Farewell to the Working Class

The proletariat is no longer a revolutionary subject.

Changes in the role of the work and labor process in the closing decades of the 20th century have, once and for all, weakened the political power of skilled industrial workers. And it's not coming back.

Employment will continue to decrease. Unemployment will keep on rising. What little actual "work" remains will rely more and more on atomized individuals. The ideal employee of 21st-century capitalism is not the factory worker but the Uber driver. How exactly does anyone plan on organizing a working class that only survives as a category of pure economic analysis with no basis in sociological reality?

That is also how increasingly popular idpol claptrap must be understood: as an impotent substitute to the now defunct workers' movement. It is no surprise the decline in union membership coincided with the triumph of identitarianism in all its forms, be it liberal feminism or populist nativism.

That does not mean all is lost and socialism is now out of reach. It does however implies that the Left should radically adapt its worldview to the new circumstances if it is serious about reviving the communist project, slaying identity politics and taking the future back from the hands of capitalists.

I've said it at least once and I'll say it again: decentralised networks will provide autonomy for people when capitalism doesn't.

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Industrial workers were the last bastion of the organized proletariat. It's gone now.

I usually come here to escape liberal drivel.


Not really.
It moved to third world countries, where they became Sweat Shops.
It is up to them to save communism.

"wah wah everyone who disagrees with me is a liberal"


Yes, they're gone in the West. And they will eventually disappear from the third world, too.

hi, bookchin. Enjoying that class collab?

Meme proselytizing is the only way, this is a sign

How does any of this implies any sort of class collaborationism?

Its true. Capital is the true revolutionary subject. Acceleration of the development of the mode of production is the only path forward.

Future society has a place for you as a meth addled cyborg terrorist robot race car driver with a broken brake and a 50% APR. 5 kilos of RDX are stuffed in your trunk as you oscillate between hitting the gas some more and running off the cliff. Sometimes you contemplate both.

This literally cannot happen without destroying capitalism. Also pic related the number of industrial workers in the world has hit an unprecedented high and even in the First World they are far from negligible or insignificant.

The proletariat knows no identity such as industrial worker. Just because traditional unions catering to them are dead or dying now doesn't mean that stuff's over. In fact, it's just starting up again. You're 10 years late with this post. The neoliberal haze is fading back into the normalcy of mass class politics which has always defined capitalism. New unions and even new structures (solidarity networks come to mind) will arise to deal with the realities of the modern proletariat. Your petty activist mindset means nothing in the face of the development of material conditions. Communize and they will respond.

meant for

Is it tho? Genuinely curious.

Only labour can create value. With less labour the economy will go into crisis. Without any labour the economy can't function. The problem doesn't lie in the disappearance of factory workers. It lies in the inability of the workers to identify themselves as workers. People are too busy considering themselves by their specific profession and can't see that they are workers. The difference in wages based on profession has strengthened this concept. To create class consciousness it is key to highlight the difference between worker and capitalist.

Good post.

Have you considered the growing number of unemployed in first world countries?

Doesn't this becomes increasingly difficult as many of the newly-created jobs consist of high-skilled guard labor like business executives? Whose side are the HR people on?

bump

These are the exact porky antics from the Victorian-era Gilded Age that originally caused the mobilization of the labor movement, 100% identical except for a splash of neon cyber tech paint.

I fucking wish these silicon valley fucksticks bothered to go full cyberpunk zaibatsu with their aesthetics. Mais non, they all just ape Apple's shitty design instead. Truly this is the worst of all possible worlds.

The finest of historical materialism at work, I see. That you would make such a claim unironically just goes to show how terribly the Left remains stuck in the past, using 19th-century frameworks to try to understand current issues.

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That's far from the only point of similarity with the Gilded Age: Trade/GDP, immigrants/capita, labor unionization, compensation/productivity…

My basic point is that the last time what you're talking about happened, it was because there were no laws regulating the conduct of such business activities, which allowed them to make massive profits off the arbitrage from societal externalities.

