected to class processes/relations, their effects are ­distributed unequally depending on one’s gender, racial, caste, location, etc. background. Suffering and precarity created by capitalist class relations, including effects of economic recession – are unevenly distributed along lines of race, gender, caste and other such relations of social identity. Class practices, at a concrete level (i.e. as they are experienced by people), are gendered and racialized and spatial. Gender and race-based differences within classes are important to study. Property is concentrated in the hands of men and dominant ethnic and racial groups.116 Among those who do low-paid and precarious work and those who are unemployed or underemployed, women and racial/ ethnic minorities tend to be disproportionately represented.117 Women and minorities are subjected to violence by men and by the majority and suffer from physical and moral injuries. These are like the effects of capitalist class relations. In this limited sense, race, caste, ethnicity, and gender have class-like effects.118 115 The analysis of race and of gender relations, including relations around production of working-bodies (social reproduction and role of family in reproduction of class relations), must be a part of class analysis. Race and gender issues are too important to be left to those who often go by the names of ‘feminists’ and ‘anti-racists’, i.e. who deny the significance, and indeed, the primacy of class, or who indeed analyze race and gender on their own, in abstraction from class relations. In Marxist class theory of society, class relations subordinate race and gender such that what exists are not just race or gender relations to be analyzed and acted on (as if a genuine fight against racial and gender inequalities can happen outside of the fight against capitalist class relation); much rather what exist are capitalist race relations and capitalist gender relations, i.e. race and gender relations as they are subordinated to capitalist class relations. Given that class analysis exists at multiple levels of generality, analysis of non-class oppression in relation to class must also happen at these levels. 116 ‘The median wealth of white households in the usa in 2009 was 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanics’ (Kochhar, Fry and Taylor, 2011). 117 A part of the reserve army – a section of immigrant labour in advanced countries – is racialized, and racial oppression reinforces the unequal power relations in the labour market (Olivos and Sandoval, 2015; McIntyre, 2011). 118 Consider one woman and one man. The woman has to work long hours at home looking after children and cooking. So, she has no time to relax. She falls sick. The man has to work extremely long hours for an employer for a low wage and therefore has no time to relax, and he falls sick. In both cases the two people suffer. The unequal gender relations produce an effect in the first instance which is like that of class.

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Although capital, in the abstract, remains indifferent to the differences, ‘it  utilises existing differences, and sometimes it promotes new ones, in order to create new differentials of surplus-value. Indeed, … the production of differentials of ­surplus-value can occur by continuously revolutionising the means of production (through the sporadic introduction of new machinery), by encountering modes of production in which the productive power of labour is lower, or by differentiating wages according to different geographical areas, gender or ethnicity. In its diffusion, capital does not need an exterior, something other than itself, but it does, instead, need a vast range of differentials of wages, of different productive powers and intensities of labour (Tomba, 2015: 82). If capital is indifferent to social-cultural (e.g. ethnic or gender) differences, this indifference, from the perspective of the logic of capital, i.e., the valorization of value, however, does not make the capitalist class progressive. On the contrary, historically, capital encounters a large spectrum of differences of gender, religion and ethnicity, as well as differences generated by racism. Capital is able to use these differences to its own profit in order to differentiate wages and intensities of exploitation and thereby divide the working class. ‘From the perspective of the historiography of layered temporalities ….those differences and hierarchies are understood to pre-exist capitalism; however, it is capital that subsumes and reconfigures them in order to put them to work. One can say that the modern gender division as well as modern ‘ethnicities’ or ‘races’ are continuously reshaped by state and capital. … Capital is able to use them, but in order to subsume them they ‘must first be destroyed as independent forms and subordinated’ to capital through the violence of the state. Race, gender differences etc. are not to be seen as ‘historical invariants or as pure products of capitalism’. These differences are not to be ‘naturalised by transforming them into something metahistorical’. They are not to ‘ontologised by being turned into forms of the capitalist life-process’. The ‘already-­existing differences and practices are located within a different temporality’ and are ‘reshaped and reorganised by capital’. That is: ‘Capital reconfigures these differences and takes profits from them through permanent attempts to synchronise them with its production agenda. By doing so, it subsumes them and converts them into forms of its own life-process, but, at the same time, it cannot prevent them from appearing as non-synchronisms that, in tension with the dominant capitalist temporality, can disclose both emancipatory and reactionary possibilities. And sometimes these two sides are interwoven’ (Tomba, 2015: 81–82). Capital encourages these differences. Capital makes them even more severe since they can be economically profitable. The capitalist class organizes and synchronizes different temporalities of race, gender, class, etc. according to the

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dominant temporality of socially-necessary labour time that underlies much of the content of what class relation is about under capitalism (ibid.). Once again, capital is by nature neither patriarchal nor ‘white’, but it uses existing patriarchal relations and racial discrimination by putting them to work and often intensifying them (Tomba, 2015: 82). Gender- and race-based differences pre-date capitalism. Like many other things, these differences and oppressions associated with them have a general class aspect and a more specific class aspect. That is: ‘all the oppressions associated with class society also have their capitalist specific forms and intensities having to do with their place and function in capitalism as a particular form of class society, but the main relations that underlie and give force to these oppressions come from class society as such’ (Ollman, 2003).119 While there is much gender- and race-based suffering, is the suffering fundamentally caused by gender and race?120 It is not.121 The discrimination against 119 The implication of this, according to Ollman, is that ‘the abolition of capitalism [capitalist property relations] will not do away with any of these oppressions, only with their capitalist forms. Ending racism, patriarchy, nationalism, etc., in all their forms and completely can only occur when class society itself is abolished, and in particular with the end of the division between mental and manual labor, a world historical change that could only occur, Marx believes, with the arrival of full communism’ (Ollman, 2003). My argument is that abolition of capitalist property will significantly weaken the basis for undemocratic ideas and undemocratic practices, including those the working masses actively engage in to further their own interests under the dull compulsion of capitalist class relation, against ethnic/racialized minorities and women (see Llorente, 2013), although a separate round of struggling including educational struggle, is necessary to weed out these ideas and practices. 120 ‘There is no intrinsic motor or dynamic within “patriarchy” which can explain its self-­ perpetuation. Capitalism, on the other hand, does have such an internal dynamic: the self-expansion of capital -profit – which drives the system, is premised on a particular set of social relations of production: the class relations of capital and wage labour’ (Pollert, 1996: 643; see also Gottfried, 1998). Pollert adds: ‘There is no necessary internal connection between men and women as gendered subjects which defines a self-­perpetuating material dynamic or economic/social system. Many (or most) men, and thus a widespread masculinity, may be premised on a hierarchy of power over women; but this does not define a system of producing social and material existence. Capitalists could not become “good capitalists” by ceasing to exploit wage labour; they would cease to be capitalists and if they did it en-masse (and we know no system has ever committed collective suicide), capitalism would disappear with it. By contrast, men can and do alter their gender as do women, and they can alter their material and ideological relationship into ­different sex-gender systems without social production grinding to a halt, or abolishing all gender relations and men and women’ (ibid.). 121 As Naiman (1996) says: most men, like most women, have little power over their lives as they, like most women, have little control over the means of production, like most

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women is dominantly the effect of relations between genders, determined by the way in which capitalist class relations (e.g. absence of a living-wage; absence of universal socialized childcare) are articulated with the organization of physical and social reproduction among the working class people (Giminez, 2005). The effects of class relations – and relations between class-fractions – never exist outside of the space of social relations defined on the basis of gender, race, etc. (see Camfield, 2004; Mann, 2007). But the fundamental cleavage in society is one of class and not one of race, gender or caste, etc., although the latter cleavages can have significant impacts on people’s lives.122 Class ­relation has women. Major ­economic policies (e.g. Free trade agreement or even bank bailout) are not passed in the interest of men, although certain policies may affect women and men differently and racial m ­ inorities and majorities differently. It is very problematic when Green says this: ‘From their very origins, class relations are gendered, racialized, sexualized, just as gender is classed, racialized and sexualized and race is sexualized, classed and gendered’ (Green, 2006: 607). What does ‘very origins’ mean? If tomorrow, all workers in a place are men, or if women stop performing domestic labour, will capitalism just disappear? 122 ‘The two sets of relationships – class and gender – are of a different analytical order’ (Pollert, 1996: 643). What is really the case is that class relations are always infused with gender, race and other modes of social differentiation (within the working class), and such infusion must be unearthed empirically (Pollert, 1996), i.e. in practice. ‘While class relations can be conceived abstractly in a mode of production, gender relations cannot be conceptualised without material actors and concrete social processes and relations; they have to be analysed at a lower level of abstraction, in lived experience. It is at this point of intersection – in empirical investigation – that the analysis of class and gender intermingling can take place, and static oppositions disappear (Glucksman 1990: 15–16).’ (Pollert, 1996). ‘At the level of lived social relations, the process of gendering can (indeed must) be perceived as endemic to them. As Cockburn observes, “employers are never sex-blind” (1991: 24). There are no ungendered class relations, and conversely, there are no gender relations without a class dimension’ (Pollert, 1996). It is the case that ‘“the experience of female oppression shapes their exploitation, their exploitation alters their oppression. The two together combine into an unstable whole: both the ‘double burden’ and a potentially explosive challenge” (Pollert 1981: 4)’(Pollert, 1996). It is true that male dominance is almost ubiquitous, but ‘men’s [unequal] relationship to women does not contain a mutually defining economic relationship in the same way as the relations of capitalism to wage labour. Attempts to elevate patriarchy to a mode of production, thus giving it equal historical and explanatory weight to capitalism, have fallen into the trap of a-historicity and biologism, or into circularity. Rather, gender relations are constructed and reconstructed at both a material and ideological level and are intertwined at both a material and ideological level with class relations. …Thus, although separable conceptually to the extent that we have different words for them, in concrete social experience, class and gender are inseparable. But to argue that class relations themselves are always gendered is not the

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primacy over other social relations for philosophical and historical-­materialist reasons. And in capitalist class society, capitalist class relation has primacy over other class relations and over other social relations (gender, race, etc.). An iota of theoretical and political advantage does not accrue by diluting this point, by saying that society is characterized by difference and that all sorts of relations (of difference) intersect with one another as roads at a traffic light do. It is not just that the totality of a class-society is reproduced through differences and relations between classes. It is also the case that the totality of capitalist class relations – and capitalist class society as such – is reproduced through divisions (difference) within basic classes and within non-basis classes and strata (e.g. self-employed commodity producers). To put it in another way, the totality of the working class, just like that of the capitalist class (and the stratum of independent commodity producers), is reproduced through the parts of that totality (class fractions). Class fractions are a form through which this class – indeed, any class – exists and is reproduced. ‘In reality classes are heterogeneous; they are torn by inner antagonisms’ (Trotsky, 1991: 227). In a sense, and in a limited way, class may be seen as a form of difference. To say that class exists is to say that there is a world of difference between, say, the working class and the capitalist class, or between the wage-earners and petty commodity producers, in terms of their interests (and world-views and political capacities, which will be discussed in two subsequent chapters). The totality of class is immediately a world of difference. Every totality is internally punctured (i.e. differentiated). The differences within the working class are real.123 It may be useful to briefly state the differences in the conditions of living and working within the working class here, some of which have been mentioned earlier. Conditions of workers are different in terms of where, which sector and what kind of enterprise they work and they also differ in terms of life histories.124 While some workers are descendants of urban wage labourers, others are those of small-scale property owners or of farm labourers. While some work in large factories, others work in small or medium-sized manufacturing companies or in the so-called service sectors. While some sections of the working class live in big cities and have been literate for a long time, others live in small towns or villages. Some sections of the world working class live same as saying that class relations are “patriarchal”. We need far more complex metaphors to understand class and gender than ‘patriarchy’ can provide’ (­ Pollert, 1996: 654). A similar argument about empirical infusion can be made about race as well. 123 It is a little difficult to understand how it is that ‘In its social structure, the proletariat is the least heterogeneous class of capitalist society’ (Trotsky, 1991: 227). 124 This paragraph is partly based on Mandel (1970a, para 10).

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and work in nations which were independent for centuries, and whose ruling classes have oppressed for long periods other nations, while other w ­ orkers work and live in countries which were until recently ex-colonized nations and continue to be under imperialist control. While some workers have lived and worked most of their lives in a country or in a region of a country, others are intra-national or international migrants. While some workers earn more and live better and have the full freedom to change their employers as they like, others do not. And then workers have lived in countries and regions with different traditions in terms of racial, caste and gender oppression and pre-capitalist exploitation and themselves bear variable level of prejudice against women and minorities. While the matter of difference within classes cannot be ignored, it is the case that: the essential relation between capitalist and working classes will be missed unless we contemplate, not the single capitalist, and the single labourer, but the capitalist class as a whole and the labouring class as a whole. As Marx writes in Capital vol 2: ‘Every individual capital forms…an individualised fraction, a fraction endowed with individual life, as it were, of the aggregate social capital, just as every individual capitalist is but an individual element of the capitalist class’ (Marx, 1885; paragraph 3).125 Similarly, every labourer is a part of the collective labourer. There is a distinct need to see the totality of the capitalist class: Marx writes in Capital vol 3: each individual capitalist, just like the totality of all capitalists in each particular sphere of production, participates in the exploitation of the entire working class by capital as a whole, and in the level of this exploitation; not just in terms of general class sympathy, but in a direct economic sense, since, taking all other circumstances as given, including the value of the total constant capital advanced, the average rate of profit depends on the level [or intensity] of exploitation of labour as a whole [i.e. of the entire working class] by capital as a whole [i.e. the entire capitalist class]. marx, 1981: 298–299

The differences within classes are less fundamental than the fact that given people fall in given class-categories. There are commonalities between the fragments of the capitalist class (all appropriate surplus value directly or indirectly) or the working class (all perform unpaid labour and lack control means of production and the workplace, and so on). Any idea of difference within classes must be subordinated to that of totality. 125 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch18.htm (para 3).

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The capitalist class relation is a contradictory process. This is so in many ways as already indicated. Two points may be made here, which speak to the political relevance of the discussion presented here. The capitalist class r­ elation is partly reproduced through the divisions within the working class, including those based on income and status of employment (part-time or full-time) and level of skill (low-skilled and high skilled or manual and mental labour), and so on. The capitalist class relation is also reproduced through the fact that members of the working class compete with one another for employment and higher wages, and in doing so, some of them do make use of existing differences among working class members that are based in race, gender, location, etc. However, it is also important to bear in mind that the totality of capital-labour class relation tends to erase some of those divisions within the working class, or indeed within the class of direct producers in a society ruled by that totality, and such erasure points to a future of capitalist class relation, i.e. its annihilation, and the abolition of class-ness of society. The form of the division of labor which makes one person a farmer, another a cobbler, a third a factory worker, a fourth a stock-market operator, has already been undermined by machinery and will completely disappear, say Marx and Engels in the Manifesto. In this process education, which is denied to millions now, will play an important role in that it ‘will enable young people quickly to familiarize themselves with the whole system of production and to pass from one branch of production to ­another in response to the needs of society or their own inclinations’. As a result education will, under communism, ‘free them from the one-sided character which the present-day division of labor impresses upon every individual’. Communist society will, in this way, make it possible for its members to put their comprehensively developed faculties to full use. But, when this happens, classes will necessarily disappear. It follows that society organized on a communist basis is incompatible with the existence of classes on the one hand, and that the very building of such a society provides the means of abolishing class differences on the other.126 The second aspect of the contradictory character of the capitalist relation concerns the nature of capitalist property. This relation is based on the n ­ egation 126 Education will strike at the heart of the division between manual and mental labour. Conversely, ‘A precondition for combining physical and mental labor is the destruction of class rule’ (Trotsky, 1973: 137). Given that some of the distinction between manual and mental labour corresponds to rural and urban distinction, a precondition for removing the latter distinction is also the destruction of class rule, that of capitalism.

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of a form of property based in one’s own labour. And capitalist property ­relation awaits its own negation, as a definite necessary pre-supposition for classlessness. As soon as this metamorphosis [of pre-capitalist private property] has sufficiently decomposed the old society throughout its depth and breadth, as soon as the workers have been turned into proletarians, and their means of labor into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, the further socialization of labor and further transformation of the soil and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, communal [or common] means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. What is now to be expropriated is not the self-employed worker, but the capitalist who exploits a large number of workers. marx, 1977: 928

Yet, there are enormous obstacles to such negation. In four chapters (9–12), we will discuss some of these and what is to be done about these.

chapter 8

Subsumptions of Labour by Capital: Theory of Capitalist Class Relation from an International Perspective Of course, infinitely diverse combinations of elements of this or that type of capitalist evolution are possible, and only hopeless pedants could set about solving the peculiar and complex problems arising merely by quoting this or that opinion of Marx about a different historical epoch. lenin’s Second Preface to Development of Capitalism in Russia, in lenin, 1964a: 33

…

‘I freely acknowledge that there is no general agreement about the meaning of capitalism or its basic dynamics’ … ‘what we need is precisely a definition of Capitalism’ wood, 2007: 145; 159

⸪ Commenting on the progressive nature of capitalism in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels say that ‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without ­constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the [class] relations of production…’ (Marx and Engels, 1975: 45). As a general principle, this theoretical statement is correct. But this comment seems a little odd when one observes the development of productive forces in large swathes of the global capitalist system, and especially, in the less developed world, where the majority of the global population and majority of the global working class live. The nature of economic development in the global periphery as a whole does not appear to support Marx and Engels’ general optimism about the progressive character of the capitalist class relation. In this part of the world as well as in specific places in advanced capitalism where sweatshop production exists, labour productivity per person per hour1 is rather low. Instruments of 1

1 This is the most important indicator of economic development. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004337473_009

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production have not been revolutionized (to the extent Marx might have expected). If the idea that capitalism will ‘constantly’ revolutionize instruments of production is a part of the core of Marxist thinking, there appears to be a contradiction between that and what is happening empirically.2 Such a contradiction raises questions about the nature of class relation itself as theorized by Marx (and Lenin, etc.) and as discussed in the previous chapter. This chapter, which is a continuation of the previous chapter, deals with some of these questions, both in general terms, keeping in mind the world capitalist system, which is internally uneven in terms of class relations and economic development, and which includes a vast global periphery. How does one identify capitalism? When does the capitalist class, which is a personification of capital, of the relation between capital and labour, revolutionize instruments of production and increase labor productivity? And, what might be the relation between development3/technological change and class struggle? What might be the class-specificity of the global periphery or the less-developed world? The rest of the chapter is divided into six sections. In the first section I ­briefly discuss, and critique, the way in which certain writers conceptualize capitalism. In the next section, I present an alternative framework for understanding capitalism as a class relation, a framework that accentuates the relation between capital and labour at the point of production. In doing so, I build on Marx’s often-neglected discussion in Capital volume 1 on hybrid, formal and real subsumptions of labor as forms of the capitalist class relation. Capitalism as a class relation exists even if there is only formal subsumption, and even if instruments of production have not been systematically revolutionized. I then contend, in Section 3, that the transition from formal to real subsumption with associated technological change is not automatic, but that it is a protracted process. It is a process that is mediated by class struggle which occurs in the context of a whole host of place-specific factors, including capitalist state interventions. I also show that under the pressure to cut costs, property-owners can respond to class struggle against formal subsumption in multiple ways. Real subsumption is only one. Property owners can also respond by reinforcing formal subsumption and/or introducing hybrid subsumption (which includes mercantile-usury based exploitation). In section four, I introduce ­imperialism, 2 3

2 Of course, there is a limit to the extent to which the validity of a theoretical statement can be challenged merely on the basis of empirical evidence. 3 Here development is seen as the development of productive forces including technological change and an increase in labor productivity. It is also assumed that a situation where there is technological change and enhanced labor productivity is better for laborers’ overall quality of life (including wages) than one where there is technological backwardness, with attendant low labor productivity.

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which is discussed in terms of its internal relation to the multiple forms of ­subsumption, both in the context of advanced capitalism and peripheral ­capitalism. In Section  5, I show how the subsumption perspective has been misconstrued by radical scholars. I reiterate the view argued in Section 2 that formal subsumption is the most general form of capitalism, both conceptually, and in the context of the global periphery. I also launch a criticism not only of the misconceptions of formal subsumption of labour by a wide range of scholars including Harvey. I also present a number of criticisms of Harvey’s theory that accumulation by dispossession – and not the capital-labour relation – defines the dominant contradiction now. The final section draws out several theoretical implications – including for understanding uneven development and the class character of peripheral capitalism – of the subsumption-based theoretical project in class theory introduced in this chapter. If the argument of the chapter is that formal and real subsumptions are really different historically-­ specific forms of capitalist class relation, and that formal subsumption is the most general form of capitalist class relation, which coexists with real subsumption, and that subsumption of labour, and not dispossession, defines the dominant form of contradiction, then such an argument must produce determinate political implications, which Marxists and the world proletariat can ignore at their own peril. 1

How is Capitalism Conceptualized?

Wallerstein (2000) and others view capitalism dominantly as a system of production for the market for a profit. This one-sided, exchange-relations-based, view in which owners of capital and proletarians/semi-proletarians are merely commodity owners, has been widely critiqued, including by Brenner (1977),4 so I will not dwell on it.5 My focus is on capitalism as a system of production relation. 4 5

4 Although Brenner stresses production, it is also the case that he abstracts from full considerations to it, and relates his thinking about the development of productive forces to exchange relations. He writes that under capitalism, ‘the ultimate result of innovation can only be to reduce the exchange value of the goods produced in their line and thus, directly or indirectly, to reduce the exchange value of the wage, and thus to raise the average rate of profit, given again the Marxian assumption that the real wage remains constant. It certainly cannot be to reduce the rate of profit’ (1998: 12). 5 The view of capitalism as production for exchange for a profit, advanced by Wallerstein and others, is incompatible with Marx’s view in Capital, and will not be discussed here. Marx

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Capitalism as a production relation has been variously defined. According to many, the existence of capitalist social relations necessarily coincides with expanded accumulation, i.e. capitalist development with technological change. Brenner, the political Marxist, tends to have this view of capitalism. So does Harvey. Capitalism, says Brenner, is characterized by ‘the presence of the necessity of competitive production – and the correlative absence of the possibility of cutting costs, or otherwise raising income, by forcefully squeezing the direct producers [which is a feature of feudalism]’ (Brenner, 1986: 33). He says that it is only under such a condition that we can ‘expect the systematic and continual pressure to increase the efficiency of production which is the sine qua non of modern economic growth’ (ibid.). Brenner’s logic of the capitalist economic development, from which one can infer his view about capitalist class relation, is as follows (Brenner, 1977; 1986). Capitalist entrepreneurs have to buy their means of subsistence from the market. The feudal mode of ‘raising income.., by forcefully squeezing the direct producers’ (i.e. by exploiting direct producers through non-market processes) is not available any more mainly due to their class struggle. This means that entrepreneurs have to have money (to buy the things they need). And to have money, they have to sell their commodities. They can sell only if they produce these at a competitive price. To be competitive, they have to cut costs, and they cut costs by investing in labor-saving technical change and thus increasing labour productivity. So, modern economic growth, seen as long-term increases in labor productivity, is associated with – and emanates from – the development of capitalist class relations (or capitalist social property relations, in his language). Brenner’s assumption is that the existence of capital-labour relations along with competition within capitalist and working classes, in a commodity-producing society, automatically leads to capitalism with technological change; they are one process. That is, the existence of capitalist social relations necessarily coincides with expanded accumulation, i.e. capitalist development with technological change. Capitalism = advanced capitalism. Intervening in a debate on the mode of production in the Indian context,6 Patnaik also held that capitalism is characterized jointly by three factors: 6

implicitly starts, in the early part of Capital volume 1, with the following concept of capitalism: it is a society where almost everything is produced for sale, where things are exchanged on the basis of socially necessary average labour time, a society one in which whatever one needs can be bought, everything has a price, and all transactions at the bottom are exchange transactions. 6 In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a debate in India on the nature of the mode of production (in agriculture) which discussed some of these issues. Several articles that contributed to

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­ roduction for the market, use of free wage labor, and reinvestment of profit p in production (Patnaik, 1990b: 41–44). Capitalism exists where these three features exist. In this view of capitalism, if technological change does not happen, it is because capitalist social relations do not exist (or do not exist fully). And capitalist social relations and capitalist development do not exist, because, for example, ‘semi-feudal’ class relations act as a fetter on the development of capitalist class relations and on productive forces.7 Although Banaji is critical of the kind of political Marxism that Brenner, Wood, Post and the like make, he also conflates capitalism with advanced capitalism. He accepts a definition of capitalism in terms of ‘the laws of motion of capitalist production’ which he attributes to Marx. These include: the production and accumulation of surplus-value, the revolutionisation of the labour-process, the production of relative surplus-value on the basis of a capitalistically-­constituted labour-process, the compulsion to increase the productivity of labour, etc. The ‘relations of capitalist production’ are the relations which express and realise these laws of motion at different levels of the social process of production’ (Banaji, 2010: 60). Whatever form of social relation of production allows these laws of motion to exist is capitalist, for Banaji. In an alternative view, one that was held by Lenin, and commenting on agriculture, ‘the use of wage-labour is the chief distinguishing mark of’ capitalism’ (Lenin, 1963b: 429). A Montreal-based Marxist economist (Chattopadhyay), among others, holds the Leninist view when he says that commodity production and wage-labor are necessary and sufficient conditions for capitalism (Chattopadhyay, 1990: 82). This alternative view, including that of Lenin, is surely an advance over the Brenner type view. But it assumes that the production of surplus value necessarily generates its productive reinvestment: ‘The very process of commodity production with the sale of labor power as its ultimate form generates the process of surplus value and its reinvestment…’ in technological change (ibid.). But from the standpoint of class theory (and theory of development under 7

this debate are included in Patnaik (1990a) and Rudra (1978). This debate, reviewed by many scholars, has remained an important part of the global literature on class relations in the capitalist periphery (Thorner, 1982a, b, c; Richards, 1986; Harriss, 1982). 7 Semi-feudalism is said to occur where property owners appropriate surplus in the form of rent and usurious interest from small-scale producers, and when property owners make use of unfree labour relations to appropriate surplus from workers (Patnaik, 1986; Bhaduri, 1973). Deploying direct producers as wage-labourers and deploying them as tenants who pay a ­market-enforced – not extra-economic – rent in cash or kind, are often mutually exchangeable. In a wider sense, semi-feudalism is also taken to mean exploitation of wage-labour on the basis of extra-economic coercion..

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capitalism), the question that remains unanswered is this: why might surplus produced in a place or a production unit or a sector that is under capital-labor relations not be re-invested in that place, unit or sector to promote technological change? And if the answer is that it might not, then what does that say about capitalism as a form of class relation? What is missing in the alternative view is a conceptualization of capitalism on the basis of principles of dialectics, the ones which were briefly discussed in Chapter 5.8 As Ollman reminds us: Dialectics … helps us expand our notion of anything to include, as aspects of what it is, both the process by which it has become that and the broader interactive context within which it is found (2003: 13). Dialectics is about how a process develops over time through internal contradictions. Dialectics helps us avoid treating including the final stage of the process of development of an object (e.g. capitalism) as its only defining moment. If an object goes through multiple processes at different points in time (e.g. P1, P2, P3, etc.), then it is undialectical to define the object in terms of P3 only. 2

Formal and Real Subsumptions of Labour as Forms of Capitalist Class Relation

One solution to the problem surrounding the conceptualization of capitalism as a class relation – which has implications for understanding capitalism’s evolution as well as anti-capitalist politics – could be achieved by rigorously and critically employing Marx’s concept of subsumption of labor under capital. Subsumption of labor is indicative of the extent to which, and the forms in which, labour is integrated into the process of the production of value and of surplus value (i.e. process of exploitation). This concept signifies the importance Marx attached to the moment of historical difference within the system of capitalist class relation.9 In the ‘Results’ section of Capital vol. 1 (in the Appendix), Marx 8 9

8 What is also missing is a geographical view as well, as we will see. 9 These concepts are present in the middle of Capital volume 1 and in the Appendix to it, called ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’ written between 1863 and 1866. This discussion suffered from a delayed publication and relative neglect as a consequence. Even after its publication, the discussion on subsumption has suffered from a lack of an integrated reading of the Appendix as well as the main text (chapters 11 and 16 of Capital 1). Marx also discusses subsumption of labour in Economic Manuscripts of 1861–63, Part 3). I am abstracting from the discussion on subsumption in relation to cognitive capitalism (Vercellone, 2007).

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says that capitalist production, following primitive a­ ccumulation (‘pre-history’ of capitalist class relation), is historically differentiated into at least two forms/ stages:10 the formal subsumption of labor under capital and the real subsumption of labor under capital. In Chapter 16 of Capital, Marx also introduces a third form of subsumption, which has remained more or less unnoticed. In the initial stage of the evolution of capitalist class relation, wage-labor is only formally subsumed under capital.11 There are four main features of formal subsumption (Marx, 1977: 1025–1029) as a form of capitalist class relation. First, surplus is pumped out via economic, and not extra-economic, coercion: that is, labourers, who do not own means of production, are generally free to choose their employers in a labour market. Second: the means of production and consumption are bought in the market (both by capital and labour). They confront the worker as capital. Third: no more labor time is used in production than is socially necessary: there is competition to reduce the cost of production of commodities for sale. This suggests that the law of value is operating. Fourth: an economic relation of supremacy and subordination exists at the point of production, as the worker is supervised by the capitalist (or their manager). In this initial stage of capitalism,12 capital takes over a pre-existing labor process without ‘revolutionizing’ it (Marx, 1977: 1021). At first, capital does not change immediately the technical mode of production: capital only ‘subordinates labor on the basis of the technical conditions within which labor has been carried on up to that point in history’ (Marx, 1977: 425). Marx elaborates: when the capitalist class relation begins its journey: at first, the subjection of labour to capital [is] … only a formal result of the fact, that the worker, instead of working for himself, works for and ­consequently under the capitalist. … Through the co-operation of 10 11 12

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11 12

The term ‘stage’ is used both in historical sense and conceptual sense (where stage = form), unless otherwise noted. Historically, formal subsumption precedes real subsumption. But at the same time, once real subsumption is developed it can and does coexist with formal subsumption. The class relation is changed from pre-capitalist to capitalist relation but the techniques of production remain unchanged. Formal subsumption lasted in Britain for more than two centuries (i.e. until the last third of the 1700s. This coincided with the age of manufacturing (and craft-workers) in Marx’s language (Marx, 1977: Chapters 13–14).

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­ umerous wage-labourers, the command of capital develops into a ren quirement for carrying on the labour-process itself, into a real condition of production. That a capitalist should command in the field of production, is now as indispensable as that a general should command on the field of battle. marx, 1977: 448

The mode of production in the technical sense does not have to be revolutionized for capitalist class relation (=mode of production in a social sense) to exist, although such revolution is a tendency within the system of capitalist class relation. The necessary part of the labor-time (necessary labor) – the labor-time that the workers expend for producing their own means of subsistence – is not decreased through technological change, during the ‘early stage’ of capitalism. So, the only way more surplus value can be produced is by increasing the other part of the labor-time (i.e. surplus labor-time). This is done by making workers work longer (and/or intensifying the pace of work). ‘The production of surplusvalue …by means of simple extension of the working day, appeared therefore independently of any change in the mode of production itself’ (Marx, 1977: 425). In Marx’s language, absolute surplus value is produced in this first stage of capitalism. This form of surplus value is also produced by depressing wages below the value of labor power, leading to super-exploitation and appropriation of an above-average rate of profit. Unfortunately, Marx does not generally emphasize this aspect as he assumes that wages cover labor’s cost of maintenance.13 And, arguably, formal subsumption (like real subsumption), in some contexts, may make use of unfree wage labour. Although Marx stipulated free labour as a necessary characteristic of capitalism (including formal and real subsumptions of labour), the history of actual capitalist societies does indicate 13

13

Of course, Marx is completely aware of the fact that actual wages fall below the value of labour power: “the cost of production of simple labour-power amounts to the cost of the existence and propagation of the worker. The price of this cost of existence and propagation constitutes wages. The wages thus determined are called the minimum of wages. This minimum wage, like the determination of the price of commodities in general by cost of production, does not hold good for the single individual, but only for the race. Individual workers, indeed, millions of workers, do not receive enough to be able to exist and to propagate themselves; but the wages of the whole working class adjust themselves, within the limits of their fluctuations, to this minimum” (Marx, 1976: 27). In the context of peripheral capitalism, the assumption that wages cover the cost of reproduction must be relaxed. This is also increasingly true about many parts of the advanced capitalist countries, with the gradual withdrawal of regulations in the labour market. On the notion of super-exploitation, see the work of Marini discussed in Valencia (2014).

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that specific capitals do take away labourers’ right to freely enter into, and exit from, a labour contract, thus making labour lose the right to directly negotiate wages and the working-day.14 Unfreedom is expressed as various forms of bondage (e.g. debt-bondage) imposed by capitalists as a localised form of class struggle from above in order to continue to formally subsume labour and increase surplus value (Brass, 2011).15 Four general and inter-related points must be quickly noted here about formal subsumption. In Marx’s definition of formal subsumption, he is emphasizing capitalism as a relation of production, although his second point (among the four points listed above) is more about exchange relations.16 Further, he stresses subsumption of wage-laborers: his view is not that petty commodity producers are formally subsumed under (merchant) capital, an issue to be discussed later. In addition, underlying, and coinciding with, the four attributes of formal subsumption of labour are the twin qualities of capitalistic labour 14 15 16

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Some scholars (e.g. Patnaik) think that laborers are unfree when they work for only one employer because they cannot find an alternative employment. Such a view grossly underestimates the extent of the development of capitalist relations. In such an erroneous view, unfree relations exist where they do not, and therefore capitalism does not exist where it does. Unfree labourers who have an unsettled high-interest loan are obliged to report to the lender-employer first before other employers; they work off the loan based on a pre-­ arranged tied wage. Capitalists resort to these arrangements to secure labour supply – ­especially during periods of high labour demand (Bhalla, 1999: 50) and to secure it at a lower than the market rate. The use of unfree labour relations must also be seen as a mechanism of labour control, a form of class struggle from above, and it does not at all automatically suggest feudal relations (Brass, 2011). More specifically, the use of unfree labour segments the labour market into two parts (free labour and unfree labour). This segmentation undermines the solidarity of laborers as a class. As more work is done by unfree laborers, there is less demand for free labour. This reduces the bargaining power of free labourers, reducing their wages. In an adequate conception of capitalism, exchange relations cannot be ignored, for capitalism is about capital, which appears in the form of things bought and sold, although what underlies this appearance is a set of production relations. Marx is right to emphasize that in capitalism, means of production and consumption are bought and sold. Note also that his point about means of production and consumption being bought and sold is not entirely about exchange: workers have to buy means of consumption – they have a market-mediated access to means of consumption – because they have been dispossessed of their means of production (e.g. land), and this is an aspect of class relation. With exchange relations, another vantage point is often stressed in the literature, i.e. competition. But what is often forgotten is that competition as well pre-supposes separation of workers from means of production (Weeks, 2014).

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process, of labour process that is capitalist in terms of class relation. These are mentioned in the last chapter but it is worth repeating these here: The [capitalist] labour-process …exhibits two characteristic phenomena. …First, the worker works under the control of the capitalist to whom his labour belongs; the capitalist takes good care that the work is done in a proper manner, and the means of production are applied directly to the purpose, so that the raw material is not wasted, and the instruments of labour are spared, i.e. only worn to the extent necessitated by their use in the work…Secondly, the product is the property of the capitalist and not that of the worker, its immediate producer. marx, 1977: 291–292

And finally, a capitalist who is formally subsuming labour is a personification of capital. Marx’s points about the dual objectives of the capitalist, the capital personified, apply to the capitalist who is formally subsuming labour. Our capitalist has two objectives: in the first place, he wants to produce a use-value which has exchange-value, i.e. an article destined to be sold, a commodity; and secondly, he wants to produce a commodity greater in value than the sum of the values of the commodities used to produce it, namely the means of production and the labour-power he purchased with his good money on the open market. marx, 1977: 293

Real subsumption is associated with what Marx, in his ‘Results’ (and elsewhere in Capital), calls specifically capitalist mode of production (i.e. the mode of production in the technical sense). But the distinction appears to be not just in terms of the technique of production. Real subsumption has all the four characteristics of formal subsumption, discussed earlier. In addition, it involves the reduction of necessary labor time through the use of technology, reflected in an increase in the ratio of constant capital to variable capital, leading to an increase in labour productivity (Marx, 1977: 762). In this stage of capitalism, the appropriation of surplus value in its relative form dominates. The specific way in which surplus is pumped out of the class of direct producer changes now, giving rise to a new form of capitalist class relation. Therefore, the distinction between formal and real subsumptions, in my view, is in terms of the form of capitalist class relation, and not just in terms of changes in the technique of production. Figure 13 shows the two forms into which Marx’s general formula for capital can be split.

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chapter 8 M-C-M′ M-C (LP + MP)-P-C′-M′

M-C (LP + Raw materials-P-C′-M′ (Formal Subsumption)

M-C (LP + raw materials + instruments)-P-C′-M′ (Real Subsumption)

Note: M = Money; C = commodities; M′ = M + surplus value; LP = labour power; Mp = means of production (raw materials and energy plus instruments of production); P = production; C′ = new commodities produced.

Figure 13 Marx’s general formula for capital and two forms of subsumption of labour

In addition to these two forms of subsumption (i.e. formal and real subsumption), Marx also mentions in Capital 1 (1977: 645) ‘hybrid subsumption’:17 It will be sufficient if we merely refer to certain hybrid forms [transitional forms], in which although surplus-labor is not extorted by direct compulsion from the producer, the producer has not yet become formally subordinate to capital. In these forms, capital has not yet acquired a direct control of the labor process. Alongside the independent producers, who carry on their handicrafts or their agriculture in the inherited, traditional way, there steps the usurer or merchant, with his usurer’s capital or merchant’s capital, which feeds on them like a parasite. The predominance of this form of exploitation in a society excludes the capitalist mode of production, (meaning that sporadic existence of these forms does not exclude capitalist mode of production); although it may form the transition, as in the later Middle Ages. (italics and parenthesis are added). Thus hybrid subsumption has several attributes. (a) There is no pre-­capitalist relation including feudalism; there is no extra-economic coercion against direct producers, who include petty commodity producers of goods and services. (b) At the same time, the production process is not directly controlled/ supervised by capital. The money-lenders or merchants give direct producers ­advances (for the production process to occur as well as for the reproduction of 17

17

This concept is highly relevant in the context of the present-day less developed world (or peripheral capitalism) and in less developed parts (e.g. aboriginal areas; de-industrialized regions; non-metropolitan rural periphery) of advanced capitalism.

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family labour), and exploit them like parasites. The advances are settled against the product (including surplus product) taken by the creditor/usurer. (c) The surplus is appropriated by what Marx calls ‘antediluvian forms’ of capital ­(merchants’ capital and usurers’ capital), in Chapter 5 of Capital volume 1 and in Chapter 36 of Capital vol. 3 (1977: 266; 1991: 728). They appear chronologically prior to the ‘primary form of capital’, i.e. capital in its productive form (Marx, 1977: 266). The relevant class relations here are the class relations  – which are in spheres of exchange not unconnected to production – between nonproductive, antediluvian capital, and independent producers (whose private property is based in own/family labour). It would also not be entirely inconsistent with Marx’s thinking to include, from the vantage point of peripheral capitalism, money-owners buying up land (and other means of production) and renting them out to small-scale direct producers,18 without necessarily exercising any extra-economic coercion, as another kind of parasite alongside usurious money-lenders and merchants.19 Clearly, hybrid subsumption is not the subsumption of wage labour. This is an intervening process, a transitional process, between pre-capitalist relations and formal subsumption of labour under capital (see the Figure 14 below). Thus, capitalist class relation must be seen in terms of forms/stages of subsumption of labour (formal and real subsumptions of labour). Conceptually, to the extent that the production process has the four characteristics of formal subsumption labour which coincide with the most general aspects of capitalist class relation as such, the class relation in question – and associated production process – is dominantly capitalist, regardless of whether there is real subsumption, which is the second moment of what I will call accumulation by exploitation. Capitalist class relations dominantly exist in a country, if workers can normally choose their employers to work for a wage, if there is a class 18 19

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19

The ground rent charged to small-scale owners is not capitalist rent: it is not over and above the capitalist profit. Often the rent paid by small-scale producers eats into the cost of reproduction of the small-scale producer. Strictly speaking, rent and mercantile profit (or usurious interest) cannot be put in one category. On the other hand, buying land and leasing it out to land-poor semi-proletarians for a rent may be considered somewhat similar to money-lenders/merchants who give an advance in cash or kind to small producers. So, the appropriation of rent as a form of exploitation is much closer to Marx’s antediluvian forms of capital than to pre-­capitalist forms of property, including feudalism, in the specific context where land and other means of production are commodities and relations between property-owners and direct producers are mainly based on monetary relations rather than extra-economic coercion.

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Dominance of capitalist class relation in its productive

Dominance of class relations of antediluvean capital

Dominance of class relations of antediluvean capital

Dominance of capitalist class relation in its productive form

O

Pre-Capitalist Class Relation

K

Hybrid Subsumption

X

Formal Subsumption of Labour

Y

Real Subsumption of Labour

Z

Note: The geometric shape of the curves does not denote any strict mathematical notion, or more specifically, a quadratic function. The curves merely indicate the fact that the degree of dominance of specific form of class relations changes (increases/decreases) over time, but not in a linear way.

Figure 14  History of capitalist class relation: Dominance of different forms of class relations over time

of people which has the resources to hire them, with the intention of making more money than invested usually, in an endless cycle of investment,20 and if the means of subsistence and production are usually bought and sold in the market.21 If technical change is made a part of the very definition of capitalist class relation, one of the theoretical implications is this: it is difficult to say whether capitalist class relation promotes or fetters technical change.22

20 21 22

20 21

22

This excludes one time investment to make quick money. This means that those who seek to make money by investing in production can go out of business unless they cut costs, and that workers will starve if they are not able to sell their labour power, their only/main main commodity. It is a fundamental view in Marxist social theory that class relations (and intra-class relations of competition) sometime promote and sometime fetter the development of productive forces which then set limits within which social relations change. This is discussed in the debate on fettering (see Sitton, 1996; Wright and Levine, 1992).

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Transition from Formal Subsumption, and the Mediation of Class Struggle

Underlying the conceptualization of capitalism as formal subsumption of labour and separating the essence of capitalist class relation from real subsumption of labour is the idea that real subsumption is less likely to emerge as long as there is ample scope for the appropriation of absolute surplus value through formal subsumption (and hybrid subsumption), that is, as long as there is no strong imperative – economic compulsion – on the part of property owners to resort to methods of relative surplus value. In other words, the transition to real subsumption, which points to the temporal differentiation within the system of capitalist class relations, will not occur spontaneously.23 It actually never has. The ‘spontaneity argument’ appears, however, to have been wrongly made by Marx himself at times. Marx says: ‘a specifically capitalist mode of production (his word for technologically advanced capitalism) … arises and develops spontaneously on the basis of the formal subsumption of labour under capital’ (1977: 645; italics added). This uncharacteristic24 teleological assumption in his thinking contradicts his more general view about the role of class struggle in social change – social change within a mode of production (as in Capital – see below) and from one mode of production to another (as in the beginning of the Communist Manifesto). There is much discussion on the role of class struggle in social theory and theory of capital, and especially as to where it belongs in the hierarchy of abstractions in this theory.25 It is surprising that most of the writing about the evolution of capitalist mode of production (including in the context of peripheral capitalist countries) talks about the class relations aspect of the mode of production as if they can be separated from class struggle. When class struggle 23 24 25

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One cannot assume that real subsumption of labor will happen because it is in the interest of capital. Of course, and characteristically, he would say this about formal subsumption: ‘It is the general form of every capitalist process of production; at the same time, however, it can be found as a particular form alongside the specifically capitalist mode of production in its developed form, because although the latter entails the former, the converse does not necessarily obtain [i.e. formal subsumption can be found in the absence of the specifically capitalist mode of production]’ (Marx, 1977: 1019; parenthesis added). But why is the converse not true? See Albritton (2007) and Lebowitz (2003, 2005) on the importance of class struggle in the theory of capital.

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is discussed, its relation to capitalist accumulation – or transition from one form of subsumption of labour under capital to another form – is usually left out.26 It is interesting that in the European transition debates (Hilton, 1976; Aston and Philipin, 1987), there has been little, if any, (explicit) discussion on the forms of subsumption. The assumption, including that of Brenner (1977; 1982), is, to repeat, that once relations between capital and labour come to exist, replacing unfree relations that are characteristic of the pre-capitalist system of class relations, there will be a capitalism that is based on the dominance of the appropriation of relative surplus value, i.e. the kind of capitalism we see in the relatively economically-advanced countries. That Brenner and many others have had this problematic assumption could be partly because of a Euro-centric view, one that seeks to make general statements based on historical evidence from Europe, in abstraction from capitalist development in the periphery and indeed in abstraction from an internationalist view of capitalist class relation.27 In my view, the transition from formal subsumption to a capitalist regime where the Brenner logic (1977; 1986) operates, the logic praised in the Manifesto – the idea that capitalists make use of technology to improve labor productivity and sell products in a competitive manner – this very transition is not automatic at all. It is not automatic because, other things constant, it is class struggle (in conjunction with the state) that plays a crucial mediating role in the transition to real subsumption, the transition from an under-developed capitalism to a developed one, i.e. transition from a form of capitalist class relation based on the dominance of formal subsumption of labour to one based on the dominance of real subsumption of labour.28 So how does class struggle matter? As Lebowitz (2003; 2005) writes, in its struggle for its own development, labor plays an extremely active agency in 26 27 28

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The literature on class struggle tends to focus more on its impact on the distribution of (surplus) value (e.g. wage-share) than the production of (surplus) value itself. Or, as in the transition debate, class struggle may matter in relation to the transition from capitalist class relation to capitalist class relation (as in political Marxism) but not from one form of capitalist class relation to another. See Booth (1985: 77). I do not, however, agree with Booth’s post-modernist ‘meta-critique’ of Marxist theory. As we will see: the conditions for class struggle against the formal subsumption form of capitalist class relation that existed in original areas (e.g. England) of capitalist accumulation, which could rely on imperialist exploitation, do not exist in peripheral capitalism (late comers). It is not automatic, at least, in peripheral capitalist societies, and indeed, it is the relative absence of the logic of real subsumption that contributes to the very specificity of these societies.

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the actual reproduction of capitalism. The extent of capitalists’ success in pumping out surplus labor in a time and place depends, to some extent, on the degree of separation among workers, or its opposite, that is, the intensity of their class struggle.29 For example, the outcome of struggle against capitalism influences, within limits, how much surplus is appropriated, and, more importantly, how (e.g. whether labor-displacing technology is used and thus whether the transition to real subsumption of labor occurs). Successful struggle against long working hours (and low wages) during formal subsumption contributes to the introduction of machinery and conscious use of science to increase labour productivity.30 This prompts Marx to make a more general point in Capital that ‘It would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working class revolt’ (1977: 563). Of course, how important class struggle is in a specific context is another matter. Class struggle occurs amidst specific factors. These contextual factors influence the actual effect of class struggle.31 These factors 29 30 31

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A similar argument about working class agency exists within human geography (Herod, 1994). In fact, he also mentions the role of class struggle in the transition to real subsumption in a historical (as opposed to a conceptual/logical) sense: ‘As soon as the gradual upsurge of working-class revolt compelled Parliament compulsorily to shorten the hours of labour, and to begin by imposing a normal working day on factories properly so called, i.e. from the moment it was made impossible once and for all to increase the production of surplus-value by prolonging the working day, capital threw itself with all its might, and in full awareness of the situation, into the production of relative surplus-value, by speeding up the development of the machine system’ (Marx, 1977: 533–534). In this context one may recall Banaji’s (2013) point that ‘To read Capital as if Marx were writing history runs the risk of radically impoverishing the history of capitalism’ (p. 130). These factors include: availability of a given technology that increases labour productivity and that has the potential for increased total production and total potential surplus over which class struggle can occur; existence of a sufficient amount of concentration of means of production in the hands of a few, who have the means to invest in technology and who live very differently from ordinary workers, in a social-cultural sense and who therefore induce workers’ sense of ‘they are not among us’; a local tightening of the labour market (increased demand for labour in given sectors or sub-sectors in given places) contributing to workers’ ability to strike; government assistance to workers under their pressure (e.g. public wage) improving workers’ power a bit; and so on. It should be noted that all these contextual factors which have an impact on class struggle are connected, directly or indirectly, to the overall capitalist development of the country. The latter, in turn, defines the context for capital-labour struggle which affects the possibility of the transition to real subsumption, albeit differently in different areas, contributing to uneven development under capitalism.

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exist unevenly, making the ­transition to real subsumption, and therefore, development of productive forces, uneven. Here lies a crucial mechanism of capitalist uneven development for a brief discussion of these factors.32 In its geographically uneven struggle against capital, the working class may succeed in at least three ways.33 It may emancipate itself from unfree labour relations and/or it may obtain an increase in wages at least up to the cost of reproduction of labour power, and achieve a reduction in the working day (with a given wage).34 Even if no overt collective action exists or if the overt collective action fails, the implicit ‘go-slow’ by laborers at lower-than-­reservationwage may still make some employers raise wages. The tightening of labour market puts pressure on employers to pay higher wages, either through strike actions or simply to be able to attract sufficient labourers, who are free to reject any request from employer for work in a particular place. Now, where labor struggles occurring under different conditions in different places achieve some success (e.g. a rise in wages; shorter hours; laborers being able to more freely choose their employers), the very context within which accumulation based on formal subsumption happens is changed. The changed class context structures accumulation strategies on the part of capital formally subsuming labor and under pressure to cut costs. Of these strategies, three are important. One is that: as wages increase or the working day becomes shorter without a reduction in daily wages, due to a balance of power in favour of labourers caused by their struggle and other factors, employers may resort to labour-displacing mechanization to discipline labour, raise labour productivity, and increase surplus value. Usually, struggle against formal subsumption does tend to prompt a transition to real subsumption, i.e. capitalist class relation with technological changes that increase labour productivity. But how quick the transition is, and in what form and extent it happens, depend on the intensity and form of class struggle, which is influenced by specific contextual factors. The transition to real subsumption may be (temporarily) slowed down where laborers’ organization against labour-displacing machinery has reached 32 33 34

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Not to acknowledge the existence of the material context within which labor struggles happen is to fall in the trap of voluntarism [see Anderson’s (1980: 32–33) discussion of E.P. Thompson]. Labour struggle can be at individual and collective levels. It can take covert form and overt form. Usually, where labour is organized in covert form and collectively, it has the greatest impact. Consider Andhra Pradesh (in south India). In many of its villages, studied by da Corta and Venkateshwarlu (1999), labour struggle has led to a decline in bonded labour relations and to increases in real wages for men and women.

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a sufficiently high level and where there are other ­favorable factors including a certain degree of state support for labor locally.35 It is also the case that different fractions of capital have differential ability to fight back against, and discipline, labour: landed capital (as in agriculture) is not able to use the threat of moving to other paces, against labour. Other fractions are more mobile and can use that geographical threat better. But on the other hand, some kinds of labour (e.g. agrarian labour) are geographically more dispersed and therefore can exercise its power less effectively vis a vis capital, especially as most of the organizational activities tend to be concentrated in or near cities. In a non-linear historical view of capitalism, there are at least two other possible accumulation strategies, in addition to the transition to real subsumption. In some cases (and especially, in the peripheral capitalist countries), the dominant responses of capitalists to resistance against formal subsumption may be those which are other than real subsumption. This results in a c­ apitalism that is not quite progressive, a capitalism that can remain relatively backward for long.36 The first of these responses is just ‘business-as-usual’: reinforcement of formal subsumption (use of new forms of formal subsumption). The second type of response is Marx’s ‘hybrid subsumption’ (mercantile-usury based exploitation, and rental extraction).37 These require some explanation. In a class-context where there is a certain degree of struggle against formal subsumption, but where labour is not particularly strong, capitalists may continue to use hired labour but appropriate surplus value by various nontechnological means. This situation reinforces the system of formal subsumption. Capital reinforces formal subsumption in its response to class struggle by using a ‘gender fix’ in some areas. The class struggle by men over low w ­ ages, long working days and unfree labour relations provokes capital to ­intensify/ 35 36 37

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It should also be noted that the struggle against formal subsumption is one thing, but the struggle against real subsumption and indeed against capital’s right to appropriate surplus value, is another; the latter is much more difficult from labourers’ standpoint. Note that this backward form of capitalism is not the same as what Lenin refers to when he defines imperialism as ‘moribund capitalism’, which is ‘capitalism in transition’ (1939: 126). Still another response is what can be called political accumulation. Property owners, especially those who formally subsume labour, may utilize (local/regional) state institutions including police to beat up striking labourers, or to have them jailed on false charges. A part of the surplus can be used to support friendly political parties and bribe state bureaucracy which, in turn, helps capital’s use of state’s resources illegally, in a form of ‘primitive accumulation’. The fact of state intervention and the fact of it being instrumentally used by local dominant classes suggest that reproduction of capitalism is a deeply political matter (Harriss, 1992).

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reinforce formal subsumption by increasing the use of female labour.38 In order to support their families, women can be forced to accept lower wages and relatively unfree labour contracts (more on this below), which their husbands refused.39 In other areas, capital may resort to a ‘spatial fix’ in response to class struggle: when local labourers go on a strike, capital may use laborers from outside the locality (e.g. docile workers from the aboriginal hinterland) ready to work with lower wages and less satisfactory working conditions that local laborers reject. In fact, the use of extra-local labor is a geographically wider process.40 To the extent that property-owners can use the spatial differentiation in wages and in laborers’ solidarity, this is a barrier to the transition to real subsumption, although the strategy may benefit specific capitalists locally.41 As mentioned earlier, an important mechanism of reinforcement of formal subsumption as well could be the use of wage-labour which is unfree and which therefore, more or less, lacks the power to negotiate the terms on which to sell labour power. We may recall that capital responds to struggle against formal subsumption in three ways. Two of these discussed so far are: transition to real subsumption, and reinforcement of formal subsumption. The third strategy is one in which capital may resort to ‘hybrid subsumption’.42 Hybrid subsumption is not capitalist in its labour process. As real wages rise and the working-day shortens, thanks to, say, class struggle from below, owners of accumulated capital, instead of investing capital in production, may buy up land and lease it out at high rent; and/or may be involved in mercantile and money-lending activity 38 39 40 41 42

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Owners often prefer to hire women to men to just pre-empt the possibility of men going on a strike. In many places, women laborers are seen as less difficult and willing to work for less. To the extent that patriarchy can be used to divide the working class, the impetus for technological change may be less strong. By taking up work refused by men, women may enable men to prolong their strike. The positive side of the gender fix is that capital, in its own interest, enables women to leave home and exercise some freedom. This is a particularly notable tendency under neoliberal capitalism: in spite of the availability of local labor, employers tend to use migrant labor in order to exercise maximum control over it, avoid any possible labor conflict, and squeeze out the maximum amount of surplus value by paying low wages. At a more concrete level, the value of labour power must be seen as geographically differentiated, rather than just as a constant within a country. If, for example, traditional needs of aboriginal migrants are more limited (or are seen as limited – ‘as in the narrative of simple life’), they can work (can be made to work) for less and in a more disciplined manner, and thus help their owners make an above-average profit. This is especially in rural areas.

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and exploit direct producers through these activities. Sometimes merchants advance cash loan to small ­land-holders, and/or lease out some land, and borrowers promise to pay in kind at harvest at a (below-market) price determined by the lender. Thus, and in other words, as wage costs rise, employers seek to appropriate surplus through exchange relations rather than directly through production relations based on hiring in of wage-labour.43 All this suggests that productive capital as well as commodity capital and money capital are interlocked, and generally without the mediation of extra-economic relations. The property-owners are involved in a cycle of expanded reproduction,44 though this may not show up in the investment in productivity-raising techniques within a given sector or indeed in a given place. Of course, hybrid ­subsumption in a situation where wage labour is sporadic or non-dominant is different from hybrid subsumption in the opposite case (where employers may respond to struggle against formal subsumption partly by moving into hybrid subsumption, i.e. buying up product, and reselling it at higher prices to merchants). In specific cases, employers can make use of both formal and hybrid subsumption.45 4

Imperialism, Subsumption of Labour under Capital, and Class

So far the argument has been this: capitalism must be seen more in terms of its historically specific class relations and less in terms of a given level of the development of productive forces (implying that it is inadequate to think that only economically advanced capitalism is really capitalism). More specifically, capitalism must be seen in terms of forms of subsumption of labor. Following primitive accumulation, the capitalist class relation with its associated accumulation process begins with the formal subsumption of wage-labor; it is a regime of exploitation dominantly based on long hours and low-wages (wages can be below the value of labour power). The transition to real subsumption 43 44 45

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In rural areas, in some cases, property owners, in response to struggle over wages and working day, instead of getting their land cultivated by hired wage labourers rent out their land to the same people, now as tenants. Here I refer to the fact that property-owners are investing money to make more money (aprocess not to be confused with conspicuous consumption). Capital also makes use of labor whose reproduction is only partly borne by the capitalist wage system: this happens when, for example, laboring households working seasonally for capital as migrant laborers may collect some means of subsistence (fuel, etc.) from common properties for free and/or who may own some means of production/subsistence.

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of labor is not automatic. Much rather, that transition is crucially contingent on the success of class struggle against formal subsumption. Thus far I have abstracted, however, from the questions concerning the connection between imperialism and this transition.46 A related question is also that: can real subsumption of labor not happen outside of advanced (imperialist) countries at all? In fact, at times, I have almost given the false impression that the answer is absolutely in the negative: that the capitalist periphery will remain stuck in the formal subsumption of labor always and everywhere. Such an answer would be un-dialectical. One must remind oneself of Engels’ statement in Feurerbach and end of classical German Philosophy: for dialectical philosophy, ‘nothing is final, absolute, sacred. It reveals the transitory character of everything and in everything’ (Engels, in Marx and Engels, 1977c: 339).47 I define imperialism not in terms of unequal relations in the realm of exchange or in terms of income inequality between rich and poor countries, etc. although all these are important, but fundamentally as capitalist class relation at the international scale. Imperialism is the exploitation and domination of proletarians and semi-proletarians in the peripheral capitalist world (with its relatively weaker states) by the various competing fractions of the ‘nationally-­based’ capitalist class of advanced countries (supported by their powerful, highly militarized states).48 Classical imperialism contributed to a 46 47 48

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There is much literature on imperialism, including: Harvey, 2003, Wood, 2003; Avineri, 1969; Blaut, 1985, 1997; Brewer, 1990; Callinicos, 2009; Foster, 2015; McDonough, 1995; Patnaik, 1995; Patnaik and Patnaik, 2016; Pradella, 2013; Wolfe, 1997. Westra, 2015; Kiely, 2012; Blackledge, 2007; Sathyamurthy, 1997; Lim, 1992. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1886/ludwig-feuerbach/ch01.htm. Of course, militarism and political bullying are an aspect of imperialism. Control over peripheral capitalist countries (for their resources, markets, and labour power, etc.), through imperialist-military control (buttressed by non-military processes including ideas and practice of cooperation and assistance), is an important mechanism of competition between fractions of global capital, still sustained by their respective nation-states (or a group of nation-states), promoting/reproducing nationalist ideology. So peripheral societies become the battle ground for inter-imperialist rivalry, which can become bloody from time to time, because control over specific parts of the peripheral capitalist world by an imperialist country or a group of imperialist countries is a means of staying competitive internationally. Besides, what the state does inside a given country with respect to protecting capitalist property rights, the imperialist state does in relation to the global periphery (economically poorer, politically and militarily less powerful countries, where the massive poverty and molecular anger against the capitalism and imperialism is always potentially explosive). As Wood (2005) has stressed, imperialist power must be exercised to make sure that states and peoples in the periphery more or less adhere to the rules of the capitalist market.

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quick transition to real subsumption in imperialist countries, while blocking such a transition in the ex-colonies. This happened in many ways. (a) The presence of capital-labor relations that existed already in the core countries allowed vast resources flowing from their ex-colonies (and indeed from the post-colonial peripheral capitalist regions) to be converted into capital. The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, flowed back to the mother-country and were turned into capital there (Marx, 1977: 918; italics added].49 (b) Struggle against capitalists in the imperialist center, who were only/ mainly formally subsuming labor, forced them to adopt new technologies that increased labor productivity and that allowed the appropriation of relative surplus value; in other words a transition to real subsumption of labor was possible. On the other hand, during classical imperialism (colonialism), a vast reserve army was created through deindustrialization caused by cheap machine-made imports from colonizing countries and through primitive accumulation (dispossession of small property owners, including peasants).50 And, under current, ‘new imperialism’,51 primitive accumulation is also happening on a big scale, thanks to the extra-economic (state-enabled) dispossession: this has been expanding the reserve army as well, a reserve army which Harvey, unfortunately, thinks is capitalism’s other. The reserve army is also expanding because of cheap exports from imperialist countries and by lack of financial support from peripheral capitalist states for their relatively weak, small-scale property-­owners against international competition (Das, 2013; Patnaik, 1999).52 49 50 51 52

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‘If the free traders cannot understand how one nation can grow rich at the expense of another, we need not wonder, since these same gentlemen also refuse to under-stand how in the same country one class can enrich itself at the expense of another’ (Marx’s speech on free trade, in Marx and Engels, 2000: 295). In some parts of the ex-colonized world, the state actually took steps to break up the communal type property into private property in order to stop ideas about communal (communist) property from taking root, and Marx commented on this (Anderson, 2010: 219–220). Under new imperialism, market mechanisms are generally more significant relative to the coercive state power of advanced capitalist countries in implementing the imperialist project, although state power (sanctions, threat of or actual use of military power) is always the midwife of the imperialist project. The regime of cheap exports from imperialist countries is enabled by their own states and by the institutions controlled by them. The relative lack of financial support from

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The global reserve army is a significant aspect of global capitalism (Foster et al., 2011) and especially, in the context of peripheral capitalism.53 It is the lever of accumulation driven by global and imperialist capitalist class relation: it is a massive way to depress wages and working conditions in the periphery (as well as in the core).54 The reserve army is in the form of ‘vulnerable laborers’ who are generally not organized and who can and must work for less and for long hours. They are also oppressed and divided by various non-class relations: they include migrants (without access to usual limited welfare benefits available to locals), aboriginal people, women and children, and racialized workers.55 And this reserve army contributes to the situation where formal subsumption is widely prevalent in the periphery. A massive reserve army means that wages can be driven down, and often below the value of labour power, causing superexploitation. It also means that a currently employed person is forced to do the work of two, allowing the employer to pump out extra amount of surplus value. Under these conditions, for a property owner who must cut costs to stay competitive nationally and globally, there is relatively little incentive or structural pressure to go for real subsumption. Given the global law of value ­operating nationally and globally, and therefore given the pressure to cut costs, formal subsumption of labour remains a major option. 53 54 55

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peripheral capitalist states for relatively weaker, small-scale property-owners against the international law of value (competition), this lack of support is one for which imperialist institutions have also been responsible through various international treaties and organizations such as the World Bank. It is instructive to note what Cammack (2004) says about the Bank in particular: World Bank-led projects aim at the systematic transformation of social relations and institutions in the developing world, in order to generalize and facilitate capitalist accumulation on a global scale. Crucially, capitalist accumulation on a global scale is another name for imperialism. The reserve army is not only massive in peripheral capitalism, something that is not always seen in official statistics (hardly anyone can live without doing some work, including picking garbage). Its reserve army – whether floating, latent, stagnant, pauper, etc – has little recourse to state support for reproduction, is increasingly more reliant on the wagelabour market (where employment is not only irregular but wages are abysmally low), and is extremely poverty-stricken (in the sense of lack of access to even food), relative to the situation in imperialist capitalism. Some of the ‘worst excesses’ of global capitalism are concentrated in the peripheral capitalist world, at least from the standpoint of simple bodily reproduction. Of course, whether the rate of exploitation is greater there than in advanced capitalism is a different matter. Because of the effect on the global reserve army on the core countries themselves, the regime of low-wages and long hours is increasingly prevalent here as well. Indeed, as wages are stagnating, there is a greater need to justify this fact by resorting to various ideologies such as those of race and gender. To the extent that unpaid labor by women indirectly contributes to the surplus value, and given the intensely patriarchal

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Imperialist capital, to the extent that it promotes export-oriented production, also reinforces, directly or indirectly, formal subsumption of labor, a regime of long hours. As the capitalist class relation and its production system become more and more globalized, the thirst for more surplus labour ­increases. Marx (1977: 345) says: as soon as peoples… are drawn into a world market dominated by the capitalistic mode of production, whereby the sale of their products for export develops into their principal interest, the civilised horrors of overwork [come to exist].56 These lines depicts the over-exploitation of the working class in the current phase of globalization, and point to the capitalists’ drive to appropriate surplus value in its absolute form, or formal subsumption of labour. Further: ­export-oriented production under capitalism, tends to produce disarticulation of the economy, which is an important feature of many peripheral capitalist countries: this is the disarticulation between production and consumption sectors (de Janvry, 1981). Export-oriented production, which thrives on superexploitation, does not necessarily need local proletarians/semi-proletarians as local consumers. The logic also applies to that part of the production system which caters to the needs of local economic elite (e.g. the capitalist class and the high-wage earning people, who are its taskmasters). So such a process allows imperialist capital and its local allies (domestic business) to exploit labor through various mechanisms of formal subsumption, including the use of unfree labor.57 Consider also the fact that on top of the opportunities to produce absolute surplus value from formal subsumption, there are plenty of opportunities for accumulation by dispossession (taking over peasants’ land; ­privatization of commons and state’s resources) and parasitic forms of accumulation. So, ‘national-bourgeois’ and imperialist-bourgeois investors have a

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nature of many societies in the periphery, women’s labor at home must be a part of the discussion on the production of absolute surplus value. ‘Hence the Negro labour in the Southern States of the American Union preserved something of a patriarchal character, so long as production was chiefly directed to immediate local consumption. But in proportion, as the export of cotton became of vital interest to these states, the over-working of the Negro, and sometimes the consumption of his life in seven years of labour, became a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It was no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products, but rather of the production of surpus-value itself’ (Marx, 1977: 345). Note that the use of unfree labor as a capitalist strategy also exists in developed capitalist economies, as a method of responding to potential or real class struggle on the part of the masses (Brass, 2011).

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tendency towards a distinctive disincentive towards accumulation by exploitation based on the real subsumption of labor. It is not difficult to see that the nature of subsumption of labour – the nature of class relations under capitalism – holds a key to the understanding of why the periphery, for example, remains economically underdeveloped in spite of being capitalist in class relationship. The specificity of the periphery is not just that it is subordinated to imperialism or that it has pre-capitalist relations or indeed that its production and consumption sectors are not interlinked, or that it loses value through unequal exchange, although all of these are relevant attributes.58 From the standpoint of class theory presented here, the periphery remains backward because property owners formally subsume wage labour and do not generally have to resort to real subsumption of labour in any systemic and long-term manner. Given the difficulty on the part of labour in launching class struggle against formal subsumption owing to a massive reserve army (among other factors),59 capitalists operating increasingly under the impact of the global law of value and thus having to cut costs, resort to formal subsumption of labour and thus reproduce a backward form of capitalist class relation. However, and dialectically seen, imperialism – accumulation and exploitation at the world scale – is not only responsible for the general absence of the dominance of real subsumption, and thus for the lack of advanced development of productive forces under capitalism. It is also responsible for introducing islands of real subsumption in a ‘sea’ of formal and hybrid subsumptions. In part driven by (a) class struggle in imperialist countries forcing capital to move some production overseas, and (b) the crisis of profit and over-­accumulation in these countries, and (c) the need to sell newly developed technologies (e.g. biotechnologies) which are a source of monopoly profits, imperialist capital sometimes introduces into the peripheral capitalist world a labor process that is based on real subsumption. This is made possible by the availability of cheap skilled labour, once again, thanks to a massive reserve army. In other words, in collaboration with national capitals from the periphery and their state,60 58 59 60

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It is in fact widely believed that one specific characteristic of peripheral capitalist societies is that in such societies capitalism coexists with pre – (or non) capitalist class relations (see Ougaard, 1982). This has been accumulating since the times of formal imperialism (colonialism), and is expanding now, as noted earlier. The peripheral capitalist state can be also responsible for real subsumption, both in relation to, and independently of, imperialism. Partly prompted by struggles of the masses against low living standards and partly prompted by geopolitical rivalries (sometimes overlain by nationalist chauvinism with religious overtones), and in some cases, to protect

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the ­imperialist capital introduces advanced forms of development in specific places and sectors/sub-sectors, which constitute ‘islands of real subsumption’. These include: the peripheral capitalist versions of advanced capitalism’ ‘silicon valleys’ and the techno parks. These also include high-tech greenhouses, high-tech theme parks, and agribusiness multinationals introducing advanced technologies through the contract farming system. Like imperialist capital, domestic capital is also subjected to the law of value. The (dependent) bourgeoisie of the less developed countries must compete internationally (including with imperialist capital itself) to cut costs, and to this end, real subsumption of labor is sometimes used. This especially ­happens where formal subsumption is not the preferred method in the labor process on technical ground (e.g. oil drilling; production of tomatoes or potatoes of a specific size which are required for further industrial-processing). That is, certain production processes cannot just be conducted with the use of working bodies. So machines – more generally advanced technologies – become necessary. Besides, in specific cases (e.g. specific parts of so-called emerging economies, where class struggle against the gruelling methods of exploitation based on formal subsumption are rampant, especially where there is a large concentration of workers in a place), class struggle is beginning to happen and intensifying. Class struggle in one place makes capital fear it in another place. Capital – domestic or imperialism – is being forced to use machines to reduce reliance on the recalcitrant workers.61 However, several points should be made in relation to these counter-­ tendencies towards imperialism blocking the real subsumption of labour. The process of the introduction of real subsumption of labor via the entry of foreign technology inside the global periphery is always geographically uneven. It depends on prior geography of profit-making: prior spatial division of labor, and pro-business friendly policies promoted by local/regional governing elites who are competing for foreign (and domestic) capital. It crucially depends on the geography of labor and social struggles against low wages and long hours62 61 62

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their own capitals against imperialist competition, capitalist states in the periphery can give various forms of assistance to national capitals to introduce modern technologies, and to increase labor productivity. This process may signal some kind of transition from formal to real subsumption. And when some of them commit suicide or take similar steps in sheer frustration (including in a Luddite style), the image of capital among middle class people is tarnished. From the standpoint of capital, it is better to get rid of these workers and use machines, and even robots, instead. ‘Low wages’ and ‘long hours’ relative to what will be the case if there is real subsumption of labour.

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(i.e. against the formal subsumption of labor). Because of geographical unevenness in class struggle, the transition to real subsumption will be uneven.63 Class struggle against formal subsumption in one peripheral country can, under certain conditions, lead to capital moving to another peripheral country, where class struggle is not that prevalent, to deploy formal subsumption, instead of being forced to switch to real subsumption in the first country. To the extent that technological change does happen, the general tendency is still one of a regime of exploitation based on formal subsumption. This is reflected in the fact that labor productivity per hour in the less developed countries is a lot lower than, for example, in the usa and other advanced capitalist countries, even if the gap is narrowing a bit. There is plenty of empirical evidence to this effect.64 As well, when technological change does happen, it is often based on adaptation of technology from advanced capitalist nations, and not based on the kind of inventions that Marx talked about which, to a certain extent, are results of class struggle against formal subsumption of labor. Given the plenty of opportunities for surplus value in forms other than relative surplus value, the extent to which there is a systemic tendency towards a rise in labor productivity – of the type Marx and Brenner talk about – is relatively limited (even if it cannot be totally excluded).65 More or less, the peripheral capitalist countries 63 64 65

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As Harvey (2014) rightly notes, in this age of mobility, small differences between places get translated into rather large differences. While labour productivity per worker may have improved a little, labor productivity per hour has not quite done so. The former is not an accurate measure of rise in productivity as much as the latter is. A worker can produce more in a day simply because she/he is forced to work for long hours. When there is a large reserve army, not only are wages kept low; it is also the case that those who are employed are forced to work long hours simply because of employers’ class power that is enhanced by the reserve army: this means that two persons working really long hours a day do the work of, say, three persons, and this may give the impression of rising productivity, which is mistaken. It should be stressed that: to the extent that real subsumption occurs, the ratio of the investment in labour-saving technologies to the investment in labour is likely to be below that in the advanced countries, given the massive reserve army at hand, making available labour at a cheap rate for super-exploitation. Nick Beams, a very powerful Marxist analyst of the global economy, draws our attention to a major report from the us which says that China’s capitalist industrial development ‘has been rooted in an adaptation of assembly line methods, not in the development of the new system of production. While it has provided a boost to profits, this has been obtained not through an increase in the productivity of labor, as was previously accomplished by American capitalism, but through the employment of ultra cheap labor’ (quoted in Beams, 2012; italics mine).

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are (consequently) a low-wage platform of global capitalist accumulation (and an arena of massive accumulation by dispossession). Like any other tendency it is modified by certain factors, which may even counter it in specific contexts. 5

Misconceptions about Subsumption of Labour and Dominant Contradiction in Modern Society

It should be clear that the approach to subsumption taken in this chapter differs from that of other scholars such as Banaji (1977a; 1977b; 2011), Milios (1999), Harvey (1982), etc. Banaji talks about formal subsumption in his theoretical work and in his historical discussion (of small-scale producers). While my approach emphasizes subsumption of wage-labour under capital in line with Capital, Banaji’s interest is in ‘The [coercive] subjugation of the simple commodity form of production to capital’ (ibid.: 33; 36; stress added). According to him, the labour of small producers… can be seen as formally subsumed under capital. This is so because ‘The relations of production which tie the enterprise of small commodity producers to capital are already relations of capitalist production’ (1977a: 34; italics added).66 Banaji insists that ‘Behind the superficial ‘surface’ sale of products’ small-scale producers ‘under this form of domination sell their labour-power’ to ‘the monied bourgeoisie of moneylenders and merchants through whom the small producer was brought into relation with the market’ (ibid.: 35–36) by way of the latter receiving advances necessary for carrying out the production process. The ‘price’ which small producers receive signifies a relation, not of exchange, but of production; it is ‘a concealed wage’ (ibid.). So they are ‘disguised labourers’, according to Banaji.67 In at least one place,

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The empirical context is sharecropping in South India in the 19th century. More broadly: Banaji rejects the equation of the capitalist mode of production with juridically free wage-labour as a particular form of exploitation. He thinks about the capitalist mode of production in terms of its laws of motion (i.e. continuous accumulation of capital). Such a mode of production is not about any specific relations of exploitation, and can be based on a variety of forms of exploitation based on wage-labour, including sharecropping, labour tenancy, bonded labour. These forms of exploitation may just be ways in which paid labour is recruited, exploited and controlled by employers. Sharecroppers, tenants working on landowners’ lands, and bonded labourers are not necessarily wage-workers, but the forms of exploitation these categories represent may reflect the subsumption of labour into capital in ways where the ‘sale’ of labour-power for wages is mediated and possibly disguised in more complex arrangements. Sharecroppers, etc. are disguised wage-workers.

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Banaji admits that what he describes is in fact ‘pre-formal’ ­subsumption. The latter, he says, ‘would tend to lead in the vast majority of cases to the system of formal subordination’ (italics added). He says that, for Marx, ‘pre-formal’ subsumption can be ‘assimilated’ into formal subsumption, and that is how he (i.e. Banaji) treats the matter (1977b: 1376). Marx, in fact, clearly distinguishes between formal and hybrid subsumptions, and Banaji loses sight of the specificity of capitalism as a class relation, which is generally based in nominally free wage-labour, although it may make use of unfree labour as a strategy of class struggle from above.68 While arguing that Lenin’s analysis of Russian agriculture69 was probably mistaken, Milios (1999) finds useful the theory of the ‘buyer-up’ as the major agent of preindustrial capitalist relations. Milios says that according to Lenin, Russia could be characterized as a predominantly capitalist economy and society not because the majority of the population were involved in wage relations, but rather, because small-scale producers were formally subordinated to capital through their relations with merchant buyers. Thus, according to Milios, Lenin conceived large-scale industrialization as representing a transition from a relatively underdeveloped form of capitalism to a more developed form rather than – as his opponents then and many radical thinkers in recent years maintain – the passage from precapitalism to capitalism. For Milios, the spread of cottage industries and subcontracting in contemporary peripheral capitalist countries indicates, like the buyer-up system in Lenin’s time, the existence of incipient forms of capitalist development which, under certain social circumstances, may lead to the real subordination of labor to capital and, thus, 68 69

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More broadly, Banaji rejects the equation of the capitalist mode of production with juridically free wage-labour as a particular form of exploitation. He reconceptualises the capitalist mode of production in terms of its laws of motion (i.e. ceaseless accumulation of capital), rather than any specific relations of exploitation, and doing so allows him to investigate a variety of forms of historical capitalism: a multiplicity of forms of exploitation based on wage-labour....sharecropping, labour tenancy, and various forms of bonded labour, these specific individual forms of exploitation may just be ways in which paid labour is recruited, exploited and controlled by employers. The argument is not that all sharecroppers, labour tenants, and bonded labourers are wage-workers, but that these ‘forms’ may reflect the subsumption of labour to capital in ways where the ‘sale’ of ­labour-power for wages is mediated and possibly disguised in more complex arrangements: they are disguised wage-workers (see Post, 2013). According to this the rural population was being increasingly polarized into capitalists and wage-laborers.

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more developed forms of capitalist relations. Once again, formal subsumption is seen as formal subsumption of small-scale producers and not of wage labourers. And the assumption is also that real subsumption of labour as a form of class relation of capitalism can straightaway develop out of the buyer-up system. In line with Milios is the view of Vercellone (2007) according to whom formal subsumption is ‘based on the models of production of the putting-out system and of centralised manufacture’.70 In my reading of Marx, Banaji’s (and Milios’ and others’) characterization describes not formal subsumption of labour, but what can, at best, be called hybrid subsumption. The latter concept Marx clearly sets out in the main text of Capital. The concepts of formal and real subsumption apply not to petty commodity-producing labour, but to nominally free wage-labour. According to Marx, the relations between usurious capital or merchant capital and the labour of direct producers do not constitute formal subsumption of labour. This form of capital does not directly intervene in the labour process, and direct producers are still in (some) control over the product and over their own work. It is worthwhile to quote him in full length from Marx’s Results (in the Appendix to Capital 1): The distinctive character of the formal subsumption of labour under capital appears at its sharpest if we compare it to situations in which capital is to be found in certain specific, subordinate situations, but where it has not emerged as the direct purchaser of labour and as the immediate owner of the means of production, and where in consequence it has not yet succeeded in becoming the dominant force, capable of determining the form of society as a whole. In India, for example, the capital of the usurer advances raw materials or tools or even both to the immediate producer in the form of money. The exorbitant interest which it attracts, the interest which, irrespective of its magnitude, it extorts from the primary producer, is just another name for surplus value. It transforms its money into capital by extorting unpaid labour, surplus labour, from the immediate producer. But it does not intervene in the process of production itself, which proceeds in its traditional fashion, as it always had done. … But here we have not yet reached the stage of the formal subsumption of labour under capital. 70

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‘The capital-labour relation is marked by the hegemony of the knowledge of craftsmen and of workers with a trade, and by the pre-eminence of the mechanisms of accumulation of a mercantile and financial type’ (ibid.: 15).

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…A further example is merchant’s capital, which commissions a number of immediate producers, then collects their produce and sells it, perhaps making them advances in the form of raw materials, etc. or even money. It is this form which provides the soil from which modern capitalism has grown and here and there it still forms the transition to capitalism proper. Here too we find no formal subsumption of labour under capital. The immediate producer still performs the functions of selling his wares and making use of his own labour. But the transition is more strongly marked here than in the case of the usurer. marx, 1977: 1023

So formal subsumption is not the same as small-scale producers being subordinated to merchant capital. Neither is formal subsumption to be equated to the use of unfree labour. When Mundle (1977) confines formal subsumption of labour only to unfree labourers, that is also too narrow a view. In fact, the essence of formal subsumption is not the use of unfree labour, but that of free labour, although in specific times and places, capitalists, formally subsuming labour, may make some of their labourers unfree or may make use of ­unfree labour. Besides, the transition to real subsumption, for me, is a protracted process, mediated by class struggle. This is not an essential part of Banaji’s and others’ thinking.71 The most general form of capitalism anywhere in the world, and historically, is when capital appropriates absolute surplus value through the formal subsumption of labour by making workers work longer hours, by intensifying the labor process (and by even paying them below-subsistence wages). F­ ormal subsumption is the more ‘primitive’ (original) form of capitalist accumulation and capitalist exploitation, of M-C-M′. Given capitalist class relations (the existence of a working class and a capitalist class in a context of generalized commodity production), whether property-owners formally subsuming labor will also resort to technological change and therefore whether real subsumption will result, crucially depends on, among other things, the place-specific ­balance of power between them and labor, and on interventions of the nationstate, and of imperialist capital. With respect to ­capitalism as a whole, formal subsumption, conceptually speaking, is the general form of capitalist class 71

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As well, neither he nor others, such as the geographer Watts (1992), who occasionally use the subsumption perspective, explore its implication for understanding the existence of capitalist class relation (and uneven development).

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relation, as just mentioned, while with respect to the empirical context of the periphery, the dominant moment of capitalist class relation happens to be the formal subsumption as well, and not accumulation by dispossession (nor is it semi-feudalism). Something must be said about accumulation by dispossession here. Harvey’s inadequate approach to the distinction between formal and real subsumption is symptomatic of his inadequate treatment of the class character of capitalism. Harvey (1982: 373) has got the class character of capitalism wrong when he says that: ‘Monetary relations have penetrated into every nook and cranny of the world and into almost every aspect of social, even private life. This formal subordination of human activity [or labour], exercised through the market, has been increasingly complemented by that real subordination which requires the conversion of labour into the commodity labour power through primitive accumulation’. One can see how Harvey’s conceptualization of formal and real subordination/subsumption is different from Marx’s which is briefly presented above. According to Marx, and as we have seen, capital, in its most general form, is based on the formal subsumption of nominally free wage labour which is purchased by capital in the market. For Marx, labour power is already a commodity under formal subsumption. The capitalism of Harvey’s theory of capitalism is merely the capitalism in its more economically-­developed form. Harvey is de-historicising the concept of subsumption: he sees subsumption of labour as subsumption of all human activity under capital. Not surprisingly, the distinction between formal and real subsumptions has no relevance for him. Not just that. In his theorization of capitalism, especially since his New imperialism published in 2003, he has been saying that the dominant moment of capitalism is accumulation by dispossession, which refers to modern form of what Marx called primitive accumulation and it includes, among other things, privatization of communal and state property, etc. By accumulation by dispossession, Harvey means (2007: 34–35): the continuation and proliferation of accretion practices that Marx had designated as ‘primitive’ or ‘original’ during the rise of capitalism. These include (1) the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations (as in Mexico and India in recent times); (2) conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusively private property rights; (3) suppression of rights to the commons; (4) commodification of labor power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; (5) colonial, neocolonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); (6) monetization of

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exchange and taxation, particularly of land; (7) the slave trade (which continues, particularly in the sex industry); and (8) usury, the national debt, and, most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as radical means of primitive accumulation. The state, with its monopoly of violence and definitions of legality, plays a crucial role in backing and promoting these processes. To this list of mechanisms, we may now add a raft of additional techniques, such as the extraction of rents from patents and intellectual property rights and the diminution or erasure of various forms of communal property rights – such as state pensions, paid vacations, access to education, and health care – won through a generation or more of social democratic struggles. The proposal to privatize all state pension rights… is, for example, one of the cherished objectives of neoliberals in the United States. Accumulation by dispossession is ‘most importantly exercised through the credit system and financial power’ (2006: 159); it is primarily economic rather than extra-economic. There is a geography of this concept in the sense that: in the developing world what is happening in terms of dispossession may be covered under primitive accumulation, but not necessarily in advanced capitalism: In the cases of China and Russia, it might be reasonable to refer to recent events in ‘primitive’ and ‘original’ terms, but the practices that restored class power to capitalist elites in the United States and elsewhere are best described as an ongoing process of accumulation by dispossession that grew rapidly under neoliberalism. harvey, 2007: 35

What is happening in advanced capitalism is different from what happened in the originating stage of capitalism and from what is happening in the less developed world: I would argue…that the on-going cannibalistic and predatory practices occurring even within the advanced capitalist countries under the guise of privatisation, market reforms, welfare withdrawals and neoliberalisation are better described as ‘accumulation by dispossession’. They are qualitatively different, theoretically, from what happened at the origins of capitalism. I am not arguing that we drop all Marxian theorising and pander to popular understandings, but when an easy shift in language can be far more politically effective why not use it? (2006: 158).

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The word ‘but’ here is key. In the interest of the dissemination of an idea among an accepting audience, some form of pandering to popularity and some sort of playing with theoretical rigor can be allowed, according to Harvey. A c­ ertain amount of dropping of Marxist theorizing is behind the fact that there are numerous problems with this concept. Harvey himself admits that ‘I inflate the idea somewhat’ (2006b: 165). Somewhat is an under-statement. Overzealous to popularize Marx’s primitive accumulation,72 Harvey dispossesses the power of that original concept. He indeed under-conceptualizes both dispossession and capitalism. He himself is aware that all is not well with the concept. This idea of accumulation by dispossession does require… critical s­crutiny. The term has almost instantaneously been taken up (almost certainly because it is so evocative) and I worry about the indiscriminate way in which it might be (and already has been!) used. harvey, 2006b: 158

It is, first of all, a chaotic concept in the critical realist sense (Sayer, 1992: 138), for it includes so many things under its scope, which are not necessarily connected. What conceptual advantage does one gain by clubbing privatization of government-owned companies, mortgage fraud by banks, increased banks fees and land rents, privatization of pension funds, and dispossession of smallscale owners together? Harvey confuses the extra-economic aspect of dispossession with economic (market-mediated) aspects.73 The process of people losing land and other assets is only partly through extra-economic coercion: Leninist class differentiation, which he hardly talks about, is another, when smaller-scale producers lose their assets because of their economic unviability, i.e. because of competition in a market dominated by big business, in whose ‘favour’ the law of value works. This is the process of accumulation by classdifferentiation, and the state has always been complicit in this process.74 72 73 74

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‘Consider, from this perspective, my use of the term “accumulation by dispossession”. People who know nothing of Marxian theory sense immediately what I mean. I only have to mention pension rights, the illegitimate use of eminent domain, the privatisation of water, credit crunches and loss of health-care rights to get most people to sit up and listen. Eyes glaze over if I insist on “primitive accumulation” as the correct formulation’ (Harvey, 2006: 158). This has been pointed out by Fine (2006) and Brenner (2006) as well. Interestingly, Harvey’s long list of mechanisms of accumulation by dispossession does not include capital dispossessing labor of its fundamental freedom mentioned above (Brass, 2011), and which points to a serious deficiency in his concept, from the standpoint of class analysis.

