From exploitation to resistance and revolt: the working class (original) (raw)
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Exploring Working Class Consciousness: A Critique of the Theory of the ``Labour-Aristocracy
The notion of the labour-aristocracy is one of the oldest Marxian explanations of working-class conservatism and reformism. Despite its continued appeal to scholars and activists on the Left, there is no single, coherent theory of the labour-aristocracy. While all versions argue workingclass conservatism and reformism reflects the politics of a privileged layer of workers who share in 'monopoly' super-profits, they differ on the sources of those super-profits: national dominance of the world-market in the nineteenth century (Marx and Engels), imperialist investments in the 'colonial world'/global South (Lenin and Zinoviev), or corporate monopoly in the twentieth century (Elbaum and Seltzer). The existence of a privileged layer of workers who share monopoly super-profits with the capitalist class cannot be empirically verified. This essay presents evidence that British capital's dominance of key-branches of global capitalist production in the Victorian period, imperialist investment and corporate market-power can not explain wage-differentials among workers globally or nationally, and that relatively well-paid workers have and continue to play a leading rôle in radical and revolutionary working-class organisations and struggles. An alternative explanation of working-class radicalism, reformism, and conservatism will be the subject of a subsequent essay.
Class Struggle: Money, Power, Oppression, and Resistance
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The paper contributes to the lifelong dialogs about the capital-labor conflict between the upper-class (bourgeoisie) and the working-class (proletariat). It unpacks the ideological underpinnings driving the insatiable quest of the capitalist class for profit, power, interminable exploitation of the working class across ages. The paper underscores the knack of the upper-classes to exert limitless authority over the working classes given their control of the means of production in ways that include dictating the working conditions, wages, hours of work, and engaging the apparatuses of the state-laws, judiciary, police, and army-as detailed by Althusser, to enforce their compliance with capitalist ideals (80). It ascribes the continued failure of the working-class to successfully resist and overthrow the brutal capitalist machinery to encumbering False Consciousness; described as a mental trap that propels the class to accept and naively participate in their own economic oppression. The predilection of the members towards individualized forms of resistance as against forming formidable alliances across interest groups to pursue collective action is equally found culpable. Alongside forming alliances, the author suggests outright rejection of bourgeois ideologies which permeate the major spheres of the society and their replacement with the workers' own ideological alternatives as imperative. Consistent with Marx's submission, workers' ownership of the means of production to produce their own necessities rather than continually selling their labor for a living wage is considered expedient in their struggle to disable the capitalist machinery system (571). This is coupled with textual analysis of media and popular culture, for example, newspapers, television, advertising, games, and films, by the audience; mostly comprising the working class, to unearth and disavow the entrenched capitalist ethos. The paper examines two films that exemplify how the capitalist class systematically exploits their subjects with feeble resistance.
" The History of all Hitherto Existing Society: " Class Struggle and the Current Wave of Resistance
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Across the last decade we have witnessed a growing wave of resistance across the globe. In this article we argue that it is critical to utilise class analysis to understand contemporary social movements. We maintain that class analysis begins with understanding class as a series of relations and/or processes that condition both the objective and subjective dimensions of class. Following this, we illustrate how sectors of the contemporary working class are in struggle, yet struggle differently, based on their structural location as well as differing nature of their resistance. In taking this approach to class and social movements, we argue that scholars can begin to unmask the central role of capitalism and the attending regimes of accumulation in the current wave of resistance even when they appear disconnected .
The Proletariat versus the Working Class: Shifts in Class Struggle in the Twenty-first Century
Pluto Press, 2020
Open Marxism 4. Against a Closing World // Edited by Ana Cecilia Dinerstein, Alfonso García Vela, Edith González and John Holloway // Pluto Press, 2020 // ISBN 978 0 7453 4024 1 // In Chapter 8, Katerina Nasioka traces the effects of the capitalist crisis since the 1970s, and the shifts that are observed in class struggle as a result of this ongoing crisis. She argues that the anticapitalist struggle today displays two mutually contradicting dynamics which reflect the intensity of the capitalist crisis and the sharpening of contradictions in the capital relation. On the one hand, the twentieth-century’s dominant form of political organisation of the working class, hegemonised by the labour movement and guided by the Leninist canon, is hard to assert in the present-day context. On the other hand, the contemporary struggles against capital, which are defensive in most cases, are often fought in the name of ‘we, the workers’, looking for class unity in those categories that have built the identity of the labour movement in the past, e.g. the nation, the state. Therefore, while organisation based on the working class is debilitated, the lack of class unity is challenging the prospect of revolution. Nasioka asks, then: how can new struggles be translated into a political prospect that goes against-and-beyond capitalist society?
