[Marxism] Telling the Truth About Class

[Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus@xxxxxxxxx>]

Fantastic article:

http://www.grundrisse.net/grundrisse22/tellingTheTruthAboutClass.htm

"Some people mistake the absence of identifiable
cultural and status groups on either side of the class
divide for  an absence of class rule. But this is
false. The capitalist class rules, but it is anonymous
and open, and therefore impossible to hate, to storm,
to chase away. So is the proletariat. Legal, political
and cultural equality (equality here only means a
random distribution of – very real –
advantages and privileges) has made class
conflict into what  Capital makes it out to be.
Class conflict is dependent on the extraction of
surplus, and it is not a battle between two camps for
superior recognition and a better position in the
scheme of (re)distribution. That battle goes on still,
to be sure, but it is essentially the battle of
yesteryear. The bourgeoisie is by now incapable of
autonomous self-representation; the representation of
its interests which is taken over more and more by the
state. Since the state represents, and looks after,
capitalism, the old-style self-representation of the
working class is moribund, too, but the state is  not
supplanted – as was the case, at least
symbolically, in the past – by political
institutions of counter-power. Thus revolutionary
proletarian movements, although they now barely exist,
are cast into the outer darkness.  

The truth about class is, therefore, that the
proletariat had, historically, two contradictory
objectives: one, to preserve itself as  an estate with
its own institutions (trade unions, working-class
parties, a socialist press, instruments of self-help,
etc.), and another one, to defeat its antagonist and
to abolish itself as a class. We can now see that the
abolition of the working class  as an
‘estate’, as a ‘guild’, has
been effected by capitalism; capitalism has
finally transformed the proletariat (and the
bourgeoisie) into a veritable class, putting an end to
their capacity for hegemony. Class hegemony of any
kind (still quite vivacious and vigorous in
Gramsci’s time) was exactly what was
annihilated. Class as an economic reality exists, and
it is as fundamental as ever, although it is
culturally and politically almost extinct. This is a
triumph of capitalism."




      

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