| understanding class... (my comments are contained in the endnotes) ...the working class is the class that produces capitalist wealth by carrying out unpaid labor. Marx's theory of surplus value shows how waged workers produce surplus over and above the value of wages needed to reproduce themselves. But this result is usually restricted to describe only those workers who are paid. In doing so, Marx and Marxists have not been Marxist enough. For it is the unpaid part of the workday summed over all the work done that day which determines commodity values. In contemporary capitalism, this catagory of the working class would include the work of housewives (reproducing labor power), students (training to function as labor power), and agrarian workers (producing subsistance goods for urban workers and existing as a reserve supply of labor power)*. Capitalist profit no doubt derives from extracting surplus labor from waged workers -- this is what defines it from previous modes of production also based on unpaid labor -- but it also directly derives the surplus from the unpaid labor of many unwaged workers. It is important to redefine "the working class" in this way so that we can comprehend the anti-capitalist thrust of what appear to be non-working class struggles and demands. Working class struggles are those that attempt to reduce the unpaid labor capital appropriates throughout the social circut. Women's struggles against forced labor, student's struggle against forced military labor, indifenous peoples' struggle against land expropriation are all working class struggles. The point in stress the term "working class" here is not to homogenize the various struggles -- indeed we must understand their heteroeneity -- but to help comprehend their commonality and thus indicate how we might avoid reproducing the divisions of our class within the capitalist world. Since the 1970s, many leftists have adopted a "social movements" perspective in which the working class is just one sphere of some generalized movement for social change. The women's movement, the envrionmentalist movement, the gay men and lesbian movement, the Black movement (amoung others) are theorized as spheres of a veguely deined "liberatory politics". The "working class", narrowly defined as industrial waged workers, is not accorded any primacy. But the vision of all these spheres floating around is like the idea of the ancient astronomers who thought that the astral spheres orbited in a vacuum. The fact is that, regardless of one's gender, race, sexual preference, or feelings toward the earth, we all move through capitalist space; we live on capitalist soil, we eat capitalist bread, we expend our body's energy in capitalist work. Everything is a commodity -- the water, the land, even the air (i.e., clean air) -- and must be purchased through work. We experience the unity of capitalism in very different and at times apparently contradictory ways, but nonetheless the unity remains**. A recategorization of the working class allows us to see the diversity of agents behind a distinctly anti-capitalist project. If capitalism is all-pervasive, the struggle against it must operate on many fronts., Instead of evacuating the working class content of various "social movements", we must attempt to deepen this content. --from the introduction to Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, 1973-1992 by the Midnight Notes Collective (published by Autonomedia, 1992) *we should also include here: the unemployed as another reserve supply of labor power. --commie00 ** thus, we can look at class struggle this way: not only as those "that attempt to reduce the unpaid labor capital appropriates", but also as any struggle carried on by working class people against the ruling class. thus the grassroots movements against racism, sexism, homophobia, and the destruction of the environment are all class struggles since they are attacking things which are imposed on us by capitalism. these movements, thus, can ony be successful to the extent that they understand their anti-capitalist nature and attack capitalism. by this i do not mean this to underemphesize the necessary activity of confronting sexism, racism, homophobia, and actions which injur the planet in our class, but to point out that in order for these movements to be sucessful we also have to get back to the source of the problems, the social relations which create them by socializing people into participating in them... and these are all based in capitalism. |