"working class take power" - should we rethink this phrasing?

I do.

Devrım

boomerang,

Perhaps stop thinking in terms of static (and narrow) definitions of class and class power and rather in terms of a process of class formation (starting with that old concept of 'a class in itself and a class for itself' to which some of us added the phrase ' a class becomming for itself'). Some of the Communisation tendencies have tried to tackle this question better than traditional anarchist and left communist tendencies but frankly are still struggling with it (though I would recomend Dauve on this issue more than others).

Depends, Devrim. It could be said that many of what passes for petit bourgeois is nothing more than sections of the "reserve army" trying to get by.

On what grounds? If they're in a council, they must have their interests aligned with it somewhat (or else they would stay out). That implies to me that the cards about class are on the table.

When I think 'self-employed', I think of this article: http://libcom.org/library/self-employment-or-illusion-freedom and it doesn't quite sound far removed from the proletarian experience, even though you have your own tools and less job security.

In the GDR, the official umbrella term was 'working people' (Werktätige) that included everyone from working class to agricultural workers (farmers, ranchers), petit bourgeoisie, lower public administration, soldiers, basically everyone who's not a full-on capitalist or 'intelligentsia'. And it's such a nebulous term, you couldn't tell what was going on anymore.

well I don't think it's true. There is a chapter on anarchist understaning of class in Black Flame and I think this is how most of anarchist use this notion. Basically form anarchist point of view marxist understanding of class is narrow and fragmentary and it's because of economic determinism:

Marxist understanding of class is outdated. By working class Marx and Engels understood proletariat in factories and working class defined in this way is minority and in decline in society. Whole theory of emancipatory role of working class is useless if Marxist definition of working class is preserved. It's not suited to contemporary capitalism which made somehow a circle. Once again Marx predictions were wrong as he thought self-employment disappear (only proletariat and capitalists were supposed to exist) but it made him practical joke and grew instead. But this is Marxist problem

In my personal opinion self-employed are generally one of working classes if understood in plural (or part of working class in singular, in more broad sense)

The 2.3 million SFRs (self-funded retirees) as we call them in Australia are the bedrock of reactionary politics here and they get extremely favourable tax treatment so I wouldn't expect to see them at the forefront of the revolution.

Oh, really? There's a fagpaper's difference between the "Marxist understanding of class" and the anarcho-communist understanding of class. So both must be outdated, eh?

Ive been self employed for a decade, working from home, doing contract work.

I don't really see my position as anything other than proletarian. Sure I don't have one boss, but I have lots of little bosses, who don't have to pay certain benefits. Remember a significant part of the workforce are also in a similar position, and that workforce is growing. These are neoliberal workers par excellence, atomised and non unionised inculcated with the ideology of entrepreneurialism, sadly all too willing to do anything to keep face, long hours, free work, bad working conditions, little security. All to keep the image of successful and talented individual and all to get the often elusive next contract, that next break. Pitiful really.

augustynww's and Black Flames reference to 'state capitalism' as an illustration of the relationship of 'ownership, control and class' is useful but hardly at odds with Marx or the many Marxist tendencies that have developed that theme better than most anarchists.

There are of course many technically self-employed workers who are in fact proletarians, who have been forced into this position as bosses have tried to cut the costs of direct labour.

But many of the petite-bourgeoisie who don't employ others labour, don't do it because they are not successful enough, and would take somebody on as soon as possible.

In what way would the petite-bourgeoisie exist in an immediately post-revolutionary situation? Surely the implementation of an economic programme which would destroy them as a class would be one of the first tasks of the revolution.

Devrim

Augustyn's assertions that:

1. Marx had no concept of the necessity of supervision and relations of domination

and

2. Marx viewed the term "working class" as synonymous with "factory workers"

are both wrong.

As for 1, Marx says almost exactly the same thing as Bakunin (as quoted by Augustyn) in the chapter on the labor process in Volume 1 of Capital. Onlythat, probably unlike Bakunin (given his rejection of "economic determinism"), he sees a clear causal relation between the "economic" relation (the capital-relation of dispossesion on the one hand and of monopoly of the means of production on the other hand) and the "managerial" relation (that of supervision in the labor process), in the sense that the former necessitates the latter and not vice versa.

As for 2, one only need to look at Marx's theory of productive and unproductive labor, where even teachers, as long as they are exploited by a capitalist, are counted among productive workers (and thus unequivocally the working class). Again, there is a quote in Volume 1 about a school and a sausage factory to corroborate this, but I can't be bothered to look for it now.

