Date: Sun, 2 Feb 1997 20:44:34 +0100
Subject: M-G: The organized proletariat exists, what it needs is leadership


Another fundamental disagreement from Marxism-Intro between Justin S and myself.

Justin writes:

>Hugh and I are in agreement on the issue of the existence, definition,
>and role of the workibg class.

OK so far...

>However, there is an important distinction Marx
>draws between a class "in itself," as constituted by the fact that wage
>workers have no property and must sell their labor (power) to live, and
>a class "for itself," as a group with a collective identity and a sense
>of political organization and capacity.

True. Self-awareness is essential to a class for itself.

>In the latter sense the proletariat does not exist in America.

This conclusion is extreme, and wrong, and Justin uses it as the foundation
for  a whole series of false propositions.

The proletariat in the US has a long history of self-organization,
including not just local and craft organizations but also national and
international organizations of the class in general. Not every worker at
the same time, of course, but that's not the point. It is incredible that
Justin can make this claim at present when the new Labor Party has made its
appearance. Inadequate as it is, it still represents the working class as a
collective identity with a sense of political organization and capacity.


>My expression, which Hugh found ambiguous, is right out of of the
>Manifesto: "This organization of the proletarians into a class, and
>consequently into a political party . . . ," Marx and Engels write.
>>(Tucker anthology, p. 481).

This is a poor piece of work by Justin.

The quote is pretty useless:

a) there are a million editions of the Manifesto, so a page is no good as a
guide. At the very least the section should be given and preferably the
position of the quote within it. In this case it's in the first section
"Bourgeois and Proletarians, four or five pages from the end of the
section.

b) It's utterly out of context.

Taken in context it proves the opposite of what Justin wants it to prove.

Let's look at the preceding paragraphs.

        At this stage [early manufacturing industry, say late 18th
        century] the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered
        over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual
        competition.

        [Three paragraphs before Justin's quote]

This is what Justin implies is the situation today in the world's most
capitalistically developed country, a completely unhistorical assumption.

The following paragraph states:

        But with the development of industry the proletariat not only
        increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses,
        its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. [...]
        the collisions between individual workmen and individual
        bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between
        two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations
        (Trades' Unions) against the bourgeois [...]

So the character of collisions between classes actually precedes even the
formation of trade unions! And the proletariat starts *feeling its
strength* -- and all this is before 1848, almost exactly 150 years ago.

The next paragraph states:

        Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time.
        The real fruit of their battle lies, not in that immediate
        result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers. This
        union is helped on by the improved means of communication that
        are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of
        different localities in contact with one another. It was just
        this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local
        struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle
        between classes. But every class struggle is a political
        struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the
        Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries,
        the modern proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few
        years.

Then follows Justin's quote -- and what a difference in the original
context! No pessimism about unorganized, unaware classes or individual
workers just jumbled together like potatoes in a sack, but a build-up to
political victories for the class both in itself, objectively, and for
itself, subjectively:

        This organization of the proletarians into a class, and
        consequently into a political party, is continually being upset
        again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it
        ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels
        legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers,
        by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie
        itself. Thus the ten-hours' bill in England was passed.

As for subsequent history, there have been four great workers'
internationals with their roots in Marxism -- the First founded by Marx and
Engels in 1864, the Second likewise after the defeat of the Paris Commune,
the Third founded by the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky in 1919 after
the treacherous collapse of the Second International at the outbreak of the
First World War and the victory of the workers' socialist revolution in
Russia in 1917, and the Fourth founded by Trotsky in 1938 after the
treacherous collapse of the Third International under Stalin with the
coming to power of Hitler in Germany in 1933 and the consequent destruction
of two of the world's most powerful socialist parties, the German Social
Democratic Party and the German Communist Party. There are innumerable
international trade union organizations. There are innumerable political
organizations of the working class, such as the European Social Democratic
parties, many of which alternate in governing bourgeois states with the
parties of the bourgeoisie.

I would say, and this is the orthodox Trotskyist (that is Marxist and
Leninist) position, that the problem is not so much one of organizing the
class as such, but more one of the kind of leadership being provided for
organizations of the class that actually exist.

The point of organizing a revolutionary party, is to build up a
revolutionary socialist leadership that is loyal to the interests of the
working class and particularly its central interest of removing the
oppressive system of wage-slavery built into capitalism.



Cheers,

Hugh




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