Is there still the working class?

Published on June 8, 2017by sascha313

It is worthwhile to look at this question again, because often, depending on the perspective, there is the impression that the number of unemployed (including the dark) is increasing disproportionately, and the workers actually employed in the production process or in other areas of wages depend on services , Organizations, foundations, etc.) has declined significantly as a result of rationalization measures and mass redundancies. Is that correct?

The other side is that in fact , wants to know something about a change in social conditions hardly any of those who are in employment. Sure, the wage could be better, the holiday longer and the time pressure on labor less, but on the whole it can be lived with. In any case, the average FRG wage earners seems to think. And those who are in a higher position have entirely different interests than to think about capitalism. There are, of course, critical voices, which have always existed in the exploiting state of the FRG, but as long as this could somehow appease or ignore, the silence of the lambs came back and no one dared to open their mouths.

How is it, had Marx been right or is it no longer true? Let us now read what Klaus Hesse has to say about this question ...

How is that with the working class?

At the present time, too, everything is done to dismiss the knowledge of the class character of social development, in particular the word "working class," as something which may have existed in the past, but which is now disappearing, and most likely still, as a precariat 'Worth mentioning. But all that is described as 'revocable, uncertain, delicate' with the French precaire, although in different ways and intensity, slaves and physical workers, meet wage laborers and all those whose lives depend on power, profit, and whims And the arbitrariness of the owners. [1]

But at the beginning of the 21st century, the number of wage-dependent workers is greater than ever before in the history of mankind. In doing so, the number of those who can not be ignored or statistically 'sorted out', who are objectively dependent on wages, can and must not be pushed, but have been pushed into temporary work, short-time work or unemployment in the context of falling demand.

An unmasking overview ...

It is interesting to note that this reporting of the World Bank [2] has not been continued. But in a comment on the 'World Development Report 2013', there are not only the findings that 200 million people are unemployed and that 600 million jobs are needed at the earliest "to employ new young people on the labor market, to stimulate the development of women "It is also noted that" almost half of the world's three billion people are employed in agriculture, small family businesses, occasional jobs or as seasonal workers - often under disastrous conditions ... "[3]

For this very reason, it is high time to oppose the lies of the "end of the working class" and the "disappearance of labor", recommended by neo-liberal ideologues of finance and monopoly capital, and of social democratic and "leftist" political actors.

1.Who actually belongs to the working class?

An answer to the question of the working class can not be found, if it is not clear and defined by means of facts what classes are and what distinguishes them from each other. On the basis of Lenin's class definition it is possible to elaborate these answers and to update them according to the concrete historical development of these relations:

"Classes are defined as large groups of people, which differ from one another in their place in a historically determined system of social production, according to their (largely fixed and formulated) relations with means of production, according to their role in the social organization of labor and consequently According to the nature of the acquisition and the size of the share of the social wealth which they possess. Classes are groups of people, one of which is capable of acquiring the work of others because of the diversity of their place in a particular system of the social economy. "[4]

2.Objective characteristics

On the basis of this definition, the objective attribution of persons and groups of persons to social classes and strata within the framework of different societal reproductions (slavery, feudalism, capitalism, imperialism, socialism ...), the distinction between owners of means of production and those without possessions, Labor-intensive social reproduction process and the available wealth. But this is a problem which Marx and Engels have pointed out with the following conclusion: "It is not a question of what this or that proletariat, or even the whole proletariat, presents itself for the time being. It is about what it is and what it will be forced to do historically according to this being. "[5]

3.The next purpose of the Communists

But this definition can not answer the question of the identification of the respective persons or group of persons with their social-economic identity. Again and again, and especially when these have lost their identity-creating relationships through social descent or are striving to change their living conditions through the ascent, there is and is a break. In this sense Marx and Engels described the next purpose of the Communists:

"The next purpose of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: the formation of the proletariat as a class, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the conquest of political power by the proletariat."

The first step in this direction is the transition of wage-dependent workers from the objective affiliation to the workforce to the subjective identification with resulting social-economic, political and ideological consequences, the development of the working class to the working class.

4.An erroneous self-understanding ...

But what is referred to here as 'the formation of the proletariat to the class' is much easier to say than done: many of those who, regardless of their origin, their ambitions, and their expectations and desires for objective criteria, belong to the working class As a craftsman, locksmith, master, foreman, employee, manager, secretary, accountant etc. but not as a worker. The step of the multi-layered interests of this working class towards the working class, that is to say, the recognition of common interests, the dispute over the advantages of individuals and privileges of different groups for the common interest, the diffuse,

5.Experiences of the Russian Bolsheviks

Here, too, the experiences of the Russian Bolsheviks are of little value. Lenin cited in this context in his work, What to do? Burning questions of our movement ', also the highly current "striking and valuable words of K. Kautsky":