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Once the bag of accumulation by dispossession is over-stuffed, it is easy to argue that it is the dominant form of capitalism, of capitalist class relation. For Harvey the central contradiction is between the dispossessor and the dispossessed, and not the capitalist-exploiter and exploited workers. ‘While the labour-capital contradiction is unquestionably a central and foundational contradiction of capital, it is not – even from the standpoint of capital alone – a primary contradiction to which all other contradictions are in some sense subservient’. (2014: 68). So what is the primacy contradiction now? Harvey says that during the 1980s and 1990s, ‘“accumulation by dispossession”…became a much more central feature within global capitalism (with privatization as one of its key elements)’. In fact, ‘accumulation by dispossession [has emerged] from this background state to become the dominant form of accumulation relative to expanded reproduction’, and ‘In part this has to do with how and when crises form in expanded reproduction’ (Harvey, 2003: 153; italics added). Such practices as speculation and predatory activities in housing market and privatization of Medicare, education etc. ‘form a collective site where the politics of accumulation by dispossession takes over as a primary means for the extraction of income and wealth from vulnerable populations, including the working classes’ (Harvey, 2014: 68).75 Harvey’s one-sided stress on dispossession raises many questions. For example: If the claim that accumulation by dispossession is the dominant mode of contemporary capitalism, how will one explain the fact of ‘the formidable growth of employment on a world scale: in the last 20 years, employment in advanced countries grew by 20%, and by 80% in emergent economies’? ­(Batou, 2015: 34). Are there not workers in the South that imperialist capital and third world capital exploit (and over-exploit) in mines, offices and factories and on farms and plantations? Harvey rightly points to the slowing down of the economy, but should we not think about the fact that capital seeks to counter that slowing down through increasing exploitation of labour in part through the formal subsumption of labour and indeed attendant over-exploitation in the periphery?76 75 76

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Note Harvey’s language of income and wealth, not value and surplus value. For Harvey, abd is an attempted fix for capitalism’s economic crisis which is caused by what he calls over-accumulation, which is, in spite of his protestation, a generalized form of under-consumptionism. If he thought of capitalism’s crisis in terms of rising organic composition of capital, and he rejects such a theory, then he might be inclined to think about heightened exploitation of labour as a mechanism of accumulation that the ruling class mobilizes to stave off the crisis. No wonder, ‘Accumulation by...’ has become a new

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Number of times dispossession/capitalism has been used

Harvey’s view (2003; 2006b; 2007, 2014) about accumulation by dispossession, which has more or less stayed the same over the years and has remained inadequately scrutinized even by himself, has produced a little cottage industry,77 which, incidentally, includes numerous land-grabbing studies. His overemphasis on dispossession has led to a relative neglect of class exploitation. In fact, interestingly, following his lead, scholars are increasingly talking about dispossession much more than about capitalism as such (see Figure 15). Harvey theory of accumulation by dispossession abstracts from this fact: the system of capitalist class relation is marked by three main logics of ­accumulation under capitalism (i.e. ‘accumulation by dispossession’; accumulation by exploitation, with its two moments of formal and real subsumption, and accumulation by class differentiation). These may then coexist with the

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Figure 15  Number of times ‘dispossession’ and ‘capitalism’ have been used (2008–2015) 77

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buzzword, and often in ways which, more or less, ignore the original meaning of accumulation itself. Here is a sample of the recent literature, apart from Harvey’s work, that speaks to Marx’s insights on primitive accumulation (1977: Chs 26–33): Ashman and Callinicos, 2006;

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pre-capitalist class relations, and class relations of hybrid subsumption, i.e. the dual ‘histories’ of capitalism. Harvey misses the totality of these class relations. The state, both in economic and extra-economic ways, is involved in each of these five moments, in some way.78 A one-sided stress on dispossession is not acceptable. What Harvey ignores is the fact that: accumulation by dispossession and accumulation by exploitation (and accumulation by class differentiation) along with state complicity in all this and the struggle against all moments of accumulation must be seen as parts of a dialectical whole, the global capitalist-class system, one in which the ways (these refer to formal and real subsumptions of labour) in which surplus labor is appropriated in the sphere of production – which is the core stuff of class – colours other aspects, including, the nature of extra-economic relations.79 6

Summary, and Theoretical and Political Implications

Asserted in this chapter is the need for a return to Marx’s often-neglected distinction between formal and real subsumptions of wage-labour by capital in its productive form80 for understanding capitalism as a class relation, its temporality and spatiality, as well as the nature of peripheral capitalist social formations. But this return to Marx must be critical: it must challenge Marx’s neglect of – or rather an inconsistent stance towards – class struggle, and possible Eurocentrism.81 Several theoretical and political conclusions follow from the foregoing discussion. 78 79 80 81

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Batou, 2015; Brass, 2011; De Angelis, 2001; Glassman, 2006; Gordon and Webber, 2008; Hartsock, 2006; Millar, 1978; Moyo et al., 2012; Perelman, 2001; Bonefeld, 2011). Although Marx tends to focus on this or that logic depending on which geographical area (e.g. Africa or China/India/Europe), he is thinking about, and at what level of abstraction and from what vantage point he is thinking about, in the totality of his thinking, all three matter. One cannot also always assume that coercive dispossession succeeds; and dispossession does not have to succeed for capitalism to reproduce itself. There indeed can be accumulation without dispossession on the basis of such things as contract farming (see Shrimali, 2014 for an empirical illustration of this idea). Depending on concrete historical-­ geographical conditions and the power of lower classes (proletarians, semi-proletarians, etc.) relative to that of an enterprise, they can, at times and partially, ‘dispossess’, or weaken, the right of capital to dispossess to some extent. This is not to be confused with subsumption of petty commodity producers by antediluvian forms of capital. This critique of Eurocentrism must be from an internationalist and not a regionalist perspective, whether that regionalism is in the form of Third wordism (Kiely, 1995) or in any

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1 Conceptualization of Capitalism Capitalism must be seen primarily as a class relation. Like everything else, capitalism must be seen as essentially historical: it is historically differentiated into various forms/stages of subsumption of wage-labor (which in turn exhibit geographical variation). Building on Marx’s own discussion on forms of subsumption of labour under capital, the chapter makes the following conceptual argument: to the extent that Marx’s four conditions for formal subsumption exist, capitalist class relations exist, even if productivity-increasing technological change is absent or is not adopted in a widespread and systemic manner. The most general form of capitalism anywhere in the world, and historically, is when capital appropriates absolute surplus value through formal subsumption by making workers work longer hours, by intensifying the labor process (and by even paying them below-subsistence wages). Formal subsumption, theoretically, is the more ‘primitive’ (original) form of capitalist accumulation and capitalist exploitation, of M-C-M'. Given capitalist class relations (the existence of a working class and a capitalist class in a context of generalized commodity production), whether property-owners who are formally subsuming labor will also resort to technological change to appropriate surplus value in its relative form, depends on several things. They include: the place-specific balance of power between them and labor, and on interventions of imperialist capital, nation-state policies, and the technical nature of the labour process. If class relation is a historically-specific form of human social relation, and if capitalism is a historically-specific form of class relation, then formal and real subsumptions of labour are historically-specific forms of the same thing: capitalist class relation (see the Figure 16 below).82 As Marx himself says (1977: 411): the production of surplus-value, or the extraction of surplus-labour, forms the specific content and purpose of capitalist production, quite apart from any reconstruction of the mode of production itself, which may arise from the subordination of labour to capital 82

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other form of regionalism. Note also that: Marx does not neglect the role of class struggle in the evolution of capitalist class relation from a historical angle, but whether he assigns to class struggle the kind conceptual importance that is give here is a different matter. My argument is that he does not, or he does not do this consistently, and that is uncharacteristic of him. ‘[I]f the relations of production and exploitation are the critical objective factors in constituting a mode of production, and if they provide the impulse for the transformation of labour processes, then the “formal subjection” of labour to capital assumes a special significance and primacy’ (Wood, 1995: 91).

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Interaction among people’s mental and manual labour and (original and transformed) nature is the starting point for analysis of society Such interaction (‘metabolism’) – organization of human life – is the content of life which takes the class form beyond a stage in human history (when human productivity allows supplus production) Content of class is the integration of direct producers in production process and production – appropriation of surplus by ruling classes The content of class takes the form of capitalism (other forms of class include feudalism, slavery, etc.) Subsumption of labour under capital is the form in which capitalismas-class is manifested in the sphere of production Subsumption is expressed in formal, real and hybrid forms Specific content of formal, real and hybrid subsumption

Figure 16  Class, capitalism, and subsumption of labour

The conceptualization of capitalism advanced here is different from several existing conceptualizations, including those of both Wood and Harvey (who themselves have major differences between them). For Wood, ‘there is no general agreement about the meaning of capitalism or its basic dynamics’ and that ‘what we need is precisely a definition of Capitalism’ (Wood, 2007: 145; 159). She offers this definition: Capitalism is a system in which both appropriators and producers are subject to … the capitalist imperatives of competition, ­profit-maximisation and accumulation because they are market-dependent. wood, 2007

But this view of capitalism is neutral with respect to the actual mode – form – of subsumption of labour (i.e. formal or real). The underlying assumption, once again, is that merely capital-labour relation in the absence of extra-­ economic coercion will result in what Marx calls real subsumption. Harvey’s definition of capitalism is also inadequate. According to Wood (2007: 146),

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Harvey ‘seems p ­ erfectly happy with a definition of capital which confines itself to simple profit on alienation or of capital as predatory activities’. Wood says that Harvey’s definition of capitalism, even if it invokes M-C-M′: not only confines itself to simple profit on alienation but can also dispense with the mediation of commodities altogether and treat plain old usury as the essence of capitalist appropriation. However useful this may be in the moral condemnation of capitalism, it tells us very little about how the system operates as distinct from other social forms, and nothing at all about how it came into being. wood, 2007: 146

Marx’s concept of subsumption of labor remains as useful as ever. In thinking about the contemporary reality in the light of this concept, and its dual forms (formal and real subsumptions), attention must be paid to obstacles to class struggle against formal subsumption of labor in contexts that Marx did not have a chance to explore. The chapter argues that property owners respond in three different ways to class struggle from below against formal subsumption, representing three methods of appropriating surplus, which can be seen as constituting class struggle from above. Where laborers are better organized, and in the presence of other favorable factors (state’s pro-poor interventions ensuring a good social wage), wages can rise, and the working-day can get shorter. Property-owners respond to this by making use of available technology. In other words, the transition to real subsumption becomes likely. Yet, this process is a non-linear and complicated one. Class struggle can actually slow it down, within limits. Employers may also respond to class struggle by using new forms of formal subsumption as methods of appropriating surplus, resulting in an economically backward capitalism.83 Another type of response is ‘hybrid subsumption’ (mercantile-usury based exploitation as well as exploitation based on rental payment). Property-owners may resort to a combination of hybrid and formal subsumptions as well. 83

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For example, when local labourers go on a strike (in a situation where factors conducive to their success may not exist), capitalists may use migrant labourers or local female labourers, for low wages or resort to unfree labour use (making indebted labourers work for low wages for long hours). In such a situation, property owners do not resort to mechanization to displace and discipline labor. Property-owners, who were earlier formally subsuming laborers on long-term contracts, can as well resort to large-scale casualization: permanent workers become casuals.

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2 Spatiality of Capitalist Class Relation Any discussion of capitalist class relations must be sensitive to its spatial unevenness. Spatial unevenness occurs at multiple scales: internationally and intra-nationally. In a country/territory, class struggle occurs within a context of specific factors, including capitalist state interventions. Partly because of the geographical variation in these contextual factors, the form and outcome of class struggle against formal subsumption will be place-specific with uneven impacts on the transition to real subsumption. Thus, productive forces are more developed in one place than in another, even if capitalist relations may exist in all places. In other words, the more general tendency under capitalist class relation (i.e. the causal powers and liabilities of capitalists to produce commodities by using wage labourers so as to earn at least the average rate of surplus value) interacts with locally existing contingent conditions to produce geographically uneven development, more concrete forms of which must be subjected to empirical analysis.84 Uneven development is taking place because of, and in the framework of, social relations that are predominantly capitalist, at least at the national level (as well as in most places at the sub-national scale). Uneven development is fundamentally, though not exclusively, a product of spatially uneven transitions within the system of class relations: from primitive accumulation to various forms of subsumption, and to real subsumption; these transitions are influenced by unevenness in class struggle and state policies, within the overall framework of imperialism (Figure 17). Trotsky’s (2007: 5) comments are insightful here: Unevenness, the most general law of the historic process, reveals itself most sharply and complexly in the destiny of the backward countries. … From the universal law of unevenness thus derives another law which… we may call the law of combined development – by which we mean a drawing together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of the separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms. Unevenness then, in the above terms, can be seen in terms of ‘a drawing together of the different stages of the journey’ including: various forms of pre-capitalist class relation based on extra-economic coercion, hybrid subsumption as well as formal and real subsumption, and mechanisms of class differentiation by 84

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This cannot be fully captured through data at the scale of large regions and provinces but must be investigated at smaller scales.

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market means, and dispossession via extra-economic means. So unevenness means: ‘a c­ ombining of’ all these ‘separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms’.85 Uneven development is unevenness in forms of class relation (of capitalism). It is true that in terms of a tendential law, capitalism is a progressive force: it tends to promote the development of productive forces. Marx stressed this. Brenner has stressed this. But this does not mean that in every part of the world this will be the case, at a point in time. Capitalism based on formal subsumption of labour may not be particularly progressive. But to say that where capitalism is not playing its ‘assigned’ progressive role, it must be because of some pre-capitalist (or semi-feudal) relations,86 or that capitalism as a social relation does not exist (fully), or to say that capitalism will inevitably bring 85 86

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There is a large amount of recent literature on combined and uneven development (Ashman, A. 2010; Allinson and Anievas, 2009; Bond and Desai, 2006; Dunn and Radice 2006; Lowy, 2010). This is not to deny that there are localities where pre-capitalist relations exist, where land and labour are not commodities, and where extra-economic coercion is exercised in the sphere of production, to which, for example, the caste/race system contributes. But these local relations do not define the system’s dynamics, although they affect how the law of value in the system actually works in specific places.

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economic dynamism of the kind we have seen in the us or Canada to all parts of the global periphery, is being blind to one important aspect of capitalism. This is its socio-spatial dialectics which Marx generally ignored, a concept popularised by Soja (1989) and Peet (1998): presence and absence of backwardness within a single global system of capitalism.87 The absence of dynamism is as much a part of this system as the presence of it. This is what is partly suggested in Leon Trotsky’s uneven and combined development as well as in Lenin’s discussion on imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism. The argument of this paper supports the conclusion of a recent paper on Marx’s view of development: considering the theory of capitalist development (theory of capital), the diffusionist interpretation sought to assign to Marx a unilateral view of capitalist expansion [causing capitalist development], where any form of underdevelopment would necessarily be a perennial reminder of precapitalist modes of production. In this interpretation, any possibility of applying the critical theory of political economy elaborated by Marx in Capital to underdeveloped countries and regions was excluded. Those countries were considered “insufficiently capitalist.… Marx, on the contrary, saw clearly that the expansion of capital was a contradictory process that in many cases expressed itself in what would be now called underdevelopment. de paula, 2015: 601

Or, as Freeman has also argued: ‘Capitalism has accelerated growth and innovation to a historically unparalleled extent – but it cannot be defined as a society that grows and innovates [always and everywhere]. In most of the world and for most of the time, it creates misery, barbarism and destruction’ (Freeman, 2010: 92–93; parenthesis added). In fact, there can be capitalism and there can be, under certain conditions, a lack of dynamics associated with capitalism. There can be a specifically capitalist under-development (ibid.: 604). Such a concept cannot be reconciled with views that attribute its cause only to backwardness or to insufficient adoption of capitalist relations of production in a given region or country’ (ibid.). Capitalism cannot be invested with the power to develop productive forces always 87

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Here backwardness simply means lower level of labour productivity and technical change.

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and everywhere. And not in this age of imperialism which is associated with the accumulation of a massive global reserve army, with all its implications for formal subsumption of labour. In this sense – and not just in the Lenin sense  – capitalism has indeed become moribund: ‘the economic essence of imperialism is a ‘capitalism in transition’ or ‘moribund capitalism’ (1939: 126). Lenin explains this point: the deepest economic foundation of imperialism is monopoly. This is capitalist monopoly, i.e., monopoly which has grown out of capitalism and which exists in the general environment of capitalism, commodity production and competition, in permanent and insoluble contradiction to this general environment. Nevertheless, like all monopoly, it inevitably engenders a tendency of stagnation and decay. Since monopoly prices are established, even temporarily, the motive cause of technical and, consequently, of all other progress disappears to a certain extent and, further, the economic possibility arises of deliberately retarding technical progress. lenin, 1939: 99

For instance, to generalize an example he gives, a company can invent a machine or an idea which can revolutionise production of certain things. Another company can, a cartel, can buy the patent and pigeon-hole it and refrain from using it. Lenin (ibid.: 99–100) continues: Certainly the possibility of reducing cost of production and increasing profits by introducing technical improvements operates in the direction of change. Nevertheless, the tendency to stagnation and decay, which is ­the of monopoly, continues, and in certain branches of industry, in certain countries, for certain periods of time, it becomes predominant. Most of the innovation happens in imperialist countries. These innovations are also patented there (which means that the fruits of innovations which are products of socialized labour are privately appropriated and geographically concentrated). The use of these innovations in the imperialized countries requires, under the rule of capitalist relation of exchange and production, payment of huge amounts of money, which these countries do not necessarily have or they cannot necessarily afford. This obstacle to the use of innovative methods of production is something which the production for profit on a competitive basis based on formal subsumption of labour feeds into and complement.

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The approach to uneven development which was briefly presented above and which directly follows from subsumption theory of capitalist class relation is contrary to two existing approaches to uneven development, which employ a theoretically restrictive view of capitalist class relation. First, if one thinks that only the use of modern technology represents capitalist class relation, what erroneously follows from this is that uneven development of productive forces is a function of spatially limited development of capitalist social relations: i.e. uneven development occurs because there is capitalism here but not there. Second, uneven development is often seen as caused by the dialectics of dual tendencies of geographical concentration and dispersion of capitalist investment, a la Neil Smith and Harvey etc., the tendencies that are shaped by crossclass alliances and class struggle in particular places. This view is useful and is a part of the approach to uneven development presented here (see Figure 18), but it is, in itself, one-sided. It is one-sided because it employs a productive force-centric view of capitalism88 and of uneven development – as opposed to a social relations centric view of capitalism as advanced here – and is oblivious of the historically differentiated nature of capitalism as a class relation. Capitalist Class Relation in Advanced and Less Developed Countries, and Imperialism The discussion on capitalist class relations at a relatively high level of abstraction (forms of capitalist class relations) has implications for understanding advanced and peripheral capitalism. Advanced capitalism – or the world of imperialist countries – is generally characterized by: a successful transition to real subsumption of labour, which coexists with formal subsumption and with tendencies towards continued dispossession from property based in private labour, as well as class differentiation. In imperialist countries, the transition from formal to real subsumption form of capitalist class relation, and the resultant dynamism associated with capitalism, were partly possible because of two factors. One is this: given the presence of capital-labour relations existing already, the flow of vast resources from the colonies, a flow that represented primitive accumulation at the international scale, was converted into capital. Another factor was class struggle against capitalists who are only formally subsuming labour: such class struggle forced the formally subsuming capitalist class to invest their capital, including the capital that was based on

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This is the view that uneven development means uneven development of productive forces, of technical change. Associated with this view is ‘[A] general theory of capital accumulation in space and time’ [that assumes that] ‘technological change (or “progress”) is inevitable’ (Harvey, 2006a: 95).

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resources from the colonies, i.e. in new technology (or new ways of producing). This increased ­labour productivity, and represented the transition to the real ­subsumption form of capitalist class relation. Since more was produced in less time, the rate of surplus value increased, in spite of the relatively shorter working day.89 Thus class struggle is important not only to the transition to capitalism (as powerfully argued in the transition debate by Dobb, Brenner, etc.). It is also important to the transition within capitalism, a process they neglect. What about peripheral capitalism?90 The ideas discussed in this chapter have some implications for understanding the class character of peripheral capitalism under which the majority of the global population and majority of proletarians and semi-proletarians live, and these are summarized in Figure 18 below. As Marx (1977: 400) says in Capital 1: ‘The nature of capital remains the same in its developed as it is in its undeveloped forms’, and this means at a fundamental level and at an international scale, class relations of advanced capitalism and those of the periphery must be similar. The chapter has critiqued in tandem the view of many radicals who subscribing to a restrictive view of capitalism say that social formations in ex-colonial countries are not capitalist enough because they are economically – technologically – less-developed. One is compelled to be critical, on both intellectual and political grounds, of those who doubt that many parts of the world – ex-colonial peripheral capitalist social formations – are dominantly capitalist in terms of class relation. They are like those post-structuralist Marxists who doubt the dominance of capitalism in advanced countries. Any society, whether in the global periphery or more economically advanced, is capitalist, to the extent that it is characterized by: commodity production, land and other means of production confronting labour as capital, and, a class of labourers forced to work for a wage because they do not own sufficient means of production.91 When such conditions exist, 89 90 91

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Of course, the use of machinery puts pressure on the capitalists to lengthen the working day as well, because when a machinery remains idle, that represents a loss of value. There is a large amount of literature on the class character of the periphery. This includes: Anderson, 2010; Amin, 1976; Avineri, 1969; Banaji, 2011, 2013; Berberoglu, 2009; Brass, 2003; 2008; Burawoy, 1982; Corbridge, 1993; De Janvry, 1981; Foster-Carter, 1978; Godelier, 1978; Hobsbawm, 1964; Larrain, 1991; Lindner, 2010; Meisenhelder, 1995; Mohri, 1979; Patnaik, 1990a; Rudra, 1978; Terray, 1972; Valencia, 2014; Warren, 1980; Weeks, 1997; Wolpe, 1980. An economy was slave economy not because slaves performed the bulk of production but because the bulk of the surplus that was extracted from direct producers took the following form: the propertied class derived its surplus above all through the exploitation of slaves (unfree labour) (Croix, 1981: 26).

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then capitalist relation exists, at least in the sense of formal subsumption.92 There is hardly any place in the world which is not dominated by capitalism based on formal subsumption, where the law of value does not work. In peripheral capitalism, there is a vast industrial reserve army of labor which owes its origin to colonialism and is expanding under new imperialism through, for example, primitive accumulation. The expanding reserve army provides capital an ample opportunity for formal subsumption of labour, including the vulnerable elements whose social status (gender, race, age, caste, etc.) is made use of in order to super-exploit them; on the other hand, the reserve army adversely affects the bargaining power of employed labour and makes class struggle against formal subsumption rather difficult. It is also the case that the peripheral capitalist state lacks the resources93 – or it is not allowed by imperialist institutions to use the resources where they exist – to adequately augment the social wage through pro-labour policies in a way in which they can substantially increase the power of labour, however conjuncturally.94 Given all 92 93 94

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Dominance of formal subsumption can be seen empirically. It can also be seen in terms of the logic of value: in the world economy as in peripheral capitalism, property owners producing for the market using hired labor who are not able to cut costs can go out of business, sooner or later (of course there are counter-acting tendencies which can slow down such a process, and these include the use of income from the sale of labour power by a part of the household to keep a losing enterprise afloat. One can also reduce one’s reproductive needs well below the average and stay afloat). Among constraints on the state is the (relative) lack of state funds due to the overall lower development of productive forces, and ruling classes being reluctant to share a part the surplus value as taxes. Also, the alliance of imperialist capital and domestic capital politically inhibits the enhancement of social wage and other pro-labor interventions, which could potentially enhance the bargaining power of labor and consequently force capital to develop productive forces through technological change. Further, given the transfer of resources in the form of debt-payment, etc., from these societies in the system of imperialism, the resources necessary to invest in technology may be limited, although this is not to say that imperialism completely rules out technological change in the periphery. Indeed, imperialism is partly responsible for ‘combined and uneven development’. The Green Revolution technology was indeed promoted in part by imperialism. The sale of modern farm inputs including tractors by the us in India was a strategy to counter the crisis of overproduction in the us (Cleaver, 1972). More recently, the introduction of green-house farming in floriculture (at least initially), and contract farming under neoliberalism (Shrimali, 2014) have also happened partly through the involvement of imperialist companies. To the extent that technological change in agriculture in the periphery will create a market for products for these companies and/or will increase relative surplus value, a part of which will be shared by imperialist countries, imperialism may not be inimical to technological change.

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this, capitalism based on formal subsumption of labour may continue for a very long time in the periphery.95 At the concrete level, i.e. in a specific place and at a specific time, formal subsumption of labor coexists not only with islands of real subsumption of labor created partly by imperialist capital, but also: with ‘hybrid subsumption’ (e.g. usury, etc.), which does not represent capitalist production relations, with localized pre-capitalist relations (both in the sphere of commodity economy, and non-commodity economy), and with new means of primitive accumulation, where the dispossessed joining not the active army of workers but the reserve army.96 Formal subsumption is not just the early history of capitalism. Formal subsumption – as an aspect of accumulation by exploitation – is a continuous affair. A major implication of an accumulation regime characterized by a massive reserve army and low wages is that the market for goods and services for proletarian and semi-proletarian masses (who constitute the majority of the population) remains limited while their needs remain unmet. A large part of the production remains export-oriented or for the local elite (luxury production), and such a production system has, generally, little incentive to raise wages of workers who are not the consumers of such a system (see Richards, 1986; de Janvry, 1981). Distribution of income/wealth does feed back into the nature of production system. A further implication of the subsumption perspective on the capitalist class is that the development process in the world in general and in peripheral capitalism in particular, with its attendant class relations, must be seen as multiple ­transitions (Figure 14). These transitions refer to not just in terms of the single transition from feudalism to capitalism, which is how it has been seen traditionally in Marxism. Much rather, these transitions must be viewed, in terms of obstacles to and opportunities for, the transitions: from pre-capitalist relations to hybrid subsumption, from these two to formal subsumption of labor under capital, from formal to real subsumption of labor, and finally, from the latter to cooperative labor of associated producers, nationally and at a global scale. 95 96

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This is especially the case with rural and semi-rural areas, which are increasingly representing what can be called ruralization of capital, which coexists with what Harvey (1985) admirably drew attention to, i.e. urbanization of capital. Peoples and places ‘suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development. Alongside the modern evils, we are oppressed by a whole series of inherited evils, arising from the passive survival of archaic and outmoded modes of production, with their accompanying train of anachronistic social and political relations. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead.’ (Marx, 1977: 91).

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In peripheral capitalist societies, formal subsumption (with remnants of hybrid subsumption as well as pre-capitalist relations) is much more ­important than real subsumption, and herein lies a most important key to the understanding of under-development from the specifically Marxist standpoint, which has been hitherto gone unrecognized (Figure 18). Formal subsumption demands serious historical-geographical materialist enquiry if we want to understand peripheral capitalist development (as well as imperialism doing its dirty work in the periphery). There is capitalist class relation in the periphery which shares certain qualities with that in the advanced world and which has also its own specificity. One may recall what Trotsky (1995: 119) says In defense of Marxism: Dialectical thinking gives to concepts, by means of closer approximations, corrections, concretizations, a richness of content and flexibility; I would even say a succulence which to a certain extent brings them close

1. Capitalism as a class relation based on formal subsumption of labour (FSL) coexisting with subsumption (RSL) a. Historically accumulating reserve army as a factor b. Islands of transition to RSL c. Articulation between FSL and RSL

2. Capitalism articulates with non-capitalist modes of production (e.g. remnants of precapitalism)

3. Capitalism’s disarticulation: production and consumption(‘luxury’ production for export and domestic elite has limited internal market)

4. Capitalist accumulation by dispossession/encroachment a. Dispossession of small-scale producers; privatization of commons; recommodification b. Bigger reserve army contributing to FSL

Theorizing peripheral capitalism 5. Capitalist imperialism causing surplus transfer and environmental destruction directly impacting small-scale producers and wage workers; super-exploitation of labour (and environmental destruction)

6. Peripheral-capitalist state a. its complicity in making the periphery a low-wage platform for global capitalist production (general FSL) and a market for global capitalist commodities, through repression and development discourse b. domestic and imperialist capitalist use of periphery states in their competitive games

7.Capitalism is supported by non-capitalist relations (e.g. race, gender, indigenous identity, caste, locational identity based in uneven development, etc.). a. The non-capitalist relations divide the class-bloc of workers and independent producers b. ‘political unity’ (psychological wage) function and ‘belownormal wages’ function

Figure 18  Theorizing peripheral capitalism97 97

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There isn’t space for fully elaborating all the seven elements presented in the diagram. The aim of the diagram is only to indicate how a rigorous class-theorizing of capitalism in the imperialized periphery can proceed.

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to living phenomena. Not capitalism in general, but a given capitalism at a given stage of development. 4 Politics of Conceptualization of Capitalism Much of radical/critical development research is concerned with the barriers to development under capitalism. And much of this research has been concerned with strategies to cope with capitalism at local, regional and national scales to make living conditions a little tolerable for some people. There is nothing necessarily wrong with this approach as long as we are not permanently stuck there, as long as we understand the limits to this sort of approach. Unless we assume that capitalist private property rights are immutable/natural, we must also investigate the conditions under the regimes of formal and real subsumption that facilitate/inhibit the emergence the proletarian and semi-proletarian classes as the key force to challenge capitalist subsumption of labor, along with any remnants of pre-capitalist class relations, and social oppression. Whether or not capitalism exists is not a matter of academic squabbling. Whether the capital-labour contradiction, or the contradiction between the dispossessor and the dispossessed (as in Harvey’s theory of accumulation by dispossession) or the contradiction between semi-feudal owners and peasants, is the main contradiction is not an insignificant issue. The concept of what is present determines what needs to be absented (to use the terminology of the radical philosopher, Roy Bhaskar). To say that a social formation is decidedly capitalist has a different political implication than the contrary view that it is not capitalist (enough), or that it is capitalist here and there but not everywhere.98 If a country is, say, dominantly semi-feudal, or not-­capitalist enough, then the radical strategy is seen by many as one which is to be directed against semi-feudal exploiters, or at the promotion of advanced capitalism. This strategy licenses an indefinite wait for the fight for socialism (=abolition of class relations) to start.99 But if what is present is already capitalism, albeit one that is not very progressive and that is unlikely to be very p ­ rogressive for a very long 98 99

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Similarly, if a country is seen as merely neoliberal as opposed to capitalist, the political implication can be: fight for a non-neoliberal society, i.e. a society which is more socialdemocratic and where there is restriction on accumulation by dispossession. Much of the Left, intellectually and politically, falls in this category. As discussed in this chapter, this tendency construes inadequate (=neoliberal) state policies as the main problem and not the class contradiction between capital and labour. Uneven development is at the heart of the matter: if capitalism is just here and there, but not everywhere, we must wait till it is everywhere to fight against it.

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time, the nature of class politics must be seen in a radically different manner. To repeat: given the imperialised nature of peripheral social formations, the possibility of the transition to capitalist class relation with advanced level of productive forces at the national scale and at the level of what is now the global periphery may be slim for an intolerably long time. Capitalist class relation (in the sense of formal subsumption of l­abour), in conditions of imperialism, has been acting as a barrier to the development of productive forces. Therefore what needs to be overthrown is not some pre-capitalist social formation or a capitalism proper, but the capitalism as we have it and as we know it now, in these countries, the really existing capitalism. Hence the immediate need for a socialist movement based in the proletarian-semi-proletarian alliance, not for some elusive democratic revolution, which some movements and scholars are arguing for. Similarly, in advanced countries, what exists in terms of the dominant moment of capitalism is not accumulation by dispossession nor is it neoliberalism. What exists there is real subsumption of labour under capital which dominates over other forms of class relations, including formal subsumption, relations around dispossession, and class differentiation. What exists there is capitalism, and a capitalism that is also a source of imperialism that exploits (and super-exploits) proletarians and semi-proletarians in peripheral capitalism. And what is common to both peripheral capitalism and advanced capitalism is the formal subsumption of labour, which is the most general form of the capitalist class relation. And it is that that must be the target for removal through revolutionary action from below. But that project of removal faces an immense obstacle. That is the state, which is an internal relation of the capitalist class relation, to which we now turn.

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The Capitalist State as Constitutive of Capitalist Class Relation: Class Exploitation and Political Oppression The ways in which the capitalist state works enter into the very constitution of classes. This may be a slightly controversial statement to make, given its potential politicism, but an argument for this position must be made in order to advance class theory forward. To abstract the class status of the basic classes and their internal relation of exploitation from the internal relation of these classes to the capitalist state is to engage in chaotic conception, and not rational abstraction. Simply put: it is true that the property-less working class is exploited by the propertied capitalist class but there can be no monopoly over the instruments of production nor can there be exploitation without the instrument of exploitation. The capitalist state is, more than anything else, ‘an instrument of exploitation of wage-labour by capital’; it is an instrument of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class, the class of workers (Engels in Marx and Engels, 1977c: 328). There is an internal relation between the state and the class relation. The bourgeois state is the capitalist class organized as the ruling class. To the extent that ‘political power is precisely the official expression of [class] antagonism in civil society’ (Marx, 1987: 149) to that precise extent, political oppression of the working class as a class is an inherent part of the experience of that class and therefore, legitimately, a part of class theory. That the exploiters are a minority is indisputably true. This is seen in the recent slogan of 1% vs 99%. But the relation between the minority and the majority is not basically a quantitative relation between two groups of people but a qualitative relation between two classes based on exploitation. This means that to be able to exploit the majority, their political oppression1 is absolutely necessary, often under the mask of majority rule. In the first section the argument that the state is a part of the wider class relation is elaborated. The second section discusses the nature of the class ­character of the democratic form of the state: to what extent does the democratic form of the capitalist state matter in so far as the economic and political interests of the majority class are concerned. The third section what discusses 1 That coercive political oppression coexists with cultural subjugation and consent formation is beyond doubt.

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the ways in which the class relations and the operation of the state create barriers to the working class obtaining genuine control over state power under capitalism and therefore to the working class actually controlling the common affairs of society in which it is the majority. The final section draws some conceptual and political implications of the arguments that are made in the first two sections. 1

The Capitalist State and the Capitalist Class Relation

It is often said that the capitalist state cannot do this or that because the capitalist class constrains state’s actions (for example, it is said that the state ­cannot tax capitalists because they will move elsewhere or will go on an investment strike). This is true from one angle (see the figure below), i.e. from the standpoint of relatively concrete aspects of capitalist class society. Underlying this view is, however, the ontology of external relation: class and the state are considered separate things and they interact. Such an approach must be contested. One must ask: what stops the state from using its monopolistic coercive power to force capitalists, who are a tiny minority, and who monopolize over the means of production and subsistence, to do things that serve the majority class? What stops the state from dispossessing this minority which dispossesses (and exploits) the millions? If the state cannot abolish capitalist private property it is not because capitalists as a class (barely top 1–10% of the population of a country) are very powerful. There is a need for a different ontological approach to the political form of the capitalist class relation. The basic idea discussed in Chapter 6 was this: class and the state have a symmetrical-internal relation2 such that one cannot exist without the other. Class relations beget, and reproduce, the state. The state makes it possible for class exploitation to continue. Now in terms of the capitalist class relation: what the capitalist class is and what the proletariat is, it is partly because of their respective relation to the state, and not just because one class exploits another class. The relation between the basic classes is not just one of economic exploitation but also of political oppression. The capitalist class is a class which controls property, surplus and the labour process, and simultaneously ‘controls’ the state. The state does not merely enable and constrain the capitalist class. It is a historically specific form of the very existence 2 This type of relation holds between object A and object B when A cannot exist without B, and B cannot exist without A. The relation between the working class and the capitalist class is a symmetrical-internal relationship.

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of that class: it is the political character – political form – of class itself. The state and the capitalist class are two arms of one single thing: capitalist class relationship (see Figure 19 below). One arm signifies economic exploitation and oppression, and another arm signifies political oppression. In capitalist class society, as in other class societies, the relation between classes is the sum of the relation between the state and all classes in a society, and the relation between each of the classes and the state. Put simply: the capitalist state has all the coercive means in its hands to make the capitalist class do whatever it wants it to do, but it will not. It is not because of any so-called economic constraints on the state or that the state is reliant on the capitalist class for its survival. It is in the very nature of capitalist state power, whether the state form is democratic or not, that it will fundamentally protect the interests of the capitalist class (see the Figure 19 below). This fact sets limits on the state. There are two limits. One is the outer limit: the state must ensure the right of the capitalist class to own property in its specifically capitalist form:3 to buy and sell for profit, to appropriate surplus (whether in production or outside), to dispossess

State State

State

Capitalist Accumulation

Capitalist Private Property Relations

Figure 19  Capitalist class and capitalist state: An internal relation 3 As we have seen in Chapter 7, capitalist property is not self-earned property, it is not based in one’s own labour. It is based on alien labour. Surplus value appropriated from the working class is turned into private property which is then used to appropriate surplus value.

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direct producers, and so on. The other limit is the inner limit: the state must ensure conditions for accumulation within the framework of capitalist property relation, in a country and globally.4 The outer limit is much more stringent than the inner limit, in relative terms. But given that the capitalist class relation is like a bicycle that must keep running if it is not to fall on the ground,5 it is useless for the capitalist class to just maintain its ownership of money and property if it is not put to use to produce more money. The capitalist class is not a class of misers. While both capitalists and misers seek to enrich themselves, there is a difference: the capitalist class is subjected by the coercive economic mechanism of competition to a ‘boundless drive for enrichment’ and a ‘passionate chase after value’, and it must therefore constantly invest money to expand money. (Marx, 1977: 254–255; parentheses added). In fact, when the system seems to come to a halt (as in a crisis), the state starts making sure that, for example, the rate of exploitation and/or imperialist oppression is heightened, in order to create fresh ground for raising the rate of profit. So the two limits are internally related and overlapping. The association between the capitalist class and the state has been indeed close historically, and not just logically. In fact: ‘Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class’ (Marx and Engels, 1975: 43). Itself an ‘oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility’, ‘the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway’ (ibid.: 43–44). The bourgeoisie has not only ‘annihilated the social power of the nobility and the guild-burghers’, but also has it ‘annihilated their political power’, as Engels says in his Principles of Communism (quoted in Marx and Engels, 1977a: 86). Having become ‘the first class in society’, the bourgeoisie ‘proclaimed itself the first class also in the political field’. This it has done by establishing a representative system (ibid.). 4 As capital cannot generally reproduce the conditions of its own reproduction, the state performs four functions to preserve capitalism (Altvater, 1978): providing for general material conditions (e.g. infrastructure; climate change mitigation); establishing and guaranteeing general legal relations; regulating capital-labor relations, if necessary by repression; and ­safeguarding the existence/expansion of national capital on the world market. In the less developed countries, the state in the current epoch functions to create conditions to make sure that these countries are low-wage platform for production of goods and services for global capitalism. To the extent that low-wage production in these countries acts as a counter-vailing force towards the rate of profit to fall in advanced countries, such a role of the state is crucial. The state also makes sure that these countries absorb surplus commodities and finance from advanced capitalist countries. 5 The bicycle metaphor is from Bertell Ollman, who emphasizes the idea of things being in motion all the time.

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Such a system elects the managers of the state who are bourgeois, directly or otherwise. Yet, this class now denies the working class the right to fight for the status of the first class in society and in the political field. The bourgeois class not only monopolizes means of production, accumulation and exploitation; it also wants to continue to monopolize state power, and it has done so. The reason is that the former monopoly is not possible without the latter monopoly. The fact that this or that political party of the capitalist class manages the common affairs of the state and of the capitalist class as a whole (or of a dominant fraction of it) does not mean that the state is not under the control of the capitalist class, any more than members of the working class being able to change their capitalist employers on a regular basis means that they are not a class subjugated to the capitalist class.6 And once the capitalist class is the dominant political class, it is more or less the case that ‘The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’ (Marx and Engels 1975: 44). The management of common affairs include the defense of bourgeoisie’s property ownership, its right to appropriate surplus value, and its need to commodify/recommodify all things, over the resistance of the oppressed classes. With the gradual progress of modern industry, ‘the class antagonism between capital and labor’ intensifies, and with this ‘the state power ... [assumes] more and more the character of the national power of capital over labor, of a public force organized for social as Marx (1988: 55) says in his Civil War in France, enslavement, of an engine of class despotism.7 The state has played an important role in the on-going coercive separation of private property from direct producers, a process which resulted in the ­emergence of the capitalist class and conversion of pre-capitalist property into capitalist property. The state would often provide subsidies to the emerging capitalist class so it has the minimum sum necessary for investment and to remain a capitalist.8 It is not enough that there exists a group of people (proletarians) that is dispossessed of its property. They must be, through discipline, be converted into wage workers, who must be taught to listen to the capitalist class. So the role of discipline is important during the stage between dispossession and exploitation (as well as during exploitation itself). Marx says that: 6 Lots of things change in the capitalist order. Examining what changes should point to what does not change. 7 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm. 8 This gives rise partly to state subsidies to private persons, as in France in the time of Colbert, and as in many German states up to our own epoch; partly to the formation of societies with legal monopoly for the exploitation of certain branches of industry and commerce, the forerunners of our own modern joint-stock companies.

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f­ollowing ‘the f­orcible creation of a class of free and rightless proletarians’, it was the ‘bloody discipline by the that, that ‘turned them into wage-labourers’; they were subjected to ‘the disgraceful proceedings of the state which employed police methods to accelerate the accumulation of capital by increasing the degree of exploitation of labour’ (Marx, 1977: 904)9 The state made sure that wage remained within limits and that the working day is long enough so that the capitalist class would have a reasonable rate of profit: The rising bourgeoisie needs the power of the state, and uses it ‘regulate’ wages, i.e., to force them into the limits suitable for making a profit, to lengthen the working-day, and to keep the worker himself at his normal level of dependence. This is an essential aspect of so-called primitive accumulation. marx, 1977: 899–900

The state not only made sure that wages did not rise; it also prevented workers from self-mobilizing against low wages. And this happened until the time of the manufacture period when the capitalist mode of production had become sufficiently strong to render legal regulation of wages as impracticable as it was unnecessary; but the ruling classes were unwilling in case of necessity to be without the weapons of the old arsenal in case some emergency should arise (p. 902) Methods of primitive accumulation – ‘the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system’ etc. involved coercive state power, which is: the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, as in a hothouse, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power. marx, 1977: 915

9 Marx says in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: political Economy considers the proletarian ‘the same as any horse’, who ‘must get as much as will enable him to work’. It does not consider him when he is not working, as a human being; but leaves such consideration to criminal law, to doctors, to religion, to the statistical tables, to politics, and to the poor-house overseer’ (Marx, 1977: 28).

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What is true about state-class relation nationally is also true globally. With capitalist class relation being transformed into imperialistic class relation, the state of advanced countries has been transformed into the imperialist state. The working class and the capitalist class need each other. Between two ‘equal’ needs, which class is more vulnerable depends on the balance of power that is in the labour market, and that is based in property relations and in the workplace. That the working class lacks power at the site of production and often in the labour market as well,10 is widely accepted as a part of class and was discussed in Chapter 7.11 Indeed, lack of power is a part of its experience of alienation, and prompts the workers to fight for some power in the labour market through trade union organization. But the working class also lacks power at a wider scale.12 It lacks power outside of the work-place and in the sphere of property-ownership. It lacks power to control the state, i.e. to control the common affairs of society as a whole. It lacks coercive power, the power to resist all those who are against the collective control over resources and their deployment to satisfy human need. So the working class lacks power not only in the spheres of the three aspects of capitalist class relation discussed in Chapter 7 (i.e. exchange, property and value/production) but also over the society as a whole, over that communal form of organization of common affairs of society, called the state. More specifically: it lacks the power over the capitalist class because it does not control the coercive – or any other – apparatus of the state. The bourgeois does not just exploit. It also dictates. It has a political dominance over the working class, which is a precondition for the reproduction of class relations, and which indeed is partly constitutive of the relation between classes. Workers are ‘slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State’13 (Marx and Engels, 1975: 52). The state indeed ‘is nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for 10

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Such lack of power is expressed in the fact that the capitalist class can pay a wage which does not cover the cost of reproduction of workers. Workers are often compelled to accept whatever wage that is offered by the masters. Once again, in capitalist workplaces, ‘Masses of laborers… are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army, they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants’ (Marx and Engels, 1975: 52). So long as you let the relation of wage-labor to capital exist, no matter how favorable the conditions under which you accomplish the exchange of commodities, there will always be a class which exploits and a class which is exploited. In addition, ‘they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and above all, by the individual capitalist … [or their managers, etc.]’ (ibid.). This kind of enslavement usually receives more academic attention than the enslavement by the capitalist class as a whole and by the capitalist state.

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the mutual guarantee of their property and interests’ (Marx and Engels, 1978: 80). The state is constitutive of the capitalist class relation; it codifies the class relations into juridical relations and reproduces them politically against the resistance of the working class (and it seeks to mitigate the destructive effects of intra-capitalist class competition).14 Property rights of the ruling class are enshrined in the law and enforced by the state; the political power of the ruling class is derived from these property rights (Clarke, 1991). When the exploited class struggles against economic exploitation, it also struggles against the state that defends property rights. The exploited class experience its ‘exploitation not simply as economic, but as inseparably economic and political, with, for example, the threat of the bailiff and eviction standing behind the landlord’ (Clarke, 1991: 32). The state responds to class struggles by reinforcing the separation of the economic from the political. For example, when people struggle against exploitation, ‘[T]he state seeks to enforce the rights of property on the dominated classes individually through the courts, fragmenting collective resistance to the social power of property and ensuring that such power will be imposed on dominated classes individually through the ‘market’, decomposing class forces, and recomposing them as ‘interest groups’’ (Clarke, 1991: 33), so that masses are prevented from struggling as a class. 14



Of course, all this does not mean that: the state cannot and does not go against the shortterm or long-term interests of individual members of the capitalist class or indeed against certain short-term economic interests of the class as a whole in order to preserve its class rule. As Engels says: ‘rarely it happens that a code of law is the blunt, unmitigated, unadulterated expression of the domination of a class’ (in Marx and Engels, 1982: 399–400). The idea that the state is a part of the class relation does not rule out the fact that under unusual conditions the state may give concessions to the working class in order to, for example, protect property relations from the working class threat, and for reasons that ultimately serve the interests of the capitalist class (e.g. reproduction of a healthy and educated workforce; expansion of market for goods and services). The state itself, and state officials have their own autonomy, within the limits, that are set by the fact that it must look after the common interests of the exploiting class. ‘[From the standpoint of division of labour it is possible to argue that] Society gives rise to certain public functions which it cannot dispense with. The persons appointed for this purpose form a new branch of the division of labor within society. They give them particular interests, distinct, too, from the interests of their mandators [i.e. those who have designated them]; they make themselves independent of the latter and – the state is in being’ (Engels in Marx and Engels, 1982: 398; parenthesis added).    The idea that is being discussed here that the working class is a class that is essentially politically oppressed through the state abstracts from the state’s other functions (inertcapitalist conflict and other conflicts; public governmental functions, etc.).

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Whenever class struggle tends to overstep the constitutional boundaries of politics and law, and to challenge the rights of property, the state makes ­economic concessions in an attempt to re-establish the rule of money and law and to restore the separation of the two spheres. 2

Democratic State Form and the Capitalist Class Relation

But what about the democratic state form? Many of those who seek to ‘revise the foundation of Marxism, namely, the doctrine of the class struggle’ assert that ‘Political freedom, democracy and universal suffrage remove the ground for the class struggle’ and that ‘since the “will of the majority” prevails in a democracy’, one must not ‘regard the state as an organ of class rule’ (Lenin, 1977a: 53). It cannot be disputed that these arguments of the revisionists amounted to a fairly well-balanced system of views, namely, the old and well-known liberal-bourgeois views. The liberals have always said that bourgeois parliamentarism destroys classes and class divisions, since the right to vote and the right to participate in the government of the country are shared by all citizens without distinction. (ibid.) So from a revisionist perspective, one may ask this: does the democratic form of the state not insulate the state from the pressure of the dominant class, and does it not allow the state to be the state for all?15 Democracy does make a difference, both economically and politically. But the difference that democracy makes is limited. Economically, democracy does make a difference to the distribution of the social product, but this is more or less the case within labor as a whole and within capital as a whole (Cox, 2004). Public pressure (real or potential) can lead to some increase in taxes that the large property-owners pay, and some of this tax money can be used for the welfare of the working class people. Yet: the 15

In Texas, Lawrence Meyers serves as the senior judge on the state’s highest criminal court. He is the sole Democrat. He was elected in 1992 as a Republican but switched parties in 2013. In an interview to New York Times in June 2016, this is what he said: ‘I like government. I think government is good for everybody’. He goes on to add: ‘I think government protects us. It employs us. It defends us. Every now and then the government may get overambitious as to certain regulations. But this idea [of the Republican party] that government is bad, that’s not me’ (quoted in Fernandez, 2016: A16).

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balance between the accumulation fund for capital and the consumption fund for labour is something that is achieved more or less independently of what is legislated by the state, and by forces beyond the control of anyone, and certainly independently of any so-called ‘balance of class forces’ (Cox, 2004). And while it might certainly seem that labor has ‘gained’ as in capital’s Golden Age and the expansion of the welfare state, this cannot be so in the relative sense that is implied by the notion of a shifting balance of class forces (Cox, 2004: 31). The working class has wrested gains. But generally speaking, ‘the gains that labor makes by virtue of the vote cannot be and have not been at the expense of capital’ (Cox, 2004: 32). There is a reason for it. ‘Wages… imply by their very nature that the worker will always provide a certain quantity of unpaid labour. [An] increase in wages [when it occurs] means only a quantitative reduction in the amount of unpaid labour the worker has to supply. This reduction can never go so far to threaten the system itself.’ (Marx, 1977: 769–770). This is true whether wages rise because of workers’ action against capitalists or because of government pressure on the capitalists or a combination of the two. ‘There cannot be, nor is there nor will there ever be “equality” between the oppressed and the oppressors, between the exploited and the exploiters’ (Lenin, 1919: para 10).16 ‘Inequality’ between wages and surplus value (unpaid labour) cannot be removed by the state or union pressure, etc. In fact, the state is a major upholder of conditions that ensure class inequality. Note also that a large part of what is democratic participation – the political aspect of democracy – is ultimately about economic matters: working masses seek to put political pressure by using democratic mechanisms for economic gains from employers and/or the state. Yet, there are strict limits to what the democratic form can deliver. Politically: a democratic state form is better than a non-democratic state form, even if both forms are forms of the rule of the capitalist class. There is no doubt that bourgeois democracy is ‘a great historical advance in comparison with medievalism’ (Lenin, 1977c: 28). Marxists in fact ‘demand the extension of … bourgeois democracy’ as a tool for working class organization, in order to prepare the people for revolution for the purpose of overthrowing …the exploiters’ (ibid.: 59; italics in original). Yet, it is also more or less the case, and especially after the degree of working class resistance reaches a given point of tolerance of the ruling class, that ‘the democratic state must inevitably be a democracy for the exploiters’, who are the minority. There is always a threat to democracy (consider fascism which is raising its ugly heads now in many countries in North and South) which is a necessary tool in the hands of the proletarians who are the majority in most countries (tendentially or in reality). 16

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/nov/06.htm.

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Just because a state currently tolerates democratic rights that does not mean it will always do so. In fact, whenever the proletariat comes forward as an independent force the bourgeoisie shifts over to the camp of the counterrevolution. The more audacious the mass struggle all the swifter is the reactionary degeneration of liberalism. No one has yet invented a means for paralyzing the effects of the law of the class struggle. trotsky, 1940 (section 3, para 1)

And when democracy does exist, it is ‘for an insignificant minority’, it is ‘for the rich – that is the democracy of capitalist society’ (Lenin, 1977d: 83). the exploiters inevitably transform the state (and we are speaking of democracy, i.e., one of the forms of the state) into an instrument of the rule of their class, the exploiters, over the exploited. Hence, as long as there are exploiters who rule the majority, the exploited, the democratic state must inevitably be a democracy for the exploiters. lenin, 1977c: 35

It is problematic to say that the majority decide and that violence results when a minority does not submit to the majority view, as if the majority and minority division – and the practice of political suppression, of violence – is devoid of any class content (ibid.).17 The fundamental reason why the working class is subjected to violence has little to do with the fact that a minority does not submit to a majority view and has more to do with the class character of the working class: when it resists, beyond a limit, political suppression will follow. While the bourgeoisie exercises its political dominance ‘through the introduction of the representative system which rests on bourgeois equality before the law and the recognition of free competition’, the working class is excluded from effective control over the state. In that sense, it is politically oppressed and it is powerless. The ruling party in a bourgeois democracy extends the protection of the minority only to another bourgeois party, while the proletariat, on all serious, profound and fundamental issues, gets martial law or pogroms, instead of the ‘protection of the minority’. It is the case that: the greater is the inequality18 between the working class and the propertied class, the more excluded it will be from the exercise of political power. This happens because as inequality 17 18

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/equality.htm. Here class inequality is being seen in quantitative terms (e.g. in terms of unequal living standards), rather qualitatively (in terms of class relations as such).

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between the amount of social product that goes to the working class as opposed to the property owners rises between the classes, the state becomes more authoritarian – suppresses democratic rights of the masses – in order to preserve the privileges of the capitalist class. Even when it is most unionized, the working class cannot merely by virtue of that, challenge the private property right, and the right to appropriate surplus, the bourgeois rights that are guaranteed by the state. Once again, the opposite side of the political oppression of working class is the political domination of bourgeoisie, as an aspect of class relation. 3

Capitalist Class Relations and Barrier to Working Class Access to State Power

Democracy ‘always remains, and under capitalism is bound to remain, restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the exploited, for the poor’ (Lenin, 1977c: 28). Democracy effectively means dictatorship of the bourgeoisie as a whole. Just as the economic bondage or unfreedom of the working class ‘is at once mediated through, and concealed by, the periodic renewal of the act by which he sells himself, his change of masters, and [by] the oscillations in the market price of his labour [power]’ (Marx, 1977: 723–724). Similarly, the political unfreedom of the working class is also ‘mediated through, and concealed by, the periodic renewal of the act by which’ this or that member/group of the exploiting class as a whole is elected/approved of by members of the working class to rule and to ensure conditions for economic exploitation and political oppression. Now the question is what are precisely the ways which prevent the proletarians from exercising a significant influence on the fundamental ways in which the state works and supports the ruling class? This question is important to ask especially given that much class theory (e.g. Analytical Marxism) has argued that through control over the state, the classness of the capitalist class society can be reduced and that such control can make the society much less polarized than Marxism says it is. The bourgeoisie as an exploiting class, talks about democracy, but ‘at every step’, it erects ‘thousands of barriers to prevent the oppressed people from taking part in politics’ (Lenin, 1977c: 59; italics in original). It must. There are four types of barriers. These barriers include class relations and effects of class relations such as poverty, etc. Class-Economic Barriers These are economic barriers from within the capitalist class society. To a large extent, it is true that the health of the stock exchange and mobility of money

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capital constrain the extent to which the state can meet demands of the working class19 and therefore limit the ability and eagerness of the working class to make these demands. Much of the culture industry which includes printing plants as well as media through which the working class could make its demands, are controlled by the capitalist class. Much of the public place is also controlled by this class, directly or otherwise, which is partly how the right of assembly is curtailed. The need to earn a living (dull economic compulsion), long working hours, and poverty directly constrain the exercise of democratic rights on the part of the working asses. As Lenin notes in State and revolution, ‘Under capitalism, democracy is restricted, cramped, curtailed, mutilated by all the conditions of wage slavery, and the poverty and misery of the people’ (Lenin, 1977d: 109). In fact: ‘notwithstanding all the progress of bourgeois culture and bourgeois democracy’, it is the case that ‘the vast mass of the working people in the most advanced, civilised and democratic republics [have] remained an ignorant and downtrodden mass of wage-slaves or oppressed peasants, robbed and tyrannised by a handful of capitalists’ (Lenin, 1965: 419).20 These conditions lead to the lack of adequate participation which then becomes ‘the reason why the functionaries of our political organizations and trade unions are corrupted – or rather tend to be corrupted’. They become the ‘privileged persons divorced from the people and standing above the people’. That is the essence of the political form – bureaucracy – in which capitalist society’s affairs are managed.21 Thus the misery and poverty of the masses discourage their participation in political affairs. This creates a condition for bureaucratism which, in turn, stifles participation.

Non-economic Class Barriers: Physical (Violence) and Administrative Coercion In terms of the non-economic barriers, ‘The world-wide experience of bourgeois and landowner governments has evolved two methods of keeping the people in subjection’. The first is violence. The working class is subject to 19 20 21

One may consider shrinking provision of welfare and privatization of social commons. This has important political implications for class theory and class practice, which is ­discussed later. There is a relation between bureaucracy and imperialism. ‘Imperialism – the era of bank capital, the era of gigantic capitalist monopolies, of the development of monopoly ­capitalism into state-monopoly capitalism – has clearly shown an extraordinary strengthening of the “state machinery” and an unprecedented growth in its bureaucratic and ­military apparatus in connection with the intensification of repressive measures against the proletariat’ (Lenin, 1977d: 33).

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­capitalist, imperialist and feudal violence.22 Political oppression via violence is not only expressed in the form of suppression of strikes (or economic class struggle). It is also expressed in, for example, ‘the brutal treatment of the people by the police, the persecution of religious sects, the flogging of peasants, the outrageous censorship, the torture of soldiers, the persecution of the most innocent cultural undertakings, etc.’. Even when the coercive powers are justified on the basis of repression of specific groups – criminals – or to keep general order, these are used specifically against the working class. The daily life of the working class is its everyday encounter with: a state with a standing army, a police opposed to the people, and an officialdom placed above the people. All of these parts of the state (their top elements), which enjoy the privileges of wealth, of bourgeois education, of social connections, etc., are deeply connected to the bourgeoisie, as Miliband (1969) and others have shown for a long time.23 Given ‘the threatening upheaval of the proletariat’, state power is used ‘mercilessly and ostentatiously as the national war engine of capital against labor’ (Marx, 1988: 55).24 The state is indeed ‘an organ of class rule’; it is ‘an organ for the o­ ppression’ of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, and not for the conciliation of their mutual class interests (Lenin, 1977d: 11).25 The state is the official expression of bourgeois economic domination of the working class necessary for sustaining economic exploitation. The state represents mean average interest, or common affairs:26 the common affairs include the subjugation of the working masses, when necessary, by force and by the ultimate threat of force, i.e. by political oppression of the working class, in order 22 23

24 25

26

This is what Zizek (2008) would call subjective violence. ‘The centralized state power that is peculiar to bourgeois society came into being in the period of the fall of absolutism. Two institutions most characteristic of this state machine are the bureaucracy and the standing army. In their works, Marx and Engels repeatedly show that the bourgeoisie are connected with these institutions by thousands of threads. Every worker’s experience illustrates this connection in an extremely graphic and impressive manner. From its own bitter experience, the working class learns to recognize this connection’ (Lenin, 1977d: 31). https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm. [The state is] at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the victorious proletariat will have to lop off as speedily as possible, just as the Commune had to, until a generation reared in new, and free social conditions is able to discard the entire lumber of the state’ (Engels quoted in Lenin, 1977d: 76). These also include providing social and physical infrastructure, protection against foreign competition, creating a market; of course how exactly this should be achieved is a politically contested topic among the members of the bourgeois class.

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to defend the b­ ourgeois rights to property and to the surplus that arises out of the property being used by labor, thus stopping the masses from taking control over means of production and stopping the transfer of the surplus product. Objective antagonism in class interests, combined with the immanent possibility of struggle, is the reason why the bourgeoisie organizes itself nationally (and internationally) in the form of the state. The lords of the land and the lords of capital … always use their political privileges for the defense and perpetuation of their economical monopolies … [and] they will continue to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emancipation of labour. …To conquer political power has therefore become the great duty of the working classes.27 marx in marx and engels, 1977b: 17

Thus political oppression of the working class happens through laws that directly allow the use of violence. Political oppression happens also through indirect legal means. So-called democratic states have plenty of ‘loopholes or reservations [and limitations and subterfuges] in its constitution guaranteeing the bourgeoisie the possibility of dispatching troops against the workers [including workers on strike], of proclaiming martial law, and so forth, in case of a “violation of public order,” and actually in case the exploited class “violates” its position of slavery and tries to behave in a non-slavish manner’ (Lenin, 1977c: 29–30). The democratic state form under the capitalist class relation, while appearing democratic and being democratic to some extent, will have to be ultimately undemocratic in practice. The democratic state-form signifies the formal recognition of political equality of citizens, the equal right of all to determine the structure of, and to administer, the state, and yet there can be no economic equality between the working class and the capitalist class.28 This contradiction between economic inequality and political equality complements what happens in the realm of value form, that important aspect of class relation. The value-form recognizes both the relation of equality in exchange relations between the capitalist class and the working class (both are buyers and sellers of commodities) while masking and perpetuating the profound inequality in the sphere of production of value where the worker give up a large part of what 27 28

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1872/hague-conference/ parties.htm. This contradiction, this unity of inter-penetrating opposites, must contribute to working class political consciousness.

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it produces. And this contradiction the state has to enforce by force: the state cannot allow the resolution of this contradiction. Now: the democratic state-form allows the possibility that the working class will participate more in the management of state affairs, but this has dangerous implications: the more highly developed a democracy is, the more potent is the threat that the working class will gain access to state power, and therefore the more imminent become the pogroms or civil war. The democratic state-form represents therefore the organized, systematic use of force against persons; that is, the democratic state-form represents the most undemocratic practice. The democratic form, in reality, is more useful to resolving conflicts within classes, including the ruling class, and conflicts between members of the ruling class and some state elites,29 and less about resolving conflicts between the classes or allowing the masses access to the state.30 The democratic state is a form of the state which is a form of the public political power of the capitalist class, the public power which protects and reinforces the private political power in the realm of production in which workers work under the despotic control of the capitalist class. The oppressed/exploited are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing/exploiting class shall represent and repress them in national and regional parliaments. A secular form of religion for the masses, a ‘festival of the oppressed’ in many cases, the capacity to exercise the vote at intervals produces in the minds of the exploited and oppressed classes the illusion that it is they who exercise control over the state and the dominant classes.31 Not only does this fuel the hope that they gain material benefits from electoral patronage, but it also perpetuates the belief that if not the present party/leader then the next one in power will address their problems. The deployment of the formally democratic state form as a means of effecting dictatorship (political hegemony) of the bourgeoisie by coercive 29

30 31

These top officials and politicians who run the affairs of the state on behalf of the capitalist class as a class who may share a different vision about how capitalism should be reproduced; they may also pursue their own interests in a way that contradicts the capitalist class interests in the short and medium term. Their power is derivative: it is partly derived from the fact of a division of labour between them and the capitalist class as a class. That is: the responsibility of running the affairs of the state gives them some power vis a vis the capitalist class. The masses ‘never decide important questions under bourgeois democracy, which are decided by the stock exchange and the banks’ (Lenin, 1977c: 32). Lack of power over the labour market, over property and in the production – alienation in all these spheres – may appear to be compensated for, in a psychological sense, by the appearance that they play a role in changing governments.

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means is to be noted. The use of coercion against the lower classes is justified through a mechanism which is the opposite of coercion. The democratic form. Whichever party manages the ‘common affairs’ of the state, it will use violence against the lower classes if what the latter demand fundamentally challenges, or threatens to challenge, the dominant class elements.32 The difference in the violent character between liberal democracies and other forms of the state can get easily blurred. When necessary, every state can turn a place of working class protest (potential or real) into a ‘state of exception’. The state produces a state of exception when it is trying to ‘resolve’ intense class contradiction and the contradiction between a small elite and the majority of the population, by creating a (quasi-) ‘state of exception’, ‘a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reasons cannot be integrated into the political system’ (Agamben, 2005: 2). The state is often able to do this by producing epistemological exaggeration: overestimation of the threat to the state, a kind of knowledge-claim, a ruling class ideology, which would justify the increased level of violence by the class-state. The state is turning the ‘homo sufferer’ (working masses) into Agamben’s ‘homo sacer’: those people who one could coerce, repress and even kill without being guilty of committing murder. Once again, whether a constitutional republic or not, the state, fundamentally, is the dictatorship of the capitalist exploiters, a political dictatorship which parallels the dictatorship and monopoly of this class in the economic sphere. Violence – sanctioned by laws or not – is not the only method of oppression of the working class by the state. There is another non-economic barrier to democracy: this is the non-violent method. It ‘is best developed by some of the so-called democratic bourgeoisies’; they have ‘“learned their lesson” in a series of great revolutions and revolutionary movements of the masses. It is the method of deception, flattery, fine phrases, promises by the million, petty sops, and concessions of the unessential while retaining the essential’ (1977b: 42) If class relations will inevitably result in class struggle, the latter will lead to oppression, including repressive and non-repressive activities. Whether the state has a democratic form or not is beside the point. 32

The state will not shy away from seeking to ‘resolve’ intense contradiction between a small elite and the majority of the population, by creating a (quasi-) ‘state of exception’, ‘a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who for some reasons cannot be integrated into the political system’ (Agamben, 2005: 2). By doing so, it is turning the ‘homo sufferer’ (working masses) into Agamben’s ‘homo sacer’: those people who one could kill without being guilty of committing murder.

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Administrative coercion is another non-economic method of keeping the working class in control and suppressing/oppressing it. This refers to the use of laws and legal arbitrariness. When thoroughly bourgeois and for the most part reactionary lawyers in the capitalist countries have for centuries or decades been drawing up most detailed rules and regulations and writing scores and hundreds of volumes of laws and interpretations of laws to oppress the workers, to bind the poor man hand and foot and to place thousands of hindrances and obstacles in the way of any of the common labouring people, [this is called law and order]. The ways in which the poor are to be ‘kept down’ have all been thought out and written down. There are thousands of bourgeois lawyers and bureaucrats, who know how to interpret the laws in such a way that the worker and the average peasant can never break through the barbed-wire entanglements of these laws. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the ‘petty’…details of the suffrage…, in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly…, in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc., – we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight [,]…but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy (1977d: 83–84). As Lenin further notes in his critique of Kautsky’s notion of democracy: The working people are barred from participation in bourgeois parliaments …by thousands of obstacles, and the workers know and feel, see and realise perfectly well that the bourgeois parliaments are institutions alien to them, instruments for the oppression of the workers by the bourgeoisie, institutions of a hostile class, of the exploiting minority (1977c: 32).33 It is widely known that ‘Under bourgeois democracy, the capitalists, by thousands of tricks – which are the more artful and effective the more ‘pure’ de­ mocracy is developed – drive the people away from administrative work, from freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, etc.’ (ibid.). The fact that 33

Further, ‘The parliamentary bourgeois republic hampers and stifles the independent political life of the masses, their direct participation in the democratic organisation of the life of the state from the bottom up’ (Lenin, 1977b: 47).

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state f­unctions become complex, an intricate jungle of rules is a great barrier to cash-starved working masses to deal with these rules because they have to spend time to earn money to live. In fact, if the state is accessible to everyone it cannot p ­ erform its class function. The bureaucracy (and especially top levels), which designs and implements complex rules, harasses ordinary people by using  these rules, and is generally class-biased, whereas it ‘provides the upper sections of the peasants, small artisans, tradesmen, and the like with comparatively comfortable, quiet, and respectable jobs raising the holders above the people’ (Lenin, 1977d: 31). This partly explains the ideological gap between the bureaucracy and the working class people.34 It is also the case that when the contradiction between classes deepen, rules are ignored and the bourgeois governments ‘resort to any violation of legality’ (Lenin, 1968: 46).35 4 Conclusion The state power is necessarily a form of class power. That is, the relation between the two forms of power is an internal one, and not an external one. The state power is the power of the exploiting classes in all pre-socialist class societies. The capitalist class controls the means of production and the surplus value and it commands far more exchange value than the working class, and it is the class that ‘controls’ political power as well. The obverse side of this is the fact that the class of proletarians lacks control over property, surplus value, and indeed over labour process, and it is also the class that lacks control over state power (and must therefore achieve it for it to gain control over the economic aspects of class structure of society).36 The proletariat which lacks control over economic means of production experiences relative powerless-ness. 34

35 36

If ‘the employment of surplus-value as capital, or its reconversion into capital, is called accumulation of capital’ (Marx, 1977: 72) which reproduces capital-labour relations on an expanded scale, then converting non-capitalist forms of property to capital, i.e. primitive accumulation, creates new and fresh conditions for capitalist exploitation to take root and creates condition for reproduction of class relation on an expanded scale. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch07.htm. In so far as the state fundamentally and necessarily influences the direct relationship between owners and non-owners of property, the state is a part of theory of class. That is: if the relation based on control over property and surplus defines the direct relationship between classes, the state defines what can be called the indirect relationship, and this must be a part of class theory. How class relationships influence the state belong to what is called state theory.

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Powerlessness is a hallmark of the classness of the proletariat. The p ­ roletariat is not just a class which is economically exploited; it is also a class which is politically oppressed/dominated. And this political oppression/domination is not just in the sphere of exchange relations (e.g. labour market) and in the sphere of work-relation, but also at the level of society as a whole. It is not for nothing that Lenin said in The State and revolution this: Marx ‘developed his theory of the class struggle consistently, down to the theory of political power, of the state’ (Lenin, 1977d: 27). Fundamental aspects of state theory must be a part of class theory. The miserable conditions created by the capitalist class relation become a condition for the lack of participation of masses in politics. Such lack of participation becomes a condition for bureaucratism which further stifles participation of the masses, the participation that can prepare the masses for struggle for their self-emancipation. People are generally excluded from effective political participation. When they do seek to participate, the state uses legal harassment, physical violence, monetary restrictions, etc. All this produces what can be called ‘a discouraged worker-citizen’. This is akin to the discouraged worker in the labour market: after unsuccessfully looking for employment, a worker gives up looking. Just as workers are without direct access to means of subsistence, they are also without direct access to coercive power, for a body of armed people, separate from workers as workers, stands in there to oppress them, and to prevent their direct participation, i.e. participation in relation to the issues that really matter (e.g. secure employment; decent wages, safe working conditions; access to health-care and access to education and other cultural resources, etc.). A body of people (bureaucrats) is also there to coerce and manage them, and who are not elected by them and over whom they have little direct control. They live much better than ordinary workers and do not share their interest and their worldview. Denial of access to means of production and to surplus and denial of genuine access to political power concentrated in the state go together, and cannot be separated at all into class theory and state theory. Commodification of labour and its exploitation under capitalism were, and are, two sides of the same process. Economic exploitation and the extraction of surplus value from labour by capital was simultaneously an ‘economic’ process (in the realms of the private, capitalist workplace) and a ‘political’ process, supported and instituted by pro-capitalist states as they sought to raise the competitiveness of their economies in relation to other capitalist economies. The commodification of labour power enabled its sale and purchase on the labour market, but the extraction of

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surplus value required a complex and ever-changing apparatus of state laws and strict management of the capitalist labour process. selwyin, 2014: 657

Or, as Peter Burnham has suggested: the states are political nodes in the global flow of capital in its different forms, and that state managers are complicit in trying to create conditions for maximum exploitation of labour, even if they seek to depoliticse unpopular public policy. As widely known, the unpopular public policy (e.g. various austerity measures) is often called bipartisan, and therefore above politics. It is just the opposite: it is very political. It indicates the extent to which political representatives of different fractions of the bourgeoisie come together to use the state against the masses. The capitalist class relation and the state have a symmetrical-internal relation: one cannot exist without the other. This idea has several conceptual and political implications. Firstly, the state is constitutive of the capitalist class relation. It codifies class relations into juridical relations. It reproduces class relations, against workers’ resistance. The content of social power of capitalists is expressed in the form of state power: the state = political form of class. The capitalist state and the capitalist class are two arms of the social relationship called class; one arm signifies exploitation/exclusion of the majority, and another arm signifies its political oppression by the state. The state is, more or less, the political affairs department of the capitalist class in the modern society. Secondly: the state has the coercive means to force the Moneybags, a minority, to serve the majority, including by curtailing capital’s mobility, but it will not do so. This, fundamentally, is not because of any economic constraints on the state. It is not even because the state is reliant on the capitalist class for its survival; the so-called institutional separation view of Offe (1985) is overemphasized. Nor is it because the state is occupied by capitalists or their ideological supporters. All these three ideas about the state, if not entirely false, are intellectually inadequate and politically social-democratic and left-bourgeois. The ‘burdens’ that the state imposes on the capitalist class or the ways in which the state itself is constrained by that class are internal to the nature of class relations. The Polanyian social-democratic argument is problematic: The [Polanyian] concept of the always embedded economy suggests that there are no inherent obstacles to restructuring market societies along more democratic and egalitarian lines. This is in contrast to those who insist that reforms of capitalism that interfere with the logic of capital ­accumulation are basically futile. …[The fact of] multiple forms of

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d­ ependence of business groups …on state action provides a critical resource or lever for those seeking [progressive] political change. … It is true that ‘business interests … have formidable resources with which to resist such changes. however, …. these resources are contingent; they are not built into the essence of the social system. Hence, the [economic] rules of the [game] …[that] often serve to reinforce the power of business interests… can …. be changed …to make resistance, at least within developed countries, to egalitarian reforms more difficult. block, 2003: 300–301

These views are echoed not only by the class theorists we have encountered (especially, in chapters 2–3) but also by other scholars: efforts should continue for the state to enact and adequately enforce laws that hold corporations to account for their harmful acts. In addition to the law being a site for struggling against the dominant ideology of corporate capitalism, the fact remains that the state is the only countervailing force capable of holding corporations to account. bittle, 2015: 147

Block is mistaken that there are no inherent obstacles. The obstacles are internal to the capitalist class relation.37 These will remain as long as the capitalist class relation remains. Thirdly: If class was merely about economic exploitation of the majority by a tiny minority, a struggle against the minority class by the majority class could diminish, and even remove the structure of class relations. The belief that such a thing is possible is at the heart of much of thinking about class and the state, whether in Analytical or Post-structuralist Marxisms, etc. or similar discourses. Fourthly: The abolition of the class system, and ‘smashing’ of the state to create a state of the genuine majority are two sides of the same coin. Having won political power, the capitalist class treats its power as eternal. Such l­ uxury 37

Interestingly, this type of ideas was echoed by the French Prime Minister, Mr. Manuel Valls, who belongs to the Socialist party, during the on-going labour strike (June 2016): ‘What’s happening now is very important in French unions… There’s a debate in the union movement between those who are interested in dialogue, and those who are not. There is also a debate in French socialism. How do we reform in this country? Can a minority [a section of the trade union movement] block? Reform is possible. It’s a question of political will’ (reported in a New York Times article by Nossiter, 2016).

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of political sway which it itself has enjoyed, it now denies to the working class, the new rising world-class. ‘The working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machine, and wield it for its own purposes’ (217), just as the capitalist relations of exploitation and exchange cannot be reformed. This ­implies that the working class is not only exploited but also oppressed, and that the state of capitalists as well as the capitalist relations of exchange and production must be overthrown. Fifthly: Marxist theoretical conclusions ‘merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes’ and point to the necessity of the abolition of capitalist private property. (Marx and Engels, 1975: 62) which the state protects by suppressing/oppressing the working masses. Because ‘The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations’, its underlying theory, i.e. Marxist theory involves, and is looked upon by nearly everyone, ‘the most radical rupture with traditional ideas’ (ibid.: 74). This theory includes the approach to the relation between the state and the capitalist class. According to this theory, ‘The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise [it] to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy’ (ibid.: 74). Unlike other ruling classes, of the past, the working class must conquer political power before conquering economic power. It cannot but make ‘despotic inroads on the rights of property’ (ibid.): such inroads are nothing as compared to current bourgeois dictatorship that the masses are subjected to. If it is the case that every class which is struggling for mastery must conquer political power (= state power) to able to represent its own interest as the general interest of society (Marx and Engels say in German Ideology), then that means that in the current system the proletariat, like every other class of direct producers in the past, lacks political power, and that it must achieve political power to meet its economic needs.38 There is a large amount of ‘deceit, violence, corruption, mendacity, hypocrisy and oppression of the poor [that] is hidden beneath the civilised, polished and perfumed exterior of modern bourgeois democracy’ (Lenin, 1977c: 97). 38

Plekhanov noted that: ‘not a single class which has achieved political domination has had cause to regret its interest in “politics”, but on the contrary, that each one of them attained the highest, the culminating point of its development only after it had acquired political domination, then we must admit that the political struggle is an instrument of social reconstruction whose effectiveness is proved by history. Every teaching [e.g. anarchism] which runs counter to this historical induction loses a considerable part of its power of conviction, and if modern socialism were in fact to condemn the political striving of the working class as inexpedient, that would be sufficient reason not to call it scientific’ (Plekhanov, 1883; para 17).

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It is the case that ‘bourgeois democracy suppresses the working and exploited people’, who are the majority, and therefore, ‘proletarian democracy will have to suppress the bourgeoisie’, who are the minority (ibid.). It is theoretically bankrupt and politically opportunistic to recognize class but not recognize the following: (a) the state’s fundamental role, whether it is democratic or not, is to suppress the working class, (b) there is a need for abolition of class, as it cannot be regulated or reformed in the interest of the proletariat, and (c) there is a need for political hegemony of the working class through the overthrow of the capitalist rule, as a necessary interregnum prior to classlessness. Political hegemony of the proletariat requires its class consciousness.

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Dialectics of Class Consciousness Relations between classes (along with intra-class relations), based in processes of exchange, control over property and production of (surplus) value, form the very basis of the capitalist class society. That basis, operating within the context of capitalist accumulation, shapes, and is shaped by, consciousness of different classes. Consciousness of classes is ‘the possible conscious representation of its [objective] interests within a given mode of production’ (Dos Santos, 1970: 181; italics added). Consciousness is politically important: ‘We are many, but our success will be dependent upon a sufficient degree of class consciousness among a substantial number of us’ (Le Blanc; 2015; para 46). Conceptualizing class as an objective relation that individuals enter into independently of their will presupposes the concept of objective class interests. Class interests – of workers and capitalists – exist, and therefore class exists, and is causally important, independently of class consciousness, including selfconsciousness (identity). Individuals constituting a class may or may not be wholly or partly conscious of their own identity and common interests as a class, and they may or may not feel antagonism towards members of other classes as such (Croix, 1981: 44). That does not mean that class does not exist. There is an objective interest of workers:1 it is in being not exploited in the workplace (and not suffering from the concrete adverse effects of exploitation such as unemployment and poverty). The objective interest of the capitalist class is in exploiting.2 If workers say no to the suggestion that they have an objective interest in non-exploitation, one needs to find out why workers think the way they do under the given structural conditions they live. How their class interest is perceived, how it is politically expressed/translated, and how this interest is articulated with other (non-class) interests, to what extent this interest is satisfied and how – all these are place- and time-specific. There has to be something called class (as an objective structural relation) for there to be something called class consciousness. The structure of class relations is reproduced, and transformed, through political action which is informed by consciousness, but consciousness is shaped (constrained and 1 Similarly, there is an objective interest of small-scale self-employed producers in not being dispossessed, in not being exploited by financial and merchant capitals. 2 This is the case even if they give some of their money away in philanthropy reducing their bank balance a little bit or in paying a little higher taxes.

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enabled) by that structure (as well as political action of the classes). During extraordinary moments3 does consciousness grip the minds of the masses and begin to act as a material force, as a weapon against the structure. The fact that class consciousness is contingent on class relations is not the only attribute of class consciousness. It is also the case that ‘the concept of class consciousness’ refers to a theoretical object, and is therefore an abstract, theoretical, concept. It is so because the actual object the concept refers to is ‘not directly referable to one or more empirical (forms of) consciousness’ (Dos Santos, 1970: 181). Consciousness of a class cannot be reduced to that of the individuals who form the class: ‘The individuals that make up or “personify” these abstract categories, i.e., that realize these relations in practice, do not, in general, have the theoretical resources for representing them in their consciousness’ (ibid.). Individuals composing a class, and especially the working class, represent their class interests not in a systematic and coherent way but in ‘a chaotic, un- systematic, fragmentary way, confused with the ideas dominant in their society or in which they were brought up’ (ibid.).4 Class consciousness of a society, like all other things, is internally contradictory. In other words, a capitalist society’s class consciousness has a bourgeois form (bourgeois consciousness) and a working class form (working class consciousness) indeed, class consciousness is, ultimately, of two types: bourgeois and socialist (proletarian), as Lenin’s What is to be done says:5 3 These are the moments when contradiction between productive forces and class relations produces an intense crisis of structural reproduction that cannot be resolved by the ruling class, and when an organizational force of the hitherto exploited class exists that is able to resolve the crisis of its leadership. 4 Related to class consciousness are class psychology and ideology (Dos Santos, 1970). Ideology, which has many meanings (Eagleton, 1991), a least partly, refers to ‘the operationalization of those [class] interests into aims, and definite means for achieving them’ (Dos Santos, 1970: 184). ‘Ideology is determined by an effort of theory to express the forms of possible development of those interests and the ends and means it can generate’. Class psychology refers to ‘the mode of thought and feeling of determinate human groupings in a given situation or at a given instant’ (ibid.). It refers to the ‘Systematization, in the heads of individuals, of these impressions of a system of real relations’ (p. 181). ‘Insofar as this class psychology fails to express the reality of these relations in a significant sector of the individuals that make up a class, these human aggregates may be thought of as a class in itself.’ (ibid.). Class psychology is determined on the level of the empirical study of individuals or of certain collective phenomena, always referring its dynamics to the determination of class conscious-ness and ideology and to the conflicts existing between the class’s psychology and its class consciousness. Analysis aims at defining the elements that condition class consciousness in actual human groupings. This is the kind of work Analytical Marxism has sought to conduct (pp. 184–185). 5 Any form of class consciousness ‘in between’ that there might be can only be transitional or an unstable hybrid, with elements of bourgeois and of working class consciousness.

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Contradictory class consciousness of class society

Aspect of class

Bourgeois form

Working class form

× × × ×

× × × ×

Commodity relations Control over property Control over production of value Control over the state

Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology [consciousness] formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement the only choice is – either bourgeois or socialist ideology [consciousness]. There is no middle course (for mankind has not created a ‘third’ ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or an above-class ideology). Hence, to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. lenin, 1977a: 121–122; italics added

I have argued in Chapter 8 that class relation between capital and labour is at the level of exchange relation (money/commodity relation expressed in the wage form), private property relation, and a relation of value/exploitation. Consciousness of both capital and labour can be seen from the vantage point of each of these aspects of the class relation (Table 2). And as agued in the last chapter, there is also contradictory class interest in relation to the state: the state fundamentally protects the interests of the capitalist class as a whole and over the long term, while its basic role is to suppress the working class. The bourgeois view is that the state is class neutral, while the working class view is that the state fundamentally works in the interest of the bourgeois class. Of course, elements of bourgeois consciousness in relation to each aspect of the class relation are shared by both the bourgeoisie and the working class, in empirically given conditions. 1

Consciousness of the Bourgeoisie

Let us begin with bourgeois consciousness, the consciousness that supports bourgeois interests and is generally held by the bourgeoisie, and is also, in given empirical conditions, shared by elements of the working class.

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Commodity Relations, Wage-form, and Juridical Freedom The bourgeois society is marked by commodity relations. Everything is a commodity: things we need and want must be bought, and sold and must be produced for a profit. Things we need and want appear to have a price tag as if to do so is in the dna of things. This means that use-value as use-values (education, food, movies or medicines) will not be produced – and are not expected to be produced – except as commodities for a profit. Not only is it that things we need are commodities. The power to work – labour power – has become a commodity. It is paid for in monetary form (wage-form). Consider the wage-form. The capitalist class buys the ability of the worker to work and produce things, from members of the working class who are nominally free. Wages are the phenomenal form of value of labour power expressed in the money-form. ‘The wage-form …extinguishes every trace of the division of the working day into necessary labour and surplus labour… All labour appears as paid labour’ and this appearance is accepted by all classes (Marx, 1977: 680). This appearance has interesting implications: All the notions of justice held by both the worker and the capitalist, all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production, all capitalisms’ illusions about freedom… have as their basis the form of appearance discussed above, which makes the actual relation invisible, and indeed presents to the eye the precise opposite of that relation (ibid.; italics added). The capitalist class has a notion of freedom which is based in market relations, a bourgeois notion which large sections of the working class also shares. This notion is ideological in the specific sense that it is rooted in objective conditions and is therefore real, but it is also partly false, and it thus contributes to the ­reproduction of the capitalist class relation. The objective conditions here refer to the fact that both the classes are commodity owners and commodity buyers/sellers and that they do have the freedom to own and buy/sell the commodities they have.6 The notion of freedom belies the fact that the w ­ orking class abjectly depends on the capitalist class which controls the means of ­production, and therefore means of employment, and means of subsistence. This is a relation of dependence – economic unfreedom – which the capitalist 6 ‘Because the exchange of equivalents by free individuals in the market is seen on the surface of society and conceals the hidden process of production, it naturally tends to be reproduced in the minds of both capitalists and laborers as equality and freedom, the linchpins of capitalist ideology’ (Larrain, 1983: 157).

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class relation reproduces when it forces workers to surrender whatever they produce. This is a dependence without which the capitalist class relation cannot continue to exist. A large part of what is ‘a social dependence of the worker on the capitalist’, one that is indispensable (Marx, 1977: 935), is secured through, among other things, the relative surplus population. But this relation of absolute dependence is turned by ideological spokespersons of the capitalist class into one of ‘free contract between buyer and seller, between equally independent owners of commodities, the owner of the commodity capital on one side, the owner of the commodity labour [power] on the other’ (ibid.). What is in fact a relation of dependence appears to be a relation of freedom.7 Of course, the contradictory nature of such consciousness concerning freedom comes into conflict when the dependence of labour on capital is reduced because of access to means of production and subsistence, and therefore ‘in the colonies this beautiful illusion is torn outside’ (ibid.). This relation of dependence of the working class on the capitalist class for access to means of subsistence is further strengthened by the fact that the working class works under the despotic control of the capitalist class or its hired agents. Thus the reality is that there is economic unfreedom for the working class e­ verywhere, but according to bourgeois consciousness, there is freedom everywhere, a consciousness that is shared by many members of the working class. The market relations between the two basic classes, which from one vantage point produce the notion of equality (both are commodity owners/sellers) also leads to an opposite aspect of bourgeois consciousness (which is shared by the working class as well). This is the idea that the capitalist class is everything (buyer of workers’ labour power, and thus the provider of employment and of means of subsistence) and the working class is (almost) nothing. This means that the bourgeois class is the do-er and that the working class is the class that receives benefits from what the bourgeois class does. This form of bourgeois consciousness is mistaken from the working class standpoint. This is because: the wage that the labourers receive is the form of value that is produced by them only. ‘What flows back to the labourer in the shape of wages is a portion of the product he himself continuously reproduces. The capitalist pays him the value of the commodity [labour power] in money, but this money is merely the transmuted form of the product of his labour’ (Marx, 1977: 712). In other words, while the labourer ‘is converting a portion of the means of production into products, a portion of his former product is ­being 7 Piterberg and Veracini (2015) show how capitalist class consciousness about property ownership is changed in colonies.

