Marxist Account of Class in Contemporary Society - Essay Example

Is the Marxist account still relevant in contemporary society The essential argument of the Marxist account is that capitalist development begets working-class development. It is argued that the capacity of the working class to transform the social relations of production basic to capitalism are enhanced with the maturation of capitalism and that one facet of that increased capacity can be observed in the organizational forms of labor unions (Braverman 2004). Specifically, it is argued that the more proletarianized fractions of the working class give rise to union organizational forms that enhance the capacity of the working class to transform capitalist social relations. Thesis The Marxist account of class is still relevant in contemporary society because it reflects and supports the main social, political and economic relations between the state and social classes, and between upper and low classes of modern society. During the twentieth century the working class has been shaped by three trends. In the workplace the displacement of craft and skilled labor by mass production techniques has allowed the employment of large numbers of unskilled workers; culturally, the integration of diverse ethnic strains produced by the centralization of production facilities and the constant infusion of petty bourgeois ideology has precluded the development of a clear-cut working-class consciousness; politically, the increasing intervention of the state in the regulation and management of the economy has added to the complexity of class relations and complicated the formulation of working-class strategy and tactics. These treads are typical; for modern society and social relations between the classes. The theoretical problems are linked because the relationship between the development process and class capacities largely depends on how one conceptualizes working-class capacities. If one accepts traditional pluralist notions of class capacity as applicable to the working class, then it is probably true that the capitalist development process erodes working-class capacities (Elster 1985). If, however, the capacity of the working class is something other than an aggregation of sovereign individuals, a more dialectical relationship between development and working-class capacity can be established (Braverman 2004). In modern society, similar to the Marxist approach to class, the institution of mass production techniques and the separation of the knowledge of how steel is made from the workers themselves is the key to breaking worker control of the industry. The rich would voluntarily renounce their wealth; a community of goods and absolute equality would be established. Marx began from the postulate that men, by their nature, are species-beings, that is, beings who are conscious of belonging to a species composed of others like themselves, and beings who can realize their full human potential only in loving collaboration with those others (Geschwender 1990). Perceiving their own imperfections as isolated individuals and not yet conscious of their collective potential, men seek consolation in an imagined God, abase themselves, and worship him as a power standing over them, when he is in reality their own alienated species-essence and represents only a schism within themselves. Marx now saw this phenomenon in politics as well as in religion. For him, man's present isolation is not simply a matter of perception but a reality, a product of modern civil society: "egoistic man is the passive and given result of a dissolved society" (Marx and Engels 1972, p. 65). Equally real is man's debasement: he is "corrupted by the entire organization (Braverman 2004). It is typical for modern society that the affable young man plunged himself into working-class activities, attending meetings by the score, and gained a profound respect for the people he came to know. Marx repeatedly marveled at "the extent to which the English workers have succeeded in educating themselves." "I have sometimes come across workers, with their fustian jackets falling apart, who are better informed on geology, astronomy and other matters, than many an educated member of the middle classes in Germany" (Marx and Engels 1972, p. 76) Therefore even democracy as a form of state, even the rule of the working-class majority would be an evil--though a necessary and defensible one-for it would involve constraining the bourgeois minority to give up its property and power. Once class antagonisms were resolved, however, individuals would presumably internalize elementary social rules to the extent that they would obey them from conviction or habit without the need of any external force (Geschwender 1990). Instead, his species-life appears as an alienation, as a projection upon something external--namely, the modern state. As an alien power this state is most clearly recognizable in its monarchical form, as the king, the Lord Jehovah, before whose authority men must bow down and humble themselves. Such a metaphor did not really fit the democratic republic, however, so Marx substituted the dream of heaven as the specific parallel alienation (Braverman 2004). Just as religious man imagines a heaven of ideal communal life but which alas has no power over this world's vale of sorrows, so political man creates the republic as an ideal but alas inconsequential expression of his communal life. Here, to be sure, he participates--minimally--as a species-being, but the republic seems to have no power over the vale of civil society: "he is an imaginary member of an imagined sovereignty, divested of his actual life and endowed with an unactual universality" (Marx and Engels 1972, p. 68) The notion of proletarianization can be successfully applied to modern factory system and bureaucratic organization. The notion of proletarianization is based on the Marxist understanding of exploitation. Marx argued that the source of all profit lies in human labor, and that if the capitalist is to earn a profit it must come from the unequal distribution of returns on production. Because the capitalist controls the means of production and hence the sale and distribution of products, the capitalist returns less to the workers than what the worker actually produces. This is called exploitation, and the rate at which the capitalists extract surplus from the labor of their workers is called the rate of exploitation. Marx expressed this as the rate of exploitation: surplus/variable capital (Gorz 2002). At the beginning of the 21st century, the capitalist is also in competition with other capitalists, both nationally and internationally. There is a constant pressure to produce for a lower selling price. This means getting more out of the productive process for the same or lower costs. It means workers will have to produce more without receiving a commensurate increase in wages, that is, an increase in the rate of exploitation. The first way to do this is to increase the ratio of constant capital (machinery and raw material) to variable capital (wages)--what Marx called the organic composition of capital. The second is to increase the scale of production--what Marx called the centralization of capital (Braverman 2004). Even today, proletarianization captures the human and social effects of capitalists' efforts to maintain an acceptable rate of exploitation. Increasing the organic composition of capital most directly effects workers by displacing their jobs through mechanization and automation; the quality of the remaining jobs is also diminished. Accident rates in manufacturing, for example, have increased as production