IV. Only the working class is
capable of overthrowing capitalism and establishing a socialist
world
There is no other social force
but the working class anywhere in the world capable of
overthrowing international capitalism and establishing a social
order founded on universal co-operation and solidarity. Here we
are talking about the working class in the classic definition of
the term (already mentioned earlier) [9]
– all those wage earners economically obliged to sell their
labour power in order to obtain their means of consumption,
since they lack access to the means of production and do not own
capital). Far from declining in numbers or becoming
heterogeneous or having a greater segmentation than in 1914,1939
or in 1954, it is today stronger and less heterogeneous than at
those times. [10]
1t is true that the
billion-strong army of wage-earners throughout the world is not
growing at the same rate in every country at all times, nor are
their living standards and working conditions bringing them
closer together than they were at all times in the past. The
development of the working class does not progress in a linear
way. It declines (and becomes de-skilled) in certain sectors,
regions, or even countries while progressing and becoming more
skilled in others. But there are no data that prove that the
long-term, world-wide tendency is one of decline, far from it.
Already the number of
wage-earners in the capitalist countries is higher than the
number of peasants, even if we include the most populous Third
World countries (India, Pakistan, Indonesia). Furthermore, this
historic transformation has only taken place in the recent past.
Just to put things in context, we should remember that when the
October Revolution took place wage earners were scarcely 20% of
Russia’s working population. World-wide at that time peasants
constituted 75% of the working population. Even in
Europe, the United States, and Japan the proportion of wage
earners was much smaller than it is today.
The fact that only the
proletariat has the potential to overthrow capitalism and
replace it with a social order based on solidarity and
co-operation does not mean in any way that in the dependent
semi-industrialised countries, and particularly in the most
important semi-colonial countries, there is no need of allies in
order to conquer and hold onto power. Even if they have become a
minority in those countries, the poor peasants still represent
an important social force. Peasants can engage in socially
explosive struggles, and their main demands cannot be satisfied
by the existing regimes. The worker-peasant alliance is still
the main motor force for successfully carrying through a
strategy of permanent revolution, the sine qua non for
solving problems of under-development.
Furthermore, the specific
combination of development and underdevelopment which
characterises the emerging dependent semi-industrialised
countries over the past two decades, has led to the growth of a
particular social layer – the marginalised, semi-proletarian
urban population, the shantytown dwellers surviving without
proper jobs through irregular work in the “informal”
economy. This social layer, often a majority in Third World
metropolises (including in the semi-colonial countries), are
often arbiters of political struggles in the short term. It can
and must also be won as an ally of the proletariat through a
permanent revolution strategy which takes up the fight for urban
reform, an indispensable complement to the agrarian revolution.
Sometimes the impact of “new
social movements” is brought up to cast doubt on the
proletariat’s role as the main potential revolutionary subject
in the world today. Concerning the definition of
“revolutionary subject” we should note the confusion of
those who blindly worship the “new social movements” or
those who systematically denigrate them by defining them as
petty-bourgeois.
One of Marxism’s seminal
ideas, without which historical materialism loses all its
potential to explain history, is precisely the concept of
“social class” having an objective character. Social
classes exist and struggle against one another independently of
the consciousness they have of their own class and of their own
historic interests (this obviously does not mean the level of
consciousness does not influence the development and end result
of these struggles). A good proportion of American wage-earners
see themselves as being middle class. This does not prevent them
leading tough strikes against the bosses, sometimes in a harder
way than the wage-earners of other countries who have a much
higher level of class consciousness. They behave like
wage-earners because they are wage-earners, even if
they do not see themselves as such.
Viewed from this perspective
the great majority of the people involved in the “new social
movements” are wage earners, at least in the imperialist and
dependent semi-industrialised countries. This is a
quasi-automatic consequence of the social structure of these
countries, given the very size of the “social movements.”
The only social groups outside the proletariat from which they
could recruit in a mass way would be housewives or school and
college students. But these groups are a long way from being a
majority either in the anti-war, ecologist, anti-imperialist or
anti-racist movements. Only the student or school students’
movement – as a mobilised mass movement – has up to now been
the exception.
Confusion arises because the
“new social movements” are organisationally. and often
ideologically, not really connected to the organised labour
movement. In fact, in most cases it is the latter’s fault
since it has been slow or simply refused to take up the defence
of the objectives these movements struggle for. Hence we have
fragmented and tangential movements. As single-issue movements
they often mobilise big numbers. But at the same time their
fragmentation facilitates their diversion into reformist dead
ends. It is not possible seriously to defend the idea that
students, housewives, or even Third World peasants have
sufficient economic and social power to overthrow
bourgeois states in the main centres. They can weaken this
power. They are vital allies of the socialist revolution. This
is especially the case with the feminist movement. Its
liberating potential concerns more than half the human race, and
its independent effectiveness is considerable. It mobilises an
important sector of wage-earners and a growing proportion of the
proletariat as a whole. However, these social movements cannot
on their own bring about the socialist revolution. This victory
is necessary if humanity wants to survive. Only the proletariat
is socially capable of making sure this comes about. Any other
project of overthrowing international capitalism is unrealistic.
