Where is Class Struggle?

julio 30, 2011 Article and Chapters / English

John Holloway

Where is Class Struggle Today?

Perhaps the biggest argument against Marxist theory today is not that it is wrong in its criticism of capitalism but that it is wrong in insisting on the importance of class struggle. The evils of capitalism are plain for all to see, but where is the class struggle that Marxists keep talking about? Struggle certainly, struggle there is: the struggles of the anti-globalisation movement from Seattle to Genoa, the struggles of the Zapatistas in Mexico or of the landless peasants in Brazil, the struggles of women and gays against discrimination, the struggles to protect the environment, even the spectacular protest of the people who flew the planes into the World Trade Centre. Struggle is easy to see, but is it class struggle? Where has the labour movement been in the last twenty or thirty years? Certainly not leading the revolution. Is it not better then to stop talking about class struggle and to speak of new social actors or simply of ‘the multitude’?

This chapter will argue that class struggle has probably never been so vicious and violent as it is today.

The Existence of Capital is Class Struggle

But no, we must go back before that. Why start with capital, why not with racism or patriarchy? Are there not lots of different types of oppression?

Let’s not start with capital, then. Let’s start with ourselves. We want to change the world. We want to change the world because it stinks, because it is obscenely unjust, because it is violent, because, the way society is organised at the moment, it looks as if humanity will probably destroy itself before very long. (If you don’t want to change the world, go and read a different book.)

Changing the world implies doing. If we want to change society, then we must think of society not as-it-is, but as something that people have made and that people can change. We must think of ourselves as doers, not as beings. This is sometimes referred to as materialism, or even dialectical materialism: what Marx means by materialism is basically understanding society in terms of human doing, ‘sensuous human activity, practice’ (First Thesis on Feuerbach, 1976, p. 3).

Doing is central to any revolutionary project, to any project of changing the world. That is why revolutionary thought means thinking of society in terms of doing. This is not just a call to action, to rushing out in the street and doing something. It means first trying to understand society (and our own repudiation of present society) in terms of the way that human doing, human activity, is organised.

When we think of our doing, our activity, one of the first things that strikes us is that it is social. It is difficult to think of any activity that does not depend on the doing of others, either now or in the past. I sit here writing and think of it perhaps as my great individual act, but I know that without the doing of the people who made the computer, installed the electricity, built the building, made the desk, wrote all those other books that have influenced me, I could not be writing what I am writing. The doing of others is always the precondition of our own doing, the means of our doing; and our doing becomes the means of the doing of others. Our doing is always part of a social flow of doing.

Our doing is not only social, it is also projective. An aspect of our doing is the aim to change, to make things other than they are. Our doing includes a projection beyond that which is. This projection-beyond is fundamental to any idea of changing the world. For Marx, it was also the characteristic that distinguished humans from animals – or from machines, we might add. In a famous passage in Capital, he contrasts the architect and the bee: ‘A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own’ (1965, p. 178).

What happens to doing in capitalism? Somebody comes along, takes what we have done and says ‘this is mine.’ The capitalist (and the feudal lord and the slave-owner before him, but let us focus on the capitalist) appropriates that which we have done, the product of our work.

This shatters doing. The capitalist, by appropriating the product, shatters the social flow of doing. (Oh, he may conceivably be a very nice man, or possibly woman, and this is not a very nice thing to do, but if he doesn’t do it, he won’t be a capitalist: that’s what Marx means by talking of capitalists as the ‘personifications of capital’) What we have done becomes his property. He now owns the means of doing of others – the means of production, in other words. In order for others to do (and to survive) they must get access to the means of production: this they do by selling their labour power (their capacity to do) to the owner of the means of production. Their doing is now converted into labour at the command of the capitalist, labour which produces commodities which are, of course, the capitalist’s property and which he can sell on the market.

