On 1/1/07, Angelus Novus <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
At a categorical level, the abolition of the commodity form entails the abolition of the proletariat.
Yes. But that theoretical truth doesn't entail that a majority of workers will act on it or wage workers are more likely than other classes like peasants to favor social revolution.
In history, social movements with real emancipatory potential have almost always been comprised of either peasantry refusing the process of proletarianisation, or recently proletarianised people with a common memory of a non-capitalist way of life.
Precisely. It's not the state of being already a proletarian but the process of getting proletarianized -- or otherwise displaced -- that tends to have a radicalizing effect. When people get used to being wage workers and especially when they know no other way of life, they, under normal circumstances, are unlikely to find wage labor as alienating as the newly proletarianized, who have direct experience or recent familial and communal memories of other ways of life.
It seems to me a real emancipatory movement would do well to orient towards something like E.P. Thompson's ideas concerning a moral economy, rather than the stinking corpse of the classical workers movement which stands in direct lineage of a never-revolutionary German social democracy, anamolous, isolated figures like Rosa Luxemburg notwithstanding.
Angel, I find your ideas sympatico. :->
None of this is to argue that peasants are automatically the revolutionary subject, just that the domesticated urban working-class needs to be knocked off its pedestal. Proletarians have emancipatory potential to the extent that they are capable of abolishing their social existence as proletarians. Unfortunately, the classical Marxist conception of revolution is one of proletarian power, rather than of proletarian self-abolition.
Well said. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
