Who can make successful revolutions?

Agency;
There has been a big argument in academia, the media and even in mainstream political parties in Western Europe about whether or not the working class still exists in the west. (Not in US mainstream politics. There everybody has been ‘middle class folks’ since Roosevelt.) But this article does not discuss whether a working class exists. Capitalism, even our current neo-liberal version, could not live without it. And a great many writers and academics – including supporters of the status quo - have studied and analysed the sociological, economic and even demographic evidence to come to the conclusion that there is still a working class – and that, from a global perspective, it is growing in numbers as well as in percentage terms. Perhaps it is therefore unsurprising that despite huge changes in western societies, even in Britain, a country without any mass Marxist tradition, the term, ‘working class’ stubbornly sticks in popular understanding. Despite Blair, Mandleson and Milliband who think (and hope) that the working class has dissolved into their mush of ‘hardworking families’, 60% of the UK population still insists on defining themselves as working class. (Jan 2013 – Independent.)

Ok. The question then becomes whether or not the actual working class, in its modern mosaic, still has the revolutionary potential to overthrow capitalism. The critical question for Marx was - who could lead and succeed in the struggle of the majority to overthrow the social and economic system of capitalism? This would be the first time in history where the majority consciously undertook the removal of a social system that served a small minority class and then, consciously, replaced it with another that served first the majority and then all. For Marx the crucial role of the working class emerged from its place in the fundamental contradiction of the new system of capitalism, the contradiction between private accumulation and social production. Nowhere was this contradiction expressed more acutely than in the vast units of production which sucked in all who had only their labour power to sell and their owners, who expanded and accumulated their wealth exclusively through their private ownership of those means of production.

And even where the working class were a tiny minority of the oppressed classes in the whole of society, for example in 1916 Russia, their social concentration, their rough equality of condition and their vast collective enterprise at the workplace would provide the material basis for their leadership of all the oppressed in the battle with the old system. Russia in 1916 had the largest factories in the world. The Russian working class was the most class conscious at that point in history. They led their cities, the countryside and the army through two revolutions and the beginnings of the creation of the new ‘socialist order.’

Today, the ‘large units of production’ are growing exponentially through countries like Brazil, South Africa India and most of all China. Tomorrow they will conquer the whole continent of Africa. Their emergence (and the independent, albeit distorted, national development that they create) is a product of the weakness of modern western imperialism and not an example of the extension of its strength. (See last blogs.) And they still produce the largest examples of social unrest apparent on the planet today. But in Western Europe today, ‘large units of production’ employ a small minority of the workers as a whole and a rash of different contracts for the sale of labour have replaced the weight of the old collective agreements and industrial bargaining. Millions are ‘self employed’. (They are ‘outsourced’ labour that is paid for by big owners or the state with the minimum overheads. Few really ‘own’ their own means of production when you include premises, energy sources, raw materials etc.) Other millions are employed temporarily, with their insecure contracts. It is the politics of the arguments about the minimum wage that appear vital to more millions, as the only apparent avenue to improvement of their lot.  And so Capital has not liquidated the working class. They have defeated its leading, best organised trade union sectors, most especially in Britain, then they have reorganised it to service its international investment in overseas production, its markets, domestic sales and finances, its services and transport, its high tech markets and rearranged all of the contracts for its labour. Simultaneously it has further demarcated the division of labour – but now on a global scale – to make use of the new infrastructures, created by state property in China and India, to access the cheapest unskilled labour on the planet.

Marx lived in England at the point of its fastest industrial development. He observed the working class as it emerged in the world’s first industrial nation (although even England did not have a majority of its population in the cities until the early 1880s.) The younger Marx, inspired by Europe’s (failed) revolutions of 1848, began to watch at first hand the emergence of this new class in a laboratory pure experiment conducted in his new country of exile. He made a natural mistake.

Both Marx and Engels commented profusely on the Chartists in Britain, supportively and with respect. They also saw the new politics required by the emergence of the working class in Europe as a whole and the weakness it displayed, as it could not wrest its independence from middle class and even bourgeois class forces across Europe in the 1848 revolutions. But, impressed with the class independence of the Chartists and its revolutionary (‘physical force’ wing) they did not see in Britain that the working class was socially recomposing from its pre-1848 character to an altogether different social existence post 1848 – and that Chartism was already dieing as a consequence. Yet Chartism and Chartism alone of all the various expressions of working class politics in Europe up to 1848 had been the most independent of other social classes and had organised millions.

Chartism was overtaken because the British working class was recomposed by Capital in the 1840s 50s and 60s. By the time that some workers in towns got the franchise in 1867 the British working class had been transformed.