The direct connection between our doing and the doing of others is broken. Of course, our doing is still part of a social flow of doing, but it does not appear that way. Now my writing appears as an individual act in which I use a number of things (computer, electricity, desk, and so on), for which I have paid money, commodities which I buy on the market. Our doing is social, but is not directly social: it is indirectly social.

The social flow of doing is broken, and so too is the projective character of doing. It is now the capitalist, the owner of the means of production to whom the worker sells her labour power, who decides what the worker will do. The conception or projection is now the activity of the capitalist, the execution is left to the worker. With that, the worker is reduced to the status of a bee, having been deprived of the projection which is the distinctive character of humans. This does not just happen once, it is a repeated process. Since the capitalist appropriates the product of the labour, the worker leaves the labour process just as poor as she entered, just as dependent on the kindness of the capitalist in employing her the next day. The capitalist, on the other hand, gets richer and richer, since the product produced by the worker is worth more than what the capitalist has paid her for her labour power. The capitalist, in other words, exploits the worker, extracts more value from the worker than he pays her.

So what?

We started with interesting things like the Zapatistas and the World Trade Centre, and now the argument seems to be dragging us into the factory, dragging us towards some sort of economic theory of society. That’s the problem with Marxism, isn’t it?

No, no you didn’t understand. Or perhaps I didn’t explain. Doing is not in itself economic. It is lying in bed, making dinner, eating, writing articles, doing essays, making love, going on a demonstration, making a chair, producing electricity, making a car, whatever. It is the existence of capitalism that defines a major part of our doing as labour, as an ‘economic’ activity. It is the fact that our only access to the means of survival is through money and our only way of getting money is by selling our labour power and turning a big part of our daily doing into labour at the command of others – that is what puts ‘economics’ at the centre of our lives. But the critique of capitalism is not an economic critique, it is necessarily a critique of economics. That is why Marx in Capital did not develop an alternative economics but a critique of economics (or a critique of political economy). The struggle is to emancipate doing from labour, life from economics. That is why our analysis cannot start from labour, but must begin with doing, ‘sensuous human activity, practice’.

Doing, then, in capitalism, is a shattered, fragmented, separated process. ‘Separation’, says Marx, is the ‘real generation process of capital’ (1972, p. 422). Capital is the separation of the vast majority of people from the means of doing (means of production), the separation of the product from the producers, the separation of people from purposive social activity (their ‘species-being’, as Marx puts it in the 1844 Manuscripts), the separation of people from one another, the separation of ‘labour’ from other forms of activity. This separation affects absolutely every aspect of our lives. The doing which is separated off from labour is affected, for it is defined as leisure, as secondary, as not very serious – ‘I don’t do anything, I’m just a housewife’, or ‘I don’t do anything at the moment, I’m unemployed’. The doing which creates the conditions for the doing of others is now seen as producing ‘things’ for others to buy. The relations between people thus become refracted through things; they become reified or fetishised, as Marx puts it in the first chapter of Capital. The way in which we relate to the doing of others is through the exchange of things. Social relations acquire the form of things (such as money, commodities, capital, the state) which we do not recognise as forms of social relations, nor as the product of our own doing. Fetishism does not refer just to the economic, to the appearance of social relations in economic forms, but to every aspect of society, every aspect of the way in which we see our own lives and our relations to others. Every aspect of our doing is transformed by that fundamental rupture of the social flow of doing, that separation process which is capital.