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turned into money’ (ibid.: 712–713). Clearly, ‘It is his labour of last week, or of last year, that pays for his labour-power this week or this year’ (ibid.). If anything, the labourers give a credit to the capitalist class because the latter pays wages several weeks after the work is performed. All this is clear when we look at the capitalist class relation at the level of all labourers and all capitalists, and when we see that relationship as a process, as a continuous ­process in time. This relation of dependence of the working class on the capitalist class for access to means of subsistence is further strengthened by the fact that the working class works under the despotic control of the capitalist class or its hired agents. The illusion created by the money-form vanishes immediately if, instead of taking a single capitalist and a single labourer, we take the whole capitalist class and the whole working class. The capitalist class is constantly giving to the working class drafts, in the form of money, on a portion of the product produced by the latter and appropriated by the former. The workers give these drafts back just as constantly to the capitalists, and thereby withdraw from the latter their allotted share of their own product. The transaction is veiled by the commodity-form of the product and the money-form of the commodity. marx, 1977: 713; italics added

The commodity relations are the surface appearance of capitalist class relation. These are reflected in capitalist class consciousness. The latter treats wage labour as normal, natural and that if a labourer is paid according to its needs or according to the supply and demand conditions, it cannot be that the labour receives less than what it produces. This is bourgeois consciousness, because it reflects bourgeois interests. The concept of class exploitation – appropriation of surplus value from labour whose cost of reproduction may be paid for – is not a part of consciousness of the capitalist class as a whole. It is only the semblance of the relations of production which is reflected by the brain of the capitalist. He does not know that the normal price of labour [power] also includes a definite quantity of unpaid labour, and that this very unpaid labour is the normal source of his profits. The category of surplus-labour-time does not exist at all for him, since it is included in the normal working-day, which he thinks he has paid for in the day’s wages. marx, 1977: 690–691; italics added

So the capitalist class consciousness does not know that unpaid labour is the normal source of his/her profits. It does not know that ‘the use-value supplied by the labourer to the capitalist is not…his labour-power, but its function, a

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specific form of useful labour’, such as the work of tailoring, shoemaking, spinning, or writing a software, etc. The idea that ‘this same labour is, on the other hand, the universal value-creating element, and thus possesses a property by virtue of which it differs from all other commodities, is something which falls outside the frame of reference of the everyday consciousness’ (Marx, 1977: 681, emphasis added). In the capitalist class consciousness, one source of profit is the ability to buy cheap and sell dear, to reduce costs. And the loss of profit implies idleness. This is not his/her own idleness (he/she is more or less idle and that does not count) but the idleness of the material form of his own being (e.g. workplace). ‘Furnaces and workshops that stand idle by night, and absorb no living labour, are “a mere loss” to the capitalist’, which is why they ‘constitute “lawful claims upon the night-labour”’ of working people (Marx, 1977: 425).8 This has implication for consciousness through a process of dual transformation of social-material forms of capital. First, the money form of capital is transformed into capital in the form of means of production; and then the means of production undergo a transformation into ‘a title, both by right and by might, to the labour and surplus-labour of others’ (ibid.). This ‘inversion, indeed this distortion, which is peculiar to and characteristic of capitalist production, of the relation between dead and living labour, between value and the force that creates value, is mirrored in the consciousness of capitalist’ (as well as that of labourers) (ibid.). The product is fetishism. Thus when the capitalist class takes care to find out the source of its profit, it resorts to the categories that are on the surface of bourgeois class society: the market relations. This can be called the bourgeois version of spontaneous consciousness. The capitalist explains the source of their profit in terms buying and selling. The capitalist ‘wishes to receive as much labour as possible for as little money as possible’, so he/she is only interested in ‘the difference between the price of labour-power and the value which its function creates’ (Marx, 1977: 682). The capitalist ‘tries to buy all commodities as cheaply as possible, and his own invariable explanation for his profit is that it is a result of mere sharp practice, of buying under the value, and selling over it’. That is why, the capitalist ‘never comes to see’, or think that ‘if such a thing as the value of labour’, as opposed to the value of labour power, ‘really existed, and he really paid this value’, then ‘no capital would exist, his money would not be turned into capital’. (Marx, 1977: 682; italics and parentheses added] The objective reality of commodity fetishism when translated discursively becomes an important aspect of bourgeois class consciousness. This is an 8 Similarly, a land that is not subjected to intense multiple cropping and chemicalization or organic products (shrimps or chicken) that do not fatten quickly is ordinarily a loss.

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a­ spect of consciousness shaped by market relations according to which: wage labour or capacity to perform labour is naturally a commodity so are means of subsistence and the things which the worker works with/on in order to produce any commodity. In a situation where the working class sells a commodity (labour power), and the capitalist class buys that commodity, their consciousness is limited to the fact that each class tries to get, for a given unit of what they sell, more of what they buy. The capitalist tries to get more amount of labour capacity for every dollar it pays. The working class tries to get as many dollars as possible for every hour of its labour capacity. As long as this is ensured, all is well. Bourgeois Passion for Wealth The capitalist class system functions, and is reproduced, as an objective system. But the subjectivity of the capitalist class is not inconsequential for the reproduction of that system. It is true that a capitalist does what she does because of the imperative to accumulate, yet, members of this class are also known for their greed and avarice (which must have some influence on their concrete accumulation strategies). The capitalist class, subjectively speaking, is a greedy class. Whether it is ‘At the historical dawn of capitalist production’ or in the life of a capitalist upstart in modern capitalist society, ‘avarice, and the drive for self-enrichment, are the passions which are entirely predominant’ (Marx, 1977: 741; italics added). The capitalist ‘squeezes out labour-power from others, and compels the worker to renounce all the enjoyments of life’, and that is how he gets rich (ibid.). And with this, ‘Luxury enters into capital’s expenses of representation’, which grow with his accumulation. Extravagant, demonstrative wasteful expenditures on luxuries, which it shares with the aristocrats, and the opportunities for which are opened up, with the progress of capitalist production, via speculation and the credit system, help culturally reproduce the capitalist class (and its retinues) as a class separate from the rest. Its way of life (e.g. wasteful expenditure) stands in sharp contrast to the demand on the part of this class for abstinence from the working class, which must get by with less, because if it does not, the capitalist class will not have the usual profit it accumulates. Given all this, the capitalist class in practice and consciousness experiences ‘a Faustian conflict between the passion for accumulation, and the desire for enjoyment’ (ibid.). It is true that the capitalist class consciousness is bathed with the fire of the passion of money-making. But this class also has feeling. It can be great animal lovers. It can be soft-hearted philanthropists and can actually sometimes sympathize with the suffering of the masses, especially when the ­latter get a little agitated. This is where bourgeois socialist consciousness comes: the consciousness of the critics of the capitalist social order who include not only

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‘economists, philanthropists, humanitarians’ but also the ‘improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, …. hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind’ and who want ‘all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom’ and who therefore ‘desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements’ and who ‘wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat’ (Marx and Engels, 1975: 87). If the capitalist class is as mean as it is, and if apart from the Faustian conflict (between investment of savings and enjoyment) it also experiences a conflict between enjoyment and (philanthropic) sympathy for the suffering masses, it is because it itself is a cog in the wheel of accumulation-for-its-own sake.9 Capital causes ‘the physical and mental degradation, the premature death, the torture of overwork’ to increase its profits, but ‘looking at things as a whole’, this fact ‘does not depend on the will, either good or bad, of the individual capitalist’ (Marx, 1977: 381).10 What the members of the capitalist class are, subjectively, i.e. in terms of consciousness, are marked by the objective imperative of the system, to accumulate: the imperative to accumulate at the socially average rate sets limit on capitalists as people with feelings, as people who wish to enjoy their wealth and who feel for the masses and wish to do something for them.11 So this ­imperative 9

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Retired capitalists – whose capitalist social being does not depend any more on their constant reinvestment at a normal rate – can engage in philanthropy. Active capitalists cannot normally practice philanthropy beyond a limit. Besides, philanthropy is also not entirely outside of monetary calculations: it is good for public relations, and what is good for public relations may be good in the market over the long term. Even the fact that capitalists turn into imperialists and develop an imperialist ideology has an objective reason: ‘The capitalists divide the world, not out of any particular malice, but because the degree of concentration [small companies can compete within a limited geographical terrain but big monopolies must compete in larger geographical areas, often transcending the boundaries of countries] which has been reached forces them to adopt this method in order to obtain profits. And they divide it “in proportion to capital”, “in proportion to strength”, because there cannot be any other method of division under commodity production and capitalism. But strength varies with the degree of economic and political development’ (Lenin, 1939: 75). The epoch of the latest stage of capitalism shows us that certain relations between capitalist associations grow up, based on the economic division of the world; while parallel to and in connection with it, certain relations grow up between political alliances, between states, on the basis of the territorial division of the world, of the struggle for colonies, of the ‘struggle for spheres of influence’. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ works/1916/imp-hsc/ch05.htm. The implied capital-centrism is not the invention of Marxists but a correct reflection of the dominance of the capitalist logic.

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sets limit on what is called conscious capitalism (or conscience capitalism), one that is friendly towards social and ecological issues (Farrell, 2015). But such imperative to accumulate, the existence of which Post-structuralist Marxists deny, has become a part of their very personality, of who they are as persons. They have internalized a passion, a passion for wealth in the abstract, wealth for its own sake, just like a genuine lover is interested in love for its own sake. ‘As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital’. In fact, ‘capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself’, the drive to make its constant part, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour’ (Marx, 1977: 343). The capitalist is respectable ‘Only as a personification of capital’, in the sense that he/she saves a large part of his/ her surplus value to invest (Marx, 1977: 739). Both the capitalist and the miser share ‘an absolute drive for self-­enrichment’. But there is a difference between the two: what appears in the miser as the mania of an individual is in the capitalist the effect of a social mechanism’, one ‘in which he is merely a cog’. Marx goes on to add: ‘This boundless drive for enrichment, this passionate chase after value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser’ in the sense that instead of consuming it, he/she invests it to expand his/her money.12 (Marx, 1977: 254–255; parentheses and italics added). It is competition that ‘subordinates every individual capitalist to the immanent laws of capitalist production, as external and coercive laws’; it ‘compels him to keep extending his capital, so as to preserve it, and he can only extend it by means of progressive accumulation’ (Marx, 1977: 739).13 The actions of a capitalist ‘are a mere function of capital – endowed as capital is, in his person, with consciousness and a will – his own private consumption counts as a robbery committed against the accumulation of his capital’ (ibid.; stress added).14 The capitalist class as a class signifies the subjectivisation of an objective imperative and the materialization of a subjective desire, of greed: for money As the conscious bearer of this movement [advancing money to make more money], the possessor of money becomes a capitalist. His person, or 12

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‘The ceaseless augmentation of value, which the miser seeks to attain by saving his money from circulation, is achieved by the more acute capitalist by means of throwing his money again and again into circulation’ (ibid.). ‘Free competition brings out the inherent laws of capitalist production, in the shape of external coercive laws having power over every individual capitalist’. And this the working class has also come to generally accept this view. What is said here about private consumption applies to bourgeois philanthropy as well, to the idea of capitalists sharing their wealth with the masses.

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rather his pocket, is the point from which the money starts and to which it returns. The objective content of the circulation …. – ­valorization of value – is his subjective purpose, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more wealth in the abstract is the sole driving force behind his operations that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will. Use-values must therefore never be treated as the immediate aim of the capitalist, nor must the profit on any single transaction. His aim is rather is the unceasing movement of profit-making. marx, 1977: 254; italics and parenthesis added

Control over Production and Capital Fetishism The capitalist class is not just a director of a process of a specific form of production; the capitalist class is the personification of that process. Capitalist consciousness praises control and specialization inside the hidden abode of production. ‘The same bourgeois consciousness which celebrates the division of labour in the workshop, the lifelong annexation of the worker to a partial operation, and his complete subjection to capital… denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt to control and regulate the process of production socially, as an inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property, freedom and the self-determining “genius” of the individual capitalist’ (Marx, 1977: 477; italics added). In fact, the ideological spokespersons of the capitalist class ‘have nothing more damning to urge against a general organization of labour in society than that it would turn the whole society into a factory’ (ibid.). In the work-place, where the capitalist control reigns supreme, powers of labour appear to be powers of capital, in the consciousness of both capitalist and the working classes. The consciousness of the working class is marked with reification: while it is their own living labour or past labour that has created value, workers think that capital does everything. Living labour working in conjunction with, and working on dead labour (means of production), produces new value. What is in fact due to itself (the working class) is seen by the class as being due to the force which is opposite to it: the capitalist class. It creates more new value with the increase in efficacy of the means of production and ‘consequently with the accumulation that accompanies the development of its productive power’. This natural power of labour to create value ‘appears as a power incorporated into capital…just as the productive forces of social labour appear as inherent characteristics of capital’ (Marx, 1977: 755–756).

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The socially productive power of labour develops as a free gift to capital whenever the workers are placed under certain conditions, and it is capital that places them under these conditions. Because this power costs capital nothing, and because, on the other hand, it is not developed by the worker until his labour itself belongs to capital, it appears as a power which capital possesses by its nature – a productive power inherent in capital marx, 1977: 451

As bearers of the process of the extraction of surplus labour, capitalists are aware that their profit depends on, for example, how long workers work. This fact is demonstrated by the violent struggle over the limits of the working-day. However, when profit depends less on the prolongation of the working day and more on the appropriation of relative surplus-value in the specifically capitalist mode of production made possible by the development of ‘the productive powers of social labour’, an interesting outcome occurs, as Marx explains in Capital volume 3: these productive powers and the social context of labour appear in the immediate labour process as shifted from labour to capital. Capital thereby already becomes a very mystical being, since all the productive forces of social labour appear attributable to it, and not to labour as such, as a power springing forth from its own womb. marx, 1981: 966

An Imaginary Situation The illusory and false consciousness of the capitalist class lies in the fact that it believes, and it makes the society (workers) believe, that the things it has are the things it owns and has created. The capitalist has an over-inflated class ego. Society has accepted this class as the main doer. Let us think about an imaginary capitalist family in existence over 15 years. Suppose this family needs $1000 a year for its reproduction expenditure. Suppose it has a factory worth $10,000 this year, which it has established through self-earned money, and the same factory is worth at least $10,000 in 15 years (we are abstracting from inflation, depreciation, etc.). In 10 years’ from now the family will have spent $10,000 yet, in the 11th, 12th, 13th, etc. years, the family will still see the factory standing in front of it. In reality, the capitalist has consumed every bit of its self-earned money of $10,000. If the factory still is a physical reality, it is because: the reproduction of the factory signifies the physical or material form of the social relation of the appropriation of surplus value. That is: the capitalist

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class has appropriated surplus value from its workers, which is why the factory still stands and is owned/controlled by the capitalist. If the factory still stands under the control of the capitalist class, it is an expression of its debt to the working class: the latter has been forced to give to the capitalist class something which has not been, and cannot be and will not be, returned to the working class. The value of the capital advanced divided by the surplus-value annually consumed, gives the number of years… at the expiration of which the capital originally advanced has been consumed by the capitalist and has disappeared. The capitalist thinks he is consuming the [profit]… and is keeping intact the value of his original capital; but what he thinks cannot alter the actual situation. After the lapse of a certain number of years, the value of the capital he possesses is equal to the sum total of the surplus-value he has appropriated during those years, and the total value he has consumed is equal to the value of his original capital. It is true that he has in hand a quantity of capital whose magnitude has not changed, and that part of it, such as buildings, machinery, etc., was already there when he began to conduct his business operations. But we are not concerned here with the material components of the capital. We are concerned with its value.15 marx, 1977: 715; italics added

What is also significant from the standpoint of capitalism as a class relation is this: even if production process is based on simple reproduction, it ‘sooner or later, and necessarily, converts all capital into accumulated ­capital, or ­capitalized surplus-value’ (p. 715). Even if a person invests capital that was originally acqui­ red by his/her personal labour, ‘it sooner or later becomes value appropriated without an equivalent, the unpaid labour of others materialised either in money or in some other way’ (ibid.). But this is not how the capitalist class thinks. The illusion of the capitalist class, the working class and society as a whole that the capitalist is really a doer of things and creator of things is nothing but just that: an illusion. Such illusion is an obstacle to the development of class consciousness of the working class. 15

Marx makes a more general point: ‘When a person gets through all his property, by taking upon himself debts equal to the value of that property, it is clear that his property represents nothing but the sum total of his debts. And so it is with the capitalist; when he has consumed the equivalent of his original capital, the value of his present capital represents nothing but the total amount of the surplus-value appropriated by him without payment. Not a single atom of the value of his old capital continues to exist.’

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Consciousness of the Working Class and Its Multiple Forms

Stadiality of Working Class Consciousness The working class possesses various forms of consciousness of the situation in which it lives and works, in terms of what causes the problems it faces and what can be done about these (Table 3).16 It develops stadially, i.e. in stages (see also Figure 20 below). Plekhanov (1883) beautifully describes the stadiality of working class consciousness. It is worth quoting him at length: Only gradually does the oppressed class become clear about the connection between its economic position and its political role in the state. For a long time it does not understand even its economic task to the full. The individuals composing it wage a hard struggle for their daily subsistence without even thinking which aspects of the social organisation they owe their wretched condition to. They try to avoid the blows aimed at them without asking where they come from or by whom, in the final analysis, they are aimed. As yet they have no class consciousness and there is no guiding idea in their struggle against individual oppressors. The oppressed class does not yet exist for itself; in time it will be the advanced class in society, but it is not yet becoming such. Facing the consciously organised power of the ruling class are separate individual strivings of isolated individuals or isolated groups of individuals. Even now, for example, we frequently enough meet a worker who hates the particularly intensive exploiter but does not yet suspect that the whole class of exploiters must be fought and the very possibility of exploitation of man by man removed. Little by little, however, the process of generalisation takes effect, and the oppressed begin to be conscious of themselves as a class. But their ­understanding of the specific features of their class position still remains too one-sided: the springs and motive forces of the social mechanism as a whole are still hidden from their mind’s eye. The class of exploiters appears to them as the simple sum of individual employers, not connected by the threads of political organisation. At this stage of development, it is not yet clear in the minds of the oppressed…what connection exists ­between “society” and “state”. State power is presumed to stand above the antagonisms of the classes; its representatives appear to be the natural judges and conciliators of the hostile sides. The oppressed class has complete trust in them and is extremely surprised when its requests for help 16

There is space below only for 6–8 in the Table.

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Step 9: Workers having arrived at all the foregoing must not be afraid to act in solidarity and at multiple scales, when the time comes. Step 8: Workers must believe in the Marxist strategy of their self-emancipation as the best means for achieving their aims, with the help of a vanguard party of educators/organizers. Step 7: Workers must believe that they themselves, through some means or other, can help bring about this improvement. Step 6: Workers must believe, however vaguely, that their situation could be improved beyond small and reversible changes, and this means abolition of class. Step 5: Workers must truly hate their capitalist exploiters and the state and pro-capitalist union bureaucrats and everyone who seeks to maintain the system. Step 4: Workers must believe that their class interests come prior to their interests as members of a particular nation, religion, race, caste, gender, location, etc. Step 3: Workers must be able to distinguish their main interests as workers from other less important economic (and other) interests. Step 2: Workers must be able to see their interests as individuals in their interests as members of a class. Step 1: Workers must recognize that they have common interests, and these are irreconcilably different from ruling class interests. Note: The figure is significantly adapted from Ollman (1979: 10–11).

Figure 20 Steps to class consciousness

remain unanswered by them. [Workers can launch] quite an energetic struggle in the economic field and yet [they may consider] it possible to belong to one of the bourgeois political parties. Only in the next and last stage of development does the oppressed class come to a thorough realisation of its position. It now realises the connection between society and state, and it does not appeal for the curbing of its exploiters to those who constitute the political organ of that ­exploitation. It knows that the state is a fortress serving as the bulwark and defence of its oppressors, a fortress which the oppressed can and must capture and reorganise for their own defence and which they cannot bypass, counting on its neutrality. Relying only on themselves, the oppressed begin to understand that “political self-help”, as Lange says, “is the most important of all forms of social self-help”. They then fight for political domination in order to help themselves by changing the ­existing social relations and adapting the social system to the conditions of their own

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development and welfare. Neither do they, of course, achieve domination immediately; they only gradually become a formidable power precluding all thought of resistance by their opponents. For a long time they fight only for concessions, demand only such reforms as would give them not domination, but merely the possibility to develop and mature for future domination; reforms which would satisfy the most urgent and immediate of their demands and extend, if only slightly, the sphere of their influence over the country’s social life. Only by going through the hard school of the struggle for separate little pieces of enemy territory does the oppressed class acquire the persistence, the daring, and the development necessary for the decisive battle. But once it has acquired those qualities it can look at its opponents as at a class finally condemned by history; it need have no doubt about its victory. What is called the revolution is only the last act in the long drama of revolutionary class struggle which becomes conscious only insofar as it becomes a political struggle. (italics added) It is possible to see at least three stages in the development of class consciousness. It begins with ‘Mechanical’ or primitive consciousness according to which, for example, machines are the problem. At an early stage, ‘this consciousness is expressed in the form of “outbursts of desperation and vengeance than of struggle”’, and fights by individual and isolated workers (Lenin, 1977a: 114). Initially, workers may spontaneously break the machines, in a Luddite style (as happened in Russia in the 1860s and 70s). ‘Even the primitive revolts’ of this type express ‘the awakening of consciousness to a certain ­extent’ (p. 113). This stage is followed by a proper trade union consciousness which is the idea that problems in a capitalist society can be tackled through organized pressure on employers (and on the state), on the basis of trade union (and similar) activities. Trade union consciousness is a form of bourgeois consciousness in that it incorporates ideas of, and reflects interests of, the bourgeoisie. Like all exploited classes, the working class in capitalist class society ‘as a rule’, tends ‘to formulate the first phases of the class struggle in terms of the formulas, ideals and ideologies of the exploiters’ (Mandel, 1970a; para 2).17 The most developed form of consciousness is the socialist political consciousness or revolutionary 17

‘Thus the rising bourgeois class consciousness, and even the rising plebian or semi-­ proletarian class consciousness in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were expressed within a completely religious framework, finding the way to overt materialism only with the full-blown decadence of the feudal absolutist order in the second half of the eighteenth century’ (Mandel, 1970a; para 14).

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consciousness, which aims at political power. At any given point in time and in a place, the working class will possess a combination of the different forms of consciousness. The dominance of one over another may vary from time to time and from one place to another. Bourgeois Trade Union Consciousness of the Working Class Bourgeois consciousness reflects short and long-term economic and political interests of the bourgeoisie as a whole, including its dominant strata/bloc. It is possessed by the bourgeoisie, and elements of this are shared by the nonbourgeois classes. That consciousness helps reproduce bourgeois class relations, and some of this consciousness is purely false consciousness (e.g. the idea that capital does not appropriate surplus value or that capital, and not labour, produces wealth). Bourgeois consciousness of the working class is one which reflects the agenda of continuing the reproduction of bourgeois society including via actions/ thoughts that are aimed at the slight modification of the system making it somewhat more tolerable than it is. It is consciousness in a more or less spontaneous form: spontaneous in that it is not achieved through conscious hard intellectual labour. It is therefore not anti-capitalist and socialist. It is not class consciousness proper. Rather it is ‘class consciousness in an embryonic form’ (Lenin, 1977a: 113).18 It is the lower form of consciousness. The embryonic or the lower form of consciousness uncritically reflects the ways in which bourgeois relations work. It is bourgeois consciousness of the working class. It is unable to conceive of class relations as the basis of human history. Trade union consciousness is the most prominent form of spontaneous consciousness. However, broadly construed, and going beyond Lenin’s narrow conception of scope of spontaneity, spontaneous consciousness, I will argue, includes not only trade union consciousness but also many other forms of it, all of which revolve around a given problematique: i.e. conception of the cause/s of ‘suffering’ of the masses, and a given conception of what is it to be done (Table 3 below). 18

What are basically non-trade union struggles (e.g. anti-war protests in which trade union members may participate) can be informed by spontaneous consciousness as well in so far as war is not explained in terms of the operation of the capitalist-imperialist system as a whole. A theoretical consciousness of wars will point to the fact that wars often are ‘at bottom a revolt of the forces of production against the political form of nation and state’ and signify ‘the collapse of the national state as an independent economic unit’ (Trotsky, 1914; para 2).

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chapter 10 Forms of working class consciousness

Forms of consciousness ‘Problematique’ Individualist/humanist consciousness

Absence of individual actions/agency; lack of ethical choice in private life, labour market, and in spheres of exchange (ethical purchases), consumption (simple and eco-friendly living), etc. Ethical living. Cultural identity-politics (Perceived) actions/attitudes towards a section of the workconsciousness ing class on the part of some capitalists, state, and certain sections of the working class, causing discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, religion, disability, etc. (e.g. denial of jobs; lower wages; indignity); lack of government or non-governmental protection against such discrimination. Identity politics; affirmative action Nationalist/regionalist (Perceived) adverse actions/ideas of capital and state and consciousness sections of the working class from outside areas/countries; lack of government protection against such actions. Government protection; nationalist struggle or regionalistautonomist movement Petty bourgeois Big monopolistic businesses out-competing small busiconsciousness nesses and thwarting state regulation of big businesses; dispossession of, and threat to, self-earned/small-scale private or communal property, often with state’s complicity Protection to small-scale property-owners by the government and/or civil society intervention Anti-market (Re-)commodification of collective or state-owned property; privatization of social commons (e.g. pension system); (or anti-­neoliberal) relative absence of state (or community-based) control consciousness over economic and ecological matters concerning workers. State or community control over the market and over commons; state provision of welfare Trade union economic ‘Unequal exchange’ between capital and labour resulting consciousness in low wages (e.g. wages below value of labour power); workers not receiving enough from the increased productivity; capital not ensuring safe working conditions and normal working day, which ultimately violates the law of exchange; politics of realization (e.g. workers having to pay higher rent or interest or bank fees). Union pressure on capitalists for a better terms on which labour sells its labour power

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Forms of consciousness ‘Problematique’

Trade union political consciousness

Socialist or class consciousness

Police violence against striking workers; lack of legislation on working class issues (wages, working hours); corrupt/ inefficient government; absence of a government amenable to working class pressure. Union pressure on governments for a social wage (welfare benefits), for the right to form unions and to strike, and protection to striking workers Irreconcilable economic and political contradiction between workers and capital; the system of class relations at multiple levels (exchange, property and value) and the coercive capitalist state, globally. Revolution against all forms of class, including capitalism, and against social oppression, including that based on race, gender and nationality, and overthrow of the capitalist state; construction of socialist society

Note: The conception of what is to be done is underlined in Table 3.

Bourgeois consciousness of the working class in the form of trade union consciousness is the consciousness according to which bourgeois class relations and bourgeois political relations are treated as natural and should be – and can only be – reproduced (including in somewhat slightly modified form) and need not be – and cannot be – transcended. According to such consciousness, the money relation involving the purchase and sale of means of production and subsistence is natural, that it is normal for the bourgeoisie to control property, and that its right to control production and social product and to exploit the working class is legitimate, and that it is right for the state to protect all these processes, if necessarily, by violently suppressing the working masses and by other means including trickery and deception (see Table 2 & 3). It is in the interest of the bourgeoisie that it possess this kind of consciousness (as we have seen). And elements of this consciousness are shared by the working class as well. Trade union consciousness19 concerns exchange relations between capital and labour (which is only one aspect of the three-level class relation): labour market is the most important site of this consciousness. Trade union ­consciousness can be summarized as the slogan of ‘fair day’s pay for a fair day’s 19

This is the type of consciousness that is reflected in the labour geography type of literature, which indirectly promotes such consciousness.

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work’. In trade union consciousness, agitation related to economic ‘bread and butter’ issues and immediate problems encountered in the factory (e.g. factory abuse) serves as the principal form of – principal means of – developing class consciousness. Trade union consciousness is about economic matters (e.g. about wages, etc.), as just discussed. It is also about political matters. Or, more accurately, trade union consciousness is not only about the idea of putting pressure on employers for concessions but also on the government (for labour market regulations). Trade union consciousness in its political form is the belief that the government of the day or an alternative government can provide economic benefit (a social wage) and political benefits (democratic rights) for the working class. Trade union political consciousness has many forms. One is what Lenin calls ‘unreasoning trust’ in capitalist state and in capitalists themselves, because of the intellectual hegemony of ideas of the ruling class (Lenin, 1977b: 41). Trust in the state may mean that workers think that propertied classes are self-interested people but with enough pressure from below, the state can address the problems of the masses. This is the crux of social-democratic or left-bourgeois consciousness. In terms of the trust in the state, it is a different matter that depending on conditions, workers may have more trust in local as opposed to federal branches of the state, or vice versa.20 The trade union consciousness of the working masses in relation to the state whose fundamental job is to suppress them is informed by a process which is akin to commodity fetishism. When the state form is nominally democratic, coercion by the state is not seen as what it really is – namely, political suppression of exploited classes by a class-state acting on behalf of dominant class interests. Rather coercion is seen as what it appears to be: it appears to be a wrongful action carried out either by this or that political party in furtherance of an incorrect policy, or by officials/ politicians who are misinformed about the interests of the masses, and who merely pursue their own independent interest. A corollary is that such agency by the state is in effect mistaken, an anomaly that can be rectified by: changing the party in power or changing the 20

It is quite true that at a given point in time a large part of the population may have a very low level of trust in the government, and often the trust level has been lower in more recent times than earlier. In the us: ‘The public’s trust in the federal government continues to be at historically low levels. Only 19% of Americans today say they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right…Fewer than three-in-ten Americans have expressed trust in the federal government …since 2007…In 1958, …73% said they could trust the government just about always or most of the time’ (pew, 2015; para 1–2). But even then: low level of trust in the government does not mean low level of trust in the state as such. While expressing low level of trust in an existing government, people are likely to hope that a better government is possible (next time).

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character and functioning of bureaucrats and officials carrying out the o­ rders. In Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, an ideological inversion occurs whereby ‘the relationships between producers…take on the form of a social relation between the products of labour’; that is, an ideological inversion happens when ‘the definite social relation’ among producers themselves assumes ‘the fantastic form of a relation between things’ (Marx, 1977: 164, 165). Similarly, what actually is a coercive relation between classes, enforced by the capitalist state, is mistakenly seen as a relation between voters/citizens on the one hand and parties, political leaders, officials, and even governments on the other.21 It is the case that ‘the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc.’ (Lenin, 1977a: 114). And ‘the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology’: ‘trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie’ (Lenin, 1977a: 122). To the extent that practical politics shapes consciousness, involvement in merely trade union politics will result in increasing acceptance of bourgeois ideology. The latter is in line with the reproduction of bourgeois society in slightly modified (transformed) forms (e.g. increased wages, etc.) through the exercise of a very limited form of working class agency. It is often the case that scholars and trends that tend to emphasize working class agency, its ability to modify capitalism, including its spatial configurations,22 fail to theorize agency (they fail to distinguish between agency involved in trade union consciousness and in reforming the system, and the agency associated with revolutionary consciousness), and they themselves tend to be of reformist in thinking. Failure to theorize agency is a part of a larger failure to theorize the system and its revolutionary potential as a whole. Economism and lack of theory go together.23 Trade union consciousness does have in it an embryonic critique of the capitalist system but such critique is ultimately of the type that is system 21

22 23

An unreasoning trust in governments is expressed for example in the belief that ‘this government is bad, but the next government would be better’, or that ‘this government may be bad but it is the lesser of the two evils’. The history of political life of the masses becomes a history of electing one bourgeois government after another, who are all, more or less, the same, when it comes to their fundamental interests. This concept refers to the idea that workers can force a certain geography of where employment is provided or wage-increase happens. The ‘much vaunted freedom of criticism’ that people fixated with trade unionist ­consciousness and struggles talk about, ‘does not imply substitution of one theory for ­another, but freedom from all integral and pondered theory; it implies eclecticism and lack of principle’ (Lenin, 1977a: 108–109).

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s­upporting and not system-transcending. Trade union consciousness to the extent that it is oppositional criticism, it is generally ‘the oppositional criticism [which] is nothing more than a safety valve for mass dissatisfaction, a condition of the stability of the social structure’ (Trotsky, 2008: xvi). The stuff of the bourgeois form of working class consciousness is basically about getting a good deal in the market or a slight quantitative reduction in the degree to which the capitalist class controls the means of production and the workplace. Such a consciousness can reproduce a quiescent working class, one that listens to the bourgeoisie. In fact, what can be called left bourgeois consciousness, which is shared by reformist intellectuals (most of so-called critical social scientists) is based in this. One can see that within limits, the bourgeois class should be fine with trade union consciousness: it is in the long-term interest of the bourgeoisie that workers’ consciousness of their own interests vis a vis bourgeois interests takes the form of trade union consciousness, and not something more than this (i.e. class consciousness proper). In fact, sections of the capitalist class itself are advocating for such things as the Universal Basic Income (ubi), of the type some Marxist class theorists approve of: everyone receiving a minimum amount of income to pay for basic necessities. Class Consciousness Proper or Socialist Political Consciousness If trade union consciousness is about a ‘fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work’, or about pro-worker government regulations, the objective possibility and the necessity of the abolition of wage-slavery, of work as wage-work, itself is mirrored in what is socialist consciousness or class consciousness proper. This consciousness is about the self-knowledge of the working class. It is genuine political class consciousness. It is the consciousness that objective class relations24 are the cause behind major problems that workers and the humanity suffer from (e.g. low wages), and that interests of the working class are irreconcilably opposed to those of the capitalist class, and indeed to the whole of the modern political and social system. Socialist consciousness is characterized by a rejection of the idea that the capitalist class system including its state, can be reformed in any long-term manner and in the genuine interests of the masses, at the national scale and globally, and that that system must therefore be overthrown through (disciplined, democratically organized, mutli-scalar) self-­ emancipatory actions of workers. Class consciousness is the belief of the working class in the objective possibility and necessity of the break-up of the s­ ystem 24

The relations, that is, that, more or less, operate regardless of both subjective consciousness of capitalists and of workers and specific state policies which may be sometimes pro-workers.

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through a proletarian revolution and its replacement with a transitional state that is controlled by the majority. Class consciousness is opposed to stagism (i.e. the fight for democratic and economic reforms first, and for socialism in the distant future) and to the idea of unprincipled alliance with bourgeois parties and movements. Class consciousness rejects localist actions and is for the national level, and ultimately, international level, actions (proletarian internationalism, including during times of wars between bourgeois countries). A fundamental hallmark of class consciousness is the complete distrust of the capitalist state and the capitalist class. Conversely, unreasoning trust in the dominant classes and in the state is a sign of false consciousness. Lenin (1968: 64–65) says in ‘Leftwing’ communism: ‘in a representative of the oppressed and exploited masses, hatred [for them] is truly the “beginning of all wisdom”, the basis of any socialist and communist movement and of its success’. Indeed, ‘A sign of the development of consciousness [proper] is when workers lose “their age-long faith in the permanence of the system”, ceasing to think that the system is a natural and irreplaceable one, and when they ‘sense [if not fully understand] the necessity for collective resistance’ against the system that oppresses them, and when they abandon ‘their slavish submission to the authorities’ (Lenin, 1977a: 114). In class consciousness: the class relation enforced by the state cannot be eliminated until the state is directly and socially regulated, in much the same way as commodity fetishism, as Rubin [1973] says, cannot be removed until labour-power is directly and socially regulated in its own interest. Given the three levels of the objective capitalist class relation (money relation, property relation and value/production relation) discussed in the previChapter 7, class consciousness is the consciousness that all these levels, along with the state, must be overthrown. That is socialist consciousness. In other words: class consciousness of the working class reflects the objective fact that it is against the interest of this class to (a) rely on the sale of its labour power as a commodity for a living, (b) remain alienated from the control over means of production, (c) be exploited by the capitalist class, and (d) be oppressed by the capitalist state. To be conscious of these interests and of the fact that no reconciliation between the capitalist class and the working class is possible and therefore that class relations need be abolished and be replaced by the system of a democratically controlled production with the explicit aim of directly satisfying people’s needs, this is the class consciousness of the workers. Political (socialist or class) consciousness, as different from spontaneous or trade unionist consciousness, occurs when workers learn to ‘respond to all ­cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected’ (Lenin, 1977a: 145; italics added). The working class, which seeks to be the hegemonic class, is the tribune of the people. To study class consciousness

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and to remove barriers to it, Marxists cannot ‘concentrate the attention, observation, and consciousness of the working class exclusively, or even mainly, upon that class only’ (ibid.). Why? Interests and ideas of the working class are internally connected to those of other classes (capitalists, the landed, smallscale producers, etc.). The class consciousness of the working class is a consciousness about the entire class-society, role of different classes, including itself. It is a total consciousness. And it is a totalizing consciousness: that is, consciousness of the contradiction-ridden society as a totality as it is and as it needs transcending. The question now is how does consciousness, including socialist consciousness, develop (in time and over space)? 3

Capitalist Class Relation and Working Class Consciousness

Capitalist Class Consciousness and Working Class Consciousness There is an internal relation between capitalist class society and class consciousness (and other forms of consciousness). It is the capitalist class society that produces certain kinds of consciousness. Indeed, reproduction of capitalist class relations requires not just the concentration of capital in one pole and of property-less people (labour) in another pole, which is compelled to sell its ability to work voluntarily. What is also required is discursive condition for the reproduction of capitalist class relations, a specific form of consciousness on the part of workers. The capitalist class relation produces not only things for profit. It not only reproduces the working class as a class that is constantly reliant on the capitalist class for access to means of production. The capitalist class relation also produces – and requires – a certain mentality of the working class:25 The advance of capitalist production develops a working-class which by education, tradition, habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production is self-evident natural laws. marx, 1977: 899; italics added

Or, as Lenin says: the bourgeoisie maintains itself in power not only by force but, also by virtue of the lack of class-consciousness and organisation, the routinism 25

Of course, this tendency is also counter-acted by other tendencies.

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and downtrodden state of the masses [including both workers and smallscale producers]. lenin, 1917; para 33

The capitalist class society is itself a producer of false consciousness. It necessitates it: in fact, the interests of ruling classes necessitate falsifying the actual class relations (Bensaid, 2002). It is in the interest of ruling classes that working class has false representation of its own interests, that it misidentifies its own interests, that the bourgeois is seen not as a class but as a group of people representing common interests of society, including workers. The empirically existing consciousness of the working class, as it somewhat mirrors what is objectively happening, naturalizes the system, thinking that: it is fine to wake up in the morning, go and work for someone for a wage under someone’s control, and exchange the wage for the things one needs, and that it is acceptable for capitalists to control society’s resources, and that it is normal for people to lose jobs as companies fail, and so on. Such empirically existing working class consciousness is shaped by objective conditions of bourgeois society and by the consciousness of the bourgeoisie (and other non-proletarian classes of bourgeois society). There are various ways in which this happens. Both the capitalist class and the working class do share some ‘common interests’, even if conjuncturally: after all, capitalist accumulation creates jobs and higher wages for some, and when a worker goes to work, she produces wealth for the capitalist class and also gets money to buy her groceries. In fact, the existence of such common interests leads to some workers’ sympathy for their employers: if wages are delayed or not paid, then workers attribute this to the fact that perhaps commodities have not been sold for a profit by their employers because of the adverse market situation, etc. and that therefore the employers have not realized the profit.26 One’s outlook is shaped by the totality of the different aspects of the capitalist class relation. One’s outlook is shaped not only by how one gains access to social wealth (e.g. hiring workers or working for another class as a wagelabourer), but also by the consequences of how that system works (e.g. more income and higher standard of living or less income and penury). The objective fact of the unequal distribution of income and wealth produced by the system (the fact that some people receive more than others) in turn becomes a condition for trade unionist, distributive political consciousness: the idea that 26

It is as if wages for a worker employed today are paid from the sale of the product produced by that worker today! It is as if wages paid today are not from the surplus value produced in the past by the worker.

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more equal distribution of income and wealth is possible through a combination of trade union and governmental activity. Many workers see themselves as consumers of this or that prestige commodity, and this consumer consciousness feeds into trade union consciousness. This is because working under the despotic gaze of capital is an alienating experience, so everything outside of the place of work becomes important. There is a connection between people’s work lives where individuality is denied, and how they think outside of their work lives (German, 1996). When workers have little power to express themselves with respect to all the important decisions in their lives, including in the workplace (and indeed, in relation to the affairs of the state), then being able to consume ‘prestige commodities’ (e.g. designer clothes; highly priced ‘ethnic’ and exotic commodities; facial makeover with the help of a hired image consultant, and so on) and exercising some freedom in personal lives (e.g. freedom to choose one’s intimate partner, to choose where to live or where to take the next vacation) becomes a valuable life experience, a source of meaning in life.27 Given commodity fetishism, workers think of themselves as consumers or as buyers/sellers of commodities. When they go about their daily lives, relations between them (relation between producers of potatoes and producers of coffee) are replaced by relations between commodities: each one wants to get the maximum amount of another commodity in return for her own commodity. This is commodity fetishism. In Capital, Marx also expands his notion of fetishism to include capital fetishism (see Dimoulis and Milios, 2004). He shows that: because it is capital that is able to bring a large number of workers who cooperate and develop their productive abilities and because it is capital which by using the surplus appropriated from workers invests in technology that increases workers’ productive powers and thus the rate of exploitation, workers think – wrongly – that capital is the origin of the surplus and of the development of workers’ productive powers. Workers assign a power to capital which capital palpably lacks. Capital is seen as an investor, a producer, an employer, and even a philanthropist, and so on, rather than as an exploiter, a ‘dis-investor’, as people who fire employees, and so on. As well, the fact that given capitalists see the majority of the working class (all workers except those who are directly employed by them) as consumers, this fact may partly be ­responsible for the view of workers as merely consumers. So workers’ consciousness – false consciousness – is dominantly rooted in the capitalist reality. Further, the ideas of the capitalist and land-owning c­ lasses, 27

That all these privileges are, more or less, denied to the majority of the working class of the world is a different matter.

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which support, and are reflective of, their material interests, become the ruling ideas. These classes are ‘the ruling material force of society’ and therefore they are ‘at the same time its ruling intellectual force’ (Marx and Engels, 1978: 64). The class instinct of the working class makes it receptive to socialist ideas. Yet, it is also subjected to the ‘most widespread (and continuously and diversely revived) bourgeois ideology’ which is older than socialist ideology and which can be disseminated more widely, thanks to the resources of the bourgeois elite and, which therefore ‘spontaneously imposes itself upon the working class to a still greater degree’ (Lenin, 1977a: 123).28 Workers and other non-bourgeois classes remain ‘under the economic, political, and moral leadership of the … rich, the bourgeoisie’ (Lenin, 1977c: 79). As Marx says in Capital volume 3: ‘The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the foremost minds of a ruled class, the more stable and dangerous becomes its rule’ (Marx, 1981: 736). The ruling classes make conscious effort through media and universities to inculcate false consciousness in workers.29 When expressing and acting on class relations may be difficult because of ruling class ideological pressure, members of the exploited class may express their identity in non-class ways; relations between workers and capitalists, and relations between workers, are seen as relations between genders, races, religious groups, etc.30 The capitalist state itself shapes working class consciousness in important ways. The capitalist class makes conscious effort through ideological state apparatuses (Althusser, 2001) to inculcate false consciousness in workers.31 State coercion of various forms as discussed in the last chapter can produce consent to the system: when every time workers launch a militant strike, if the state sends police, many workers may accept the reality of low wages. The so-called democratic freedom can also produce consent to the system: by allowing workers and peasants to decide once every few years which member of the ruling class will rule over them, the state may create trust in the system. Of course, even this form of limited democratic freedom is better than its opposite and is worth fighting for (and therefore class struggle is also a struggle for democratic freedom and not just about the money matter). But capital is also able to often make use of this freedom in its own interest, including when both workers and capitalists combine in defense of liberal democracy vis a vis communists who 28 29 30

31

Here the upper middle class (professors, trade union think-tanks, etc.) plays a crucial role. This is the consciousness that is overall false but that has elements of truth in it. When expressing and acting on class relations may be difficult because of ruling class pressure and because of coercive measures of the capitalist state, many dominated classes may express their identity in non-class ways (religious, racial, etc.). This is the consciousness that is overall false but that has elements of truth in it.

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are automatically seen as being against democracy.32 Trade union political consciousness that demands sops and the state granting the sops can have a corrupting influence on the working class consciousness. The consciousness of the masses is corrupted not just by violence and authoritarian laws of the state (which can coercively curtail the scope of truly radical ideas, and thus produce consent to the system); it is also corrupted by the false friends of the workers who are the liberal bourgeoisie as they divert the masses from their real struggle in a reformist direction, as Lenin argued.33 The capitalist governments can and do drive a wedge between workers’ self-­interest and their ­collective interest, because governments willingly make reforms to gain the support of workers.34 Non-proletarian Masses and Working Class Consciousness In a concrete class society, the working class lives (and works) with small-scale producers. Small-scale producers’ ideas and interests have some common 32

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Consider how even radical elements within the working class have tied themselves to this or that progressive-looking political party (e.g. the Democratic party in the us, the Labour party in the uk, the New democratic party in Canada), and what adverse implication this has had for an independent mobilization of the working class, theoretically and politically. This raises an interesting question we will return to in the last section. ‘If there is a correlation between improved conditions and non-revolutionary consciousness can “mere” propaganda by the party destroy the effect of the “objective” conditions?’ (Wolpe, 1970: 269). Mayer says: ‘it is possible for workers to be deflected from the class interest in the course of movement by the prospect of short-term material gain. When Marx and Lenin believed that such a gap between material and collective interests had appeared, they described it as “corruption”, the decay of class consciousness’ (Mayer, 1993: 639; also Draper, 1978; Kelly, 1988). Consider also how majority of proletarians and semi-proletarians have reposed faith during election times in this or that bourgeois political party’s ability to meet their needs. That there is a major contradiction between the needs of the capitalist class that these parties must, more or less, protect and the needs of the masses, this contradiction eludes the masses. If electing a party in the belief that that party will meet the needs of the masses is a faith, it is clear why the masses will not pose their faith in working class parties. Devoid of any real power over social relations of production, the apparent ability to choose this party over that party or being able to dislodge a party at an election time becomes a source of feeling of empowerment, much like that one has when one is able to choose this or that commodity. What appears to be a feeling of empowerment is indeed the reality of disempowerment: election results are decided on the basis of superficial matters, as all contending parties are stridently in support of bourgeois interests and ideas.

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ground both with the capitalist and working classes and which are therefore deeply contradictory. Such contradictory consciousness cannot but affect working class consciousness. The petty- bourgeoisie (both old and new) are in real life dependent upon, and close to, the bourgeoisie, for they live like masters and not like proletarians (from the point of view of their place in social production, and income and lifestyle, etc.) and follow the bourgeoisie in their outlook. They wish to attain bourgeois status and but cannot do so (easily). Themselves influenced by the bourgeoisie, they influence the working class in turn, with their pettybourgeois political outlook. After all, ‘There is no Chinese Wall between … [the working class] and the other classes’, as Lenin (2004: 109) says in his Imperialism. It is the case that the proletariat coexists with the (old, i.e. propertyowning) petty bourgeoisie. To the extent that the petty bourgeoisie can make money by selling the products of their labour at a higher rate and on the basis of their self-earned private property, they are against the working class. And to the extent that they also sell not their labour but their labour power, that is, to the extent that they work for a wage partly because they do not own/control enough of self-earned private property, they are (potentially) an ally of the working class.35 This inter-penetration of opposite class conditions within the petty-bourgeoisie is the origin of petty-bourgeois vacillation between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and of their flippant attitude towards the question of revolution as the highest form of class struggle and towards Marxism as the highest form of class consciousness. This also applies to the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ (e.g. higher-income strata within the working class who have some control over conditions of their work such as the professoriate and upper echelons of trade union bureaucracy with control over unions funds and with its links to the corridors of power). These vacillating petty bourgeois people ‘surround the proletariat on every side with a petty-bourgeois atmosphere’ (Lenin, 1968: 29). Such an atmosphere, at the level of consciousness, ­‘permeates and corrupts the proletariat’ (ibid.). It ‘constantly causes among the proletariat relapses into petty-bourgeois spinelessness, disunity, individualism, and alternating moods of exaltation and dejection’ (ibid.: 29–30). 35

‘As long as it is possible to trade in grain and to make profit out of [scarcity] …, the peasant will remain (and this will for some time be inevitable under the dictatorship of the proletariat) a semi-working man, a semi-profiteer. As a profiteer he is hostile to …the proletarian state; he is inclined to agree with the bourgeoisie and their faithful lackeys…who stand for freedom to trade in grain. But as a working man, the peasant is a friend of the proletarian state, a most loyal ally of the worker in the struggle against the landowner and against the capitalist’.

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Imperialism and Working Class Consciousness Capitalist class relation, along with its accumulation imperative, expressed globally, becomes imperialism. Imperialism shapes working class consciousness as well. This is a complicated process. There is the possibility that significant parts of the working class in imperialist countries (i.e. upper strata of the proletariat including labour leaders and upper strata of labour aristocracy) can benefit from imperialist super-profits (high monopoly profits),36 or from the fact that jobs and higher wages of these sections of the working class are protected through national government interventions which protect imperialist countries against competition from imperialized countries. The result of all this is opportunist consciousness in the working class movement which prompts members of working class parties to ‘be the representatives of the better-paid workers, who lose touch with the masses, “get along” fairly well under capitalism, and sell their birthright for a mass of pottage, i.e., ­renounce their role as revolutionary leaders of the people against the bourgeoisie’ ­(Lenin, 1977d: 28).37 Thus ‘Imperialism has the tendency to create privileged sections even among the workers, and to detach them from the main proletarian masses’ and to produce reformist thinking (Lenin, 2004: 106). The bribed upper sections of the working class who can form ‘for a time a fairly considerable minority’ of the proletariat, are won to ‘the side of the bourgeoisie of a given industry or given nation against all the others’ (Lenin, 2004: 126). ‘In the civil war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie they inevitably, and in no small numbers take the side of the bourgeoisie’ (Lenin, 2004: 14). These people – social-chauvinists38 – are class enemies of world-proletariat in that ‘they are bourgeois within the working-class movement’. They can help their own bourgeoisie to plunder and oppress small and weak peoples and to fight for the division of the capitalist spoils’.39 The working class people who are bribed, the ‘stratum of bourgeoisfied workers, the “labour aristocracy”, who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and in their entire outlook, serves as the principal prop’ of the reformist tendencies in working class movements, and ‘the principal social (not military) prop of the 36

37 38

39

These profits are super-profits in that they are obtained over and above the profits which capitalists squeeze out of the workers of their own countries. Super-profits are obtained through super-exploitation: paying a wage which is below the value of labour power. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/pref02.htm. The social-chauvinists are socialists in word and chauvinists in deed. They support ‘defence of the fatherland’ in an imperialist war (and above all in the present imperialist war). These sections support imperialism including in its humanitarian and peace-keeping form.

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bourgeoisie’ (Lenin, 2004: 14). For they are ‘the real agents of the bourgeoisie in the labour movement, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class, real channels of reformism and chauvinism’ (ibid.). Imperialist ideology ‘penetrates the working class’ and thus serves the capitalist class (Lenin, 2004: 109). What are actually relations of solidarity among workers of different countries become relations of antagonism among them. So, although imperialism should give rise to world-capitalists and world-workers and international working class consciousness, it often produces nationalist consciousness (see Table 2).40 In imperialist countries, nationalist ideology is used by the states and trade unions41 to oppress workers and peasants of imperialized countries, a process which may benefit a section of the working class, even if temporarily, and thus provide some psychological compensation in the way that racism provides it to white working class. And in the ­imperialized ­countries, imperialism produces nationalist consciousness:42 what is indeed a class relation between capitalists of advanced countries and workers/peasants of Third World countries, as facilitated by Third World capitalists, and governments, is seen as relation between nations, and this ties Third World masses with their so-called ‘national bourgeoisie’. And what is a class relation of ­antagonism between workers and their national capitalists becomes forever a relation of solidarity as peoples of an oppressed nation. So genuine class consciousness reflecting antagonistic class interests between 40

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The idea of supporting one nation in a world war ‘ignores the appraisal of the war as a whole from the point of view of the world bourgeoisie and the world proletariat, that is, it ignores internationalism, and all that remains is miserable and narrow-minded nationalism. My country is being wronged, that is all I care about – that is what this argument amounts to, and that is where its petty-bourgeois, nationalist narrow-mindedness lies. It is the same as if in regard to individual violence, violence against an individual, one were to argue that socialism is opposed to violence and therefore I would rather be a traitor than go to prison’ (Lenin, 1977c: 64). Trade unions typically use economic nationalism to undermine the class-consciousness of workers; after all, it is only when their capitalists operating in their own countries do well that unions can achieve some crumbs and often this requires legislations against free imports and other such measures to insulate the national economies from the global law of value. Workers are told that if pressure is put on a company to pay more than others, that company would be at a competitive disadvantage with other companies. So like companies, unions are cogs in the wheel. This is reflected in the trade union consciousness. In addition to economic handouts. Lenin also warned of the government’s policy of ‘corrupting the workers with nationalist slogans’. Great-Russian chauvinism, anti-Semitism and patriotism were used by the autocracy and the dominant classes to weaken proletarian solidarity and encourage class collaboration for the sake of the nation (Mayer, 1993: 642).

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world capitalists and world workers is replaced by (forms of) nationalist consciousness, including bourgeois nationalism in Third World countries and aggressive war-­mongering and humanitarian imperialism in imperialist countries, and the like.43 H ­ owever, while it is the case that ‘The intensification of antagonisms between imperialist nations for the division of the world [into spheres of geopolitical and economic influence] increases this striving’ (Lenin, 2004: 126; parenthesis added), one ‘must not, however, lose sight of the forces which counteract imperialism in general, and opportunism in particular’ (ibid.: 104), which is partly seen in massive anti-war rallies around the world in recent times. These counteracting forces include the fact that it is the working class people of imperialized and imperialist countries who die in the wars associated with or driven by imperialism and that it is they who pay for the wars in taxes (the money that could be spent on their welfare of the masses in imperialist countries are spent in killing their brothers and sisters in imperialized countries). The actions of the capitalists and capitalist states in some parts of the periphery as junior partners of imperialist states and thus the diversion of a poor country’s resources towards the war effort, etc. in the interest of imperialism from welfare activities in the interest of the masses in those countries, this very fact will no doubt shape the working class consciousness. The foregoing discussion suggests that processes within capitalist social formation inhibit socialist class consciousness. So when/how does socialist or genuine consciousness develop then? To become class conscious, ‘the worker must have a clear picture in his mind of the economic nature and the social and political features of the landlord and the priest, the high state official and the peasant, the student and the vagabond’ (ibid.). But ‘this “clear picture” cannot be obtained from any book’ (ibid.), although knowledge from the book is important. Workers – ordinary workers – develop genuine class consciousness when ‘they learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life’ and when ‘they learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population’ (ibid.; stress added). The worker ‘must grasp the meaning of all the catchwords and sophisms by which each class and each stratum camouflages its selfish strivings and its real “inner workings”’. The worker must know the strong and weak points of these classes and strata and ‘must understand what interests are reflected by certain institutions and certain laws’. For working-class consciousness to become 43

In fact, much of what goes on in the name of Marxism is more or less bourgeois nationalism, which is no un-accompanied by a stagist view of class relations: political and ideological compromise with the national capitalist class is the hallmark of such a view.

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genuine political consciousness it is necessary that workers are systematically trained by the Marxist vanguard to develop such consciousness. Class consciousness can be obtained only from living examples and from exposures that follow close upon what is going on about us at a given moment; upon what is being discussed, in whispers perhaps, by each one in his own way; upon what finds expression in such and such events, in such and such statistics, in such and such court sentences, etc., etc. These comprehensive political exposures are an essential and fundamental condition for training the masses in revolutionary activity, for the development of revolutionary class consciousness. lenin, 1977a: 145–146

The ‘self-knowledge of the working class is indissolubly bound up, not solely with a fully clear theoretical understanding – or rather, not so much with the theoretical, as with the practical, understanding – of the relationships between all the various classes of modern society, acquired through the experience of political life’ (p. 145). The working class movement must learn the history of the revolutionary movement in a country and globally, ‘questions of the government’s home and foreign policy’, ‘questions of the economic evolution’ of a country and world regions and of the world at large, ‘the position of the various classes in modern society’ and so on (p. 153), and here knowledge from books is very important. The working class must develop an original consciousness, and independently of other classes, but fully aware of other classes’ interests and ideas. As mentioned, the working class is affected by petty bourgeois44 and bourgeois consciousness. Yet, the working class, by virtue of its objective conditions, is the first class to develop genuine anti-capitalist class consciousness and bring that consciousness to non-proletarian masses. Workers can help small-scale producers ‘to discard petty-bourgeois slogans, to pass from them as quickly and as easily as possible to socialist slogans.’ (Lenin, 1977c: 83). ­Workers’ objective conditions create their class instinct,45 that propensity to develop – 44

45

As Lenin says in ‘Marxism and Revisionism’: ‘It is quite natural that the petty-bourgeois world-outlook [the idea that we can control some aspects of our lives under capitalism] should again and again crop up in the ranks of the broad workers’ parties. It is quite natural that this should be so and always will be so, right up to the changes of fortune that will take place in the proletarian revolution’ (Lenin, 1977a: 55). ‘Class feeling, the class instinct, is alive and very active’ when, as in the case of the Russian proletariat in 1905, the proletarians ‘regard every partial question of any small group of workers as a general question, as a class affair, and quick as lightning they react to its influence as a unity’, and is ‘simply a result of direct revolutionary mass action’ ­(Luxemburg).

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be receptive to – socialist consciousness. The working class spontaneously gravitates towards socialism because ‘socialist theory [Marxism] reveals the causes of the misery of the working class more profoundly and more correctly than any other theory’, which is why ‘the workers are able to assimilate it so easily’, with the help of Marxist theory as long as ‘this theory does not itself yield to spontaneity’ (Lenin, 1977a: 123; parenthesis added). The social being of the working class exists in two overlapping spheres: (a) relations with employers, which is the sphere of economic struggle, and (b) relationships of all classes and strata to the state (the totality of class society). Class political consciousness – class consciousness proper – can be brought to the workers only from the first sphere, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. There is absolutely no reason to believe, theoretically or empirically, that genuine class consciousness can emerge merely out of a narrow economic basis.46 Agitation on immediate economic concerns can only promote trade union consciousness, i.e., the bourgeois consciousness of the working class. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain genuine class consciousness is the second sphere, which does not exclude agitation for economic demands though. This consciousness, that has to come from outside of the first sphere, ‘would have to be brought to them [i.e. the working class] from without’ (Lenin, 1977a: 114; parenthesis added), i.e. by organic intellectuals,47 although workers, in so far as they are also intellectuals, could

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Luxemburg argued that widespread ‘class feeling’ cannot be manufactured by educational efforts and does not emerge out of routine, isolated struggles. Rather, it is the product of ‘a constant struggle against the existing order.’ Most workers partake in such a ‘constant struggle’ only during a period of political or economic instability and widespread collective protest. Luxemburg’s perspective is distinct from syndicalism in that she emphasized the importance of political education in giving the working-class movement a socialist aim. However, she also emphasized that only a wave of collective struggle can build the class-conscious will which the movement needs in order to oppose capitalism (Langford, 1994: 132). Thinking backward, this point once again suggests that class is more than about merely economic matters, the matters that concern labour market or the production sphere. Marx and Engels contributed to this consciousness as did Lenin and Trotsky and many others: If the proletariat has a communist class consciousness and if without that it is not proletariat, why would this be necessary? Engels wrote later, in his work ‘On the History of the Communist League’: ‘We were both of us already deeply involved in the political movement, and possessed a certain following in the educated world, especially of Western Germany, and abundant contact with the organised proletariat. It was our duty to provide a scientific foundation for our view, but it was equally important for us to win over the European and in the first place the German proletariat to our conviction’ (Engels, 1885; para 21). Consider also Engels’ assessment of Marx (in his speech at Marx’s funeral):

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produce this consciousness, and help win the consent of the majority to the idea and practice of revolutionary rupture by clarifying proletarian minds, by emancipating them from the influence of the bourgeoisie.48 Because masses have unreasoning trust, ‘propaganda [educative] work is revolutionary’, which ‘by persuasion’, shows ‘lessons of their own day to day experience’, as Lenin stresses in his April Theses (1977b: 42; parenthesis added). Once again, given the objective conditions under which the working class lives and works, it has the power to develop class consciousness (as opposed to trade union consciousness), but this power, in concrete circumstances, is shaped/counter-acted by bourgeois consciousness and by the objective conditions not conductive to working class consciousness, which is why (a) working class consciousness develops unevenly over time and space and (b) sometimes it appears to develop not at all and takes forms which are anything but working class anti-capitalist consciousness. The development of class consciousness is a historical process. It happens over time. Progress from the workers’ conditions to class consciousness involves not one but many steps (see Figure 20), each of which constitutes a real problem of achievement for some section of the working class (Ollman, 1979). What we find then is that most workers have climbed a few of these steps (enough to complain), that some have scaled most of them (enough to vote for working-class candidates), but that relatively few have managed to ascend to the top (Ollman, 1979). Relatively few have managed to develop consciousness of the totality of the social-political order.

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‘For Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation’ (Engels, 1883; para 7; italics added). ‘This does not mean, of course, that the workers have no part in creating such an ideology. They take part, however, not as workers, but as socialist theoreticians… in other words, they take part only when they are able, and to the extent that they are able, more or less, to acquire the knowledge of their age and develop that knowledge. But in order that working men may succeed in this more often, every effort must be made to raise the level of the consciousness of the workers in general; it is necessary that the workers do not confine themselves to the artificially restricted limits of “literature for workers” but that they learn to an increasing degree to master general literature. It would be even truer to say “are not confined”, instead of “do not confine themselves”, because the workers themselves wish to read and do read all that is written for the intelligentsia, and only a few (bad) intellectuals believe that it is enough “for workers” to be told a few things about factory conditions and to have repeated to them over and over again what has long been known’ (Lenin, 1977a: 121).

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The fact of the matter is quite precisely this. It is only the working class as a class, given its objective conditions, that can develop anti-capitalist, socialist, class consciousness, although given members of this class at a given time and place do not possess this. No other class can, although given members of other classes, including the capitalist class itself, can and do. But the fact of the matter is also that the proletariat is, and is not, a homogeneous mass. From one vantage point the working class is one homogeneous entity, like capital-as-capital: it is all those who have to sell themselves a bit by bit, who have no, or limited, control over means of production and who are exploited, whether they are fed better or not from time to time. But from another angle, the working class is not a homogenous mass. It is deeply stratified into different groups of workers, with different levels of consciousness. This is associated with the fact that, as mentioned, class consciousness of the working class is an uneven process, in terms of time and place. The working class is stratified by means of objective processes in capitalist society, and this has an implication for stratification on the basis of consciousness. There are two forms of stratification. The working class formation is an objective historical process that shapes the biography of a worker, her social being and her consciousness.49 It is worth repeating the relevant points made in Chapter 7. Working class consciousness will be influenced by whether workers are descendants of working class ­families or first time workers, whether they work in large factories where ­conditions of working and living are conducive to an elementary class consciousness, whether they live in big cities with their geographical ­concentration of several generations of trade-union organisation and political and cultural education behind them, or whether they are from an imperialist or imperialized country.50 Working class consciousness is also affected by whether workers are (international) migrants, how well or badly they live (level of wages and employment security), and by the level of exposure to regional and national traditions of sexism, racism, patriarchy, etc. If one adds to all these historical and structural differences the various personal abilities of each wage worker – not just differences in intelligence and ability to generalise from immediate experiences, but differences in the amount of energy, strength of character: combatively and self-assurance too – then one understands that the stratification of the 49 50

This paragraph is partly based on Mandel (1970a; para 10). Class consciousness can get blurred by nationalist consciousness in both types of countries.

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working class into various layers, depending on the degree of class consciousness, is an inevitable phenomenon in the history of the working class itself. It is this historical process of becoming a class which, at a given point in time, is reflected in the various degrees of consciousness within the class. mandel, 1970a; para 10

Consciousness of the working class is shaped by wider and complex mechanisms of how capitalist society and the state work (e.g. dull economic compulsion, commodity fetishism, reformist concessions, imperialism, etc.), the mechanisms to which all workers are more or less subjected to, along with the fact of workers’ resistance, non-proletarian class interests, and the intervention of Marxist theory. The general processes that impact workers’ lives interact with the fact that workers themselves live and work in geographically and historically different conditions as just mentioned above, and such interaction produces stratification among them in terms of their consciousness. The working class, which is objectively stratified, as discussed in Chapter 7, is also stratified into what can be called consciousness strata: some are more developed than others in terms of consciousness, and therefore, some have more dedication, will to sacrifice, etc. than others. It is futile to imagine that the entire working class is, and will be ever, class conscious at a given point in time. A majority have to have that consciousness for a revolution to happen, and this Marxist theory/practice aims to achieve. In terms of consciousness, one needs to think about the working class – which is defined on the basis of the objective relations of exchange, property and exploitation – in terms of three categories, or consciousness strata. For a start, the broad masses develop class consciousness only through action, or more through action than through propaganda and theoretical education. ‘Yet although the masses learn only through action, all actions do not necessarily lead to a mass acquisition of revolutionary class consciousness’ (Mandel, 1970c; para 3). ‘Actions around immediately realisable economic and political goals that can be completely achieved within the framework of the capitalist social order’, i.e. trade union type actions, ‘do not produce revolutionary class consciousness’ (ibid.).51

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‘The development of revolutionary class consciousness among the broad masses is possible only if they accumulate experiences of struggles that are not only limited to the winning of partial demands within the framework of capitalism. The gradual injection of these demands into mass struggles can come about only through the efforts of a broad

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The two other categories are: advanced workers and the revolutionary nuclei. Advanced workers are class conscious workers, who are ‘already engaging in more than sporadic struggles’ and who have ‘already reached a first level of organisation (the proletarian vanguard in the broad sense of the word)’ (Mandel, 1970a; para 6). They, generally, live and work in objective conditions which are conductive to the formation of class consciousness, the conditions which are not available to all workers. They are more likely to be working in large-scale enterprises located in big cities, with a certain level of formal and political education, and with working class family background. Advanced workers are also likely to have experienced struggles against capitalist exploitation and social oppression, and they tend to have a combative personality. However, ‘advanced workers are driven to continuous organisation and growing class consciousness less by theory, science, or an intellectual grasp of the social whole than by the practical knowledge acquired in struggle’. Since the struggle shows to them that ‘the dissolving of the resistance funds after each strike damages the effectiveness of the strike and the working sums in hand, attempts are made to go over to the permanent strike fund’. Similarly, ‘Since experience shows an occasional leaflet to have less effect than a regular newspaper, the workers press is born’ (Mandel, 1970b; para 3).52 The revolutionary nuclei (organisation) consists of workers and intellectuals who participate in revolutionary activities and are at least partially ­educated in Marxism. The revolutionary vanguard can fulfil its role in educating advanced workers in Marxist consciousness through theoretical, propagandistic and literary activity if such activity ‘corresponds to the needs of the advanced workers’ (Mandel, 1970c; para 8). ‘At the same time, this kind of activity must be linked to activity of a practical nature and to a political perspective’, that is informed by Marxism, ‘thus enhancing the credibility of both the revolutionary strategy and the organisation putting it forward’ (ibid.). Each of the three layers of the working class (mass of workers; advanced workers and revolutionary nuclei or vanguard, see Figure 21) require their own methods of instruction, goes through its own learning process and needs to

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layer of advanced workers who are closely linked to the masses and who disseminate and publicise these demands’ (Mandel, 1970c; para 6). ‘Although revolutionary class consciousness among the broad masses develops only out of the experience of objectively revolutionary struggle, among advanced workers it flows from the experience of life, work and struggle in general. These experiences do not necessarily need to be revolutionary at all. From the daily experiences of class conflict, these advanced workers draw the elementary conclusions about the need for class solidarity, class action and class organisation’ (Mandel, 1970c; para 7).

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Broad masses

The entire working class

Advanced workers (class conscious workers) Revolutionary nuclei

Figure 21  Three Strata of the working class on the basis of consciousness

have a special form of communication with the class as a whole and with the realm of theoretical production. The historical role of the revolutionary vanguard party Lenin had in mind can be summed up as that of jointly expressing these three forms of pedagogy (Mandel, 1970b; para 2). 4

Class Consciousness, Objectivism and Workers’ Struggle: Somegeneral Considerations

Based on the foregoing discussion it is now possible to reflect, more ­generally, on the relation between objective conditions in capitalist society and consciousness and to underscore the importance of a certain form of consciousness (consciousness embodied in Marxist theory) in combating a certain other form consciousness (bourgeois consciousness), within the limits set by objective conditions. These limits are important. Mere propaganda or theorizing in abstraction from consideration of these limits is useless. First of all, workers’ interest cannot be what one imagines them to be. It is futile to think about workers’ interests apart from the objective conditions under which they work and live. So Mouffe (1983: 21) is mistaken to think that ‘it is in ideology and through politics that interests are defined’, and that interests cannot ‘exist prior to the discourse in which they are formulated and articulated’. In fact, when workers struggle, they may not always be fully conscious

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of their interests but they know from experience that not being able to go to work is not in their interest. They do not need Mouffe’s or anyone’s discourse to tell them that. Workers do not take part in resistance because of, or through, a ­‘discourse’ which explicitly rejects capitalism in political and ideological terms. It is possible to argue that objective conditions matter but be hyper optimist or hyper pessimist about the development of workers’ consciousness (as discussed in Chapter 6). ­Hyper-optimism results when one thinks that: objective conditions will inevitably produce class consciousness. Workers’ objective interests ‘bring them into the scope of its consciousness, i.e., to make the realisation of its objective interests into its subjective interest’ (Trotsky quoted in Mandel, 1970b; para 19).53 This view, taken in itself, can potentially encourage fatalism. In fact, commenting on this, Mandel says: ‘Today it is easy to see what a naively fatalistic optimism was concealed in this inadequate analysis’. One must distinguish between ‘Immediate interests’ from ‘historical interests’ which involve ‘the unravelling of the most complex questions of political tactics and strategy’. To hope that the proletariat will ‘eventually’ recognise its historical interests – that it will achieve class consciousness – seems rather shallow’ when we think about ‘the historical catastrophes that have arisen because, in the absence of an adequate revolutionary leadership, the proletariat was not even able to accomplish the revolutionary tasks of the here and now, even if objective conditions are present’ (ibid.).54

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One can say that this kind of optimism has a logical basis: by virtue of its numerical mass and geographical concentration (especially at the level of the city or larger geographical regions), strategic economic role (ultimately, it alone creates value and profit), and common experiences of exploitation, injustice, and collective resistance, the proletariat will over time develop class consciousness. ‘The same naive optimism is even more strikingly manifested in the following passage from the same polemic: The revolutionary social democrat is convinced not only of the inevitable (!) growth of the political party of the proletariat, but also of the inevitable (!) victory of the ideas of revolutionary socialism within this party. The first proof lies in the fact that the development of bourgeois society spontaneously leads the proletariat to politically demarcate itself; the second in the fact that the objective tendencies and the tactical problems of this demarcation find their best, fullest and deepest expression in revolutionary socialism, i.e., Marxism’ (Mandel, 1970b; para 20). Mandel (ibid.; para 21) says that ‘Following the outbreak of the Russian revolution in 1917, Trotsky fully adopted Lenin’s analysis of the formation of proletarian class consciousness and hence also Lenin’s theory of organisation, and until his death he stubbornly defended them against all sceptics and arch-pessimists (who claimed to detect in them the “embryo” of Stalinism)’.

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Actually, Trotsky himself argues against objectivism, in The Third International after Lenin. By creating certain objective conditions, capitalism compels the masses to revolt, he says. But does our historical evaluation of the objective role of capitalism as a whole or of certain actions of the bourgeoisie in particular, become a substitute for our active class revolutionary attitude toward capitalism or toward the actions of the bourgeoisie? Opportunist policies have always been based on this kind of non-dialectical, conservative, tail-endist ‘objectivism.’ Marxism on the contrary invariably taught that the revolutionary consequences of one or another act of the bourgeoisie, to which it is compelled by its position, will be fuller, more decisive, less doubtful, and firmer, the more independent the proletarian vanguard will be in relation to the bourgeoisie, the less it will be inclined to place its fingers between the jaws of the bourgeoisie, to see it in bright colors, to over-estimate its revolutionary spirit or its readiness for a ‘united front’ and for a struggle against imperialism. trotsky, 1996: 201–202

And then there is hyper-pessimism. Objective conditions in capitalist class society impede class consciousness. And this fact reinforced by the fact that the dominant ideology of capitalist society is the ideology of the capitalist class which keeps the exploited class subordinated through its ideas, can lead to hyper-pessimism.55 In this view, class consciousness is impossible if it is the case: that ‘all means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination and exploitation of [the direct] producers [i.e. worker]; that ‘they distort [them] into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into a torment, they alienate from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process’ and so on and thus that with ‘Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole’ (Marx, 1977: 799). Indeed, if the working masses are under such a massive yoke, then surely its social being

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Some may argue that: if the ruling class can manipulate the minds of the working class perpetually, there is surely no hope for the development of a counter-consciousness on the part of the working class. On this topic, see: Marcuse (1971); Gorz (1982); Mouffe (1983); Popper (1966); Touraine et al. (1987); and Mann (1973).

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– the social situation – will impede class consciousness. When conditions are so massive, how is it that the proletariat will historically be ‘compelled’ to develop class consciousness which would be necessary to abolish class regardless of what the ‘proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, regards as its aim’, it ‘in according with this being’?56 One needs to be critical of objectivism whether it leads to hyper optimism or hyper-pessimism. Just because the objective reality exists, that does not necessarily mean people understand it adequately. Mere sense perception or experience of life – whether it is conducive to class consciousness or not – is no guarantee for a proper understanding of the reality, although our understanding is rooted in – and it emerges from – such experience. The Marxist approach must be dialectical-­materialist. While the objectivist ‘speaks of the necessity of a given historical process’, of the ‘insurmountable historical tendencies’, and ‘runs the risk of becoming an apologist for these’, a materialist takes a dialectical approach. The materialist ‘gives an exact picture of the given socialeconomic formation and of the antagonistic [class] relations to which it gives rise’, ‘speaks of the class which “directs” the given economic system’, and determines the necessity of historical processes. The materialist would ‘point to the existence of certain classes, which determine the content of the given system and preclude the possibility of any solution except by the action of the ­producers themselves’, and ‘enjoins the direct and open adoption of the standpoint of a definite social group in any assessment of events’ (Lenin, 1960: 400–401). And this is the standpoint of the working class (and semi-proletarians). This standpoint is a crucial ingredient in the development of class consciousness. If objective conditions exist independently of consciousness, then the ­question is: what role does consciousness play in the changing of objective conditions. One may answer by saying this: given the material conditions’ internal contradictions, how new things can happen can be quickened because of theory (correct consciousness). This theory is one that correctly reflects the objective conditions (of the capitalist class society), in terms of their past, present and future direction of change, and therefore that can ­advance masses’ consciousness and make them aware of what they can do to obtain the changes in the objective conditions in their own interest. To say that the emergence of genuine class consciousness (and the socialist movement) has an objective foundation does not diminish the need for the the struggle to develop that

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See Lukacs (1970) and his self-criticisms. Fracchia (2013) talks about Lukacs pessimistic view of the proletariat ever possessing proper class consciousness.

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consciousness.57,58 Indeed, the clarification of the objective basis of socialism is itself a critical component of the theoretical education/training of the working class and continued learning on the part of the vanguard. Objective conditions of the capitalist class relation and attendant accumulation processes are not easy to understand. There are two reasons. One is more philosophical: if capitalist society exists at the level of capitalist class relations/ structures and mechanisms, and the at level of effects and experiences, then consciousness of capitalist society has to exist at these levels. Correspondingly, there is consciousness with respect to each of these levels. It is often the case that what is real and what appears to be the real are not the same. There is often a contradiction. While capital-labour exchange appears to be based on equality, it is in fact based on inequality: labour surrenders unpaid labour every day when she goes to work. Because the reality is not the same as the ways in which it is manifested, there is a need for deeper scientific intervention, scientific labour, which most workers as workers are not usually able to perform. Thus: we may be able to conceptualize class consciousness and spontaneous consciousness in a slightly more precise manner than the way they have been thus far (including in Lenin’s work). The capitalist class relation operates at different ontological levels. The totality of capitalist class relation (exchange relation, property relation and value relation) and mechanisms (e. g. multiple methods of exploitation in the hidden abode of production, fetishistic relations that characterize the commodity, competition, etc.) produces specific effects, as discussed in Chapter 7 (e.g. low wages, unemployment, abuse at work, police coercion during strikes, etc.). This totality takes specific ‘historically-determinate’ forms (e.g. neoliberal-capitalism or imperialist/globalized capitalism) or such other or such other ‘conjunctural’ forms as a capitalism which is more or less racist, more or less ­patriarchal, etc. The consciousness of the working class with respect to the totality of the capitalist relation and its underlying mechanisms of society is class consciousness. Its consciousness in relation to the effects of these mechanisms and to the ways/ 57

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In fact, the struggle to produce a classless society is a dual struggle: the struggle against the consciousness that helps reproduce the current society, and the struggle to develop a new consciousness that is supportive of such a new society (e.g. a consciousness of solidarity, etc.). The degree of development of theoretical clarification and consciousness that is possible depends on the degree of development of productive forces, and social relations and their contradiction between the two; it is difficult to imagine socialism on the basis of contradiction between slaves and save owners and on the basis of contradiction between slavery and development of productive forces under slavery.

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forms in which the capitalist relation is actually reproduced/experienced (e.g. a neoliberal capitalism, a racist capitalism) pertain to a consciousness which is more or less spontaneous, in that it focusses on the effects and forms of the capitalist class relation and not on the basic class relation itself.59 In possessing a spontaneous consciousness, workers mistake the form for the content, or they mistake the effects (symptoms) for the actual underlying mechanisms that conuncturally produce those effects (e.g. low wages, racism, etc.). What is actually the capitalist class relation appears in their minds to be merely, for example, a less regulated capitalism (e.g. neoliberalism); or a capitalism that is imperialistic or marked by dispossession of small-scale producers; or a capitalism dominated by big multi-national companies; or a semi-feudal capitalism, and so on. What is actually the basic relation between capitalists and workers appears as a relation between groups that are not defined on the basis of such relation: genders, races, religions, castes, nations, locations, classes other than capitalists and workers, etc. As a result of the conflation of different ontological levels of the totality of capitalist class-society, the working class makes use of its spontaneous form of consciousness to secure its own material and cultural reproduction within the limits of the capitalist class relation, and which is why this form of consciousness comes to have some material significance. To summarize the point made above: the capitalist class relation produces certain specific effects (e.g. low wages, etc.) and is expressed in specific conjunctural forms of capitalist class relation (e.g. neoliberal capitalism; a capitalism that is imperialist; a capitalism that is racist or that oppresses women; a capitalism that is based on low wages, and so on). Consciousness that focusses on the capitalist class relation itself, a consciousness that mirrors the fact that that relation itself has to be transcended, is class consciousness. A consciousness that focusses on the effects of the operation of the capitalist class relation and on the conjunctural forms that the capitalist class relation takes, is the spontaneous consciousness. It mirrors the fact that it is merely the effects and the forms that need to be changed. Experience of the effects of the operation of relations and mechanisms as refracted through some commonsensical ideas, or ideas of the bourgeois class (or indeed ideas of pre-capitalist

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Often frustration with effects of exploitation and scarcity of jobs and lack of decent living standards and social wage etc. is expressed in the form of rivalry between male and female workers and black and white workers. It is also often the case that the interests of privileged layers from the female gender and from racial minorities – e.g. blacks and women who are middle class or who are from the entrepreneurial class – represent their interests as interest of the entire black community or of all women. And ordinary members of the working class who are blacks and women accept such ideas.

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­societies) that workers have internalized as commons sense, produces spontaneous consciousness. The spontaneous consciousness – the boundary between spontaneous consciousness this and class consciousness is not one strict clear-cut line but a zone – is something one can achieve without a lot of hard intellectual labour. Hard intellectual labour is necessary to go u ­ nderneath the surface reality, and to develop a class consciousness. Such consciousness, which requires the hard labour of reflection on the material conditions and on the struggles around these, produces class or socialist consciousness, according to which: class interests are antagonistic and irreconcilable and must be overthrown through class struggle in order to make way for efforts to be made towards classlessness. Of course, class consciousness will include elements of what is called spontaneous consciousness. Another reason why objective conditions are not easily accessible to human consciousness is empirical. This point refers to the social-geographical complexity, not of the capitalist class relation as such but of the modern capitalist world, including the trans-national production and exchange, the intricate system of financial capital, and so on. Indeed, capitalists themselves hire specialists to understand these things for them.60 The objective world of the capitalist class relation consists of: a) the stratified nature of the reality as such (the contradiction between the surface appearance and the underlying reality) and b) the immense complexity of modern capitalist class society as it exists concretely, a form of society where the contradiction between surface appearance and the reality is perhaps greater than in any other class society. This means that theory plays a crucial role in understanding the objective conditions which require change. And it is not any theory. It is Marxism that is the only theory can help remove the veil over the objective reality more than any other competing theory. That is why the intellectuals (or the workers-intellectuals) play a key role in the development of class consciousness. ‘For only systematic intellectual activity can draw the consequences of practice and systematize it in such a way that consciousness becomes effective consciousness on the part of the individuals of the class’ (Dos Santos, 1970: 186). Marxism transforms elementary or spontaneous consciousness into class consciousness, a Marxism which is ‘the only correct 60

For ordinary workers it is indeed difficult to understand properly if at all ‘the vast network of global economic interconnections of which their own job is a minute element’, ‘the immensely complex processes of modern transnational production and exchange of goods and services’ and how such a system affects one’s work and life, and ‘the mysteries of international capitalist finance’ and currency transactions across the globe, and so on (North, 2007: 59).

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r­evolutionary theory’. Marxist theory is achieved through prolonged ‘agony’, over decades of ‘unparalleled torment and sacrifice, of unparalleled revolutionary heroism, incredible energy, devoted searching, study, practical trial [or testing in practice], disappointment, verification and comparison with’ objective conditions and class struggle in different parts of the world, more or less developed (Lenin, 1968: 11). Once again, ‘Experience in struggle is by no means sufficient for clarity on the tasks of a broad pre-revolutionary, or even a revolutionary, mass struggle to be attained’. (Mandel, 1970b; para 13). These tasks ‘can be grasped only by means of a comprehensive analysis of the overall social development, of the historical position achieved by the capitalist mode of production and its internal contradictions, and of the national and international relationship of forces between classes’ (ibid.).61 The science and politics of Marxism would be superfluous if the objectively existing proletariat was also a class conscious proletariat. Precisely because there is a gap between the objective and subjective conditions of the proletariat, i.e. between what it has the powers to do/know and what it actually does/ knows, that there is a need for Marxism, which embodies the highest form of consciousness of the proletarians.62 The role of Marxist i­ ntellectuals cannot be over-emphasized in the production and dissemination of ‘political knowledge’ among workers, as opposed to knowledge about merely factory conditions here or there, that helps workers advance ‘concrete demands that promise palpable results’ (Lenin, 1977a: 148). Affecting the voice of a knowledge-hungry worker, Lenin makes this demand on the Marxist intellectual:

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Dialectics of class consciousness and struggle is explored in the next chapter. Marxist theory, must, of course, maintain a relative distance from the objective conditions and struggle and does so in a dialectical way. A Marxist cannot justify any statement just because it supports the interests and struggles of the proletariat for power. An underlying Marxist belief is that the commitment to truth or practical adequacy will serve the interests of the proletariat. ‘The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true (Lenin, 1977a: 44). It is not true because it is omnipotent, i.e. because it supports the power of the proletariat. Marxism can correctly mirror the reality, i.e. class contradictions and class struggle that are really happening in the world. Therefore, Marxism can declare that ‘there can be no “impartial” social science in a society based on class struggle’ and while ‘In one way or another, all official and liberal science defends wage-slavery’, Marxism alone ‘has declared relentless war on that slavery’. Marxism firmly believes that ‘To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as foolishly naïve as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers’ wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital’ (ibid.).

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You intellectuals can acquire this knowledge [i.e. political knowledge], and it is your duty to bring it to us in a hundred- and a thousand-fold greater measure than you’ve done to now; and you must bring it to us, not only in the form of discussion, pamphlets, and articles (which very often – pardon our frankness – are rather dull), but precisely in the form of vivid exposures of what our government and our governing classes are doing at this very moment in all spheres of life’ (ibid.: 149). Of course, workers should engage in economic struggles, and they do, and often without help from Marxists. Correspondingly, often they possess the ­consciousness that allows them to to challenge the capitalist class and to obtain some concessions, and such form of consciousness is an advance over the consciousness which says that that is not even possible. But the fixation on this form of struggle and expecting that class consciousness will inevitably develop on the basis of such struggles, this fixation is harmful from the standpoint of the development of socialist consciousness. The role of Marxists ‘is not exhausted by political agitation on an economic basis’. In fact, ‘their task is to convert trade-unionist politics’ into a political struggle to end wage-slavery, ‘to utilise the sparks of political consciousness which the economic struggle generates among the workers, for the purpose of raising the workers to the level of [communist] consciousness’ (Lenin, 1977a: 148). To repeat: Marxism as an expression of the highest degree in the development of international-proletarian social consciousness in its class form. Acquiring such a consciousness is a social process in the sense that it is shaped by forces independent of one’s will. It is also an individual process: ‘only through an individual process of selection that the best, most experienced, the most intelligent and the most combative members of the proletariat are able to directly and independently acquire this class consciousness in its most potent form’ (Mandel, 1970a; para 12). This is also how Marxist knowledge ‘becomes accessible to other social classes and layers (above all, the revolutionary intelligentsia and the students)’ (ibid.). It is true that: Marxism is a product of ‘the actual development of bourgeois society and of the class struggle’ that inevitably unfolds within it. Indeed: There is an inextricable tie between the collective, historical experience of the working class in struggle and its scientific working out of Marxism as collective, historical class consciousness in its most potent form. But to maintain that scientific socialism is an historical product of the proletarian class struggle is not to say that all or even most members of this class can, with greater or lesser ease, reproduce this knowledge. Marxism

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is not an automatic product of the class struggle and class experience but a result of scientific, theoretical production. Such an assimilation is made possible only through participation in that process of production; and this process is by definition an individual one, even though it is only made possible through the development social forces of production and class contradictions under capitalism. mandel, 1970a; para 13

The success or failure of the Marxist intervention – the potential/actual impact of Marxist intellectual or a party – can be gaged partly on the basis of whether this task is achieved. 5

‘Marxist Elitism’ and Class Consciousness

The idea advanced by Lenin that without active intervention of Marxist theory to be brought to workers by a vanguard, the mass of workers will develop what is merely trade union consciousness, has been dubbed elitist and arrogant. Neil Harding writes (1996: 174): Leninism is wholly a child of Marxism in respect to the basic foundations of its theory of the party. It bases itself on a similar claim to a special sort of knowledge and a similar arrogant contention that the proletarian cause cannot be discovered merely by taking a poll among workers. Harding goes on to say: The privileged role allotted to the socialist intelligentsia in organizing and articulating the grievances of the proletariat and leading their political struggle, far from being a Leninist deviation from Marxism, is central to the arrogance of Marxism as a whole. Marx (and all subsequent Marxists) had to assert that he had a more profound awareness of the long-term interests and objectives of the proletariat than any proletarian, or group of proletarians could themselves possess (ibid.: 34; see also p. 13; p. 173). Tony Cliff (1975; para 6) accuses Lenin of having overemphasized ‘the difference between spontaneity and consciousness’, and goes on to say: The logic of the mechanical juxtaposition of spontaneity and consciousness was the complete separation of the party from the actual elements

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of working-class leadership that had already risen in the struggle. It assumed that the party had answers to all the questions that spontaneous struggle might bring forth.63 Wolpe (1970) says: the inadequacy of Lenin’s treatment [of working class consciousness] appears from the following argument: It is clear from his whole attack upon spontaneity that Lenin rejected the notion that consciousness is so determined by the mode and conditions of production that ideological factors, the conscious element, can have no effect (p. 269). In other words, for Lenin, consciousness-raising effort is important. But then if workers can choose between socialist and bourgeois consciousness/ideology, which one will they chose and why, asks Wolpe. He answers by saying that: Lenin emphasizes that bourgeois ideology will dominate because there is a spontaneous tendency for the working class to adopt it: ‘…bourgeois ideology spontaneously imposes itself upon the working class....’ (p. 269). Such a view ‘accords with the thesis that the working-class, “left to itself” will engage only in an economic struggle’. Wolpe writes that according to Lenin, ‘if the working-class is spontaneously led’ by the force of objective conditions, that is, by the need to improve their objective conditions within the system: ‘only into a trade union struggle of a limited, reformist type, then presumably bourgeois ideology which is reflected and inherent in this action also emerges spontaneously’ (p. 269; italics added). But ‘At the same time, …. and in contradiction to the above’, says Wolpe: Lenin asserts that the objective conditions of the workers is a predisposing factor to the adoption of revolutionary consciousness. ‘It is often said that the working-class spontaneously gravitates towards socialism. This is perfectly true in the sense that socialist theory measures the causes of misery of the working-class more profoundly and more correctly than any other theory, and for that reason the workers are able to assimilate it so easily....’ (270) It then follows that: 63

https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1975/lenin1/chap04.htm.