Chartism was undoubtedly the first political even partly revolutionary expression of the British working class – as Marx saw clearly. But that working class was not at all the working class being assembled at an extreme rate into large units of production. On the contrary. In the premier Capitalist nation on earth, where obstacles first to the international slave trade and then to Empire had been destroyed by the revolutions of the 17th century, where the market dominated land, rent, overseas expansion and Parliament, Britain’s first self acknowledged and self conscious working class emerged from Hand Loom Weavers in cottages and shacks in villages and farms – as well as from the earliest cotton mills, from ‘self employed’ families scratching coal out of the landowners’ pits, from agricultural labourers, from spinners and weavers gathered in small workshops. They sold vegetables and meats around the streets in the new towns. They made shoes in their masters’ workshops. (Much later the majority of the members of Marx’s First International in Britain worked in shoemakers shops.) They rowed boats to collect the tobacco off the ships on the Thames, the Mersey, the Avon and the Clyde. They were domestic servants and sewed jute and hemp. They returned from the Napoleonic wars and starved. Already by 1819 and the Peterloo massacre the Manchester workers led the others. The city was where to protest. Burning the barns and the ‘Spinning Jennies’ did not work. But it was no simple utopian accident that the Chartists developed a ‘land for the workers’ policy. Most of the Charter’s support was barely one generation from that rural sense of how the poor might secure their independence.

In other words the working class in Britain went through a thorough social and economic as well as a political refoundation in front of Marx’s eyes. He could see the future in Chartism but not its past

As we know, courtesy first of Marx, all capitalism’s relations are constantly changing, shifting even at moments of crisis, turning into their opposite. The political significance of Chartism is that already the working class of the first capitalist country had created a multi-millioned revolutionary movement of working class political independence, but one hardly built on any major units of production at all! It was not defeated as part of the general failure of the 1848 revolutions in Europe. It was destroyed by the social transformation of the British working class.

The working class across the planet is in constant social, political and economic change. This change is contradictory and uneven. What emerges as China’s high road to national development creates a vast new layer of humanity chained to the equivalents of the Mill and the Mine is that, at the same time, and as part of the same process, a million workers in the UK’s five thousand call centres (UNISON 2014) are socially organised as the modern market – for the distribution of money and goods - while the cost of this essential labour to ensure consumption in the west of commodities and related services, is reduced to the minimum.

It remains the case, both in China and the UK, that the ‘large units of production’ that do exist can still play a disproportionate role in social upheaval and in class struggle. But working class consciousness, the sense that you are part of a separate class, that you have class interests that are separate and apart and contradictory to those of the capitalist class, that you need to express those interests distinctly from all other layers in society – although you might welcome their support; that sort of understanding does not depend on 1950s heavy industry.

It follows that the working class can achieve its identity in a number of different ways and / or combination of those ways. For example in Britain the trade unions created the Labour Party. The defense of the social and economic interests of the workers’ movement, trade unions, became the basis for its political expression. In France and other European countries the political formations of the working class, mainly the old Socialist Parties that had supported WW1 and the new Communist Parties that supported the Russian Revolution, created their own trade union federations. The workers’ movement’s political expressions in those cases created the different routes to its economic defenses. In Spain that state of affairs was further divided by the Anarchists. (And it would seem that Britain’s much vaunted ‘working class unity’ behind the TUC and the LP has not exactly proved its superiority over these examples!) The working classes in Thailand are today being called together by a political revolution launched by reformers from within the state. Their class independence has yet to be achieved, as is also the case in the various political revolutions ‘summoned up’ by different factions of the ruling class across Eastern and South Eastern Europe over the last twenty years.

In Britain the clearest, albeit fragile and uneven expression of the ‘new’ working class has come with the anti-war movement against Blair’s Iraq war. This profoundly British political action was at once global in its perspective, deeply hostile to the savage remnants of past imperial glory, horrified by the betrayal of the Labour Party leadership and committed to mass action because nothing else in politics or society represented those that were involved. What this event showed was the error of any belief that the ‘new’ working class cannot act in its interests, including directly, including politically with a capital ‘P’. But it also showed its immaturity in that it could not yet lead the whole of society – even against war. It could not yet challenge the political system with an alternative political system. It has not yet built the germs of the ‘new’ working class organisations, communities, activities and culture that express an alternative way of life, way of ‘doing things.’ It has no system, no coherence, and no combinations yet to counterpose to the rotten core of British society. But the ‘new’ working class has emerged out of the convulsions of change with some small examples of its best and most worthy parts of its history still intact – indeed more politically powerful than ever. Those tiny examples in a few unions and the campaigns of working class democracy (e.g. the defense of local hospitals, occupy, anti-fracking etc) are an immeasurable gain. They will help new working class leaders address the new working class politics and economics as well as promote the sort of society for which the new working class will stand, and it will be done in practice, in life, in argument and thought, as we fight the battles ahead.  

Note: The last of the four issues of Marxism – its claim to be scientific – will follow next. And after that some of the practical political implications of the four discussions will be elaborated.