And how does the separation take place? Through struggle, of course. It does not take place automatically. Think of what the capitalist says to us each day. He says ‘all of these wonderful things that you see around you, all these things that you would like to have in order to survive, all these things that you would like to enjoy, all of that is private property, all that is mine. If you want to enjoy any of these things, you can do so by earning money. But in order to get money, you must give up any idea of spending your days doing what you like: you must come and labour for me and, if you do what I tell you, then I shall give you money so that you can buy some of these things. But, mind you, I shall only give you enough money to keep you going for a short time, tomorrow you must come back and labour for me again. And of course I shall employ you only as long as I manage to exploit you successfully and make a profit from employing you.’ He says all this as though it were obvious, but of course it is not. Think of the poor capitalist. In order to carry through his existence as a capitalist, he must persuade or force us to accept what he says when he says ‘this is mine’: he must force us to respect his private property. This is not done easily: it requires the services of millions of police and security guards, not to mention teachers, social workers and parents. Then he must persuade or force us to accept the horrifying, absurd idea that we should turn our daily doing into labour under his command. In general terms, he does this by protecting his private property, but he still has to get us up early in the morning (never an easy task, especially when the prospect is going to work at the command of others), and get us to go to work and to do what he commands and do it efficiently (more efficiently than his fellow capitalists, with whom he has to compete).

All this is not easy. It is made more complicated by the fact that we are not slaves or serfs. We are free. ‘Ha ha!’, you laugh, ‘free to obey the command of the capitalist.’ Yes, certainly, but also, as a result of the struggles of slaves and serfs, really free in a way that is sometimes inconvenient for the capitalist. He cannot stop us from going and selling our labour power to a different capitalist if we get tired of him. He also cannot (usually) shoot us or flog us if we do not obey his commands at work. In other words, unlike the feudal lords, the capitalists require the support of an apparently external instance in order to apply the sort of violence that is required to maintain a system of exploitation. This is the state. The separation of state and society, the political and the economic, is another, very important aspect of the separation process which is capital. The state, as part of the process of separation, regulates the process of separation as best it can: it protects the separation of done from doing, the ‘this is mine!’ of private property which ruptures everything. All systems of exploitation are armed robbery; what is peculiar about capitalism is that the person who holds the arms is distinct from the person who does the robbing.

All of this is struggle. Of course it is. It is struggle over what we think, how we act, struggle over how we get up in the morning and therefore over what time we go to bed and what we do in bed, it is the struggle of the alarm clock, as we throw it at the wall and then still get up to go and sell our labour power. It is an extremely violent struggle in which thousands and thousands of people die each day, because they are cut off from the flow of doing and starve, because of the repression against those who do not accept the ‘this is mine!’ proclaimed by the capitalists, because what they are commanded to do by capital is dangerous. It is a struggle that comes in the first place from them, from the capitalists. If it were up to us, we would lie in bed or potter about all day or dedicate ourselves with passion to whatever we like to do. It is they who do not leave us in peace, it is they who say ‘get up out of bed and come to labour for us – or starve, if you prefer’. The struggle, then, is between two ways of doing, two forms of social relations. Capital is the imposition on our lives of a certain form of doing, a certain form of relating to one another. Capital is the struggle both to transform our doing into labour and also, once we are in the place of work, to get us to work as capital commands.

And of course we struggle back. We struggle back because we are not yet machines. We struggle back by throwing the alarm clock at the wall, by going to bed late even when we know it will impair our efficiency at work the next day, we struggle back by giving higher priority to playing with our children than to producing profit, we struggle back by fighting for higher wages at work or by fighting for more acceptable conditions, we struggle back when we demonstrate against the misery created by the imposition of private property, we struggle back by projecting beyond capitalism, by dreaming of a better society, a society in which we ourselves decide what we do. We struggle in the workplace and outside the workplace. We struggle for a different way of doing, a different form of social relations.

This, then, is class struggle.

