Re: [Marxism] absence of real forces Footnote on Class

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Sayan Bhattacharyya wrote:
> 
> 
> But socialist revolutions are usually made (according to classical
> Marxism, anyway) by the  proletarian workers, not by the relatively
> more well-off workers. No? Relatively more well-off workers are going
> to be less likely to do anything that upsets the status quo, than
> proletarian workers.

This is wrong in a number of ways.

1. There have not been enough socialist revolutions for the phrase
"socialist revolutions are USUALLY made" to have any content. That is,
we don't have enough empirical data to generalize from it.

2. More importantly, it is fundamentally wrong to contrast "proletarian
workers" with "relatively more well-off workers." "Proletarian" is just
another name for "worker." 

        (a) "Proletarian workers" is redundant, like speaking of "wet water." 

        (b) Class is a relationship and a process, not a tin can into which we
dump red and blue-green but not purple or yellow marbles. One cannot
reach an accurate notion of class through empirical description of
individuals.

        (c) There are huge differences _within_ the working class of a nation,
and (under conditions when such thought is possible*) a core part of
revolutionary thought  consists in analyzing those differences and
identifying the sectors of the class which are in motion.

                (c1) *I think my parenthesis here is important. One cannot 
conduct
this analysis in the abstract and 'in advance,' but only in the context
of an ongoing resistance movement.

                (c2) As Joaquin has been arguing, there is no such movement 
now, and
hence our thinking has to be focused on what left activists can usefully
do under current conditions. Abstract political theory offers little
(non-tautological) guidance to that task.

3. There is no reason in the abstract to assume that any given sector of
the working class is more or less apt to initiate the next "political
punctuation." (I am using Stephen Gould's metaphor of "punctuated
equilibrium.")

4. The leading elements in France & the U.S. in the '60s were the
better-off sectors of the working class. This is true even _within_ the
"worse-off" sectors. For example, one of the shaping struggles of the
period was the Montgomery Bus Boycott, led by domestic workers. But
Domestic workers were amongst the "better off" members of the black
community of Montgomery!

Carrol


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