An interesting aside, even during Marx's time the "industrial proletariat", in the sense of factory workers, was a minority. Again, there is a table somewhere in the chapter on machinery that shows Marx was aware of this.

Of course, none of this means that certain forms of Marxism weren't/aren't guilty of a reductionist understanding of class. At the same time, some of the most illuminating (and often mutually diverging) analyses of class (and also the state) come from the marxist tradition (E. P. Thompson, operaismo and "class composition", the "derivation" debate, the "open Marxism" relational conception of classes etc.).

As regards the self-employed, it is important to look beyond the juridicial form. On the one hand, many "self-employed" not only do not employ anyone etc., but are proletarians in all but the contract (but because the employer does not want to pay health care or social services contributions, they force them to become "self-employed"). There are even factory workers who are formally "self-employed". On the other hand, many people who formally are "employed" and earn a "wage" aren't workers (top managment, or even enterprise owners, for example).

Well, 1. is not my assertion, but feel free to discuss it

2.:

What Marx describes for instance in Communist manifesto is industrial capitalism. I mean I could quote countless fragments from Marx which sounds as if industrial proletariat was synonymous with working class

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch0...

Marxian description of capitalism is description of industrial capitalism and industrial working class (exploitation scheme, alienation etc - all of this is based on industrial capitalism. Why it's important even when Marx mentioned once in Capital some other workers?, Well what would suppose to happen with capitalism depended on it.

It would be very hard not to notice But Marx and Engels predicted it will grow to become majority of workers, am I right?
What's more whole marxist theory of revolution was based on this assumption: "industrial army" will become more and more centralized etc and only one small step of state nationalization will suffice to enter the road to socialism (yes, I know the state was supposed to disappear later, don't start another discussion)

and for what I know all of those theories abandoned classical Marxist idea that industrial proletariat is driving force here, am I right again? Most of them is similar rather to anarchist understanding of class

that's true, but how it looks in context of Marx exploitation theory? They sell the product of their labour not "ability to work".
(wasn't that something that Marx criticized Proudhon about?)

Well the former doesn't necessitate the latter. This is what this thread is about actually...
Self-employed are workers without "managers" so to speak.

If the latter neccesitate the former? This is what experience is telling us. When formal proprietor disappers, managers are taking his place and exploitation continues.

That's true that some Marxists developed anarchist themes. This is good development

Marx's ideas developed over time. Already during his life, he and Engels expressed reservations about the content of the Manifesto. There are other passages in the Manifesto which contradict Marx's later views (e.g., absolute vs. relative immiseration). Quoting the Manifesto on this issue is much like taking some of Bakunin's early panslavic rants and "disproving" his later views.

Yes, industrial production is central to capitalism. I apologize but I don't understand the last two sentences.

Well, yeah, in the Manifesto. If you open Capital Volume 3, you find passages like this:

There were views like this, yes. Engels certainly expressed something like this. Does this falsify Marx's theory as a whole? No.

Nope.

It's just like piecework, Volume 1, Chapter 21 in the English translation.

I think you've misunderstood me. What I wrote was that Marx certainly paid attention to relations of supervision and domination (the deployment of "both coercive and administrative resources" described in the Black Flame text). He viewed it as a necessary consequence of the underlying capital relation.

You seem to be talking about something else, also described by Marx: the "disappearance" of the formal proprietor from management and the bifurcation of the "economic" and the "managerial" functions of capital. Marx discusses this in Vol. 3 in connection with joint-stock companies.

What precisely do you have in mind? It could be. I encountered in Poland some anarcho-communists with very outdated understanding of working class (basically factory workers leading future revolution)

Augustyn, the problem is that you operate with the assumption that for Marx, "the working class" equals "factory workers". A similar assumption is that "industrial workers", for Marx, equals "factory workers". Both assumptions are wrong.

Marx counted "commercial workers" (salespeople, basically) and many other categories of laborers among the working class (for evidence on commercial workers, see above; there is plenty evidence for other categories in Vols. 2 and 3 of Capital). When he speaks of "industrial capital" he simply means a branch of production that is organized along capitalist lines and produces commodities or services with the aim of profit. So, for example, transportation and communication are "industries". Teaching can be an "industry" and teachers "industrial workers". Marx's concept of "industrial capital" is not a technological one. It is used to distinguish certain branches of the economy (of the employment of capital, to be more precise) from others (from interest-bearing capital, i.e., finance, for example). If I make cars on my own, at home, as a hobby, I'm neither an industrial capitalist nor an industrial worker, even though I may use the same machines as a factory would use.