It is class struggle not because we wear cloth caps. It is class struggle not because we think of ourselves as being left-wing, but just because we live and want to live: if class struggle were exclusive to the left or the consciously militant, there would be no hope. It is class struggle not because we want to be the working class, but because we don’t want to be working class. On our part, it is struggle not for being a class but against being a class. It is capital that classifies us. It is capital that says to us each day, ‘you are without property, you must come and work for us; and then you will go home without property and come back the next day, and so on for the rest of your life, and so on for the lives of your children and of their children.’ It is capital that ensures that each day what is produced in the factory is not just commodities but two classes. As Marx puts it, ‘capitalist production, therefore, under its aspect of a continuous connected process, of a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation; on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer’ (1965, p. 578). Capitalist production produces classes, imposes discipline and regimentation, forces our doing into the narrow band of labour that produces profit for the capitalist, (or labour that supports capitalist profitability, in the case of state employment). Capital is grey, we are the rainbow, fighting for a world in which doing becomes free, liberated from the bonds of value production, from the chains of profit.

The existence of capital, then, is class struggle: the daily repeated separation of people from the social flow of doing, the daily repeated enforcement of private property, the daily repeated transformation of doing into labour at the command of capital, the daily repeated seizure of the products of that labour. It is class struggle but it does not appear as such. It does not appear to be class struggle (or indeed struggle at all) because of the very nature of the struggle itself. Capital’s struggle is to separate doers from the social flow of doing, but that very separation means that people no longer understand themselves as doers, nor as social. The separation means that people appear as individuals and as beings rather than as doers. The more successful capitalist class struggle is, the more invisible it becomes: people are transformed from doers bound together by the community of their doing into free and equal individuals tied together by external institutions such as the state. Capitalist class struggle takes place through apparently neutral forms such as property, money, law, state. These are all forms through which capital as a form of doing is imposed upon our lives. Capital does not say ‘we are going to exploit you, we are going to force you to labour for us until you crawl home exhausted at the end of the day, and then we are going to force you to come back and back for the rest of your life’. No, capital simply says a number of key words: ‘Respect private property, the money, the law’. When it says ‘respect private property’, what it means is ‘stand aside while we separate you from the means of doing and of survival.’ ‘Respect money’ means ‘just let us get on with shattering all social relations, with mediating all relations between people through money.’ And respecting the law means that we should give up all idea of shaping our own doing, that all activity must be made to conform with the acceptance of private property, that we must bow to an external force. Capitalist class struggle comes clothed in liberal theory.

Capital cannot stand still. Under feudalism, the relations of exploitation were more or less stable: what the lord demanded of his serfs did not vary very much over time. It is different with capital. Capital is driven forward constantly by its ‘were-wolf’s hunger for surplus-labour (Marx, 1965, p. 243). The fact that capital is fragmented into many distinct capitalist units (companies), each in competition with the other, each depending for its survival on being able to exploit its workers more effectively than the other, means that capital can never stand still, that it is constantly driven forward to intensify the exploitation of labour. Intensifying exploitation means not only imposing tighter discipline in the factory but creating the conditions in society (that is, the world) that make this exploitation easier. This means subordinating every aspect of life more and more tightly to the aims of value production. More and more intensely, every aspect of life becomes a battleground for the imposition of capital, a battleground on which we resist and try to defend and develop what we consider to be human or emancipatory. In education, for example, recent years have seen a huge assault in all parts of the world to bring teaching into line with the requirements of the market (that is, capital). Sometimes, this takes the form of outright privatisation, allowing the content of education to be dictated directly by the market, sometimes it means the introduction of various forms of control within the state system of education to achieve the same end. Of course that assault meets constant resistance, either in the form of student strikes or, far less dramatically, in the form of teachers and students pushing beyond market requirements in the attempt to develop an honest and critical understanding. Sometimes it takes the form of teachers writing or recommending and students reading books like this one and suddenly finding that, just when they thought that class struggle was dead, they are in the middle of it.

Capital has been particularly violent in recent years.

