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arbetaren:klassenbortom [Y-m-dH:i]
ludvig Tillägg. |
— (current) |
| ====== The class beyond the workers' movement ====== | |
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| //Fredrik Samuelsson// | |
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| The contemporary workers' movement is not what it once was. Nostalgics idealise a semi-mythical past when the workers' movement was a forceful counter-society. There once was a time when the spare time of class-conscious workers was given meaning through the party, the union, the youth league, education leagues and cooperatives. These were the times of proletarian culture and proletarian literature and the road from dust to prize seemed obvious, regardless of whether it took the form of reform or revolution. | |
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| Obviously, this is not the case today, but how do we approach this new situation? The bourgeois answer is to declare the working class dead, and along with it goes class struggle. Today, we are told, we have new contradictions to grasp: worker/unemployed, between ethnic groups or between different generations. The post-industrial society wiped out the working class, or made it into a meaningless replica of the past, where those who do not fulfil the demands of contemporary society are placed. The temptation is great: without a working class the entire theory of Marxism falls like a house of cards, as will every conception of the world that seriously question capitalist order and aims at something beyond it. | |
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| Instead, vast layers of the left respond by closing their eyes and let the changes go unnoticed. Old forms of organisation and old symbols are made into fetisches. Sometimes they find the guilty party: the social democrats and the union bureaucrats sold their ideals, they betrayed the movement. If we replace the central committee we can still win back what has been lost. They often try to reconquer past forms: "Create struggling unions!", "Let's build a new workers' party!". But each such attempt only becomes a pale glow from the glory days of the workers' movement. | |
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| We do not mourn the decay of the old workers' movement, nor do we try to declare class struggle dead. The connection between class struggle and the workers' movement is not that simple. | |
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| Of course class struggle exists today -- otherwise the capitalistic system would be inconceivable. Because capital is basically nothing but labour: living labour and former living labour objectified in its dead form: machines, commodities and money. Capital is dependent on the worker for its own existence -- as is the worker, as labour power, dependent on capital for his existence. This basic relationship between labour and capital makes all contradictions in terms of length of the work day or work intensity, in terms of wages and working conditions, is as present today as it ever was. Capital has penetrated our entire existence, thus making more and more areas subject to the form of commodity and also the contradictions penetrate society in its entirety, far beyond the gates of the industry. | |
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| But if the class contradictions remain, how can we understand the decay of the workers' movement? Primarily we can not idealise the historic workers' movement. Neither unions nor workers' parties invented class struggle: riots, strikes and everyday struggles at and outside the workplace existed long before this movement. On the contrary, unions and parties were founded in order to channel already existing class struggle and came to act like a mediator between the classes. In order for this mediation to function it needed to give concrete advances on behalf of the workers on one hand, but discipline workers on the other hand, so the proletarian struggle did not jeopardise the existence of capital. | |
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| The entrance of capitalism always consisted of primitive accumulation, the separation of humans from their means of existence, thus being forced into wage labour. Making honest workers out of propertyless people in rural areas was not an easy process. Long work hours, poor work environement and unfree labour made it understandable to resort to different forms of begging, vagabondery and criminal behaviour, and in many cases this was a more prosperous choice than drudgery in the factory. | |
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| Careful regulations of the factory and mandatory public school became the tools to readapt the workers. There were also campaigns from philanthropics in the educated middle class aimed at the working class in order to counter the claimed dissolution of customs and moral chaos amongst the workers. To remedy this illness education circles and workers' societies were instituted in an attempt to organise time outside of the employer's control by reading literature and popular science. | |
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| When the workers' movement appeared they mantled this ideal of properness and honesty. The ideal came to be sober workers who were in time and behaved properly against co-workers as well as superiors. Self-disciplination contributed to the creation of an honest working class, just the kind of working class capital needed: never late for work, no laziness, no drinking, but always performing their tasks as precise as possible. Thus, the workers' movement has not been a simple counterforce against capital, but it actively contributed to the creation of a new subjectivity, adapted to the needs of modern industry capital. Workers' struggles have been completely dominated by the interests of organisations, where every action is made through representatives. | |
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| The real power of workers is to be found in their ability to stop being workers, refusing creation of value, which capital needs. The official workers' movement has left struggle against labour as such behind. Most often the power over the labour process has been given to capital as well, while the unions focused on wage struggles and the parties focused on welfare reforms. We also have to remember that this organisation appeared within the confines of the national State. Indeed, only with the integration of workers in society, through the mediation of the workers' movement, the building of the national State could be legitimised. | |
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| What is the cause of the crisis of the workers' movement? Why is it no longer able to mediate labour and capital, integrate, discipline and creating identity? Why has it been so radically diminished, if not totally lost? Several factors work together: | |
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| - In compliance with the spread of mass consumption, identity has more and more become a product to buy and create through consumption. Old class identities seem more inhibitory and less luring than the ever-growing supply offered by the market. The subject has changed and it does not allow itself to be constructed at soberity lodges or in study circles within the workers' movement. We demand more than that. | |
| - Because of the success of the workers' movement, primarily the large compromises of the post-war era, the workers' movement was integrated into the State to such a degree it lost its function as counter-society. | |
| - When a wave of workers' struggles appeared at the end of the 1960's the workers' movement became an obvious opponent. Wildcat strikes and other independent forms of struggle broke with the compromise and showed that it was able to act outside of mediating instances. The sect-based left of the 1970's appeared in the forms of the old workers' movement, but only managed to channel a small part of the struggle, while most of these struggles appeared in other forms. | |
| - When capital aimed at a new neo-liberal counter-strategy, partly as an answer to the increased resistance of workers, the workers' movement largely lost its function as class mediator and as warranty for the compromises. The workers' movement was no longer able to warrant neither labour peace and honest workers nor rising real wages and social safety. Additionally, the globalisation of the flows of finance and chains of production within capital has diminished the space for national compromises. | |