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Fredrik Samuelsson
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.