Pulling the lever on the revolution of the future? (Catherine Schell in Hammer Films' Moon Zero Two, 1969. Because it's campy and I like it.)
Cross posted to caucus99percent.
The desire for revolution lives at the beating heart of anti-capitalism. There may be differing visions of how that revolution will be conducted and on exactly whose terms the new-born society will be ruled, but in the end our mission is to overturn the power of Capital and remake the world for the benefit of the masses.
Orthodox Marxism tells us that the revolution will be conducted by the proletariat, the class that is forced to sell its labor for wages, especially industrial labor. The division between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie was long thought of as clear cut.
As Marx noted in Communist Manifesto:
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.
A young Karl Marx. He was 30 in 1848, the tumultuous year the Manifesto was published.
Is this division still so clear? Is there still a proletariat, or at least a functional equivalent?
There can be no doubt we are still mostly wage-earners packing on surplus value for the benefit of the bourgeoisie; if anything, more so now than at any time since the mid-Twentieth Century zenith of the labor movement. Industrial employment in the United States has shrunk so dramatically over the last four decades that the ruined industrial towns of the Midwest and Northeast are legendary, even mythical, places that serve as settings for tales of working class hopelessness, like porn for the bourgeoisie.
What heavy industry and manufacturing remained in the United States largely moved where wages are low and labor is docile. The evisceration of industrial employment, the taming of labor, and stagnant (or lower) constant-dollar wages have eliminated what we knew as the proletariat.
Instead of an identifiable and coherent working class with a discernible level of class consciousness and revolutionary potential, we have a prominent and ever growing precariat.
Anti-Capitalist Meetup writer Audrey Charbonneau described the precariat neatly in her recent diary Three Premises for New Socialism:
...as capitalism has advanced into its neoliberal era, class in a Marxist sense has changed as financialization and fiat currency have become the driving engines of economic activity and work has gradually declined, producing new conditions for the proletariat where debt plays a uniquely predominant, almost feudal, role in economic exchange and the lumpenproletariat is naturalized and incapable of being differentiated from proletariat when examining the course of a proletariat life.
Where does the disappearance of the classically defined proletariat leave us? If it no longer exists, who will conduct the revolution against the rule of Capital in its absence?
Here I turn to an extract from Chapter 5 of Lenin’s The State and Revolution (1917):
Lenin addressing a large crowd in 1917, and looking good doing it.
Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich - that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the "petty" - supposedly petty - details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for "paupers"!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc., - we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been in close contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.
Even a century later, this still an excellent depiction of the sham democracy we find ourselves in across the capitalist world. Not only are we still neck deep in the sewer of bourgeois democracy, we are, in my opinion, approaching it’s nadir. The functional death of the labor movement and the disappearance of any ideological rival to capitalist social and economic control (that rivalry with communist dictatorships having spurred some compromise with some segments of labor) has allowed finance capital and its clients (political figures, the petty bourgeoisie, intellectual hired labor, i.e. lawyers, accountants, scientists, engineers, etc.) to bring us closer than ever to a time where another inevitable crisis of capitalism can be effectively addressed by a contemporary revolutionary class.
Certainly we can expect nothing like a revolution now, as the US population is only just beginning to awaken to the notion that maybe we can return to some version of the capitalism-preserving New Deal that began its harrowing—and thoroughly engineered—decline some decades ago. (It is a sad illustration of our time that such a notion, a return to that relatively tame set of compromises that kept Capital firmly in control, is thought of in liberal quarters as a revolution.) But this Welfare State Capitalist attempt at “revolution” will fail to thwart the retrenchment of capitalist power just as surely as the previous post-Depression attempt did.
How do we know? The history of capitalism is replete with examples of its astounding ability to weave and feint in the face of opposition while later bobbing back into place. We have seen it very clearly in the United States during the last several decades, where despite the development of a welfare state unprecedented in its history, the richest, most powerful society that ever existed just barely managed to keep Social Security off the neoliberal bargaining table during the most recent crisis under liberal President Obama, not to mention the shameless and highly successful assault on the safety net under liberal President Bill Clinton, whose unapologetically neoliberal spouse is poised to claim the nomination of that same liberal party.