Just as unrealistic is the idea
that used to be quite popular on the left, but which practically
nobody supports today anymore, that imperialism could be
overthrown through a combination of strengthening of the
“socialist camp” and of victorious revolutions in the Third
World. To the extent this hypothesis implied a world nuclear war
“won” by the “socialist camp” it was criminally
irresponsible. It presupposed you could “build socialism”
with atomic dust instead of with living men and women. Once this
hypothesis was dropped the general approach was limited to the
idea that a monstrous giant could be killed by cutting off a
leg, an arm, and a few toes. Given the monster’s vast
resources for equipping itself with very effective artificial
limbs it is a remarkably silly position to hold.
Other critics reply that if the
proletariat is the only potentially revolutionary subject
capable of overthrowing international capitalism then the world
socialist revolution becomes a utopian project, since the
proletariat has shown itself incapable of carrying out any such
revolution in any sort of advanced industrial country. In fact
throughout the history of international workers movement a
refusal to recognise the potential revolutionary role
of the proletariat has nearly always led to the giving up of any
revolutionary perspectives or activity.[11]
But is it really correct, on
the basis of the concrete experience of the last fifty years, to
assert that the proletariat has ceased to be the revolutionary
subject as Marx predicted? Merely to list all the defeats in
successive revolutionary crises is not sufficient to prove this
argument. Not only is the historical period much too short to
draw definitive historical conclusions [12]
but Marx’s very analysis of the proletarian situation
implied that the first wave of proletarian revolutions would be
almost inevitably defeated. [13]
The correct approach to this
question is quite different. We must not start from the
metaphysical norms which reflect idealised visions of the
proletariat and the proletarian revolution but from the real
movement of the actual proletariat in history. We should ask: is
it the case that millions of wage-earners have continued to periodically
(i.e. not every year or in every country) mobilise in struggles
of such scope that the possibility of working-class, popular
counter-power is put on the agenda – in other words a
generalisation of dual power, of struggles that can
lead to the overthrow of the bourgeois state and to the
establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the
classic Marxist sense of the term? Have these struggles a
tendency to broaden or to get smaller in the long term? Have
they a tendency to paralyse bourgeois power more than in the
past or has the latter increased its ability to technically and
materially defeat them? Do wage earners have a perspective of
taking over the factories and centres of communication or is
this less so than before? Do they tend more or less than in the
past to move towards self-administration and self-management?
We just have to compare the 10
million strikers of May 1968 with the 3 million of June 1936 in
France, the 10 million Polish workers in Solidarnosc in 1979-80
with the ½ million who were involved in the general strikes of
1905-6 or the 1918-1920 revolutionary movements in Poland, and
those involved in the 1973-4 Portuguese revolution with the
numbers participating in previous struggles there. We can see
that at least in a number of countries (we do not say all
countries) there is a clear tendency for the numbers involved to
increase significantly.
It is certainly true that the
scope of these explosive mass struggles is not enough in itself
to bring about victorious proletarian revolutions. But it is
enough to make them possible. But once you accept that
these revolutions, the only chance to ensure the survival of the
human race, are possible, then a refusal to fight to bring about
the conditions for their victory appears unreasonable. It means
literally playing Russian roulette with the physical survival of
humanity. Never was the equivalent of the “Pascalian gamble”
in relation to revolutionary political commitment as valid as it
is today. By not committing oneself everything is lost in
advance. How can one not make that choice even if the chance of
success is only 1%? In fact, the odds are much better than that.
Footnotes
9.
This is the definition used by Lenin, in the first programme of
the Russian Social Democratic Workers Party that he drew up with
Plekhanov.
10.
See our article on the future of work published in Quatrième
Internationale, No.20 May 1986.
11.
This is what happened to the most gifted intellectual
collaborator of Trotsky, Jean Van Heijenoort, who broke with
Trotskyism and Marxism on this basis in 1948.
12.
Do we need to remind our readers that 200 years passed between
the first bourgeois revolution (in Holland) and its victory in
France in a “mature” and definitive form, consolidated by
the industrial revolution?
13.
“Now and then the workers sit victorious, but only for a time.
The real fruit of their battles lies not in the immediate
result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers.” Communist
Manifesto, p.58, Marx and Engels, Basic
Writings, Ed. L. Feuer, New York 1959. Also see the
famous last paragraph of the preface to Marx’s 18th
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, on the long term
provisional and self-critical character of proletarian
revolutions.
|