g ) Proletariat and Revolution
 Capital creates a network of enterprises which exist only for and through profit and are protected by States which are no more than anti-communist organisations, and simultaneously creates the mass of individuals who are forced to rise against capital itself. [18] This mass is not homogeneous, but it will forge its unity in the communist revolution, although its components will not play the same role. A revolution is the result of real needs; it originates in material living conditions which have become unbearable. This also applies to the proletariat, which is brought into existence by capital. A large part of the world's population must sell its labour power in order to live, since it has no means of production. Some sell their labour and are productive. Others sell it and are unproductive. Still others cannot sell it : capital only buys living labour if it can hope to valorise itself at a reasonable rate ( the average rate of profit ); they are excluded from production. If one identifies proletarian with factory worker ( or even worse : with manual labourer ), or with the poor, then one cannot see what is subversive in the proletarian condition. The proletariat is the negation of this society. It is not the collection of the poor, but of those who are desperate, those who have no reserves ( les sans-réserves in French, or senza riserve in Italian ), [19] who have nothing to lose but their chains; those who are nothing, have nothing, and cannot liberate themselves without destroying the whole social order. The proletariat is the dissolution of present society, because this society deprives it of nearly all its positive aspects. Thus the proletariat is also its own destruction. All theories ( either bourgeois, fascist, stalinist, left-wing or "gauchistes" ) which in any way glorify and praise the proletariat as it is and claim for it the positive role of defending values and regenerating society, are counter-revolutionary. [20] Worship of the proletariat has become one of the most efficient and dangerous weapons of capital. Nevertheless, whenever it interferes with the normal course of events, the proletariat shows that it is the negation of contemporary society, that it has no values to give it and no role to play in it except a destructive one. The proletariat is not the working class; it is a social relation. [21] It is the ever-present destruction of the old world, but only potentially; it becomes real only in a moment of social tension and upheaval, when it is compelled by capital to be the agent of communism. It only becomes the subversion of established society when it unifies itself, constitutes itself into a class and organises itself, not in order to make itself the dominant class, like the bourgeoisie in its time, but in order to destroy the society of classes; at that point there is only one social agent : mankind. But apart from such a period of conflict and the period which precedes it, the proletariat is reduced to the status of an element of capital, a wheel within a mechanism ( and of course this is precisely the aspect glorified by capital, which worships the worker only as a part of the existing social system ). If in some cases ( as in the U.S. ) the development of capital has reduced the number of factory workers, it cannot reduce the proletariat to nothing. It is true that a number of productive workers have been integrated by capital through reformism ( i.e., the qualified white workers organised in the American and English unions, or in the P.C.F. and C.G.T. in France ). One part of the unproductive workers ( office workers, clerks ) has wages and living conditions similar to that of factory workers, while another part ( executive and managerial staffs ) has been successfully attracted into the sphere of capital -- at least for the time being. Finally, it is clear that a fraction of those excluded from wage labour in the poor countries will not be able to act efficiently in a revolutionary process, because of backwardness, isolation, etc., at least for a given length of time. Yet there is no doubt that : 1 ) the revolution will be the work of the most desperate, those without reserves, among these three sub-groups within the proletariat; 2 ) among the revolutionaries, former productive workers will play a decisive ( but not exclusive ) role, as their place in production puts them in a better situation ( at least at the beginning ) to revolutionise it ( see below on the use of the economy as a weapon ). Thus the factory proletariat does not lose its central role, although other elements reinforce it in the revolution. Gradually all revolutionary elements become a single mass; former classes tend to merge into a single world community. But this is the result of the revolutionary process, not its starting-point. As associated workers ( kombiniert Arbeiter ), organising common ( gemeinschaftlich ) labour, productive workers can attack the roots of society : its material basis, its productive process. Thus their role is privileged in so far as their social function enables them to carry out different tasks than others. This has nothing to do with the usual apology for "the working class," which treats work ( especially manual work ) as some sort of infinite bliss. Ouvrierisme and labourism are the opposite side of intellectualism. The communist revolution is a mechanism which the proletariat sets in motion without knowing beforehand that it is going to do this ( yet the consciousness of what it is doing is useful since it allows it to be more efficient ). As Bordiga explains in a still somewhat mechanistic way, the process is not : economic determination, then class consciousness, then class action; but : economic determination, then class action, then class consciousness. The proletariat is forced to use the weapon which its social function gives it -- in the case of productive workers. For instance, in certain circumstances, even when they are only asking for higher wages, productive workers can organise a sit-down strike because this is the normal way for them to exert pressure. To be able to win, the proletariat must carry the logic of its action to its conclusion; it must establish contact with other enterprises and, later, begin production on its own, in all the factories. Of course it cannot make use of value : it has no control over capital as a sum of value. It cannot use finance capital, but only its own function, i.e., the labour process. This splits apart the double nature of wage labour, the labour mechanism as well as the value-mechanism. At the same time, in the sphere of consumption, real needs -- housing, transportation, etc. -- bring about the end of social commodity relations : only the use and circulation of use values remain. Notes [18] J. Boggs, Pages of a Negro Worker's Notebook. New York : Monthly Review Press, 1964. ( Interesting in spite of its black nationalism. ) [19] The concept of those who have "no reserves" was formulated by the Italian communist, Amadeo Bordiga, in the years following World War ll. Bordiga's purpose was not to create a new definition of the proletariat, but to go back to the general definition. What Capital describes can and must be understood together with earlier analyses of the proletariat, for instance, the Contribution to the Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Law : Introduction ( 1843 ). [20] This is what the vast majority of so-called revolutionaries do ( in many ways ). [21] E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 939. |