Their modern incarnations, likewise, occur only because they have either camouflaged themselves in enough technological flimflam to skirt existing regulations, or because any that would've applied have been weakened by post-1970s neoliberal deregulation. Because of this, they can be stamped out exactly the same as their predecessors, and outraged popular political pressure to do so will arise for exactly the same reasons.

A good analogy from more recently would be, for instance, the 1980s S&L crisis. Though smaller in scale compared to the great 1800s bank runs, the only reason it could occur is because of new and pre-existing loopholes in federal regulations that allowed a multibillion dollar financial sector to sprout up outside the FDIC system, and patching that hole promptly fixed the problem.

The re-proletarianization of the first world must be the essential task of the communist project.

FALC is a shitty meme predicated on bourgeois ideology and our existing atomized individualist society. Any successful communist society will need to dismantle the current practices of global trade and supply chains, mass consumption and perpetual growth that are incredibly wasteful, environmentally destructive and anti-labor. This will mean a return to local and regional industries, with smaller firms and a much larger, less intensive population of agricultural and industrial laborers. This will have the by-product of producing the local community structures and proletarian cultures that were so amenable to unionization and labor organization in previous centuries.

Admittedly this process would have been a lot easier and smoother if we had done this starting in the 1970s, but I digress.

This is neither possible nor desirable.

Have you tried actually reading his post?

The point is to liberate people from toil, not from work entirely. Star Trek replicators aren't happening anytime soon, and good luck convincing the Asian proletariat to continue laboring in the factories to produce commodities for you once revolutions start popping off.

Rationalisation of the economy on use-value lines and the elimination of the leisure class goes a long way, but your point about western luxury being built on the backs of the periphery of global capitalism is correct.
That's one of the reasons why I advocate for a market or a pseudo-market system as a transitionary period in the short term.

Capitalism could not survive de-globalization the rate of profit has declined too much to allow for mass production at first world wage levels. The capitalist class will never tolerate a return to post-war levels of economic protection and capital mobility, the claim by the right that they will do this is a fraud (see Trump.)

Its either a continuation of the current globalizing trajectory or revolution, there is no returning to Keynesian protectionism.

Why is it so hard for environmentalists to conceptualize the idea that we can maintain our standard of living while doing less harm to the environment.

Fucking Thoreau tier

What sort of changes are you talking about?

Because I can agree or disagree with that statement. Many people think that just because capitalism has evolved in its productive forces during the past 150 years, concepts like relations of production no longer apply. That I disagree with.

But I do think that a lot of new techniques and tools have been developed in order to keep the employees separated from each other, which means the concentration of the proletariat under capitalism that Marx described no longer implies an increasingly unified working class from a social point of view. New techniques are needed, and we should invest on adapting the Party to become a social milieu in itself, to supply the social and communal needs that liberalism's atomization has destroyed.

Good, work must be abolished. After that, we abolish money.

not an argument

Perhaps we need to live like the Amish, form movements that are completely OFF-GRID, and go back to total self-sufficiency, living off the land. That, or just join up with Amish groups and defect from what we (or others) consider the "norm" of society.

Industrial workers are declining, but people holding wage jobs have not declined that significantly, especially the group of people we call the precariat now – they're at the front line of trade union struggles like $15 hour living wage battle.

That's not even accounting for the new ways in which we can organize the unemployed in democratic struggles.

Is this a joke or have you never been within a country mile of HR?

This.

The proletariat is the only class capable of overthrowing the bourgeois. They aren't revolutionary now but they will be when capitalism collapses from its own inherent flaws.

there's a difference between a skilled factory machinist and a fresh from the farms garment sower though.

Just look at Bernie and Corbyn and Melenchon. The alt right is just the hangover expected after the neoliberal stupor - it is an attempt to scale the logic of a political system built for sectarian squabbles between Republicans and Democrats over culture to the real world of faceless economic forms and political structures, where, by virtue of its illiteracy and analytical impotency, it is easily diverted to support the establishment. It'll end if we show them the alternative to it. Even if he's not what brings us socialism (far, far from it), we need another Bernie, one with social access to the base of the Right, to complete this process.