2. The working class - Uraz

Marx's social classes and exploitation

The first part of this talk focuses on Marx's concept of class and the formation of class society. How did social classes come into being? How were relations of exploitation formed? From a historical perspective, we will mobilize concepts such as the social division of labor, labor power, surplus product and alienation.

The genesis of the proletariat and its revolutionary potential

The second part provides an overview of the historical evolution of the proletariat. We begin with what Marx calls primitive accumulation, which created the conditions for the emergence of the working class. We'll then look at this evolution since manufacturing and the industrial revolution, highlighting in particular the battles waged over working hours. A more political aspect, namely the conception of working-class self-emancipation, which signifies a break with earlier socialist thought and practice, will also be addressed in this section.

The working class today

Part Three will look at the composition of the class today, particularly in the age of neoliberalism. We'll start with the proletarianization of intellectual labor in late capitalism, discuss the concepts of precarity, social reproduction and racial capitalism. We will also debate the experiences and possibilities of organizing, as well as the obstacles to it.

Extract from: E.P. Thompson. Preface to 'The making of the English working class' : E.P. Thompson. Preface to the making of the English working class

By class I understand an historical phenomenon unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness. I emphasize that it is an historical phenomenon. I do not see class as a "structure", nor even as a "category", but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.

The finest meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure specimen of class, any more than it can give us one of deference or of love. The relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context. Moreover, we cannot have two distinct classes, each with an independent being, and then bring them into relationship with each other. We cannot have love without lovers, nor deference without squires and labourers. And class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.

Class-consciousness is the way in which these experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value systems, ideas, and institutional forms. If the experience appears as determined, class-consciousness does not. We can see a logic in the responses of similar occupational groups undergoing similar experiences, but we cannot predicate any law. Consciousness of class arises in the same way in different times and places, but never in just the same way.

Michael Löwy, The Communist Revolution and the Self-emancipation of the Proletariat in The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx, Haymarket Books, 2005.

Ernest Mandel, Origines and definition of the modern proletariat

Tithi Bhattacharya - Capitalism’s life source: the domestic and social basis for exploitation [[1]]

Excerpts from the 17th World Congress preparation text: "Social upheavals, fightbacks and alternatives"

Secondary:

-Ernest Mandel, Historical pedagogy and communication of class consciousness

Daniel Bensaïd, Classes, or the lost Subject

Karl Marx, Division of labour and manufacture Capital, Vol. 01