Our hope against this re-consolidation is supposed to lie in a reformer whose goal is to win power and lead a movement to remove corruption from politics and rule in favor of the people by way of a mildly social democratic (small s/small d) program. Given the laser focus of capital on preserving its power, this trend, while encouraging, is destined to meet the same fate as the original New Deal version met when wages and productivity were uncoupled from one another in the 1970’s.
Rosa Luxemburg makes this plain in Reform or Revolution (1900), her decisive response to Eduard Bernstein and the folly of mistaking Social Democracy for a safer, tidier form of revolution:
Rosa Luxemburg speaking in 1907, fearlessly as always.
It is contrary to history to represent work for reforms as a long-drawn out revolution and revolution as a condensed series of reforms. A social transformation and a legislative reform do not differ according to their duration but according to their content. The secret of historic change through the utilization of political power resides precisely in the transformation of simple quantitative modification into a new quality, or to speak more concretely, in the passage of an historic period from one given form of society to another.
That is why people who pronounce themselves in favor of the method of legislative reform in place and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power and social revolution, do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal.
Given all this, who will make up the revolutionary class-to-be, and what events will inspire it? Historical Materialism (not to mention simple pattern recognition) teaches us that the capitalist system contains the seeds of its own destruction. Not only is neoliberalism no exception, I believe it is accelerating the process. The determination of the Democratic party elite (and of course the business interests that sustain it) to maintain neoliberal control are the sun and the rain that will make revolt necessary.
Observe two growing crises facing the people of the United States, debt and climate change. The first, massive debt, especially student loan debt, is a weight around the necks of the working and middle classes. Personal debt has grown immensely as economic opportunity has shriveled, driven by the need of the owning class to redress its declining return on domestic capital and its refusal to forego profits so wages are adequate to a secure middle class life.
Education, once thought to be the main line from poverty or working class status to the middle class, has become so expensive that it weighs down former students for decades, sometimes sucking up as much income as a mortgage. Even meager Social Security benefits aren’t immune. The lowest Social Security benefit, well under $1000 per month, can be diminished by 15% for those too poor to pay voluntarily. Neoliberal economics, while promising to make us all freer and richer, will do nothing but aggravate the crisis. The people can’t pay it and the rich will refuse to be taxed.
Enter the millennial generation: they will be deeply in debt, with aging parents and college age children, poised to take demographic center stage as the forces now in control strive to preserve the system that enriches and protects itself.
What does the ruling class do? If the decades since the anti-New Deal resurgence are any guide, it continues to encourage vulgar spectacle as the default form of political debate while keeping that “debate” within very limited parameters of political acceptability. It further consolidates control of the media to police those limits. The already unprecedented scope and penetration of state surveillance will grow and increase the criminalization of protest. Our government has already placed organizations like the Quakers and the Occupy movement under surveillance (while right wing terrorists somehow slip through the cracks) while coordinating tightly with Big Business, as with Wall Street during Occupy. A body that presents a real threat to capitalist economics, like the Black Panthers, who organized and fed thousands in Chicago in the 60’s, would be criminalized and its leaders murdered like Fred Hampton was by the FBI and Chicago police.
And that’s just domestically. Threat to business interests abroad are dealt with mercilessly, like when dictators such as Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi refuse to stay bought, including the latter’s initiative to leave the petrodollar; an alternative is economic subversion leading to violence, like the coups and attempted coups that have existed in Latin America until the present administration.
Will Millennials even be given the opportunity for reform?
The history of Capital tells us with certainty that it will not, unless the threat to Capital is so severe that the losses that would occur under violent domestic conflict would reduce profits significantly and permanently.
Capital never gives up.
Likewise the crisis of climate change. The human migrations under climate change will make the current refugee crisis look like child’s play. Within the US, many millions of people will need to be moved and capital investment will be threatened, thus preserved at whatever cost necessary. Massive and expensive engineering projects—which are opportunities for massive profits—will become overwhelming necessities completely apart from issues like national “security” in the face of global turmoil.
Will the ruling class relax its control, give away its profits, and seek cooperative solutions to these and other crises? Or will it use every tool at its disposal to tighten its grip and preserve—increase--it’s profits?
Until we see significant signs that the ruling class is willing to sacrifice profit for the benefit of humanity, the answer is the latter.
The potential revolutionary class of the future will be everyone alive in twenty to fifty years who is not a member of the ruling class. Who among them is most ready to turn from normative (i.e., ruling class) politics is my next subject.