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workers are in a given objective situation which is equally conducive to two completely opposing ideologies. This, indeed, seems to be the logical outcome of the attack on spontaneity. But if this is so then the objective conditions themselves appear to have become irrelevant to Lenin’s argument (ibid.: 270). And ‘If… the objective conditions are to be discounted, what other factors are relevant?’ asks Wolpe (p. 270). ‘Here, Lenin appears to give, in general, great weight to propaganda’. (p. 270). So: while in regard to proletarian consciousness, Lenin contended that mere propaganda was not enough, in the case of bourgeois ideology, he asserted that its overpowering weight was sufficient to lead to its domination: ‘But why…does the spontaneous movement…lead to the domination of bourgeois ideology? For the simple reason that bourgeois ideology is far older in origin than socialist ideology, that it is more fully developed, and that it has at its disposal immeasurably more means of dissemination.’ Since none of these factors, either singly or in combination, are alone, as a matter of empirical fact, always sufficient for the ‘success’ of an ideology, we still require to have the appropriate conditions specified. This Lenin failed to do. (ibid.: 270)64 In other words, Wolpe’s accusation against Lenin appears to be this: Lenin thinks that either objective conditions are important or propaganda and theoretical knowledge are important, in shaping class consciousness. having rejected the view that the mode of production creates, directly, revolutionary consciousness, [Lenin] assigned a determining role to 64

Even Shandro (1995) thinks that: ‘Lenin’s most accessible explanation of bourgeois ideological domination, “that bourgeois ideology is far older in origin than socialist ideology, that it is more fully developed, and that it has at its disposal immeasurably more means of dissemination”... is clearly inadequate’. Shandro adds: such an approach ‘suggests a mechanistic account of proletarian consciousness as a simple receptacle for ideas produced by bourgeois or socialist intellectuals and an idealistic agenda for change through the dissemination of socialist ideology’. But if, as Lenin claims, spontaneous proletarian struggle [and consciousness] is the embryo of socialist consciousness, further explanation is required of how bourgeois ideology can gain a grip in the consciousness of workers. A full explanation must situate the terms of the problem (spontaneity/­consciousness; bourgeois spontaneity/socialist spontaneity) within a dynamic of struggle, and thereby relativize them’ (281–282).

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i­deology by means of, or through, political action of the party. But in so doing he made the objective conditions irrelevant altogether and, therefore, necessarily had to treat the ideological factors in isolation from them (p. 270). Cohen and Moody (1998) have argued for ‘a reversal of standard left [Leninist] conceptions of socialist politics’. They argue against the idea that the working class movement should proceed ‘from a carefully-worked out, analytically correct programme to the dissemination of such analysis to the masses’. They argue for a ‘shift in perspective’ that would ‘abandon the pursuit of programmatic rectitude in favour of a focus on, and engagement with, existing levels of working class consciousness and conflict’ (p. 119; italics added). They are for: a consistent orientation towards the everyday ‘economistic’ demands and actions of a working class which may exhibit, for principled socialists, a discomfiting conservatism on many issues, or at least the kind of gulf between its own conceptions and those of middle-class socialism…. Even given such difficulties, the kind of ‘sacrifice’ of principles and programme required of socialists in starting from where the working class is, rather than where they might like it to be, is in our view indispensable if existing patterns of working class resistance are to realise their objective potential and meaning. Any such process requires from socialists the ability to see, and draw out, the political and class implications of what may appear on the face of it to be decidedly ‘non-political’ struggles. cohen and moody, 1998: 119–120

They say that: ‘the conception of “class for itself” does not have to be confined to those historical moments when the working class consciously recognises its historic mission at the wholly political level of state power’. They advance a concept of class that ‘refers to a transitional dynamic, a pull through the ­materially-based necessity of basic struggles for what are objectively class interests towards the beginnings of a conscious, subjective awareness of class identity’ (Cohen and Moody, 1988: 107).65 In other words: economic struggle 65

They add that: ‘the key to socialist advance lies in that most despised and least acknowledged expression of “socialism from below”, basic material class struggles’. Further: ‘The persistence of highly conflictual economic struggles entered into by workers whose subjective consciousness may be profoundly reformist, not to say conservative, continues to …. demonstrate…a transformative potential in terms of both consciousness and praxis’ (p. 108).

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and without a larger vision (analytically correct programme reflecting class consciousness of advanced workers) is what is needed to develop consciousness. This is just the opposite of Lenin’s theory of consciousness. A similar implied criticism of Leninist idea that conscious Marxist theoretical intervention is necessary is advanced by McCall (2008). ‘As workers confront capital in the workplace they learn of the need for cooperation to further their needs. Through the very process of “struggle” against capital, workers become “conscious” of the systemic nature of inequality and exploitation. Ultimately, with this transformation comes a sense of political direction, i.e., that the system of structured inequality, necessary to preserve capital, must be overthrown, and a fundamentally different system put in its place’ (McCall, 2008: 158). The ideas of McCall, Cohen and Moody, Cliff, Harding, Wolpe, etc. must be responded to. Their common refrain is that it is elitist to say that the working class requires assistance in developing its self-knowledge. Lenin does not claim that the workers must be, or even that they are, unaware of their interests or of the antagonism of their interests to those of their employers. What distinguishes his claim, rather, is the extension of this antagonism to the whole ‘modern political and social system,’ and the idea of irreconcilability of the antagonism. What Lenin asserts, then, is that the spontaneous workers’ movement cannot but remain unconscious of the total, irreconcilable nature of this antagonism of interest (Shandro, 1995: 279). As discussed earlier, the influence on the working class consciousness is two-fold. The working class consciousness is shaped by both the contradiction-ridden objective conditions of bourgeois class-society, causing suffering, some of which workers understand and others they do not, and then by the ideology of the bourgeoisie and socialists. [T]he working-class movement [is] not simply as determined by the relations of production but also as subjected to the influence of the ideological apparatuses of the bourgeoisie. It is only at this second, more concrete, level of analysis that Lenin locates the dominance of bourgeois ideology in the spontaneous working class movement. shandro, 1995: 283

What is subject to this domination, if Lenin’s two-fold distinction is to be taken seriously, is not the working class as such, a working class that exists as a large group of people on the basis of their relation to property, etc., and that exists independently of whether it is engaged in political action. Rather what is

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s­ ubject to domination is the spontaneous unfolding of its movement’, one that is considered in abstraction from the socialist vanguard, which is informed by Marxist theory (Shandro, 1995: 284). In experiencing and resisting capitalism, the working class tends to be shaped by bourgeois consciousness, one that supports the reproduction of capitalism (including in slightly modified forms). Lenin’s thesis of consciousness from without does not mean that proletarian spontaneity plays no important role in the development of Marxist theory. Indeed, properly understood, his thesis suggests the contrary, as Shandro says. Lenin’s thesis does not exclude the possibility that ‘workers are capable of “spontaneous” innovations; and, since the constraints upon the spontaneous movement are to be grasped in relative rather than absolute terms, there is no reason why its innovations could not sometimes be seeds c­apable of bearing revolutionary, even theoretically revolu­ tionary, fruit’. shandro, 1995: 293

What Lenin’s thesis implies is that such innovations can play no more than an episodic part in the drama of proletarian self-emancipation unless they are absorbed, and their implications drawn out and clarified, by Marxist theory; but if the theoretical absorption of spontaneous proletarian innovations leads to significant modifications in Marxist theory, [then] …the masses of workers and not just the theoreticians take an active, independent and creative part in the elaboration of socialist consciousness. shandro, 1995: 293–294

‘Marxism learns…from mass practice,’ Lenin says. Marxism ‘makes no claim whatever to teach the masses forms of struggle merely invented by “systematizers” in the seclusion of their studies’ (Lenin, 1962, 213–214). Marxists learn from mass practice, including the spontaneous proletarian initiative in establishing the rank-and-file committees, Soviets, working class councils, etc. and where necessary will modify the structure of Marxist theory in consequence of this learning. There is theoretical reason to expect that: the [Leninist] vanguard cannot be equated theoretically with the intelligentsia: to the extent that workers assimilate Marxist theory they are

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here considered part of the conscious vanguard and, while still part of the working class, distinguished from the spontaneous movement. shandro, 1995: 284

A determinate conclusion can only be this: class consciousness is co-produced, under objective conditions, by workers as workers, workers as intellectuals, and intellectuals, all working together, on the basis of solidarity and the principle of democracy. It is entirely unacceptable to attribute ‘an innate theoretical incapacity to workers’, to deny ‘a place for worker-theoreticians either in the pre-history of Marxist theory or, more importantly, in its subsequent development’. Indeed, ‘an important part of the rationale for the political project’ and with respect to workers qua workers it is the case that: although the spontaneous working-class movement could not generate Marxist theory by itself, once it exists and is made available to them, they grasp it easily; they can do so because, in a sense, the theory is not alien to them, because it constitutes a mirror in which they can see their reality and their aspirations more clearly. This is part of what Lenin means in referring to spontaneity as “consciousness in embryonic form. shandro, 1995: 276

If class consciousness of workers must encompass a recognition of the irreconcilability of their class interests to the whole of the capitalist class social and political order, such consciousness must take a theoretical form. This is so no just because they have little access to ‘many of the higher reaches of this whole, but also because working-class experience will always reflect various attempts to reconcile workers’ interests to the pre- vailing order, and the failure of such attempts (or their merely partial, provisional and temporary success) may always be attributed to ephemeral aspects of the political struggle (or to a fatality of human nature). The fact that the spontaneous movement is shaped in part by a logic of political struggle that prescribes strategic, tactical and ideological innovation implies that new and unforeseen ­conjunctures will be generated and in the face of constantly renewed, and occasionally innovative attempts to establish a reconciliation, understanding of the irreconcilable and not simply as- yet-unreconciled nature of class antagonism must necessarily rely upon theory. shandro, 1995: 292

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For the Marxists, the fight for socialist consciousness is only partly about convincing the masses to struggle against the exploitative objective conditions when they fail to, for a given section of workers does not always fight. It is often the case that people do fight against their conditions and when they do, Marxists strive to develop a class consciousness among the masses and especially among the advanced workers. Lenin’s claim that the spontaneous working-class movement is necessarily subordinate to bourgeois ideology may be represented thus: first, that the working-class movement cannot establish a position of strategic independence vis-à-vis its adversaries without attaining a recognition of the irreconcilability of its interests with the whole politicosocial system organized around the dominance of bourgeois interests; second, that such recognition cannot be effectively brought to bear upon the class struggle in the absence of an organized leadership informed by Marxist theory. shandro, 1995: 285

If workers as workers can develop socialist consciousness, there is no need for a special sphere of activity (political education), whether it is for workers or any other class.66 This brings us to the central theoretical and philosophical ­issue that underlies not only Lenin’s conception of the role of the party, but the whole Marxist project. Those who believe that it is elitism for Marxists to 66

All political parties and their leaders claim to speak in the name of broader social communities. ‘If one takes the history of the bourgeoisie, its interests as a class have been identified, defined, and articulated by political parties – whose leaders were not infrequently compelled to work in opposition, as a small minority faction and even in illegality, until they won over their class, or at least the most critical elements within it, to the perspective and program for which they fought’ (North, 2005). ‘Policies which express the “objective” interests of a class – that is, which identify and programmatically formulate the means of establishing the conditions required for the advancement of a particular class’ political, social and economic interests – may not be recognized by a majority, or even any substantial section of a class at any given point.’ (North, 2005). ‘[T]he ruling elites employ the services of hundreds of thousands of specialists in politics, sociology, economics, international affairs, etc., to help them understand what their objective interests are. Even though it is…far easier for the average bourgeois to perceive where his true interests lie than for the average worker, the formulation of ruling class policy can never be merely a direct reflection of what the “average” American businessman, or even the “average” multi-millionaire corporate executive, thinks’.

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encourage workers to transcend spontaneous consciousness into a more developed form of consciousness forget the following: the distinction between spontaneous knowledge (or commonsensical knowledge) and consciouslyacquired knowledge, which is a more examined knowledge, is a valid epistemological distinction (e.g. knowledge of city-life one obtains while travelling in different cities vs learning about cities in a university course on urban geography or urban sociology taught by a professor who is a specialist in the field). Both forms of knowledge have value, and one form can indeed feed into another somehow, but they are not the same: they are useful for different kinds of things.67 Now-a-days many people are skeptical of specialized knowledge and view it as elitist.68 Revolutions are passionate, turbulent, earth-shaking affairs full of wrath and exuberance and to imagine that they need experts or professionals sounds to some like needing an expert at sneezing…Anyone can revolt but not everyone can carry through a successful revolution. eagleton, 2007: 44

Revolutions need revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary theory, and the latter require interventions of intellectuals,69 the kind of people who spend 67

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The knowledge one gains about city life by travelling is unlikely to be useful to produce a theory of the city-landscape or theory of the connection between city life and revolution, which can assist in the process of organizing city workers, the kind of knowledge that some work of David Harvey has sought to provide. This skepticism is a part of a wider skepticism about science as such, about knowledge about the reality which exists somewhat independently of our knowledge about it and which therefore can be more or less verified in relation to that reality, although the process of verification is not always easy. Incidentally, these include the same kind of people who would go to a specialist doctor with expert scientific knowledge if they have a serious illness (possibly after trying some self-help treatments). They can be workers as well as professors and not just the latter. The distinction between intellectual and non-intellectual is not to be conflated with that between middle class people (professors, etc.) and workers, and in a working class party that seeks to educate workers, both types coexist. The fact that intellectuals have come from the middle class background ‘is a confirmation of the socialist critique, not an embarrassment for it’, for such a thing simply shows that capitalist class society has kept the broader masses culturally and educationally deprived (Eagleton, 2007: 46). These lines from Marx and Engels are useful in this context (in ‘Strategy and Tactics of the Class Struggle’): ‘It is an unavoidable phenomenon, well established in the course of development, that people from the ruling class also join the proletariat and supply it with educated elements. This we have

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a lot of time reading and thinking about things, about the objective conditions and ordinary people’s struggles against those conditions from different times and places and generalizing from those in order to guide revolutionary movement of the present and the future. Those who ‘denigrate and oppose the political and cultural enlightenment of the working class’ and the need for assistance from Marxists in this process, and ‘thereby leave it at the mercy of its exploiters’, these people should be asked the following question: are they not being elitists in holding such a view? (North, 2005: 9). 6 Conclusion Class interests exist, and class relations and classes as large groups of people exist, regardless of whether, and the extent to which, they are aware of their class interests (i.e. the extent to which there is class consciousness), although class relations are reproduced through and shape such consciousness (including both true and false consciousness).

already clearly stated in the Manifesto. Here, however, two remarks are to be made: [As long as these elements can provide] “real, factual, or theoretical material” they will be useful for the movement. Instead, there are efforts to bring superficial socialist ideas into harmony with the various theoretical viewpoints which the gentlemen from the universities, or from wherever, bring with them, and among whom one is more confused than the other…’. Both Marx and Lenin were very critical of so-called intellectuals. ‘Second, when such people from other classes join the proletarian movement, the first demand upon them must be that they do not bring with them any remnants of bourgeois, pettybourgeois, etc., prejudices, but that they irreversibly assimilate the proletarian viewpoint. But those gentlemen, as has been shown, adhere overwhelmingly to petty-bourgeois conceptions….’ ‘It is inconceivable to us how the party can any longer tolerate in its midst the authors of that [Hochberg, Bernstein, Schramm] article. If the party leadership more or less falls into the hands of such people, the party will simply be emasculated and, with it, an end to the proletarian order…’ ‘We cannot, therefore, go along with people who openly claim that the workers are too ignorant to emancipate themselves but must first be emancipated from the top down, by the philanthropic big and petty bourgeois. Should the new party organ take a position that corresponds with the ideas of those gentlemen, become bourgeois and not proletarian, then there is nothing left for us, sorry as we should be to do so, than to speak out against it publicly and dissolve the solidarity within which we have hitherto represented the German party abroad. But we hope it will not come to that’ (Marx and Engels, 1879).

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‘Class consciousness is determined on the level of analysis of class interests within a given social formation, independently of the existence of i­ ndividuals who may or may not perceive those interests’ (Dos Santos, 1970: 184). ‘What is involved is showing the possible antagonistic forms of consciousness ­corresponding to given modes of production, not what men think at a given moment. We have to give a theoretical description of the possible forms of consciousness, to which the empirical or psychological consciousness of men may approach more or less closely’ (ibid.: 175). The capitalist class society is an internally contradictory society. Interests of workers and interests of capitalists are opposite. This fact is registered – or should be registered – in the sphere of consciousness of society as a whole. It is important to ask what/how workers and capitalists think about the capitalist society they live in and why they think in certain ways, why has the content of their identity taken the form it has? The development of working class consciousness is a non-automatic, non-linear, and dialectical process. Their class situation (i.e. their social being), broadly shapes their social consciousness, which in turn has an impact on their social being (including political practice). The capitalist class structure and its associated ideas promote and inhibit workers’ class consciousness. Hence there is a need for class analysis to contribute to the undermining of the role of the capitalist class structure and ideology in inhibiting workers’ consciousness. Class analysis is a process of demystification. So if and to the extent that workers do not have true class consciousness – a consciousness that mirrors their true interests – class analysis is not invalid. For, it is because of class (e.g. ruling class actions; commodity fetishism, etc.) that the workers have a certain form of consciousness. But it also happens that exploitative class relations are truly registered in the minds of workers. They do come to possess class consciousness. Class consciousness, consciousness of antagonistic class interests on the part of a single worker or a group of workers, which is expressed partly in the form of class identity, is important. But it must be properly placed. The particular form of working class consciousness is dominantly but not exclusively, influenced by class, by the class-processes (e.g. forms and effects of exploitation, what the capitalist class does directly and through the capitalist state and universities, and media, so on). The concept of class consciousness has been understood in various ways. Wright (1997: 384; italics added), the analytical Marxist, writes: ‘class ­consciousness can be understood as the subjective processes with a class

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content70 that shape intentional choices with respect to [class] interests and struggles’, thus influencing how ‘individuals operate within a given structure of class relations’. For Elster (1985: 347), another analytical Marxist, class consciousness is ‘the ability to overcome the free-rider problem’ that individuals face ‘in realizing class interests’.71 Tanner et al. (1992: 450) say that the working class has no higher potential and that for rational working class actors struggle for wages is important in its own right and that workers balk at revolution anyway and it is rational to do so. According to post-structuralist oriented scholars, there is no necessary reason to believe that the working class will ever eschew pre- or non-capitalist forms of consciousness to become class consciousness everywhere in the same way (see Chakravarty, 1988). In fact, they argue that there is no necessary link between interests and consciousness. In the light of the discussion in this chapter, all this is an inadequate way of thinking about class consciousness. Analytical Marxists mistakenly treat class consciousness in an individual and psychological sense: the consciousness of people is not a free, independent psychological process, but a function of the material economic basis; that it is conditioned by it and serves it’ (Trotsky, 1973: 356). Working-class consciousness ‘is not the sum of all the individual consciousness. It is collective, and the collective consciousness is greater that the sum of its parts’ (Glaberman, 1996: 236). The individualist approach to consciousness, informed by rational choice theory, ignores the idea that ‘the explanation of social change cannot be reduced to the decisions of individuals, at a specific place and time, to take a specific action, based on their individual needs or desires’ (McCall, 2008: 158; see also Wolff, 1990). In Marxist theory, ‘By class ­consciousness is meant the systematic expression of the interests of social classes’, although particular workers may not be class conscious given the many obstacles to its formation which emanate from a capitalist society. The Marxist explanation sees class consciousness as arising over time, meaning that the explanation of social change cannot be reduced to the decisions of individuals, at a specific place and time, to take a specific action, based on their individual needs or desires, regardless of how one defines those individual needs or desires’ (Mccall, 2008: 149). 70 71

Class content refers to beliefs that are about class issues such as belief in private property’s desirability (ibid.). Elster goes on to say: ‘the individual can reap a greater reward if he abstains from the action to get the benefits without the cost. This generates a conflict between the interest of the individual class member and that of the class as a whole’ (p. 347).

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There are three aspects of bourgeois class society that has relevance for the production of bourgeois consciousness: commodity relations; bourgeois passion for wealth in the abstract; and bourgeois control over production. Bourgeois class relations produce a specific form of consciousness of the bourgeois class. In bourgeois consciousness: the money relation involving the purchase and sale of means of production and subsistence is natural, it is normal for the bourgeoisie to control property, and its right to control production and social product and to exploit the working class is legitimate, and it is right for the state to protect all these processes, if necessarily, by violently suppressing the working masses and by other means including trickery and deception. The bourgeois form of social consciousness supports bourgeois interests and is generally held by the bourgeoisie, and is also, in given empirical conditions, shared by elements of the working class. The bourgeois society is marked by commodity relations. Everything is a commodity: things we need and want must be bought and sold and must be produced for a profit. Things we need and want appear to have a price tag as if to do so is in the dna of things. This means that use-value as use-values (education, food, movies, medicines, etc.) will not be produced except as commodities for a profit. Not only is it that things we need are commodities. The power to work – labour power – has become a commodity. It is paid for in monetary form (wage-form). Given the wage-form, the distinction between paid and unpaid labour disappears from view; the capitalist class thinks that all labour is paid labour, a view generally accepted by workers as well. In this wage-form are ‘the notions of justice held by both the worker and the capitalist’, all the illusions about freedom’, as workers and capitalists see themselves as mere commodity owners and commodity buyers-sellers. The notion of freedom contradicts the fact that the working class abjectly depends on the capitalist class which controls means of production, and therefore means of employment, and means of subsistence, and that workers are not free not to work under despotic control of the capitalist class. The capitalist class forgets that the wages that workers receive form a part of the product they continuously produce, that what is paid to workers is the product of workers’ ‘labour of last week, or of last year’. The concept of class exploitation – appropriation of surplus value from labour whose cost of reproduction may be paid for – is not a part of consciousness of the capitalist class. That ‘the normal price of labour power includes a definite quantity of unpaid labour, that capitalists exploit workers, is ‘something which falls outside the frame of reference of the everyday consciousness’. Of course they make profits but they explain profits in terms of market relations, surface appearance of class relations, and not in terms of property and production relations: profit comes from ‘buying under

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the value, and selling over it’, and not in the normal process of buying labour power at its value.72 Bourgeois passion for wealth is a prominent part of bourgeois consciousness. They possess a sense of ‘avarice, and the drive for self-enrichment, are the passions they possess’, the passions for the pursuit of wealth in the abstract, a passion, which is a product of an imperative, one to which the bourgeois ­subjects the entire society to: society must be ruled by the logic of unceasing production for profit. Of course, this class can be great animal lovers, ­philanthropists and can actually sometimes sympathize with the suffering of the masses. This is where bourgeois socialist consciousness comes. Control over production and capital fetishism is another aspect of the consciousness of the bourgeois. Their bourgeois consciousness celebrates the division of labour in the workshop and the lifelong annexation of the worker to a partial operation, and so on, but the same bourgeois consciousness ‘denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt to socially control and regulate the process of production, as an encroachment on their private property rights. As well, powers of labour appear to be powers of capital, in the consciousness of both capitalist and the working classes. The consciousness of the capitalist class, which it shares with the working class, is marked with reification: while it is workers’ own living labour or past labour that has created value, capitalists thinks and workers think that capital does everything. It is true that the factory, the enterprise, the laboratories, farms, machinery, the software, etc., all these are forms of capital and workers work on/with/in them, and without these things workers are nothing, so both the classes think that capital does everything, and therefore nothing should be done to upset that fact. Capital becomes a very mystical being, since all the productive forces of social labour appear attributable to it, and not to labour as such, as a power springing forth from its own womb. The illusory and false consciousness of the capitalist class lies in the fact that it believes, and it makes the society (workers) believe, that the things it has are the things it owns and has created. The illusion of the capitalist class, the working class and society as such that the capitalist is really a doer of things and creator of things is nothing but just an illusion. Such illusion is an obstacle to the development of class consciousness of the working class. The capitalist class system produces huge obstacles to its proper understanding and to an explanation of what is to be done. 72

In fact, the idea of profit being generated in the market conceals the appropriation of surplus-value during the labor process, and the notion of “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay” conceals the division of the working-day into paid and unpaid labor’ (McCall, 2008: 157).

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If workers are as physically and morally degraded by capitalism as they are, can they really develop a revolutionary consciousness? Reality is stratified into relations and practices that are more on the surface and those that are deeper down at a more structural level. Consciousness of the working class operates at these levels: level of the surface relations and that of deeper mechanisms. Working class consciousness of its interests has different forms. In bourgeois class consciousness, what is =what can be. In the class consciousness of the working class: what can happen is a lot more than what is. The world can be a lot different from, and indeed, in terms of class relations, opposite to, what exists. The surface relations refer to the ways in which the logic of property relations and value production works and produces certain effects such as low wages, unemployment and abuse at work, racial and gender discrimination reinforcing class exploitation, and so on. The surface relations including the symptoms of the system can be somewhat mended within the overall framework of capitalist relations. Such mending can happen through trade unionist pressure on employers (e.g. strikes, lobbying a labour party) and/or pressure for some government (or even non-governmental) regulation. Working class consciousness of the social being of the worker that is confined to the surface is a lower form of consciousness. Consciousness corresponding to the surface relations is the trade unionist consciousness or bourgeois consciousness of the working class. Capitalist society does have an enormous influence on working class consciousness. These conditions include: the internalisation of commodity relations, which is closely tied to the reification of human relations and which results from the generalised extension of commodity production and the transformation of labour power into a commodity, and from the generalised extension of the social division of labour under conditions of commodity production. Working consciousness is also accomplished through the fatigue and brutalisation of the producers through exploitation and the alienated nature of labour, as well as through a lack of leisure time, not only in a quantitative but also in a qualitative sense, etc. mandel, 1970a; para 5

Objective class relations shape consciousness of the exploited classes in various ways. To the extent that pre-capitalist relations (e.g. self-earned private property) and ideas (including religious ideas) are prevalent in capitalist social

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formations, that may also shape working class consciousness.73 One should also not ignore the fact that interests and consciousness of the petty bourgeoisie does shape working class consciousness.74 It is indeed the case ‘A special problem may arise in studying transitory classes, or those which do not succeed in crystallizing as classes, since their conditions of existence in society are in constant transformation toward new forms of relation’. Their ‘consciousness…cannot crystallize into a solid set of interests and they are subject to the constant pressure of the interests of other classes (e.g., the petty bourgeoisie under the capitalist system). This does not deprive the class of its specific character as transitional, but makes analysis of its class consciousness and psychology very complex’ (Dos Santos, 1970: 185). In a society where there are bourgeois and petty bourgeois forces, with proprietary habits and petty-bourgeois traditions, these will hamper proletarian consciousness ‘both outside and within the working-class movement, not only in a single field of activity – the parliamentary – but, inevitably, in every field of social activity, in all cultural and political spheres without exception. Therefore the fight for working class consciousness – that is, the fight to development working class consciousness – is simultaneously a fight against the (limited) consciousness of other classes’. This is why there is the importance of the idea of the tribune of the people in the sphere of working class consciousness. Objective conditions in capitalist class society do impede class consciousness.75 Commodity fetishism of a material reality, one that stands for an 73

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Saxton writes this with respect to religion, which is pre-capitalist in origin: ‘Marx and Engels were mistaken both in their prediction of revolution and their belief that industrial workers would reject religion’ (2006: 316). The working classes have tended to be more religious than middle classes, and thus religiousity has remained an obstacle to Marxian politics. Saxton suggests that there is no necessary link between religious belief and revolutionary belief. That the working class will not automatically develop class consciousness in place of a non-class consciousness is a correct statement and cannot be used against Marxism, for Marxism accepts this, but that statement is not to be conflated with the statement that the working class will never experience proletarian class consciousness more or less uniformly across regions and countries, given that fundamental interests of workers are more or less the same everywhere. This is often the focus on the literature that is influenced by post-modernist economics, some of which is characterized by what can be called ‘modern-day Narodinikism’. ‘Many different analysts have argued that while workers may develop workplace class consciousness during the course of collective struggle, certain aspects of life in contemporary capitalist societies block them from attaining generalized class consciousness. Both objective and subjective factors have been posited as blocking mechanisms. Among the objective factors are the institutional integration of unions into the capitalist system,

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i­ nversion: relations between people are inverted into relations between things. This produces commodity fetishism in consciousness. Similarly, when what are more or less class relations are seen as relations between genders, castes, and ­races, etc., this form of consciousness signifies another inversion alongside ­commodity fetishism. Thus working class consciousness suffers from dual inversion. This inversion simply shows that no serious class analysis can idealize the working class. Marx did not do this. Lenin did not (more on this later). Individual workers and groups of workers can have reactionary, rightwing-nationalist, patriarchal, racist, casteist, imperialist, etc. identities, because of the objective conditions of their lives and because of bourgeois/petty-bourgeois promotion of these identities. It is important to stress that developing proper class consciousness is not an easy task, given the nature of the capitalist class relation. If exploitation under feudalism, for example, is transparent [appears direct], this is because it occurs under circumstances where face-to-face relations of association predominate over any social context of subjugation, and where, because market relations are peripheral to those of production and distribution, the physical form of the surplus always retains priority’. However, if capitalist exploitation ‘cannot be proved, this is b­ ecause it does not occur on the personal level’ [italics added]. Surely, ‘capitalists have powers of control over workers in production’ but ‘the same is not true in the wage-bargaining process given … that exploitation takes place [more or less] on the basis of the law of value rather than through individual cheating, and given that this is interpreted here to mean that the capitalist’s actions when realising wages, or when assigning output prices, are circumscribed by the pricing actions of all other agents in the market (which is increasingly global). Capitalist exploitation, therefore, has to be explained at the social level. lysandrou, 2000: 332

the affluence of workers and consequent instrumentalism, divisions among workers in different sectors of the economy, the powerlessness of workers compared to big ­business and the state, and the capacity of representative political institutions to absorb and deflect working-class grievances. The subjective factors are the conservatism of trade union bureaucrats and the failure of working-class parties to promote class-conscious interpretations of social and political developments. Of course, every one of these factors is likely to contribute to the failure of workers to develop generalized class consciousness’ (Langford, 1994: 130).

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That is why it is so elusive. Trade union consciousness, the consciousness that arises ‘directly out of the practical experience of struggle is empirical and pragmatic consciousness, which can enrich action to a certain extent, but which is far inferior to the effectiveness, of a scientifically global consciousness, i.e., of theoretical ­understanding’ (Mandel, 1970a; para 3). It is therefore a mistake to think that there exists ‘the impressive capacity of basic economic struggles for opening up, as it were, an “epistemological break” in working-class consciousness’ (Cohen and Moody, 1998: 112–113), that such struggles themselves will develop socialist consciousness, even if it is true that workers fight for their rights without socialist consciousness. If mere economic struggles can develop socialist consciousness then all that Marxists/socialists should do is to organize the working class for such initiatives, and militantly, without them having to confront the political conceptions that guide its struggles. Unlike bourgeois consciousness, proletarian or socialist class consciousness reveals class relationships as the basis of its theory of social reality. Workers are genuinely class conscious when they think their interests are antagonistic towards, and irreconcilable with, those of capitalists and the complete social order of capitalists. When armed with this consciousness, the working class becomes a class for itself: it will be a class for itself in a social situation in which it becomes aware of these relations in the form of a political ideology that clearly defines the real conditions of its existence and the contradiction between those conditions and its interests as a social class, and which proposes the means of overcoming this situation. It then goes on to constitute a class “for itself” that is, a class able to work out a project of social existence suited to its class interests. dos santos, 1970: 181

The working class has certain class instincts. It has the potential to develop working class consciousness but it has to be empirically achieved. The empirically existing working class consciousness has sparks of class consciousness proper. The ‘actually existing’ working-class consciousness is not completely bourgeois consciousness: ‘rather than coherent and explicit assent to a consistent set of ideas and “values”, [there exists] a more complex mix; one characterised less by undifferentiated ideological domination than by inconsistency, contradiction, and lack of information’ (Cohen and Moody, 1988: 109). This is expressed in the fact that for example, shop stewards who subjectively endorse

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the profit-related ethos of their management may also objectively undermine it with their own actions (Cohen and Moody, 1998: 119). While objective conditions and dominant naturalizing ways of thinking that the extant class society promotes under the rule of capital do shape ­workers’ consciousness, such influences are not eternal nor unbreakable. Class consciousness develops over time. Workers develop class consciousness not merely by being told that capitalist contradiction is irreconcilable. They develop it in practice, through struggle, though not entirely through struggle. Class consciousness ‘becomes freer and freer of the mystified forms of relations’ among people,76 the closer society comes to eliminating class relations’ (Dos Santos, 1970: 187). There is ‘an inner dialectic of the formation of political class consciousness, which can develop fully only during the revolution itself, yet only on the condition that it has already begun to develop before the revolution’ (Mandel, 1970a; para 6). It is only when the workings of the capitalist system that economically imprisons and brutalizes the working class ‘are blown apart by a revolution, i.e., by a sudden, intense increase, in mass activity outside of the confines of alienated labour’ that ‘the mystifying influence of this very imprisonment upon mass consciousness rapidly [can] recede.’ (Mandel, 1970a; para 5). Individual members of the working class are re-educated in the process of revolution. The question is what forms of previously-existing consciousness, what ideas which reflect previous experience, mediate the impact of objective conditions on consciousness. In all cases objective conditions will be interpreted on the basis of certain ideas which a given class may possess based on its own experience and that of other classes, and on the basis of ideas propagated by the dominant class. These ideas may be commonsensical ideas, which reflect the surface forms of bourgeois society (e.g. exchange relations), giving rise to ­(non-militant forms) of trade union type consciousness, which is class consciousness only in its embryonic form. If no conscious theory intervenes, if Marxist theory of class does not intervene,77 common-sense or bourgeois theory fills the gap. If Marxist theory intervenes, if socialist consciousness intervenes, which is based on theoretical reflection on the history of objective conditions and class struggle around these in the past, then objective conditions may actually help produce socialist consciousness in the minds of the working class. The fact remains that struggle against capitalist class can happen 76 77

These forms are accompanied by, for example, ‘magical, mystical, religious, philosophical, etc., justifications’ for existing class relations’ (Dos Santos, 1970: 187). If subordinate classes were class conscious there would be no need for Marxism. Revolution requires revolutionary consciousness which is provided only by Marxism.

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­ ithout there being fully-fledged class consciousness, and often class struggle w can shape consciousness. The question is what impedes and prompts class struggle, what kind of struggle is necessary to abolish the conditions which prompt struggle, i.e. wage-slavery and its protection by the state. It is not ordinarily possible for individual workers to understand the socialgeographical complexity in the world, including global value relations, mechanism of exploitation in the hidden abode of production, fetishistic relations that characterize the commodity, the trans-national production and exchange, the intricate system of financial capital, and so on. Indeed, capitalists themselves hire specialists to understand these things for them. Those who are immersed in practice and cannot bring it to the level of consciousness (a task that requires a specific theoretical labor) do not, generally, have class consciousness. It is the Marxist intellectuals who develop class consciousness and ideology. That is why Lenin insisted that left to its own condition, the proletariat cannot arrive at a class consciousness, but at most a trade-union consciousness. Without revolutionary theory that seeks to understand the interconnections among all the classes, how the system as a whole works, along with its contradictions, there is no revolutionary practice.78 At a rather high level of abstraction, it is the case that ‘either the workers spontaneously develop a consciousness of themselves as a class with a socialist vocation (autonomy) or this consciousness must be imposed upon them by others (heteronomy)’. And ‘This dichotomy commands a whole series of conceptual distinctions: consciousness and spontaneity, theory and practice, idealism and materialism, intellectuals and workers, authoritarianism and democracy’ (Shandro, 1995: 271). The conscious vanguard is called upon to perform two tasks at the same time: ‘foster and guide the spontaneous working-class movement’ and ‘to combat it’. This apparent ambivalence, Shandro argues, ‘has its roots in a contradictory assessment of spontaneity itself: the latter is adjudged both the embryo of socialist consciousness and the repository of bourgeois ideology’ (p. 281).79 78

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Lukacs says this about Lenin’s theory: ‘his strength in theory is derived from the fact that however abstract a concept may be, he always considers its implications for human praxis’. Mayer (1997: 181) mistakenly argues that Leninist thesis of consciousness from without is one that Plekhanov disagreed with and that it is elitist and perverse and undemocratic and that ‘Leninism took shape only as it broke with these democratic traditions [of Russia])’. However, Shandro argues, ‘Lenin’s appraisal of spontaneity and consciousness does not, contrary to conventional wisdom, violate the Marxist conception of proletarian self-emancipation; I will suggest that the sophisticated method of political analysis upon

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As we have seen, classes are defined by their antagonistic interests as against one another. So ‘class consciousness will likewise be defined by this ­antagonistic character’ (Dos Santos, 1970: 185).80 Such ‘antagonism is not expressed simply in the form of opposing interests within the existing mode of production.81 For these classes really to be able to have class consciousness, distinct social systems have to confront one another’ (ibid.; italics added). Class antagonism ‘finds expression in a relation of overcoming, destruction, or domination of one class by another. This insures the role of the class struggle in history, as the moving force not only within systems but in the supplanting of one system by another’ (ibid.). And it is to class struggle that we now turn.

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which it rests permits a more fruitful understanding of this conception and of the relation between class struggle and consciousness than has been recognized’ (Shandro, 1995: 269). In society where interests of one class are antagonistically different from those of another, class consciousness cannot but reflect that. Consciousness about abuses in factories or delayed payment of wages or low wages, etc. is all a part of overall class consciousness but it is still a small part, and a lower part, and it is trade union consciousness.

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Trade Unionist Struggle and the Proletariat Class struggle is the material form of class consciousness under given material conditions and their contradictions. Class consciousness must be expressed in the form of, and is generally necessary, for class struggle, although mere consciousness is not enough to effect social change. The capitalist class system, in terms of its economic and political aspects, engenders class struggle, overt and covert. Class struggle is immanent in more than one way in capitalism. The very basis of the capitalist class relation lies in the fact that the propertied class must reproduce the proletariat as dependent on the sale of wage labour, appropriate of surplus labour, and control property. The capitalist class must seek to reproduce these conditions. And in response, the working class resists in covert and overt ways. From the day capitalism is born, class struggle has occurred: ‘As the bourgeoisie develops, there develops in its bosom’ the proletariat, and ‘there develops a struggle between the proletarian class and the bourgeoisie class (Marx, 1987: 106)’. As long as there exists the contradiction between ‘the blind rule of the supply and demand laws which form the political economy of the middle class [i.e. the bourgeoisie], and social production controlled by social foresight, which forms the political economy of the working class’ (Marx in Marx and Engels, 1977b: 16) there is always the possibility of class struggle. This struggle develops even ‘before being felt, perceived, appreciated, understood, avowed, and proclaimed aloud by both sides’ and it ‘expresses itself, to start with, merely in partial and momentary conflicts, in subversive acts’ (Marx, 1987: 106). The struggle of the proletariat against the capitalist class takes many forms. In its trade union form, the struggle of the proletariat aims to obtain concessions from the capitalist class and its state, within the bounds of the capitalist class system. This is the focus of this chapter. In the next chapter we will discuss class struggle proper: the struggle to abolish the capitalist class relation itself and the attendant wage-slavery. This chapter has 3 sections. Section 1 begins by making the distinction between class struggle in its two forms, class struggle from above and class struggle from below, and talks about the former. Section 2 of this chapter talks about pre-trade union struggle (‘primitive revolts’). Section 3 discusses the trade union struggle in its economic and political forms. Section 4 explains the conditions that affect trade union form of struggle: what makes trade union struggle necessary and possible?

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Struggle from Above and Struggle from Below

Class exploitation and class struggle are dialectically connected. Class exploitation (and dispossession that presupposes exploitation) requires, and leads to, class struggle, which is the exercise of class agency, i.e. the power to make a difference in the conditions under which a class operates. Classes are contingently reproduced through class struggle, overt or covert. It is mistaken to believe that class struggle happens only when working masses engage in a struggle, and therefore, if they do not, there is no class struggle; so class is not important. Class struggle goes on all the time. Even when the working class does not struggle or does not struggle successfully, the capitalist class does. This is evident from Mr. Buffet’s remarks cited in Chapter 1 that there is a class war going on in which the capitalist class is winning. He gets it. Academics do not.1 Class struggle is always class struggle from above and from below. It is uneven (sometimes one class gets the upper-hand and sometimes another class does), and class society’s continued existence contingently depends on the outcome of class struggle. Besides, class exists and is important whether or not the working class actively engages in class struggle. Reducing wages and employment, austerity measures are forms of class struggle from above, which lead to suffering on the part of the working class, and this is class struggle, and should prompt academic discussions of class. To think that class is important only when there is working class struggle is a very narrow view of class. The objects of class struggle from below and above are multiple. In other words, there can be class struggle over: conditions of work and wages; primitive accumulation or what Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession; the form and policies of the capitalist-territorial state (e.g. struggle over democracy and over corporate and people’s welfare); undemocratic relations injurious to dominated classes (e.g. racism; patriarchy), and so on.2 With respect to each of these object of struggle, class interests are antagonistic: for example, if the working class seeks to gain a rise in wages or struggles for the expansion of democratic rights, the capitalist class struggles to keep the wages low and to curtail democratic rights. 1 When Fukuyama says that conservative parties winning in elections is an indicator of receding class issue, this implies that class struggle is always class struggle from below. If the conservatives are winning, why can this not be seen as the capitalist class gaining more power electorally? Vivek Chibber says that ‘the decline of class theorizing was a predictable and natural result of the decline of working-class politics in the United States’ (2006: 357). This, once again, implies class struggle is only from below. 2 There is also class struggle over adverse environmental conditions created by capital affecting the working class both at work and in the living places.

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Class relations can only be reproduced through class struggle, and the capitalist class cannot but engage in class struggle. This is class struggle from above. If ordinary people think that only they have to engage in class struggle and the capitalist class does not, that is a mistaken view. The capitalist class knows it engages in class struggle. The neo-liberal welfare cut is an instance of class struggle launched by capital and its state against the social wage the working class had successfully fought for after the War.3 When there is speed up at work, when public transport gets worse, when welfare is cut, when the media is used to create confusion, ignorance and lies, when publishers fire radical editors fearlessly championing ideas and interests of the oppressed, these are instances of class struggle, the class struggle from the top. When employers take away the freedom of labor to sell labor power freely, thus making labor unfree, in order to depress the wages and discipline labor – this is called deproletarianisation by Brass – this is class struggle from above. To quote Brass again: ‘the initial presence of casual labor that is free (= thesis) is then transformed by “from above” class struggle (= antithesis) into a workforce of casuals who are now unfree (= synthesis)’ (Brass, 2014: 299–300). The degree to which labor actually has this freedom depends on the level of class struggle. When employers, collaborating with union bureaucrats, create a two-tier job (one set of jobs that is secure and relatively high-paying and another set of jobs which is insecure and low-paying), that is class struggle from above. De-­industrialization in such places as Detroit, which is described by the government as having ‘some of the most inefficient and troublesome workforces available’, must be seen not merely as a result of working class struggle, i.e. class struggle from below. It must also be seen as a product of class struggle 3 A part of the wage workers receive is the social wage benefits from the state paid from general taxation, which comes mainly from the total surplus value workers produce. The social wage is an expense from the standpoint of capitalist production as a whole, and this expense does not directly produce surplus value and therefore profit for the capitalist class. Such an expense is, however, objectively necessary for the system of capitalist class relations. When ‘wages and profits fell simultaneously in total value’ and ‘If in such conditions capitalist and workman wanted to consume the same amount of value in material things as they did before’, then ‘they would have to buy less of the services of the doctor, schoolmaster, etc.’ (Brooks, 2005). Now consider that the state provides health care and education. Given that the labour involved in the production of these services does not directly produce surplus value, austerity can be seen as class struggle from above: struggle of capital for cuts in order to ‘stop the drain on surplus value provided by the state spending’ (ibid.). Such cuts can also be prompted by state’s corporate welfare program: when the state spends billions of dollars on corporate welfare, including to bail out criminal financiers that become bankrupt, a policy that creates a massive deficit, and then shifts the financial burden to workers in the form of cuts in welfare funding.

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from above, as a strategy of the bourgeoisie to shift production to low-wage areas, shut down factories, and to discipline striking workers via a deal with the trade union bureaucracy. The state as an arm of the capitalist class supremely signifies class struggle from above by suppressing any significant potential or actual threat from workers to commodity relations, relations of property and profit-making. There is struggle from above inside the hidden abode of production itself. Capitalist control over the labour process is a form of class struggle from above, which is in response to the potential or actual class struggle from below. ‘As the number of the co-operating workers increases, so too does their resistance to the domination of capital’ (Marx, 1977: 449), and capital seeks to counter this resistance by controlling the workplace. In any form of society, there is a need for control over, and exercise of some authority in, the sphere of production when production becomes a social labour process, i.e. when a large number of workers work in a place.4 This applies to the control exercised by the capitalist. But such control has a special character in that: ‘the control exercised by the capitalist is… a function of the exploitation of a social labour-process, and is consequently rooted in the unavoidable antagonism between the exploiter and the living and labouring raw material he exploits’ (italics added). An important aspect of class struggle from above is to negate class struggle from below. When labourers, upon the realization that they produce wealth for the capitalist class but their needs remain unmet, capital and its sycophant intellectuals ‘cry out at the infringement of’ the ‘eternal’ and the ‘sacred’ ‘law of supply and demand’, saying that labourers’ class struggle, including through combination between employed and unemployed people, ‘disturbs the ‘pure’ action of this law’ (Marx, 1977: 793–794). However, when ‘adverse ­circumstances prevent the creation of the industrial reserve army and, with it, the absolute dependence of the working class upon the capitalist class’, capital’s response is different: it ‘rebels against the ‘sacred’ law of supply and demand. It engages in its own methods of class struggle. It relies on ‘forcible means’, including state interference’(ibid.). When the capitalist class hires goons to kill trade union leaders or hires strike-breakers during a strike, or when the business bosses use court orders to stop a strike, that is class struggle on their part. Capitalists have their associations and organizations (including chambers of commerce, bourgeois parties, etc.) through which their class agency is exercised and through which they launch class struggle. Of course, the state itself is the most trustworthy organization of the capitalist class (if not a specific regional or social fraction of the class). Capitalists may, of course, give smaller 4 That is why, Marxists differ from anarchists who think no form of authority is acceptable.

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or larger level of concessions to workers (in tactical retreat), and when necessary, launch an all-out attack on working class organization (e.g. miners strike in the uk). So, all these and many more similar processes are instances of class struggle even if we do not see class struggle from below immediately as a response. To see class struggle only when the working class struggles to bring about some change, including change in the geographical landscape of capitalism (e.g. where employment is created), is un-dialectical. 2

‘Primitive’ Revolts of the Working Class

The struggle from above is ‘matched’ by, and prompts, struggle from below, which usually goes by the name of class struggle. As mentioned, the capitalist class relation has always been marked by class struggle. ‘The struggle between the capitalist and the wage-labourer starts with the existence of the capital-­ relation itself’ (Marx, 1977: 553). One of the earliest struggles of the working class was against what is known as the formal subsumption of labour (this is discussed in details in Chapter 8): this is the method of exploitation based on the prolongation of the working day. Workers had to fight for shorter working days, a struggle that happened at different points in time in different countries. It still continues. When the successful struggle for shorter working days forces the capitalist class to introduce machinery, the latter becomes an object of struggle. In what are called ‘primitive revolts’, the proletariat ‘direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production’ as such, nor against the bourgeois social relations as such, ‘but against the instruments of production themselves’. For example, workers ‘destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman’ of the pre-capitalist times. These are more-or-less spontaneous revolts against machines, against instruments of work, against the material bearer of capital as a social power, as class power. These revolts (Luddite style actions)5 are simply ‘the resistance of the oppressed’. 5 What I will call geographical Ludditism is simply blaming workers or capitalists or both originating in other countries than one’s own for the problems of low wages and unemployment etc., and thus diverting attention from the capitalist class of the country where one lives. For example: Sanders claims to represent the interests of American workers, but he promotes economic nationalism, lining up with the American trade unions in seeking to divert workers’ anger over layoffs and wage cuts away from the American companies and instead directing it against the workers in the global periphery.

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Workers’ struggle continued ‘throughout the whole manufacturing period’, the period before the systematic introduction of machinery. But it is ‘only since the introduction of machinery’, that workers have ‘fought against the instrument of labour itself, the material embodiment of capital’, revolting against ‘this particular form of the means of production, as being the material basis of the capitalist mode of production’. Such revolting is not based on class consciousness in any developed form. However, as discussed in a previous chapter, it is not purely without class consciousness either: Even the primitive revolts expressed the awakening of consciousness to a certain extent. The workers were losing their age-long faith in the permanence of the system which oppressed them and began… [if not] to understand, but to sense the necessity for collective resistance, definitely abandoning their slavish submission to the authorities. But this was, nevertheless, more in the nature of outbursts of desperation and vengeance than of struggle (113–114). While the introduction of machinery by capitalists is a response to struggle over long hours and other similar conditions of the working class, the introduction of machinery leads to further struggle by workers. This is because machinery competes with workers, making them redundant and putting downward pressure on wages. Machinery makes workers become a fragment; workers become an appendage of machines. So, in the consciousness of workers, machinery comes to embody – signify – capital as a social power. So machinery, which is the tool of capital in its own struggle against labour, becomes an object of workers’ struggle itself. Under capitalist class relations, instruments of labour attain a degree of ‘independence and estrangement’, and this tendency is developed to a higher level with the introduction of machinery. The relation between machinery and the worker becomes antagonistic. ‘It is therefore when machinery arrives on the scene that the worker for the first time revolts savagely against the instruments of labour’.6 (Marx, 1977: 558–559) ‘At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them’ (Marx and Engels, 1975: 53) At this early stage, workers ‘form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition’ (ibid.: 54). In some 6 When environmental protestors destroy genetically modified crops, this act shows that in some cases even subjects of labour become also a source of antagonism. One may call this environmental Ludditism.

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places they ‘they unite to form more compact bodies’. But this is not because of ‘their own active union’. Much rather, this is because ‘of the union of the bourgeoisie’: in order to attain its own political ends’, in its fight against feudals, the bourgeoisie is ‘compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion’.7 In other words, the proletarians do not fight their enemies at this stage, but they fight ‘enemies of their enemies’, who are ‘the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois’. This means that ‘the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.’ (ibid.: 54) 3

Trade Union Struggle

Followed by these Luddite type revolts, workers learning from their experience, may engage in ‘more conscious’ actions against capital. As a result of changes in objective factors discussed in the next section (e.g. introduction of machinery, concentration of industries in cities, etc.), a distinct political change happens in the form of the struggle of the proletariat, because now: ‘its strength grows, and it feels that strength more’ (Marx and Engels, 1975: 54). Trade union struggle occurs: it is “the economic struggle against the employers and the ­government” (Lenin, 1977a: 165). Trade union struggle is a form of class struggle, although an inadequate form (or a lower form) of struggle, for reasons we will see below. The proletariat now makes definite demands, unlike in the days of primitive revolts. It times the strikes carefully; it shows geographical imagination, spacing the strikes and discussing the known cases in different places. Workers set up associations, first secretly and then openly as conditions permit, the ‘associations not for just a day against any single manufacturer’, the associations which are partial combinations engaging in a passing strike and which disappear with the strike. They set up permanent associations or ­combinations (trade unions) that are ‘directed against entire groups of manufacturers, workers’ associations of entire industries, entire towns, finally associations uniting large numbers of workers’ throughout a country. In other words, class struggle is scaled up. Trade unions ‘serve as ramparts for the 7 ‘At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie’ (Marx and Engels, 1975: 54).

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workers in their struggles with the employers.’ And then political parties of the workers are formed. In the early stage (and even sometimes now), the associations and their numerous fights against capitalists often lead to ‘acts of violence, revengeful destructions, arson, armed attacks and assassinations – all these actions just prove the love [!] of the proletariat for the bourgeoisie.’ (Engels, 1848; para 5). Unlike the Luddite style actions/revolts (‘spontaneous’ destruction of machinery, etc.) ‘the systematic strikes’ represent ‘the class struggle in embryo’. They signify ‘a transition from the workers’ disunity and helplessness to the rudiments of class organisation’ (Lenin, 1968: 35). These strikes are still ‘simply trade union struggles’, because Lenin as explains in What is to be done?, ‘working conditions differ greatly in different trades, and, consequently, the struggle to improve them can only be conducted on the basis of trade organisations’ (Lenin, 1977: 138). The aim of trade union struggles is to get a better economic deal: ‘The economic struggle is the collective struggle of the workers against their employers for better terms in the sale of their labour-power, for better living and working conditions’ (ibid.). Thanks to the strikes, it is, at least, partly the case that ‘Wages are determined through the antagonistic struggle between capitalist and worker.’  Surely, competition divides workers’ interests. But the maintenance of wages, this common interest which they have against their boss, unites them in a common thought of resistance – combination. Combination always has a double aim, that of a) stopping competition among the workers, so that b) they can carry on general competition with the capitalist. If the first aim of resistance was merely the maintenance of wages, combinations, at first isolated, constitute themselves into groups as the capitalists in their turn unite for the purpose of repression, and in the face of always united capital, the maintenance of the association becomes more necessary to them than that of wages. This is so true that …workers sacrifice a good part of their wages in favour of associations, which…are established solely in favour of wages. Trade union struggle is mainly economic in that it involves economic demands (e.g. rise in wages). Trade union struggle is also a political struggle. It is political in two inter-related senses. Firstly: trade union economic struggle becomes political when the government becomes the target of struggle for concessions: it puts pressure on the government to make employers grant concessions. The trade union struggle is a political struggle in so far as it involves ‘striving to secure … the improvement of working conditions in each separate trade by means of “legislative and administrative measures”’ as well as ‘laws to protect women and children… the

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improvement of labour conditions by means of health and factory legislation, etc.’. The trade union struggle also puts pressure on the government for a social wage (benefits such as unemployment insurance, etc.) (Lenin, 1977a: 138). Thus trade union economic struggle becomes a form of political struggle, giving rise to trade union politics, when it involves: ‘the common striving of all workers to secure from the government measures for alleviating the distress to which their condition gives rise, but which do not abolish that condition, i.e., which do not remove the subjection of labour to capital’ (Lenin, 1977a: 124). An increase in the scalar scope of economic demand from the scale of a factory or a group of factories (e.g. an industry) to a regional scale or a national scale leads to a qualitative change.8 For example, ‘the attempt by strikes, etc. in a particular factory or even in a particular trade [industry] to compel individual capitalists to reduce the working day, is a purely economic movement’, but ‘the movement to force through an eight-hour day, etc., law is a political ­movement’. Thus ‘out of the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say, a class movement, with the object of enforcing its interests in a general form, in a form possessing general, socially coercive force’ (Marx’s letter to Bolte, in Marx and Engels, 1982: 254–255). So, ‘every movement in which the working class comes out as a class confronts the ruling classes and tries to constrain them by pressure from without is a political movement’ (Marx’s letter to Bolte, in Marx and Engels, 1982: 254). And there is, according to Marx, a connection between economic movements for concessions and organizational form the movements take: ‘If these movements presuppose a certain degree of previous organisation, they are themselves equally a means of the development of this organisation’ (ibid.: 254–255). Secondly: often it is the quantitative increase in the intensity and scope of trade union economic struggle that transforms into a trade union political struggle. This happens, for example, when a strike continues longer than an 8 That the scale issue – the scale at which the working class can negotiate its demands with employers – is important came to light during the on-going labour strike in France (i.e. June 2016). In response to the labor strike against a pro-employer labour reforms legislation, the French government has made many concessions but there is one sticking point. There is a rule in the proposed reform that the government insists on keeping: ‘a rule that would allow employers to negotiate with unions at the factory – rather than the sector – level’. The influence of the union (Genera Confederation of labour) ‘has always come from its role as an actor on the national stage, capable of going head-to-head against the government. A devolution to the local level would be a blow to its disproportionate power’ (Bohlen, 2016: p. A9).

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employer or a group of employers would normally tolerate it, so police intervenes, which prompts a trade union political response (action against police). The coercive forces of the state ‘often take the initiative in lending the economic struggle a political character’ (e.g. when they use force against strikers) (Lenin, 1977a: 147). When police supress strikers, ‘the workers themselves learn to understand whom the government supports’. Thus trade union struggle becomes political to the extent that it involves striving for political conditions necessary for making economic demands. These conditions include: ‘the right to strike’ and ‘the removal of all legal hindrances to the co-operative and trade union movements’ (Lenin, 1977a: 138). Trade union – spontaneous – ­political struggle also aims at fighting against political oppression covering areas of ‘passport, flogging, corruption’, etc. exposing injustice of the laws and partiality of the judges (ibid.: 140). So, there is political oppression, tyranny, which is not connected to economic struggle (political oppression is of two types: one connected to economic struggle and one is not). There is political oppression that is independent of economic oppression. Trade union political struggle is expressed electorally. Workers’ politics aims not just at putting pressure on a government to force capitalists to grant economic concessions. It also seeks to engage in a regime change: changing of a government that would provide more concessions than the existing government. The economic struggle of the workers is thus often connected (although not inseparably) with bourgeois politics. This kind of striving is common to numerous trade union organizations, including organizations with loyalty towards identity politics, nationalist chauvinism, religion, etc. This is a kind of political struggle, based on more or less spontaneous consciousness informing the working class movement with its unreasoning trust in governments.9 The state does grant concessions under certain conditions, fearing more intense revolt, i.e. it grants concessions ‘against its will, and under the pressure of the masses’ (Marx, 1977: 903). Thus sometimes, the state, which occupies the ‘position of a permanent Trades’ Union of the capitalists against the labourers’ (ibid.), gives up the anti-workers laws such as those against Strikes and Trades’ Unions, and it does introduce laws in the interest of workers. For example, ‘The 9 Note that: non-trade union struggle can be spontaneous as well. For example: opposition to the war. The deep opposition to Obama’s war plans, though still passive and not fully conscious, shows the enormous potential for the building of a mass, anti-war movement. This opposition lacks a conscious working class political form. The opposition to the war must be rooted in a political struggle to mobilize the working class, which is the only consistent supporter of peace, equality and democracy.

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establishment of a normal working day is the result of centuries of struggle between the capitalist and the worker’ (Marx, 1977: 382). Trade union struggle compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. This partly explains pro-worker legislations such as those that mandate shorter working days. 4

What Makes (Spontaneous or Trade Unionist) Struggle Necessary and Possible?

Class relation and class struggle are internally, if asymmetrically, connected. Classes can exist without there being (conscious) class struggle. But class struggle cannot exist without antagonistically related classes. The material basis for class relation is characterized, within limits, by a ‘conditional spectrum’. This means that: a) a variable standard of living is compatible with the capitalist class relation in that the latter, ultimately, sets limit within which the conditions of life and work of the working class can vary, and b) which level of living standard exists in a concrete conjuncture becomes a target of class struggle and is therefore not automatically fixed. For example, while it is the case that on an average, over a long period of time and over a large area, wages correspond to the value of labour power, there is a range of wages which is compatible with capitalism at a given point in time; and indeed for a given period wages can even rise above value, as long as the diminution of unpaid labour does not significantly cut off the supply of capital generally necessary to support accumulation. The struggle for a rise in wages and for better working conditions is necessary (and possible). It is necessary because without such struggle, wages may fall below the value of labour power. Similarly, politically, the capitalist class system is compatible with a variety of political forms, ranging from tsarism and fascism10 to monarchy, liberal democracy and even social democracy. So some antagonisms are reconcilable (e.g. a relatively high level of wage; a certain degree of democracy in politics), and other antagonisms are not. These include: the right to buy labour power, the right to private property, the right to appropriate surplus value, and the right to control the hidden abode of production; the state suppressing a strike going out of control). It is this conditional spectrum of possibilities that explains the fact of struggle, and a variety of forms of struggle (defensive and offensive).

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It is to be noted that fascist tendency has been raising its ugly head in many parts of the world now.

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Workers own only one commodity: their labour power. Excessive abuse of their labour power through long working days and speed-up, unsafe working conditions, insecure employment (contract work) and reduction in social wage, etc. – such abuse may benefit some capitalists but hurt the long-term interests of the capitalist class as a whole – has always prompted class struggle. Further, workers’ (absolute and relative) standard of living (and their socialemotional dignity and well-being associated with that) depends on their earnings relative to expenditures, and their earnings depend on the value of labour power (i.e. wages, in monetary terms) and days of employment. Any social process that reduces wages11 and increases unemployment reduces earnings, and can trigger workers’ struggle against such process. Similarly, a long working day benefits individual capitalists and hurts workers. Yet, ‘the nature of commodity exchange itself imposes no limit to the working day, no limit to surplus-labour’ (Marx, 1977: 344). On the one hand: The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser [of labour power] when he tries to make the working day as long as possible. On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the worker maintains his right as a seller when he wishes to reduce the working day to ... There is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges. Between equal rights force decides (ibid.). Hence is it that in the history of production under capitalist class relation, the determination of what is a normal working day, presents itself as the result of a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working class (ibid.). Introduction of machinery is an important part of the history of class struggle. Indeed, it occurs as a potential and/or actual response to working class struggle. Machinery is ‘a power inimical to’ the worker ‘and as such capital proclaims this fact loudly’ (Marx, 1977: 562). ‘It is the most powerful weapon for repressing strikes’ (ibid.).12 The economic aim of machinery is to produce 11

12

Wages are nominal (money wages), real (nominal wages relative to the buying power) and relative (wages relative to the surplus value appropriated by the property-owners). Usually, workers struggle for a rise in nominal or real wages. ‘In the first place, in machinery the motion and the activity of the instruments of labour asserts its independence vis a vis the worker. The instrument of labour now becomes an industrial form of perpetual motion. It would go on producing forever if it did not come

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surplus value in its relative form. And in the process, it creates a surplus population13 (unemployment and u ­ nder-employment): machinery competes with the workman, ‘to make him superfluous’ (Marx, 1977: 618). It also puts downward pressure on wages of the currently employed and subjects them to overwork). As ‘new labor-saving machines are invented’, the ‘pressure exercised by big industry on wages’ is increased and as a result wages ‘sink to their minimum and therewith render the condition of the proletariat increasingly unbearable’ (Marx and Engels, 1975). That is why, the introduction of machinery prompts – like geographical relocation of enterprises leading to loss of local jobs – prompts class struggle from below.14 As well, ‘The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating’ (Marx and Engels, 1975: 54–55). And this prompts trade union struggle. A major impetus for class struggle is indeed the regular economic crisis, which signifies the fact that the development of forces of production is being contradicted by existing relations of production and exchange. While the normal operation of capitalism promotes class struggle, economic crisis under capitalism is a particularly potent context for class struggle. Capital’s existence depends on the augmentation of capital, but during crisis that process stops or slows down, so while it suffers from an auto-immune disease, an extra attack by the working class really hurts it. If class struggle is like actors, the economic crisis of overproduction (and its underlying mechanism of falling rate of profit) is like the stage, and is indicative of the contradiction between productive forces

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up against certain natural limits in the shape of the weak bodies and strong wills of its human assistants. Because it is capital, the automatic mechanism is endowed, in the person of the capitalist, with consciousness and a will. As capital, therefore, it is animated by the drive to reduce to a minimum the resistance offered by man, that obstinate yet elastic natural barrier. This resistance is moreover lessened by the apparently undemanding nature of work at a machine, and the more pliant and docile character of the women and children employed by preference’ (Marx, 1977: 526–527). In his review of Marx’s Capital 1, Engels (1868; para 13) writes: ‘[The]… industrial reserve army, which, when business is bad or middling, is paid below the value of its labour and is irregularly employed or is left to be cared for by public charity, but which is indispensable to the capitalist class at times when business is especially lively…but which under all circumstances serves to break the power of resistance of the regularly employed workers and to keep their wages down’. Engels was a little too optimistic when he said in the context of machinery-worker relation: the growing dissatisfaction of the proletariat combined with its rising power prepares it for a proletarian social revolution (in Marx and Engels, 1977a: 86).

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and private appropriation of profit. With its own class relations which include ‘relations of production, of exchange and of property’, the capitalist society ‘has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange’, and it is ‘like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells’ (Marx and Engels, 1975: 49). Within the womb of this class-society, ‘the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations [class relations] that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule’ (ibid.). This form of class society experiences period and regular commercial crises that ‘put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly’. ‘In these crises’ which are crises of over-production from one vantage point, ‘a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed’ (ibid.), potentially creating conditions for new production.15 Trade union struggle (and other form of struggle) is also prompted by the capitalist political system including the bureaucratic character of b­ ourgeois and petty-bourgeois parties, and by the paralysis in the political rule of the propertied class: this occurs when, for example, too much difference in economic and political interests and in theoretical views within the propertied class leads to policy paralysis or policy contradictions. The latter can weaken the ability of the state, the ‘collective capitalist’, to respond to the effects of the economic crisis, producing adverse impacts on the economic and political rights of the working class.16 15

16

‘Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented’ (Marx and Engels, 1975: 50). Often at the international scale, competition between capitalist powers pushes the workers to war, which in turn can prompt class struggle.

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Class struggle against capital is necessary, not just because workers’ interests are hurt, but also because individual resistance will not work, and it will not work especially with regards to government regulation in workers’ interest. In fact, the history of such regulations indicates that: ‘the isolated worker ... as free seller of his labour-power … succumbs without any power of resistance’ (Marx, 1977: 412). That is why driven by objective conditions of its working and living, the working class has always launched class struggle against capital in its own immediate needs: as soon as the workers learn the secret of why it happens that the more they work, the more alien wealth they produce, and that the more the productivity of their labour increases, the more does their very function as a means for the valorization of capital become precarious; as soon as they discover that the degree of intensity of the competition among themselves depends wholly on the pressure of the relative surplus population; as soon as, by setting up trade unions, etc. they try to organise planned co-operation between the employed and the unemployed in order to obviate or weaken the ruinous effects of this natural law of capitalistic production on their class so soon does capital and its sycophant, political economy, cry out at the infringement of the ‘eternal’ and so to speak ‘sacred’ law of supply and demand. marx, 1977: 793

Pro-worker legislations are therefore ‘the product of a protracted and more or less concealed civil war between the capitalist class and the working class’ (Marx, 1977: 412–413). Indeed: ‘For “protection” against the serpent of their agonies, the workers have to their heads together, and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier by which they can be prevented from selling themselves and their families into slavery and death by voluntary contract with capital’ (ibid.: 416). There are various processes that make trade union struggle possible. There is a certain commonality between labor interest and interest of the capitalist class. For example, a healthy, educated and well-fed working class, working/ living in environmentally safe conditions, is good for the long-term interest of capitalist accumulation, both economically and politically. So this principle allows, under certain conditions, the possibility of trade union struggle. Capitalists, generally speaking, would not like class struggle against their own interests or class position. However, capitalists have a collective action problem: competing with one another, they fail to ensure collective conditions (e.g. well-fed workers) for their reproduction as a class. Class struggle, which is a

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subjective process from workers’ standpoint is an objective process from the standpoint of a fraction of the capitalists and indeed the capitalist class. Class struggle forces the capitalist class to ensure the collective conditions which the class would not otherwise do. As individual capitalists, they would be interested in long working days which however destroys, through overwork of workers, the basis for profit: quality labour power. By limiting the working day through class struggle, the latter indirectly makes sure long-term interests of capital are met. With respect to the struggle over the working day that puts pressure on the state to respond through its Acts, Marx says: These laws curb capital’s drive towards a limitless draining away of l­ abour-power by forcibly limiting the working day on the authority of the state, but a state ruled by capitalist and landlord. Apart from the daily more threatening advance of the working-class movement the limiting of factory labour was dictated by the [necessity to protect the health of the working class so it could continue to produce surplus value for the capitalist class] (1977: 348; parenthesis added).17 In so far as individual capitalists do not see the long-term and common interests this way, trade union activity is necessary to check ‘the plundering nature of individual capitalists’ who are competing with one another, and each of whom sees their own workers as a cost and other capitalists’ workers as consumers. Similarly, class struggle over higher wages has the potential to create a consumer market, other things constant, but given that a given capitalist thinks of her worker as an expenditure and other capitalists’ workers are consumers, no capitalist left to themselves would ordinarily want to increase wages (or indeed pay higher taxes to fund public education and health-care). So structurally and objectively speaking, in certain situations, there is some common ground between long-term common interests of capital as a whole (in a wellfed, well-educated healthy workforce) and workers’ interest in economic concession (higher wages and shorter hours, better public services, etc.). Among the objective conditions that make trade union struggle possible is also the introduction of large-scale industry. Given the law of value, any property-­owner whose cost of production is above the socially average level faces the risk of going out of business. The large-scale character of an enterprise 17

It was indeed the ‘same necessity as forced the manuring of English fields with guano. The same blind desire for profit that in the one case exhausted the soil had in the other case seized hold of the vital force of the nation at its roots’ (ibid.).

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can help reduce cost and increase competitiveness: those members of the capitalist class who can reap the economies of scale can out-compete those who cannot, and the latter lose out. This is why ‘entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence’ and thus ‘supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress’. The capitalist class relation gradually socializes private property by also destroying property based on self-earned property (ruining petty bourgeoisie, including peasants). As a well, with large-scale industry, a large number of workers come to work in a single factory or bank or retail store, or on a industrialized farm. Besides, with large-scale industry and introduction of machinery, the ­various interests and conditions of life within the working class are increasingly – even if unevenly – equalized across regions, countries, and sectors. This happens: in proportion as machinery o­ bliterates all distinctions of labour [deskilling], and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. ... The unceasing improvement of machinery [where it occurs], ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (Trades’ Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots. marx and engels, 1975: 54–55; parenthesis added

This sort of socialization of society’s production and exchange activities, that happens through, and takes the form of, large-scale enterprises, has important implication for workers’ struggle. In the days of the isolated small producers, they ‘each performed several operations simultaneously, and were therefore relatively independent of each other…’ (Lenin, 1963a: 176). When capitalism has advanced, things become different under the socialisation of labour. ‘In each branch of industry, which has now become more specialised, the number of capitalists steadily decreases. This means that the social tie between the producers becomes increasingly stronger, the producers become welded into a single whole’ (ibid.). This means that for example, ‘The manufacturer who produces fabrics depends on the cotton-yarn ‘manufacturer; the latter depends on the capitalist planter who grows the cotton, on the owner of the e­ ngineering

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works, the coal mine, and so on and so forth’ (ibid.). The result is that no capitalist can get along without others. This has implications for the impact of economic struggle: strike in one place of production can impact another’. The process of socialization of means of production under the capitalist class relation has a direct geographical form. With large-scale industry, the geographical concentration of workers in particular factories, cities and regions occurs. What Harvey (1985) famously calls urbanization of capital results; it is the process of the concentration of productive forces under the rule of capital in cities, which ‘draws members of the bourgeoisie and proletarians together into the great cities where industry can be carried on most profitably’ (Engels, in Marx and Engels, 1977a: 86). Such a process throws ‘great masses in one spot’ and thus gives them ‘a consciousness of their own power’ (ibid.). It is true that the capitalist class improves the means of communication in its own interest (there is an imperative to reduce the cost of transportation of means of production and final products, and that geographical imperative gets stronger as the economic scale of capitalist operation expands). But this process also helps the union of workers: it places the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It is just this contact that helps to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between ­classes.18 Urbanization of capital leads to urbanization of class struggle in a country, and later internationalization of struggle: Hand in hand with this centralization, or this expropriation of many capitalists by a few, other developments take place on an ever-increasing scale, such as the growth of the co-operative form of the labor-process, … the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world market, and, with this, the growth of the international character of the capitalistic regime.19 marx, 1977: 929

Workers do differ on the basis of racial and national background, and this fact problematizes workers’ struggle, but that background can also be a source of global struggle. Marxists urge the necessity of an understanding between the workmen in the different countries and of different regions of a country, which becomes more necessary as capitalists become increasingly cosmopolitan in 18

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The union, ‘to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years’ It is possible to extend this geographical insight to include such technologies as air-travel and the internet. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/hist-mat/capital/vol1-ch32.htm.

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hiring labor, pitting foreign against native labor, especially in advanced countries with a relative shortage of labour supply. International relations spring up at once between workingmen of different countries, and this shows that the problem created by the capitalist class relations is not merely a local or national problem, but an international problem, to be solved by the international action of the working class. Collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of political development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, including that of ex-colonized countries in its fight with imperialists, therefore, supplies the proletariat and semi-proletarians) with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie. Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie…[in what are more or less veiled civil wars, raging within existing society].20 marx and engels, 1975: 59

While objective conditions prompt and make possible class struggle in its trade union form, they also pose many obstacles. The political action on the part of the proletariat including trade union struggle and beyond (e.g. their ­formation into a class conscious political party) is continually upset ‘by the competition between the workers themselves’ for employment, etc. The history of trade union struggle (and not just trade union struggle) is cyclical21 showing the changing balance of forces which help and which hinder 20

21

Such civil wars beyond a point have the potential to break out ‘into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie’ can lay ‘the foundation for the sway of the proletariat’ (Marx and Engels, 1975: 59). 2015–2016 has been a period of massive workers’ struggles. In the us, there were more strikes in 2015 than in 2014.

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struggle. There is always ‘an alternation of periods of revolution and reaction, peace and war, stagnation and rapid progress or decline’ (Lenin, 1977a: 25). Class struggle also occurs in a spatially uneven way, so it is a geographical project. Class struggles from below develop through stages, as Marx outlined in the Manifesto: struggles by individual laborers, then by a group of laborers of a factory, then by workers of one trade, then in one locality, and all this against an individual employer. When workers get concentrated in industrial cities, individual collisions take on the character of collisions between classes. Then they form unions, which make possible national-level struggles. Workers from areas with traditions of class and other non-class struggles bring their memories and fighting spirit to new places which they come to, following capital. While workers use spatial concentration to build solidarity and launch class struggle in a place, capital in its struggle uses a spatial fix (dispersal): shifting production to sub-urban and rural locations and to low wage areas including in less developed countries (deskilling and fragmentation of the labor process allow it to locate different parts of a labor process in different places). It also pits workers in one city against those in another city in order to wrench concessions (to gain/keep jobs, workers give in to the demands of capital for low wages and limited benefits) (Harvey, 2001: 381; Massey, 1984). ‘The organization of working-class struggle concentrates and diffuses across space in a way that mirrors the [space-annihilating] actions of capital’ (Harvey, 2001: 374). But it is fair to say that ‘while workers have been better at commanding power in places and territories rather than in controlling spatialities, … the capitalist class has used its superior powers of spatial maneuvers to defeat place-bound proletarian/socialist revolutions’ (Harvey, 2001: 381–382). In some areas, as mentioned above, in pursuing their local interests, some workers become a part of place-specific cross-class alliance (Cox and Mair, 1988; Harvey, 1985): workers and capital get together to devise state policies to attract business into an area which will create employment for workers and help businesses make profit, because the interests of these class actors are such that they can be satisfied in particular places, at a given point in time. This opens up place-based differences in interests within the class of capital and the class of labor. Workers support competition between areas (Gough, 1992). But this – a geographical cross-class consciousness rather than a class consciousness p ­ roper – is by no means ­typical – neither conceptually nor empirically – of the world working class. When factories close, it has a devastating impact on historically sedimented relations and practices in a place with which people have developed an attachment. So many anti-plant closure movements have been organized around attachment to place. It is through these struggles for changes within capitalism – many failed place-placed movements against plant closures – that workers

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attain more radical consciousness. Capitalists need to make profit by exploiting labor. Labor has an interest in a decent living and reduced exploitationlevel, and finally, in abolishing exploitation. But these interests/needs are met always in spatially mediated, place-specific ways. This means that a struggle over a relatively ‘small issue’ such as a delayed payment of wages (Lenin’s example) here can spark a struggle against low wages against women there, and a general strike at the national scale later, leading to up-scaling of workers’ agency. Similarly, specific strategies of exploitation, including introduction of new technology of enhanced productivity or of labor control are tried in specific spatial contexts, depending on capital-labor balance of power, characteristics of labor, and so on. So questions of class interests/powers and questions of geography are intimately interconnected (Sadler, 2003: 331). But the primacy of class cannot be understood in terms of what happens to class practices and relations in specific places. Capitalism develops unevenly in space and this can divide the working class and weaken its struggle. But uneven development does not have to undermine class struggle. German Ideology says: It is evident that big industry does not reach the same level of development in all districts of a country. This does not, however, retard the class movement of the proletariat, because the proletarians created by big industry assume leadership of this movement and carry the whole mass along with them, and because the workers excluded from big industry are placed by it in a still worse situation than the workers in big industry itself. The countries in which big industry is developed act in a similar manner upon the more or less non-industrial countries, insofar as the latter are swept by universal commerce into the universal competitive struggle. marx and engels, 1978: 78–79

Capital’s relation of power with labor is reproduced through space relations. Class – class in capitalism – is fundamentally a spatial project. There is an ­implication of the world-scale character of class. Because there is a geographical contradiction between the world-scale character of bourgeois production and the nation-state character of bourgeois politics, the success and failure of working class action in a place must be partly assessed on the basis of its success and failure to coordinate its actions across national and regional spaces and to develop internationalist working class consciousness. While the capitalist class as a whole is the enemy of the working class and seeks to undermine the struggle of the working class, specific members of the capitalist class may behave differently: they may support the working class.

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in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole. marx and engels, 1975: 56–57

Capitalists, and the state on their behalf, promote and make use of divisions within the working class (on the basis of race,22 gender, location, nationality, etc.) – the divisions which are also promoted by the relatively educated and well-off sections of the wage-earning class trying to still better their own situation on the basis of their special status defined by race, gender, etc.23 These divisions – often mistakenly seen as the primary cleavages more fundamental than class divisions – weaken class consciousness and organization. The state’s coercive force, apart from its consent-producing processes, and economic mechanisms of the capitalist class relation, is perhaps the single most important obstacle to both struggle for reforms (as evident when police attacks striking workers) and revolutionary struggle. The geographical dispersion of a large section of the working class – the elements living in small towns and villages – allows capitalists to enslave them more easily than urban workers. Uneven capitalist economic development creates uneven material conditions that weaken class struggle, even if not insurmountably. The workers are also divided politically on the basis of their 22

23

When in a city workers of different races work and live (and often capitalists may encourage such racial diversity in order to create divisions), economic competition for jobs which they experience – and which is actually due to the mechanisms that exist by virtue of the capitalist class relations which controls the supply and nature of jobs – is seen more as competition on the basis of race, and not as a class-based mechanism. So in relation to workers of dominated race, workers of the majority race feel as if they belong to the ruling nation and receive a psychological compensation in the form of such belongingness, and thus become a tool of the ruling class, and this contributes to their own domination. Alienated from one another because of the capitalist class system, workers – as individuals or groups – make use of multiple forms of difference or social identity (e.g. gender, race, nationality, etc.) to augment their competitive position in the labor market, and thus they become oblivious of what binds them all. Workers cannot be idealized. Workers who lack class consciousness can be racist, casteist, patriarchal and nationalistic.

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a­ lliance with, and loyalty to, different political parties of the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeoisie. Bourgeois democracy is a great divider of the working class. Imperialism also divides the working class. To the extent that imperialism is about disciplining, this disciplining is partly an internal activity, internal to imperialist countries: by placing the working class of the rich countries in a competitive relation with that of the imperialized countries, imperialist capital disciplines the working class of core countries, as Cammack (2004) has argued. Capitalists’ economic power itself is a paramount obstacle to class struggle for economic concessions. Capitalists control the supply of jobs, and workers, separated from means of subsistence, compete for jobs in a place and across places. While workers have numbers on their side, that itself can make class unity difficult, while the fewer capitalists can be better united, and they do have powerful associations/organizations of their own (e.g. chambers of commerce; think tanks, etc.). Indeed the state is the biggest and most trusted trade union of the capitalist class. Besides, how long can workers go on a strike and live on their limited savings? In the course of a strike: ‘Victory goes necessarily to the capitalist (Marx, 1974: 21). The capitalist can live longer without the worker than can the worker without the capitalist’. Indeed: ‘the landowner and the capitalist can make use of industrial advantages to augment their revenues’ (ibid.). In contrast, ‘the worker has neither rent nor interest on capital to supplement his industrial income. Hence the intensity of the competition among the workers’. It is also the case that ‘Combination among the capitalists is customary and effective; workers’ combination is prohibited and painful in its consequences for them’ (ibid.). Apart from the competition among workers in different areas and sectors (for jobs, higher wages, etc. which takes the form of competition between migrants and locals, genders and racial groups), there is the issue of sectarianism. While there is no denying that finer distinctions between threads and tendencies should be made on the basis of basic principles informed by class analysis, unnecessary sectarianism and attendant incessant negative critique24 is problematic as it destroys the basis for building unity on the basis of fundamental interests of workers.25 Sectarianism is a sign of immaturity of working class movement. 24

25

‘We should commit the greatest mistake if we refrained from sympathy with it or if in our attitude to the “related” parties we confined ourselves merely to negative criticism. There may come a moment when it would be our duty to co-operate in a positive way’ (Engels, 1894; para 13). While it is true that sectarianism is counter-productive, and that ‘Unity is quite a good thing so long as it is possible’, it is also the case that ‘there are things which stand higher

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The development of socialist sectarianism and that of the real working class movement always stand in inverse proportion to each other. Sects are (historically) justified so long as the working class is not yet ripe for an independent historic movement. As soon as it has attained this maturity all sects are essentially reactionary.26 marx’s letter to bolte in marx and engels, 1982: 253

There is a need to work with non-radicals and non-Marxists in a united front of workers. At times a class conscious movement of the proletariat may work with groups and parties on the condition that it maintains its independence, and that the movement indulges in no illusions whatever as to the result of the struggle in case of victory; that far from satisfying us this result will only mean to us another stage won, a new base of operations for further conquests; that on the very day of victory, our ways will part; that from that day on we shall constitute the new opposition to the new government, an opposition …of the extreme

26

than unity’ (Engels’ letter to Bebel in Marx and Engels, 1982: 334). Marx and Engels ‘fought harder … against the alleged Socialists than against anyone else (for …they] only regarded the bourgeoisie as a class and hardly ever involved ourselves in conflicts with individual bourgeois)’, and yet, differences did break out (ibid.). The Communist Manifesto asks: ‘In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?’ It goes on to answer the question like this. ‘The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement. The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole. The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement’ (Marx and Engels, 1975: 61–62).

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Left, which will press on to new conquests beyond the ground already gained. engels’ letter to turati on marx and engels, 1982: 446

The principle of united front form of struggle ‘is imposed by the dialectics of the class struggle’ (Trotsky, 1933; para 10). This is in the sense that ‘No successes would be possible without temporary agreements, for the sake of fulfilling immediate tasks, among various sections, organizations and groups of the proletariat’. The proletariat must engage in ‘Strikes, trade unions, journals, parliamentary elections, street demonstrations’ which ‘demand that the split [within the proletariat] be bridged in practice from time to time as the need arises’. In other words, ‘they demand a united front ad hoc, even if it does not always take on the form of one’. Initially, during a working class movement, ‘unity arises episodically and spontaneously from below, but when the masses are accustomed to fighting through their organizations, unity must also be established at the top’ (ibid.). On the other hand, the history of ‘alliances, agreements and blocs’ with nonrevolutionary groups or with groups which are not revolutionary enough ‘has convincingly shown that these agreements only blunt the consciousness of the masses, that they do not enhance but weaken the actual significance of their struggle, by linking fighters with elements who are least capable of fighting and most vacillating and treacherous’ (Lenin, 1977a: 54).27 27

Lenin writes in his ‘Left-wing’ communism: ‘Prior to the downfall of tsarism, the Russian [communists] made repeated use of the services of the bourgeois liberals, i.e., they concluded numerous practical compromises with the latter. In 1901–02, even prior to the appearance of Bolshevism, [Marxists] … concluded (not for long, it is true) a formal political alliance with … bourgeois liberalism, while at the same time being able to wage an unremitting and most merciless ideological and political struggle against bourgeois liberalism and against the slightest manifestation of its influence in the working-class movement. The Bolsheviks have always adhered to this policy. Since 1905 they have systematically advocated an alliance between the working class and the peasantry, against the liberal bourgeoisie and [autocracy], never, however, refusing to support the bourgeoisie against [autocracy] …and never ceasing their relentless ideological and political struggle against the Socialist-Revolutionaries, the bourgeois-revolutionary peasant party, exposing them as petty-bourgeois democrats who have falsely described themselves as socialists. During the Duma elections of 1907, the Bolsheviks entered briefly into a formal political bloc with the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Between 1903 and 1912, there were periods of several years in which we were formally united with the Mensheviks in a single Social-Democratic Party, but we never stopped our ideological and political struggle against them as opportunists and vehicles of bourgeois influence on the proletariat. During the war, we concluded certain compromises with the Kautskyites, with the Left Mensheviks (Martov), and with

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While objective and subjective conditions prompt and make possible class struggle in its trade union form,28 they also pose many obstacles. The trade union struggle is not only geographically uneven but also cyclical,29 and this fact reflects the changing balance of forces. Trade union struggle does not happen (everywhere) all the time: The necessarily discontinuous nature of mass action is explained by the class condition of the proletariat itself. As long as a mass action does not succeed in toppling the capitalist mode of production, its duration will be limited by the financial, physical and mental ability of the workers to withstand the loss of wages. It is obvious that this ability is not unlimited. To deny this would be to deny the material conditions of the proletariat’s existence, which compel it, as a class, to sell its labour power. mandel, 1970b; para 2

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a section of the Socialist-Revolutionaries… However, we never ceased and never relaxed our ideological and political struggle against the Kautskyites…. At the very moment of the October Revolution, we entered into an informal but very important (and very successful) political bloc with the petty-bourgeois peasantry by adopting the Socialist-Revolutionary agrarian programme in its entirety, without a single alteration – i.e., we effected an undeniable compromise in order to prove to the peasants that we wanted, not to “steam-roller” them but to reach agreement with them. At the same time we proposed (and soon after effected) a formal political bloc, including participation in the government, with the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries’ (Lenin, 1968: 56–57). Many of the processes discussed above apply to workers’ struggle as such and not just trade union form of it. 2015–2016 has been a period of massive workers’ struggles. In the us, there were more strikes in 2015 than in 2014.

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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 different levels: a more fundamental level, and a level at which effects of the operation 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 preserves 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 history’; 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, aristocratic 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 immediate 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).