Marxism and the Critique of Value. Edited by Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson, and Nicholas Brown (MCM'), www.mcmprime.com, 2014
From Class Struggle to Declassing While living and working conditions continue to grow more precarious, affecting greater and greater segments of the population even in countries that have emerged victorious on the world market, widespread talk of a return of class society and of class struggle suggest the (re)birth of a new historical conjuncture. Given the rapid growth in social polarization, such talk can, at first glance, seem quite plausible. However, as is usually the case, resorting to the past modes of interpretation and explanation leads not to clarification, but only to greater confusion. Despite initial appearances, categories of class opposition cannot provide a basis for any adequate conception of the extreme growth in social inequality, nor are the oppositions and conflicts between social interest groups resulting from such inequality simply recurrences of what, measured by their real historical content, were once accurately conceived as instances of class struggle. [...]
Class Matters: Inequality and Exploitation in 21st Century Britain
Class Matters: Inequality and Exploitation in 21st Century Britain, 2018
Social class remains a fundamental presence in British life in the twenty-first century. It is woven into the very fabric of social and political discourse, undiminished by the end of mass industry; unaugmented despite the ascendancy of 'ordinary working people' and other substitute phrases. Absent from this landscape, however, is any compelling Marxist expression or analysis of class. In Class Matters, Charles Umney brings Marxist analysis out of the 19th century textiles mill, and into the call centres, office blocks and fast food chains of modern Britain. He shows how core Marxist concepts are vital to understanding increasing pay inequality, decreasing job security, increasing routinisation and managerial control of the labour process. Providing a critical analysis of competing perspectives, Umney argues that class must be understood as a dynamic and exploitative process integral to capitalism - rather than a descriptive categorisation - in order for us to better understand the gains capital has made at the expense of labour over the last four decades.
‘Us’ and ‘them’: Theoretical insights about the class division in contemporary capitalism
This article discusses the problem of class division in contemporary capitalism. Focusing on the recent work of Savage et al. (2013), it addresses two problems: First, it calls into question their concept of “the elite” and particularly their neglect of the role of the capitalist mode of production in the constitution of this group; second, it questions how these authors create class borders between the working class and social groups such as the middle class and the precariat. Regarding the treatment of “the elite”, we suggest it would be useful to bring back the question of the relationship between the capital accumulated by this group and the control/ownership over the means of production. Regarding the working class and the other aforementioned groups, we suggest to instead use the concept of class fractions. In order to develop these proposals, the article explores a way to integrate the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu – used by Savage et al. (2013) – and the Marxian approach to social classes. To this end, it follows a double path, first using Eric Olin Wright’s classification of social class approaches in order to highlight their limits and potential contributions, and, second, suggesting the use of some insights from Alain Badiou in order to build a common ontological framework.
The Perils of the 'White Working Class': Analysing the New Discussion on Class
Global Labour Journal, 2019
As the conservative promise of law, order and economic stability remains just as unfulfilled as the social-democratic promises of peace and social justice, we are experiencing what the philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1975) has labelled a “crisis of authority”. This is defined as a situation in which the ruling class is no longer able to rule in the same way as before. At the same time, low levels of unionisation in the Global North, the decline of social democratic parties (apart from Corbyn’s Labour Party in the United Kingdom) and the decimation of communist parties are symptoms of a crisis of the working class. Arguably, this amounts to a twin crisis in which the ruling class can no longer “lead” and the working class is unable to advance an alternative vision for society. This ultimately raises the question of how these crises reconfigure working-class politics. In this article I seek to address this question by discussing “popular books” on the working class. In doing so, I investigate how these books seek to explain the twin crises, how and where they locate “class”, how working-class families are portrayed, how the relationship between class, gender and immigration is conceptualised, and lastly how the role of working-class organisation features in these accounts.