Bakunin wasn't even an anarchist when he was panslavist

Falsification in not best word here. That's why I said "outdated" instead of "false".

OK thx. This theory is really outdated since industrial proletariat became minority in my opinion.

what about this:

"Second, the proportion between wages and surplus-value remains unaltered, since the mass of surplus labour supplied by each particular labourer corresponds with the wage received by him."

(I'm not saying its not true, just asking)

Yeah and "industrial revolution" means suddenly more schoolteachers appeared

double

I take it you have no more substantial points to add.

BTW,

is literally true. It's just that "industrial revolution" also means a lot more than that.

What "what about this"? I'd like to answer the question, but I don't know what you're asking about. The idea is that whetherb the formal agreement is "payment by the hour" or "payment by the product" ("project", "design", "app", you get the idea), it's still wage labor. It's not like all the self-employed people ("subcontractors") are individual capitalists. They're workers, they're just not formally employed at the enterprise they work for. Since when do self-professed materialists explain reality from juridicial relations instead of material relations?

Depends on how you define "industrial proletariat". On Marx's definition, the numbers are actually growing. The contemporary statistics are misleading in that they put a lot of (Marxian) "industrial" jobs under the "services" heading (like transport and logistcs, for example). And still, "industrial workers" (i.e., those employed by industrial capital) is not the same as "working class" (for Marx).

Anyway, to come back to the original post, I think boomerang raises interesting points. Marx is often accused of having a reductionist concept of the working class, in that he focused exclusively on factory workers. I think this is very easy to prove wrong. I also think that the issue of the self-employed can easily be dealt with (some of them are waged laborers, some of them are not). But there is a different sense in which Marx's mature concept of the working class/waged workers is "formalistic", so to speak: it presupposes that the worker enjoys the "two-fold freedom" of (a) being free to dispose of her labor-power, (b) being free from means of subsistence and production (and hence having to sell labor-power). Historically, but even today, many of the most exploited workers are far from being free in the first sense (some historians even say that people who satisfy condition (a) where never a majority of the working class). There is still slavery/debt slavery/indenture around, there is forced/militarized labor around, there is state-sponsored segregation/coercion in the workforce around (e.g. migrant workers can't move around freely, can't settle etc). So one probably has to keep in mind that Marx's category of the "worker" is a theoretical device used to illuminate certain aspects of the concrete reality, but it shouldn't be confused with that reality (in other words, there are millions of "gradations" and shades in which the abstract "worker" from Capital appears in reality). In other words, when we say "working class take power" we don't mean that only people who satisfy (a) take power.

Then there is the "peasant question". The original idea of most working-class-oriented revolutionaries (not only Marx-inspired) was that (a part of the) peasantry is an ally, but somehow has to be led by the more conscious and better organized working class, and also kept at a slight distance because it is potentially a very reactionary force due to its "backwardness" etc. Historically, this didn't work out too well, to say the least. It is interesting that, for instance, on the forums here or in the theoretical production of most organizations and groups that I know of etc., this question is only very rarely dealt with (aside from historical debates). Personally I often resort to saying "Well, nowadays most of them are just waged workers who happen to work in agriculture" but I don't really know if it's true and what role the non-capitalist and small-capitalist peasantry plays today.

And I don't think it's just a question of language (i.e., making ourselves more appealing); behind the language issue, there's a theoretical issue that pretty much everyone (in the "class struggle" milieu) seems to gloss over.

Well, so are the unemployed and all unproductive workers either in the public sector (yeah, including cops, but also including state-employed teachers!) or in the private sector (e.g. commercial workers) insofar they are purely unproductive workers. These categories are quite easy to deal with (the unemployed are part of the reserve army; the unproductive workers, even though they don't produce surplus-value and are ultimately paid from surplus-value extracted elsewhere, are still exploited, because what they get paid is less then the amount of labor they expend). But the retired worker is similar: he's definitely not a capitalist because he does not advance any money with the view of valorizing it (and doing it over and over), he simply finances his own (often meagre) consumption. And throughout the course of his life, insofar as he'd been a worker, he'd probably put in a lot more surplus labor than he actually receives back via interest.

In practice it is impossible to exclude anyone from expressing their opinions in a soviet meeting - even the bourgeoisie if they chose to do so!. So if "proletarian power" means soviet like organs to hold political power, then you can't obstruct petty bourgeoisie to raise its voice.