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‘Capitalism could have been declared – and with full justice – to be “historically 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 capitalism’ (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 current world conjuncture where: there is a deep contradiction between objective 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 widespread 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. Section 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. Section 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

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is against the aim to abolish capitalist business, i.e. to abolish wage-slavery. The conflation of trade union struggle with class struggle mistakenly assumes that class relation is merely a relation of exploitation, including ‘exploitation’ on the basis of payment of below-market – or inadequate – compensation, or that class relation is merely about workers not receiving a good share of the social product, and that exploitation can be reduced a bit through trade union pressure and/or through pressure on the state for welfare, or indeed, through the collective provision of goods and services that is paid for through taxes. Spontaneous trade union struggle engages in ‘a narrow circle of strikes for higher wages and shorter hours, not, however, as an expedient or means of propaganda and organisation but as the ultimate goal’ (Engels to Bernstein in Marx and Engels, 1982: 300). This means that: ‘any subservience to the spontaneity of the mass movement’ and any degrading of communist politics that aims to abolish wage-slavery ‘to the level of trade-unionist politics mean preparing the ground for converting the working-class movement into an instrument of bourgeois democracy’ (Lenin, 1977a: 165). Indeed, as Lenin says in What is to be done?: The spontaneous working-class movement is by itself able to create (and inevitably does create) only trade-unionism, and working-class tradeunionist politics is precisely working-class bourgeois politics. The fact that the working class participates in the political struggle, and even in the political revolution, does not in itself make its politics … [communist] politics. lenin, 1977a: 165

The trade union movement is a nuisance to the capitalist class as it challenges the capitalists’ prerogative to do whatever it wishes with its means of production. Yet, once the bourgeoisie has reconciled itself to the fact that trade unions exist. Trade unions are ‘petted and patronized’ (Engels in Marx and Engels, 1977c: 446) by all political parties of the bourgeoisie, some more than others. The fact that trade unions spread sound economical doctrines amongst workers ‘(ibid.: 447) (about common interests of capital and labour; national interests, etc.) and discipline workers on behalf of capitalists, serves bourgeois interests. Trade unions can act as a safety valve for the bourgeoisie as well. Economic concessions that trade unions may gain from time to time help the state and the capitalist class produce consent of the masses to the rule of capital in an economically cheap manner, where possible. They are ‘the cheapest and most advantageous from the government’s point of view, because by these means the state hopes to win the confidence of the working masses’. Any success in trade union struggle may feed into illusions about the

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ability of e­ conomic struggle to significantly and permanently address workers’ problems. A single-minded focus on trade union movement, by dividing the workers on the basis of location (workers here gain a wage increase at the expense of workers there) or trade (e.g. skilled trades), actually weakens the ability of the working class as a whole to mount a struggle against the capitalist class system as a whole to end wage-slavery. The history of economic struggle has shown that ‘when the revolutionary party of the proletariat, the highest form of proletarian class organisation, began to take shape, the trade unions inevitably began to reveal certain reactionary features, a certain craft narrow-mindedness, a certain tendency to be non-political, a certain inertness, etc.’ (Lenin, 1968: 35). While masses have proletarian consciousness and socialist or class instincts, those who lead their associations often do not. They hobnob with the bourgeoisie and its state. The trade union bureaucracy often strangles the unions in the service of the bourgeoisie. This is increasingly happening because the ability to use trade union to protect the interest of some workers on the national basis is difficult given the ease with which physical and money capital can move around the world.2 One might argue that trade union struggle itself will be a means of political education of workers. This view is also mistaken: it is mistaken to think that ‘the economic struggle brings the workers to realise that they have no political rights and that the concrete conditions unavoidably impel the working-class movement on to the path of revolution’ (Lenin, 1977a: 167). Even more optimistic is the mistaken view that by economic struggle, or ‘by organising a general strike of the workers the trade unions … could, without a revolution, overthrow capitalism and take over control of production’. Such a Syndicalist view completely abstracts from the class character of the capitalist state that ultimately shields the capitalist class relation. Some indeed believe that economic struggle itself is a route to political struggle over state power.3 In workers’ economic struggle, which is ‘a v­ eritable civil war’, ‘all the elements necessary for a coming battle unite and develop. Once it has reached this point’, workers’ associations take ‘on a political character’ (Marx, 1987: 148). Such a view is erroneous in that it assumes that e­ conomic 2 Even if the trade union struggle is coordinated across countries and sub-national regions, still the maximum it can achieve is fighting the symptoms, albeit more efficiently than more localized movement. It can do very little to attack the ability of capitalism to produce economic crisis, and it will do little to undermine the principle that on an average wages will only cover the means of reproduction or that workers will have little control over the workplace and common management of society’s affairs. 3 Marx sometimes appeared to believe that.

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struggle can just automatically grow over into political struggle for state power. Economic struggle abstracted from the broader political struggle, including struggle against oppression and tyranny against any class, is simply a narrow view of class struggle. For this reason the conception of the economic struggle as the most widely applicable means of drawing the masses into the political movement… is so extremely harmful and reactionary in its practical significance. lenin, 1977a: 145

Workers also tend to think that a change in the government will alter matters. They do not see the state as necessarily being coercive in relation to the basic interests of workers. When the existing government sends police to suppress a workers’ strike against capital in a city, the relationship between capital and labour, and correspondingly the relation between the capitalist state and citizens, is seen as merely the relationship between a government and citizens, and therefore trade union politics aims at changing the government of a certain type. ‘The demand “to lend the economic struggle itself a political character” most strikingly expresses subservience to spontaneity in the sphere of political activity’ (Lenin, 1977a: 147). The boundary between trade unionist struggle and socialist struggle for abolition of class (class struggle proper) is not an entirely strict one, however, for trade union struggle does have sparks of socialist struggle. Yet, trade union struggle itself cannot be a vehicle for struggle against the system of class relations. The spontaneous revolts against the machinery and against low wages, etc. tend to be ‘the resistance of the oppressed’. These acts of resistance are class struggle but ‘only in embryo’. Taken by themselves, these strikes are ‘simply trade union struggles’, not yet socialist struggles, because striking workers are not ‘conscious of the irreconcilable antagonism of their interests to the whole of the modern political and social system’, and they lack socialist consciousness. But the trade union movement is not class struggle proper not only because of the lack of socialist consciousness: that assertion would amount to idealism. The very nature and aim of the trade union movement as trade union movement has little to do with the movement to abolish class. In that specific sense, the trade union strikes are a more developed form of class struggle than mere primitive revolts (e.g. Luddite actions) but they are a less developed form of class struggle proper. Class struggle proper presupposes limits to, and a critique of, trade union form of economic and political struggle. For all these reasons, Marxists do not and must not ‘under any circumstances or in any way whatever create grounds for the belief (or the misunderstanding) that we attach greater value to economic reforms, or that we regard them

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as being particularly important, etc.’ (Lenin, 1977a: 140). To conflate trade union struggle with class struggle is theoretically erroneous and politically dangerous. Trade union struggle is, once again, the struggle of workers of different trades to gain concessions within capitalism, and that is the ultimate aim, while class struggle is the struggle of the class as a whole against wage-slavery, a struggle that makes use of trade union struggle when possible. Trade unionist politics is marked by the wide tendency towards opportunism, of which Marxist theory of class struggle is critical. Opportunism ‘limits recognition of the class struggle to the sphere of bourgeois relations’ as it ‘does not extend recognition of the class struggle to the cardinal point, to the period of transition from capitalism to communism, of the overthrow and the complete abolition of the bourgeoisie’ (Lenin, 1977a: 36). There is politics, and there is politics. There is political struggle, and there is political struggle. Trade union politics or trade union political struggle is not the same as socialist politics or socialist political struggle. There is nothing inherently Marxist about trade union form of class struggle. Spontaneous struggle for economic and political reforms within capitalism is not entirely unacceptable to the bourgeoisie or its (organic) ideological spokespersons. 2

Trade Union Struggle is a (Subordinate) Part of Class Struggle

Marxist theory as advanced here rejects the criticisms of trade union struggle from sections of the Right. The latter reject trade union struggle because it ‘hinder[s] the regular progress of industry’, it prevents ‘manufacturers from carrying out their orders’, it disturbs trade and it precipitates ‘the invasion of machines which, by rendering … labour in part useless’, force workers ‘to accept a still lower wage’ (Marx, 1987: 146). Marxists do not endorse the argument that whatever workers do, ‘wages will always be determined by the relation of hands demanded to hands supplied, and it is an effort as ridiculous as it is dangerous for you to revolt against the eternal laws of political economy’ (ibid.). Marxists consider it false that if wages increase due to a strike, inflation will cut into the raised wage.4 On the other hand: some of the criticisms of the trade union struggle as advanced by sections of the Left are also problematic. One argument from the

4 Such a false view forgets that the price of a commodity includes wages and profit, and if wages go up, it is not necessary that the entire price will go up, because profit does not have to go up.

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Left is that ‘workers should not engage in strikes for higher wages’, for a little extra money one may gain ‘will be followed by a permanent fall’ and that ‘it would take … years merely to recover, through the increase in your wages, the expenses incurred for the organisation and upkeep of the combinations.’ Also problematic is this argument from David Harvey, the Marxist: Wage concessions to workers can… be stolen back and recuperated for the capitalist class as a whole by merchant capitalists and landlords, and … credit-mongers, the bankers, and the financiers. harvey, 2012: 129

It is true that struggle at the workplace and the struggle in the secondary sphere of exploitation should be combined. But it is not necessary that an increase in wages gained through workers’ workplace struggle is necessarily taken away by the capitalist class: whether or not that happens is contingent. Rent, groceries, etc. are expected to be parts of the value of labour power. So what the worker receives at the workplace is spent away outside of it. That is in the nature of capitalism. Of course, workers are subjected to above-market, predatory charges, and those should be a target for struggle. But just because secondary exploitation exists, that does not undermine the primacy of struggle against primary exploitation (or against its effects). If workers can demand a rise in real and relative wages, the necessity that Harvey establishes between the rise in wages and secondary exploitation can be weakened. Also problematic is the argument from the Left that workers often lose in the strike or have to strike compromises and therefore there is no point in launching a trade union struggle. There are compromises, and there are compromises. Compromises ordained by objective conditions and those by ­inadequate subjective conditions are not the same. Every proletarian has been through strikes and has experienced “compromises” with the hated oppressors and exploiters, when the workers have had to return to work either without having achieved anything or else agreeing to only a partial satisfaction of their demands. Every ­proletarian – as a result of the conditions of the mass struggle and the acute intensification of class antagonisms he lives among – sees the difference between a compromise enforced by objective conditions (such as lack of strike funds, no outside support, starvation and exhaustion) – a compromise which in no way minimises the revolutionary devotion and readiness to carry on the struggle on the part of the workers who have agreed to such a

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compromise – and, on the other hand, a compromise by traitors who try to ascribe to objective causes their self-interest (strike-breakers also enter into “compromises”!), their cowardice, desire to toady to the capitalists, and readiness to yield to intimidation, sometimes to persuasion, sometimes to sops, and sometimes to flattery from the capitalists. lenin, 1968: 52–53

Marxist theory of struggle rejects another Leftist idea: ‘The working class must not occupy itself with politics. They must only organise themselves by tradesunions… As the transformation of the existing States into Associations is our last end, we must allow the governments, those great Trade-Unions of the ruling classes, to do as they like, because to occupy ourselves with them is to ­acknowledge them’ (Marx, 1870). There is also the wrong pre-Marxist socialist view that ‘You must not occupy yourselves with the wages question, because you want to abolish wages labour, and to struggle with the capitalist about the rate of wages is to acknowledge the wages system!’ (ibid.). All these arguments fail to consider this: so long as the existing ‘state of affairs offers us the means of protesting against it, our use of these means does not signify that we recognise the prevailing order’ (Engels, 1871; para 3). Marxist theory poses the question of abolition of class in stark term: what is the means of the abolition of classes? The answer is: ‘The only means is political domination of the proletariat’. Yet, there are some – abstentionists – who advise the proletariat ‘not to meddle with politics’. These people say ‘they are revolutionaries, even revolutionaries par excellence’. Yet, they fail to understand that ‘revolution is a supreme political act’ and that ‘those who want revolution must also want the means of achieving it, that is, political action, which prepares the ground for revolution and provides the workers with the revolutionary training without which they are sure to become the dupes’ of bourgeois parties and movements (Engels, 1871; para 2). It is true that the trade union top leadership exhibits ‘reactionary and counter-­revolutionary character’ (Lenin, 1968: 37–38). But that does not justifying withdrawal from trade unions, however. To refuse to work in the reactionary trade unions means leaving the insufficiently developed or backward masses of workers under the influence of the reactionary leaders, the agents of the bourgeoisie, the labour aristocrats, or “workers who have become completely bourgeois” … The trade unions and the workers’ co-operatives [and other societies and associations] …are the very organisations in which the [proletarian or semi-proletarian] masses are to be found. lenin, 1968: 38

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Agitation and propaganda must be carried in these places systematically, perseveringly, persistently and patiently, even if they are most reactionary (Lenin, 1968: 38). That is why revolutionary parties ‘work legally in the most reactionary of parliaments, in the most reactionary of trade unions, co-operative and insurance societies and similar organisations’ (Lenin, 1968: 14). As a recent ­writer says with respect to the use of parliament: The electoral/parliamentary arena…, rather than being a vehicle for working-class ascent to power – as the reformists erroneously b­ elieved – was nevertheless an invaluable venue to propagandize revolutionary ideas and “to count forces” for the decisive battles in the streets and on the barricades. nimtz, 2015: 174–175

There is no doubt that the working class must fight for higher wages and better conditions of work. The Marxist approach cannot be in favour of sitting back and abstaining ‘while somebody tries to rob us of them’ (Engels, 1871; para 3). This is for several reasons. For one thing, ‘the whole history of modern industry shows that capital, if not checked, will recklessly and ruthlessly work to cast down the whole working class to this utmost …’ (Marx, 1976: 54). The struggle for reforms such as various legislations to improve conditions in workplaces is seen as providing, Marx says in a letter to a friend, ‘the primary condition for giving the working class elbow-room for development and movement’, and the working class demands them from the state. The struggle against wage slavery includes struggle for economic reforms, i.e. struggle against the symptoms of the operation of the system of wage slavery. Yet, trade union struggle outside of a theoretical and political struggle against wage-slavery ultimately reproduces wage slavery and bourgeois politics of the working class. The working class has always fought for concessions, and it always will, and Marxist theory recognizes that: The trade unions were a tremendous step forward for the working class in the early days of capitalist development, inasmuch as they marked a transition from the workers’ disunity and helplessness to the rudiments of class organisation. lenin, 1968: 35; italics in original

The problem is not that workers demand an increase in wages and improvement in their conditions. The problem is that they do not demand enough: not only an increase in real wages but an increase in relative wages, as a transitional demand, which would prevent the extra money earned in the workplace being

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taken away by the propertied class in the form of rent, etc. in the living place.5 Their struggle should be over not just real wages but relative wages. The struggle against the drop in relative wages is actually a revolutionary demand in a transitional sense: the struggle against the fall in relative wages … implies a struggle against the commodity-character of labour-power, i.e. against capitalist ­production as a whole. [The] struggle against the fall in relative wages is no longer a struggle on the basis of the commodity economy, but a revolutionary, subversive attack on the existence of this economy; it is the socialist movement of the proletariat. Luxemburg as quoted in BELLOFIORE, 2009: 13

Marxists view trade union struggle as a part of a broader movement to abolish wage-slavery. Marxists ‘always represent the interests of the movement [of the proletarians] as a whole’. They are for ‘the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class’. However, in the movement of the present’, what is not forgotten by them is ‘the future of that movement’ (Marx and Engels, 1975: 94). Therefore, Marxists/socialists take an active part in all the phases of the development of the struggle between the two classes without in so doing losing sight of the fact that these phases are only just so many preliminary steps to the first great aim: the conquest of political power by the proletariat as the means towards a new organisation of society. Their place is by the side of those who are fighting for the immediate achievement of an advance, which is at the same time in the interests of the working class. They accept all the political or social progressive steps, but only as instalments. Hence they regard every revolutionary or progressive movement as a step further in the attainment of their own end; and it is their special task to drive other revolutionary parties ever further. Socialists never mistake the little steps, the struggle forms reforms for the final goal: taking state power. engels, 1894; para 9

They never say the process is everything and the final goal is nothing. Marxist theory of class struggle recognizes that: class struggle will happen in many steps and stages, and that while trade unions can be reactionary, it is also true that, historically: 5 Of course, this does not obviate the need to combine workplace struggle with struggle in the living place, over rent, etc. In fact, such combined struggles must happen.

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the development of the proletariat did not, and could not, proceed anywhere in the world otherwise than through…through reciprocal action between them and the party of the working class.6 lenin, 1968: 36

Certain kinds of economic struggle, even if they are not informed by socialist consciousness, signifies something that is beyond the merely economic realm. When workers are successful in winning a major legislation in their interest (e.g. a bill reducing the working day or introducing a minimum wage against the wishes of capital or a bill forcing landlords to give up a part of their property to the semi-proletarians), this is not merely ‘a great practical success’. It is also ‘the victory of a principle’ in that it signifies that ‘in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class’, i.e. the political economy of property’, has ‘succumbed to the political economy of the working class’ (Marx in Marx and Engels, 1977b: 16). And potentially, further inroads into private property via anti-capitalist ‘social experiments’ are possible at a local or regional scale in specific sectors. Consider workers’ demand for cooperatively organized and managed factories. The value of these great social experiments [e.g. cooperative factories] cannot be overrated. By deed instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands; that to bear fruit, the means of labor need not be monopolized as a means of dominion over, and of extortion against, the laboring man himself; and that, like slave labor, like serf labor, hired labor is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labor plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart. marx in marx and engels, 1977b: 16–17

6 It is also the case that trade union struggle, if it is guided by a theoretical conscious vanguard, contributes to radical consciousness among workers, more than trade union struggle which is not, although trade union struggle without the intervention of a vanguard does have some impact on workers’ consciousness (Patel, 1994; Cohen and Moody, 1998). Participation in trade union activities, especially, in activities of trade unions committed to some form of class ideology does have a positive influence on class consciousness (Patel, 1994). This is especially true about broad masses whose political education occurs through action. That globalization of capitalist economies has weakened the power of trade unions and has dented their self-confidence is a separate matter.

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Of course, Marxist theory sees serious limits to the struggles for concessions from the government and for social experiments within capitalism, the limits which exist as long as the law of value exists and as long as there is a need for the reproduction of a significant number of people without access to means of production and subsistence. The principle of socialist struggle recognizes that ‘action by the masses, a big strike, for instance, is more important than parliamentary activity at all times, and not only during a revolution or in a revolutionary situation’ (Lenin, 1968: 45). Once again, socialist political struggle does not reject economic struggle. However, the fact that the trade union struggle is not futile does not mean that it is paramount. Obtaining economic concessions is a double-edged sword. It is good and it is problematic. It is true that trade union struggles as such are not the struggles to abolish wage-slavery. Yet, strikes mark ‘the awakening antagonisms between workers and employers’ (Lenin, 1977a: 114); strikes are ‘periodical revolts of the working class against the autocracy of capital’ (Marx, 1977: 562)7. Trade union struggle – ‘as a school of communism’ (Lenin, 1968: 36) – against employers and the government can inject some political consciousness into the working class.8 Yet, it is not true that only ‘political agitation on an economic basis’ can raise the activity of the working masses. The workplace/­ labour-market is only one part, albeit, a very important part, of workers’ lives. Workers also suffer much outside of the workplace and the labour market. So, political struggle outside of the trade union economic struggle can also politicize the masses. Any and every manifestation of police tyranny and autocratic outrage, not only in connection with the economic struggle, is not one whit less “widely applicable” as a means of “drawing in” the masses. The …flogging of peasants, the corruption of the officials and the police treatment of the “common people” in the cities, the fight against the famine-stricken 7 Of course, one should always bear the following in mind. When wages rise due to ‘more or less favourable circumstances’ in which the wage-working class supports and multiplies itself, whether it is due to tight labour market increasing the bargaining power of individual workers or because of wage struggle or a combination of the two, this fact of rise in wages does ‘in no way alter the fundamental character of capitalist production’ (Marx, 1977: 763). 8 But there are limits to a school where only one subject is taught, rather than attention being paid to a comprehensive development of those who attend the school; there should be various subjects and at various levels (at freshman and sophomore levels and beyond). The role of trade unions as a school of communism in capitalism is not quite the same as that in a post-revolution society.

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and the suppression of the popular striving towards enlightenment and knowledge, the extortion of taxes and the persecution of the religious sects, the humiliating treatment of soldiers and the barrack methods in the treatment of the students and liberal intellectuals. lenin, 1977a: 136

All these are indicative of tyranny, of political oppression, which is the supreme objective and function of the state, the political arm of the propertied classes, and therefore objects of political struggle by the working class. ‘A basic condition for the necessary expansion of political agitation is the organisation of comprehensive political exposure’ which only can train the masses ‘in political consciousness and revolutionary activity’ (Lenin,1977a: 144).9 Working class propaganda must go beyond raising awareness about ‘abuses in the factories, the government’s partiality towards the capitalists, and the tyranny of the police’ (Lenin, 1977a: 153). Indeed, the communist movement should not be merely a trade union movement but ‘the tribune of the people’, one which can respond to ‘every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects’ and which can ‘generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation’ and which can ‘take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic ­significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat’ (Lenin, 1977a: 154). “the Communists support every revolutionary movement”, that we are obliged for that reason to expound and emphasise general democratic tasks before the whole people, without for a moment concealing our socialist convictions. He is no Social-Democrat who forgets in practice his obligation to be ahead of all in raising, accentuating, and solving every general democratic question. lenin, 1977a: 155–156

9 ‘These exposures could [serve] (if properly utilised by an organisation of revolutionaries) as a beginning and a component part of [communist] activity; but they could also [lead] (and, given a worshipful attitude towards spontaneity, [are] bound to lead) to a ‘purely trade union’ struggle and to a non-[communist] working-class movement. [Communist movement] leads the struggle of the working class, not only for better terms for the sale of labour-power, but for the abolition of the social system that compels the propertyless to sell themselves to the rich’ (Lenin, 1977a: 135).

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Of all the cases in which the workers suffer ‘from tyranny, violence, and the lack of rights, only a small minority represent cases of police tyranny in the trade union struggle as such’ (Lenin, 1977a: 136–137). Lenin rightly asks: ‘Why then should we, beforehand, restrict the scope of political agitation by declaring only one of the means to be ‘the most widely applicable’?’ (ibid.) Struggle for reforms is important, but within a broader agenda of class struggle. On the one hand: the ruling class struggles to maintain the separation of the political from the economic by channeling the conflicts arising from the sphere of production into the political processes. On the other hand: the working class struggles to challenge capital politically (for example, by opposing the property rights that the state protects) and economically (by ­pushing for higher wages). When the dominated class struggles against economic ­exploitation in primary and secondary spheres, its struggle points to the necessity for a struggle against the state itself that defends property rights. Struggle against capitalist exploitation must be conscious of the existence of the state as the condition for exploitation, and must not separate the struggle for economic concessions from the struggle for political power. Class struggle takes place not just over policies (e.g. some economic benefits). Class struggle also takes place over: (i) the fact of the separation of the political (i.e. the very existence of the capitalist state); and (ii) the form of that separation (e.g. how much separation – the extent to which it intervenes in the economic). While the state reinforces and imposes the separation of the political from the economic, the dominated classes tend to fuse them together. Capital and the state constrain class struggle, but these structures are not permanent. Rather they are subject to, and reproduced through, class struggle. The wage contract between individual worker and capitalist is a very solid reality if the capitalist has the power to enforce that contract, but dissolves into pure illusion if the workers are able to counter-pose their collective power to that of capital. [Similarly] The ‘majesty of the law’ can inspire awe when it confronts the isolated individual, while becoming an object of ridicule in the face of collective resistance. clarke, 1991: 45

The masses experience various problems, which exist at various levels. There is the capitalist class relation, and its logic of accumulation and exploitation, etc. And then there are the effects of the operation of this relation and the logic (e.g. low wages, etc.). Class struggle combines struggle at both the levels, even if at a given point in time workers struggle against the symptoms only. But struggle against problems requires conditions – political conditions – of struggle for which there has to be a struggle as well. These conditions for struggle

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are the weapons of struggle, and include the ‘political freedoms, the right of assembly and association, and the freedom of the press’, etc. The ultimate object of the political movement of the working class is, of course, the conquest of political power for this class, and this naturally requires that the organisation of the working class, an organisation which arises from its economic struggles, should previously reach certain level of development. marx to bolte in marx and engels, 1982: 254

The Marxist theory argues for the need to fight for political reforms (e.g. democratic rights) which can serve as conditions for class struggle and be used to deepen class struggle. There is always a threat to democracy,10 which is a necessary tool in the hands of the proletarains who are the majority in most countries. ‘It makes a difference whether or not the political institutions of a capitalist society are parliamentary-democratic ones resting on an ensemble of ‘liberal’ rights, practices and procedures: a ‘quite enormous difference’, as Trotsky put it in connection with Nazism, and for workers’ organizations, ‘a question of political life or death’. The point has been formulated in various ways’ (Geras, 1990: 134). Parliamentary democracy and fascism are two ‘different systems of (class) domination’. Within parliamentary democracy, workers are able to create ‘elements of proletarian democracy’; ‘defensive bulwarks’. By utilizing bourgeois democracy and ‘by fighting against it’, workers create ‘their own strongholds and bases of proletarian democracy: the trade unions, the political parties, the educational and sport clubs, the cooperatives, etc.’ (ibid.). While political democracy (elections, parliament, etc.) in a bourgeois society reflect, ultimately, bourgeois interests, it is at the same time a tool in the hands of the working class in its self-organization. The principle of socialist struggle does not reject parliamentary struggle. The Marxist state theory explicitly declares that all parts of the state apparatus are the means of oppression of the masses, that parliaments – like most trade unions – are reactionary. If one examines the speeches in the parliament of bourgeois politicians, and their legislative outputs, one will quickly realize that bourgeois ­parliamentary rule ‘does not eliminate, but lays bare the innate character even of the most democratic bourgeois republics as organs of class oppression’ (Lenin, 1977a:  53).11 The parliamentary rule of the bourgeoisie helps to ‘enlighten and to ­organise 10 11

Consider fascism which is raising its ugly heads now in many countries in North and South. Marxists reject the liberal view that ‘bourgeois parliamentarism destroys classes and class divisions, since the right to vote and the right to participate in the government of the country are shared by all citizens without distinction’ (Lenin, 1977a: 53).

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immeasurably wider masses of the population than those which previously took an active part in political events’, and it does not ‘make for the elimination of crises and political revolutions, but for the maximum intensification of civil war during such revolutions’ (ibid.: 53–54). And yet: while the proletariat lacks ‘the strength to do away with bourgeois parliaments and every other type of reactionary institution’, one ‘must work within them because it is there that’ one ‘will still find workers who are duped by the priests and stultified by the conditions of rural life…’ (Lenin, 1968: 44). Indeed: participation in parliamentary elections and in the struggle on the ­parliamentary rostrum is obligatory on the party of the revolutionary proletariat specifically for the purpose of educating the backward strata of its own class, and for the purpose of awakening and enlightening the undeveloped, downtrodden and ignorant rural masses.12 lenin, 1968: 44

But Marxism rejects – and its must reject – fetishization of parliamentary struggle, i.e. making that form of struggle the dominant focus of class politics. Unfortunately, such fetishization characterizes many communist parties and radicals/Marxists. This is a fetishization which is palpably oblivious to the fact that a democratic state, not unlike a fascist state (in spite of their mutual differences), is also a form of class rule. When class struggle turns acute, the bourgeoisie will cast off its shell – democracy – like dirty clothes. Similarly, the theory of class struggle argues for a combined deployment of legal and illegal methods; it rejects the amateurish idea that legal methods of struggle are opportunist because, ‘in this field, the bourgeoisie has most frequently deceived and duped the workers’, while illegal methods of struggle are considered revolutionary (Lenin, 1968: 81). ‘But revolutionaries who are incapable of combining illegal forms of struggle with every form of legal struggle are poor revolutionaries indeed’ (ibid.).13 12

13

‘Parliamentarianism is “historically obsolete” from the standpoint of world history, i.e., the era of bourgeois parliamentarianism is over…But world history is counted in decades. Ten or twenty years earlier or later makes no difference when measured with the yardstick of world history; from the standpoint of world history it is a trifle that cannot be considered even approximately. But for that very reason, it is a glaring theoretical error to apply the yardstick of world history to practical politics’ (Lenin, 1968: 41–42). ‘It is far more difficult – and far more precious – to be a revolutionary when the conditions for direct, open, really mass and really revolutionary struggle do not yet exist, to be able to champion the interests of the revolution (by propaganda, agitation and organisation) in non-revolutionary bodies, and quite often in downright reactionary bodies,

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In sum: the working class must engage in a constant struggle for economic and political reforms, a struggle which is a part of the struggle against wageslavery and against the capitalist state, i.e. for political power. A major aim of the struggle for reform is to raise the level of working class consciousness, as broad masses learn about society and what is to be done on the basis of their experience in the struggle for reforms. Where the working class is not yet far enough advanced in its organisation to undertake a decisive campaign against the collective power, i.e., the political power, of the ruling classes, it must at any rate be trained for this by continual agitation against this power and by a hostile attitude toward the policies of the ruling classes. marx to bolte in marx and engels, 1982: 255

[The task of class struggle is] to convert trade-unionist politics into… ­political struggle [for state power], to utilise the sparks of political consciousness which the economic struggle generates among the workers, for the purpose of raising the workers to the level of [Marxist] political consciousness. lenin, 1977a: 148

3

Revolution as the Ultimate Form of Class Struggle

Revolution is the highest form of class struggle. It means transfer of state power from one class to another, and consequently gradual transfer of class power. ‘The passing of state power from one class to another is the first, the principal, the basic sign of a revolution’. This is so ‘both in the strictly scientific and in the practical political meaning of that term’ (Lenin, 1917). And this shows once again the significance of political oppression of the working class as an essential aspect of their classness, as discussed in Chapter 9. the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle of class against class, a struggle which carried to its highest expression in a non-­revolutionary situation, among the masses who are incapable of immediately appreciating the need for revolutionary methods of action. To be able to seek, find and correctly ­determine the specific path or the particular turn of events that will lead the masses to the real, decisive and final revolutionary struggle – such is the main objective of communism…’ (Lenin, 1968: 81).

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is a total revolution. Indeed, is it at all surprising that a society founded on the opposition of classes should culminate in brutal contradiction, the shock of body against body, as its final dénouement? marx, 1987: 149

Revolution is the most acute form of class struggle, requiring the most developed form of class consciousness and the undermining of reformist consciousness. Revolution is not about gaining a wage increase or some improvement in conditions of living within capitalism. It is against the very existence of the capitalist class relation that requires workers to fight for little crumbs from the capitalist class and its state, the crumbs from the very pie that workers produce, the crumbs that may be granted today reluctantly and taken away tomorrow boastfully. Revolution is about creating a situation where the working class does not have to beg for the conditions of its life before the capitalist class. Revolution requires an economic crisis, the crisis of existence of capitalist class relation, a crisis, the resolution of which revolutionary action of the working class can expedite and direct in its own interest. What does that crisis mean? It is an economic crisis and it is a governmental crisis. Capitalist class relation must fail to promote further development of productive forces, or the development of productive forces must, critically, decelerate, if not absolutely stagnate.14 A system of class relation (social order in Marx’s language) will not be destroyed ‘before all the productive forces for which there is room in it developed’ and new superior relations of production (i.e. class relations) never replace older ones ‘before the material conditions for their existence have matured’ within the framework of the old society (Marx, 1977a: 504). Beyond a point in the history of capitalist class relation, the development of productive forces cannot be accommodated within the capitalist class relation of exchange and production and within the capitalist nation-state system. That is when crisis occurs. An aspect of the crisis is this: The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has flourished alongside and under it. The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labor reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.15 marx, 1977: 929

14 15

This is manifested in the rate of profit to fall, caused by an increase in the organic composition of capital. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/hist-mat/capital/vol1-ch32.htm.

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For this to happen, something else has to exist: the class of workers, the class of workers, the class that can not only stop the capitalist class from resolving its crisis by increasing exploitation (and resorting to wars16 that kill workers), but also ultimately expropriate the capitalist class. This is a class whose life represents the concentration of all disadvantages, and which confronts a class which monopolizes all the advantages. This is a class which, under proper conditions, is aware of the causes of its problems, which are also the problems of the humanity as such, and how to overcome them permanently, and which is disciplined enough to exercise its power: Along with the constantly decrease in the number of the capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united and organized by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production. marx, 1977: 929

When there is an ongoing unresolved economic crisis, the ruling class cannot live – cannot exist – in the way it has. It fails to appropriate surplus value at the usual rate. On the other hand, given the economic crisis, the exploited masses continue to suffer. A point comes when they feel they cannot continue to live their miserable life any more. The system is vulnerable to collapse when two facts combine: current class relation fails to promote the further development of productive forces in a way it did before thus producing an economic crisis,17 which also prompts a governmental crisis; and an intensification of class struggle against the system in response to such a crisis and in response to the attempt of the capitalist class and the state to resolve the crisis through heightened exploitation of workers and similar other methods (e.g. war, etc.). 16

17

The conflict between productive forces and social relations combines with the conflict between productive forces and the nation-state system of the capitalist politics to prompt wars as a means of resolving these conflicts. Ordinary people pay for the wars by being killed and through taxes. War-spending occurs at the expense of welfare-spending. Once again, revolution happens only when there is a crisis (contradiction between class relations and productive forces): ‘Given this general prosperity, wherein the productive forces of bourgeois society are developing as luxuriantly as it is possible for them to do within bourgeois relationships, a real revolution is out of the question. Such a revolution is possible only in periods when both of these factors – the modern forces of production and the bourgeois forms of production – come into opposition with each other’.

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Neither the crisis on its own, nor class struggle on its own, will result in the revolution against capitalist class relation. The fundamental law of revolution, which has been confirmed by all [major] revolutions … in the twentieth century, is as follows: for a revolution to take place it is not enough for the exploited and oppressed masses to realise the impossibility of living in the old way, and demand changes; for a revolution to take place it is essential that the exploiters should not be able to live and rule in the old way. It is only when the “lower classes” do not want to live in the old way and the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way that the revolution can triumph. This truth can be expressed in other words: revolution is impossible without a nation-wide crisis (affecting both the exploited and the exploiters). It follows that, for a revolution to take place, it is essential, first, that a majority of the workers (or at least a majority of the class-conscious, thinking, and politically active workers) should fully realise that revolution is necessary, and that they should be prepared to die for it; second, that the ruling classes should be going through a governmental crisis, which draws even the most backward masses into politics (symptomatic of any genuine revolution is a rapid, tenfold and even hundredfold increase in the size of the working and oppressed masses – hitherto apathetic – who are capable of waging the political struggle), weakens the government, and makes it possible for the revolutionaries to rapidly overthrow it. lenin, 1968: 69

Revolution is necessary to resolve the economic and the governmental crises in the interest of the workers. The time for revolution comes when: ‘the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law’, i.e. when ‘it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery’, as: it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society. marx and engels,1975: 60

Objective conditions (crisis, etc.) and subjective conditions are necessary for the revolution. With respect to the latter, there are some special processes. The success of the 1917 revolution sheds light on these special processes, some of which may be generalizable (Lenin, 1968).

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3.

4.

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‘the class-consciousness of the proletarian vanguard’ and ‘its devotion to the revolution’, ‘its tenacity, self-sacrifice and heroism’. ‘its ability to link up, maintain the closest contact, and…merge, in certain measure, with the broadest masses of the working people – primarily with the proletariat, but also with the non-proletarian masses of working people’. ‘the correctness of the political leadership exercised by this vanguard, by the correctness of its political strategy and tactics, provided the broad masses have seen, from their own experience, that they are correct.18 … [These] conditions [can be] created only by prolonged effort and hardwon experience’. ‘a correct revolutionary theory’: The creation of the above conditions ‘is facilitated by a correct revolutionary theory’. Marxism ‘is not a dogma, but assumes final shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement’. ‘Indeed, before the proletariat wins its victory on the barricades and battle lines it announces the coming of its rule by intellectual victories, by emergence of working class intellectuals.….19 It is Marxist theory, generally developed by intellectuals connected to the working class and by workers in their role as intellectuals, that educates the workers’ party’, and ‘the vanguard of the proletariat, capable of assuming power and leading the whole people to socialism, of directing and organizing the new system’. Marxists become ‘the teacher, the guide, the leader of all the working and exploited people in organizing their social life without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie’. Without these conditions, discipline in a revolutionary party really capable of being the party of the advanced class, whose mission it is to overthrow the bourgeoisie and transform the whole of society, cannot be achieved. Without these conditions, all attempts to establish discipline inevitably fall flat and end up in phrasemongering and clowning. Such revolutionary theory will be achieved ‘through the agony… experienced [over a protracted period of] … unparalleled torment and sacrifice, of unparalleled revolutionary heroism, incredible energy, devoted searching, study, practical trial, disappointment, verification, and comparison with [international working class revolutionary experience, including in the most developed parts of the world] (Lenin, 1968: 11). [The development of such theory benefits from] a wealth of international links and excellent information on the forms and theories of the world revolutionary movement’ (ibid.). It should also be noted that such theory will have its various forms: ‘As the stage of development reached by different sections of workers in the same country and by the working class in different countries necessarily varies very much, the actual movement necessarily expresses itself in very various theoretical forms’ (Marx, in Marx and Engels, 1982: 207).

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deployment of ‘rapid and varied succession of [a wealth of] different forms of the movement – legal and illegal, peaceful and stormy, underground and open, local circles and mass movements, and parliamentary and [extra-parliamentary/direct-action] forms’.

The subjective forces include the revolutionists (revolutionary nuclei): individuals and groups of individuals constituting the collective subject of revolution (akin to the collective worker of capitalist production). Their training is ‘based on a bedrock of theory and closely and inseparably linked with the practical reality of the revolutionary class struggle throughout the world’ (Trotsky, 1973: 111). Constantly in touch with the masses, and armed with Marxist theory and ‘the will for revolutionary action’, they observe the ‘worldwide struggle with the utmost attention, penetrating its logic, understanding its inner laws’ and have an internationalist approach to revolutionary possibilities (ibid.). They have trained ‘themselves to evaluate their situation, the material and concrete reality of their entire arena of activity, in its positive and negative aspects, and to draw the correct political balance sheet’ (ibid.). There are two kinds of obstructions that revolutionaries face. Firstly, there are objective historical obstructions. If it is necessary and possible, revolutionists forcefully shatter the historical obstructions. If this is not possible, they make a detour. If it is impossible to make a detour, revolutionists patiently and persistently keep scraping and chipping away. They are revolutionists because they are not afraid to shatter obstacles or to employ relentless force. trotsky, 1973: 111

They know how to ‘extract from every given historical situation the maximum that it is capable of rendering toward the advancement of the revolutionary class’ (ibid.). Secondly, there are internal obstacles. It is true that revolutionists ‘possess their own special psychological characteristics, qualities of intellect and will’. However, if the revolutionist is internally hampered by subjective hindrances [obstructions] to action, is lacking in understanding or will, is paralyzed by internal discord… he [or she] is at best only half a revolutionist. … there are already too many obstacles in the objective conditions for revolutionists to allow themselves the luxury of multiplying the objective obstacles and frictions by subjective ones. trotsky, 1973: 145

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The revolution requires that ‘enough’ workers have become class-conscious. In many ways, it creates the raw material it needs. Just as the peasants and manufacturing workers of the 19th century changed their whole way of life and became quite different people when they were drawn into big industry, in the same way, communal control over production by society as a whole, and the resulting new development, will both require an entirely different kind of human material (Engels in Marx and Engels, 1977a: 93). Revolution ‘is necessary… not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew’. Revolution is also necessary to create the kind of people who will construct the new society and relate to each other on the basis of solidarity, and not as exploiters and exploited. That is: revolution is necessary ‘for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and … the alteration of men on a mass scale’. Revolutionary struggle changes the people involved in it. Revolutions are locomotives of history. Revolutions produce a proletariat fit to rule through self-changing and self-education: ‘in revolutionary activity the changing of oneself coincides with the changing of circumstances’. Struggle – an important aspect of human practice as Mao (2007: 53) stressed – changes consciousness, identity. it is only in the revolution itself that the majority of the oppressed can liberate themselves from the ideology of the ruling class. For this control is exerted not only, nor even primarily, through purely ideological manipulation and the mass assimilation of the ruling class’ ideological production, but above all through the actual day-to-day workings of the existing economy and society and their effect on the consciousness of the oppressed. mandel, 1970a

It is true that ruling class ideology impedes revolutionary class consciousness and deters revolutionary struggle. But the relation between the two is not c­ onstant over time. As long as class rule is on the upswing, stable and hence hardly questioned, the ideology of the dominant class will also dominate the conscious­ness of the oppressed class (Mandel, 1970a). In the initial stages of class struggle by the masses, dominant class ideology does play an important role. However, the more the stability of the existing society is brought into question, and the more the class struggle intensifies, and the more the class rule of the exploiters itself begins to waver in practice, the more will at least sections of the oppressed class begin to free themselves of

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the control of the ideas of those in power. Prior to, and along with, the struggle for the social revolution, a struggle goes on between the ideology of the rulers and the new ideals of the revolutionary class. mandel, 1970a

In other words, class struggle is conducted at the level of theory, ideas, including in the academia. This struggle in turn intensifies and accelerates the concrete class struggle out of which it arose by lifting the revolutionary class to an awareness of its historical tasks and of the immediate goals of its struggle. Class consciousness on the part of the revolutionary class can therefore develop out of the class struggle in spite of and in opposition to the ideology of the ruling class (ibid.). During a revolutionary process, mass views and moods change swiftly. These come not from the flexibility and mobility of man’s mind, but just the opposite, from its deep conservatism. The chronic lag of ideas and relations behind new objective conditions, right up to the moment when the latter crash over people in the form of a catastrophe, is what creates in a period of revolution that leaping movement of ideas and passions which seems to the police mind a mere result of the activities of “demagogues.”20 trotsky, 2008: xvi

Revolutionary struggle does require elementary struggle. In fact: The process whereby the proletarian mass, the proletarian vanguard and the revolutionary party are united depends on the elementary proletarian class struggle growing over into revolutionary class struggle – the proletarian revolution – and on the effects this has on the wage-earning masses. mandel, 1970b

Without the involvement of broad masses, no revolution can and should happen. Their involvement happens and their class consciousness deepens 20

Moreover, the immense ‘leaps’ in consciousness characteristic of a period of revolutionary struggle represent the long-postponed (and therefore explosive) realignment of social thought with external social reality. The experience of mass struggles changes people and their consciousness (North, 2007: 91).

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through elementary struggles, struggles for various reforms. Class struggle has taken place for thousands of years without those who struggled being (fully) aware of what they were doing. Proletarian class struggle was conducted long before there was a socialist movement, let alone scientific socialism (=Marxism). Elementary class struggle – strikes, work stoppages around wage demands or for shorter working hours and other improvements in working conditions – leads to elementary forms of class organisation (mutual aid funds, embryonic trade unions), even if these are short-lived. (It also gives rise to a general socialist ideal among many workers.) Elementary class struggle, elementary class organisation and elementary class consciousness are born, then, directly out of action, and only the experience arising out of that action is able to develop and accelerate consciousness. It is a general law of history that only through action are broad masses able to elevate their consciousness (Mandel, 1970b). The proletariat will never reach ‘its historic objectives if the necessary education, schooling and testing of a proletarian vanguard in the working out and agitational application of the revolutionary program in struggle has not taken place before the outbreak of the broadest mass struggles, which by themselves create only the possibility of the broad masses attaining revolutionary consciousness’ (Mandel, 1970c; para 11). In fact, ‘workers have to go through 15, 20, 50 years of civil wars and people’s struggles not only to change the conditions, but in order to change [themselves so they] will be capable of exercising political rule’ (Mandel, 1970a; footnote 9). Class struggle proper – political struggle for the abolition of class relations and for the establishment of socialism – poses a specific problem in the context of the global capitalist peripheral social formations where majority of global proletarians and semi-proletarians live and work, and where remnants of precapitalist relations still exist locally, and which suffer from imperialism. In a stagist theory, one first struggles against feudalism and imperialism and certain un-progressive elements of the capitalist class, and one stabilizes capitalism, promotes capitalism in its more democratic form, and fights for socialism and against capitalist class relation in some indefinite future. The real genuine Marxist view of struggle is the one that was developed by Trotsky (among others): permanent revolution,21 which is based on Marx’s idea that at a certain 21

Engels explains the concept (in Marx and Engels, 1977a: 90–92) by asking ‘What will be the course of this revolution?’ ‘Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat. …Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat’.

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point in the evolution of class society of capitalism, ‘no form of bondage can be broken without breaking all forms of bondage’ and that revolution must go on until all class relations are abolished22 (see Day and Guido, 2011). revolutionary socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as the inevitable [necessary] transit point to the abolition of class differences generally, to the abolition of all the productive relations on which they rest, to the abolition of all the social relations that correspond to these relations of

22

Of course, ‘It is impossible, of course, to carry out all these measures at once. But one will always bring others in its wake. Once the first radical attack on private property has been launched, the proletariat will find itself forced to go ever further, to concentrate increasingly in the hands of the state all capital, all agriculture, all transport, all trade. All the foregoing measures are directed to this end; and they will become practicable and feasible, capable of producing their centralizing effects to precisely the degree that the proletariat, through its labor, multiplies the country’s productive forces.’ And ‘Finally, when all capital, all production, all exchange have been brought together in the hands of the nation, private property will disappear of its own accord, money will become superfluous, and production will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough off whatever of its old economic habits may remain.’ Engels asks: ‘Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone?’ Engels provides a detailed answer. ‘No. By creating the world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the Earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others’. He adds: ‘Further, it has co-ordinated the social development of the civilized countries to such an extent that, in all of them, bourgeoisie and proletariat have become the decisive classes, and the struggle between them the great struggle of the day. It follows that the communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilized countries – that is to say, at least in England, America, France, and Germany. It will develop in each of these countries more or less rapidly, according as one country or the other has a more developed industry, greater wealth, a more significant mass of productive forces. It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range.’ There is a difference between the position of the proletariat in the advanced capitalist countries and that in less developed countries. With respect to the former, ‘there is a direct obstacle: the bourgeois state, which allows only a definite area of proletarian activity, the area the ruling class considers permissible. The first task in the West is to overthrow class rule, the bourgeois state. There, it is more difficult to solve this problem than here, for the bourgeois state is stronger there’ than in a poor country where a proletarian revolution may have happened. ‘But when it has overthrown class rule, the Western proletariat will find itself in a more favorable position with respect to cultural creation than’ will be the case in a poor country with the proletariat in power (Trotsky, 1973: 181).

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production, to the revolutionizing of all the ideas that result from these ­social connections. marx, 1964: 126

The perspective of permanent revolution that Marx introduced and that was developed by Trotsky and others may be briefly summarized in the following way:23 ‘the complete victory of the democratic revolution is … conceivable only in the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, leaning on the peasantry’.24 In fact: ‘The dictatorship of the proletariat, which would inevitably place on the order of the day not only democratic but socialistic tasks as well, would at the same time give a powerful impetus to the international socialist revolution’ (Trotsky, 1940; section 9, para 3).25 4

Revolutionary Role of the Proletariat

It is not enough to point to the objective conditions in the system. One needs to identify the class that determines the necessity of historical processes and 23

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Lenin’s pre-1917 perspective was this: a backward semi-feudal country is incapable of completing its own revolution. A democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry would purge the country of feudalism, promote development of productive forces under capitalism, strengthen the proletariat in city and village, and make really possible the struggle for socialism. And such a victory in backward countries would give tremendous impetus to the socialist revolution in the West, while the latter would not only protect the revolution in backward countries from the dangers of counter-revolution but would also enable the proletariat to come to the conquest of power in a comparatively brief historical period. This stagist perspective is very problematic and internally contradictory, and Lenin himself repudiated this. ‘In the revolutions of the East the peasantry will still play a decisive role, but once again, this role will be neither leading nor independent. The poor peasants of Hupeh, Kwangtung, or Bengal can play a role not only on a national but on an international scale, but only if they support the workers of Shanghai, Canton, Hankow, and Calcutta. This is the only way out for the revolutionary peasant on an international road. It is hopeless to attempt to forge a direct link’ between the peasant of country x and country y’ (Trotsky, 1996: 255). It is altogether self-evident that, to be able to fight at all, the working class must organize itself at home as a class and that its own country is the immediate arena of its struggle – insofar as its class struggle is national, not in substance, but, as the Communist Manifesto says, ‘in form’. Marxists reject the Plekhanovite idea that the working class will join the bourgeoisie to fight against feudal forces and democratize society or that workers will join the undifferentiated peasantry to fight against feudalism and to establish a democratic capitalist system and then fight against the bourgeois system in some distant future. Even Lenin had this view, which he changed just before 1917.

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its direction. If revolution is necessary to transcend the capitalist class relation, then which class will lead the revolution? The answer is not an easy one. ‘An oppressed class is the vital condition for every [class] society (Marx, 1987: 148). Its emancipation implies ‘necessarily the creation of a new society’ (ibid.) because there is absolutely no possibility of its emancipation within the framework of the current society. For this class to be able to emancipate itself, the following condition must be met: ‘the existing social relations should no longer be capable of existing side by side’ with existing ‘productive powers’ already acquired. Of all the productive powers or ‘the instruments of production’, ‘the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself’ (Marx, 1987: 149).26 Conditions that are favourable to class struggle (and for revolution) must constitute the conditions of life of the revolutionary class. there is only one way of smashing the resistance of [propertied] classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, the forces which can – and, owing to their social position, must – constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organise those forces for the struggle. lenin, 1977a: 48

Class divisions cannot be abolished until a class has formed which no longer has any particular class interest to assert against the ruling class. A revolutionary class must represent its interests as the communal interest of all members of society. As Marx and Engels (1978: 65–66) say in German Ideology: For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. Once again, which class is it? Many people think that petty bourgeoisie (small-scale producers) can be the revolutionary agent. In terms of numbers, and to the extent that numbers matter, small-scale producers have an advantage. They are ‘a social type existing on a very extensive and even mass scale’. To the extent that being a revolutionary agent requires that a class must be oppressed, it must be a suffering class, it can be said that small scale producers suffer a lot. Marxist theory has established that under capitalism ‘the small master … always suffers ­oppression and very 26

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02e.htm.

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frequently a most acute and rapid deterioration in his conditions of life, and even ruin’ (Lenin, 1968: 18). Yet, small-scale producers cannot lead the revolution against capitalism, although it can be an important ally in the process of revolution. To the extent that it is revolutionary, its revolutionary instinct and practice are more against precapitalist landowners and against certain regulatory policies of the state, and less against the capitalist class relation as such. Although oppressed and exploited, this class cannot play an independent political role; they also cannot join the proletariat as equal class partners in taking state power.27 As mentioned, this class vacillates between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie: to the extent that members of this class (e.g. peasants) can make money by selling their products at a higher rate, they are against the working class; as long as they also work for a wage, they are an ally of the working class.28 The petty bourgeoisie are, in real life, dependent upon the bourgeoisie, for they live like masters and not like proletarians (from the point of view of their place in social production).29 The class of small-scale producers is unstable, as it is always self-differentiating into 27

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‘In all bourgeois revolutions as well as counter-revolutions, beginning with the peasant wars of the sixteenth century and even before that time, the various strata of the peasantry played an enormous and at times even decisive role. But it never played an independent role. Directly or indirectly, the peasantry always supported one political force against another. By itself it never constituted an independent force capable of solving national political tasks. In the epoch of finance capital the process of the polarization of capitalist society has enormously accelerated in comparison to earlier phases of capitalist development. This means that the specific gravity of the peasantry has diminished and not increased. In any case, the peasant is less capable in the imperialist epoch of independent political action on a national, let alone international scale, than he was in the epoch of industrial capitalism’ (Trotsky, 1996: 253–254). ‘As long as it is possible to trade in grain and to make profit out of [scarcity] …, the peasant will remain (and this will for some time be inevitable under the dictatorship of the proletariat) a semi-working man, a semi-profiteer. As a profiteer he is hostile to …the proletarian state; he is inclined to agree with the bourgeoisie and their faithful lackeys…who stand for freedom to trade in grain. But as a working man, the peasant is a friend of the proletarian state, a most loyal ally of the worker in the struggle against the landowner and against the capitalist’ (Lenin, 1965: 433). ‘Those organizations which in capitalist countries label themselves peasant parties are in reality one of the varieties of bourgeois parties. Every peasant who has not adopted the proletarian position, abandoning his proprietor psychology, will inevitably follow the bourgeoisie when it comes to fundamental political issues. Of course, every bourgeois party that relies or seeks to rely on the peasantry and, if possible, on the workers, is compelled to camouflage itself, that is, to assume two or three appropriate colorations. The celebrated idea of ‘workers’ and peasants’ parties’ seems to have been specially created to camouflage bourgeois parties which are compelled to seek support from the peasantry but who are also ready to absorb workers into their ranks (Trotsky, 1996: 243).

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labour-exploiting property owners and proletarians. Small-scale p ­ roduction is still widespread in the world, and it in fact ‘engenders capitalism and the bourgeoisie continuously, daily, hourly, spontaneously, and on a mass scale’ (Lenin, 1968: 10). As a ‘class’, as Trotsky stresses, it is ‘incapable even of formulating its own interests’ and is ‘utterly incapable of assuming the reins of government’ because its richer elements (kulaks) are attracted towards the urban bourgeoisie and the poorer elements (middle peasants, poor peasants and landless peasants) gravitate towards to the urban proletariat, although the rich peasants try to influence them.30 The class of small-scale producers, which suffers much ‘easily goes to revolutionary extremes’, is incapable of perseverance, organisation, discipline and steadfastness. A petty bourgeois driven to frenzy by the horrors of capitalism is a social phenomenon which, like anarchism, is characteristic of all capitalist countries. The instability of such revolutionism, its barrenness, and its tendency to turn rapidly into submission, apathy, phantasms, and even a frenzied infatuation with one bourgeois fad or another – all this is common knowledge.31 lenin, 1968: 18

The small-scale producers in the context of agriculture (peasantry) are geographically dispersed in numerous villages.32 And while the revolutionary process must be an international process, peasants are basically not an international class the way urban workers are. ‘The peasantry, by virtue of its entire history and the conditions of its existence, is the least international of all classes. What are commonly called national traits have their chief’ (Trotsky, 1996: 252).33 30

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‘From among the peasantry, it is only the semi-proletarian masses of the peasant poor who can be guided along the road of internationalism, and only the proletariat can guide them’ (Trotsky, 1996: 253). In his ‘Three concepts of revolution’, Trotsky says: ‘The Narodniks [Populists] regarded all workers and peasants as simply “toilers” and “exploited ones,” who were equally interested in socialism, while to Marxists a peasant was a petty bourgeois, capable of becoming a socialist only to the extent that he either materially or spiritually ceased being a peasant’ (Trotsky, 1940; section 6, para 1). ‘The city cannot be equated to the village, the village cannot be equated to the city in the historical conditions of the present epoch. The city inevitably leads the village, the village inevitably follows the city. The only question is which of the urban classes will lead the village’ (Trotsky, 1996: 254). ‘The peasantry can be attracted to internationalist politics only if it is torn away from the influence of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat and if it recognizes in the proletariat not

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Of all the classes34 that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.35 A Marxist stresses the special role of the proletariat – especially urban workers, including industrial and service sector workers – in the process. This class is able to: lead the whole mass of the working and exploited people in the struggle to throw off the yoke of capital, in actually carrying it out, in the struggle to maintain and consolidate the victory, in the work of creating the new, socialist social system and in the entire struggle for the complete abolition of classes. lenin, 1965: 423

If Marxists assign the revolutionary character to the proletarian, it is not ­because they have some idealistic ‘romantic’ attachment to that class. The ­proletariat has ‘this world-historic role’ not because ‘the proletarians [are] … gods’. Rather the contrary. Actually existing proletarians can be traitors, ­chauvinistic, narrow-minded, racist, conservative, sheep-like, and so on. Not every proletarian member is revolutionary in a given time and place. The proletarian has a tendency to be revolutionary as a class in the long run. Indeed: It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably

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only its ally, but its leader. Conversely, attempts to organize the peasants of the various countries into an independent international organization, over the head of the proletariat and without regard to the national communist parties, are doomed in advance to failure. In the final analysis such attempts can only harm the struggle of the proletariat in each country for hegemony over the agricultural laborers and poor peasants’ (Trotsky, 1996: 23). They include: the landed aristocracy, capitalists (including its various fractions such as financial capitalists and industrial capitalists, and merchants), the peasants, urban pettybourgeoisie, the proletariat, the lumpen proletariat, etc. There is no reason to believe that the proletariat in the periphery has any special importance as more revolutionary than the proletariat of the rich countries. If sections of the latter have been bribed by the capitalist class and by imperialism, there are also sections of the former who have been similarly bribed.

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foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today.36 marx, 1844 (in his ‘critical comment no. 2’ in Holy family, para 13)

What is the proletarian social being, what is that ensemble of structures and powers, that compels it to have a tendency towards being revolutionary? The proletariat is a suffering class and it has the power to overthrow the conditions which create its suffering. First, its suffering, which is an internal relation of the capitalist class relation. Proletariat and capitalist wealth (or capitalist private property) are opposite sides of a whole, i.e. of the capitalist class relation. What is common to both of them is that ‘They are both creations of the world of private property’ (Marx, 1844). Given the imperative of accumulation for its sake, capitalist private property ‘is compelled to maintain itself, and thereby ensure the existence of its opposite, the proletariat’. The bourgeoisie is ‘the positive side [or the conservative side] of the antithesis, self-satisfied private property’. The proletariat ‘is the negative side of the [whole] antithesis’, of the contradictory world of capitalist private property. The proletariat ‘is compelled as proletariat’ by its ­objective ­conditions created by private property, ‘to abolish itself and thereby 36

Without a dialectical world view, one will not, however, comprehend all this – the special character of the proletariat as a suffering class-in-itself and as a fighting revolutionary class-for-itself. In such a view, as indicated, in Chapter 5, an internally contradictory ­entity, a ‘whole antithesis is nothing but the movement of both its sides, and the precondition for the existence of the whole lies in the very nature of the two sides’ (Marx, 1844; section on critical comment no. 2, para 6). An approach to knowledge, including one that claims to be critical, is mistaken if it ‘dispenses with the study of this real movement which forms the whole in order to be able to declare that it… is above both extremes of the antithesis’, i.e. of the dialectical whole (ibid.). Such an approach, even if it is critical, is mistaken to accept that merely the work of abstraction which has created the contradictory entity can ‘abolish the abstraction of which it is the maker’. No. It is absolutely the case that ‘The weapon of criticism cannot…. the criticism of weapons’ (Marx, in Marx and Engels, 2000: 77). Indeed, ‘material force must be overthrown by material force [only]’, and not by sentimentalism, not by idealistic abstractions, not even by sympathy with the proletariat’s suffering (ibid.). This material force includes not just proletarian ­organizations but also proletarian theory (Marxism): ‘theory … will become material force as soon as it seizes the masses’ and theory ‘is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it … is radical’ and it becomes radical, when it is able to grasp the root of the matter, (ibid.) i.e. when  it comprehends the roots of human suffering, suffering of the majority of the humanity in conditions created by the world of private property and its relations and allows the sufferer to foresee the map of an alternative world and shows the sufferer the ways in which to revolt against the conditions of suffering and to fight for the alternative world.

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its opposite, private property’. The proletariat is ‘its restlessness within its very self, dissolved and self-dissolving private property’. The proletariat produces ‘wealth for others and poverty for itself’. When proletarian revolution succeeds, and the proletariat becomes victorious, the proletariat ‘by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite’. The victory of the proletariat means that ‘the proletariat disappears as well as the opposite which determines it, private property’ (ibid.). There lies its dialectical ‘beauty’ and its special character. Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need – the practical expression of necessity – is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation.37 marx, 1844 (in his ‘critical comment no. 2’ in Holy family, para 13)

The capitalist class and proletariat ‘present the same human self-­estrangement’. But the capitalist class ‘feels at ease and strengthened in this self-­estrangement’ (ibid.). This class ‘recognizes estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence’. In contrast, ‘the proletariat feels annihilated in estrangement’. This class ‘sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence’. The proletariat ‘is… in its abasement the indignation at that abasement’. It is ‘an indignation to which’ the proletariat ‘is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its “human nature” and its [actual] condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature’ (ibid.). The proletariat is the class that suffers in the hands of the capitalist class in all realms of class relations (exchange, property, and value production). Given the contradiction of private property, as expressed in the ­incompatibility ­between private appropriation and socialization of means of production, and other attendant contradictions, ‘private property drives itself in its economic movement towards its own dissolution’. This is the case ‘inasmuch as 37

This applies to the proletariat of the world (compare, Sweezy, 1990: 240).

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it produces the proletariat as proletariat’, that is, ‘poverty which is conscious of its spiritual and physical poverty, dehumanization which is conscious of its dehumanization, and therefore self-abolishing’ (ibid.). The proletariat is not only a suffering class. It is also a fighting class. Both suffering and struggling are parts of its dna. The overthrow of bourgeois rule can be accomplished only by the proletariat, the particular class whose economic conditions of existence prepare it for this task and provide it with the possibility and the power to perform it…… Only the proletariat – by virtue of the economic role it plays in large-scale production – is capable of being the leader of all the working and exploited people, whom the bourgeoisie exploit, oppress and crush, often not less but more than they do the proletarians, but who are incapable of waging an independent struggle for their emancipation. lenin, 1977d: 27

The conditions which make the proletariat a suffering class are the ones which make it a class that compels it to struggle. This is so for a variety of reasons. This class, the proletariat ‘has been placed in a special, favourable position as far as its emancipation is concerned’ because ‘it no longer has any ties with the old society based entirely on exploitation; the very conditions of its labour and the circumstances of life organise it, compel it to think and enable it to step into the arena of political struggle’ (Lenin, 1963: 191). ‘The nucleus of population in a contemporary city-at least, in a city of economic and political significance-is the sharply differentiated class of hired labor. It is this class… which is fated to play the decisive role in our revolution.’ (Trotsky, 1940; section 7, para 2) The proletarians, the majority of whom are concentrated in towns and cities, are the class that can make use of its geographical concentration as a tool in its struggle. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern [capitalist] Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. marx and engels, 1975: 60

Objective conditions, including geographical concentration of workers cities and regions, tend to make them revolutionary, even if they may not be so at a given point in time. The proletariat is the one that produces (and distributes)

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value and only that class can stop that production, appropriation and distribution of value, by withdrawing its labour power. In fact: The strength of the proletariat in any capitalist country is infinitely greater than the proportion of the proletariat in the total population. This is due to the fact that the proletariat is in economic command of the central points and nerve centers of the entire capitalist system of economy, and also because the proletariat expresses economically and politically the real interests of the vast majority of the toilers under capitalism.38 lenin quoted in trotsky, 1996: 237

Unlike the small-scale producing class, the proletarian is not a transitional class, it is not a class-in-decay: it is a class which looks forward to and not backward. The capitalist class relation prepares this class as a revolutionary class. ‘While the bourgeoisie break up and disintegrate the peasantry and all the petty-­bourgeois groups, they weld together, unite and organize the proletariat’ (Lenin, 1977d: 27). While the bourgeoisie destroys other suffering classes (e.g. peasants), it creates and expands the class of the proletariat, the grave digger of the bourgeoisie: The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. …What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.39 marx and engels, 1975: 60

The idea that the proletariat is shrinking is a mistaken sectoralist view of the proletariat based on the idea that the proletariat is equal to industrial workers, and it is also plain Eurocentric fantasy (because the industrial workforce is shrinking in the West, therefore the proletarian class as such is shrinking 38

39

‘For this reason the proletariat, even if it constitutes the minority of the population (or in cases where the conscious and truly revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat comprises the minority of the population), is capable both of overthrowing the bourgeoisie and of attracting subsequently to its side many allies from among the masses of ­semi-­proletarians and petty bourgeois, who will never come out beforehand for the domination of the proletariat, who will not understand the conditions and tasks of this domination, but who will convince themselves solely from their subsequent experiences of the inevitability, justice, and legitimacy of the proletarian dictatorship.’ (Trotsky, 1996: 236–237). One should bear in mind that the word inevitable cannot be seen literally. Nothing is inevitable.

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globally). The capitalist class of the world continues to produce and expand the size of its grave-digger. The proletarians (and semi-proletarians) are the vast majority of the humanity, and this is more true now than it ever was during the time Marx and Lenin wrote about proletarian struggle. This has political implications: In the history of class struggle, ‘All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities’ (Marx and ­Engels, 1975: 58). In contrast, ‘The proletarian movement is the self-­ conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority’. On the other hand, the class to be overthrown is a small minority: when capitalism supplanted small-scale private property, we had ‘the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers’; what is on the agenda now is ‘the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people’, i.e. by the majority (Marx, 1977: 930).40 The proletariat is special not only because it has the power to overthrow capitalism but also because only it can lead in the construction of a new society. This class is ‘the repository, or the vehicle, of [the] … material conditions [of large-scale production] is a definite historical class, created, organised, united, trained, educated and hardened by large-scale capitalism’ (Lenin, 1965: 420). Large scale capitalist production and exchange system has taught the habit of cooperation on a large scale and have educated large sections of this class, the qualities which this class can use to construct socialism. Unlike small-scale producers, whose lives revolve around local interconnections and which restricts their ability for systemic political action at extra-local scales,41 the proletarians working in large-scale workshops know that fragmentation of productive units and their individualization are counter-productive, and this is so in a modern society where the use of technology and modern methods of large-scale production can raise labour productivity and free time for leisure and art: 40

41

Anti-capitalist forces – proletarians and semi-proletarians – have numbers on their side. They are the majority in every country, and the number is an element of their success in class struggle. Of course, ‘numbers weigh in the balance only if united by combination and led by knowledge [class consciousness], (Marx in Marx and Engels, 1977b: 17). As Marx famously says (Marx and Engels, 1977a: 479): ‘Insofar as there is merely a local ­interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the ­executive power which subordinates society to itself’ (Marx in Marx and Engels, 1977a: 479).

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The assumption that all “working people” are equally capable of doing this work [construction of socialism] would be an empty phrase, or the illusion of an antediluvian, pre-Marxist socialist; for this ability does not come of itself, but grows historically, and grows only out of the material conditions of large-scale capitalist production. This ability, at the beginning of the road from capitalism to socialism, is possessed by the proletariat alone. It is capable of fulfilling the gigantic task that confronts it, first, because it is the strongest and most advanced class in civilised societies secondly, because in the most developed countries it constitutes the majority of the population, and thirdly, because in backward capitalist countries… the majority of the population consists of [proletarians or] semi-proletarians, i.e., of people who regularly live in a proletarian way part of the year, who regularly earn a part of their means of subsistence as wage-workers in capitalist enterprises. lenin, 1965: 421–422

5

Political Hegemony of the Proletariat

It is not specifically Marxist to recognize class or class struggle, although class and class struggle are important necessary categories in Marxist theory of class. Marxist theory of class extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat [i.e. the proletariat organized as the new ruling class] and to the sphere of the transition between capitalism and communism, and to the recognition that a socialist society is, in a sense, a class society]. That is what constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. Lenin, 1977d: 35

Therefore: the idea that ‘the main point in Marx’s theory is the class struggle’ is wrong (Lenin, 1977d: 35). And this wrong notion very often results in an opportunist distortion of Marxism and its falsification in a spirit acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the theory of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and, generally speaking, it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognize only the class struggle are not yet Marxists; they may be found to be still within the bounds of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the theory of the class struggle

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means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Lenin, 1977d: 35

Revolution is the highest form of class struggle. The outcome of a successful revolution is the dictatorship of the proletariat. Both revolution and the exercise of the dictatorship of the proletariat are guided by Marxist theory, which is the highest form of consciousness of the proletariat and of emancipatory consciousness. Marx says in his Critique of the Gotha programme: Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. marx in marx and engels, 1977c: 26

The Marxist theory of the proletariat organized as the new ruling class – i.e. political hegemony of the proletariat dictatorship to replace bourgeois dictatorship – is inseparably bound up with the doctrine of the revolutionary role of the proletariat in history. While dictatorship of the proletariat is the outcome of a successful proletarian revolution, this period is also an intense period of class struggle. ‘In reality, this period inevitably is a period of an unprecedently violent class struggle in unprecedentedly acute forms’ (Lenin, 1977d: 36), although high violent the process will be depends more or less on the counter-revolutionary response of the overthrown classes. So, ‘during this period the state must inevitably be a state that is democratic in a new way (for the proletariat and the propertyless in general) and dictatorial in a new way (against the bourgeoisie)’ (ibid.). The dictatorship of the proletariat is the truly majoritarian economic-political democratic rule of, for, and by the proletariat, a rule which is an instrument for the establishment of classlessness, nationally and globally.42 42

It is useful to show how different the Marxist position on the state and political power of the working class is vis a vis anarchism, which, along with its twin, post-structuralism, informs – very problematically, in my view – much of current leftist thinking: ‘The issue of dictatorship of the proletarian – democratic revolutionary of the proletarian masses which control the state to crush the overthrown classes and use their energy and the energy of the masses to construct socialism – divides Marxists from the rest, including anarchists. The distinction between Marxists and the anarchists is this: (1) The former, while aiming at the complete abolition of the state, recognize that this aim can only be achieved after classes have been abolished by the socialist revolution, as the result of the establishment of socialism, which leads to the withering away of the state. The latter want to abolish the state completely overnight, not understanding the conditions under which the

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The proletariat will create its own state in order to hold down its overthrown class adversaries. Victory over the bourgeoisie is impossible without a long, stubborn and desperate life-and-death struggle which calls for tenacity, discipline, and a single and inflexible will. The dictatorship of the proletariat means a most determined and most ruthless war waged by the new class against a more powerful enemy, the bourgeoisie, whose resistance is increased tenfold by their overthrow (even if only in a single country). lenin, 1968: 9–10

Reconciliation of class interests of capital and labour is not possible, and that as long as the possibility of overthrown classes returning to power exists, a new state – a proletarian state – is necessary to ensure that such possibility does not become a reality. If it is the case that ‘The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms’ and that ‘The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled’ then, ‘conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable’ (Lenin, 1977d: 10–11). This is true about the proletarian-­ transitional state. This sheer possibility of the return of overthrown classes necessitates dictatorship of the proletariat to replace that of the bourgeoisie. The aim of socialist political struggle is to elevate the proletariat to the status of a new ruling class. This will happen when the proletariat has control over state power which will be democratically controlled by that majority class and its allies, with the aim to stop the overthrown classes from returning. Even if exploiters can be politically defeated at one stroke, they – i.e. their class power – cannot be destroyed at one stroke, i.e. they cannot be expropriated, and they ‘cannot be deposed, even if expropriated – at one stroke’. It is ‘not easy to replace their management of the factories and estates by a different management, workers’ management, in actual fact’ (Lenin, 1977c: 36). The project of the abolition of classes is a protracted process and takes much longer than dispossessing the capitalist class of its state power. ­Merely state can be abolished. (2) The former recognize that after the proletariat has won political power it must completely destroy the old state machine and replace it by a new one consisting of an organization of the armed workers, after the type of the Commune. The latter, while insisting on the destruction of the state machine, have a very vague idea of what the proletariat will put in its place and how it will use its revolutionary power. The anarchists even deny that the revolutionary proletariat should use the state power, they reject its revolutionary dictatorship. (3) The former demand that the proletariat be trained for revolution by utilizing the present state. The anarchists reject this’ (Lenin, 1977d: 106–107).

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dispossessing the capitalist class is not enough. This class has, apart from its control over the means of production, many practical advantages which it will use to return to power. For example, it has: international connections and knowledge. The power of the bourgeoisie indeed lies ‘in the strength of international capital, the strength and durability of their international connections’ (Lenin, 1968: 10). It is rare that all countries will experience revolution at the same time. ‘If the exploiters are defeated in one country only… they still remain stronger than the exploited, for the international connections of the exploiters are enormous’ (Lenin, 1977c: 37). Revolution is a universal, international struggle. A free union of nations is impossible without this, without ‘the struggle of the socialist republics against the backward states’ The power of the bourgeoisie also lies ‘in the force of habit, in the strength of small-scale production’ (Lenin, 1968: 10). History indeed tells us: ‘That a section of the exploited from the least advanced middle-peasant, artisan and similar groups of the population may, and indeed does, follow the exploiters has been proved by all revolutions’ (Lenin, 1977c: 37). Dictatorship of the proletariat – political hegemony of the proletariat – does not have only a coercive function. It also has a constructive function. It aims to create a new society, and to create condition for classness and for democracy for all. Clearly, in order to abolish classes completely, it is not enough to overthrow the exploiters, the landowners and capitalists, not enough to abolish their rights of ownership; it is necessary also to [gradually] abolish all private ownership [including of petty producers] of the means of production, it is necessary to abolish the [social-spatial] distinction between town and country, as well as the distinction between manual workers and brain workers. This requires a very long period of time. In order to achieve this an enormous step forward must be taken in developing the productive forces [to which the capitalist class has been a barrier to]; it is necessary to overcome the resistance (frequently passive, which is particularly stubborn and particularly difficult to overcome) of the numerous survivals of small-scale production; it is necessary to overcome the enormous force of habit [this means that class is about class habit] and conservatism which are connected with these survivals. lenin, 1965: 421 [parentheses added]

The dictatorship of the proletariat is needed to abolish class. ‘The abolition of classes means, not merely ousting the landowners and the capitalists’; that is something that can be ‘accomplished with comparative ease’; ‘it also means abolishing the small commodity producers, and they cannot be ousted, or crushed; we must learn to live with them. They can (and must) be transformed

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and re-educated only by means of very prolonged, slow, and cautious organisational work’ (Lenin, 1968: 29). This requires the deployment of dictatorship of the proletariat to do this educative and consent-producing transformatory work. The dictatorship of proletariat is necessary to make sure that the conditions created by capitalism for socialism are fully made use of: The development of capitalism, in turn, creates the preconditions that enable really “all” to take part in the administration of the state. Some of these preconditions are: universal literacy, which has already been achieved in a number of the most advanced capitalist countries, then the “training and disciplining” of millions of workers by the huge, complex, socialized apparatus of the postal service, railways, big factories, largescale commerce, banking, etc., etc. lenin, 1977d: 95

The proletariat requires its political power to make sure that all citizens ‘work equally, do their proper share of work, and get equal pay’ (ibid.: 96). In fact, capitalism in its own interest has simplified ‘the accounting and control necessary for this…to the utmost’ such that ‘any literate person can perform – of supervising and recording, knowledge of the four rules of arithmetic, and issuing appropriate receipts’ (ibid.), and if anything the current electronic technology makes the task easier. The project of abolition of class may be partly seen as a project of equality. The great significance of the proletariat’s struggle for equality, and of equality as a slogan, will be clear if we correctly interpret it as meaning the abolition of classes and dictatorship of the proletariat that is necessary to achieve it: But democracy means only formal equality. And as soon as equality is achieved for all members of society in relation to ownership of the means of production, that is, equality of labor and wages, humanity will inevitably be confronted with the question of advancing further from formal equality to actual equality, i.e., to the operation of the rule “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. By what stages, by means of what practical measures humanity will proceed to this supreme aim we do not and cannot know.43 lenin, 1977d: 94–95

43

This requires a vigorous culture of debate and dissent, one that promotes airing of different kinds of proletarian views within the limits of anti-capitalism, internationalism, and socialism.

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And to establish a regime of equality and democracy from the standpoint of the working class, the vast majority of the humanity, the proletariat requires political hegemony or political power, just as the exploiting class requires political hegemony to reproduce its own class rule, its own form of equality and democracy. Once again, here is Lenin from his State and revolution: The exploiting classes need political rule to maintain exploitation, i.e., in the selfish interests of an insignificant minority against the vast majority of all people. The exploited classes need political rule in order to completely abolish all exploitation, i.e., in the interests of the vast majority of the people, and against the insignificant minority consisting of the modern slave-owners – the landowners and capitalists. The working people need the state only to suppress the resistance of the exploiters, and only the proletariat can direct this suppression, can carry it out. lenin, 1977d: 27

6

Political Vehicles for Class Struggle

Revolution requires objective conditions, and economic and governmental crisis, and intense suffering (immiserization at least in its relative form). But that is not enough. Also not enough is a reasonable level of class consciousness. If the proletariat is the special class, a class that is the only consistently revolutionary class and that can be the vanguard for all other exploited and oppressed strata, the proletariat needs a special organization to conduct its revolution against capitalist and achieve political hegemony. It is its political party (or even a federation of socialist-proletarian political parties, all of which operate within limits of anti-capitalism and internationalism, have a sense of solidarity, and respect principles of non-exploitation and non-domination of human beings). The working class struggle occurs through various political forms, including trade unions, rank-and-file workplace committees, and neighbourhood committees, soviets, coops, reading cells, libraries, etc.,44 all of which must work 44

Encouraging a process of transition from acting on basic economic demands [transitional demands] to the explicit understanding of the class meaning of such demands may require forms of organisation which are themselves ‘transitional’. The concept of transition is central in shaping a politics which, through its necessary roots in working-class concerns and conditions, can act to build a ‘bridge’ between the material conditions which continuously propel workers into struggle and a political perspective which can address and make sense of that process. Historically, structures like soviets have been the most

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under the guidance of the party even if they have some relative autonomy. But the party is the supreme vehicle for class struggle. Against the collective, concentrated social power of the propertied classes the working class cannot act unless it constitutes itself into a political party, a party that is distinct from, and opposed to, the parties of the propertied classes, as Marx insists. Without the party, independently of the party, skipping over the party, through a substitute for the party, the proletarian revolution can never triumph. … To be sure, …trade unions can become a powerful lever of the proletarian revolution. They can, for example, under certain conditions and for a certain period, even replace the workers’ Soviets. But they cannot play such a role without the communist party and certainly not against it, but only provided that communist influence in the trade unions becomes decisive. trotsky, 1996: 148

There are reasons why the working class struggle requires the intervention of a party. ‘Lenin and Luxemburg agreed that capitalism itself, and the bourgeois state, exert a powerful centralising influence on modern society, and that it is in turn absolutely illusory to think that this centralised state power can be gradually dismantled, as for instance a wall can be taken apart brick by brick ‘(Mandel, 1970b; para 16). So localist consciousness not useful. As well, this explains the need for a centralized party to concentrate proletarian political energies. The proletariat exists as a class on the basis of its relation to capitalist means of exchange and property, etc., but it is not necessarily class conscious. A vehicle is necessary to promote class consciousness, for reasons we have discussed in Chapter 10. The force of habit in millions and tens of millions is a most formidable force. Without a party of iron that has been tempered in the struggle, a party enjoying the confidence of all honest people in the class in question, a party capable of watching and influencing the mood of the masses, such a struggle cannot be waged successfully. It is a thousand times easier to vanquish the centralised big bourgeoisie than to “vanquish” the millions upon millions of petty proprietors; however, through their revolutionary forms of organisation that encapsulate this transitional dynamic in arising from basic mass strike movements, while pointing toward class power. Such structures are of significance not least in terms of their spontaneous eruption during major episodes of working-class struggle (Cohen and Moody, 1988: 120).

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o­ rdinary, everyday, imperceptible, elusive and demoralising activities, they produce the very results which the bourgeoisie need and which tend to restore the bourgeoisie. lenin, 1968: 30

It is the role of an organization to close the gap between the proletariat’s objective and subjective existence, and the party is that form, although it is not the only form. Trade unions can be instrumental as a school of communism, under the guidance of the party, even after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.45 The proletariat’s conquest of political power is a gigantic step forward for the proletariat as a class, and the Party must … educate and guide the trade unions, at the same time bearing in mind that they are and will long remain an indispensable “school of communism” and a preparatory school that trains proletarians to exercise their dictatorship [following a revolution], an indispensable organisation of the workers for the gradual transfer of the management of the whole economic life of the country to the working class (and not to the separate trades), and later to all the working people. lenin, 1968: 35

A major role of the party is to raise the level of consciousness of the masses. Even in its most elementary form, the spontaneous class struggle of the wage earners under capitalism leaves behind a residue in the form of a consciousness crystallised in a process of continuous organisation. Most of the mass is active only during the struggle; after the struggle it will sooner or later retreat into private life (i.e., ‘into the struggle for existence’). What distinguishes the workers’ vanguard from this mass is the fact that even during a lull in the struggle it does not abandon the front lines of the class struggle but continues the war, so to speak, ‘by other means.’ It attempts to solidify the resistance funds generated in the struggle into ongoing resistance funds – i.e., into unions. By publishing workers newspapers and organising educational groups for w ­ orkers, it 45

As mentioned in Chapter 10, the proletariat is divided on the basis of the level of consciousness. Some members and some groups of workers are more class conscious than others. ‘since a class has many “parts”-some look forward and some back’ (Trotsky, 1991: 267). This means that ‘one and the same class may create several parties. For the same reason one party may rest upon parts of different classes. An example of only one party corresponding to one class is not to be found in the whole course of political historyprovided, of course’ (ibid.).

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attempts to crystallise and heighten the elementary class consciousness generated in the struggle. It thus helps give form to a factor of continuity, as opposed to the necessarily discontinuous action of the mass, and to a factor of consciousness, as opposed to the spontaneity of the mass movement in and of itself (Mandel, 1970b). Based on its general theoretical understanding the revolutionary vanguard organisation can consolidate and enrich this higher consciousness, provided it is able to establish ties to the class struggle, i.e., provided it does not shrink from the hard test of verifying theory in practice, of reuniting theory and practice (ibid.). The party plays a crucial role in conducting class struggle. It plays this role differently with respect to the different strata of the working class (masses vs advanced workers). It is only because there exists an objectively revolutionary class that can, and is periodically obliged to, conduct an actual revolutionary class struggle, and it is only in relation to such an actual class struggle, that the concept of a revolutionary vanguard party (including that of professional revolutionaries) has any scientific meaning at all, as Lenin himself explicitly observed. All revolutionary activity not related to this class struggle leads at best to a party nucleus, but not to a party. This runs the risk of degenerating into sectarian, subjective dilettantism. According to Lenin’s concept of organisation, there is no self-proclaimed vanguard. Rather, the vanguard must win recognition as a vanguard (i.e., the historical right to act as a vanguard) through its attempts to establish revolutionary ties with the advanced part of the class and its actual struggle (Mandel, 1970b). The collective action of the advanced workers (the ‘natural leaders’ of the working class in the workplaces) is, relatively speaking, more difficult to attain because it can be aroused neither through pure conviction (as with the revolutionary nuclei) nor through purely spontaneous explosiveness (as with the broad masses). It is precisely the struggle experience – the important motivating factor in the actions of the advanced workers – that makes them much more careful and cautious before they undertake action on a broad scale. They have already digested the lessons of past actions and know that an explosion is not at all sufficient for them to be able to reach their goal. They have fewer illusions about the strength of the enemy (not to mention his ‘generosity’) and about the durability of the mass movement. The greatest ‘temptation’ of economism can be traced to this very point. (Mandel, 1970b) This also highlights the central importance of transitional demands, the strategic position of advanced workers already trained in propagating these transitional demands, and the historical importance of the revolutionary organisation, which alone is capable of working out a

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c­ omprehensive program of transitional demands corresponding to the objective historical conditions, as well as to the subjective needs, of the broadest layers of the mass. A successful proletarian revolution is only possible if all these factors are successfully combined. mandel, 1970b; italics in original

Party and class are two interpenetrating opposites at one level (the class ‘for itself’ and the class ‘in itself’). These two poles at the same time constitute a whole (the working class) which itself is one pole as against its opposite (the capitalist class) in another contradictory whole (capitalist society). The working class must realize itself, against capitalism, subsuming all the historical gains for humanity made by capitalism at the same time as overthrowing it. This it can do only when the outlook, strategy and tactics of a Marxist party predominate in the actions of the class as a class, in revolutionary struggles. A similar process is necessary within the party: only if it can study, unify and transform through struggle all the experiences of the class can its theory be saved from one-sidedness, dogma and idealism. Within the Marxist party, once again we have a struggle of opposites, a struggle for the development of Marxist theory and its application to the struggles of the proletariat, in constant struggle against every mode of adaptation to the existing position of the working class, its disunity, fragmentation, etc., those aspects of its situation which predispose it towards acceptance of its oppression. slaughter, 1975; para 32

Although there is much opposition to the working class needing a party, there is nothing special about such a need. All classes have parties: in most cases – at least in present-day civilised countries – classes are led by political parties; that political parties, as a general rule, are run by more or less stable groups composed of the most authoritative, influential and experienced members, who are elected to the most responsible positions, and are called leaders. All this is elementary. All this is clear and simple. lenin, 1968: 27

‘Not a single class in history,’ Lenin wrote, ‘has achieved power without producing its political leaders, its prominent representatives able to organize a movement and lead it’ (Lenin, 1900; para 8).

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However, the party of the working class has special qualities. Working class party must have its own political independence vis a vis politics of ruling classes, existing or overthrown. The workers’ party must never be the tagtail of any bourgeois party; it must be independent and have its goal and its own policy’ (Engels, 1871; para 2).46 The tribune of the whole (people, the masses), the party will concentrate its energy however. If it is our duty to support every real movement of the people, it is not less our duty to protect the scarcely formed core of our proletarian Party, not to sacrifice it uselessly and not to allow the proletariat to be decimated in fruitless local risings.47 The party of the proletariat must be international. ‘In our epoch, which is the epoch of imperialism, i.e., of world economy and world politics under the hegemony of finance capital, not a single communist party can establish its program by proceeding solely or mainly from conditions and tendencies of developments in its own country’ (Trotsky, 1996: 25–26). The working class is a world class. The capitalist class relation ultimately operates via the law of value, and it can ultimately be defeated at the international scale, even if revolutions against capitalism will not happen at the same time in all the countries.48 Here is what Trotsky says: The revolutionary party of the proletariat can base itself only upon an international program corresponding to the character of the present e­ poch, 46

47 48

In fact, Marx’s attitude towards the relations between the workers’ movement and leftsounding middle class reformers was absolutely clear. In their joint report to Central Authority of the Communist League in 1850 Marx and Engels summed up the experience of the European-wide revolutions, saying, ‘At the present moment, when the democratic petty bourgeois are everywhere oppressed, they preach in general unity and reconciliation to the proletariat, they offer it their hand and strive for the establishment of a large opposition party which will embrace all shades of opinion in the democratic party, that is, they strive to entangle the workers in a party organization in which general socialdemocratic phrases predominate, and serve to conceal their special interests, and in which the definite demands of the proletariat must not be brought forward for the sake of beloved peace. Such a union would turn solely to their advantage and altogether to the disadvantage of the proletariat. The proletariat would lose its whole independent, laboriously achieved position and once more be reduced to an appendage of official bourgeois democracy. The union must, therefore, be decisively rejected.’ https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/letters/94_01_26.htm. In the mid-1840s, when Marx began elaborating his theory of historical materialism, he explained that communism presupposed and arose out of the development of the world market, and that ‘the proletariat can thus only exist world historically, just as communism, its activity, can only have a “world-historical” existence.’