The violence stems from the curse that strikes all who try to dominate and exploit: they depend absolutely upon those whom they exploit and dominate. Capital depends for its existence on its capacity to transform doing into labour and to exploit that labour. Not just that: it depends for its existence, as we have just seen, not just on being able to maintain exploitation but on being able to intensify it all the time. It needs not just to subordinate society, but to subordinate it more and more and more. If it cannot do so, it falls into crisis. The crisis tells capital that in order to survive, it must intensify subordination. In the 1970s, capital was manifestly in crisis, socially and economically. The weakness of subordination was obvious in society from the late 1960s: strikes, demonstrations, student movements, revolutionary movements in many parts of the world. The failure to subordinate became economically manifest in the world-wide crisis which broke in 1973-1974. The response of capital came in various forms (emphasis on a return to traditional family values, increasing police and in some cases military action), but above all it took the form of money and property.

Money has been central to class struggle over the last twenty-five years or so. First, in the early years of Reagan and Thatcher, tight monetary policies were applied as a means of reducing debt and imposing the discipline of the market. When this strategy threatened to destroy the world financial system, a more flexible approach to debt was adopted, allowing more spending to those (basically big companies, rich people and rich states) whose well-being was considered essential to the health of capitalism, while using debt as a means of disciplining those who required discipline (basically the poor) or were simply disposable (a large part of the world’s population is not an ‘industrial reserve army’ for capital in any sense, but simply a nuisance).

The extension of property has also been important to capital’s struggle. Just as, in the early days of capitalism, landowners pushed the peasants off the land, enclosed the land and said ‘this is mine’, so capital is now enclosing more and more areas of human activity and saying ‘this is my property, this is mine.’ The development of the concept of ‘intellectual property’ has been crucial in this. Capital spends enormous sums of money on trying to assert its property rights over music, software, pharmaceutical discoveries, genes and so on. In many parts of the world this extension of property rights has been carried out with a remarkable violence, as the traditional agricultural or medicinal knowledge of communities has been appropriated by capitalist enterprises, which patent the knowledge without any compensation and then enforce their property rights against all comers, including the communities themselves.

Money and property are very violent forms of struggle. They have undoubtedly caused far more deaths in the last twenty years than all the wars fought in the last hundred. Thirty-five thousand children die each day simply because property and money separate them from what they need to survive. But they are also remarkably vulnerable forms of struggle. Money, especially in the form of debt, is contested all the time, both by those who will not pay and by those who point to the enormous destruction of human lives that the enforcement of debt involves. Property, especially intellectual property, is also contested almost universally – both by those who habitually copy software, videos and CDs, and by those who campaign against the misery caused to AIDS sufferers, for example, by the protection of pharmaceutical patents. Both of these issues have been important features of the anti-capitalist movement of recent years.

Is this class struggle? Of course it is. Why not refer to it just as a multiplicity of struggles by new social actors or by the ‘multitude’? Because the concept of class points to the fact that behind the particular issues (AIDS in Africa, copying music from the internet, student loans, poverty in Latin America) there is a single struggle: the struggle by capital for profit, that is, the struggle by capital to exploit, to convert doing into labour and impose its form of social relations, and the struggle by us against all that, for a different form of doing, a society based on the recognition of human dignity. Class points to that underlying unity in a way that the other categories do not. It also points to something else that is fundamental: there is no certainty that we shall win, that humanity will survive the attacks of capital, but the concept of class gives us hope, for it shows that capital depends upon us for its existence, that we are the only subjects.

References:

Marx Karl (1976) Theses on Feuerbach, Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5, (London: Lawrence and Wishart).

Marx Karl (1965) Capital, Vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers).

Marx Karl (1972) Theories of Surplus Value, Part III, (London: Lawrence and Wishart).

Suggestions for Further Reading:

Bloch Ernst (1993) The Principle of Hope (3 vols) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).

Bonefeld Werner and Holloway John (eds) (1995).Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money (London: Macmillan).

Dinerstein Ana and Neary Mike (eds) (2002) The Labour Debate (London: Ashgate).

Holloway John (2002) Change the World without taking Power (London: Pluto).

Marx Karl Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (any edition).

Marx Karl Capital (any edition).

Smith Cyril (1996) Marx at the Milennium (London: Pluto)