processes have become more capital intensive. Marx noted that workers "direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves;. But in Marx's view, the past could not be restored and he characterized continuing efforts to do so as "utopian" (Gorz 2002). The processes of capitalist development proceeded unevenly, however, and that unevenness was reflected in the uneven development of the working class. In locales and regions where technology lagged behind and the centralization of workers did not occur, the individualized pre-capitalist artisanal forms of production persisted ( Kuczyniski 1990). There emerges from the outline a working-class strategic agenda of unifying the broadest possible elements of the working class, including the unemployed and the marginally employed. This is the key point because in the context of current struggles it becomes the criterion by which we can specify the most efficacious form of union organization (Braverman 2004). At the beginning of the 21st century, the argument that workers conform to rationality could be more a projection of a class-specific bourgeois ethic onto the working class than anything else. If the Marxist assumption that social conditions give rise to social consciousness is true, however, it is logical that the conditions of working-class existence would engender a different consciousness, and that one dimension of working class formation is the displacement of individual consciousness by class consciousness. Marx and Engels (1972) argued that in this process has proceeded very unevenly, with the result that one finds a range of consciousness among workers and that the internal power struggles in unions can be interpreted as struggles among class fractions rooted in very different material conditions. Specifically, it can be shown that those fractions that advocated an economic agenda resembling neoclassical rationality were precisely the least proletarianized craft and skilled workers (Lichtenstein 1999). The reasoning behind the principle is that organizing campaigns focusing on issues raised by the workers themselves and relying on organizers that the workers themselves know and respect will have greater resonance with workers. The level of trust and cohesiveness developed during the struggle for a union will carry over and add to the union's durability. Such an arrangement means that, in a sense, workers have to become participants in a parent union organization before they are actually dues paying union members. In other words, if they are to be responsible for their own organization campaign, they have to have some autonomy in decision making (e.g., who to hire, what leaflets to print, tactical choices, and budgetary control) before they are actually financial contributors to the union (Roemer 1992) An examination of that convergence enables us to see that the logic of collective action shifted from an associational logic to a pecuniary logic as the fractional basis of power shifted from leaders with a more proletarian social base to those with a more petty-bourgeois base (Roemer 1992). The workers of each mine constituted a unit of organization and each unit had the same representation on the central strike committee (. There is no indication that the largest units had more power than the small mines. From this instance we could conclude that in strike situations, at least, the strategic priority of uniting the largest number of workers and supporters prevailed over the formal democratic priority of ensuring representation on a one worker, one vote basis. Associational logic, in other words, prevailed over pecuniary logic (Braverman 2004). Modern organizations can be visualized as a kind of elbow-joint through which inherited social characteristics can be transferred to a different space (Elster 1985). This organizational form was reproduced well beyond the time when it benefited the majority of workers. Moreover, it transmitted the power relationship it represented between craft and skilled workers, on the one hand, and unskilled industrial workers, on the other. At another level of abstraction, it also transmitted the power relationship between the working class as a whole and the capitalist class. Given that the nature of pecuniary organizational forms translated size into power vis-a-vis other class fractions, it was an historical impossibility for associational organizational forms to take root and supplant the pecuniary forms within the same industrial and geographic space (Roemer 1992). Space unoccupied by previous organizational forms would have to be created by the class struggle, and working-class advances (organizational and other) would not proceed until that occurred. In the meantime, the pecuniary forms of union organization transmitted the dominance of the craft/skilled fraction of the working class. Organizational form was the mechanism linking the accumulated capacity of the working class and the potential for increasing the class's capacity. It was only through organization that the unevenness created by the development process, which capital could endlessly manipulate to its advantage (by fostering competition between fractions of the working class and geographic regions), could be offset or counterbalanced by the unions. The key, in other words, was to mobilize the sectors of the working-class movement that were regionally, sectorally, and politically over-developed in such a way that those sectors underdeveloped at the time could advance, sling-shot fashion, beyond the presently more advanced sectors (Elster 1985). In sum, following Marxist approach, it is possible to say that the process of modern social class development has continued to out-flank the organized capacity of the working class through the creation of new (and non-union) sectors of the economy and new fractions of the working class, isolating the political Left from the trade union movement. The key to a successful working-class strategy during this period is the recognition that each of these developments has a dialectical underside with the potential to enhance class capacity. The major dynamic being repeated, however, is that capitalism is once again resolving a crisis through the creation of an entirely new sector. The social class theory can be fully applied to modern society and its current development: with national liberation movements having limited the international options of capital for the closing decades of the twentieth century, the capitalist class must create social space within the domestic economy through the creation of new sectoral options. Left strategies and tactics for the remainder of the century must be premised on the dialectical qualities of capitalism's own crisis solutions--in this case, the expansion of the public sector. These is accomplished by allowing the state vastly increased responsibilities and power to manage the economy. Bibliography Braverman Harry. 2004, Labor and Monopoly Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press. Elster Jon. 1985, Making Sense of Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geschwender James. 1990, Class, Race & Worker Insurgency: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. Gorz Andr. 2002, Farewell to the Working Class. Boston: South End. Kuczyniski Jurgen. 1990, The Rise of the Working Class. New York: World Univ. Library. Lichtenstein Nelson. 1999, Labor's War at Home: The CIO in World War II. Cambridge Univ. Press. Marx Karl, and F. Engels. 1972, Selected Works in One Volume. New York: International. Roemer John. 1992, A General Theory of Exploitation and Class. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. Read More