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the epoch of the highest development and collapse of capitalism. An international communist program is in no case the sum total of national programs or an amalgam of their common features. The international program must proceed directly from an analysis of the conditions and tendencies of world economy and of the world political system taken as a whole in all its connections and contradictions, that is, with the mutually antagonistic interdependence of its separate parts. In the present epoch, to a much larger extent than in the past, the national orientation of the proletariat must and can flow only from a world orientation and not vice versa. Herein lies the basic and primary difference between communist internationalism and all varieties of national socialism. trotsky, 1996: 26

Trotsky adds: Linking up countries and continents that stand on different levels of development into a system of mutual dependence and antagonism, leveling out the various stages of their development and at the same time immediately enhancing the differences between them, and ruthlessly counterposing one country to another, world economy has become a mighty reality which holds sway over the economic life of individual countries and continents. This basic fact alone invests the idea of a world communist party with a supreme reality. Bringing world economy as a whole to the highest phase of development generally attainable on the basis of private property, imperialism,…“aggravates to an extreme tension the contradiction between the growth of the productive forces of world economy and the national state barriers” trotsky, 1996: 27

7 Conclusion The ideas presented in this chapter and in the last go against the views of Analytical Marxism, of Harvey, and the like, presented in Chapters 2–4, including against the skepticism in their thinking of large-scale class struggle against capitalism and for socialism led by the proletariat. Analytical Marxism says that class struggle is about (selfishly rational) decision taken by the individuals making up a class to take action directed at the members of another class. Viewed as a kind of bargaining, class struggle occurs ‘when many agents in the working class, for example, learn to organize and act as one unit in order to set up a bilateral monopoly against capital’ (Roemer, 1986b, 198). However, the Analytical Marxists with their assumption of ­selfishly

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rational behavior by individuals conclude that the working-class collective ­action seems highly unlikely. For example, Roemer argues: Class struggle takes place only when the members of the working class see a potential for victory. The costs of fighting are too great for an individual, even in a collective mass where he is relatively anonymous, unless there is some expectation of victory. (Roemer, 1988, 88.) Similarly, Elster says: Every incipient strike or revolution must overcome the natural skepticism and suspicion of the would-be participants…. The motivation to engage in collective action involves, centrally, the structure of the gains and losses associated with it for the individual…measured in terms of expected utility. Hence they depend on both the individual’s estimate of the likelihood of success and failure and on the degree of risk aversion. (Elster, 1985, 351.) The rational choice argument is a very weak argument against the possibility of revolution. Yes, revolutions and struggles are painful affairs but millions of people have engaged in these in the history of class society. One is reminded of the following from the History of the Russian revolution: Do the consequences of a revolution justify in general the sacrifices it involves? The question is teleological and therefore fruitless. It would be as well to ask in face of the difficulties and griefs of personal existence: Is it worth while to be born? Melancholy reflections have not so far, however, prevented people from bearing or being born. Even in the present epoch of intolerable misfortune only a small percentage of the population of our planet resorts to suicide. But the people are seeking the way out of their unbearable difficulties in revolution. trotsky, 2008: 872

Much Marxist thinking argues against the working class party-led revolution against capitalism and for socialism. According to Cohen and Moody: such actions as ‘publishing reports of struggles and issues across the class, providing support contacts in other sectors for those in dispute, and bringing activists across employment together in schools and conferences, begin to demonstrate to rank-and-file trade unionists the class meaning of their everyday activity, without the need for principles and programmes dictated from above’ (Cohen and Moody, 1988: 121). As we have seen, the centralised coercive state power that capitalist class relation has produced cannot be gradually dismantled without a centralized party to educate the working class and to concentrate its political energies. Harvey’s idea that accumulation by dispossession is the dominant form of capitalism and therefore the contradiction between the dispossessor and the

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disposed, and not the contradiction between capital and labour, is the main contradiction, has important implication for theory and practice of class struggle. He says: ‘The tendency in left thinking is to privilege the labour market and the workplace as the twin central domains of class struggle’ (2014: 66–67) and [At these privileged sites] the proletarian vanguard supposedly fashions itself to lead the way to a socialist revolution. …[However] there are other terrains of struggle that can be of equal if not more compelling significance’ (2014: 67). He writes this about the Left dismissively: ‘the left, obsessed with the figure of the factory worker, as the bearer of class consciousness and as the avatar of socialist ambition, fails largely to incorporate this other world of class practices [practices of dispossession] into its thinking and its political strategies’ (2014: 68). This sort of left practice has been ‘damaging to a full-blooded revolutionary search for an alternative to capital and hence, to capitalism’ (2014: 69). ‘If the current period has seen a shift in emphasis from accumulation through expanded reproduction to accumulation through dispossession, and if the latter lies at the heart of imperialist practices, then it follows that the balance of interest within the anti- and alternative globalization movement must acknowledge accumulation by dispossession as the primary contradiction to be confronted’ (Harvey, 2003: 177), through a broader social movement. What should happen is this: ‘Organizing against this accumulation by dispossession (the formation of an anti-austerity movement, for example) and the pursuit of demand for cheaper and more effective housing, education, health care and social services are therefore just as important to the class struggle as is the fight against exploitation in the labour market and in the workplace’(2014: 68). And who will lead this movement? ‘You have to have a broader notion of an alliance of forces in which the conventional proletariat is an important element, but not necessarily an element that has a leadership role’ (Harvey and Rivera, 2010). Harvey thinks that small quantities of push will lead to a qualitative transformation. When he says that Marxists must ‘try to intervene in a way which is going to push society toward more democratic and more egalitarian solutions, and ultimately to solutions that are entirely non-capitalistic’ (Harvey and Rivera, 2010), this sounds reasonable on the surface but on close reflection, very stagist and reformist, especially in the light of Harvey’s other utterances which have no notion of transitional demands and no notion of an organizational framework to promote socialist consciousness. Harvey’s overall political perspective is not the overthrow of the present dictatorship of capital, including finance capital involved in accumulation by dispossession, but the development of a social movement (not a socialist movement) to pressure its ­representatives

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to just listen and throw some concessions (new New Deal).49 It is not clear how it is that what are mere social movements will challenge capitalism, which is backed up by the powerful state? It is clear however that class struggle is what is needed, especially in forms that Harvey is critical of, including class struggle in workplaces, and class struggle everywhere, although these have to be supported by other forms of struggle,50 such as those against non-class oppression, the main victims of which are often workers and petty producers. The working class – and especially the conscious elements of the working class – is the vanguard of all sorts of exploited masses, including petty producers, and all those who are oppressed because of their skin colour or sexual orientation, even though it is not the only agent of revolution. Harvey does not share this view. He wants to see a certain reversal of neoliberal (pro-market, pro-­business) policies, a curtailment of the freedom of business.51 Harvey’s politics is mainly anti-neoliberalism (or Polanyian). It is a politics of anti-dispossession but not a revolutionary politics of proletarian, socialist, anti-capitalism.52 49

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‘Paradoxically, a strong and powerful social democratic and working class movement is in a better position to redeem capitalism than is capitalist class power’. And such a prospect would help the ‘ordinary people who suffer, starve, and even die in the course of capitalist crises rather than the upper classes’ (Harvey, 2005: 152–153). He also writes: ‘A massive counterattack within the us as well as in the other core countries of capitalism against the politics of neoliberalism and the cutting of state and social expenditures might be one of the only ways to protect capitalism internally from its self-destructive and crisis prone tendencies’ (Harvey, 2003: 75–76). They have to be supported because relations of non-class social oppression harm the working class and because these relations divide this class and undermines its power to fight as a united force against capital. ‘The only possible, albeit temporary, answer to this problem (of overaccumulation)… is some sort of “New Deal” that has a global reach. This means liberating the logic of capital circulation and accumulation from its neo-liberal chains, reformulating state power along much more interventionist and redistributive lines, curbing the speculative powers of finance capital …’ (Harvey, 2003: 209). He is increasingly more a critic of marketization and privatization and less of capitalist class relation as a totality. His criticism of capitalism is not specifically Marxist anticapitalism, i.e. anti-capitalism from the standpoint of the international proletariat and the building of international socialism. Burdeau enthusiastically reports: ‘Harvey has long argued that many of the fiercest and most successful forms of resistance have centered on struggles against accumulation by dispossession, thanks to its ability to unite people across social and class divisions’ (Burdeau, 2015: 660). That exactly is where the problem with accumulation by dispossession theory lies. One must also ask: is a capitalism without dispossession a better capitalism and worth fighting for? Many scholars and

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All ideas about the impotence of the working class to lead and bring about a revolution reflect the inadequacy not of this class but of those who refuse to see the power of the proletariat and who are searching for alternatives to the working class. Some find them in smaller groups, whose power to effect revolutionary changes remains unexplained, and others locate the agency at the level of the human. Consider this. a viable, not class-centered, reformulation of the emancipatory project is possible through an analysis of capitalism’s “dialectic of scarcity.” The task of the emancipatory project, it is argued, is to turn humanity, and not the working class, from a political subject in itself to a political subject in and for itself. panayotakis, 2004

They appear to be oblivious to the basic principles of class struggle. They tend to forget that the interest of the working class, once again, is in not being exploited and dominated, and that the structure of exploitation and domination is beyond long-term significant reform, so the working class has an objective interest in revolution. It is the working class which produces value and surplus value and wealth for capital. It only has the unique power to stop that production and to annihilate capital, to expropriate the expropriator (through an alliance with semi-proletarian masses), although exactly how and when this potential can be realized is a different matter. As Neil Smith put it: ‘although workers sell their labor power as a commodity in an economic transaction, they retain direct social and political power, attendant upon the collective refusal of work, to destroy the social economy [capitalism]’ (2000: 1027). Of course, its success is not inevitable, neither is it inevitable that capitalism will be here forever or that the working class has no revolutionary power. So what does one make of the statement of McDowell, who apparently would like to see more work on class, that ‘my unease lies…in an inevitable romanticisation of the transformatory potential of working class politics’ (2008: 20)? Against the skepticism of those who think class struggle is not possible, class struggle happens all the time. It is immanent to capitalism. It happens in all the spheres of capitalist class relation: the labour market, and against ­control over property and against exploitation, and against the capitalist state.

a­ ctivists – on the Left – including in the academia, have uncritically jumped on to the bandwagon of so-called accumulation by dispossession; lurking under this and related ideas are the intellectuals’ sympathy for, and the actual interests of, small-producers’. In other words: intellectual populism.

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In D ­ ialectical Investigations, Ollman writes: ‘[O]ne doesn’t advocate class struggle or choose to participate in it… The class struggle … simply is’. Not only is that the case. It is also the case that ‘in one way or another we are already involved [in it], often … on the wrong side…What can be chosen is to what side to take in this struggle’ (Ollman, 2003: 20). Those of us who are teachers and students, we are indeed already involved in ideological struggle which is a form of class struggle, as Althusser argued. But on whose side are we? How do we know? The litmus test is this: a) where do we stand on the question of capitalist private property and of control over production, surplus and state power, b) how important are these matters as the explanation of major problems in society in our thinking, and c) and how do we imagine the solution to social problems in relation to these matters? Much distrust of class analysis is unfortunately based on a misunderstanding of the working class unity and agency: the working class is fragmented, and therefore it does not exist so, class analysis is dead. All that Marxist theory claims is that common class situation, and crises and other tendencies of capitalism create the possibility for a working class unity. Working class unity is not a finished product. It is an uneven process, historically and geographically. The Marx of the Manifesto was unnecessarily and unrealistically sanguine about capitalism contributing towards the racial and ethnic homogenization of workers across national spaces. But a tendency as a tendency, that is often realized (as expressed in the form of waves of struggle), is true. In a given time and place the working class is spatially and socially divided in part due to capitalist class strategies and due to the socio-spatial variation in working conditions caused by capitalism. But the working class is no less real for that, a point Dick Walker has also made (1985). A disunited working class is still the working class. It is real. It exists. It suffers. It fights. For the working class to be the central force of change and a central interpretive concept and for it to be even recognized as being in existence, it does not have to be 100% united. A fractured table is a table. Although fractured, there are also tendencies towards unity within the working class. This is on display when successful resistances against capital have happened. There were men and women and people of different nationalities in pre-1917 Russia and yet 1917 happened. The proletariat is not only the class in whose life suffering is concentrated. It is also the class in whose life the fighting power against capitalism is also concentrated. If the proletariat does not fight against capitalism, no other social group can. Relations between classes (along with intra-class relations) are based in processes of exchange (wage-form) and control over property and production of (surplus) value. These relations form the very basis of class society. That basis is shaped by class consciousness and class struggle in its various political and economic forms, and by the results of class struggle as embodied in

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g­ overnment rules/regulations, theoretical ideas, etc. And all such results of class struggle can in turn shape forms of class struggle. There have to be something called class (as an objective structural relation), and significant number of members of classes who are class consciousness for there to be class struggle. The structure of class relations is reproduced and transformed through action informed by consciousness, but consciousness is shaped (constrained and enabled) by that structure. Only during extraordinary moments53 does consciousness grip the minds of the masses and begin to act as a material force, as a weapon against the structure. Class relations, class consciousness and class struggle form a triad, within which class relations hold the ontological primacy. Class struggle is important as a proximate reason for social change and the lever of emancipation of the working class, and Marxism is intransigently antagonistic towards any approach or movement or people who dilute the significance of class. ‘The “highest expression” of human life consists in the union of workers organized in a revolutionary struggle for the mastery of means of production’ and satisfaction of democratically defined needs’ (Andrew, 1990: 274). There are three impulses in every worker’s experience. Firstly, the capitalist class relation promotes competition among workers pitting one worker against another. The capitalist class relation is reproduced through such division and atomization. Secondly, the capitalist class relation also promotes solidarity among workers, a solidarity that is based on the fact that one worker recognizes the suffering and struggles of other workers across the world. Capital has created a mass of workers with their common interest vis a vis capital. In that sense, this mass of workers is ‘a class as against capital, but not yet for itself’. In its struggle, which goes through phases, ‘this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself’ in that ‘The interests it defends become class interests’. Thirdly, there is the impulse towards action, which has two mutually contradictory ‘sub-impulses’: one is towards reformism, and another is towards revolution, which subordinates to it the movements for reforms. The struggle for revolution is an imperative because antagonistic interests between the basic classes cannot be resolved in any other way. The struggle of the working class against the capitalist class is, ultimately, a political struggle. Possibilities for class struggle are deeply connected to the ways in which capitalist class rule works. To the extent that Marx does speak of tendency towards bipolarization of class relations in capitalism, it is not just about the fact 53

These are the moments when contradiction between two productive forces and class relations producing an intense crisis of structural reproduction which cannot be resolved by the ruling class, and when an organizational force of the hitherto exploited class exists that is able to resolve the crisis of its leadership.

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that the class society is increasingly being divided into two objectively defined classes (classes-in-themselves) but also to subjective bipolarization: one class, i.e. bipolarization in classes-for-themselves (Friedman, 1990: 220). And that is a condition for revolution. The emergence of a proletariat class for itself will depend on the emergence of an emergence of national-based economy and of a world market, and growth of international communication among workers; transcendence of non-class divisions within the working class; and growth of large scale industry which facilitates communication among workers and their ability to control production in future (Friedman, 1990: 220). Some struggles are over economic matters (trade union economic struggle) and some are political. Some are socialist, and some are purely reformist. Marxists relate to the common interests of workers, with different social backgrounds, struggling in different places and in different ways and forms, and make them explicitly aware of their struggles. Struggles take united front strategy (where communist and non-communist, i.e. social democratic, w ­ orkers come together) or popular front strategy (where workers with loyalty to communist and capitalist etc. ideologies come together) or a more sectarian form. ‘At different stages of economic evolution’, ‘different forms of struggle’ develop and ‘become the principal forms of struggle’, depending on differences in political, national-cultural, living and other conditions’, and ‘in connection with this, the secondary, auxiliary forms of struggle undergo change in their turn’.54 Indeed, the history of class struggle is marked with ‘rapid and varied succession of different forms of the movement – legal and illegal, peaceful and stormy, underground and open, local circles and mass movements, and parliamentary and terrorist forms’. Marxist theory of class recognizes, and seeks to give conscious expressions to, the different forms of struggle – parliamentarism, trade union struggle; insurrection; mass strike; barricades, etc. The organizational vehicles of struggles vary: apart from trade unions and federations of trade unions, there are informal organization/grouping of workers, neighbourhood action committees, working class council based in workplaces, working-class political parties and mass movements. It is always possible that ‘new forms of struggle, unknown to the participants of the given period, inevitably arise as the given social situation, changes’. The political perspectives influencing these can also vary (e.g. social democratic, r­ evolutionary, etc.). The success of workers’ struggle depends crucially on their theoretical preparation and political form of their movements (e.g. what kind of organization with kind of theory/ideology). Workers may exercise agency as individuals or in smaller groups or in large groups (e.g. national strikes). Their action may 54

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aim at getting some c­ oncessions within capitalism and/or undermining the rule of capital itself. In other words, working class agency, to paraphrase Perry Anderson, can be small scale or large scale (nationally and globally) and can aim at making things better inside the system and/or can aim to transcend the system. Class struggle, strictly speaking, is the large-scale struggle to transcend the system. The struggle against oppression based on racial, caste, and gender relations must be dominantly fought on the basis of the struggle against the capitalist class – the property-owning class – as a whole, whether sections of the class are male or female or whether they are blacks or whites, or high castes or low castes. Within that overall struggle, struggle against racial, gender and caste oppression may have its own autonomous dynamics. That is: apart from the struggle to abolish class, which will considerably underline material conditions for racial and gender oppression, an additional struggle may be necessary to fight the conditions for such oppression, and especially, against the ideas that support gender and race inequality among the direct producers. Class struggle is not the only type of conflict; there are other types of conflict, but class struggle is rooted in (if not reducible to) conflicts of interest stemming from different relations that classes have, to means of production and control over surplus. All sorts of struggles are ultimately class struggle (or, are, at least, strongly associated with class struggle): Just as the movement of the industrial market is, in the main, … reflected in the money market, and of course, in inverted form, so the struggle between classes already existing and fighting with one another is reflected in the struggle between government and opposition, but likewise in inverted form, no longer directly but indirectly, not as a class struggle but as a fight for political principles, and it is so distorted that it has taken us thousands of years to get to the bottom of it.55 engels to schmidt, in marx and engels, 1982: 399

Underlying practical politics are the interests and actions of a ‘class or fraction of a class’. At a concrete level, sexuality, gender, etc. are not outside of the scope of class as a concept, of the world of the working class. We must ask: what is the class-origin of gender and other forms of discrimination, and how is reproduction of capitalist (or class) inequalities contingent on and shape gender and similar non-class processes. One should not fetishize the visible patterns of ­ 55

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_10_27a.htm.

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inequality which can be captured in statistical categories and/or represented in personal(ized) narratives, as sum of class and gender, etc. or as their ­so-called inter-section, the dynamics of which remains beyond any systemic logic. To be freed from discrimination on the basis of sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, caste, nationality, etc. is a democratic demand and a need of the toiling masses (including the working class). Scientifically, these axes of oppression will lose much of their material force (even if they will not automatically disappear overnight) if these are not available to dominant classes and their middle class supporters to make use of. Hence the fight against capital – class politics – is also a fight against social oppression.

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Conclusions, and Further Reflections on the Political Implications of Class Theory Analytical Marxism and Post-structuralist Marxism have countered the ‘death of class’ claims that have been made from time to time. They have asserted that class exists and that it is important. Whether or not one agrees with what they say, one cannot ignore them. While Analytical Marxist theory of class is realist in its philosophical orientation and accepts the principle of causality and determination, the anti-essentialist theory of class is ­post-structuralist in its origin and inspiration. But both forms of Marxism share something: they are critical of many central tenets of classical Marxism. Anti-essentialist Marxism rejects ‘the founding presumption that a complex reality can be analyzed to reveal a simpler reality, an essential attribute, or a set of fundamental causes at its core’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 56). And Wright’s Analytical Marxism seeks to develop a thin version of Marxist class theory, which is much less ambitious than classical Marxism, and shares much common ground with Weberianism. According to Analytical Marxism of Erik Wright, the central class division in capitalist society is between those who own and control the means of production – capitalists – and those hired to use those means of production  – workers. Capitalists exploit and dominate workers. Other positions within the class structure draw their specific character from their relationship to this basic division. Managers, for example, exercise many of the powers of domination and their wages are greater than their cost of reproduction, but are also subordinated to capitalists. ceos and top managers of corporations often develop significant ownership stakes in their corporations and therefore become more like capitalists. Highly educated professionals and some technical workers have sufficient control over skills and knowledge and this allows them to ‘maintain considerable autonomy from domination within work and significantly reduce, or even neutralize, the extent to which they are exploited’ (Wright, 2009: 108). In other words: the concrete class structure is more complicated than a two-class model with one central form of exploitation (e.g. capital-labor relation) implies. In a capitalist society, apart from capitalist exploitation proper, there are skill exploitation and organizational exploitation, which are based respectively on skill rents and loyalty rents. That these rents are the basis for

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strata within classes rather than for class divisions as such is acknowledged but ­ignored by Wright. They are ‘the strata that are ­differentiated by varying degrees of exploitation within a common location in the social relations of production’ (Wright, 1989d: 333; 347). But as individuals ­convert their surplus income to capital, they can join the capitalist class. The middle class in capitalism is constituted by those locations which are simultaneously in the capitalist and working classes (Wright, 1989d: 347). Managers are simultaneously capitalists and workers, not (just) because they dominate workers while being dominated by capitalists (as in Wright’s early work), but because they own capitalist property and sell labour power; they have a duality of class location (Wright, 1989d: 333). This applies to experts (most of whom eventually have supervisory and managerial duties) as well as some other members of the middle class: ‘even if their current jobs are not in managerial contradictory locations, their careers typically are’ (Wright, 1989d: 334) Intellectually, to say that ‘class counts’ is to claim that the distribution of rights and powers over the basic productive resources of a society has significant, systematic consequences at both the micro- and macro-levels of social analysis. This is not to suggest that class is universally the most important determinant of everything social, rather that it is presumptively important for a very wide range of phenomena’ (Wright, 1993: 27). Politically, Wright’s focus on class interests of workers, capitalists and middle classes points to the alliances (cross-class alliances) they may seek to build. Wright has produced a rich repertoire of multiple class locations: contradictory locations within class relations, mediated class locations, temporarily structured class locations, objectively ambiguous class locations and dualistic class locations. Instead of a simple vision of ‘epochal confrontation’ between two main classes, he produces a picture of multiple possible coalitions of variable likelihood contending over a variety of possible post-capitalist futures. He deploys his micro-level and concrete restructuring of class map of advanced capitalism, and imagines various interstitial and symbiotic strategies (mainly social-­democratic policies) that will mitigate people’s miseries and gradually weaken the salience of capitalist property relations. A ruptural strategy – a complete break with capitalism via seizure of state power – is neither necessary nor possible, according to him. There is another world possible within the overall framework of capitalist property relations on which progressives can put pressure to move them in the direction of post-capitalism and to reduce classness of existing capitalist societies. The Post-structuralist theory (or anti-essentialist theory) of class has centred on contributions from Resnick and Wolff and Gibson-Graham, whom

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Resnick and Wolff have influenced. Post-structuralism has in turn influenced such bodies of work as labour geography (and working class studies). A lot of work which appears to have ­something to do with class is indeed concentrated in the form of labor geography (geographies) and ‘new working class studies’ (Strangleman, 2008) to which geographers and sociologists contribute. This version of Marxist theory of class focusses on class as a relation/process, and it, especially in the form of the labour geography type literature, has looked at the question of working class agency. It has specific views about the relation between post-structuralist theory of class and its theory of society, and this is especially, in terms of the relative dominance of class vs non-class processes in society as a whole, and the relative dominance of capitalism as a part of society. Post-structuralists/anti-essentialists recognize that there are different conceptions of class, but they think that none of them is right or wrong. Each class discourse has different implications and effects. Class exists when: individuals produce more than is necessary to sustain them at a socially adequate level, and their “surplus labor” is appropriated, in a variety of forms, by other individuals and groups (sometimes including the performer of surplus labor her or himself). In the post-structuralist view, although concepts of class and exploitation have tended to be associated with capitalism, there are also a variety of noncapitalist forms of exploitation including ancient, primitive communist, feudal, slave, and communal class processes. They distinguish, in addition, two distinctive moments within any class process. These are: the exploitative class process, where surplus labor is produced and appropriated, and the distributive class process, where appropriated surplus labor is distributed to a variety of social destinations. Class relations as such have no more causal significance than non-class relations, and capitalism has no more dominance among class relations than noncapitalist relations. There is mere coexistence of class and non-class processes/ relations, and of capitalist and non-capitalist relations/processes. This is the essence of anti-essentialist class theory, from one angle. This theory aims to add two basic ideas to our thinking: (a) class is a distinct process of surplus labor production/ distribution which is different from the important processes of power, property, consciousness, etc., and (b) the analytical method of linking distinct processes (class and non-class processes) together into a social totality is overdetermination rather than reductionism.1 These ideas form a basis 1 For anti-essentialists, because no cause is more important than another, no theory is more important than another; ‘it is impossible to establish a definite hierarchy of interpretations’

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for unity within current social movements and thereby enhance their chances for success. The two Marxisms – Analytical Marxism and post-structuralist Marxisms – have defended the idea of class and class theory against attacks from those who have been writing obituaries of class. In spite of the attempts on the part of many, including post-structuralism-influenced scholars, to see class as merely a mental construct (class merely as identity), the Anti-essentialist Marxism of Resnick and Wolff (and Gibson-Graham) has generally resisted ­taking that ­direction: it has stressed the objective importance of ‘exploitation’ to the conceptualization of class: class exploitation does exist independently of how classes think. Of course, how important class exploitation is, in their view, and how they conceptualize this, are separate matters. While both forms of Marxism emphasize exploitation, their view of exploitation is not necessarily the same. Resnick and Wolff do pay (some) attention to labour theory of value. Wright almost ignores it, as Analytical Marxism as such does. Both forms of Marxism seek to connect class theory to class politics, although in different ways. While Analytical Marxism is critical of Post-­structuralist Marxism, both have given up on the systemic analysis of capitalism, and on the fact that capitalism’s systemic character, including its crisis-proneness, is an enormous obstacle to significant long-term reforms of the capitalist class relation. For Post-structuralist Marxists, class or capitalism is just one of several possible entry points with which to analyze society, and therefore capitalism does not have the sort of causal dominance that Marxism has usually assigned it. Similarly, Wright’s Analytical Marxism trims the theoretical ambition of Marxist class theory. It indeed makes substantive arguments to show that much of the problem of inequality, etc. is only partly to do with capitalist exploitation, because it coexists with other important forms of exploitation in capitalist society. The two forms of Marxism treat the question of property inadequately, if differently. Analytical Marxism of Wright points to, what are according to it, new forms of class relationship based on unequal ownership of organizational asset and monopolizable skill. But it is not clear – including to Wright himself – that these, as forms of property, are sufficiently different from what are (Gibson-Graham et al., 2001: 5). Texts and words are ‘complex, open to multiple readings’ (ibid.). Overdetermination ‘widens the space of political effectivity’ (ibid.: 6). ­Anti-essentialist Marxism is suspicious of totalizing frameworks and master narratives (e.g. global capitalist economy), that attempt to embrace or locate other aspects of social life within these narratives (ibid.).

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the means of production and labour, in Marxism, in order to count as new bases for the definition of classes and class relations. And for Anti-­essentialists, property ownership/control is neither necessary nor sufficient for defining class. Given that these two Marxisms define class on the basis of processes that cut across class societies (e.g. control over assets or appropriation of surplus labour), it is not clear how in their view the capitalist class is a special form of class society. In other words, they have a-historical view of class. In both the Marxisms, surplus is inadequately conceptualized. Surplus is merely a matter of exchange relations or a matter of fixing meaning or political power relations between surplus appropriators and surplus producers (i.e.  ­given enough pressure on surplus appropriators, the surplus appropriation can be enormously reduced). Surplus remains an undifferentiated category therefore. More specifically, the post-structuralist Marxist assumption is that surplus labour performed at home = surplus labour performed in a factory/office. Their assumption is also that: surplus in a slave society = surplus in capitalism = surplus in communism. In Analytical Marxism as well, the mechanisms of surplus appropriation are basically the same across class societies: unequal distribution of assets. Thus there is a totally ahistorical view of surplus and therefore exploitation and class. There is little attention to the production of surplus and the contradiction-ridden accumulation process in both the Marxisms, so surplus remains more or less a distributive category. This means that class theory is divorced from its materiality, from its political economy, and is reduced to sociologism (merely ‘relations’ between social groups). It is not clear how ownership of organizational asset and monopolizable skills is itself a source of surplus appropriation that is autonomous of capitalist surplus appropriation, as in Analytical Marxism. Given the inattention to property and to labour process, in Anti-­essentialist Marxism, class relation becomes a matter of who gets how much of the social product, and not about who has effective control over the process of production of value and surplus value and over the means of production? For both the Marxisms, the importance of class is contingent. Class is one among several forces affecting our lives (especially, in anti-essentialist thought). Both the Marxisms practice a fractionalist and typological approach to class (divisions within classes): they stress difference at the expense of the unity (=the systemic relation between the basic classes). The dilution of the ­relation between basic classes is the objective effect of Wright’s intention to concretize classes by its single-minded focus on middle classes, and to determine who belongs to which classes, beyond the two-class model. Both the Marxisms focus

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too much on who owns assets or on who appropriates surplus from whom, and as a result neglects the wider influence of class itself: how it affects different aspects of society, including politics and consciousness. They recognize that there are problems of exploitation and inequality. But the amount of surplus that is appropriated by the capitalist class is a matter of pressure on the capitalist class (from governments, unions, ‘communities’, etc.). Anti-essentialists specifically argue that social democratic pressure can be brought to bear on entrepreneurs for a greater share of the surplus: the idea is not to kill the goose (i.e. capitalists class relation) that lays the golden eggs. That is: some pressure on capitalists or some ‘humanist’ appeal to their non-­ capitalist identities can make available some of the surplus they appropriate for social-ecological purposes. Their Marxism takes inspiration from Spivak who says that production of capital can be allowed as long as it supports some redistribution. To the extent that theoretical practice contributes to the reproduction of a system, it is the case that ultimately, theoretical practice of Analytical Marxism and Post-stucturalist Marxism concerning class contributes to the reproduction of the capitalist class system. To the extent that they are critical of existing class society and of some of the authors who write about such society, their criticisms are system-supporting. More precisely, their criticisms are in the nature of the social-democratic criticism as a safety-valve (Trotsky, 2008: xvi). Analytical and Post-structuralist Marxisms have contributed to class-based thinking: they, at least, do not say that class is a mental creation, that if people are not conscious of their class position then class does not exist. They do stress class as an important form of inequality. However, their service to class theory is rather limited. It is not enough to say that class exists. It is necessary to say that class exists and that without understanding class, one will not adequately understand the fundamental causes of the humanity’s problems. These Marxisms do not say that. To say that class empirically exists and then to say that class is merely one of several processes that affect our lives is plain wrong. It is vacuous to assert that class exists but that the theoretical statements about what the existence of class is caused by or what it affects and how much it affects, are more or less arbitrary social constructions. If the science – theory – of class was merely an arbitrary social construction, what is the point of writing about class and what is the point of criticizing this or that view on it? If class is one among several processes and has no necessary primacy, or if the significance of class is only contingent on what it is that we are talking about, how does one know, at a theoretical level (and at the level of society as

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a whole), when it has significance and when it does not? The importance of class, which is a systemic process/relation, cannot be contingent. It is not the case that: it is possible that class will affect other things but not necessary. The question quite precisely is this: is it, or is it not, that class, which operates at multiple geographical scales, is the single most determinant of the things that affect whether or not the vast majority of the world will live a materially comfortable life with dignity and self-respect, with democratic rights and enjoying ecological sustainability and without the fear of endless imperialist wars eating up resources that could be used to improve conditions of living? The two Marxisms will say: class is not un-important. But even when they say class is important (a conclusion Marx reached), saying so is divorced from Marx’s and Marxist theory (e.g. theory of accumulation; theory of value, etc.). This is an example of Marxism without Marx’s theory that Alan Freeman rightly complains of as bedevilling a large amount of what is called Marxism. The Marxism without Marx is ‘a systematic attempt to divorce his conclusions from his economic theory’ (Freeman, 2015: 84); and indeed from the Marxist tradition of the 20th century (Lenin, and his legacy). The two Marxisms show some engagement with Marx, but that is relatively superficial, turning Marx to a mere sociologist or an economist, etc. and that too, a sociologist or an economist whose insights were quite inadequate, overall. They claim to engage with Marx more than they actually do. The actual content of Marxism, of Marx and Engels, for example, is surprisingly very little in the theoretical discussion of Gibson-Graham and their followers who call themselves Marxists; there is very little discussion in their work on, for example, the account of accumulation, profitability, economic crisis, wealth production, etc. Their main focus is on surplus distribution and appropriation, the qualities that capitalism shares with pre-capitalism, so capitalism’s specific class character is, once again, left out. Both the Marxisms engage very little with the rich class analysis of Marx and Engels; they, like other Marxists such as Harvey, etc., completely ignore the rich class analysis that was developed in theory and practice by Lenin, Trotsky, etc. and by those who develop, in more recent times, the legacy of these writers. And, of course, according to the revisionist view, class in the sense of relations between the basic classes has very little substantive and direct connection to consciousness and political power, including state power. The revisionist argument is either that the relation between basic classes is too abstract to shape power and consciousness (as in Analytical Marxism) or that such a relation cannot be allowed to exist epistemologically, as in Post-structuralist Marxism. The relation between class and the state does not receive any attention at all except for the assertion that state policies can somehow help the working masses. Class stays in a little province

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of the world of thinking. According to the revisionist thinking, class theory explains less than what it calls traditional Marxism thinks it can. The emphasis in Anti-essentialist Marxism on over-determination and loca­ lism suggests that much of the so-called new class analysis (including in labour geography and new working class studies) is still broadly within the discursive framework characterized by the ‘post-modernization’ of intellect that was responsible for the onslaught on class in the first place, a framework in which the material life has no privileged status, ontologically or scientifically. The denial of capitalism’s dominance ­defines the political essence of ­Anti-essentialist Marxism, which is to fetishize difference, opening up spaces for localist, reformist, ­social-democratic type action, dressed up in the Marxist language. Incidentally and interestingly: the post-structuralist conceptualization of class, – which is based on its critique of traditional Marxism for its emphasis on the logic of capitalist accumulation, property rights, etc. and which is keen to emphasize that people have multiple identities/relations, and that therefore class or capitalist relation need not be the dominant relation – is in line with one that Harvey endorses, even if he is eager to distinguish himself from the post-­structuralist, anti-capital-centric approaches such as that of GibsonGraham. To quote Harvey once again: broaden somewhat the conventional Marxian definition of ‘class’ (or, more exactly, of ‘class relation’) under capitalism to mean positionality in relation to capital circulation and accumulation. Marx often fixed this relation in terms of property rights over the means of production (including, in the laborer’s case, property rights to his or her own body), but I want to argue that this definition is too narrow to capture the content even of Marx’s own analyses …[W]ith such a definition of ‘positionality with respect to capital circulation and accumulation’ we can better articulate the internal contradictions of multiple positionalities within which human beings operate. The laborer [just like Gibson = Graham’s entrepreneur] as person is a worker, consumer, saver, lover, and bearer of culture, and can even be an occasional employer and landed proprietor, whereas the laborer as an economic role – the category Marx analyses in Capital – is singular. harvey 2000: 102; parenthesis added

The Post-structuralist approach, like Analytical Marxism, dismisses the working class as revolutionary partly on the ground that that idea was based on ­capitalism as industrial capitalism and on the idea that capitalism is the ­dominant relation. Marxism has a fiction of the working class. That has died.

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Marxism has ‘a militaristic image of a massive collectivity of workers’ is part of a receding social conception and politics of change. Both the Marxisms are skeptical of large scale class struggle against capitalism and for socialism. What is common to both Anti-essentialist (including the labour geography type thinking) and Analytical Marxist class theories is a sense of provincialization (i.e. narrowing the scope of class), an undialectical one-sidedness, in relation to class and society. Their theory of class is immensely inadequate. By being skeptical of the working class – and they actually reject it – as the revolutionary vanguard of struggle against capitalism, and indeed, by being skeptical of 1917 as an example of a successful revolutionary class struggle, they contribute to existing wider skepticism about class. Revolution against capitalist property relations has not done any good in the view of the two Marxisms, and it will, according to Wright, inevitably deepen class inequality in new forms. So (revolutionary) struggle against the capitalist class relation is not quite on their agenda. In a post-capitalist society, it is not the proletariat but the bureaucracy that will inevitably be the new ruling class. Analytical and ant-essentialist Marxisms, essentially, and on the basis of their analytical arguments, are social­-democratic (or ‘democratic socialist’). Their arguments and political proposals are sympathetic towards small scale produces and middle classes. Not cognizant of the capitalist class relation as a totality of relations, including of exchange and value-production, they favour the working class behaving as the capitalist class (e.g. running profit-seeking coops in a market society). They are also not against entering into alliance with the (sections of) the capitalist class, appealing to their good sense, so independent political mobilization of the working class, which is an important aspect of Marxist thinking, is not in their thinking. They endorse various forms of voluntarism (including in the form of labour struggles being able to inevitably win significant concessions, suggesting that capital is not necessarily the dominant agent). Putting political pressure on the capitalist class is possible because, for these Marxisms, there is no systemic logic of profitability or economic crisis, etc. or that such a logic is not that potent, nor is there any class which has an interest in overcoming capitalism in its own interest. Consider Wright once again: The thesis of the long-term nonreproducibility of capitalism – the inherent, endogenous tendency towards deepening, and eventually catastrophic, crises rooted in the falling rate of profit – is certainly problematic, as is the claim that capitalism produces a sufficiently homogeneous class of proletarians to constitute its gravediggers (1993: 23)

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In other words, capitalism is not as problematic as Marxism has thought (it is not that crisis-prone, and even if it is, it can overcome its problems), and there is not an agent which is able to challenge it at its root. This sort of thinking strikes at the root of Marxist theory of capitalism, instead of the root of capitalism itself. In thinking about class without Marxist theory of accumulation and crisis, etc., that is without Marxist political economy, they are now joined by a large number of scholars. Consider Burawoy: The socialist transition can no longer be understood as the collapse of an entire order to be replaced by a completely new one. It no longer springs from the coincidence, in time and space, of economic contradiction, class struggle, and the seeds of the new. burawoy, 2003: 251; stress added

Panitch and Gindin also hold a similar view: Capitalist crises cannot be counted on to produce conditions for socialist transformation… [for] crises may just make people despair. panitch and gindin, 2015: 16

If the implication of what these two authors say is that crisis is not enough for socialist transformation, that is an acceptable view. However, if they are saying that massive and successful class struggle against the capitalist class system and for socialism can occur without a conjuncture of severe economic (and governmental crisis), or that in spite of such crisis, class struggle is unlikely to happen, then that view is mistaken.2 For Analytical and Post-structuralist Marxists, class as a category is important even if the working class is not the dominant agent of social change in capitalist society. So they, more or less, divorce class as a concept from the conditions and powers of the working class, in producing their Marxism without Marx’s theory: the role of class as a social process may be recast in different social and theoretical settings, ones in which new political opportunities may emerge (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 69–70). Whatever view justifies making use of conjunctural opportunities for reforms is considered by them to be a class view. 2 Similarly, although Harvey talks about crisis, he, like Wright, Panitch and many others see no connection between crisis and what ultimately causes it (the tendency towards the rate of profit to fall), in spite of a massive amount of research showing the connection (see Freeman, 2015).

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The Marxism of Marx, and especially, the form of it developed by Lenin and his legacy, has a name for this kind of views: opportunism. Interestingly, this is also the kind of argument that scholars such as David Harvey make, including the argument against traditional Marxism assigning the prominent role to the proletariat as the revolutionary vanguard. A major problem with the two Marxist theories in question is that they do not take materialist dialectics or dialectical materialism seriously. They in fact reject central tenets of such a philosophy, including the epistemological principle of what Ollman calls the level of generality. Without dialectical materialism, Marxist theory (of class) and Marxist political practice against class are impossible. Analytical Marxists, who emphasize the materiality of social life but who ignore dialectical principles, have a vision of ‘anti’-capitalist politics which is anything but anti-capitalist in any real sense: there is little trace of proletarian international revolutionary socialism that can strike at the root of the profit-system as an alternative organizing principle of society that Marxismwithout-qualifiers has argued for. Similarly, Post-structuralist Marxist t­ heorists of class who have a poor view of dialectics (their preferred term is over-­ determination, which is actually no-determination) and who deny the power of systemic thinking, end up being social-democratic apologetics of capitalism. The totality of Analytical and Post-structuralist Marxist thinking on class is an Odyssey of numerous negatives, of numerous ‘nos’. I mention these in Chapter 4 and it is worth repeating these. These Marxisms say no to the fact that: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

capitalist class relation is the dominant form of class relation and of ­social relation; capital-labour relation is the dominant social cleavage/contradiction, and the dominant cause of the humanity’s fundamental problems; there is such a thing called a system and a capitalist system; there is such a thing called systemic logic, including the logic of profitability, economic crisis, of concentration-centralization of means of production, and class differentiation among commodity producers; classes are large groups of people and are large-scale potential actors; distributionist politics and trade unionist politics will not solve the humanity’s problems in any long-term and significant manner in the absence of the majority having democratic control over production and state power; there can be no localist reformism, or indeed any successful localist action against capitalism; the state is the fundamental protector of the capitalist class relation and cannot be expected to regulate capitalism in the long-term interests of the masses;

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9.

the capitalist property relation must be eliminated, along with other aspects of capitalist class relation, as it cannot be reformed; 10. there is a need for a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist society on the basis of the conscious political organization of the only class that can lead such a revolution, the class of industrial and non-industrial workers, a revolution that can only succeed when organized and effected internationally. Marxist theory says yes to all the ten points above that revisionist theory says no to. It is useful to note that Gibson-Graham (2005) see ‘theory building as potential-­making rather than limit-identifying’ (p.43). And Wright insists that Marxism has an emancipatory dimension, that it has a practical implication and that it must contribute to the project of changing the world. The question is, whose world it is that is sought to be changed, and precisely whose interests do these theories objectively seek to ‘reflect’, regardless of subjective intentions of the theorists? As mentioned, theory, more or less, reflects existing conditions, and their contradictions, and theory examines the gap between what is and what can be. The contradiction-ridden conditions exist independently of the theorist. These conditions include the material conditions (class exploitation, inequalities, etc.) and also the ways in which ordinary people (those who are not theorizing) think about these material conditions, their current level of consciousness. Revisions to theory – Marxist theory in this case – reflect these conditions. There is a history of those revisions. The revisions to Marxism, as we have seen in Chapter 4, have taken many forms which are based on criticisms against Marxism, a Marxism which is very different from Analytical and Post-structuralist Marxisms, and which says, as Lenin noted in his Marxism and revisionism: 1. 2. 3. 4.

that one must adopt a materialist – as opposed to – an idealistic world view; that there is a tendency towards concentration and centralization of means of production in the hands of a few; that small-scale producers can exist in a relation of competition with large-scale enterprises (mainly) on the basis of ‘self-exploitation’ in a capitalist market (e.g. by denying themselves what decent living requires), that economic positions between the capitalist and proletarian class positions will arise and weaken (albeit unevenly over time and space) and therefore non-capitalist small-scale production under capitalism as a long-term reproduction or development strategy is not viable (given limits to self-exploitation and given the dominance of the law of value);

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5.

that the capitalist class-system is inherently prone to regular bouts of economic crisis; that the state – whether it is democratic or not – is inherently a tool of oppression against subordinate classes, and that there is a need for a revolutionary rupture as there are significant limits to reforms within capitalism (whether these reforms come from the government, unions or civil society) (Lenin, 1977a).

6. 7.

These are core ideas in Marxism, the Marxism defended in this book (i.e. revolutionary Marxism), which includes the Marxist theory of class. These were first presented in Chapter 4, and needed to be repeated here given their significance, and should be read along with the ten points that revisionists reject. What objective class interests, once again, are represented by revisions to these ideas, which are being tried in many circles, and not just in Analytical and Anti-essentialist Marxisms? Often revision to Marxism reflects material conditions in the sphere of class relations, and more specifically, the economic rise (and dissolution) of groups of people as members of the ‘middle class’ which is between the two basic classes and which includes: small-scale property owners, some of whom may have to perform wage-work, and those who are well-paid, highly educated members of the working class, including well-paid union and government officials as well as non-managerial private sector employees. There is a dialectics of capitalist class relation and middle class positions (including those in smallscale production that Anti-essentialist Marxist talks about, and those performing highly-paid skilled labour, whose role Analytical Marxism ­emphasizes). A number of new “middle strata” are inevitably brought into existence again and again by capitalism. These new small producers, who constitute the socalled non-capitalist sector that scholars like Gibson-Graham emphasize, are just as inevitably being cast again into the ranks of the proletariat, although the process is uneven in time and space. Under these conditions of the constant rise and sinking of middle strata, a petty bourgeois world outlook crops up, and this is manifested in various criticisms of, and attempted revisions to, ‘traditional’ Marxist theory of class. The totality of revisions that analytical and anti-essentialist Marxism (and similar trends) seek to inject into ‘traditional Marxism’ is of this nature, more or less. They reflect real, contradictory material conditions, even if theorists might consciously deny this. The Post-structuralist Marxists as well appear to express the interests of ideas of certain sections of the propertied class, including the philanthropicminded capitalists, small-scale producers, including entrepreneurial women, as well as ‘middle class intellectuals’. The post-structuralist class research on

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finding alternatives to capitalism within capitalism is lucrative: after all, in the cottage industry producing research on this topic, ‘Research grants are being won, articles written, books published, conferences convened’ (Gibson-­ Graham, 2006: viii). Basically, for the left-leaning scholars such as those following Analytical and Post-structuralist Marxisms and with whom scholars such as Harvey find common ground: class exists, but class is not the main cause of humanity’s problems, so there is no need to overthrow class. In sum, while the two forms of Marxism are among the most influential contributions to class theory within Marxism, and indeed beyond Marxism, they both suffer from several problems. The totality of these revisionist forms of Marxism has not hitherto received the critical a­ ttention that is due. It is useful to repeat what Marx and Engels would say to, and about, them: the overthrow of the capitalist system is [unattainably remote]…, and therefore is of absolutely no importance in present-day practical politics; one can mediate, compromise and philanthropise to one’s heart’s content. It is just the same with the class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie. It is recognised on paper because its existence can no longer be denied, but in practice it is hushed up, diluted, attenuated. marx and engels’ letter to bebel et al. in marx and engels, 1982: 305

Given all these problems, which constitute an impasse in Marxist class theory, what is therefore needed is an argument for a return to the basics, i.e. for an alternative framework based in the first principles, emanating from what these so-called Marxists reject, traditional Marxism. There is indeed only one way out of the impasse: to critically and as fully as possible, re-articulate, re-assert, and where necessary, refine/develop and enhance the rigour of, the fundamental ideas of revolutionary Marxism, including those of Marx and Engels, on class, in its economic, discursive and political dimensions. Chapters 5–12 have sought to implement this task very modestly, laying the ground for a more comprehensive analysis in the future. 1

Marxist Philosophy and Class Theory at a Trans-Historical Level

Marxist class theory is rooted in, even if it is not reducible to, Marxist philosophy of knowledge and the knowable world. This is a philosophy that is dialectical and materialist. M ­ arxist philosophy is dialectical materialism. Dialectical materialism or materialist dialectics has four crucial ontological elements:

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‘materiality’ + ‘sociality’ (social relationships) + system/totality (including relationships between parts) + change-via-­contradiction. Marxist philosophy emphasizes the material conditions of human life (including the body) and social character of human beings. It treats the human being and society as irreducibly material. It treats it as irreducibly socially: it is a product of an ensemble of social (and social-ecological) relationships, some of which are more global, and others more local. And the Marxist philosophy emphasizes the systemic nature of the reality in which what one thing is depends on its relations to other things, although some of these relations are more ‘significant’ than other relations, for an object, and some relations are essential for an object to exist while other relations are not so. The totality, which must be the starting point of any analysis, is seen as more than sum of the parts inside it. Marxist philosophy sees change in everything and everything as changing, through contradictions inside it, and between it and its social (social-ecological) environment. These contradictions are, more or less, registered in consciousness which, in turn, responds to these contradictions. Marxist philosophy explores things/relations as they are, and as they develop into their specific forms in which they are expressed. A philosophical way of thinking that is permeated by the four elements discussed above3 has specific implications for a scientific understanding of society. More precisely: one’s analysis of society will inevitably/necessarily be from the vantage point of class, and class-vantage point will not be merely one of several entry-points or one of several things. A dialectical-materialist way of thinking will compel an analyst to ask the question about class: where does one stand on the question of property and labour? This question leads to a series of specific questions. How do people have access to, and control over – lose control over – society’s productive resources and over the social surplus that is produced on the basis of the deployment of these resources and labour, and over state power? How are these resources deployed and transformed in the labour process, for what purpose and in whose interest? How does the cleavage (class cleavage) based on the contradictory relation between those who own/ control society’s productive resources and social surplus and those who do not, shape (and are shaped by) other cleavages, and who/what ultimately protects the class-cleavage, in whose interest, and why? A materialist philosophy that is at once dialectical ignores neither consciousness nor does it fetishize structures, neglecting agency. In this philosophy, human beings from different classes have objective interests and live under objective conditions/relations, independent of whether they are fully

3 They are: materiality, sociality or social-relationality, totality (including relationships between parts/ individuals) and contradiction-ridden changeability.

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conscious of them and independently of how well they politically, or otherwise, fight for their interests. Consciousness of a class, including in its theoretical form (which is a more developed form of consciousness than simple elementary consciousness people acquire through the business of living their daily lives), can never create things for which material conditions do not exist. ­Theory – social consciousness in its more developed form – cannot create social being or objective conditions, out of nothing. In asserting all this, Marxist philosophy takes an objective view of society. But it is also mindful of the dual perils of objectivism, i.e. hyper-optimism or hyper-pessimism: the idea, respectively, that objective conditions by themselves will result in desired changes or inhibit these changes in society. Marxist philosophy avoids an objectivist approach and instead takes a materialist approach to society, an approach that is a class approach, which reflects existing class contradictions. In his Economic content of Narodism, as we have seen, Lenin makes the distinction between the two approaches: objectivist and materialist. The latter is the standpoint of the exploited classes in all class societies. This standpoint is a crucial ingredient in the development of class consciousness. If objective conditions exist independently of consciousness and action as a given point, then the question is: how does consciousness develop and what role does it play in understanding (and then changing of) the objective conditions? Armed with a materialist and dialectical way of thinking about society, one can begin to look at social relations from the standpoint of class relations (as in Chapter 6). What this means is the following: class relations are not about conflicts between groups of people, in abstraction from the process of production of wealth in its value or non-value forms. Class relations are about social relations of production and distribution of wealth, including wealth in its surplus product form, which in turn takes value and non-value forms. A trans-­ historical class theory presented in Chapter 6 discusses the common attributes of all forms of class society. It sheds light on the qualities of pre-capitalist class society in order to stress the specificity of political economy of the capitalist class society in Chapter 7. A trans-historical class theory looks at how the contradictory character of objective class-conditions, class consciousness and class struggle are interconnected. It also deals with the contradiction-driven dynamics of the transition from one form of class society to another. It deals with the generally-neglected, but inherently political character of class: the state. It presents the idea that the dominant class and the state are themselves two forms of the class relation, rather than being two separate, and interacting aspects, of the social totality. It extends the scope of the concept of class to argue that: the direct producers are not only excluded from control over the means of production and are exploited; they are also excluded from political power, and are politically oppressed.

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Common to all class societies is the fact that a social surplus exists due to the on-going, contradiction-ridden, development of productive forces beyond the level prevalent in the original class-less society. As production methods develop gradually, as therefore the amount of surplus expands (i.e. as a society with the ability to produce surplus actually starts producing a surplus and therefore becomes a qualitatively different society), social relations of production take a leap: they become class relations. So the appearance of class is a progressive act: it furthers the development of productive forces. Common to all class societies is also the fact that that surplus is appropriated by a small minority class and therefore the class which produces the surplus is not able to (fully) enjoy it. Often it even does not have access to the things it absolutely needs for its reproduction. That is the negative side of class. Class society represents the inter-­ penetration of these two opposites. Relatively harmonious relations among human beings become the opposite: antagonistic class relations. Antagonistic relations are associated with antagonistic class consciousness and antagonistic class struggle, of varying intensity and of varying degree of covertness. Class is both a thing and not a thing. It is a ‘thing’ in the sense of being a structure (e.g. a group of people). It is also a relation/process. It is a relation – and exploitative relation – between classes. And it is a process of antagonistic interaction between them (and between class fractions). The essence of a class is not an abstraction inherent in a single class. It is an ensemble of relations between/among classes, and between classes and the state, which is the necessary condition of existence of class. Each class is connected with every other class. Class relations are relations of identity and difference: there is some common ground between classes, and classes have mutually ­different – ­antagonistic – interests. The different classes and class-fractions – their relationships – along with other relations make the totality of the class-divided society. Particular classes and their fractions interact with one another and with non-class groups. What a class does (e.g. its political action in its own interests) and thinks is determined by the totality, the logic of its reproduction. The class totality is more than the sum of individual classes, some of which dominate over others. At the same time, both the class totality and individual classes have their own irreducible autonomy: the totality cannot be reduced to individual classes or classfractions, and the individual classes or fractions or indeed individual members of a class are not reducible to the totality. Yet, much of what each class or class fraction or member of a class does or think, more or less, reflects the dynamics of the totality. The totality that the system of classes is, is a totality that is constituted by the interpenetration of, struggle, of opposites. And this struggle of opposites must be, before it is anything else, the conflict between basic classes, at the level of the societal whole.

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Class relations are antagonistic because one class surrenders the fruits of its labour to another class and is alienated as well from full control over property (whether in means of production or in labour or both). So class relations have a potential to give rise to class conflict, in the realm of consciousness, and realm of politics. Class conflict in the real world is sometimes overt and sometimes covert and which is sometimes localized and sometimes not so. Further, class relations (along with intra-class relations of competition which class relations shape) promote the development of productive forces. After productive forces develop beyond a point, the extant class relations become a fetter on the further development of productive forces, leading to crisis in the realm of production and exchange. The crisis contributes to further deepening of class struggle, which is always endemic to the class-society. So one form of class society changes into another (e.g. feudal to capitalistic) because of the combined effect of the contradiction between productive forces and class relations (structural contradiction in a class society) and because of class struggle (political contradiction between classes and class-fractions). Class relations have different temporal horizons. The major epoch-changing structural contradiction (one which leads changes in one form of class society to another) operates in a longer time horizon, while struggle over changes within a class society can be more regular and happen in a shorter time horizon. Small-scale crisis is more frequent than large-scale crisis. The different class societies (slavery, feudalism, etc.) are different forms of a given content. The content is the class relation (control over property in means of production and labour). A new class society developing from the wombs of the previous class society represents a negation of this society. It preserves and develops further some elements of the old society and negates other elements. Class relations based on private property in the means of production and in one’s labour are negated by capitalist class relations where private property in means of production is based on exploitation of other people’s labour; capitalist class relations will tend to be negated by transitional (socialist) class relations, where private property develops in the direction of becoming collective property. Class relations are a deeply materialist affair. Private property in means of production, control over production and appropriation of surplus, and the state defense of private property, all these exist independently of how classes and class-fractions think about these things at a given point in time. Gradually, of course, class consciousness starts reacting on existing material conditions of class society and shaping class relations. The material aspects of class, including relations of production and exchange, and class consciousness, interact with each other within the totality of class, within which the former have ultimate primacy. Class consciousness – consciousness of a class about its own

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material and political interests, about what promotes its own welfare and what is needed to achieve this – always develops in stages, and is shaped by, apart from class relations, a variety of non-class processes which are related to class, albeit contingently. Classes – class fractions and individual members of class – act and think, and this has an impact on the totality. But they act and think in conditions they do not generally or effectively choose at a given point. There is an element of passivity of everyday, and not so-everyday, experience of class. A dialectical-materialist class theory always pays attention to the reciprocal interaction between class relations (including relations of control over the means of production and labour) on the one hand, and our bodies (including our bodily needs and power to perform labour) and the means of production/ subsistence, and how the bodily powers and means of production are used, on the other hand. Ordinary material things such as coal, computers, money, land, etc. take on a social role and social form under given class relations. So to theorize class is to say: that there are economic and political relations of antagonism between classes, that the forms of class relation change over time, that class relations give rise to certain mechanisms (e.g. appropriation of surplus labour; competition between classes and class fractions, etc.), the mechanisms which may have historically specific forms; that these mechanisms, which are supported by other such mechanisms as state power, operate under certain conditions and produce certain concrete effects (e.g. income inequality or ecological degradation),which vary historically and geographically and which in turn react back on class relations. Class theory unpacks class practices, including subordinate classes’ subjective awareness and struggle against exploitation and political oppression, which in turn inform class theory and which indeed test given elements of class theory. Marxist theory of class is basically a theory of negation of – absenting the presence of – the dominant class of a given class society, and ultimately, it is theory of the negation of economic and political conditions of the class system as such. Marxist theory is the doctrine of struggle against all forms of class relations and of classlessness. Class theory is about the relatively abstract, general, processes of wealth creation, distribution and accumulation. These processes can be seen as abstract mechanisms at the level of a given class society as a whole (e.g. feudalism or capitalism, etc.) as in ‘pure political economy’. But when these processes are seen from the vantage point of classes, then political economy becomes class theory. A class theorist qua class theorist explores how these abstract mechanisms of wealth production/distribution and accumulation further/inhibit interests (material, cultural and political) of determinate classes (e.g. property owners or property-less classes) and further/inhibit – and are influenced by – the potential or actual class consciousness and class struggle (whether in

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r­ uling class forms or in working class their trade unionist or socialist forms). Class theory is political economy from the vantage point of class antagonisms. Political economy without class theory can suffer from the twin perils of objectivism (the idea that objective conditions will lead to class struggle and consciousness or will not). And class theory without political economy can suffer from the perils of sociologism, politicism, voluntarism, and indeed reformism. Once again, class theory rooted in political economy examines (a) the material conditions (i.e. processes/relations of wealth production and distribution, including in its value and non-value forms) without which social relations, ­political actions and consciousness have little effect or meaning, (b) the possibilities for classlessness lurking inside the contradiction-ridden, crisis-prone material conditions, and (c) the identification of the main agents who can fight for classlessness. So Marxist theory of class and class struggle explores the dialectical and internal relation between class relations and class struggle which seeks to negate class relations. A necessary condition for such negation is the development a specific type of class relation, capitalism. Capitalism represents the highest and most complex form of class society. Not surprisingly capitalist class society has received the most attention from Marxist class theory of Marx, Lenin and others. Chapters 7–12 examine class relations, class consciousness and class struggle in capitalist society in general.4 Capitalism is a form of class relation which is associated with, and normally promotes, a rather high level of development of productive forces relative to pre-capitalist class forms. The capitalist class relation relation is a dialectical articulation of processes involving exchange (of labour power and means of subsistence, among other things), control over property or means of production, and production-­appropriation of value/surplus-value, with the effects 4 I should add that: Chapters 7–8 are a protracted (and still incomplete) process of a combing operation in relation to political-economic ideas of Marx and Engels (and to some extent Lenin and others) in order to articulate and re-articulate what I think is a defensible theory of class at a relatively concrete level: a theory that is valid for the capitalist form of class society. Marx’s thinking in Capital (and especially, Capital vol. 1) about abstract mechanisms of capitalism are fundamental to the articulation of class theory of capitalism. Capital, which Marx sees as the ‘terrible missile that has yet been hurled at the heads of the bourgeoisie (­landowners included)’, is about both capitalist and working classes, and therefore the accusation hurled at Capital that it says not much about the working class is almost useless. This work remain unsurpassed as far as the treatment of capitalism as a class relation at an abstract level is concerned. Marx’s Capital is definitely an exercise in the class theory of capitalism. It is not just a discussion of abstract mechanisms of accumulation, etc. playing out at the level of a society as a whole. And it is a very powerful exercise in that theory.

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on the ­capitalist and working classes that are irreconcilably different and antagonistic, and that such class relation of unity gives rise to, and is reproduced through, a massive amount of fragmentation/difference/divisions within the classes. A class theory of capitalism can only be a grand theory of capitalism, matching, contrary to existing class theories, the extremely ambitious nature of Marxist theory as such. And contrary to existing class theories of the type we have discussed, such a theory of capitalism not only unpacks the fundamental mechanisms of the capitalist class relation but also points to the possibility and necessity of its abolition. 2

The Totality of the Capitalist Class Relation

The capitalist class relation is a relation of exchange, of property and of value (production). And these different aspects are inter-connected. The capitalist class relation also exists at a concrete level: i.e. at the level at which ­non-capitalist class relations are brought into focus as are intra-class differentiations, socially, and geographically (i.e. in terms of imperialism). Underlying the concrete class map are at least six different processes of differentiation (mentioned below). The capitalist class relation thus exists at a more fundamental level and at a more surface level, the level at which it produces effects. So class theory of capitalism must be sensitive to the effects (e.g. low wages, immiserization, etc.). Class relations produce, and are reproduced though, these effects and the ways in which class relations are experienced (materially and subjectively). Let me elaborate the points made about the capitalist class relation above. The capitalist class relation is a system of three internally related processes: exchange, property, and value/production. It represents transformations in four trans-historical aspects of society: wealth, property, labour, and labour process. These aspects take specific forms in capitalist class rule. In each of the three spheres of class relation, there is a conflict of class interest. The conflict between the capitalist class and the working class is not merely that workers receive low wages and capitalists make high profits, although this is true. The real conflict is the fact that capitalists have the right to make a profit from workers’ labour while workers do not have the right to control the process of production and exchange and therefore they do not have the right to live a life of economic security. And that conflict will be there even if workers receive a wage that covers their usual cost of reproduction. The conflict is not merely over the quantity – proportion – of the social product that is received by workers. The conflict is over the fact that they have to offer themselves for sale to a class of

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people who control the means of production and exchange, and the way the means of production are used. The capitalist class relation is an exchange relation, a relation of commodification of conditions of life, and their recommodification. Wealth, considered as things, whether material or cultural, that satisfy our needs appears as, or exists in the form of, commodities, in the societies where the capitalist class rules. Not only do things become commodities. Even the ability to produce things (i.e. labour power) becomes a commodity, so labour, which is a transhistorical category, becomes wage-labour. It is bought and sold, like groceries or currencies. Production of wealth, when wealth appears in the form of commodities or value, is in the interest of the capitalist class, and not in the interest of the working class, although both the classes experience wealth in this form. That is why the fact that wealth appears in the form of commodities is a class process. In all societies wealth is necessary. But when the aim of production of wealth is not to directly satisfy needs but to produce exchange values, the production of wealth becomes a class process, a capitalist class process. The relation between the capitalist and working classes is a money relation, a relation of exchange, a commodity relation. Both buy and sell things. The relation between these two classes is played out then in two market places: the market for labour power, and the market for means of subsistence and production. These market-places exist at multiple geographical scales, including the most local labour market (e.g. urban or metropolitan or a rural labour market) (Cox and Mair, 1988; Harvey, 1982), within which labour power and means of subsistence are bought/sold, and exchange relations aspects of class are reproduced. These market places are also being increasingly global, with labour migration happening on a large scale in response to uneven development of capitalism at the international scale (Rosewarne, 2010; Lysandrou, 2005). The relation between the two basic classes, the capitalists and the workers, is a monetary relation and not a relation of personal dependence. In the capitalist form of class society, diverse forms of bondage and personal dependence are replaced by impersonal transactions in the purchase and sale of ­labour-power. The money relationship is an advance over the e­ xtra-economic relation characteristic of other forms of class society. In fact, not only can members of the working class sell their labour power to whoever they want to, they are also generally free to buy their means of subsistence from whomever they want to. Yet, the relation is one of unfreedom: workers are not free not to work for a wage, and they are generally not free to choose the terms of sale of their labour power beyond a very narrow limit (e.g. level of wages, etc.). The capitalist class relationship is not just an exchange relationship, however. It is also a relationship of property in the means of production. The class

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relation between money-owner and labourer – the market encounter between the money-owner and the owner of labour power, both being commodity owners – is produced socially and historically. Such a relation emerges out of the fact that the conditions required for the realisation of labour-power – means of subsistence and means of production – are separated from the owner of labour-power, and are the property of the capitalist class. In fact, the story of class relations in societies, pre-capitalist and capitalist, is the story of changing property relations. Just as the form of wealth changes under capitalism in that it takes the form of commodities, so does the form of property change: it changes from the private property based in one’s own labor or family labour (or property in more or less communal form) in pre- or noncapitalist class society to ‘capitalist private property’, a form of private property which rests on the exploitation of alien, but formally free, labour. C ­ apitalist class relation is based on the negation of a form of property based in own ­labour, and capitalist property relation awaits its own negation, as a definite necessary pre-supposition for classlessness. This is a process of primitive accumulation. Often the process of separation of pre- or non-capitalist property from direct producers is a violent process. This round of primitive accumulation is now experienced by the working class (and other direct ­producers) while the original primitive accumulation was the experience of the direct producers (e.g. peasants; communal producers) who had access to means of production. Primitive accumulation is a class process signifying changes in property relations: its object – the groups who are subjected to it – are now not only owners of self-earned private property but also the wage-earning working class. This implies that: class analysis cannot be just about exploitation, etc. of an already existing class of wage workers. It must be about capital’s relation to a working-class-in the process of formation, i.e. dispossession of direct producers. Primitive accumulation is a class issue also in that it is a potential object of class struggle between the capitalist class and the working class, when the latter struggles against, for example, re-commodifcation of means of subsistence (e.g. social commons), as it is a class struggle between the capitalist class and the class of independent producers (private or communal) over the dispossession of the latter’s property. Of course, that does not mean that primitive accumulation is the main contradiction in contemporary capitalism, as Harvey mistakenly thinks, a topic we will return to in Chapter 8. Apart from the forcible methods of expropriation of property from direct producers, there is another method in which the class of property-less workers emerges in a commodity-producing society. It is through a process of class differentiation among independent commodity producers, and indeed among capitalists themselves. The bourgeois class produces its wealth only by

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c­ ontinually annihilating the wealth of the individual members of this class, a process which expands the proletariat. The ‘top’ layer of capitalist class relationship is exchange, underlying which is the relation of property ownership, which has come about through forcible methods as well as differentiation among commodity producers. However, merely being able to buy and sell and to own property is not enough to produce the capitalist class relation as it itself will not produce surplus value. A capitalist class society is one in which means of production are owned and controlled by a small minority of private individuals who hire workers to produce goods/services for sale in the market for a profit, which is based, fundamentally, on the appropriation of surplus labour from workers. The capitalist class does not only own money, and it just does not engage in mere buying and selling. It also owns the things (commodities) which include means of subsistence, that the working class needs but does not have, and means of production. So exchange relations and property relations are not the only forms of the class relation between capital and labour. Additionally, the relationship between the two classes is a relationship of production, of value, and of surplus value. It is a relation of accumulation: the capitalist class not only does not buy and sell, it is not just a class which owns property. It is also a class which invests money in production to make more money employing a class of nominally free women and men from which it appropriates surplus labour, the origin of profit. Production of wealth under capitalism and its accumulation: this is a class relation/process. Capital produces and accumulates wealth by virtue of the labor of the working class. And by taking away a portion of the worker’s product in the form of profit leaving her only with values sufficient – if that all – to reproduce her labor power, capital reproduces the working class. This does not mean to say that the working class’s life chances do not improve. What is understood to be an acceptable standard of living does indeed change over time. But if they do so improve, it cannot be generally at the expense of the accumulation fund for capital. Just as under the capitalist class relation, wealth, including what is consumed directly and what is invested to produce things, takes a specific form (it  takes the form of commodities), just as labour takes the form of wage-­ labour, and just as (private) property takes a specific form (it becomes capitalist private property), so labour process also takes a specific form (it becomes capitalist labour process). All societies must engage in labour process: transform things, derived directly or otherwise, from nature into useful things. This general form of labour process that characterizes all society is turned into a capitalistic labour process, the process by which the capitalist class consumes the labour-power of the working class. The labour process becomes capitalist

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labour process in the sense that: the working class works under the control of the capitalist class to whom its labour belongs, and what is produced by the working class becomes the property of the capitalist class. The labour process is the sphere where the working class produces more value than it receives. The capitalist class appropriates the extra value and converts that into private property. Labor process as an aspect of class thus connects to, and presupposes, a specific form of the distribution of means of production, which makes exploitation within labor process possible: it is the fact that the capitalist class has monopoly in the distribution of means of production. It is not just that things exist in the form of commodities. Things as commodities exist in the form of capital. Capital is a thing in that it consists of means of subsistence and production, including physical and biological technologies, scientific knowledge, etc. The capitalist class is the class that is the owner of all these things. But capital is not just things, and so it is not enough to say that the capitalist class is the owner of things, of property. Marx’s view of capital is very different from Pickety type physicalist, or Bourdieu type pluralist-­culturalist, conceptions of capital (see Lotz, 2015; Bourdieu, 1986; Flemmen, 2013; see also Savage et al., 2013). Capital exists in the form of valorized labor and thus determines the social form of capitalist class society. It is not ‘some-thing’. It describes the functioning of a social totality as a whole (Lotz, 2015). Capital is neither a thing nor even a mere resource, economic or cultural (whether social contacts or lifestyle or education, credentials, social prestige, etc.). Whether it is the Bourdieu type cultural conceptualization of capital or it is the Pickety type economic notion of capital, both are mistaken. And therefore any theoretical discussion on class based in these notions of capital will be faulty. The capitalist class relation is a material social process, existing independently of the will of individuals, and yet capital as a process/relationship and the capitalist class as a class are not identified merely on the basis of the materiality of the things that are produced in this relation/process. One does not become more or less capitalist by virtue of the differing material form of the product one produces: to paraphrase Marx, capital remains the same whether we put cotton in the place of wool, steamships in the place of railroads or software, or the genetic code. The laboring class also does the same: whether it produces toys or guns for the capitalist class is immaterial. Working is a means to an end: survival. Unlike a craftsman, the worker ‘is absolutely indifferent to the specificity of his labour’. At the level of capitalist class relation as such, Marxist class theory abstracts from whether production is industrial or whatever, although Marxist class theory has useful things to say about class relations in specific arenas of production (manufacturing, service sector, agriculture, etc.).

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The things that capital owns must be such that surplus labour can be sucked up by capital. Means of production exist not just as commodities or property under the control of the capitalist class or as things which can be used to produce other useful things. They exist as things that absorb surplus labour. Even the importance of what workers consume is seen in relation to it being used to reproduce their labour power, which could then be employed to produce profit. Their life in their dining rooms or kitchens mimics the life of a horse that is fed to move things on a farm, or is like an engine being refueled in a factory. When money and the things needed for production that are bought with that money are used to make more money than initially invested, it is only then and it is only in that process as such that the money and the things become – f­unction as – capital. The director of the process of production of capital and the owner of the money and of the things becomes the capitalist. The most fundamental aspect of class relation between capital and labour is that of exploitation of wage-labour: surplus labour – exploitation of the working class – drives the class system. Exploitation takes primary and secondary forms. The primary form of exploitation happens in the process of capitalist production or labour process. Exploitation – and therefore the existence of some people as capitalists and others as workers in the sphere of production – presupposes not just commodification and private property but also a given level of the development of productive forces, which makes the creation of the surplus and its appropriation possible. In the absence of a higher level of development of productive forces, the property in raw materials and instruments of labour that capitalist class owns would be, as Marx says, merely nominal: economically they would belong to the working class as much as to the capitalist class, since they would create value for the capitalist only in so far as the capitalist himself/herself were a worker. The capitalist class would relate to the means of production not as capital, but as simple material and means of labour, like the working class itself does in the production process. This fact, once again, signifies the close inter-connection between the capitalist class relation on the one hand and the materiality of life in the sense of the development of productive forces, and the accumulation of wealth in value form, on the other. In a capitalist class relation, the persons who are capitalists do not have to work and they are not merely owner of things but owner of things-as-capital. It is not just that the question of the capitalist class relation – the question of how capitalist class exploitation happens – cannot be divorced from the question of accumulation; it also cannot be divorced from the question of the control over private property. So thinking about class merely in terms of surplus labour and in abstraction from control over property is a chaotic conception of

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class in that it separates things that cannot be separated. In fact, it is by virtue of the fact that the capitalist class has control over property that this class has control over the social surplus produced by the labour of the working class. Because of dull economic compulsion, i.e. because the working class does not own means of production or means of subsistence, it has to sell its commodity (labour power) to the capitalist class. Such a situation has been created, and continues to be created in a class-driven process ­(primitive ­accumulation, ­including its on-going forms). The problem for the working class is not just that it has to constantly beg for a higher proportion of the social product it itself produces; its problem is also that it lacks control over the means of production. The working class receives a wage with which to buy its means of ­subsistence. Such a wage, on average, equals the cost of production of that commodity (i.e. cost of its maintenance and future reproduction) of the entire class, of the entire ‘race’ of workers. Generally, the wage is equal to the cost of production/reproduction of the commodity (labour power) being bought/ sold, but this is not the case with millions, and generally, the conditions of the working class worsen relative to those of the owners of means of production and the strata that are closely associated with the owners (their managers, ideological spokespersons, legal defenders, army generals, etc.). Thinking about class merely in terms of surplus labour is problematic in another way. Mere performance of surplus labour – labour beyond what is required to reproduce oneself – does not necessarily result in exploitation any more than a thing is capital. Forms of labor and things become what they are under determinate social relations. In socialism, people will perform surplus labour to meet communal needs. But no individual of a country or no country of the world will have the right to appropriate the fruit of surplus of others in virtue of any special control over production through property rights, except at the direction of the community as a whole or its world government. Performance of surplus labour becomes a class process when there is private property in means of production and when direct producers have no democratic control over the purpose and dynamics of production. The labour process is not only the sphere of exploitation, and the working class does not just perform surplus labour. Labour process is also the sphere where the working class is dominated by the capitalist class: the working class has no power to decide how production happens and for what purpose. Labour process is a sphere where the productive power developed by the working class becomes the productive power of the capitalist class, and where the working class, separated from property, experiences separation from the product of its labour. It is through such separation that capitalist production, seen as a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value;

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it also produces, and reproduces, the capital-relation itself. It reproduces two classes: the capitalist and the working classes. There is an internal relation between production and accumulation of wealth in its value form, and reproduction of the relation between the capitalist and working classes. Private property owners’ control over property is a political act. This is so in three ways: at the point of production, at the level of society as a whole and in relation to the state. In a system of production based on class relations, goods and services are produced according to the demand/desire of a narrow elite (to satisfy their needs) and/or according to a societal logic (market-logic of profit), which then also satisfies the interest (i.e. wealth in the abstract – in its value form) of a narrow elite. The control over private property is codified, protected and defended by a coercive state. So class relation is not merely about what happens in the labour market (e.g. the fact that, for example, minimum wages are not paid) or in the sphere of production (workers get less than what they produce, or experience unsafe working conditions, or skilled workers and supervisors have more power and earnings, and so on). The class relation is a totality. It is about the entire social order. It is about the entire system of economic and political (and discursive) relationship between the entire capitalist class, and the entire working class and other classes, a system supported by the capitalist state. The state ensures that the capitalist class keeps control over property intact, and that the working class does not. Because of this the capitalist class has access to a vastly more quantity of means of subsistence, including luxury, than the working class. The capitalist class relation is based in the interconnections among the commodity relation, property relation and production/value relation. The capitalist class relation grows out of exchange/money relation, but is not reducible to these. The class relationship between the capitalist and the working classes is a relation based in private property, but it is not just about control over p ­ rivate property. Capital relates to labour in terms of the property question and the labour question. The capitalist class relation is not just about exploitation, however; it is also about the constant separation of labour from property, and the capitalist class denying the working class control over the labour process. The value-form, the commodity-form, the money-form and the capital-form are all inter-connected in class theory. We must see class relations at each level of these forms: class in the sense that working class must sell its ability to work in the commodity form, that the compensation it receives will be shaped by the value form, that it has no market-unmediated control over the c­ ommodities which it itself produces or which it needs for its reproduction, that it has no control over production of value and its transformation into money form ­(prices) and over the surplus which takes the form of capital,

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and so on. These different forms and their respective class-ness are internally connected. Production is primary, and exchange is secondary. So the production relation aspect of class (exploitation in production) is primary, and exchange relations (exploitation in exchange) aspect are secondary, relative to production. In terms of class theory as articulated here, the different forms of exploitation are parts of the totality of capitalist class relations, within which primary exploitation has ultimate primacy. Class relation must always be seen as ­existing as a process in which production and exchange are inter-connected, and this has important implications for a spatial view – a ‘distanciated’ (explained below) way, of thinking about class. Capitalist class exploitation is both local and non-local. It is non-local, distanciated, because relations between capital and labour in a work-place or a set of workplaces in a place, is mediated by widerscale, increasingly global-scale relations of exchange expressed as the law of value. If we think about social surplus ‘solely in terms of labour activity expended in production’ in a work-place, then we ‘inevitably restrict the context of exploitation to relations of domination that particular people exercise over others under specific conditions and in a specific location’ (Lysandrou, 2000). But if we see social surplus ‘on the basis of both the production and pricing actions of agents’, then ‘the context of exploitation’ becomes one ‘that can transcend any spatial moorings’. Capitalist class relation involves distanciation which ‘implies the possibility of a directly collective form of exploitation under capitalism’ (Lysandrou, 2000: 332). Capitalist class exploitation must presuppose exchange relations but exchange relations cannot guarantee capitalist relation of exploitation, either at the origin of capitalist class relations or now. Exchange relations – including commodification of labour power and other things – are a part of class relations even if exchange relations are subordinated to relations/processes of accumulation of wealth (in value-form) and exploitation of the working class. Workers, whether they work in a car-factory or in a financial company which is a part of or connected to the car company, are vulnerable to changes in their monthly premium on their consumer credit as they are to changes in the terms of their employment (Ascher, 2016: 18). They are also vulnerable to violent changes in the stock market, in which their pension funds are invested, whose performance will ‘determine their share of the global surplus – a surplus to which’ workers in a particular place and their peers elsewhere ‘will themselves have contributed by their past labors’ (Ascher, 2016: 19) While Polanyi stresses commodification of labour power and other things and ignores class exploitation (see Selwyn and Mayamura, 2014), Marxist class theory includes both, and therefore much more comprehensive, dialectical

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and therefore much more critical. Polanyi deliberately use the term ‘market society’ instead of ‘capitalism’ as a way of distancing himself from the associations that come from the Marxist use of the term (Burawoy, 2003). If Polanyi’s stress on commodification is associated with his ‘critical concept of the always embedded market economy’ (Block, 2003: 299), a concept that ‘challenges the economic essentialism of both market liberals and Marxists that has come to dominate our society’s common sense’, the Marxist theory advanced here stresses class as it is associated with always exploitative market economy and is a counter-challenge to Polanyianism and ‘the varieties of capitalism’ type literature it has spawned. A Polanyian single-minded emphasis on increasing commodification in contemporary capitalism can lead one to focus on capitalism as neoliberalism which can then be seen as restoration of class power of capitalist class, and this is indeed how Harvey (2003; 2005) and Dumenil and Levy (2005) see things. Such a view using the language of restoration assumes that in capitalist society where there is less commodification, the working class necessarily has more power and the capitalist class has less power. Such a Polanyian view immensely downplays the true nature of capitalist class relation, which is rooted in property and value relations, and not just in relations of exchange. If increased access to use-values via rise in wages from employers can only lead a relaxation of the golden chain around the neck of the working class, so increased public wage (access to social commons) can only have a similar effect as well, without the working class having direct control over the means of production and over the very purpose of production of wealth (satisfaction of need vs incessant accumulation of wealth in the abstract). Such control cannot occur without the masses creating their own transitional state, after replacing the current state. The capitalist class relation seen as an exchange relation appears to be an equal, harmonious process characterized by freedom. But the so-called freedom for individual members of the working class is not as expansive as it appears. Such freedom presupposes economic bondage (reliance on the capitalist class for livelihood). Indeed, the class relationship between capital and labour that is mediated by, and based in, the market is a coercive relationship. In the first instance, there is economic coercion: it is for every individual member of the working class to find a buyer of labour power from the capitalist class, and they can starve if they do not. This is increasingly true for millions of workers, who do not find regular employment with a decent wage. Many become what is known as the precariat. The capitalist class relation is also an unequal process in that the working class receives much less than what it produces, although all of its labour performed in a day appears to be paid. It is an unequal process when millions do not even get paid enough to sustain themselves, and

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when workers pushed to working long working days die prematurely, a process indicating that they give to the capitalist class, say, 50 years’ worth of work when they get paid for 30–40 years. Then there is the matter of labour unfreedom, including through extra-economic coercion (consider prison labour or bonded labour), that the members of the capitalist class actually seek to impose on individual members of the working class, including child-labourers. Although Marx stressed the nominally free nature of the working class members in the labour market, class theory must stress the nominality aspect: i.e. labour unfreedom, which Bhandari (2008), Brass (2003; 2011), Banaji (2012), Rao (1999) and others have differently stressed. The existence of deproletarianized working class signifies this: ‘the initial presence of casual labor that is free (= thesis) is then transformed by “from above” class struggle (= antithesis) into a workforce of casuals who are now unfree (= synthesis)’ (Brass, 2014: 299–300). Thus the capitalist class relation involves much unfreedom: when the right to sell labour power freely is taken away from the working class. The approach taken towards capitalist property relations in this book differs from that in political Marxism, which tends to over-emphasize the freedom aspect the labour contract. These days there is a lot of talk about inequality. Much of this is relatively inadequate: it does not touch the real content of inequality, and it talks about inequality from the standpoint of the possibility of improving inequality under capitalist class relation. But the exploiter and the exploited cannot be equal. Class equality is an oxymoron. Indeed, ‘there can be no real, actual equality until all possibility of the exploitation of one class by another has been totally destroyed. There can be no equality between the exploiters – who for many generations have been better off because of their education, conditions of wealthy life, and habits – and the exploited, the majority of whom even in the most advanced and most democratic bourgeois republics are downtrodden, backward, ignorant, intimidated and disunited’. On the surface the money relation between the two classes is based on the laws of commodity exchange. But in reality, below the surface appearance, there is a massive inequality. It is true that in circulation ‘equal’ legal subjects bargain while in production neither are those subjects equal nor their relations symmetrical. But even in circulation workers are not equal subjects with capitalists. They have less money to buy what they need: while qualitatively, both capitalists and workers must – and can – go to the market to gain access to means of subsistence, quantitatively, one class has the means with which to get what it needs and another class does not. Besides, there is labour metabolic rift: the working class receives only a part of the net product it produces, even if its wages cover its cost of maintenance. This also includes the fact that the sections of the working class are

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often paid below the value of labour power and the fact that the worker is subjected to overwork and bodily and mental injuries which adversely affect the quality and length of life and for which there is little adequate compensation. There is the possibility of some members of the working class converting themselves to members of the capitalist class (via savings transformed into capital, for example). This fact points to a general idea that ‘Classes are historical; they can become what they are not’ (Andrew, 1990: 266). However, there is a limit to such mobility across class boundaries: if all workers become property owners who will perform surplus labour? And though there is a great deal of class mobility where ‘class’ is used in some far narrower sense than Marx’s, there is far less so in his wider sense. It is comparatively rare for someone who is a worker in his sense to become a capitalist in his sense. (Graham 1993: 232). In some ways, relative to the lash of the slave owner or of the feudal landlord, the capitalist class is less violent. But the capitalist class relation must be assessed not just relative to pre-capitalist class relation (i.e. its past) but also relative to its future (post-capitalism). Relative to what is possible given the development of productive forces and their socialization made possible on the basis of the collective labour of the working class within the capitalist class relation, the latter is a deeply violent and unequal process. The capitalist class relationship is a violent process: not just in the sense of all the suffering and immiserization processes (including massive absolute and relative poverty and hunger, etc.) the working class experiences as the objective effects of the operation of the capitalist class system ruled by the logic of commodification. It is a violent process also in that means of production and subsistence were divorced and continue to be divorced from direct producers in a violent way. It is a violent process when thanks to exchange and value relations, bodily needs of large sections of the working class remain unmet, and they have to work under physically unsafe conditions. It is a violent process because any resistance to capitalist commodification and exploitation and their effects on the body meets with violence from the ruling class and its state. The commodity called labour power that the working class owns is attached to the body of the worker, no matter how high the wage is, it can ever repay the impoverishment, mutilation, and consumption of the body (Arruzza, 2015). Production under capitalist class relation converts the laboring body ‘into a crippled monstrosity’. There can be simply no monetary compensation for the physical and mental pain the working class is inflicted on: what is the monetary value of depression or loss of limbs people suffer from because they work under the juggernaut of the capitalist system? And even if some compensation is paid for, say, accidents at work or toward the stress leave, such compensation ultimate comes from what the working class has itself produced. The c­ apitalist

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class can give nothing to the working class that is its own and that is not made by the working class. ‘The worker does not have a body that he brings to work in order to provide labour-power; rather the worker is a body that is forced to work’ (Arruza, 2015). That body is deformed and suffers because of the capitalist class relation. The capitalist class relation is simply a painful bodily experience for the majority of the humanity. The capitalist class relation ‘produces and reproduces inhuman conditions of existence and denies the worker all pleasure’. Marxist class theory is and must be a discourse on the body of the working class; hence Marx’s references to the ‘shrunken flesh of the women, undermined by labour and poverty’, the ‘children crawling about in the dirt’, and ‘deformity resulting from excessive labour in the monotonous mechanical operations of the factories’ (Arruzza, 2015). Capitalist class relation ‘obliges a part of humankind to consume itself in the many-hours-a-day prison of wage labour’ (Tomba, 2015: 83). Capital’s time and labour’s time – capital’s ­reproduction temporality (its turnover time) and workers’ reproduction temporality (both daily bodily reproduction and production of human beings) – are not in sync. The map of a concrete class society is much more complicated than what is suggested if one assumes the existence of two basic homogenous classes (the capitalist class and the working class). A concrete map of class society will have the following interacting features: dynamics of the basic class relations based in primary exploitation in capitalism + classes based in non-primary exploitation (e.g. merchants) + residuals from past + border classes (small scale commodity producers) + non-class features shaping class + embryonic future class relations (e.g. relations of production in worker-owned units; workerowned consumer coops). Underlying the concrete class map – class relations in a social formation rather than in a mode of production – are six different processes: (a) differentiation at the level of class relations as such (this refers to multiple forms of class relation such as capitalism, feudalism, etc.); (b) differentiation among commodity owners-producers; (c) differentiation within the bourgeoisie (i.e. in terms of the size of capital, and division of labour, etc.); (d) differentiation within the working class (in terms of autonomy in labour process, income/wages, etc.); (e) differentiation between/among nations when imperialism splits the world-classes into their national forms (e.g. the working class of the periphery and the working class of imperialist countries), and (f) social-cultural differentiation of the b­ asic ­classes. In a concrete class society, there is a geographically and temporary varying co-presence of various forms of class relations (with various level of development of productive forces): pre-capitalist, capitalist, non-capitalist relations, but in a system of class relations and their corresponding cases (capitalists and workers; landlords and

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­ easants, etc.) within which one form generally tends to be dominant, and that p form is capitalism now. To understand the class character of a place requires knowledge of abstract ideas and the concrete situation. Differentiation/polarization tendency in capitalism results in the ‘simplified class antagonisms’ (Marx and Engels, 1975: 41). In fact, ‘Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat’ (ibid.). So: basic classes are both whole classes, and have subdivisions or class-fractions, which are based on specific division of labour (agriculture and industry, detailed division of labour, etc.), income, etc. However, the tendencies towards the simplification of class antagonisms do not mean that intermediate classes will cease to exist (Bensaid, 2002: 109). Capitalism, as Lenin said, would not be capitalism if the proletariat were not surrounded by various intermediate strata, including those between the proletarian and the semi-proletarian, between the semiproletarian and the self-employed producers, and so on. Not only is the society split into two basic classes. Each of these classes is also split. The capitalist class is split in various ways including between those who directly appropriate surplus value and those who do not. It is split on the basis of size of capital, different areas/countries in which capitalists operate, on the basis of different forms of capital (e.g. farming or industry or finance, etc.) and so on. Similarly, the working class is split into different segments, based not only on the fact that capitalist production and exchange happen in different sectors and areas but also on the basis of differences in education, employment status (causal or permanent), income level, and so on. The division within the working class on the basis of mental labour (white collar work) or intellectual work, and manual labour is a major one. In what is called cognitive capitalism, mental labour is growing in importance, with science itself increasingly being a productive force. The working class is split into those who are locals and the migrants, ­including international migrants: ‘The making of a new class of migrant ­workers, principally as temporary or undocumented workers concentrated in semi- and low-skilled occupations, is a distinctive development. Such workers can be distinguished from other wage workers who enjoy a more comprehensive freedom in their right to sell their ability to labour. The objectification of these workers’ labour may be regarded as being more substantive than that of the classic wage worker. The process of commodification is indeed more exaggerated’ (Rosewarne, 2010: 107). Another division is between the currently employed and the reserve army. The capitalist system of class relations and accumulation require a reserve army for its reproduction (Marx, 1977; Basu, 2013). By constantly keeping a part

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of the labor force unemployed or under-employed but potentially available for capital to draw on if needed, the reserve army of labor maintains the viability of capital accumulation by inflicting enormous costs on the working class as a whole (McIntyre and Nast, 2011; Foster, McChesney, and Jonna, 2011; Magdoff, and Magdoff, 2004). And much of the reserve army belongs to racialized minorities in advanced capitalist countries. In fact, the fact of permanent under- or un-employment of a large proportion of the working class and the fact that large sections of the global working class do not receive a compensation for the work they do (primarily wage-work but also work at self-owned units), apart from the inherent tendency towards imperialist wars that kill workers, and the attack on workers’ democratic rights, is the single most failure of the capitalist class order. The non-class practices and ideas can acquire a life of their own and become somewhat autonomous. Class processes/relations and the effects of the operation of those processes/relations are ontologically different. While all social strata are subjected to class processes/relations, their effects are distributed unequally depending on one’s gender, racial, caste, location, etc. background. Suffering and precarity created by capitalist class relations, including effects of economic recession – are unevenly distributed along lines of race, gender, caste and other such relations of social ‘identity’. Class practices, at a concrete level (i.e. as they are experienced by people), are gendered, racialized, and spatial. Gender and race-based differences within classes are important. Property is concentrated in the hands of men and dominant ethnic and racial groups. Among those who do low-paid and precarious work and those who are unemployed or underemployed, women and racial minorities tend to be disproportionately represented. Women and minorities are subjected to violence by men and by the majority and suffer from physical and moral injuries. Like gender-based discrimination, racism also helps capital to super-exploit sections of the working class. Racism helps capital ‘super exploit workers of color and immigrants, deepen the exploitation of white and native-born workers, and above all prevent the working class from attaining the class conscious unity needed to combat its antagonists’ (Foley, 2002: 30). Capital remains indifferent to the differences, but it utilizes existing differences, and sometimes it promotes new ones, in order to create new ­differentials of surplus-value. Indeed, ‘the production of differentials of ­surplus-value can occur by continuously revolutionizing the means of production (through the sporadic introduction of new machinery), by encountering modes of production in which the productive power of labour is lower, or by differentiating wages according to different geographical areas, gender or ethnicity. In its diffusion, capital does not need an exterior, something other than itself, but it

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does, instead, need a vast range of differentials of wages, of different productive powers and intensities of labour’ (Tomba, 2015: 82). Capital is by nature neither patriarchal nor ‘white’, but it uses existing patriarchal relations and racial discrimination by putting them to work and often intensifying them (Tomba, 2015: 82). Gender- and race-based differences pre-date capitalism. Like many other things, these differences and oppressions associated with them have a general class aspect and a more specific class aspect. That is: ‘all the oppressions associated with class society also have their ­capitalist specific forms and intensities having to do with their place and function in capitalism as a particular form of class society, but the main relations that underlie and give force to these oppressions come from class society as such’ (Ollman, 2003). The fundamental cleavage in society is one of class and not one of race, gender or caste, etc., although the latter cleavages can have significant impacts on people’s lives. The discrimination against women is dominantly the effect of relations between genders, determined by the way in which capitalist class relations (e.g. absence of a living-wage; absence of universal socialized childcare) are articulated with the organization of physical and social reproduction among the working class people (Giminez, 2005). Class relation has primacy over other social relations for philosophical and historical-materialist reasons. And in capitalist class society, capitalist class relation has primacy over other class relations and over other social relations (gender, race, etc.). An iota of theoretical and political advantage does not accrue by diluting this point, by saying that society is characterized by difference and that all sorts of relations (of difference) intersect with one another as roads at a traffic light do. Marxists are fully committed to democratic rights of all form. The Marxist political agenda concerning reproduction and women’s rights was, and is, extremely progressive (as a long generation of classical writers including Kollontai have shown). Marxist class theory is not at all narrowly about economic matters, and in fact, economic narrowness is the charge that Lenin threw at trade union struggles. The sufferings of racialized minorities, of women, and especially, proletarian women (as Luxemburg used to distinguish them from bourgeois women who have far more rights than proletarian women), oppressed nationalities and so on exist as matters of inadequate and incomplete democratic rights, within the totality of capitalist class relation which benefits from, and supports, that incompleteness. These lines from Lenin’s ‘The Revolutionary proletariat...’ are extremely useful: The proletariat cannot be victorious except through democracy, i.e., by giving full effect to democracy and by linking with each step of its

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s­ truggle democratic demands formulated in the most resolute terms. It is absurd to contrapose the socialist revolution and the revolutionary struggle against capitalism to a single problem of democracy, in this case, the national question. We must combine the revolutionary struggle against capitalism with a revolutionary programme and tactics on all democratic demands: a republic, a militia, the popular election of officials, equal rights for women, the self-determination of nations, etc. While capitalism exists, these demands – all of them – can only be accomplished as an exception, and even then in an incomplete and distorted form. Basing ourselves on the democracy already achieved, and exposing its incompleteness under capitalism, we demand the overthrow of capitalism, the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, as a necessary basis both for the abolition of the poverty of the masses and for the complete and allround institution of all democratic reforms. Some of these reforms will be started before the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, others in the course of that overthrow, and still others after it. The social revolution is not a single battle, but a period covering a series of battles over all sorts of problems of economic and democratic reform, which are consummated only by the ­expropriation of the bourgeoisie. It is for the sake of this final aim that we must formulate every one of our democratic demands in a consistently revolutionary way. It is quite conceivable that the workers of some p ­ articular country will overthrow the bourgeoisie before even a single fundamental democratic reform has been fully achieved. It is, however, quite inconceivable that the proletariat, as a historical class, will be able to defeat the bourgeoisie, unless it is prepared for that by being educated in the spirit of the most consistent and resolutely revolutionary democracy. lenin, 1964b: 408

It is absolutely the case that ‘full democracy (including sexual emancipation of all kinds) cannot be achieved within capitalism’ (Hennessy quoted in Saul, 2003: 355). Or, as one of the prominent Marxists of North America puts it: ‘Women will truly be the “equals” of men only when wages are abolished and all socially necessary labour … (including that performed at home) is recognized as being of equivalent value’ (Foley, 2002: 30). One can easily agree with Panitch and Gindin when they say: that the issue is not the denigration of movements that stand outside the ‘privileged’ category of class. It is, of course, true that not all oppressions can be reduced to class, but it is equally important to highlight the degree

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to which, once we concretise ‘labour’, the people who appear are so often Filippino maids, black autoworkers, Mexican migrants, gay orderlies, and punk ‘bar-istos’. And as soon as we concretise workingclass needs, the range of issues identified – the environment, public health, child care, education, birth control, poverty, war – suggest that what are often seen as movements external to the working class, reflect not simply ‘others’ but ‘other dimensions’ of the many-sided lives of the working class. panitch and gindin, 2006: 123

Indeed, the issues of gender or racial or caste oppression are often class issues in that they it is the working class and semi-proletarians who suffer the most because of discrimination on the basis of these relations. They are the ones who have the least amount of economic and political resources to fight this oppression. At a concrete level, the effects of class relations – and relations between class-fractions – never exist outside of the space of social relations defined on the basis of gender, race, etc. (see Camfield, 2004; Mann, 2007). It is not just that the totality of a class-society is reproduced through differences and relations between classes. It is also the case that the totality of capitalist class relations – and capitalist class society as such – is reproduced through divisions (difference) within basic classes and within non-basis classes and strata (self-employed commodity producers). To put it in another way, the totality of the working class, just like that of the capitalist class (and the stratum of independent commodity producers), is reproduced through the parts of that totality (class fractions). Class fractions are a form through which this class – indeed, any class – exists and is reproduced. ‘In reality classes are heterogeneous; they are torn by inner antagonisms’ (Trotsky, 1991: 227). In a sense, and in a limited way, class may be seen as a form of difference. To say that class exists is to say that there is a world of difference between, for example, the working class and the capitalist class, or between the wage-earners and petty commodity producers, in terms of their interests (and world-views and political capacities). The totality of class is a world of difference. Every totality is internally punctured (i.e. differentiated). The differences within the working class are real, with political consequences. It may be useful to briefly state the differences in the conditions of living and working within the working class here, some of which have been mentioned earlier. Conditions of workers are different in terms of where, which sector and what kind of enterprise they work, and they also differ in terms of life histories.5 While some workers are descendants of urban wage labourers, 5 This paragraph is partly based on Mandel (1970a, para 10).