"In this context, socialist consciousness appears as the necessary direct result of the proletarian class struggle. But this is wrong. Socialism as a doctrine, however, is rooted in today's economic conditions as well as in the class struggle of the proletariat, just as the latter arises from the struggle against mass poverty and the massing which capitalism produces; But both arise side by side, not apart, and under different conditions. Modern socialist consciousness can only arise on the basis of deep scientific insight. In fact, today's economic science is also a precondition of socialist production, as is the present technique, but the proletariat can, with the best will, do the same thing as the other; They arise both from the present social process. The bearer of science, however, is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia (emphasized by KK); In some members of this class, modern socialism has also arisen, and has been communicated by it to the mentally prominent proletarians, who then take it into the class struggle of the proletariat, where conditions permit it. The socialist consciousness is thus something which has been brought into the class struggle of the proletariat from the outside, not something which has arisen from it. "[7]

6. Can one introduce class consciousness into the working class?

The incorporation of the scientific basis of the Weltanschauung of the working class into the working class is doomed to failure if the experiences and the knowledge of those who are to be achieved are not taken into account or only superficially. Only when this process becomes a common learning, a joint effort to find sound answers to current challenges, to more effective and effective forms of organized class struggle can the changing challenges be taken into account.

7.The right understanding of work

A crucial prerequisite for the understanding of the resulting challenges is the knowledge about the development and change of the contents of the activity, which characterizes the life content and the thinking and acting of the workers. The word by which the working class differs in its name from all other classes is not only inseparable from incarnation; it was and is the life-activity of the working classes, which are the foundations of human life and the wealth of the whole To-date history of human culture, which made the development and development of human beings possible only to consciously acting creators of their lives.

The work in the "form in which it belongs exclusively to man" is distinguished by the fact that the result of the work was "already present in the imagination of the worker, Whom he knows, who determines the manner of his action as law, and to which he must subordinate his will. " Work is "appropriate activity". [8th]

How can one counteract the loss of meaning?

In the process of their exploitation in the history of the class societies, this activity has been and has been deformed and disqualified in a manner which not only led to the complete loss of meaning but also to the fact that the role of the workers is reduced to a functional element in the system of technologically predetermined processes , Marx describes the position and the relationship of the workers to labor in capital: "Since before his entry into the process his own work was alienated from himself, appropriated to the capitalist, and incorporated into capital, it constantly confirms itself in the foreign product during the process." [9] What was addressed in this way is based on the findings of the philosophical manuscripts of 1844, as follows:

"The alienated labor thus makes:
3. the nature of man, both nature and his spiritual generic power, a being alien to him, a means of his individual existence. It alienates man's own body, as nature, besides him, as his spiritual being, his human being.
4. An immediate consequence of man's being alienated from the product of his labor, his life, his generic nature is the alienation of man from man. When a man is opposed to himself, the other man stands against him. What is the relation of man to his labor, to the product of his labor and to himself, that is, from the relation of man to the other man, as well as to the work and the object of the labor of the other man.

Within the framework of capitalist ownership, wage-dependent laborers do not realize their own, but the purpose dictated to them by the owners of the means of production and their commissioners. By using their lives to realize the purposes of those who exploit them, the content of their life activity is directed in a manner which is directed against their own interests: the results of their efforts, their abilities and their creativity enrich the owners , Create the technical and technological prerequisites for the replacement of the living labor, destroy the livelihoods of wage-dependent workers in more and more areas and promote the progressive impoverishment of the propertied.

8. Reshape the concept of a working class!

Who is concerned with the differences and the concrete conditions of the social division of labor in the fields of agriculture, mining, manufacturing industries, construction and the whole diversity in trade and in the increasingly differentiated branches of the production - oriented and all other areas of gaining a more realistic idea of the actual differentiation of the activities in which wage-dependent workers develop their livelihoods.

It is therefore very easy to understand how and how quickly and especially the basic conditions have changed, which are and are connected with the simplistic idea of the conceptions of the working class, which are characterized by the discipline of joint work in industry. In a more thorough examination, it is not only clear in this context that this idea of the conditions of the organization of the working class is thus taken into account only in some areas. On closer scrutiny, the realization that the most effective and politically most effective forms of organization of the working class are and are not always and always connected with work in industry.

9. How can the scientific worldview be included in the working class?

In and with the breaches of the content and structural relations of the activity dependent on wages, which are triggered by the deeply contradictory changes and distortions in the social division of labor, a variety of different socio-economic facts have been created which determine the concrete framework of their living conditions.

In this context, however, the challenges of wage-dependent workers in their activities in the sectors of agriculture, mining, manufacturing, construction, trade and the full breadth of the spectrum of services are also developing And through the immediate trade unionist interest in their respective living conditions to the understanding of their role in the current conflict between capital and labor.

For this reason the knowledge of the respective technical and technological foundations of this activity of their life is a necessary prerequisite for the insistence on the scientific world-view of their own class which builds on the development of their lives, As well as the knowledge about the concrete and historical changes in the working and living conditions, the degree of maturity of the organization and the problems of content and ideology of the trade union and political leadership.