The Retreat from Class. Ellen Meiksins Wood
the constituents of the ‘popular’ alliance can have as their objective the abolition of classes or even, more specifically, the abolition of capitalist exploitation, and whether they possess the strategic social power to achieve these objectives. The implications have been far from revolutionary and far more conducive to displacing class struggle and the working class altogether from the centre of Marxism.
These historical developments have had profound effects on Marxist theory. It might have been possible for theory to serve as a guiding thread through the complexities of historical change and the compromises of political struggle, a means of illuminating these processes in the constant light of class struggle and its ultimate goal, analysing changes in class structure and especially the development of new formations within the working class, laying a foundation for new modalities of struggle while keeping the revolutionary objective constantly in sight. Instead, Marxist theory, when it has concerned itself with matters of practice at all, has increasingly adapted itself to the immediate demands of the contest for political power, whether in the form of revolutionary action or electoral alliance.
In the more recent major developments in Western Marxism, theory has become in many respects a theorization of Eurocommunist strategy and especially its electoral strategy of ‘popular alliances’. While the ultimate objective of Eurocommunism is still the construction of socialism, presumably a classless society without exploitation, this objective seems no longer to illuminate the whole process of revolutionary change. Instead, the process is coloured by the immediate needs of political strategy and the attainment of political office. So, for example, Marxist theory seems no longer designed to enhance working-class unity by dispelling the capitalist mystifications that stand in its way. Instead, as we shall see in what follows, these mystifications have in effect been incorporated into the post-Marxist theory of class, which is now largely devoted not to illuminating the process of class formation or the path of class struggle, but rather to establishing a ground for alliances within and between classes as they are here and now, for the purpose of attaining political power, or, more precisely, public office.
This reconceptualization of the revolutionary project has served to reinforce a tendency that has come from other directions as well: the displacement of the working class from the centre of Marxist theory and practice. Whether that displacement has been determined by the exigencies of the power struggle, by despair in the face of a non-revolutionary working class in the West, or simply by conservative and anti-democratic impulses, the search for revolutionary surrogates has been a hallmark of contemporary socialism. Whatever the reasons for this tendency and whether or not it is accompanied by an explicit reformulation of Marxism and its whole conception of the revolutionary process, to dislodge the working class is necessarily to redefine the socialist project, both its means and its ends.
Revolutionary socialism has traditionally placed the working class and its struggles at the heart of social transformation and the building of socialism, not simply as an act of faith but as a conclusion based upon a comprehensive analysis of social relations and power. In the first place, this conclusion is based on the historical/materialist principle which places the relations of production at the centre of social life and regards their exploitative character as the root of social and political oppression. The proposition that the working class is potentially the revolutionary class is not some metaphysical abstraction but an extension of these materialist principles, suggesting that, given the centrality of production and exploitation in human social life, and given the particular nature of production and exploitation in capitalist society, certain other propositions follow: 1) the working class is the social group with the most direct objective interest in bringing about the transition to socialism; 2) the working class, as the direct object of the most fundamental and determinative – though certainly not the only – form of oppression, and the one class whose interests do not rest on the oppression of other classes, can create the conditions for liberating all human beings in the struggle to liberate itself; 3) given the fundamental and ultimately unresolvable opposition between exploiting and exploited classes which lies at the heart of the structure of oppression, class struggle must be the principal motor of this emancipatory transformation; and 4) the working class is the one social force that has a strategic social power sufficient to permit its development into a revolutionary force. Underlying this analysis is an emancipatory vision which looks forward to the disalienation of power at every level of human endeavour, from the creative power of labour to the political power of the state.
To displace the working class from its position in the struggle for socialism is either to make a gross strategic error or to challenge this analysis of social relations and power, and at least implicitly to redefine the nature of the liberation which socialism offers. It is significant, however, that the traditional view of the working class as the primary agent of revolution has never been effectively challenged by an alternative analysis of social power and interest in capitalist society. This is, of course, not to deny that many people have questioned the revolutionary potential of the working class and offered other revolutionary agents in its place: students, women, practitioners of various alternative ‘life styles’, and popular alliances of one kind or another, more recently the ‘new social movements’. The point is simply that none of these alternatives has been supported by a systematic reassessment of the social forces that constitute capitalism and its critical strategic targets. The typical mode of these alternative visions is voluntaristic utopia or counsel of despair – or, as is often the case, both at once: a vision of a transformed society without real hope for a process of transformation.
One well-known attack on the traditional Marxist view of the working class is symptomatic and worth a brief consideration to illustrate the strategic bankruptcy of these alternative visions to date. Andre Gorz’s Farewell to the Working Class is both utopian vision and counsel of despair. Gorz proceeds from the premise that, since the future of society must lie in the abolition of work, it must be the objective of the socialist project to determine the particular form in which work will be abolished – whether, for example, as the degradation of mass unemployment or as an emancipatory ‘liberation of time’. The goal he proposes is the creation of a ‘discontinuous social space made up of two distinct spheres’:1 the realm of necessity, constituted by the demands of necessary material production to satisfy primary needs – a sphere that can never be fully escaped – and a realm of freedom outside the constraints of necessary social production, a sphere of autonomy which must be enlarged and to which the necessarily ‘heteronomous’ sphere of material production must be subordinated. The working class cannot by its very nature be the agent of this transformation because the abolition of work cannot be its objective. A class ‘called into being’ by capitalism,2 the working class identifies itself with its work and with the productivist logic of capital. It is itself a replica of capital, a class ‘whose interests, capacities and skills are functional to the existing productive forces, which themselves are functional solely to the rationality of capital’. It is also a class whose power has been broken by the form and structure of the labour-process itself. The transformative impulse must, therefore, come from a ‘non-class of non-workers’ not ‘marked with the insignia of capitalist relations of production’,3 made up of people who, because they experience work as ‘an externally imposed obligation’ in which life is wasted, are capable of having as their goal ‘the abolition of workers and work rather than their appropriation’.4 This group includes all those whom the system has rendered actually or potentially unemployed or underemployed, all the ‘supernumeraries’ of contemporary social production, perhaps in alliance with the ‘new social movements’, such as the ecology and women’s movements.
Countless questions can be raised about Gorz’s analysis of the labour-process in contemporary capitalism and its effects on the working class. One critical point stands out: his whole argument is based on a kind of inverted technologism, a fetishism of the labour-process and a tendency to find the essence of a mode of production in the technical process of work rather than in the relations of production, the specific mode of exploitation.