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others are those of small-scale property owners or of farm labourers. While some work in large factories, others work in small or medium-sized manufacturing companies or in the so-called service sectors. While some sections of the working class live in big cities and have been literate for a long time, others live in small towns or villages. Some sections of the world working class live and work in nations which were independent for centuries, and whose ruling classes have oppressed for long periods other nations, while other workers are work and live in countries which were until recently ex-colonized nations and continue to be under imperialist control. While some workers have lived and worked most of their lives in a country or in a region of a country, others are intra-national or international migrants. Some workers earn more and live better and have the full freedom to change their employers as they like. Others do not. And then workers have lived in countries and regions with different traditions in terms of racial, caste and gender oppression and pre-capitalist exploitation and themselves bear variable level of prejudice against women and minorities. While the matter of difference within classes cannot be ignored, it is the case that: the essential relation between capitalist and working classes will be missed unless we contemplate, not the single capitalist, and the single labourer, but the capitalist class as a whole and the labouring class as a whole. Similarly, every labourer is a part of the collective labourer. There is a distinct need to see the totality of the capitalist class, and not individual capitalists and individual workers. The differences within classes are less fundamental than the fact that given people fall in given class-categories independently of their will. There are commonalities between the fragments of the capitalist class (all appropriate surplus value directly or indirectly) or the working class (all perform unpaid labour and lack control means of production and the workplace, and so on). Any idea of difference within classes must be subordinated to that of totality. The focus should be on class, rather than classes. The capitalist class relation is a contradictory process. This is so in many ways as already indicated. Two points may be reviewed here, which speak to the political relevance of the discussion presented here. The capitalist class relation is partly reproduced through the divisions within the working class, including those based on income and status of employment (part-time or fulltime) and level of skill (low-skilled and high skilled or manual and mental labour), and so on, and through the fact that members of the working class compete with one another for employment and higher wages, and in doing so some of them do make use of existing differences among working class members that are based in race, gender, location, etc. However, it is also important to bear in mind that the totality of capital-labour class relation tends to erase some of

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those ­divisions within the working class, or indeed within the class of direct producers in a society ruled by that totality. Such erasure points to a future of capitalist class relation, i.e. its annihilation and the abolition of class-ness of society. The form of the division of labor which makes one person a farmer, another a cobbler, a third a factory worker, a fourth a stock-market operator, is being undermined by machinery, say Marx and Engels in the Manifesto. In this process education, which is denied to millions now, will play an important role in that it ‘will enable young people quickly to acquaint themselves with the whole system of production’ and to pass from one branch of production to another in response to social needs of society or their own inclinations and spiritual needs. As a result education will, under communism, free people from the one-sided character which the present-day division of labor imposes upon them (Engels, in Marx and Engels, 1977a: 93). The second aspect of the contradictory character of the capitalist relation concerns the nature of capitalist property. This relation is based on the negation of a form of property based in own labour. And capitalist property relation awaits its own negation, as a definite necessary pre-supposition for classlessness. Yet, there are enormous obstacles to such negation. In Chapters 9–12, we will discuss some of these and what is to be done about these. 3

The Capitalist Class Relation, Internationally Speaking

If the idea that capitalist class relation and attendant accumulation mechanisms will ‘constantly’ revolutionize instruments of production is a part of the core of Marxist thinking, there appears to be a contradiction between that and what is happening empirically (e.g. relative technological backwardness in the global periphery). Such a contradiction raises questions about the nature of class relation itself as theorized by Marx (and Lenin, etc.) and as discussed thus far. Chapter 8, which is a continuation of chapter 7, deals with some of these questions, both in general terms, keeping in mind the world capitalist system, which is internally uneven in terms of class relations and economic ­development, and which includes a vast global periphery. How does one identify capitalism? When does the capitalist class, which is a personification of capital, of the relation between capital and labour, revolutionize instruments of production and increase labor productivity? And, what might be the relation between development/technological change and class struggle? What might be the class-specificity of the global periphery or the less-developed world? There is a need for a return to Marx’s often-neglected distinction between formal and real subsumptions of wage-labour by capital in its productive form

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for understanding capitalism as a class relation, its temporality and spatiality, as well as the nature of peripheral capitalist social formations. But this return to Marx must be critical: it must challenge Marx’s neglect of – or rather an inconsistent stance towards – class struggle, and possible Eurocentrism. Several theoretical and political conclusions follow from the foregoing discussion. Capitalism must be seen primarily as a class relation. Like everything else, capitalism must be seen as essentially historical: it is historically differentiated into various forms/stages of subsumption of wage-labor (which in turn exhibit geographical variation). Building on Marx’s own discussion on forms of subsumption of labour under capital, it is possible to make the following conceptual argument: to the extent that Marx’s four conditions for formal subsumption exist, capitalist class relations exist, even if productivity-increasing technological change is absent or is not adopted in a widespread and systemic manner. The most general form of capitalism anywhere in the world, and historically, is when: capital appropriates absolute surplus value through formal subsumption by making workers work longer hours, by intensifying the labor process (and by even paying them below-subsistence wages, which is a distinct possibility in value theory, considered globally). Formal subsumption, theoretically, is the more ‘primitive’ (original) form of capitalist accumulation and capitalist exploitation, of M-C-M’. Given capitalist class relations (the existence of a working class and a capitalist class in a context of generalized commodity production), whether property-owners who are formally subsuming labor will also resort to technological change to appropriate surplus value in its relative form, crucially depends on several things. They include: the place-specific balance of power between them and labor, and interventions of imperialist capital, nation-state policies, and the technical nature of the labour process. If class relation is a historically-specific form of human-material social relation, and if capitalism is a historically-specific form of class relation, then formal and real subsumptions of labour are historically-specific forms of this: capitalist class relation. The conceptualization of capitalism advanced in the discussion on the subsumption aspect of class relation here is different from several existing conceptualizations, including those of both Wood and Harvey (who themselves have major differences between them). Harvey is increasingly emphasizing the dispossession aspect of capitalism. Harvey ‘seems perfectly happy with a definition of capital which confines itself to simple profit on alienation or of capital as predatory activities’ (Wood, 2007: 146). But Wood’s (2007) view of capitalism is also inadequate because it is neutral with respect to the actual mode – form – of subsumption of labour (i.e. formal or real). The underlying assumption, once again, is that merely capital-labour relation in the absence of extra-economic coercion will result in what Marx calls real subsumption.

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Marx’s concept of subsumption of labor remains as useful as ever. In thinking about the contemporary reality in the light of this concept, and its dual forms (formal and real subsumptions), attention must be paid to obstacles to class struggle against formal subsumption of labor in contexts that Marx did not have a chance to explore. I have argued that property owners respond in three different ways to class struggle from below against formal subsumption, representing three potential methods of appropriating surplus, which can be seen as constituting class struggle from above. Where laborers are better organized, and in the presence of other favorable factors (state’s pro-poor interventions ensuring a good social wage), wages can rise, and the working-day can get shorter. Property-owners may respond to this by making use of labour-saving technology. In other words, the transition to real subsumption becomes likely. Yet, this process is a non-linear and complicated one. Class struggle can actually slow it down, within limits. Employers may also respond to class struggle by using new forms of formal subsumption as methods of appropriating surplus, resulting in an economically backward capitalism. Another type of response is ‘hybrid subsumption’ (mercantile-usury based exploitation as well as exploitation based on rental payment). Property-owners may resort to a combination of hybrid and formal subsumptions as well. Any discussion of the capitalist class relation must be sensitive to its spatial unevenness. Spatial unevenness occurs at multiple scales: internationally, and intra-nationally. In a country/territory, class struggle occurs within a context of specific factors, including capitalist state interventions. Partly because of the geographical variation in these contextual factors, the form and outcome of class struggle against formal subsumption will be place-specific with uneven impacts on the transition to real subsumption. Thus, productive forces are more developed in one place than in another, even if capitalist relations may exist in all places. In other words, the more general tendency under capitalist class relation (i.e. the causal powers and liabilities of capitalists to produce commodities by using wage labourers so as to earn at least the average rate of surplus value) interacts with locally existing contingent conditions to produce geographically uneven development, more concrete forms of which require empirical analysis. To repeat: uneven development is taking place because of, and in the ­framework of, social relations that are predominantly capitalist, at least at the national level (as well as in most places at the sub-national scale). Uneven development is fundamentally, though not exclusively, a product of spatially uneven transitions within the system of class relations: from primitive accumulation to various forms of subsumption, and to real subsumption; these transitions are ­influenced by unevenness in class struggle and state policies, within the overall framework of imperialism.

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Unevenness then, in the above terms, can be seen in terms of ‘a drawing together of the different stages of the journey’ including various forms of ­pre-capitalist class relation based on extra-economic coercion, hybrid subsumption as well as formal and real subsumption, and mechanisms of class differentiation by market means and dispossession via extra-economic means, i.e. ‘a combining of’ all these ‘separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms’ (Trotsky). Uneven development is unevenness in forms of class relation (of capitalism). It is true that in terms of a tendential law, capitalism is a progressive force: it tends to promote the development of productive forces. Marx stressed this. Brenner has stressed this. But this does not mean that in every part of the world this will be the case, at a point in time. Capitalism based on formal subsumption of labour may not be particularly progressive. To say that where capitalism is not playing its ‘assigned’ progressive role, it must be because of some pre-capitalist (or semi-feudal) relations, or that capitalism as a social relation does not exist (fully), or to say that capitalism will inevitably bring economic dynamism of the kind we have seen in the us or Canada to all parts of the global periphery is being blind to one important aspect of capitalism. This is its socio-spatial dialectics which Marx generally ignored, a concept popularised by Soja (1989; 1980) and Peet (1998): presence and absence of backwardness within a single global system of capitalist class relation. The absence of dynamism is as much a part of the system as the presence of it. This is what is partly suggested in Leon Trotsky’s combined and uneven development as well as in Lenin’s discussion on imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism. The argument made here supports the conclusion of a recent paper on Marx’s view of development. To quote it again: considering the theory of capitalist development (theory of capital), the diffusionist interpretation sought to assign to Marx a unilateral view of capitalist expansion [causing capitalist development], where any form of underdevelopment would necessarily be a perennial reminder of precapitalist modes of production. In this interpretation, any possibility of applying the critical theory of political economy elaborated by Marx in Capital to underdeveloped countries and regions was excluded. Those countries were considered “insufficiently capitalist.… Marx, on the contrary, saw clearly that the expansion of capital was a contradictory process that in many cases expressed itself in what would be now called underdevelopment. de paula, 2015: 601

In fact, there can be capitalism and there can be, under certain conditions, a lack of dynamics associated with capitalism. There can be a specifically

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c­ apitalist under-development (ibid.: 604). Such a concept cannot be reconciled with views that attribute its cause only to backwardness or to insufficient adoption of capitalist relations of production in a given region or country’ (ibid.). Capitalism cannot be invested with the power to develop productive forces always and everywhere. And not in this age of imperialism which is associated with the accumulation of a massive global reserve army, with all its implications for formal subsumption of labour. In this sense – and not just in the Lenin sense – capitalism has indeed become moribund. The approach to uneven development which was briefly presented above and which directly follows from subsumption theory of capitalist class relation is contrary to two existing approaches to uneven development, which employ a theoretically restrictive view of capitalist class relation. First, if one thinks that only the use of modern technology represents capitalist class relation, what erroneously follows from this is that uneven development of productive forces is a function of spatially limited development of capitalist social relations: i.e. uneven development occurs because there is capitalism here but not there. Second, uneven development is often seen as caused by the dialectics of dual tendencies of geographical concentration and dispersion of capitalist investment, a la Neil Smith and Harvey etc., the tendencies that are shaped by cross-class alliances and class struggle in particular places. This view is useful and is a part of the approach to uneven development presented here, but it is, in itself, one-sided. It is one-sided because it employs a productive force-centric view of capitalism and of uneven development – as opposed to a social relations centric view of capitalism as advanced here – and is oblivious of the historically differentiated nature of capitalism as a class relation. The discussion on capitalist class relations at a relatively high level of abstraction (forms of capitalist class relations) has implications for understanding advanced and peripheral capitalism. Advanced capitalism – or the world of imperialist countries – is generally characterized by: a successful transition to real subsumption of labour, which coexists with formal subsumption and with tendencies towards continued dispossession from property based in private labour, as well as class differentiation among commodity producers. In imperialist countries, the transition from formal to real subsumption form of capitalist class relation, and the resultant dynamism associated with capitalism, were partly possible because of two factors. One is this: given the presence of capital-labour relations existing already, the flow of vast resources from the colonies, a flow that represented primitive accumulation at the international scale, was converted into capital. Another factor was class struggle against capitalists who were only formally subsuming labour: such class struggle forced the formally subsuming capitalist class to invest their capital, including that

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was based on resources from the colonies, in new technology (or new ways of producing), which increased labour productivity, and which represented the transition to the real subsumption form of capitalist class relation. Since more was produced in less time, the rate of surplus value increased, in spite of relatively shorter working day. Thus class struggle is important not only to the transition to capitalism (as argued in the transition debate). It is also important to the transition within capitalism. What about peripheral capitalism? The ideas discussed in Chapter 8 have some implications for understanding the class character of peripheral capitalism under which the majority of the global population and majority of proletarians and semi-proletarians live. Many radicals subscribe to a restrictive view of capitalism and say that social formations in ex-colonial countries are not capitalist enough because they are economically – technologically – lessdeveloped. One is compelled to be critical, on both intellectual and political grounds, of these scholars. They are like those Post-structuralist Marxists who doubt the dominance of capitalism in advanced countries. Any society, whether in the global periphery or more economically advanced, is capitalist, to the extent that it is characterized by: commodity production, land and other means of production confronting labour as capital, and, a class of labourers forced to work for a wage because they do not own sufficient means of production. When such conditions exist, then capitalist relation exists, at least in the sense of formal subsumption. There is hardly any place in the world which is not dominated by capitalism based on formal subsumption, i.e. where the law of value does not work. In peripheral capitalism, there is a vast industrial reserve army of labor which owes its origin to colonialism and is expanding under new imperialism through, for example, primitive accumulation. The expanding reserve army provides capital an ample opportunity for formal subsumption of labour, including the vulnerable elements whose social status (gender, race, age, caste, etc.) is made use of in order to super-exploit them; on the other hand, the reserve army adversely affects the bargaining power of employed labour and makes class struggle against formal subsumption rather difficult. It is also the case that the peripheral capitalist state lacks the resources – or it is not allowed by imperialist institutions to use the resources where they exist – to adequately augment the social wage through pro-labour policies in a way in which they can substantially increase the power of labour, however conjuncturally. Given all this, capitalism based on formal subsumption of labour may continue for a very long time. At the concrete level, i.e. in a specific place and at a specific time, the capitalist class relation in the form of formal subsumption of labor coexists not only with islands of real subsumption of labor created partly by imperialist

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capital, but also with (a) ‘hybrid subsumption’ (e.g. usury, etc.), which does not represent capitalist p­ roduction relations, (b) localized pre-capitalist relations (both in the sphere of commodity economy and non-commodity economy), and (c) new means of primitive accumulation, making the dispossessed join not the active army of workers but the reserve army. Formal subsumption is not just the early history of capitalism. Formal subsumption – as an aspect of accumulation by exploitation – is a continuous affair. A major implication of an accumulation regime characterized by a massive reserve army and low wages is that the market for goods and services for proletarian and semi-proletarian masses (who constitute the majority of the population) remains limited. A large part of the production remains exportoriented or for the local elite (luxury production), and such a production system as a whole has, generally, little incentive to raise wages of workers who are not the consumers of such a system. Distribution of income/wealth does feed back into the nature of production system. A further implication of the subsumption perspective on class is that the development process in the world in general and in peripheral capitalism in particular, with its attendant class relations, must be seen as multiple transitions. These transitions refer to not just the single transition from feudalism to capitalism, which is how it has been seen traditionally in Marxism. Much rather, these transitions must be viewed as transitions from pre-capitalist (labour) relations to hybrid subsumption of labour, from these two to formal subsumption of labor under capital, from formal to real subsumption of labor, and finally, from the latter to cooperative labor of associated producers at a global scale. In peripheral capitalist societies, formal subsumption (with remnants of hybrid subsumption as well as pre-capitalist relations) is much more important than real subsumption, and herein lies a most important key to the understanding of under-development from the specifically Marxist standpoint, which has been hitherto gone unrecognized (Figure 8.6). Formal subsumption demands serious historical-geographical materialist enquiry if we want to understand peripheral capitalist development (as well as imperialism doing its dirty work in the periphery). There is capitalist class relation in the periphery which shares certain qualities with that in the advanced world and which has also its own specificity. Whether or not capitalism exists is not a matter of academic quarrels. Whether the contradiction of capitalism (i.e. capital-labour contradiction) or the contradiction between the dispossessor and the dispossessed (as in Harvey’s theory of accumulation by dispossession, a theory that stresses the neoliberal aspect of society) or indeed the contradiction between noncapitalist property owners and direct producers is the main contradiction is

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not an insignificant issue. The concept of what is present determines what needs to be absented. To say that a social formation is decidedly capitalist has a different political implication than the contrary view that it is not capitalist (enough), or that it is capitalist here and there but not everywhere. If a country is dominantly semi-feudal or not-capitalist enough, or if it is merely seen as neoliberal, then the radical strategy is seen by many as one which is to be directed against semi-feudal exploiters or at the promotion of advanced capitalism, of a social-democratic type capitalism (where there is reduced dispossession), respectively. This strategy, which is based on the assumption that the fundamental cause of the major problems of society lie in relations/processes other than the capitalist class relation, licenses an indefinite wait for the fight for socialism (=abolition of class relations) to start. But if what is present is already capitalism, albeit one that is not very progressive and that is unlikely to be very progressive for a very long time (and which may take a neoliberal form), the nature of class politics must be seen in a radically different manner. To repeat: given the imperialised nature of peripheral social formations, the possibility of the transition to capitalist class relation with advanced level of productive forces at the national scale and at the level of what is now the global periphery may be slim for an intolerably long time. Capitalist class relation (in the form of formal subsumption of labour), in conditions of imperialism, has been acting as a barrier to the development of productive forces; even if real subsumption of labour occurs, the level of technical change (the ratio of constant to variable capital) and attendant level of labour productivity, may remain below the global average for a long time, ensuring general level of economic backwardness. Therefore, what needs to be overthrown is not some pre-capitalist social formation or a capitalism-proper-to-be-achieved, or neoliberalism. Much rather, what needs to be overthrown is, the capitalism as we have it and as we know it now, in these countries, i.e. the really existing capitalism. Hence the immediate need for a socialist movement around proletarian-semi-proletarian alliance, not for some elusive democratic revolution, which some movements and scholars are arguing for. Similarly, in advanced countries, what exists in terms of the dominant moment of capitalism is not accumulation by dispossession nor is it neoliberalism. What exists there is real subsumption of labour under capital which dominates over other forms of class relations, including the relations around dispossession and class differentiation, and formal subsumption of labour (a regime of low wages and long hours); in fact, the tendency towards this regime is being strengthened, given the global law of value and the operation of that regime in the periphery. What exists there is capitalism, and a capitalism that is also a source of imperialism that exploits (and super-exploits) proletarians and semi-proletarians

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in peripheral capitalism. And what is common to both peripheral capitalism and advanced capitalism is the formal subsumption of labour, which is the most general form of capitalist class relation. And it is that that must be the target for removal through revolutionary action from below. But that project of removal faces an immense obstacle. That is the state, which is an internal relation of the capitalist class relation, which we turn now to. 4

The State and the (Capitalist) Class Relation

In discussing capitalism as a class relation, we have so far abstracted from the state. In fact, the ways in which the capitalist state works enter into the very constitution of classes. That the property-less working class is exploited by the propertied capitalist class is true but there can be no monopoly over the instruments of production, nor exploitation, without the instrument of exploitation. The capitalist state is, more than anything else, that instrument of ­exploitation. There is an internal relation between the state-society relation and the class relation. The bourgeois state is the capitalist class organized as the ruling class. To the extent that political power is the official expression of class antagonism, political oppression of the working class as a class is an inherent part of the nature and experience of that class and therefore, legitimately, a part of class theory. The state power is necessarily a form of class power. That is, the relation between the two forms of power is an internal one, and not an external one. The state power is the power of the exploiting classes in all pre-socialist class societies. The capitalist class controls the means of production and the surplus value and it commands far more exchange value than the working class, and it is the class that ‘controls’ political power as well. The obverse side of this is the fact that the class of proletarians lacks control over property, surplus value, and indeed over labour process, and it is also the class that lacks control over state power (and must therefore achieve it for it to gain control over the economic aspects of class structure of society). The proletariat which lacks control over economic means of production experiences relative powerless-ness. Powerlessness – or the relative lack of power – is a hallmark of its classness of the proletariat. The proletariat is not just a class which is economically exploited; it is also a class which is politically oppressed/dominated. And this political oppression/domination is not just in the sphere of exchange relations (e.g. labour market) and in the sphere of work-relation, but also at the level of society as a whole. It is useful to remind ourselves of Lenin’s point in The State and revolution that: Marx ‘developed his theory of the class struggle consistently,

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down to the theory of political power, of the state’ (Lenin, 1977d: 27). Once again, fundamental aspects of state theory must be a part of class theory. The miserable conditions created by the capitalist class relation become a condition for the lack of participation of masses in politics. Such lack of participation becomes a condition for bureaucratism which further stifles participation of the masses, the participation that would prepare the masses for struggle for their self-emancipation. People are generally excluded from effective political participation, and when they do seek to participate, the state uses legal harassment, physical violence, monetary restrictions, etc. are used. All this produces what can be called ‘a discouraged worker-citizen’. This is akin to the discouraged worker in the labour market: after unsuccessfully looking for employment, a worker gives up looking. Just as workers are without direct access to means of subsistence, they are also without direct access to coercive power, for a body of armed people, separate from workers as workers, stands in there to oppress them, and to prevent their direct participation, i.e. participation in relation to the issues that really matter (e.g. secure employment; decent wages, safe working conditions; access to health-care and access to education and other cultural resources, etc.). A body of people (bureaucrats) is also there to coerce them, manage them. They are generally not elected by workers and over whom they have little direct control. They live much better than ordinary workers and do not share the interest and the worldview of the working class. Denial of access to means of production and to surplus and denial of genuine access to political power concentrated in the state go together, and cannot be separated at all into class theory and state theory. The capitalist class relation and the state have a symmetrical-internal relation: one cannot exist without the other. This idea has several conceptual and political implications. Firstly, the state is constitutive of the capitalist class relation. It codifies class relations into juridical relations. It reproduces class relations, against workers’ resistance. The content of social power of capitalists is expressed in the form of state power: the state = political form of class. The capitalist state and the capitalist class are two arms of the social relationship called class; one arm signifies exploitation/exclusion of the majority, and another arm signifies its political oppression by the state. The state is, more less, the political affairs department of the capitalist class in the modern society. Secondly: the state has the coercive means to force the Moneybags, a minority, to serve the majority, including by curtailing capital’s mobility, but it will not do so. This is not because of any economic constraints on the state. It is not even because the state is reliant on the capitalist class for its survival; the so-called institutional separation view of Offe is over-emphasized. Nor is it necessarily because the state is occupied by capitalists or their ideological

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supporters. The ‘burdens’ that the state imposes on the capitalist class or the ways in which the state itself is constrained by that class are internal to the nature of class relations. The Polanyian social-democratic argument is problematic. Block (2003) is mistaken that there are no inherent obstacles to reforms within capitalism. The obstacles are internal to the capitalist class relation. These will remain as long as the capitalist class relation remains. I disagree with Panitch and Gindin (2015: 10), when they say that: Capitalist states are dependent on capital accumulation for securing their own tax revenues and legitimacy, and [that] … state power is not the same as class power. Why does the state, which has all the coercive powers of the world, not dispossess the capitalists in order to eliminate its dependence on capitalist accumulation? The answer is this is not possible: whatever else it may be, state power is a form of class power. As I have argued earlier, the sort of institutionalist view that relies on state’s separation from accumulation (a) makes the relation between the state and capitalist class relation an external one, (b) leads one to view that any obstacle to what the state can do for the masses is one that is not essential to the capitalist relation, and therefore that with enough pressure from below, even one that is organized by a working class party, economic liberation of the masses can occur. Thirdly: If class was merely about economic exploitation of the majority by a tiny minority, a struggle against the minority class by the majority class could diminish, and even remove the structure of class relations. The belief that such a thing is possible is at the heart of much of thinking about class and the state, whether in Analytical or Post-structuralist Marxism etc. or similar discourses. Fourthly: The abolition of the class system, and ‘smashing’ of the state to create a state of the genuine majority are two sides of the same coin. Having won political power, the capitalist class treats its power as eternal. Such luxury of political sway which it itself has enjoyed, it now denies to the working class, the new rising world-class. If the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machine, just as the capitalist relations of exploitation and exchange cannot be reformed, this means that the working class is not only exploited but also oppressed and that the state of capitalists as well as the capitalist relations of exchange and production must be overthrown. It is theoretically bankrupt and politically opportunistic to recognize class but not recognize the following: (a) the state’s fundamental role, whether it is democratic or not, in suppressing the working class, (b) a need for abolition of class (as it cannot be regulated), and (c) a need for political hegemony of the

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working class through the overthrow of the capitalist rule, as a necessary interregnum prior to classlessness. 5

(Working) Class Consciousness and (Working) Class Power

We now turn to questions of class consciousness and class politics. As mentioned many times, relations between classes (along with intra-class relations), based in processes of exchange, control over property and production of (surplus) value, form the very basis of class society. That basis, operating within the context of capitalist accumulation, shapes, and is shaped by, consciousness of different classes. Conceptualizing class as an objective relation that individuals enter into independently of their will presupposes the concept of objective class interests. Class interests – of workers and capitalists – exist, and therefore class exists, and is causally important, independently of class consciousness, including selfconsciousness (identity). Individuals constituting a class may or may not be wholly or partly conscious of their own identity and common interests as a class and they may or may not feel antagonism towards members of other classes as such. That does not mean that class does not exist. There is an objective interest of workers: it is in being not exploited in the workplace (and not suffering from the concrete adverse effects of exploitation such as u ­ nemployment and poverty). The objective interest of the capitalist class is in exploiting. How their class interest is perceived, how it is politically expressed/translated, and how this interest is articulated with other (non-class) interests, to what extent this interest is satisfied and how – all these are place- and time-specific. There has to be something called class (as an objective structural relation) for there to be something called class consciousness. The structure of class relations is reproduced, and transformed, through political action which is informed by consciousness, but consciousness is shaped (constrained and enabled) by that structure (as well as political action of the classes). During extraordinary moments does consciousness grip the minds of the masses and begin to act as a material force, as a weapon against the structure. The fact that class consciousness is contingent on objective class relations is not the only attribute of class consciousness. Consciousness of a class, as well, cannot be reduced to that of the individuals who form the class. Besides, class consciousness of a society, like all other things, is internally contradictory. In other words, a society’s class consciousness has a bourgeois form (bourgeois consciousness) and a working class form (working class consciousness). So class consciousness is, ultimately, of two types: bourgeois and socialist (proletarian).

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I have argued in Chapter 7 that class relation between capital and labour is at the level of exchange relation (money/commodity relation expressed in the wage form), private property relation, and a relation of value/exploitation. Consciousness of both capital and labour can be seen from the vantage point of each of these aspects of the class relation. There is also contradictory class interest in relation to the state: the state fundamentally protects the interests of the capitalist class as a whole and over the long term, while its basic role is to suppress the working class. The bourgeois view is that the state is class neutral or that state’s class-ness can be reduced by working class action (this is a leftbourgeois view), while the working class view is that the state fundamentally works in the interest of the bourgeois class. Of course, elements of bourgeois consciousness in relation to each aspect of the class relation are shared by both the bourgeoisie and the working class, in empirically given conditions. It bears repetition that: class interests exist, and class relations exist, and classes as large groups of people exist, regardless of whether, and the extent to which, they are aware of their class interests (i.e. the extent to which there is class consciousness), although class relations are reproduced through and shape such consciousness (including both true and false consciousness). The capitalist class society is an internally contradictory society. Interests of workers and interests of capitalists are opposite. This fact is registered in the sphere of consciousness of society as a whole. It is important to ask: what/how workers and capitalists think about the capitalist society they live in, why they think in certain ways, and why has the content of their identity taken the form it has? The development of working class consciousness is a non-automatic, non-linear, and dialectical process. Their class situation (i.e. their social being), broadly shapes their social consciousness, which in turn has an impact on their social being (including political practice). The capitalist class structure and its associated ideas promote and inhibit workers’ class consciousness. Hence there is a need for class analysis to contribute to the undermining of the role of the capitalist class structure and ideology in inhibiting workers’ consciousness. Class analysis is a process of demystification. So, if and to the extent that workers do not have true class consciousness – a consciousness that mirrors their true interests – class analysis is not invalid. For, it is because of class (e.g. ruling class actions; commodity fetishism, etc.) that workers have a certain form of consciousness. But it also happens that exploitative class relations are truly registered in the minds of (advanced) workers. They do come to possess class consciousness. Class consciousness, consciousness of antagonistic class interests on the part of a single worker or a group of workers, which is expressed partly in the form of class identity, is important. But it must be properly placed. The particular form of working class consciousness is dominantly but not exclusively, influenced by class, by

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the class-processes (e.g. forms and effects of exploitation, what the capitalist class does directly and through the capitalist state and universities, and media, so on). There are three aspects of bourgeois class society that have relevance for the production of bourgeois consciousness: commodity relations; bourgeois passion for wealth in the abstract; and bourgeois control over production. Bourgeois class relations produce a specific form of consciousness of the bourgeois class. In bourgeois consciousness: the money relation involving the purchase and sale of means of production and subsistence is natural, it is normal for the bourgeoisie to control property, and its right to control production and social product and to exploit the working class is legitimate, and it is right for the state to protect all these processes (such act of protection is called maintenance of order), if necessarily, by violently suppressing the working masses and by other means including trickery and deception. The bourgeois form of social consciousness supports bourgeois interests and is generally held by the bourgeoisie. It is also, in given empirical conditions, shared by elements of the working class. The bourgeois society is marked by commodity relations. Everything is a commodity: things we need and want must be bought and sold and must be produced for a profit. Things we need and want appear to have a price tag as if to do so is in the dna of things. This means that use-value as usevalue (education or food, movies, medicines) will not be produced except as ­commodities for a profit. Not only is it that things we need are commodities. The power to work – labour power – has become a commodity. It is paid for in monetary form (wage-form). And, given the wage-form, the distinction between paid and unpaid labour in the work-place disappears from view; the capitalist class thinks that all labour is paid labour, a view generally accepted by workers as well. Based in this wage-form are ‘the notions of justice held by both the worker and the capitalist’, and all the illusions about freedom, as workers and capitalists see themselves as mere commodity owners and commodity buyers-sellers. The notion of freedom contradicts the fact that the working class abjectly depends on the capitalist class which controls means of production, and therefore means of employment, and means of subsistence, and that workers are not free not to work under despotic control of the capitalist class. The capitalist class forgets that the wages that workers receive form a part of the product they continuously produce, that what is paid to workers is the product of workers’ ‘labour of last week, or of last year’. The concept of class exploitation – appropriation of surplus value from labour whose cost of reproduction may be paid for – is not a part of consciousness of the capitalist class. Of course, capitalists make profits, but they explain profits in terms of

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market relations, i.e. surface appearance of class relations, (and in terms of the hard work, intelligence, and ability to save and take risks) and not in terms of property and production relations. Profit, for them, comes from ‘buying under the value, and selling over it’, and not in the normal process of buying labour power at its value and not from the fact of unpaid labour. Bourgeois passion for wealth is a prominent part of bourgeois consciousness. They possess a sense of ‘avarice, and the drive for self-enrichment, are the passions they possess’, the passions for the pursuit of wealth in the abstract. Bourgeois passion is a product of an imperative, one to which the bourgeois ­subjects the entire society to, an imperative that is reflected in the bourgeois mind: society must be ruled by the logic of unceasing production for profit (‘economic growth’). Of course, this class can be great animal lovers, ­philanthropists and can actually sometimes sympathize with the suffering of the masses. This is where bourgeois socialist consciousness comes. Control over production and capital fetishism is another aspect of the consciousness of the bourgeois. Their bourgeois consciousness celebrates the division of labour in the workshop and the lifelong annexation of the worker to a partial operation, and so on. But the same bourgeois consciousness ‘denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt to socially control and regulate the process of production, as an encroachment on their private property rights. As well, powers of labour appear to be powers of capital, in the consciousness of both capitalist and the working classes. The consciousness of the capitalist class, which it shares with the working class, is marked with reification: while it is workers’ own living labour or past labour that has created value (i.e. wealth under the capitalist class relation), capitalists and workers think that capital does everything (and is the main force behind such things as economic ­development). It is true that the factory, the enterprise, the laboratories, farms, machinery, the software, etc., all these are forms of capital, and workers work on/with/in them, and without these things workers are nothing. So both the classes (and their political representatives) think that capital is the main doer/actor, and therefore nothing should be done to upset that fact. Capital becomes a very mystical being, since all the productive forces of social labour appear attributable to it, and not to labour as such, as a power springing forth from its own womb. The illusory and false consciousness of the capitalist class lies in the fact that it believes, and it makes the society (workers) believe, that the things it has are the things it owns and has created. The illusion of the capitalist class (and of the working class and society as such) that the capitalist is really a doer of things and creator of things is nothing but just an illusion, even if such an illusion is objectively rooted in the ways in which capitalist class relation works. Such illusion is an obstacle to the

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development of class consciousness of the working class. The capitalist class system objectively produces huge obstacles to proper subjective understanding of the class-reality, and to an explanation of what is to be done. Let us examine the relation between capitalist class society and working class consciousness more directly. Reality is stratified into relations and practices. Some of these are more on the surface, and others are deeper down at a more structural level. Consciousness of the working class operates at these levels: level of the surface relations, and that of deeper mechanisms. This working class consciousness of its interests has different forms. In bourgeois class consciousness, what is = what can be. In the class consciousness of the working class: what can happen is a lot more than what is. The world can be a lot different from, and indeed, in terms of class relations, opposite to, what exists. The surface relations refer to the concrete ways in which the logic of property relations and value production works and produces certain effects such as low wages, unemployment and abuse at work, racial and gender discrimination reinforcing class exploitation, and so on. The surface relations including the symptoms of the system can be somewhat mended within the overall framework of capitalist relations, and of the political institutions supporting these relations and regulating them in the collective interest of the ruling class itself. Such mending can happen through trade unionist pressure on employers (e.g. strikes, lobbying a labour party) and/or pressure for some government (or even non-governmental) regulation. Working class consciousness of the social being (i.e. social condition) of the worker that is confined to the surface is a lower form of consciousness. Consciousness corresponding to the surface relations is the trade unionist consciousness or bourgeois consciousness of the working class. Consciousness corresponding to the deeper levels is the class consciousness (proper). Objective class relations of capitalist social formations shape consciousness of the exploited classes in various ways. To the extent that pre-capitalist relations (e.g. self-earned p ­ rivate property) and ideas are prevalent in capitalist social formations, that may also shape working class consciousness. One should not ignore the fact that interests and consciousness of the petty bourgeoisie does shape working class consciousness. In a society where there are bourgeois and petty bourgeois forces, with proprietary habits and petty-bourgeois traditions, these will hamper proletarian consciousness ‘both outside and within the working-class movement, not only in a single field of activity – the parliamentary – but, inevitably, in every field of social activity, in all cultural and political spheres without exception. Therefore the fight for working class consciousness – that is the fight to development working class consciousness

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– is simultaneously a fight against the (limited) consciousness of other classes’. This is why there is the importance of the idea of the tribune of the people in the sphere of working class consciousness. Objective conditions in capitalist class society do directly impede class consciousness. Commodity fetishism of a material reality, one that stands for an inversion in the sense that relations between people are inverted into relations between things, produces commodity fetishism in consciousness. Similarly, when what are more or less class relations are seen as relations between genders and races, etc., this form of consciousness signifies another inversion alongside commodity fetishism. Thus working class consciousness suffers from dual inversion. This inversion simply shows that no serious class analysis can idealize the working class. Marx did not do this. Lenin did not. Individual workers and groups of workers can have reactionary, rightwing-nationalist, patriarchal, racist, imperialist, etc. identities. Trade union consciousness, the consciousness that arises out of the practical experience of struggle is empirical and pragmatic consciousness, which can enrich action to a certain extent, but which is far inferior to consciousness grounded in conscious theorizing, the act of going behind the veil of surface relations. It is therefore a mistake to think as Cohen and Moody (1988) do, that basic economic struggles can open up an epistemological break in workingclass consciousness, that such struggles themselves will develop socialist consciousness, even if it is true that workers fight for their rights without socialist consciousness. If mere economic struggles can develop socialist consciousness then all that Marxists/socialists should do is to organize the working class for such initiatives, and militantly, without them having to confront the political conceptions that guide its struggles. Unlike bourgeois consciousness, proletarian or socialist class consciousness reveals class relationships as the basis of its theory of social reality. Workers are genuinely class conscious when they think their interests are antagonistic towards, and irreconcilable with, those of capitalists and with the complete social order of capitalists. The working class has certain class instincts. It has the potential to develop working class consciousness but it has to be achieved. The empirically existing working class consciousness has only sparks of class consciousness proper. The ‘actually existing’ working-class consciousness is not completely bourgeois consciousness. While objective conditions and dominant naturalizing ways of thinking that the extant class society promotes under the rule of capital do shape workers’ consciousness, such influences are not eternal nor unbreakable. Class consciousness develops over time. Workers do develop class consciousness. They do so not merely by being told – on the basis of theory and propaganda,

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etc. – that capitalist class contradiction is irreconcilable. They develop consciousness in practice, i.e. through struggle, though not just through struggle. The question is what forms of previously-existing consciousness, what ideas which reflect previous experience, mediate the impact of objective conditions on consciousness? In all cases objective conditions will be interpreted on the basis of certain ideas which the working class may possess based on its own experience and that of other classes, and on the basis of ideas propagated by the dominant class. These ideas may be commonsensical ideas, which reflect the surface forms of bourgeois society (e.g. exchange relations), giving rise to (nonmilitant forms) of trade union type consciousness. This is class consciousness only in its embryonic form. If no conscious theory intervenes, if Marxist theory of class does not intervene, common-sense or bourgeois theory fills the gap. If Marxist theory intervenes, which is based on the theoretical reflection on the history of objective conditions and class struggle around these in the past and globally, then objective conditions may actually help produce socialist consciousness in the minds of the working class. The fact remains that struggle against capitalist class can happen without there being fully-fledged class consciousness, and often such struggle can shape consciousness. The question is what impedes and prompts workers’ struggle, what kind of struggle is necessary to abolish the very conditions which prompt struggle, i.e. wage-slavery and its protection by the state. It is not ordinarily possible for individual workers to understand the socialgeographical complexity in the world, including value relations, mechanism of exploitation in the hidden abode of production, fetishistic relations that characterize the commodity, the transnational production and exchange, the intricate system of financial capital, and so on. Indeed, capitalists themselves hire specialists to understand these things for them. Those who are immersed in practice and cannot bring it to the level of consciousness (a task that requires a specific theoretical labor) do not have class consciousness. It is the intellectuals who develop class consciousness and ideology. That is why Lenin insisted that left to its own condition, the proletariat cannot arrive at a class consciousness, but at most a trade-union consciousness. Without revolutionary theory that seeks to understand all the interconnections among all the classes, how the system as a whole including its contradictions, works, there is no revolutionary practice. Class struggle is the material form of class consciousness under given material conditions and their contradictions. Class consciousness must be expressed in the form of, and is generally necessary, for class struggle, although mere consciousness is not enough to effect class struggle. The capitalist class system, in terms of its economic and political aspects, propels class struggle,

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overt and covert. Class struggle is immanent in more than one way in capitalism. The very basis of capitalist class relation is the fact that the propertied class must reproduce the proletariat as dependent on the sale of wage labour, on the appropriation of surplus labour and on the control over property, and the capitalist class must seek to reproduce these conditions. And in response the working class resists in covert and overt ways. The struggle of the proletariat against the capitalist class takes many forms. Like class consciousness, class struggle also occurs against the capitalist class relation which operates at different levels: a more fundamental level, and a level at which effects of the operation 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 takes economic and political forms and which is mistakenly often equated with class struggle as such. Class struggle, i.e. class struggle proper, is the struggle against the class relation itself. It is the struggle to abolish the class relation and to construct a new society that preserves 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 earlier apply, more or less, to class struggle proper as well. Relations between classes (along with intra-class relations) based in processes of exchange (wage-form) and control over property and production of (surplus) value are shaped by class struggle in its various political and economic forms, and by the results of class struggle as embodied in government rules/regulations, theoretical ideas, etc. And all such results of struggle can in turn shape forms (e.g. whether trade union form or not) of struggle. There has to be something called class (as an objective structural relation) for there to be class struggle. The structure of class relations is reproduced and transformed through struggle, which is informed by ­consciousness, but consciousness is shaped (constrained and enabled) by that structure. Class relations, class consciousness and class struggle form a triad, within which class relations hold the ontological primacy. Class struggle is important as a proximate reason for social change and the lever of emancipation of the working class, and Marxism is intransigently antagonistic towards any approach or movement or people who dilute the significance of class. Possibilities for class struggle are deeply connected to the ways in which capitalist class rule works. To the extent that Marx does speak of tendency towards bipolarization of class relations in capitalism, it is not just about the fact that the class society is increasingly being divided into two objectively defined

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classes (classes-in-themselves) but also to subjective bipolarization: one class, i.e. bipolarization in classes-for-themselves (Friedman, 1990: 220). And that is a condition for revolution. The emergence of a proletariat class for itself will depend on various factors such as the emergence of a national-based economy and of a world market, and growth of international communication among workers; transcendence of non-class divisions within the working class; and growth of large-scale industry which facilitates communication among workers and their ability to control production in future (Friedman, 1990: 220). Some struggles are over economic matters (trade union economic struggle) and some are political. Some are socialist, and some are purely reformist. Marxists relate to the common interests of workers struggling in different places and in different ways and forms, and make them explicitly aware of their struggles. Struggles deploy a united front form strategy where communist and non-communist (social democratic) workers come together or a popular front strategy (where workers with loyalty to communist and capitalist etc. ideologies come together), or the struggles take a more sectarian form. The material – organizational – forms of struggles could also vary: apart from trade unions and federations of trade unions, there are informal organization/grouping of workers, neighbourhood action committees, working class council in workplaces, political parties, and mass movements. In fact, ‘new forms of struggle, unknown to the participants of the given period, inevitably arise as the given social situation, changes’. ‘At different stages of economic evolution’, ‘different forms of struggle’ develop and ‘become the principal forms of struggle’, depending on differences in political, national-cultural, living and other conditions’, and ‘in connection with this, the secondary, auxiliary forms of struggle undergo change in their turn’. Indeed, the history of class struggle is marked with ‘rapid and varied succession of different forms of the movement – legal and illegal, peaceful and stormy, underground and open, local circles and mass movements, and parliamentary and terrorist forms’. Marxist theory of class recognizes, and seeks to give conscious expressions to, the different forms of struggle – p ­ arliamentarism, trade union struggle; insurrection; mass strike; barricades, etc. The actual ways in which workers struggle can vary. They join unions, form reading groups and associations and political parties. The political perspectives influencing these can also vary (e.g. social democratic, revolutionary, etc.). The effect of workers’ struggle depends crucially on the theoretical form and political form (what kind of organization with that kind of theory/ideology) of these movements. Workers may exercise agency as individuals or in smaller groups or in large groups (e.g. national strikes), and their action may aim at getting some concessions within capitalism and/or undermining the

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rule of capital itself. Working class agency, to paraphrase Perry Anderson, can be small scale or large scale (nationally and globally) and can aim at making things better inside the system and/or can aim to transcend the system. Class struggle is the name for large-scale struggle to transcend the system. The struggle against racial and gender oppression must be dominantly fought on the basis of the struggle against the capitalist class – the propertyowning class – as a whole, whether sections of the class are male or female or whether they are blacks or whites, or high castes or low castes. Within that overall struggle, struggle against racial, gender and caste oppression may have its own autonomous dynamics. That is: apart from the struggle to abolish class, which will considerably underline material conditions for racial and gender oppression, an additional struggle may be necessary to fight against social oppression, and especially against the ideas/practices that support gender and race inequality/prejudice within the classes of direct producers that the system has helped produce. Class struggle is not the only type of conflict; there are other types of conflict, but class struggle is rooted in (if not reducible to) conflicts of interest stemming from the different relations that classes have, to the means of production and the control over surplus. So: struggle of the masses is immanent to the capitalist class relation. The struggle for economic and political reforms as a part of an overall process of struggle to end wage-slavery and replace the capitalist state is class struggle proper, which is based on the idea that interests of capitalists and those of the working masses cannot be reconciled. In contrast, the struggle for reforms only is bourgeois politics of the working class. The ultimate form of struggle is the revolution. Revolution is necessary because the ruling class will not give up power any other way and because it is a process through which masses alter their consciousness and ready themselves to become the agents of reconstruction of society. Revolution requires an economic-and-governmental crisis, and a disciplined working class willing to contest the capitalist class, under guidance from a party of the working class. The latter works through a variety of working class organizations such as unions, coops, reading cells, libraries, cultural organizations, etc. And revolution is always (to be) revolution in permanence: struggle against undemocratic aspects of society grows over into , and are a part of, a struggle for socialism. And, given the global character of the capitalist class relation and its law of value, this is a struggle which must spread from one country to another: capitalism can only be fully defeated if the struggle is international. It is the proletariat only which can lead such a struggle. It is the class in which the suffering of society is concentrated. It is the class that the capitalist class – ‘unknowingly’ – prepares politically. It is the class that is geographically concentrated, unlike small-scale producers.

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And it is the class which produces value and surplus value, so it has the power to stop that. The ideas presented asserted and emphasized in the book on class consciousness and class struggle go against the views of Analytical and Post-­ structuralist Marxists, of Harvey, and the like, including the views that show skepticism of large-scale class struggle against capitalism and for socialism led by the proletariat. More specifically, the political implications of class theory as articulated here differ from those of many Marxists, with respect to: who the revolutionary agent is, the necessity for revolutionary rupture, the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat, and so on. All ideas about the impotence of the working class to lead and bring about a revolution reflect the inadequacy not of this class but of those who refuse to see the power of the proletariat and who are searching for alternatives to the working class. Some find them in smaller groups, whose power to effect revolutionary changes remains unexplained. Others locate the agency at the level of the human. They forget that the interest of the working class, once again, is in not being exploited and dominated, and that the structure of exploitation and domination are beyond long-term significant reform, so the working class has an objective interest in revolution. Once again, it is the working class which produces value and surplus value and wealth for capital. So it only has the unique power to stop that production and annihilate capital, to expropriate the expropriator (through an alliance with semi-proletarian masses), although exactly how and when this potential can be realized is a different matter and is not automatic at all. A large number of prominent Marxists from the academia (e. g. Harvey, Panitch) are skeptical of the idea of proletarian class struggle or talk about it vaguely such as Zizek.6 Against the skepticism of those who think class struggle is not possible, a simple truth must be told: class struggle, in one form or another, happens all the time. It is immanent to capitalism. It happens, however inadequately, in all the spheres of capitalist class relation: the labour market, and against control over property and against exploitation, and against the capitalist state. If the proletarian struggle is not as effective as Marxists expect it to be, it is partly because of the political and intellectual struggle from the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces countering that struggle. That is the dialectics of class struggle. Much distrust of class analysis is unfortunately based on a misunderstanding of the working class unity and agency: the working class is fragmented, and 6 ‘I am not preaching return to simple old notions of class struggle and socialist revolution’ (Zizek, 2000: 352).

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therefore it does not exist (and therefore, class analysis is dead). All that Marxist theory claims is that common class situation and crises and other tendencies of capitalism create the possibility for a working class unity. Working class unity is not a finished product. It is an uneven process, historically and geographically. The Marx of the Manifesto was unrealistically sanguine about capitalism contributing towards the racial and ethnic homogenization of workers across national spaces. But a tendency as a tendency, that is often realized (as expressed in the form of waves of struggle), it is true. In a given time and place the working class is spatially and socially divided in part due to capitalist class strategies and due to the socio-spatial variation in working conditions caused by capitalism. A disunited working class is still the working class. It is real. It exists. It fights. For the working class to be the central force of change and a central interpretive concept and for it to be even recognized as being in existence, it does not have to be 100% united. A fractured table is a table. Skepticism about the power of the working class, and therefore of the power of class itself as a concept, is a part of a specific form of theorizing the (main contradiction in) capitalist class society, as we have seen, especially, in Chapter 8. Harvey’s idea that accumulation by dispossession is the dominant form of capitalism and therefore the contradiction between the dispossessor and the disposed, and not the contradiction between capital and labour, is the main contradiction, has important implication for theory and practice of class struggle. It is useful to quote him again: ‘The tendency in left thinking is to privilege the labour market and the workplace as the twin central domains of class struggle’ (Harvey, 2014: 66–67). He writes that Left’s overemphasis on workplace struggle has been ‘damaging to a full-blooded revolutionary search for an alternative to capital and hence, to capitalism’ (2014: 69). What is needed is ‘a broader notion of an alliance of forces in which the conventional proletariat is an important element, but not necessarily an element that has a leadership role’ (Harvey and Rivera, 2010). I have repeatedly said that Harvey’s politics – like that of many other Marxists – is mainly anti-neoliberalism (or Polanyian). If capital-labour contradiction is not the main contradiction, then the stress on working class as a revolutionary agent is diluted as is the very idea of a revolutionary project against the multi-scalar relation of capitalist production and exploitation. There are Marxists who are skeptical of the need for a specifically working class party, which maintains its political independence vis a vis bourgeois and petty bourgeois forces. In this context, consider Radice, who a few years ago co-edited a book on permanent revolution. Showing his admiration for ‘the principles of citizenship and democracy that drove the pursuit of social justice in centuries past’, he says:

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there must be no more easy dismissal of ‘bourgeois democracy’, or insistence that enlightenment can only be brought to ‘the masses’ by a party élite. How many more attempts will be made to establish parties on the left in pursuit of the holy grail of a revolutionary politics that will brook no compromise with bourgeois politics? If we accept that bridges exist in dayto-day life that can help us to develop a popular and powerful movement for socialism, then there is nothing to be lost by working within existing organizations, whether parties, unions or social movements of all kinds. Given the compromises that we are forced to make every day of our lives, surely we can live with compromises in our political work; in many countries we have opportunities to do this in social democratic or green parties in which we will find people who share some vision of a better world. radice, 2014: 13

Or when a party is needed, it is not quite clear what it should be doing: developing the kind of party that concentrates on education; that a­ ttempts (by way of the priorities chosen, forms of struggle adopted, ­alliances developed) to structure struggles so demystification and confidence are in fact the more likely outcome; and that is committed, as ­Barker puts it, to ‘a ruthless objectivity about itself [and] its own strengths and weaknesses. panitch and gindin, 2006: 129

Elsewhere, Panitch makes a similar point: What has always been missing – and this is now strongly felt by many social movement leaders themselves – is something that would be more than the sum of the parts, something which the Social Democratic and Communist parties did partly provide in their heyday… These include providing activists with a strategic, ideological and educational vehicle; a political home which is open to individuals to enter (rather than restricted, as today’s social movement networking is, to representatives of groups); a political community which explicitly seeks to transcend particularistic identities while supporting and building on the struggles they generate. leys and panitch, 1998: 22–23

To argue for a party of the working class to provide education to workers: no Marxist can disagree. But the question is: the party to do what else other than

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educating? And educating for what purpose, and what kind of education? Unless the education encourages the masses to reject conservative and liberal thinking, social democracy of right or left version, Stalinism, the idea of opportunistic alliances, bourgeois trade unionism, and so on, the education to be delivered by the party is not of much use. Unless the party ideologically and politically prepares the masses to smash the capitalist state and establish a new state under its democratic control in order to stop the overthrown classes from coming back, and educates the small-scale producers about communism, what is the value of the party? Lenin and Luxemburg agreed that capitalism itself and the bourgeois state as well exert a powerful centralising influence on modern society, and that it is in turn absolutely illusory to think that this centralised state power can be gradually dismantled. A centralized party to concentrate proletarian political energies is necessary. I have defended as well the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat in Chapter 12 (although I prefer political hegemony to dictatorship, as a word). This concept has been subjected to much criticism, so I should return to this briefly. Panitch and Gindin, who appear to be critical of Lebowitz for characterising ‘social democracy in the passing and dismissive terms’ then turn their critical gaze towards dictatorship of the proletariat: The limitations of the concept were demonstrated by a good number of the leading Marxists political theorists of Lebowitz’s generation and disposition over two decades ago. It is impossible to recap that argument here, but suffice to say, in Marx no less than in his Leninist followers, most of the difficult questions concerning taking state power in the name of the working class are swept under the carpet by the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. panitch and gindin, 2006: 131

They go on to add: Nor does the concept address the real problem that the reason the ruling class remains such a threat is in large part because… it still has considerable support in the former subordinate classes – who then would also need to be suppressed. Relatedly, the dictatorship of the proletariat is of little help in thinking through the complex issues of democracy within the working class (p. 132). They further add that ‘The concept of smashing the state is a worn-out concept’ (Panitch and Gindin, 2015: 19), and that the concept of dual power is not

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useful and that fighting for democratic public institutions which will meet collective needs for collectively provided goods and services is where the focus should be (p. 19). They say that the goal is not to turn the state into a working class instrument but to use it to serve the entire humanity in a democratic socialist system (p. 19). In other words, people can put enough pressure including via public sector unions and the like, to convert the present state into a state in a democratic socialist system. In such a system, banks will become public utilities, they add. What all this suggests is: avoid the clumsy topic of proletarian power and dictatorship – political hegemony – of the masses. Tabak says that ‘the proletarian dictatorship should not be interpreted as a state-form’ (Tabak, 2000: 334): The state, in its modern, bureaucratic formulation, cannot emancipate the working class. On the contrary, the state becomes detrimental to the transition to communism. For this reason, the proletariat needs to shatter the state during the revolution (ibid.). Much can be said in response. But briefly: the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat is that the proletariat must shatter the capitalist state, and establish its own for the transitional period, during which it continues the class struggle against the overthrown classes and begins the positive act of construction of a new society. This act of construction includes education of small-scale producers, who as Panitch and Gindin say rightly, and Lenin always recognized, are a major source of support for the bourgeoisie, about the virtues of collective production and about communism. Marxists are against small-scale production but not against small-scale producers as people. Of course, no one will oppose the idea that coercive function of the proletarian dictatorship ‘must be subordinate to the positive, constructive means and functions of the proletarian rule, which are propelled by the aim of building communism’ (Tabak, 2000: 354). If what is called the dictatorship of the proletariat has to perform the positive function, if it has to remain ‘a solid political alternative to what exists now’ and to place ‘human need, satisfaction, and freedom above the needs of capital and special interests of ever-growing bureaucracies and the bourgeoisie’ (p. 355), then that dictatorship has to take the form of a transitional state. Yes, it is true that ‘For Marx, the project of building a communist society involves the elimination of both capitalist and bureaucratic elements from all spheres of life’ (p.355). That is also the view of Lenin and Trotsky, for example. But to reach that state, the proletarian needs a state of its own, temporarily. This is a stage – which Bensaid describes as proletarian state

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of exception – that is to be replaced as quickly as possible; this stage represents the withering away of the state (Bensaid, 2006; para 3–4). How long that state exists and how coercive it becomes relative to the bourgeoisie depends on the counter-revolutionary ideology and resistance of that class (i.e. classs struggle from above) in a country, and the success/failure of revolution, internationally. A fundamental tenet of Marxism is that the leading role of politics (as concentrated economics) ‘in the transition to socialism rests at the heart – and expresses the contradictions – of the socialist project, and it cannot be easily abandoned even as its concrete meaning must be reassessed’ (Ehrenberg, 1995: 461). The capitalist class developed its economic power in the womb of feudal class society and then won political power to further consolidate economic power. The reverse is the case with the proletariat. It has to gain political ­power – state power – in order to gain lasting economic power. The seizure of political power and subsequent use of it required suppressing the bourgeoisie and breaking its state. When all is said and done, this is the core of the Marxist theory of the revolutionary state and of socialist democracy. ehrenberg, 1995: 459

Since the time Marx or Lenin wrote about the leading role of politics in constructing socialism, Capitalism has not undergone some sort of miraculous transformation [in its fundamentals]…its deeply antidemocratic contradictions and driving forces are the same as they have always been and Lenin’s elaboration of Marx’s theory of the state still describes the democratic and revolutionary politics of the only alternative to it. Given the demonstrable, dramatic and destructive use of political power by a highly organized and conscious bourgeoisie during the present period, it is an odd time indeed to be claiming that the state and the politics of social class are no longer relevant to the democratic and socialist project of the left (ibid.: 461–462). It is hardly easy to describe the content of these lines better than the way the author writes. Overall, the state of theoretical discussion on class among Marxists could be much richer. This discussion, in the form that it exists, reminds one of Lenin’s criticisms of Bernsteinian revisionism. Changing his lines to the present tense one may paraphrase Lenin (1977a: 96):

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Denied … [is] the fact of growing impoverishment, the process of proletarianisation, and the intensification of capitalist contradictions [crisis]; the very concept, ‘ultimate aim’ [revolutionary rupture], … [is] declared to be unsound, and the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat … [is] completely rejected. Denied … [is] the antithesis in principle between liberalism and socialism. Denied … [is] the theory of the class struggle, on the alleged grounds that it could not be applied to a strictly democratic society governed according to the will of the majority, etc. Lenin would add: Denied is the preeminent role of the proletariat in leading a revolutionary onslaught against capitalism. Denied is the absolutely necessary role of a disciplined and democratically organized working class party in educating the masses, organizing them on the basis of demands for obtaining and deepening democratic rights and immediate economic concessions/benefits, as a part of the fight for going beyond the class society and its wage-slavery, and preparing them for a revolution at multiple geographical scales. Denied is the usefulness of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Denied also is the fact that 1917 has any positive lessons to offer to Marxists. And so on. Lenin was emphatic about this: for an approach to society to be Marxist it is not sufficient that it talks about the society being class-divided or to talk about the logic of the operation of the class relation and its attendant accumulation projects or that there is class struggle, overt or covert, potential or actual. All these are necessary elements but not sufficient. I ended the introduction to the book with this theme. It is best to end the book with these fine lines from Vladimir Lenin, a most innovating mind with respect to theory and practice of class, a mind that haunts the vast majority of so-called Marxists, a soul to be exorcised eternally. The haunted Marxists who are as skeptical of traditional Marxism’s class theory and the power of the working class itself as Lenin would be of theirs. Lenin wrote these lines in his State revolution: It is often said and written that the main point in Marx’s theory is the class struggle. But this is wrong. And this wrong notion very often results in an opportunist distortion of Marxism and its falsification in a spirit acceptable to the bourgeoisie. For the theory of the class struggle was created not by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx, and, generally speaking, it is acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Those who recognize only the class struggle are not yet Marxists; they may be found to be still within the bounds of bourgeois thinking and bourgeois politics. To confine Marxism to the theory of the class struggle means curtailing Marxism, distorting it, reducing it to something acceptable to the bourgeoisie. Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the

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dictatorship of the proletariat. That is what constitutes the most profound distinction between the Marxist and the ordinary petty (as well as big) bourgeois. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism should be tested. And it is not surprising that when … the working class [encounters] face to face with this question as a practical issue, not only all the opportunists and reformists, but all the ….people who vacillate between reformism and Marxism…prove to be miserable philistines and petty-bourgeois democrats repudiating the dictatorship of the proletariat. (1977d: 35–36)

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Index Aboriginal 105, 260, 305, 350, 358, 362 Abstract, to 10, 11, 24, 32, 34, 43, 45, 72, 98, 114, 120, 121, 124, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 145, 147, 155, 156, 158, 162, 169, 176, 177, 183, 186, 189, 190, 204, 205, 206, 207, 211, 212, 221, 222, 247, 249, 250, 251, 252, 265, 266, 273, 274, 280, 281, 288, 291, 301, 302, 307, 313, 318, 319, 322, 325, 329, 333, 335, 342, 345, 360, 375, 391, 398, 416, 424, 425, 426, 474, 475, 481, 512, 513, 572, 584, 585, 590, 593, 594, 599, 613, 618, 619. See also Abstraction; Abstract mechanism Abstraction 7, 19, 112, 119, 129, 132, 175, 176, 179, 183, 189, 190, 191, 203, 204, 206, 207, 212, 213, 221, 222, 236, 244, 246, 272, 299, 320, 332, 335, 353, 354, 376, 384, 391, 453, 467, 481, 540, 541, 581, 591, 609 Abstract labor 114, 120, 177, 301 Abstract mechanism 16, 132, 212, 247, 249, 250, 251, 584, 585 Academia/academic world 1, 3, 126, 164, 532, 626 Accumulation/accumulate 12, 16, 18, 19, 47, 48, 74, 79, 95, 101, 102, 103, 104, 113, 120, 129, 130, 133, 154, 157, 168, 170, 180, 191, 212, 243, 245, 247, 249, 250, 251, 260, 261, 263, 264, 265, 266, 272, 273, 279, 281, 283, 287, 294, 298, 299, 303, 304, 308, 310, 312, 313, 315, 316, 317, 318, 320, 322, 324, 325, 331, 342, 343, 344, 346, 351, 354, 356, 357, 358, 359, 361, 362, 363, 364, 367, 368, 369, 370, 371, 372, 373, 374, 375, 376, 377, 378, 380, 381, 383, 384, 386, 387, 388, 389, 390, 393, 394, 395, 396, 400, 409, 411, 415, 422, 423, 424, 425, 427, 439, 444, 451, 455, 457, 484, 493, 497, 522, 540, 557, 558, 559, 560, 570, 572, 573, 575, 584, 585, 588, 589, 590, 591, 592, 593, 594, 595, 599, 600, 605, 606, 607, 609, 610, 611, 612, 616, 627, 632. See also Accumulation by dispossession; Accumulation by exploitation; Capitalist accumulation; Centalization; Concentration Accumulation by dispossession 287, 342, 363, 367, 370, 371, 372, 373, 374,

375, 376, 388, 389, 390, 484, 557, 558, 559, 560, 611, 627. See also Primitive accumulation Advanced capitalism/advanced countries/­ advanced capitalist countries 7, 8, 59, 72, 136, 144, 145, 176, 302, 304, 306, 331, 332, 340, 342, 343, 344, 347, 350, 353, 354, 359, 360, 361, 362, 365, 366, 372, 374, 384, 385, 389, 390, 394, 397, 445, 501, 534, 549, 567, 600, 609, 610, 612, 613 Agamben, G. 145, 407 Agency/agent 10, 12, 34, 42, 43, 49, 52, 58, 62, 65, 76, 83, 85, 87, 88, 90, 98, 99, 105, 108, 110, 112, 128, 134, 135, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145, 147, 153, 166, 171, 172, 177, 187, 188, 189, 200, 201, 202, 213, 236, 248, 267, 271, 281, 283, 284, 318, 323, 324, 325, 354, 355, 368, 419, 420, 428, 432, 435, 445, 478, 484, 486, 503, 510, 516, 536, 556, 559, 560, 561, 563, 564, 568, 574, 575, 580, 585, 594, 624, 625, 626, 627 Alienation/alienated/alien 13, 45, 65, 71, 114, 128, 148, 209, 213, 231, 244, 259, 272, 278, 279, 280, 281, 283, 284, 299, 307, 312, 315, 379, 393, 397, 406, 408, 437, 440, 455, 468, 476, 480, 497, 504, 567, 583, 588, 606 Althusser, L. 10, 12, 74, 140, 179, 186, 193, 197, 242, 244, 441, 561 Amin, S. 303, 385 Analytical Marxism/Analytical Marxist theory, defined 9, 10, 12, 16, 18, 22, 23, 24, 60, 74, 106, 111, 112, 114, 115, 117, 120, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129, 132, 135, 136, 139, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 152, 153, 156, 159, 161, 164, 165, 166, 169, 172, 240, 281, 299, 402, 416, 472, 473, 556, 566, 569, 570, 571, 572, 573, 574, 578 Anarchism/Anarchist 153, 413, 486, 538, 546, 547. See also Post-structuralism Anderson, P. 140, 356, 564, 625 Antagonism/antagonistic relation 2, 3, 4, 8, 16, 24, 26, 32, 45, 50, 51, 61, 62, 66, 67, 93, 107, 109, 118, 121, 136, 141, 143, 153, 156, 162, 170, 180, 198, 199, 201, 210, 212, 218,

Index 221, 223, 224, 226, 239, 243, 244, 247, 249, 250, 271, 274, 283, 285, 286, 294, 295, 310, 330, 336, 391, 395, 405, 415, 417, 428, 445, 446, 456, 459, 466, 468, 472, 479, 482, 484, 486, 488, 490, 493, 501, 513, 515, 520, 525, 547, 556, 562, 582, 583, 584, 585, 586, 599, 600, 603, 613, 616, 617, 621, 623. See also Contradiction Anti-capitalism/anti-capitalist 13, 38, 48, 54, 58, 133, 134, 136, 138, 146, 149, 172, 196, 345, 381, 431, 447, 449, 450, 519, 544, 549, 550, 559, 576 Anti-essentialism/anti-essentialist 9, 18, 74, 75, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 98, 100, 103, 105, 109, 110, 111, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 134, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 566, 567, 568, 569, 570, 571, 573, 574, 578 Appearance 181, 188, 189, 190, 192, 238, 242, 243, 256, 268, 279, 327, 348, 406, 418, 420, 459, 474, 507, 582, 596, 619 Asset 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38, 47, 48, 50, 53, 54, 59, 60, 61, 63, 68, 112, 113, 115, 121, 122, 123, 129, 134, 138, 162, 164, 165, 219, 318, 371, 373, 569, 570, 571. See also Means of production; Productive forces; Property Authority 31, 36, 40, 48, 53, 90, 92, 113, 114, 126, 258, 270, 486, 498, 544, 555. See also Power Autonomy 4, 20, 36, 71, 100, 222, 227, 230, 244, 251, 271, 278, 279, 289, 296, 299, 329, 398, 481, 551, 566, 582, 598 Auxiliary attributes of class 286. See also Culture; Habit Backward capitalism 176, 205, 379, 607. See also Advanced capitalism; Subsumption of labour Backwardness 137, 196, 341, 382, 605, 608, 609, 612 Banaji, J. 326, 344, 355, 367, 368, 369, 370, 385, 596 Bensaid, D. 11, 12, 168, 221, 330, 439, 599, 630, 631 Bhaduri, A. 344 Block, F. 8, 324, 325, 412, 595, 615

663 Body/bodies/bodily/bodyliness/body-mind complex/bodily needs 9, 10, 16, 69, 76, 85, 86, 120, 122, 126, 139, 142, 144, 153, 170, 182, 183, 186, 200, 205, 206, 208, 209, 211, 214, 223, 229, 246, 264, 265, 269, 273, 277, 280, 295, 301, 326, 327, 328, 332, 362, 365, 399, 410, 489, 495, 524, 526, 568, 573, 583, 584, 597, 598, 614. See also Health; Injuries; Needs Bourdieu, P. 4, 263, 272, 318, 319, 330, 590 Bourgeois class/bourgeoisie 2, 3, 13, 22, 23, 32, 37, 39, 40, 47, 48, 58, 71, 123, 133, 136, 137, 138, 146, 147, 148, 159, 173, 174, 206, 249, 251, 261, 282, 283, 285, 286, 288, 289, 290, 292, 295, 303, 304, 310, 316, 322, 329, 330, 340, 365, 367, 394, 395, 396, 397, 401, 402, 404, 405, 406, 407, 408, 411, 414, 417, 419, 421, 423, 430, 431, 433, 435, 436, 438, 439, 441, 442, 443, 444, 445, 449, 455, 466, 469, 474, 476, 477, 483, 486, 489, 490, 493, 496, 499, 500, 501, 504, 505, 506, 507, 510, 511, 512, 514, 516, 523, 524, 525, 528, 529, 534, 535, 536, 537, 538, 539, 540, 542, 543, 545, 546, 547, 548, 551, 552, 579, 585, 588, 598, 602, 615, 617, 618, 620, 631, 632, 630 Brass, T. 257, 326, 348, 363, 373, 376, 385, 485, 486, 596 Brenner, R. 65, 229, 323, 342, 343, 344, 354, 366, 373, 381, 385, 608 Britain 3, 4, 8, 309, 346 Buffet, W. 3, 9, 21, 484 Bukharin error, the 329 Burawoy, M. 149, 324, 385, 575, 594 Bureaucracy/Bureaucrat/Bureaucratic 2, 28, 30, 31, 33, 37, 38, 40, 48, 54, 55, 59, 63, 82, 103, 113, 115, 117, 118, 134, 135, 136, 137, 140, 146, 147, 165, 357, 403, 404, 408, 409, 410, 429, 435, 443, 478, 485, 486, 496, 512, 574, 614, 630 Callinicos, A. 90, 140, 143, 175, 196, 305, 360, 375 Capital ruralisation of 387 urbanization of 387, 500 Capitalism as a cause of under-development 381–383 definition not settled 340, 378, 379

664 Capitalist class 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23, 29, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 45, 60, 65, 66, 67, 71, 78, 79, 81, 82, 89, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 102, 106, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 120, 121, 124, 125, 128, 129, 132, 133, 134, 135, 139, 140, 146, 149, 151, 152, 157, 158, 161, 164, 166, 167, 173, 174, 178, 191, 198, 204, 205, 206, 207, 213, 225, 229, 231, 232, 241, 242, 245, 246, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 280, 281, 282, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327, 328, 330, 332, 333, 334, 335, 336, 337, 338, 340, 341, 342, 343, 344, 345, 346, 347, 349, 351, 352, 353, 354, 356, 359, 360, 362, 363, 364, 370, 371, 374, 375, 376, 377, 380, 384, 385, 387, 388, 389, 390, 391, 392, 393, 394, 395, 396, 397, 398, 399, 400, 402, 403, 405, 406, 409, 410, 411, 412, 413, 415, 417, 418, 419, 420, 421, 422, 423, 424, 425, 426, 427, 430, 436, 437, 438, 439, 441, 442, 444, 445, 446, 447, 450, 455, 456, 457, 458, 459, 461, 468, 471, 472, 474, 475, 477, 478, 480, 483, 484, 485, 486, 487, 488, 493, 494, 495, 497, 498, 499, 500, 501, 502, 503, 504, 505, 509, 510, 511, 512, 515, 522, 526, 527, 528, 533, 536, 537, 539, 540, 541, 543, 544, 547, 548, 554, 555, 557, 559, 560, 561, 562, 564, 567, 569, 570, 571, 574, 575, 576, 577, 578, 581, 583, 585, 586, 587, 588, 589, 590, 591, 592, 593, 594, 595, 596, 597, 598, 599, 600, 601, 603, 604, 605, 606, 607, 608, 609, 610, 611, 612, 613, 614, 615, 616, 617, 618, 619, 620, 621, 622, 623, 625, 626, 627, 631. See also Bourgeois class/ bourgeoisie Capitalist labour process 65, 97, 267, 317, 349, 411, 589 Capitalist private property 19, 147, 166, 181, 231, 259, 260, 315, 317, 339, 389, 392, 393, 413, 526, 540, 561, 588, 589

Index Carchedi, G. 113, 116, 120, 125, 175, 191 Caste 304, 305, 332, 335, 337, 381, 386, 388, 429, 458, 478, 504, 564, 599, 600, 601, 603, 604, 610, 625 Centralization 160, 173, 500, 526, 576, 577. See also Accumulation; Class differentiation; Concentration Chaotic concept/conception 206, 320, 373, 391, 591. See also Abstraction Chibber, V. 5, 7, 76, 121, 215, 269, 484 Child/children 27, 40, 41, 60, 84, 93, 96, 103, 117, 119, 136, 145, 217, 237, 296, 306, 311, 328, 332, 362, 462, 490, 495, 598 China 142, 366, 372, 376 Circulation 79, 121, 130, 170, 253, 276, 277, 278, 297, 318, 326, 327, 424, 425, 559, 573, 596 Cities/towns 271, 287, 294, 295, 297, 336, 357, 450, 452, 470, 489, 500, 502, 504, 520, 542, 604. See also Capital, ruralisation of; Capital, urbanization of; Geography; Geographical Civil society 86, 146, 152, 161, 391, 432, 578 Class alliance 23, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 72, 84, 88, 381, 384, 567, 609 differentiation 16, 173, 251, 261, 316, 373, 375, 376, 380, 384, 390, 576, 586, 588, 608, 609, 612 fraction(s)/strata 24, 35, 41, 123, 128, 129, 130, 214, 232, 241, 244, 245, 246, 289, 293, 300, 330, 335, 336, 582, 583, 584, 599, 603 identity 93, 94, 107, 143, 465, 472, 617 interest/s 23, 24, 37, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 58, 65, 72, 112, 130, 161, 163, 173, 193, 203, 222, 224, 236, 239, 313, 404, 405, 406, 415, 416, 417, 429, 434, 442, 445, 451, 459, 465, 468, 471, 472, 473, 479, 484, 503, 536, 544, 547, 562, 567, 578, 586, 616, 617 as large groups of people 138, 139, 173, 471, 576, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 268, 471, 576 location (in Analytical Marxism) 11, 23, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 46, 47, 48, 52, 53, 60, 61, 62, 70, 71, 72, 94, 567

Index mobility 327, 597 polarization 260, 330, 537, 562, 563 politics 3, 6, 16, 65, 68, 76, 98, 101, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 111, 130, 151, 152, 302, 390, 484, 524, 560, 565, 569, 612, 616 primacy of (also significance of class) 11, 17, 112, 125, 332, 503 process 70, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 100, 101, 104, 106, 108, 110, 118, 126, 128, 131, 132, 139, 151, 228, 246, 264, 292, 302, 304, 314, 316, 321, 332, 472, 564, 568, 584, 587, 588, 592, 600, 618 structure 4, 5, 11, 22, 23, 24, 34, 36, 37, 39, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 51, 52, 53, 63, 64, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 77, 82, 92, 102, 111, 116, 130, 133, 143, 147, 186, 187, 216, 221, 232, 240, 241, 295, 409, 472, 566, 613, 617 Classless/classlessness 2, 8, 18, 21, 64, 66, 67, 68, 91, 118, 213, 247, 248, 315, 331, 339, 414, 457, 459, 546, 584, 585, 588, 605, 616 Classness 34, 55, 64, 67, 68, 73, 139, 204, 241, 402, 410, 525, 548, 567, 613 Cliff, T. 462, 466 Coercion/coercive/forcible methods 17, 20, 21, 29, 33, 45, 50, 62, 63, 64, 67, 142, 145, 158, 207, 226, 227, 228, 229, 232, 240, 243, 256, 268, 269, 271, 281, 322, 325, 326, 344, 346, 350, 351, 361, 367, 373, 376, 378, 380, 381, 391, 392, 393, 394, 395, 396, 397, 403, 404, 406, 407, 408, 410, 411, 424, 433, 434, 435, 441, 442, 457, 491, 492, 504, 513, 548, 557, 593, 595, 596, 606, 608, 614, 615, 630, 631 Collective action 4, 18, 43, 44, 47, 51, 55, 99, 100, 109, 356, 498, 553, 557 Collective labour 327, 337, 494, 591, 604 Collier, A. 175, 182 Combined development 179, 205, 380, 382 Command over labour 270, 271. See also Authority; Despotism/despotic Commodity/commodities 7, 19, 23, 29, 33, 35, 65, 77, 79, 81, 82, 84, 92, 95, 97, 121, 122, 124, 129, 131, 141, 145, 158, 167, 173, 176, 177, 203, 212, 229, 231, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 257, 258, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 267, 268, 272, 273, 274, 275,

665 276, 277, 278, 280, 281, 282, 284, 285, 287, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 300, 301, 302, 303, 307, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 326, 327, 328, 329, 330, 331, 336, 342, 343, 344, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 351, 352, 359, 367, 369, 370, 371, 376, 377, 379, 380, 381, 383, 385, 387, 388, 394, 397, 405, 417, 418, 419, 420, 421, 422, 423, 434, 435, 437, 439, 440, 442, 451, 457, 472, 474, 476, 477, 478, 481, 486, 494, 514, 518, 548, 560, 576, 587, 588, 589, 590, 591, 592, 593, 595, 596, 597, 598, 603, 606, 607, 609, 610, 611, 617, 618, 621, 622 Commodity fetishism 65, 421, 434, 435, 437, 440, 451, 472, 477, 478, 617, 621. See also Capital fetishism Commodity-form 177, 252, 253, 258, 323, 420, 592 Commodity production 95, 97, 121, 158, 203, 285, 290, 292, 293, 330, 331, 344, 370, 377, 383, 385, 423, 476, 606, 609, 610 Communal process 78, 86, 94, 96, 97, 101, 106, 110, 119, 151, 261, 263, 287, 302, 315, 316, 321, 339, 361, 371, 372, 397, 432, 531, 536, 568, 588, 592 Communism 8, 9, 55, 63, 66, 119, 146, 148, 154, 159, 164, 170, 217, 231, 232, 235, 253, 255, 288, 334, 338, 394, 437, 507, 514, 520, 525, 545, 552, 555, 570, 605, 629, 630. See also Socialism Competition/competitor 6, 44, 61, 65, 79, 82, 93, 128, 132, 142, 154, 158, 160, 163, 225, 232, 244, 246, 253, 293, 295, 298, 300, 301, 308, 343, 346, 348, 352, 354, 360, 361, 362, 365, 373, 378, 383, 388, 394, 398, 401, 404, 424, 444, 445, 457, 488, 490, 495, 496, 497, 499, 501, 502, 503, 504, 505, 542, 562, 577, 583, 584 Concentration 53, 160, 163, 172, 173, 189, 207, 355, 365, 381, 384, 423, 438, 450, 454, 489, 500, 502, 527, 542, 576, 577, 609. See also Centralization Concrete 11, 17, 20, 24, 32, 36, 42, 43, 47, 63, 71, 72, 114, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 151, 162, 169, 172, 176, 177, 178, 188, 189, 190, 192, 195, 198, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 209, 211, 212, 225, 226, 246, 250, 251, 257,

666 285, 288, 289, 294, 300, 302, 304, 328, 329, 330, 332, 335, 358, 376, 380, 387, 392, 415, 422, 442, 446, 449, 459, 460, 466, 493, 512, 530, 532, 564, 566, 567, 584, 585, 586, 598, 599, 603, 607, 610, 616, 620, 631 Condition of existence 77, 79, 80, 90, 93, 244, 582 Conflict 1, 4, 11, 32, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 61, 62, 67, 68, 70, 82, 84, 88, 109, 130, 133, 187, 210, 212, 224, 226, 234, 239, 244, 247, 290, 313, 326, 358, 398, 406, 416, 419, 422, 423, 452, 465, 473, 483, 506, 522, 527, 564, 581, 582, 583, 586, 625 Consciousness false 46, 89, 209, 426, 431, 437, 439, 440, 441, 471, 475, 617, 619 (see also ­Illusion; Ideology, ideological) socialist form of (class consciousness proper) 4, 7, 16, 20, 21, 22, 23, 42, 45, 46, 52, 53, 141, 186, 202, 204, 209, 212, 213, 224, 236, 237, 238, 243, 245, 247, 248, 415, 416, 417, 419, 420, 421, 422, 427, 428, 429, 430, 431, 432, 433, 434, 435, 436, 437, 438, 439, 441, 442, 443, 444, 445, 446, 447, 448, 449, 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, 455, 456, 457, 458, 459, 460, 461, 462, 463, 464, 465, 466, 467, 468, 469, 472, 473, 475, 476, 477, 478, 479, 480, 481, 482, 483, 488, 502, 503, 504, 509, 510, 513, 519, 525, 526, 529, 531, 532, 533, 544, 550, 551, 553, 558, 561, 562, 581, 582, 583, 584, 585, 616, 617, 619, 620, 621, 622, 623 strata 451 trade union form of (also elementary or spontaneous consciousness) 141, 204,  430, 431, 433, 434, 435, 436, 440, 445, 448, 449, 462, 479, 481, 482, 621, 622 Consumer/consumer market 6, 46, 96, 119, 141, 170, 279, 286, 287, 300, 324, 329, 363, 387, 440, 498, 573, 594, 598, 611 Consumption 6, 42, 43, 51, 67, 78, 82, 93, 116, 119, 137, 155, 194, 217, 219, 257, 273, 276, 279, 281, 297, 300, 315, 328, 346, 348, 359, 363, 364, 371, 374, 388, 400, 424, 432, 494, 597 Contradiction 8, 10, 11, 12, 20, 33, 83, 91, 93, 115, 121, 125, 126, 141, 157, 162, 170, 173, 179, 180, 181, 186, 187, 197, 199, 200, 201, 202,

Index 203, 208, 210, 213, 227, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 299, 316, 341, 342, 345, 367, 374, 383, 389, 405, 406, 407, 409, 416, 433, 438, 442, 456, 457, 459, 460, 462, 463, 466, 479, 480, 481, 483, 495, 496, 503, 509, 510, 526, 527, 541, 556, 557, 558, 562, 570, 573, 575, 576, 577, 580, 581, 582, 583, 585, 588, 605, 611, 612, 627, 631, 632 Control/control over 8, 13, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 34, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 43, 45, 48, 51, 53, 54, 55, 60, 61, 62, 64, 68, 69, 70, 71, 80, 81, 90, 91, 98, 101, 102, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 124, 133, 134, 136, 138, 146, 147, 148, 149, 153, 164, 165, 167, 174, 187, 200, 203, 213, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 223, 224, 225, 226, 232, 239, 240, 241, 242, 244, 245, 246, 250, 254, 255, 259, 261, 263, 266, 267, 269, 270, 272, 275, 277, 279, 280, 281, 282, 285, 288, 295, 296, 306, 307, 309, 312, 313, 316, 317, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 325, 334, 337, 348, 349, 350, 358, 360, 361, 367, 368, 369, 392, 395, 397, 400, 401, 402, 403, 405, 406, 408, 409, 410, 415, 417, 418, 419, 420, 425, 427, 432, 433, 436, 437, 439, 443, 447, 450, 474, 475, 478, 483, 486, 493, 496, 502, 503, 504, 505, 512, 531, 532, 546, 547, 548, 549, 560, 561, 563, 564, 566, 570, 576, 579, 580, 581, 583, 584, 585, 586, 587, 589, 590, 591, 592, 593, 595, 603, 604, 613, 614, 616, 618, 619, 623, 624, 625, 626, 627, 629. See also Power Corvee 29, 230 Counter-tendencies 289, 365 Control over production 20, 40, 136, 149, 174, 216, 245, 321, 323, 417, 425, 474, 475, 531, 561, 576, 583, 591, 593, 618, 619 Coops 59, 147, 154, 155, 329, 550, 574, 598, 625 Core countries 268, 361, 362, 505, 559 Cox, K. 151, 175, 176, 204, 253, 314, 317, 323, 399, 400, 502, 587 Credit/creditor 18, 80, 81, 100, 163, 286, 287, 324, 351, 372, 373, 420, 422, 515, 594 Crisis economic 19, 160, 166, 168, 173, 249, 305, 318, 374, 495, 496, 512, 526, 527, 572, 574, 576, 578 governmental 526, 527, 528, 550, 575, 625

Index Critical realism/realist 112, 175, 373 Criticism/critique/critical 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 37, 49, 55, 66, 68, 69, 70, 72, 74, 86, 87, 98, 101, 102, 105, 111, 112, 116, 123, 124, 132, 135, 138, 144, 148, 152, 155, 159, 160, 162, 164, 166, 167, 169, 170, 171, 173, 175, 179, 180, 181, 183, 187, 192, 195, 196, 197, 199, 211, 234, 237, 241, 249, 250, 263, 293, 324, 341, 342, 344, 345, 354, 373, 376, 377, 382, 385, 389, 402, 408, 412, 422, 435, 436, 456, 457, 466, 469, 470, 471, 505, 510, 513, 514, 540, 541, 546, 559, 566, 569, 570, 571, 573, 577, 578, 579, 595, 606, 608, 610, 629, 631 Croix 1, 221, 224, 225, 226, 385, 415 Death of class 5, 566 Death, premature (of workers) 5, 15, 16, 186, 255, 423, 455, 497, 523, 547, 566 Democracy/democratic 8, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 28, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 72, 91, 98, 105, 106, 119, 136, 138, 140, 147, 148, 149, 150, 152, 153, 157, 160, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171, 172, 174, 192, 196, 198, 232, 239, 321, 327, 334, 372, 389, 390, 391, 393, 399, 400, 401, 402, 403, 405, 406, 407, 408, 411, 413, 414, 434, 437, 441, 442, 468, 481, 484, 492, 493, 505, 507, 509, 511, 521, 523, 524, 533, 535, 546, 547, 548, 549, 550, 555, 558, 559, 562, 563, 565, 568, 571, 572, 573, 574, 576, 577, 592, 596, 600, 601, 602, 612, 615, 624, 625, 626, 627, 628, 629, 630, 631 De-proletarianization 261 Desire 24, 85, 87, 107, 108, 154, 157, 185, 187, 201, 202, 273, 292, 322, 422, 423, 424, 473, 498, 516, 581, 593 Despotism/despotic 270, 271, 395, 406, 413, 419, 420, 440, 474, 618. See also Authority Destitution 312. See also Lumpen proletariat Determination/determinism 43, 74, 75, 90, 100, 103, 110, 125, 126, 127, 151, 169, 172, 176, 189, 206, 207, 242, 298, 307, 326, 347, 416, 494, 566, 568, 569, 573, 576, 601. See also Cause/causality Development, stage of/level of 59, 114, 205, 206, 214, 224, 234, 242, 250, 266, 309, 320, 329, 389, 428, 503, 523, 529, 585, 591, 598

667 Dialectic(s)/dialectical 10, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 74, 114, 117, 118, 119, 127, 129, 132, 141, 144, 161, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 183, 184, 185, 187, 191, 192, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203, 208, 210, 212, 213, 237, 241, 246, 248, 249, 250, 252, 278, 282, 324, 345, 360, 364, 376, 381, 382, 384, 388, 415, 455, 456, 460, 472, 480, 484, 507, 540, 541, 560, 561, 574, 576, 578, 579, 580, 581, 584, 585, 594, 608, 609, 617, 626 Dialectical materialist 17, 192, 195, 196, 200, 203, 210, 237, 246, 456, 580, 584 Dictatorship of the capitalist class 270, 402, 558 of the proletariat 443, 534, 535, 537, 545, 546, 547, 548, 549, 626, 629, 630, 632, 633 Difference 1, 5, 14, 17, 27, 29, 43, 47, 50, 60, 69, 70, 74, 75, 83, 92, 97, 99, 101, 102, 103, 107, 108, 114, 117, 118, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 128, 129, 165, 166, 170, 175, 199, 200, 204, 207, 208, 210, 217, 219, 226, 227, 229, 230, 231, 232, 241, 244, 247, 250, 273, 274, 301, 302, 306, 330, 331, 332, 333, 334, 336, 337, 338, 345, 366, 378, 394, 399, 407, 421, 424, 450, 462, 484, 496, 502, 504, 506, 515, 523, 524, 534, 556, 563, 570, 573, 582, 586, 599, 600, 602, 603, 604, 606, 624 Direct producer 76, 78, 118, 176, 200, 213, 216, 217, 218, 223, 224, 225, 226, 228, 229, 230, 231, 240, 242, 259, 261, 282, 287, 290, 293, 294, 306, 315, 316, 321, 328, 338, 343, 344, 349, 350, 351, 369, 378, 385, 394, 395, 413, 455, 564, 581, 588, 592, 605, 611, 625 Discipline 81, 95, 143, 144, 229, 257, 270, 271, 280, 296, 305, 317, 356, 357, 358, 379, 395, 396, 436, 485, 486, 505, 511, 527, 529, 538, 547, 624, 632 Distribution of means of production 116, 219, 281, 318, 590 Distribution/distributive politics 106, 150, 156, 440 Division of labour 113, 119, 129, 184, 207, 250, 251, 257, 292, 294, 296, 298, 329, 330, 398, 406, 425, 475, 476, 598, 599, 619 Domestic labour 94, 252, 335 Domination 4, 23, 25, 26, 27, 37, 55, 60, 61, 62, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 109, 111, 225, 240,

668 242, 254, 263, 270, 277, 303, 323, 360, 367, 398, 402, 404, 410, 413, 429, 430, 455, 464, 466, 467, 479, 482, 486, 504, 516, 523, 543, 550, 560, 566, 594, 613, 626 Dos Santos, T. 221, 415, 416, 459, 472, 477, 479, 480, 482 Draper, H. 272, 442 Dull economic compulsion of the working class 273, 277, 320, 403, 451, 591 Dumenil, G. 325, 595 Eagleton, T. 11, 143, 416, 470 Economic growth 105, 282, 283, 310, 343, 619 Education (including education in a context of class relations) 40, 50, 77, 80, 81, 82, 124, 168, 198, 261, 287, 288, 298, 305, 312, 318, 327, 330, 334, 338, 372, 374, 404, 410, 418, 438, 448, 450, 451, 452, 457, 469, 470, 474, 485, 498, 501, 512, 519, 523, 531, 533, 552, 558, 590, 596, 599, 603, 605, 614, 618, 628, 629, 630 Election/electoral 8, 9, 209, 406, 442, 443, 484, 507, 517, 523, 524, 602 Elster, J. 172, 222, 473, 557 Emergence 84, 238, 293, 298, 316, 389, 395, 456, 529, 563, 624 England 21, 306, 354, 534 Enjoyment 279, 422, 423 Environment/environmental/ecological/­ nature/natural 6, 12, 18, 20, 31, 32, 37, 45, 52, 67, 68, 76, 90, 91, 92, 95, 98, 102, 104, 115, 119, 122, 124, 129, 152, 153, 156, 157, 160, 161, 162, 167, 168, 172, 177, 178, 182, 183, 184, 187, 194, 197, 200, 205, 206, 208, 209, 210, 214, 216, 217, 224, 225, 228, 231, 232, 233, 242, 246, 250, 252, 257, 258, 260, 263, 267, 268, 270, 272, 273, 276, 288, 290, 292, 308, 310, 315, 317, 321, 325, 326, 334, 338, 340, 341, 343, 363, 364, 371, 376, 377, 378, 383, 384, 385, 387, 388, 389, 390, 391, 393, 400, 411, 419, 420, 424, 425, 426, 428, 429, 432, 433, 437, 438, 446, 447, 452, 459, 466, 468, 474, 476, 478, 484, 488, 494, 495, 497, 498, 504, 508, 513, 515, 540, 541, 553, 557, 571, 572, 578, 580, 584, 586, 589, 595, 596, 603, 605, 606, 609, 611, 612, 613, 615, 618. See also Geography Epistemology/epistemological 10, 22, 74, 92, 98, 126, 127, 131, 143, 146, 151, 162, 169,

Index 170, 172, 175, 189, 198, 203, 206, 211, 246, 407, 470, 479, 572, 576, 621 Equality 22, 149, 152, 327, 400, 401, 405, 418, 419, 457, 466, 492, 549, 550, 596 Essence 17, 90, 95, 96, 101, 110, 157, 158, 164, 169, 170, 171, 179, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 197, 210, 222, 224, 244, 353, 370, 379, 383, 403, 412, 568, 573, 582 Essence of capitalism 95, 157, 158 Essentialism/essentialist/essentialist discourse 10, 11, 74, 88, 92, 94, 104, 106, 154, 324, 595 Eurocentrism/Eurocentric 11, 376, 543, 606 Europe, European 8, 26, 50, 173, 209, 260, 354, 361, 376, 448, 555 Exchange/exchange relations 13, 17, 19, 20, 29, 32, 33, 60, 61, 78, 84, 92, 93, 119, 121, 122, 124, 131, 138, 142, 148, 158, 164, 184, 203, 204, 206, 207, 212, 215, 216, 217, 219, 226, 227, 233, 237, 239, 240, 242, 245, 250, 251, 252, 253, 257, 262, 264, 265, 266, 268, 269, 274, 276, 277, 278, 284, 285, 286, 290, 292, 293, 297, 300, 301, 302, 303, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 322, 323, 324, 325, 327, 328, 330, 342, 343, 348, 349, 351, 359, 360, 364, 367, 372, 383, 397, 402, 405, 406, 409, 410, 413, 415, 417, 418, 432, 433, 439, 451, 457, 459, 480, 481, 494, 495, 496, 499, 526, 534, 541, 544, 551, 561, 570, 574, 583, 585, 586, 587, 589, 593, 594, 595, 596, 597, 599, 612, 613, 615, 616, 617, 622, 623 Exchange value 206, 212, 252, 264, 314, 342, 349, 409, 587, 613 Ex-colonized 337, 361, 501, 604 Expanded/extended reproduction 82, 120, 191, 359, 374, 558 Experience/lived experience 6, 7, 17, 20, 36, 43, 45, 51, 53, 60, 61, 71, 81, 87, 107, 122, 128, 129, 142, 143, 150, 182, 184, 187, 189, 196, 197, 202, 203, 208, 221, 237, 238, 246, 251, 255, 273, 278, 288, 292, 301, 304, 306, 307, 310, 314, 316, 321, 322, 328, 332, 335, 391, 397, 398, 403, 404, 409, 422, 423, 440, 447, 449, 450, 451, 452, 454, 456, 457, 459, 460, 461, 462, 468, 477, 479, 480, 489, 496, 504, 515, 522, 525, 529, 532, 533, 543, 548, 553, 554, 555, 562, 584, 586, 587, 588, 592, 593, 596,

Index 598, 600, 613, 621, 622. See also Surface relations Expert(s) 4, 23, 32, 33, 37, 40, 45, 48, 49, 54, 71, 115, 123, 135, 146, 299, 470, 567. See also Credentials; Rent; Skills Exploitation 4, 6, 7, 10, 12, 13, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 43, 44, 46, 47, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 78, 85, 89, 90, 93, 94, 96, 99, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 145, 146, 147, 152, 154, 157, 159, 160, 162, 164, 166, 178, 209, 213, 217, 218, 219, 221, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 231, 232, 235, 236, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 245, 247, 249, 259, 263, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 272, 273, 275, 277, 281, 283, 286, 287, 288, 294, 297, 301, 302, 303, 305, 307, 308, 311, 312, 313, 315, 316, 318, 319, 320, 321, 323, 324, 327, 328, 329, 333, 335, 337, 341, 344, 345, 347, 350, 351, 354, 357, 359, 360, 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 370, 374, 375, 376, 377, 379, 385, 387, 388, 391, 392, 393, 394, 395, 396, 398, 402, 404, 409, 410, 411, 412, 413, 415, 417, 420, 428, 429, 430, 431, 440, 444, 451, 452, 454, 455, 457, 458, 466, 472, 474, 476, 478, 481, 484, 486, 487, 496, 503, 511, 515, 521, 522, 527, 542, 550, 558, 560, 566, 567, 568, 569, 570, 571, 577, 583, 584, 588, 590, 591, 592, 593, 594, 595, 596, 597, 598, 600, 604, 606, 607, 611, 613, 614, 615, 616, 617, 618, 620, 622, 626, 627. See also Accumulation by exploitation primary 286, 287, 323, 328, 515, 594, 598 secondary 277, 286, 287, 319, 515 External relation (also accidental relation)  133, 134, 187, 188, 392. See also Relation, necessary Extra-economic coercion 207, 226, 229, 232, 256, 281, 326, 344, 346, 350, 351, 373, 378, 380, 381, 586, 606, 608 Family 41, 42, 86, 94, 96, 119, 216, 230, 239, 252, 257, 291, 292, 294, 295, 315, 332, 351, 426, 452, 540, 541, 588 Family labour 252, 291, 294, 315, 351, 588

669 Female 41, 92, 94, 159, 176, 259, 304, 335, 358, 379, 458, 564, 625. See also Woman Feminist/feminism 18, 96, 107, 160, 172, 332 Fetish/fetishism, commodity 65, 145, 158, 170, 186, 201, 263, 421, 425, 434, 435, 437, 440, 451, 472, 475, 477, 478, 481, 524, 564, 573, 580, 617, 619, 621 Feudal/feudalism/feudalist 7, 28, 29, 32, 33, 35, 37, 45, 47, 63, 66, 72, 86, 94, 97, 110, 115, 130, 137, 146, 147, 151, 212, 216, 218, 228, 229, 230, 232, 233, 235, 239, 244, 245, 246, 247, 249, 251, 260, 289, 290, 293, 327, 329, 343, 348, 350, 351, 371, 378, 381, 387, 389, 394, 396, 404, 430, 458, 478, 489, 533, 535, 568, 583, 584, 597, 598, 611, 631 Financial 29, 30, 47, 286, 287, 296, 318, 324, 330, 361, 369, 372, 415, 459, 481, 485, 508, 539, 594, 622 Fine, B. 9, 164, 263, 287, 323, 373 Foley, B. 287, 600, 602 Forced labour/unfree labour 221, 225, 226, 240, 257, 344, 348, 356, 357, 358, 368, 370, 379, 385 Forcible methods 261, 274, 316, 588, 589 Formal subsumption of labour as an on-going affair 20, 342, 348, 351, 352, 353, 354, 362,  363, 364, 369, 370, 374, 381, 382, 383, 386, 387, 388, 390, 487, 608, 609, 610, 612, 613 Foucault, M. 11 Free labour 229, 230, 231, 347, 348, 370 Fundamental class(es)/class-process 69, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 90, 93, 94, 129, 133 Gender 3, 7, 12, 13, 17, 61, 66, 87, 88, 92, 94, 127, 133, 134, 149, 159, 168, 226, 289, 304, 305, 306, 332, 333, 334, 335, 336, 337, 338, 357, 358, 362, 383, 386, 388, 429, 432, 433, 441, 458, 476, 478, 504, 505, 564, 565, 599, 600, 601, 603, 604, 610, 620, 621, 625 Gender fix 357, 358 Generality, level of (as a principle of ­dialectics) 172, 175, 190, 204, 205, 210, 213, 245, 246, 389, 576. See also Abstraction Generalized commodity production 203, 292, 370, 377, 606

670 Geography/geographies 9, 76, 83, 86, 87, 88, 128, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 151, 165, 169, 355, 365, 372, 381, 433, 435, 470, 488, 503, 567, 568, 573, 574. See also Capital, urbanization of; Capital, ruralisation of; Place/space/scale/scalar/ territorial/spatial Gibson-Graham, J-K. 10, 16, 74, 75, 76, 78, 85, 86, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 116, 120, 125, 138, 139, 143, 150, 151, 154, 157, 158, 159, 163, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 228, 566, 567, 569, 572, 573, 575, 577, 578, 579 Giminez, M. 305, 335, 601 Global 5, 13, 20, 41, 75, 101, 103, 105, 150, 152, 178, 192, 200, 253, 256, 260, 261, 286, 298, 302, 303, 314, 323, 324, 331, 340, 341, 342, 344, 360, 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 374, 376, 382, 383, 385, 387, 388, 390, 394, 397, 411, 433, 436, 444, 445, 447, 457, 459, 478, 479, 481, 487, 500, 533, 559, 569, 580, 587, 594, 600, 605, 608, 609, 610, 611, 612, 625. See also International capitalism 362, 374, 394 North 5, 523 scale 323, 362, 387, 594, 611 South 5, 523 Globalization 6, 109, 363, 519, 558 Gorz, A. 12, 139, 455 Governmental crisis 526, 527, 528, 550, 575, 625 Graham, K. 7, 10, 17 Ground rent 289, 292, 296, 351 Habit 6, 288, 327, 438, 477, 534, 544, 548, 551, 596, 620 Harvey 2, 11, 12, 19, 87, 170, 171, 172, 175, 178, 252, 253, 314, 316, 319, 325, 342, 343, 360, 361, 366, 367, 371, 372, 373, 374, 375, 376, 378, 379, 384, 387, 389, 470, 484, 500, 502, 515, 556, 557, 558, 559, 572, 573, 575, 576, 579, 587, 588, 595, 606, 609, 611, 626, 627 Health 40, 61, 141, 180, 182, 222, 261, 272, 273, 287, 312, 372, 373, 398, 402, 410, 485, 491, 498, 558, 603, 614 Herod, A. 86, 87, 88, 89, 128, 139, 144, 355

Index Holloway, J. 176, 177, 252, 323 Homo sacer 407 Household/spouses/social reproduction 41, 84, 86, 96, 97, 101, 129, 157, 219, 232, 252, 305, 332, 335, 386, 600, 601 Hunger 229, 307, 328, 597 Idealism/idealist/idealistic 19, 120, 126, 143, 160, 182, 194, 198, 237, 299, 464, 481, 513, 539, 540, 554, 577 Identity/identities 4, 6, 9, 10, 18, 45, 75, 85, 87, 88, 93, 94, 107, 111, 129, 138, 139, 143, 152, 170, 175, 203, 207, 208, 224, 239, 244, 282, 283, 304, 305, 311, 332, 388, 415, 432, 441, 465, 472, 478, 492, 504, 531, 544, 569, 571, 573, 582, 600, 616, 617, 621, 628 Identity politics 152, 432, 492 Ideology, ideological 46, 49, 55, 63, 81, 116, 124, 130, 131, 132, 133, 146, 173, 183, 189, 190, 196, 198, 237, 240, 244, 297, 321, 334, 335, 360, 362, 407, 409, 411, 412, 413, 416, 417, 418, 423, 435, 441, 445, 446, 449, 453, 454, 455, 463, 464, 465, 466, 467, 469, 472, 479, 481, 503, 507, 508, 514, 518, 519, 531, 532, 536, 561, 563, 592, 614, 617, 622, 624, 628, 631 Illusion 17, 300, 406, 418, 419, 420, 427, 474, 475, 506, 511, 522, 545, 553, 618, 619 Immaterial labour 299, 330, 331, 345, 598 Immiserization 251, 306, 312, 326, 550, 586, 597 Imperative 95, 101, 103, 141, 156, 157, 158, 224, 353, 378, 422, 423, 424, 444, 475, 500, 540, 541, 562, 619 Imperialism 19, 20, 145, 251, 289, 302, 303, 304, 329, 341, 357, 359, 360, 361, 362, 364, 365, 371, 380, 381, 382, 383, 384, 386, 388, 390, 403, 443, 444, 445, 446, 451, 455, 505, 533, 539, 555, 556, 586, 598, 607, 608, 609, 610, 611 Imperialist countries 20, 145, 251, 303, 304, 329, 360, 361, 364, 383, 384, 386, 444, 445, 446, 505, 598, 609 Imperialized countries 242, 303, 304, 383, 444, 445, 446, 505 Individualism 19, 36, 146, 443 Individuals 3, 22, 23, 35, 36, 38, 39, 42, 43, 44, 47, 50, 52, 53, 55, 57, 60, 67, 70, 71, 75, 78, 81, 84, 85, 93, 94, 104, 109, 116, 131, 132,

Index 143, 177, 182, 187, 200, 208, 215, 217, 220, 221, 222, 224, 231, 232, 233, 245, 260, 285, 296, 306, 316, 318, 319, 415, 416, 418, 428, 429, 459, 472, 473, 504, 530, 556, 557, 563, 567, 568, 580, 588, 589, 590, 616, 624, 628 Industrialized countries 97, 151, 350. See also Advanced countries; Global North; North Inequality/unequal 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, 23, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 38, 43, 62, 64, 67, 68, 84, 111, 112, 116, 121, 152, 164, 165, 166, 167, 217, 218, 219, 221, 228, 235, 246, 247, 256, 258, 268, 281, 282, 283, 293, 299, 302, 304, 305, 306, 325, 326, 327, 328, 332, 335, 360, 364, 400, 401, 405, 432, 439, 457, 466, 564, 565, 569, 570, 571, 574, 584, 595, 596, 597, 625 Injuries 269, 304, 327, 332, 597, 600. See also Body Intellectual labour 140, 331, 431, 459 Intellectuals 8, 15, 37, 163, 214, 436, 448, 449, 452, 459, 460, 461, 464, 468, 470, 471, 481, 486, 521, 529, 560, 578, 622 Intention/intentionality 10, 15, 16, 22, 144, 165, 187, 195, 208, 211, 214, 352, 473, 570, 577. See also Will Interest(s) 4, 7, 11, 13, 16, 20, 23, 24, 26, 27, 32, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 59, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 68, 70, 72, 74, 76, 81, 84, 85, 87, 88, 92, 94, 95, 96, 99, 103, 104, 107, 109, 110, 112, 123, 128, 130, 132, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 146, 148, 154, 159, 161, 163, 166, 173, 174, 193, 200, 201, 202, 203, 212, 222, 223, 224, 226, 236, 237, 239, 240, 241, 244, 246, 247, 249, 250, 259, 261, 265, 279, 282, 283, 286, 287, 291, 296, 305, 310, 311, 313, 314, 322, 325, 329, 334, 335, 336, 344, 348, 351, 353, 358, 363, 367, 369, 373, 391, 393, 398, 404, 405, 406, 410, 412, 413, 414, 415, 416, 417, 420, 421, 424, 429, 430, 431, 432, 433, 434, 435, 436, 437, 438, 439, 441, 442, 445, 446, 447, 451, 453, 454, 456, 458, 459, 460, 462, 465, 466, 468, 469, 471, 472, 473, 474, 476, 477, 479, 482, 484, 485, 487, 491, 492, 493, 494, 496, 497, 498, 499, 500, 501, 502, 503, 505, 506, 511, 512, 513, 516, 518, 519, 523,

671 524, 526, 528, 536, 538, 543, 544, 547, 549, 550, 555, 558, 560, 562, 563, 564, 567, 574, 576, 577, 578, 580, 581, 582, 584, 586, 587, 593, 603, 614, 616, 617, 618, 620, 622, 624, 625, 626, 630. See also Needs/ bodily needs; Luxury antagonistic 51, 61, 66, 249, 482, 562 common 44, 103, 128, 142, 223, 282, 283, 429, 224, 398, 415, 430, 439, 490, 498, 506, 511, 526, 562, 563, 614, 624 Internal relation/necessary relation 112, 118, 134, 138, 140, 172, 221, 248, 249, 298, 322, 342, 390, 391, 392, 393, 411, 438, 540, 585, 593, 613 International/international scale 13, 14, 18, 20, 53, 103, 117, 137, 142, 152, 155, 158, 172, 253, 257, 302, 311, 314, 331, 337, 340, 360, 361, 362, 384, 385, 437, 445, 450, 455, 459, 460, 461, 469, 476, 500, 501, 509, 529, 535, 537, 538, 539, 548, 555, 556, 559, 563, 576, 587, 599, 604, 609, 624, 625 Interpenetration of opposites 64, 141, 244, 326, 554, 582 Inversion 186, 421, 435, 455, 478, 621 Justice 68, 81, 158, 215, 418, 454, 474, 510, 543, 618, 627 Knowledge/to know 48, 54, 66, 71, 75, 89, 95, 109, 114, 145, 175, 179, 181, 182, 189, 192, 193, 194, 195, 197, 198, 208, 237, 274, 278, 287, 298, 314, 318, 329, 369, 407, 436, 446, 447, 449, 452, 460, 461, 462, 464, 466, 470, 521, 538, 540, 544, 548, 549, 558, 566, 579, 590, 598, 599 Labour aristocracy 145, 444, 445 geography 9, 76, 86, 87, 88, 128, 139, 140, 142, 145, 151, 165, 169, 433, 568, 573, 574 history 87, 144 market 27, 40, 45, 48, 49, 65, 114, 122, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 261, 279, 298, 301, 305, 314, 322, 326, 332, 346, 347, 348, 355, 356, 362, 397, 406, 410, 432, 433, 434, 448, 520, 558, 560, 587, 593, 596, 613, 614, 626, 627 metabolic rift 268, 311, 327, 596 migration 253, 296, 314, 331, 587

672 power 13, 23, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 37, 40, 54, 60, 71, 113, 114, 122, 155, 177, 187, 203, 209, 221, 223, 229, 249, 250, 252, 253, 255, 256, 258, 259, 261, 262, 264, 265, 267, 268, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 284, 285, 286, 288, 289, 290, 292, 293, 297, 298, 300, 301, 302, 305, 307, 308, 311, 313, 314, 315, 317, 319, 320, 321, 324, 326, 327, 328, 347, 349, 350, 352, 356, 358, 359, 360, 362, 367, 368, 371, 386, 410, 418, 419, 420, 421, 422, 432, 437, 443, 444, 474, 475, 476, 490, 493, 494, 497, 498, 508, 515, 518, 521, 543, 567, 585, 587, 588, 589, 591, 592, 594, 595, 596, 597, 598, 618, 619 process 20, 65, 76, 94, 97, 113, 114, 121, 133, 134, 140, 143, 147, 165, 190, 200, 212, 214, 217, 218, 242, 250, 251, 267, 268, 269, 270, 275, 278, 279, 289, 296, 313, 317, 318, 319, 320, 321, 323, 329, 344, 347, 349, 358, 369, 377, 392, 409, 411, 426, 455, 486, 570, 580, 586, 589, 590, 591, 592, 593, 598, 606, 613 productivity 307, 340, 343, 349, 355, 356, 366, 382, 544, 610, 612 (see also Technical change) subsumed under capital 346, 367 (see also Subsumption, formal; Subsumption, real; Subsumption, hybrid) vulnerable 362 Land 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 47, 50, 57, 80, 100, 105, 113, 114, 115, 122, 137, 153, 155, 183, 196, 229, 230, 231, 246, 252, 254, 287, 288, 291, 292, 296, 303, 315, 348, 351, 358, 359, 363, 367, 371, 372, 373, 375, 381, 385, 405, 421, 584, 610 Landed property 294 Landlord(s)/landowners 22, 29, 80, 130, 145, 218, 219, 221, 226, 229, 230, 232, 244, 251, 275, 286, 287, 288, 291, 292, 293, 327, 329, 367, 398, 446, 489, 498, 515, 519, 537, 548, 550, 585, 598 Landscape/landscape of capitalism 76, 86, 87, 88, 89, 98, 99, 106, 107, 128, 143, 144, 145, 154, 470, 487 Language 3, 4, 14, 46, 75, 90, 104, 107, 108, 109, 152, 185, 208, 215, 228, 263, 278, 298, 325, 343, 346, 347, 372, 374, 526, 573, 595. See also Semiotic

Index Laws of motion (logic of the system) 157, 178, 187, 344, 367, 368 Le Blanc, P. 415 Lebowitz, M. 114, 177, 199, 353, 354, 629 Leisure 43, 44, 222, 225, 292, 476, 544 Leninism 15, 462, 481 Less developed world 59, 144, 340, 341, 350, 372, 605 Level of generality 190, 206, 576 Livelihood 48, 107, 128, 184, 225, 253, 255, 285, 290, 325, 499, 533, 595 Local/localized/localization/locality/localism/localist/local scale 18, 56, 57, 86, 88, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 109, 150, 151, 152, 153, 165, 169, 170, 174, 178, 196, 200, 232, 242, 244, 253, 257, 293, 302, 314, 323, 331, 348, 355, 357, 358, 362, 363, 365, 379, 380, 381, 387, 389, 434, 437, 488, 491, 495, 500, 501, 502, 505, 512, 519, 530, 533, 544, 551, 555, 563, 573, 576, 580, 583, 587, 594, 599, 607, 610, 611, 623, 624 Lowy, M. 381 Luddite struggle; Revolt against machinery (geographical ludditism) 6, 365, 430, 487, 489, 490, 513 Lukacs, G. 194, 195, 196, 197, 199, 209, 456, 481 Lumpen proletariat 137, 297, 539 Luxemburg, R. 19, 168, 199, 447, 448, 518, 551, 601, 629 Machinery 35, 250, 271, 279, 296, 311, 318, 333, 338, 355, 356, 385, 403, 408, 427, 475, 487, 488, 489, 490, 494, 495, 499, 513, 600, 605, 619. See also Appendage; Science; Technology Manager/managers 10, 22, 23, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 47, 48, 49, 50, 54, 70, 71, 77, 81, 82, 102, 103, 104, 113, 115, 123, 134, 135, 137, 138, 146, 147, 270, 285, 321, 346, 395, 397, 411, 566, 567, 592 Mandel, E. 290, 292, 336, 430, 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, 460, 461, 462, 476, 479, 480, 508, 531, 532, 533, 551, 553, 554, 603 Manual labour 94, 132, 280, 292, 297, 299, 301, 314, 330, 331, 378, 597 Marcuse, H. 237, 455 Market economy (always embedded market economy) 59, 60, 65, 97, 324, 595 Marxist class theory in impasse 174, 579

Index Material conditions 44, 67, 155, 159, 160, 161, 162, 180, 185, 186, 199, 201, 202, 204, 209, 213, 235, 237, 244, 245, 247, 248, 276, 281, 394, 456, 459, 483, 504, 508, 509, 526, 544, 545, 550, 564, 577, 578, 580, 583, 585, 622, 625 Materialism, historical geographical 18 Material life 169, 184, 187, 573 McDowell, L. 9, 305, 560 Meaning 25, 26, 29, 74, 85, 120, 127, 136, 164, 169, 213, 311, 327, 340, 350, 375, 378, 416, 440, 446, 465, 473, 525, 549, 550, 553, 557, 570, 585, 631. See also Language; Semiotic Means of production 13, 23, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 53, 54, 55, 60, 64, 69, 70, 80, 82, 84, 91, 93, 102, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 129, 134, 146, 149, 157, 160, 164, 165, 170, 173, 205, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 224, 225, 228, 229, 230, 233, 240, 243, 244, 245, 246, 250, 253, 254, 255, 256, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 266, 267, 268, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 280, 281, 284, 285, 291, 293, 294, 312, 313, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 325, 328, 333, 334, 337, 339, 346, 348, 349, 350, 351, 355, 359, 369, 385, 392, 395, 405, 409, 410, 418, 419, 421, 424, 425, 433, 436, 437, 438, 450, 474, 488, 496, 500, 511, 520, 526, 541, 548, 549, 562, 564, 566, 570, 573, 576, 577, 581, 583, 584, 585, 587, 588, 589, 590, 591, 592, 595, 597, 600, 604, 610, 613, 614, 618, 625. See also Productive forces; Property Mechanism/mechanisms 5, 16, 17, 18, 20, 21, 27, 31, 32, 33, 34, 37, 40, 43, 44, 45, 46, 52, 54, 63, 64, 67, 68, 69, 82, 111, 123, 124, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 148, 150, 152, 164, 178, 188, 189, 191, 194, 203, 207, 211, 212, 216, 228, 235, 238, 242, 246, 247, 249, 250, 251, 254, 272, 273, 293, 306, 348, 356, 358, 360, 361, 363, 369, 372, 373, 374, 380, 394, 400, 407, 424, 428, 451, 457, 458, 476, 477, 481, 495, 504, 527, 570, 584, 585, 586, 605, 608, 620, 622 Mentality 292, 438 Mental labour 124, 299, 330, 338, 599, 604

673 Merchant/merchant capital 29, 79, 82, 83, 223, 226, 286, 296, 329, 348, 350, 351, 359, 367, 368, 369, 370, 415, 515, 539, 598 Method/methodology 22, 110, 160, 172, 176, 181, 183, 190, 195, 197, 198, 199, 203, 204, 207, 217, 220, 225, 243, 261, 274, 293, 298, 316, 353, 363, 365, 366, 379, 383, 396, 403, 407, 408, 423, 452, 457, 481, 486, 487, 521, 524, 525, 527, 544, 568, 582, 589, 607 Middle class/middle classes/middle strata 4, 22, 24, 37, 38, 40, 45, 48, 49, 50, 52, 54, 60, 69, 71, 72, 102, 124, 130, 135, 137, 145, 146, 148, 152, 159, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 293, 299, 302, 303, 304, 365, 441, 458, 465, 470, 477, 483, 519, 555, 565, 567, 570, 574, 578 Migrant 257, 295, 298, 331, 337, 358, 359, 362, 379, 451, 505, 599, 603, 604 Mobility 5, 44, 53, 178, 305, 327, 366, 402, 411, 532, 597, 614 Mode of production 23, 24, 37, 130, 155, 188, 190, 212, 215, 217, 224, 225, 235, 260, 281, 286, 289, 294, 298, 308, 326, 329, 335, 339, 343, 346, 347, 349, 350, 353, 363, 367, 368, 377, 396, 415, 418, 426, 438, 460, 464, 482, 488, 508, 526, 598 Moneybags 276, 287, 411, 614. See also Capitalist class; Bourgeoisie Money lender/money lending 84, 226, 350, 351, 358. See also Secondary exploitation Money relation (and money form) 231, 252, 253, 255, 258, 262, 268, 273, 276, 277, 312, 314, 322, 327, 433, 437, 474, 587, 593, 596, 618 Monopolization/monopoly 31, 32, 69, 80, 84, 116, 122, 123, 155, 218, 224, 225, 274, 275, 303, 318, 364, 372, 383, 391, 395, 403, 407, 444, 526, 556, 589, 590, 613 Mouffe, C. 170, 236, 237, 453, 454, 455 Multi-scalar 57, 152, 302, 627 Nation/national/national boundaries/national scale 6, 17, 34, 50, 53, 85, 87, 96, 104, 136, 137, 145, 150, 155, 158, 178, 242, 247, 251, 261, 273, 289, 302, 305, 329, 337, 360, 365, 366, 370, 372, 380, 389, 394, 395, 396, 404, 406, 429, 431, 436, 437, 444,

674 445, 446, 450, 458, 460, 490, 491, 498, 500, 501, 503, 504, 510, 512, 534, 535, 537, 538, 539, 544, 556, 561, 563, 598, 602, 604, 606, 607, 611, 624, 627 National bourgeoisie 445 Nationalism/nationalist/nationality/­ nationalities 3, 13, 19, 46, 140, 142, 227, 304, 334, 360, 364, 432, 445, 446, 450, 478, 487, 492, 504, 506, 561, 565, 601, 621 Nationalization 54, 91, 92, 133, 134 Nazism/Fascism 400, 493, 523 Necessary labour 76, 77, 119, 120, 230, 231, 269, 334, 418, 435, 601 Needs (including luxury needs) 85, 115, 120, 125, 141, 146, 148, 182, 183, 186, 200, 206, 208, 215, 220, 222, 223, 246, 252, 256, 259, 273, 275, 276, 282, 294, 297, 307, 309, 310, 313, 314, 317, 321, 322, 328, 338, 358, 386, 396, 397, 413, 420, 426, 437, 442, 473, 486, 497, 503, 549, 562, 584, 587, 589, 592, 597, 603, 605, 630 Negation 15, 181, 245, 247, 248, 259, 284, 315, 338, 339, 541, 583, 584, 585, 588, 605 Neoliberal/neoliberalism 2, 5, 101, 152, 192, 243, 283, 325, 358, 372, 386, 389, 390, 458, 558, 559, 595, 612 ngo 82, 153 Non-capitalist/non-capitalist social relations 10, 35, 76, 77, 82, 83, 84, 89, 90, 94, 96, 97, 99, 107, 110, 134, 157, 158, 160, 228, 293, 303, 315, 329, 388, 409, 473, 558, 568, 571, 577, 578, 586, 588, 598 Non-class relations/processes 17, 41, 76, 81, 83, 85, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 110, 127, 131, 246, 362, 564, 568, 584 North, D. 459, 469, 471, 532 North America 26, 50, 173, 286, 602 Obama, B. 2, 492 Objective conditions/objective world 186, 187, 200, 201, 202, 233, 235, 236, 237, 238, 247, 259, 418, 439, 442, 447, 449, 450, 452, 453, 454, 455, 456, 457, 459, 460, 463, 464, 465, 466, 468, 469, 471, 477, 478, 480, 497, 498, 501, 510, 515, 528, 530, 532, 535, 540, 543, 550, 580, 581, 585, 621, 622. See also Reality

Index Objectivism/objectivist/objective 2, 7, 10, 11, 13, 16, 17, 23, 24, 44, 50, 51, 58, 67, 68, 69, 72, 85, 111, 132, 153, 161, 165, 181, 186, 188, 193, 194, 195, 198, 200, 201, 202, 209, 212, 213, 217, 233, 235, 236, 237, 238, 244, 247, 251, 259, 280, 282, 293, 303, 306, 307, 328, 349, 372, 377, 405, 415, 418, 421, 422, 423, 424, 425, 436, 437, 439, 442, 447, 449, 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, 455, 456, 457, 459, 460, 462, 463, 464, 465, 466, 468, 469, 471, 476, 477, 478, 480, 489, 497, 498, 501, 508, 510, 515, 516, 521, 525, 528, 530, 532, 535, 540, 542, 550, 552, 554, 560, 562, 569, 570, 578, 580, 581, 585, 597, 616, 620, 621, 622, 623, 624, 626 Ollman, B. 19, 141, 175, 179, 188, 190, 191, 197, 203, 205, 227, 238, 245, 246, 334, 345, 394, 429, 449, 561, 576, 601 Ontology/ontological 20, 74, 75, 92, 101, 107, 127, 131, 134, 146, 175, 177, 199, 203, 208, 211, 238, 245, 246, 251, 302, 392, 457, 458, 562, 579, 600, 623 Opportunism/opportunist 192, 303, 444, 446, 455, 507, 514, 524, 545, 576, 632, 633 Oppression economic 26, 67, 243, 492 political (also politically oppressed) 239, 240, 242, 243, 247, 391, 392, 393, 402, 404, 405, 410, 411, 492, 521, 525, 584, 613, 614 social 303, 389, 433, 452, 559, 565, 625 Order/social-political order 14, 51, 81, 101, 102, 108, 182, 215, 235, 260, 304, 322, 295, 404, 405, 408, 422, 448, 449, 451, 468, 479, 526, 593, 600, 621 Organizational asset 28, 30, 32, 34, 112, 113, 115, 129, 138, 164, 165, 569, 570. See also Bureaucrat; Managers Over-determination 74, 125, 126, 127, 151, 169, 172, 242, 573, 576 Overwork 269, 273, 327, 363, 423, 495, 498, 597 Ownership 5, 22, 23, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 33, 34, 38, 48, 53, 54, 55, 62, 63, 67, 68, 70, 80, 90, 91, 98, 102, 103, 109, 112, 113, 115, 116, 118, 120, 121, 123, 129, 134, 146, 147, 148, 164, 165, 191, 196, 208, 218, 219, 226, 235, 254, 255, 259, 260, 274, 277, 281, 285, 287, 291, 316, 322, 394, 395, 397, 419, 548, 549, 566, 569, 570, 589

Index Panitch, L. 11, 12, 575, 602, 603, 615, 626, 628, 629, 630 Parliament/parliamentary 355, 399, 406, 408, 477, 507, 520, 523, 524, 530, 544, 563, 620, 624 Passion/love/lover/emotion/feeling, class character of 108, 143, 170, 184, 227, 394, 422, 423, 424, 442, 447, 448, 474, 475, 490, 532, 573, 616, 617, 618, 619 Passivity of experience 142, 143, 184 Patent 80, 318, 372, 383 Patnaik, U. 343, 344, 360, 361, 385 Patnaik, P. 360 Patriarchy 227, 334, 335, 336, 358, 451, 484 Payday loans 286 Peet, R. 87, 382, 608 Peripheral capitalism 145, 157, 205, 342, 347, 350, 351, 354, 362, 384, 385, 386, 387, 388, 390, 609, 610, 611, 613 Permanent revolution 533, 535, 627 Petty bourgeois, petty bourgeoisie 21, 22, 23, 35, 38, 39, 40, 45, 148, 158, 159, 161, 162, 163, 196, 290, 432, 443, 445, 447, 471, 478, 489, 496, 499, 505, 507, 508, 510, 536, 537, 538, 543, 555, 578, 620, 626, 627, 633 Philanthropy 415, 423, 424 Philosophical/philosophy 10, 19, 20, 22, 74, 112, 114, 120, 131, 153, 156, 172, 173, 175, 177, 179, 181, 182, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192, 193, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203, 208, 210, 213, 221, 234, 238, 243, 291, 315, 318, 336, 360, 396, 457, 469, 480, 566, 576, 579, 580, 581, 601 Plekhanov, G. 175, 413, 428, 481 Polanyi, K. 8, 261, 324, 594, 595 Police 29, 80, 81, 82, 180, 357, 396, 404, 433, 441, 457, 492, 504, 513, 520, 521, 522, 532. See also Coercive Political economy (in relation to class theory)  15, 16, 19, 20, 75, 144, 149, 160, 187, 196, 212, 213, 234, 247, 250, 382, 396, 483, 497, 514, 519, 570, 575, 581, 584, 585, 608 Political exposure 194, 447, 521 Political hegemony 4, 19, 21, 406, 414, 510, 545, 546, 548, 550, 615, 629, 630 Political parties 7, 46, 357, 429, 469, 490, 505, 511, 523, 550, 554, 563, 624 Poor countries 59, 97, 287, 307, 360 Popular front 563, 624

675 Populism 160, 538, 560 Positionality 170, 573 Post-capitalism/post-capitalist politics/­ politics of distribution 7, 32, 73, 113, 130, 136, 145, 154, 158, 162, 327, 567, 596 Post-capitalist society 24, 113, 118, 136, 137, 138, 146, 165, 574. See also Socialist/ socialism/communism/communist Post-colonial societies 261 Post-modernist/post-structuralist/poststructuralism/anti-essentialism 9, 11, 12, 14, 16, 18, 74, 75, 76, 94, 111, 112, 117, 118, 126, 128, 135, 138, 139, 143, 144, 149, 150, 151, 159, 160, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 199, 240, 246, 296, 354, 385, 412, 424, 473, 477, 546, 566, 567, 568, 569, 570, 571, 573, 575, 576, 577, 578, 579, 610, 615, 626 Poulantzas, N. 10, 128, 281 Poverty, poor 2, 8, 27, 59, 66, 97, 125, 127, 128, 149, 153, 156, 159, 172, 210, 221, 234, 243, 283, 285, 287, 302, 305, 306, 307, 312, 328, 360, 362, 402, 403, 446, 534, 535, 536, 541, 542, 596, 597, 598, 601, 603, 616 Power class 2, 13, 54, 55, 133, 135, 232, 325, 366, 372, 409, 487, 525, 547, 551, 559, 595, 613, 615, 616 political 5, 8, 17, 57, 135, 139, 147, 164, 169, 213, 239, 240, 241, 243, 391, 394, 398, 401, 405, 406, 409, 410, 412, 413, 431, 518, 522, 523, 525, 546, 547, 549, 550, 552, 560, 570, 572, 581, 613, 614, 615, 631 state 8, 12, 17, 57, 58, 73, 116, 135, 146, 147, 169, 240, 241, 361, 392, 393, 395, 396, 402, 404, 406, 409, 411, 413, 428, 465, 512, 513, 518, 525, 537, 547, 551, 557, 559, 561, 567, 572, 576, 580, 584, 614, 615, 631 Practice/political practice 4, 15, 19, 23, 34, 36, 42, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, 61, 63, 76, 99, 100, 101, 104, 108, 113, 154, 156, 162, 165, 166, 168, 172, 174, 182, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 210, 211, 221, 223, 227, 247, 250, 263, 273, 304, 305, 335, 360, 371, 372, 374, 401, 403, 422, 446, 449, 451, 459, 460, 467, 472, 476, 480, 481, 502, 503, 507, 521, 523, 531, 537, 553, 558, 570, 571, 572, 576, 584, 599, 617, 620, 622, 625, 627, 632 Precariat 4, 128, 255, 257, 325, 595

676 Pre-capitalist (relations/society) 9, 19, 66, 124, 157, 188, 190, 204, 207, 210, 213, 228, 229, 231, 232, 233, 241, 249, 250, 259, 261, 290, 292, 293, 306, 315, 327, 329, 337, 339, 346, 350, 351, 352, 354, 364, 376, 380, 381, 387, 388, 389, 390, 395, 458, 476, 477, 487, 581, 585, 588, 597, 598, 604, 608, 611, 612, 620 Primitive accumulation 243, 260, 261, 281, 315, 316, 320, 346, 357, 359, 361, 371, 372, 373, 375, 380, 381, 384, 386, 387, 396, 409, 484, 588, 592, 607, 609, 610, 611. See also Accumulation by dispossession Private ownership 53, 70, 80, 134, 148, 235, 322, 548 Private property 19, 20, 81, 105, 113, 116, 117, 147, 149, 152, 166, 167, 181, 188, 190, 224, 231, 232, 239, 240, 241, 245, 258, 259, 260, 272, 275, 278, 283, 315, 316, 317, 318, 320, 321, 322, 339, 351, 361, 371, 389, 392, 393, 395, 402, 413, 417, 443, 473, 475, 476, 493, 499, 519, 526, 533, 534, 540, 541, 544, 556, 561, 583, 587, 589, 590, 591, 592, 593, 617, 619, 620 Production/production relations/social ­relations of production 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 69, 70, 71, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 87, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 101, 102, 103, 106, 107, 110, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 125, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 170, 172, 173, 174, 176, 177, 182, 183, 184, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191, 193, 197, 200, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 297, 298, 301, 305, 306, 307, 308,

Index 309, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 325, 326, 327, 328, 329, 330, 331, 332, 333, 334, 335, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 342, 343, 344, 345, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 351, 352, 353, 354, 355, 358, 359, 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 370, 371, 374, 376, 377, 378, 382, 383, 385, 386, 387, 388, 391, 392, 393, 394, 395, 396, 397, 405, 406, 409, 410, 413, 415, 417, 418, 419, 420, 421, 422, 423, 424, 425, 426, 427, 431, 433, 436, 437, 438, 442, 443, 448, 450, 453, 455, 459, 460, 462, 463, 464, 466, 472, 474, 475, 476, 478, 481, 482, 483, 485, 486, 487, 488, 493, 494, 495, 496, 497, 498, 499, 500, 502, 503, 508, 511, 512, 518, 519, 520, 522, 526, 527, 530, 531, 534, 535, 536, 537, 538, 541, 542, 543, 544, 545, 548, 549, 558, 560, 561, 562, 563, 564, 566, 567, 568, 570, 572, 573, 576, 577, 578, 581, 582, 582, 583, 584, 585, 586, 587, 588, 589, 590, 591, 592, 593, 594, 595, 596, 597, 598, 599, 600, 604, 605, 606, 608, 609, 610, 611, 613, 614, 616, 617, 618, 619, 620, 622, 623, 624, 625, 626, 627, 628, 630 Productive forces 18, 115, 119, 173, 187, 202, 205, 206, 208, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 233, 234, 235, 236, 238, 243, 245, 250, 252, 266, 307, 318, 320, 327, 329, 340, 341, 342, 344, 352, 356, 359, 364, 380, 381, 382, 384, 386, 390, 416, 425, 426, 457, 475, 495, 496, 500, 526, 527, 534, 535, 548, 556, 562, 582, 583, 585, 591, 597, 598, 607, 608, 609, 612, 619 Productive labour 76, 77, 78, 83, 281, 297 Professoriate 443 Profit/profitability 6, 12, 13, 25, 30, 34, 35, 45, 48, 51, 74, 77, 79, 82, 95, 98, 101, 102, 103, 104, 115, 133, 141, 142, 147, 150, 152, 154, 156, 157, 158, 165, 166, 168, 173, 198, 223, 225, 253, 271, 272, 273, 275, 276, 283, 289, 293, 296, 298, 303, 304, 306, 309, 310, 312, 313, 315, 316, 317, 319, 322, 333, 334, 337, 342, 344, 347, 351, 358, 364, 365, 366, 378, 379, 383, 393, 394, 396, 418, 420, 421, 422, 423, 425, 426, 427, 438, 439, 443, 444, 454, 460, 474, 475, 480, 485, 486, 495, 496, 498, 500, 502, 503,

Index 514, 526, 537, 572, 574, 575, 576, 586, 589, 591, 593, 606, 618, 619 Proletarians/proletariat 7, 12, 14, 18, 19, 21, 32, 80, 94, 98, 115, 131, 132, 135, 136, 138, 145, 146, 147, 148, 154, 159, 160, 161, 163, 165, 166, 171, 172, 174, 196, 198, 222, 224, 231, 232, 253, 255, 257, 260, 261, 262, 285, 287, 288, 290, 291, 293, 294, 295, 296, 299, 301, 303, 306, 316, 330, 336, 339, 342, 360, 363, 376, 385, 387, 390, 392, 395, 396, 400, 401, 402, 403, 404, 409, 410, 413, 414, 416, 423, 430, 437, 442, 443, 444, 445, 447, 448, 449, 450, 452, 454, 455, 456, 460, 461, 462, 464, 467, 470, 471, 477, 479, 481, 483, 487, 489, 490, 495, 499, 500, 501, 502, 503, 504, 506, 507, 508, 509, 510, 512, 515, 516, 518, 519, 521, 523, 524, 525, 529, 531, 532, 533, 534, 535, 537, 538, 539, 540, 541, 542, 543, 544, 545, 546, 547, 548, 549, 550, 551, 552, 554, 555, 556, 558, 559, 560, 561, 563, 565, 574, 576, 577, 578, 579, 589, 596, 599, 601, 602, 609, 610, 611, 612, 613, 616, 620, 621, 622, 623, 624, 625, 626, 627, 629, 630, 631, 633 Propertied class/classes 163, 219, 223, 225, 308, 385, 401, 434, 483, 496, 518, 521, 536, 551, 578, 623 Property owner 5, 18, 113, 147, 157, 161, 212, 219, 224, 225, 247, 279, 287, 291, 292, 293, 294, 296, 322, 327, 336, 341, 344, 351, 353, 357, 358, 359, 361, 362, 364, 370, 377, 379, 386, 399, 402, 419, 432, 494, 498, 538, 578, 584, 593, 597, 604, 606, 607, 611 Property relations 8, 17, 18, 20, 32, 65, 68, 72, 73, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 124, 137, 165, 172, 174, 203, 234, 235, 240, 242, 259, 262, 286, 315, 316, 317, 326, 334, 343, 393, 397, 398, 413, 476, 496, 567, 574, 588, 589, 596, 620 Property-less class/classes 212, 247, 584 Punish, punishment 270, 271 Qualitative change 83, 84, 179, 180, 491 Quantitative change 83, 179, 180 Race/racism/racial bias/racial/­ racialization 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 17, 87, 88, 94, 125, 127, 133, 134, 149, 176, 207, 226,

677 227, 242, 268, 273, 289, 302, 304, 305, 306, 307, 321, 331, 332, 333, 334, 335, 336, 337, 338, 347, 362, 381, 386, 388, 429, 430, 432, 433, 441, 445, 450, 457, 458, 476, 478, 484, 500, 504, 505, 539, 561, 564, 565, 591, 599, 600, 601, 603, 604, 610, 620, 621, 625, 626 Radical demands 141 Rational abstraction 207, 391 Rees, J. 175, 177, 180 Reform/reforms/reformist/reformism 10, 16, 56, 57, 59, 106, 111, 112, 135, 141, 145, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 159, 161, 170, 174, 196, 212, 247, 249, 250, 372, 411, 412, 413, 414, 423, 430, 435, 436, 437, 442, 444, 445, 451, 463, 465, 491, 504, 513, 514, 517, 518, 522, 523, 525, 526, 533, 555, 558, 559, 560, 562, 563, 569, 573, 575, 576, 577, 578, 585, 602, 615, 624, 625, 626, 630, 633 Regional 6, 19, 87, 158, 178, 204, 302, 357, 365, 376, 389, 406, 450, 486, 491, 503, 519 Regulation 18, 25, 34, 35, 56, 81, 132, 133, 142, 147, 148, 152, 153, 156, 240, 270, 325, 347, 396, 399, 408, 432, 436, 476, 497, 562, 620, 623 Relation mediated 35, 40, 41, 42, 71 necessary (necessity) 66, 72, 75, 117, 138, 152, 156, 160, 161, 162, 176, 187, 188, 190, 197, 201, 212, 241, 250, 298, 343, 396, 413, 436, 437, 456, 466, 488, 498, 515, 521, 535, 541, 585, 624 Religion/religious 4, 46, 61, 66, 81, 133, 182, 183, 185, 220, 227, 242, 304, 308, 333, 364, 396, 404, 406, 429, 430, 432, 441, 458, 476, 477, 480, 492, 521 Remittance 295. See also Migrant/migration Remnant/survivals 185, 242, 388, 389, 471, 489, 533, 548, 611 Rent 27, 29, 32, 40, 41, 45, 48, 71, 80, 122, 123, 153, 221, 223, 230, 287, 289, 292, 296, 344, 351, 358, 359, 372, 373, 432, 505, 515, 518, 566 Rentier 34, 291, 303 Reproduction 54, 56, 62, 77, 78, 82, 87, 95, 119, 120, 142, 157, 160, 163, 166, 167, 172, 176, 186, 191, 200, 202, 209, 215, 217, 218, 219, 220, 222, 225, 230, 232, 243, 244, 252,

678 257, 258, 261, 262, 272, 273, 276, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 285, 288, 291, 294, 298, 305, 308, 313, 314, 321, 322, 323, 326, 328, 331, 332, 335, 347, 350, 351, 355, 356, 357, 359, 362, 374, 394, 397, 398, 409, 416, 418, 420, 422, 426, 427, 431, 435, 438, 458, 467, 474, 497, 512, 520, 558, 562, 564, 566, 571, 577, 582, 586, 592, 593, 598, 599, 601, 618 Reserve army 132, 287, 298, 331, 332, 361, 362, 364, 366, 383, 386, 387, 388, 486, 495, 599, 600, 609, 610, 611 Resistance 11, 26, 64, 76, 95, 105, 106, 107, 108, 133, 150, 157, 171, 216, 224, 250, 257, 270, 275, 328, 357, 395, 398, 400, 411, 412, 430, 437, 451, 452, 454, 465, 486, 487, 488, 490, 495, 497, 513, 522, 536, 547, 548, 550, 552, 559, 561, 597, 613, 631 Resnick, S. 1, 10, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 98, 99, 102, 111, 116, 118, 125, 126, 127, 138, 149, 169, 228, 567, 568, 569 Revisionism in Marxism 160, 211, 447, 577, 631 Revolution/revolutionary/revolutionary change 8, 10, 11, 12, 15, 18, 19, 21, 32, 47,  53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 85, 92, 96, 99, 105, 107, 117, 120, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 146, 147, 150, 151, 159, 161, 163, 165, 168, 171, 172, 174, 179, 180, 196, 197, 198, 204, 215, 223, 234, 242, 258, 291, 330, 347, 386, 390, 400, 403, 407, 410, 413, 423, 430, 433, 435, 437, 443, 444, 447, 449, 451, 452, 453, 454, 455, 460, 461, 463, 464, 465, 467, 470, 471, 473, 476, 477, 480, 481, 495, 501, 502, 504, 507, 508, 509, 510, 511, 512, 515, 516, 517, 518, 520, 521, 524, 525, 526, 527, 528, 529, 530, 531, 532, 533, 534, 535, 536, 537, 538, 539, 540, 541, 542, 543, 546, 547, 548, 550, 551, 552, 553, 554, 555, 557, 558, 559, 560, 562, 563, 573, 574, 576, 577, 578, 579, 601, 602, 612, 613, 622, 623, 624, 625, 626, 627, 628, 630, 631, 632 Revolutionary force 21, 136 Revolutionary Marxism/Marxist 18, 161, 168, 174, 578, 579 Revolutionary politics 10, 107, 204, 559, 628, 631

Index Revolutionary theory 460, 470, 481, 529, 622 Rich countries 59, 145, 302, 303, 307, 505, 539 Roemer, J. 27, 28, 106, 111, 121, 281, 556, 557 Ruling class/classes 11, 14, 37, 54, 99, 102, 136, 137, 138, 145, 147, 165, 193, 200, 216, 224, 230, 328, 337, 374, 378, 386, 391, 396, 398, 400, 402, 406, 407, 413, 416, 428, 429, 434, 439, 441, 455, 469, 470, 472, 491, 499, 504, 516, 522, 525, 527, 528, 531, 532, 534, 536, 545, 546, 547, 555, 562, 574, 585, 596, 604, 613, 617, 620, 625, 629 Rural areas, villages, small towns 16, 271, 295, 336, 356, 358, 359, 387, 504, 505, 538, 603, 604 Rural 16, 94, 204, 253, 292, 295, 299, 314, 338, 350, 358, 359, 368, 387, 502, 524, 587. See also Urban Russia 19, 91, 117, 179, 197, 288, 290, 329, 340, 368, 372, 430, 445, 447, 454, 481, 507, 557, 561 Sanders, B. 4, 487 Sayer, A. 112, 140, 169, 175, 183, 188, 189, 194, 208, 373 Scalar 57, 139, 151, 152, 302, 436, 491 Science 69, 145, 152, 160, 167, 182, 183, 186, 189, 193, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 209, 220, 299, 330, 355, 375, 452, 460, 461, 470, 519, 571, 599 Science and Society (the Marxist journal) 14 Sectarian/sectarianism 505, 506, 553, 563, 624 Self-earned property 393, 499 Self-employed 21, 38, 39, 71, 94, 96, 141, 212, 254, 259, 287, 290, 292, 294, 295, 330, 336, 339, 415, 599, 603. See also Smallscale producers; Peasants/peasantry/ petty bourgeoisie Self-exploitation 160, 577 Semi-proletarians 145, 287, 292, 342, 351, 360, 363, 376, 385, 390, 442, 456, 501, 519, 533, 543, 544, 545, 603, 610, 612 Semiotic/semiotically/semiotic resistance  76, 95, 106, 107, 157 Sense perception/sensation 181, 182, 193, 198, 202, 237, 456 Serf/serfs 28, 29, 32, 33, 115, 119, 123, 224, 226, 229, 230, 231, 232, 239, 253, 254, 519

Index Sex/sexual/sexuality 3, 11, 12, 95, 107, 143, 154, 226, 306, 334, 335, 372, 428, 559, 564, 565, 602 Shandro, A. 464, 466, 467, 468, 469, 481, 482 Simple reproduction 427 Skeptical/skepticism 13, 115, 134, 164, 165, 470, 510, 556, 557, 560, 574, 626, 627, 632 Skills 4, 10, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 41, 44, 49, 50, 51, 54, 55, 58, 60, 61, 63, 71, 112, 114, 115, 116, 122, 123, 124, 133, 134, 146, 162, 165, 288, 298, 566, 570 Slavery 8, 21, 99, 141, 198, 202, 218, 229, 238, 245, 378, 403, 405, 436, 455, 457, 460, 461, 481, 483, 497, 511, 512, 514, 517, 518, 520, 525, 527, 528, 583, 622, 625, 632 Small (small-scale) capitalist/small master  294, 295, 296, 536 Small-scale producers 160, 163, 166, 225, 226, 287, 344, 351, 367, 368, 369, 370, 388, 442, 447, 458, 536, 537, 538, 544, 577, 578, 625, 629, 630 Smith, N. 87, 384, 560, 609 Social commons 178, 261, 316, 325, 403, 432, 588, 595 Social construction 143, 144, 167, 571 Social democracy 16, 56, 57, 105, 150, 152, 153, 166, 493, 629 Social movement 6, 56, 103, 110, 172, 558, 559, 569, 628 Social relation/s 17, 23, 24, 25, 28, 31, 35, 36, 39, 40, 43, 51, 60, 61, 62, 71, 86, 90, 94, 113, 114, 123, 126, 127, 129, 131, 136, 139, 142, 146, 173, 178, 182, 183, 184, 186, 191, 199, 200, 202, 203, 204, 206, 208, 210, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 221, 222, 228, 233, 234, 238, 239, 243, 250, 262, 263, 273, 274, 277, 283, 321, 334, 335, 336, 343, 344, 352, 362, 377, 380, 381, 384, 426, 429, 435, 442, 457, 487, 527, 534, 536, 567, 576, 580, 581, 582, 585, 592, 601, 603, 606, 607, 608, 609, 614 Social structure 8, 52, 55, 85, 91, 93, 116, 135, 167, 187, 215, 221, 256, 336, 436 Social theory 5, 19, 24, 65, 89, 171, 213, 352, 353 Socialism in one country 136, 151, 197 South, Global/periphery/global periphery 5, 20, 41, 145, 169, 251, 268, 286, 302, 303, 329, 340, 341, 342, 344, 350, 354, 360,

679 362, 363, 364, 365, 371, 374, 382, 385, 386, 387, 388, 390, 446, 487, 539, 598, 605, 608, 610, 611, 612 Space/spatial/spatiality 40, 55, 56, 57, 59, 75, 87, 88, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97, 99, 102, 106, 107, 109, 139, 142, 150, 151, 154, 160, 170, 178, 179, 181, 190, 203, 211, 230, 243, 269, 289, 306, 323, 324, 332, 335, 358, 365, 376, 380, 381, 382, 384, 388, 428, 435, 438, 449, 502, 503, 561, 569, 573, 575, 577, 578, 593, 599, 602, 603, 605, 606, 625, 627 Spatial fix 87, 88, 139, 178, 358, 502 Spivak, G. 103, 166, 571 Stalin/Stalinism/Stalinist 15, 19, 140, 151, 197, 454, 629 State 124, 360, 370, 377, 381, 433, 504, 526, 597, 605. See also Power of the state Stratification/stratificational 69, 70, 123, 127, 203, 211, 238, 450, 451 Strike 2, 3, 46, 49, 140, 141, 145, 166, 172, 194, 256, 338, 355, 356, 358, 379, 392, 404, 405, 412, 432, 441, 452, 457, 476, 486, 487, 489, 490, 491, 492, 493, 494, 495, 500, 501, 503, 505, 507, 508, 509, 511, 512, 513, 514, 515, 516, 520, 533, 551, 557, 563, 575, 576, 620, 624 Structural conditions 6, 136, 415 Structure 4, 5, 8, 11, 22, 23, 24, 27, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 51, 52, 53, 55, 61, 63, 64, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 77, 82, 85, 89, 91, 92, 93, 97, 102, 103, 111, 116, 130, 133, 135, 137, 139, 143, 147, 151, 167, 177, 185, 186, 187, 188, 201, 203, 205, 206, 208, 214, 215, 216, 221, 232, 238, 240, 241, 244, 256, 290, 295, 306, 314, 318, 336, 356, 394, 404, 405, 409, 412, 415, 416, 436, 457, 466, 467, 472, 473, 522, 540, 550, 551, 557, 560, 562, 566, 567, 580, 582, 613, 615, 616, 617, 623, 626, 628 Struggle 1, 3, 9, 13, 16, 18, 21, 23, 24, 32, 38, 42, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 68, 70, 72, 83, 84, 85, 86, 90, 94, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 112, 116, 118, 128, 132, 138, 139, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 180, 185, 195, 197, 198, 199, 210, 212, 213, 217, 220, 223, 224, 233, 235, 236, 237,

680 238, 239, 242, 243, 244, 245, 247, 248, 250, 257, 261, 271, 296, 297, 302, 316, 318, 326, 334, 341, 343, 348, 353, 354, 355, 356, 357, 358, 359, 360, 361, 363, 364, 365, 366, 368, 370, 372, 376, 377, 379, 380, 381, 384, 385, 386, 398, 399, 401, 404, 405, 407, 410, 412, 413, 423, 426, 428, 429, 430, 431, 432, 433, 435, 441, 442, 443, 448, 451, 452, 453, 454, 455, 456, 457, 459, 460, 461, 462, 463, 464, 465, 466, 467, 468, 469, 470, 471, 473, 477, 478, 479, 480, 481, 482, 483, 484, 485, 486, 487, 488, 489, 490, 491, 492, 493, 494, 495, 496, 497, 498, 499, 500, 501, 502, 503, 504, 505, 506, 507, 508, 509, 510, 511, 512, 513, 514, 515, 516, 517, 518, 519, 520, 521, 522, 523, 524, 525, 527, 528, 530, 531, 532, 533, 534, 535, 536, 537, 539, 542, 544, 545, 546, 547, 548, 549, 550, 551, 552, 553, 554, 556, 557, 558, 559, 560, 561, 562, 563, 564, 574, 575, 579, 581, 582, 583, 584, 585, 588, 596, 601, 602, 605, 606, 607, 609, 610, 613, 614, 615, 620, 621, 622, 623, 624, 625, 626, 627, 628, 630, 631, 632 Subject/subjectivity/subjectivities 10, 17, 27, 36, 43, 45, 75, 82, 85, 89, 91, 94, 95, 96, 98, 100, 104, 107, 108, 109, 110, 138, 139, 143, 144, 145, 154, 157, 170, 181, 183, 184, 187, 188, 190, 206, 208, 209, 215, 225, 226, 254, 258, 270, 326, 327, 334, 378, 422, 489, 495, 520, 522, 530, 560, 596, 619 Subordination 27, 61, 104, 109, 134, 154, 280, 346, 368, 371, 377, 435 Subsistence 13, 85, 120, 149, 157, 184, 214, 216, 218, 220, 222, 223, 226, 229, 230, 235, 242, 243, 246, 250, 252, 253, 255, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 266, 273, 274, 275, 276, 280, 283, 284, 285, 286, 291, 300, 307, 308, 311, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 320, 321, 322, 327, 328, 343, 347, 352, 359, 370, 377, 392, 410, 418, 419, 420, 422, 428, 433, 474, 496, 505, 520, 545, 584, 585, 587, 588, 589, 590, 592, 593, 596, 597, 606, 614, 618 Subsistence, means of 149, 184, 214, 216, 218, 220, 222, 223, 225, 230, 235, 242, 250, 252, 253, 255, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 273, 274, 275, 276, 280, 283, 284,

Index 285, 286, 291, 300, 308, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 320, 321, 322, 327, 343, 347, 352, 359, 410, 418, 419, 420, 422, 474, 496, 505, 545, 585, 587, 588, 589, 590, 592, 593, 596, 613, 618 Subsumed class (process) 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 90, 91, 93, 118, 120, 129 Subsumption formal 20, 341, 342, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 351, 352, 353, 354, 355, 356, 357, 358, 359, 360, 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 370, 371, 374, 377, 379, 380, 381, 382, 383, 384, 386, 387, 388, 389, 390, 487, 606, 607, 608, 609, 610, 611, 612, 613 hybrid 341, 350, 351, 352, 353, 357, 358, 359, 364, 368, 369, 376, 378, 379, 380, 381, 387, 388, 607, 608, 611 of labour 19, 20, 342, 345, 348, 350, 351, 352, 353, 354, 359, 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 370, 371, 374, 377, 378, 381, 382, 383, 384, 386, 387, 388, 390, 487, 606, 608, 609, 610, 611, 612, 613 real 20, 269, 341, 342, 345, 346, 347, 349, 350, 351, 353, 354, 355, 356, 357, 358, 359, 360, 361, 362, 364, 365, 366, 369, 370, 371, 375, 376, 377, 378, 379, 380, 384, 385, 387, 388, 389, 390, 605, 606, 607, 608, 609, 610, 611, 612 Super-exploitation 269, 294, 302, 311, 347, 366, 388, 444 Surface appearance 189, 238, 268, 327, 420, 459, 474, 596, 619 Surface relations 142, 476, 620, 621 Surplus labour 27, 77, 78, 85, 86, 94, 115, 116, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125, 138, 147, 164, 216, 217, 218, 228, 230, 231, 239, 241, 242, 243, 246, 269, 271, 308, 311, 315, 316, 317, 319, 320, 321, 327, 363, 369, 377, 418, 420, 421, 424, 426, 483, 494, 570, 584, 589, 591, 592, 597, 623 Surplus product 18, 43, 91, 92, 119, 120, 149, 212, 236, 242, 284, 351, 405, 581 Surplus appropriation 96, 106, 120, 164, 165, 225, 234, 570 Surplus production 91, 92, 119, 216, 236 Surplus value absolute 227, 347, 353, 363, 370, 377, 606 relative 227, 344, 353, 354, 355, 361, 366, 386, 426

Index Survival 87, 178, 179, 223, 242, 265, 301, 319, 387, 393, 411, 548, 590, 614. See also Remnant Syndicalism 146, 448 System/systemic 5, 6, 8, 10, 13, 17, 25, 28, 30, 31, 34, 38, 41, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 70, 78, 85, 86, 92, 95, 96, 97, 100, 106, 108, 111, 115, 124, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 147, 150, 151, 152, 157, 158, 159, 162, 163, 166, 167, 172, 173, 174, 177, 179, 182, 185, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 204, 207, 208, 209, 210, 219, 220, 224, 225, 230, 244, 247, 251, 256, 259, 264, 271, 280, 286, 292, 293, 298, 305, 306, 307, 308, 312, 313, 320, 322, 328, 329, 331, 334, 338, 340, 341, 342, 345, 347, 353, 354, 355, 357, 359, 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 368, 369, 371, 372, 375, 376, 377, 378, 379, 380, 381, 382, 386, 387, 394, 395, 396, 399, 400, 401, 407, 412, 413, 416, 422, 423, 429, 431, 432, 433, 435, 436, 437, 439, 440, 442, 447, 456, 459, 463, 466, 467, 469, 473, 475, 476, 477, 480, 481, 482, 483, 485, 488, 493, 496, 504, 510, 512, 513, 516, 517, 521, 523, 526, 527, 529, 535, 539, 543, 544, 556, 564, 565, 569, 570, 571, 572, 574, 575, 576, 578, 579, 580, 582, 584, 586, 591, 593, 597, 598, 599, 605, 606, 607, 608, 611, 615, 620, 622, 625, 630 Tax, taxation 80, 81, 82, 84, 125, 153, 163, 226, 240, 282, 287, 372, 386, 392, 396, 399, 415 446, 485, 498, 511, 521, 527, 615 Technology/technical change 91, 160, 183, 192, 216, 230, 269, 287, 349, 354, 355, 365, 366, 379, 384, 386, 440, 503, 544, 549, 607, 609, 610 Temporal(ality)/history/historical/ stadial(ity)/time/transient/motion/ change 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 29, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 46, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 58, 59, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 91, 92, 93, 108, 116, 120, 124, 130, 133, 136, 139, 143, 144, 147, 153, 157, 158, 160, 163, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 176, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 201,

681 202, 204, 205, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 215, 216, 217, 218, 222, 223, 225, 226, 227, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 242, 245, 247, 253, 255, 258, 260, 261, 262, 265, 270, 271, 274, 275, 277, 280, 285, 287, 289, 292, 295, 297, 301, 306, 308, 311, 315, 317, 319, 326, 327, 328, 329, 330, 332, 333, 334, 335, 338, 340, 341, 343, 344, 345, 346, 347, 349, 352, 353, 354, 355, 357, 358, 366, 367, 368, 370, 376, 377, 378, 382, 383, 384, 386, 387, 394, 400, 412, 413, 415, 420, 422, 428, 429, 431, 433, 435, 438, 441, 442, 447, 449, 450, 451, 453, 454, 455, 456, 460, 462, 465, 468, 469, 473, 476, 480, 482, 483, 487, 489, 491, 492, 493, 494, 495, 496, 497, 502, 504, 507, 509, 512, 517, 524, 526, 528, 530, 531, 532, 533, 535, 538, 539, 544, 545, 546, 548, 552, 553, 554, 555, 557, 560, 562, 563, 575, 577, 580, 582, 583, 587, 596, 598, 601, 603, 606, 610, 615, 620, 622, 623, 624 Tendencies 13, 48, 66, 95, 157, 173, 198, 201, 207, 211, 212, 289, 365, 384, 386, 438, 444, 454, 456, 505, 555, 556, 559, 561, 599, 609, 627 Third World 7, 59, 374, 445 Thompson, E. 6, 269, 356 Timpanaro, S. 142, 175, 184, 246 Tomba, M. 326, 328, 333, 334, 598, 601 Totality/totalities/totalizing 17, 42, 91, 93, 97, 99, 104, 106, 107, 109, 110, 112, 126, 128, 131, 142, 151, 152, 154, 162, 173, 177, 178, 179, 181, 191, 193, 197, 199, 200, 207, 208, 209, 213, 219, 233, 244, 245, 246, 254, 262, 299, 300, 318, 322, 323, 336, 337, 338, 376, 438, 439, 448, 449, 457, 458, 559, 568, 574, 576, 578, 579, 580, 581, 582, 584, 586, 590, 593, 594, 601, 603, 604, 605 Trade union bureaucracy 443, 486, 512 Traditional Marxism 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 22, 24, 35, 101, 135, 140, 145, 147, 148, 150, 151, 153, 157, 159, 162, 169, 170, 171, 174, 199, 573, 576, 578, 579, 632 Trans-historical 19, 20, 114, 212, 213, 217, 228, 234, 249, 313, 579, 581, 586 Transition from feudalism 354, 385, 387, 609, 611 Transition, multiple transitions in class ­relations 387, 388

682 Transitional demands 141, 550, 553, 554, 558. See also Radical demands Tribute 229, 284 Trust, in the system 196, 441. See also False consciousness Truth 46, 126, 129, 181, 189, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 199, 215, 264, 329, 441, 460, 528, 626 Two-class model 24, 35, 39, 71, 165, 226, 288, 329, 566, 570 Under-development; caused by capitalist class relation 382, 388, 609, 611 Under-employment 2, 495 Underclass 49, 50 Unemployment 306, 312, 326, 415, 457, 476, 487, 491, 494, 495, 509, 616, 620, 623 Uneven development 179, 253, 314, 331, 342, 355, 356, 370, 380, 381, 384, 386, 388, 389, 503, 587, 607, 608 Unevenness 178, 179, 366, 380, 381, 607, 608 Unfreedom of the working class 256, 257, 402 Unfree labour 221, 225, 257, 344, 348, 356, 357, 358, 368, 370, 379, 385 Union 2, 5, 6, 9, 11, 12, 16, 19, 21, 34, 35, 44, 46, 53, 86, 87, 88, 94, 103, 104, 105, 132, 133, 140, 141, 142, 146, 147, 161, 171, 173, 177, 192, 193, 204, 205, 212, 223, 247, 397, 439, 400, 402, 403, 412, 429, 430, 431, 432, 433, 434, 435, 436, 437, 439, 440, 441, 442, 445, 448, 449, 450, 451, 461, 462, 463, 476, 477, 478, 479, 480, 481, 482, 483, 485, 486, 487, 488, 489, 490, 491, 492, 493, 495, 496, 497, 498, 499, 500, 501, 502, 505, 507, 508, 509, 510, 511, 512, 513, 514, 515, 516, 517, 518, 519, 520, 521, 522, 523, 525, 533, 548, 550, 551, 552, 555, 562, 563, 571, 576, 578, 585, 601, 620, 621, 622, 623, 624, 625, 628, 629, 630 United front 455, 506, 507, 563, 624 United States of America, the usa 3, 142, 305, 332, 366 Unpaid labour 216, 231, 259, 272, 296, 298, 308, 311, 337, 369, 400, 420, 427, 457, 474, 493, 604, 618, 619 Unproductive labour 76, 77, 78, 83, 281 Usury 287, 341, 357, 372, 379, 387, 607, 611 Utopian socialism 69

Index Value/value relation 18, 20, 22, 27, 40, 67, 68, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 93, 94, 95, 96, 100, 103, 104, 105, 106, 111, 116, 119, 120, 122, 124, 125, 129, 130, 133, 136, 137, 147, 151, 157, 158, 160, 164, 165, 177, 192, 196, 198, 206, 207, 212, 213, 214, 226, 227, 230, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 254, 262, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 280, 281, 282, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 296, 297, 298, 299, 301, 302, 303, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 316, 317, 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 325, 327, 328, 330, 333, 337, 342, 344, 345, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 353, 354, 355, 356, 357, 358, 359, 361, 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 369, 370, 373, 374, 377, 380, 381, 385, 386, 393, 394, 395, 397, 400, 405, 409, 410, 411, 415, 417, 418, 419, 420, 421, 424, 425, 426, 427, 431, 433, 437, 439, 444, 445, 454, 457, 470, 474, 475, 476, 478, 479, 481, 485, 493, 494, 495, 498, 513, 515, 519, 520, 527, 533, 541, 543, 555, 560, 561, 569, 570, 572, 577, 581, 585, 586, 587, 589, 590, 591, 592, 593, 594, 595, 597, 599, 600, 602, 604, 606, 607, 610, 612, 613, 616, 617, 618, 619, 620, 622, 623, 625, 626, 629 Vantage point 16, 20, 121, 132, 191, 200, 204, 212, 223, 232, 236, 237, 247, 249, 258, 259, 270, 274, 278, 348, 351, 376, 417, 419, 450, 496, 580, 585, 617 Violence, violent 51, 97, 129, 145, 158, 260, 269, 278, 281, 293, 304, 315, 324, 326, 327, 328, 332, 333, 372, 401, 403, 404, 405, 407, 410, 413, 426, 433, 437, 442, 445, 474, 490, 501, 504, 521, 522, 546, 588, 594, 597, 600, 614, 618 Voluntarism 11, 16, 128, 144, 166, 212, 247, 249, 250, 356, 574, 585 Vulgar socialism 155, 156 Wage 2, 5, 6, 13, 20, 21, 27, 29, 30, 32, 38, 40, 41, 48, 49, 79, 82, 84, 86, 87, 88, 94, 102, 121, 122, 123, 125, 128, 133, 141, 142, 143, 145, 149, 150, 153, 158, 161, 165, 167, 176, 187, 194, 198, 206, 207, 212, 219, 223, 224, 225, 226, 228, 229, 230, 231, 237, 239, 241, 249, 251, 252, 253, 255, 256, 258, 260,

Index 262, 263, 266, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 276, 277, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 289, 291, 292, 293, 294, 296, 298, 299, 300, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 320, 321, 322, 325, 326, 327, 328, 329, 331, 332, 333, 334, 335, 336, 338, 341, 342, 344, 346, 347, 348, 351, 354, 355, 356, 357, 358, 359, 362, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367, 368, 369, 370, 371, 376, 377, 379, 380, 385, 386, 387, 388, 391, 394, 395, 396, 397, 400, 403, 410, 417, 418, 419, 420, 422, 428, 432, 433, 434, 435, 436, 439, 441, 442, 443, 444, 450, 457, 458, 460, 461, 473, 474, 476, 478, 480, 482, 483, 484, 485, 486, 487, 488, 490, 491, 493, 494, 495, 498, 499, 502, 503, 504, 505, 507, 508, 509, 510, 511, 512, 513, 514, 515, 516, 517, 518, 519, 520, 521, 522, 525, 526, 532, 533, 537, 542, 543, 545, 547, 549, 551, 552, 561, 566, 578, 586, 587, 588, 589, 591, 592, 593, 595, 596, 597, 598, 599, 600, 601, 602, 603, 604, 605, 606, 607, 610, 611, 612, 614, 617, 618, 620, 622, 623, 625, 632 nominal 309, 310, 494 real 307, 309, 310, 342, 356, 358, 494, 517, 518 relative 307, 309, 310, 515, 517, 518 social 379, 386, 433, 434, 458, 485, 491, 494, 607, 610 Wage-form 213, 417, 418, 474, 561, 617, 618, 623 Walker, R. 298, 561 Wallerstein, I. 342 War 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 13, 33, 66, 135, 142, 178, 198, 233, 288, 304, 310, 311, 331, 404, 406, 407, 431, 437, 443, 444, 445, 446, 460, 484, 485, 492, 496, 497, 501, 502, 507, 512, 523, 524, 527, 533, 537, 547, 552, 572, 603 Wealth 4, 5, 12, 16, 18, 19, 105, 117, 118, 133, 168, 176, 177, 212, 213, 215, 218, 220, 226, 233, 235, 243, 245, 247, 248, 249, 252, 261, 266, 273, 277, 279, 280, 282, 283, 288, 294, 297, 307, 308, 309, 310, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 318, 320, 322, 324, 325, 327, 332, 374, 387, 404, 422, 423, 424, 425, 431, 439, 440, 455, 474, 475, 486, 496,

683 497, 509, 529, 530, 534, 540, 541, 560, 572, 580, 581, 584, 585, 586, 587, 588, 589, 591, 593, 594, 595, 611, 618, 619 Welfare benefits 282, 316, 362, 432 Wolff, R. 1, 10, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 98, 99, 102, 111, 116, 118, 125, 126, 127, 138, 169, 228, 473, 567, 568, 569 Wolpe, H. 290, 385, 442, 463, 464, 466 Woman 42, 86, 94, 103, 332 Wood, E. 5, 7, 10, 139, 158, 229, 292, 340, 344, 360, 377, 378, 379, 606 Working class 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 48, 49, 51, 54, 58, 59, 60, 65, 68, 69, 71, 76, 83, 84, 87, 98, 112, 122, 123, 128, 133, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148, 152, 157, 159, 161, 165, 166, 171, 193, 195, 198, 204, 226, 241, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 262, 267, 268, 269, 271, 272, 273, 274, 276, 277, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 289, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 317, 319, 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327, 328, 329, 330, 331, 333, 335, 336, 337, 338, 340, 343, 347, 355, 356, 358, 363, 370, 374, 377, 391, 392, 393, 395, 397, 398, 399, 400, 401, 402, 403, 404, 405, 406, 407, 408, 409, 413, 414, 416, 417, 418, 419, 420, 422, 423, 424, 425, 427, 428, 430, 431, 432, 433, 434, 435, 436, 437, 438, 439, 440, 441, 442, 443, 444, 445, 446, 447, 448, 449, 450, 451, 452, 453, 455, 456, 457, 458, 461, 463, 464, 465, 466, 467, 468, 469, 471, 472, 473, 474, 475, 476, 477, 478, 479, 480, 481, 483, 484, 485, 486, 487, 488, 490, 491, 492, 493, 494, 495, 496, 497, 498, 499, 501, 502, 503, 504, 505, 506, 507, 509, 510, 511, 512, 516, 517, 518, 519, 520, 521, 522, 523, 524, 525, 526, 527, 529, 535, 537, 546, 550, 551, 552, 553, 554, 555, 556, 557, 559, 560, 561, 562, 563, 564, 565, 567, 568, 573, 574, 575, 578, 585, 586, 587, 588, 589, 590, 591, 592, 593, 594, 595, 596, 597, 598,

684 599, 600, 601, 603, 604, 605, 606, 613, 614, 615, 616, 617, 618, 619, 620, 621, 622, 623, 624, 625, 626, 627, 628, 629, 630, 632, 633 Working day 83, 132, 147, 160, 167, 230, 231, 262, 266, 269, 311, 325, 347, 348, 355, 356, 357, 358, 359, 379, 385, 396, 418, 420, 426, 432, 475, 487, 491, 493, 494, 498, 519, 596, 607, 610 Workplace 17, 20, 27, 34, 64, 98, 101, 129, 270, 271, 280, 281, 286, 287, 296, 323, 337, 397, 410, 415, 421, 436, 440, 466, 477, 486, 512, 515, 517, 518, 520, 550, 553, 558, 559, 563, 594, 604, 616, 624, 627 World capitalist class/world capitalists 303, 445, 446

Index World market 203, 238, 290, 363, 394, 500, 534, 555, 563, 624. See salso Imperialism World scale/world-scale 302, 303, 331, 503 World workers/world working class 148, 284, 303, 307, 336, 445, 446, 502, 604 Wright, E. 7, 9, 10, 11, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 83, 90, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 120, 121, 122, 123, 127, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 157, 162, 164, 165, 166, 215, 219, 281, 352, 472, 566, 567, 569, 570, 574, 575, 577 Zizek, S. 404, 626