Proletarian Minority

A response to Ewan Ben

By L. Luria

Ewan Ben, an ex-YPer from the Democratic Socialist camp, has written a fair amount since the implosion of Your Party across various Anglophone Marxist journals and on Substack, developing a theoretical framework to confront the various sectional lines that seem to dominate the Communist milieu in Britain and in the broader West. Persistent across his writing is a demand to resituate class analysis, comprehending the composition of the proletariat as it actually is, as the primary practical endeavour before which any kind of Communist politics can proceed. In his most recent article Ewan correctly identifies the persistence of a single fundamental error across three seemingly distinct strategic purports – voluntarism, programmatic idealism, strategic moralism – which are all, for him, corrected by ‘reversing the direction of determination’, meaning reacquainting Marxists with the original insight Marx develops by his critique of idealism, with bulk of the article addressing the analysis of working-class composition as a way to properly understand how a Party, as that class’ organ, should constitute itself.

Ewan begins by relitigating the break with Hegel, that “Practice, not contemplation, is the condition of adequate engagement with the world… Theory is not a representation of practice; it is itself a practice, and is understood only in the actual life-process of those who carry it.” From here he accuses the sects of idealism; “class becomes an object of theoretical derivation rather than a field of practice to be entered,” pursuing political forms “determined by prior theory rather than by the actual encounter with the class in motion.” What follows is a rather long account of the various ways Communist sects commit the sin of idealism; even though this makes up the bulk of the article, since I don’t belong to any of the named sects I have no interest in going over this part in detail or rebuffing him in any way. On the whole he’s right and I’d recommend people read what he’s written, especially if you find yourself belonging to these kinds of organisations. What interests me is Ewan’s central commitment to dismantling “the image of a class that no longer exists,” a hang up with the movement that he and I share.

One unfortunate casualty in the movement from the Theses on Partyism on his Substack to this article is that his account of the post-industrial transformation of the working-class has gone from recognising that “new concentrations have emerged in logistics, distribution, and the social reproduction sectors, whose strategic significance has been rendered visible by the disruptions of the past decade” to focusing in on “expanded service, care, and reproductive labor, fragmented… across platform and precarious work… [stratified] along racialised and gendered lines.” Please unclench; I’m not concerned with Ewan’s reference to race or gender. What does concern me though is that he's elevated the social reproductive element seemingly at the expense of the logistical-distributive element referenced in his earlier post. In any case, it would be useful to briefly run through how the working-class is actually constituted before we go any further. Today, services now account for around 85% of jobs and roughly 80% of output, with the two largest employing sectors being health and social work at about 13.5% of all jobs, and wholesale and retail at about 13%, with manufacturing down to roughly 9% of output and a similar share of employment, our domestic economy having shed the bulk of mid-century industrial labour that once stood at roughly a quarter of all labour performed. Health and social care is largely state-funded, drawing on redistributed pre-existing revenues rather than generating its own registrable surplus; in terms of retail, its share of value has already been realised elsewhere. Against all this stands the logistical-distributive section of the working-class which, per Logistics UK’s accounting, employs around 2.6 million people (roughly half that of health and social care), constituting 8% of the contemporary workforce.

In order to properly assess the determinacy of a given group of workers, rather than comparing output alone, it’s necessary to see what tangible effects are incurred by the withdrawal of labour in their particular sectors. In August 2022 roughly 1,900 Unite members shut the Felixstowe port, which handles about 48% of the UK's container trade, delaying an estimated $4.7 billion of trade across eight days. When care staff or teachers withdraw their labour, however much hardship follows, the circuit of accumulation inevitably grinds on, adverse effects registering at a far slower, less immediate rate. Rather than referring to fragmentation alone, it would be more proper to say that at the advanced stage by which the fragmentary process has played out, we would be better to describe the overall process as the reconstitution of the class as a whole rather than just the stratification of a self-same entity, given that certain forms of labour have, by any meaningful account, been qualitatively reduced to a level of near-total indeterminacy at the domestic level, whereas others have risen to overall determinacy at increasingly higher qualitative levels. Ewan notes in the article that “power is… accumulated through organization, concentrated through coordination, deployed at points of structural vulnerability” and that the “political question is always where the forces are, how they are constituted, what their lines of strength and vulnerability are.” This is correct, however any account which doesn’t name logistics workers as the specifically determinate social element capable of inflicting precisely these points of structural vulnerability eschews the material premise for the argument. Recent wildcat strikes at Hinkley Point C also indicate another determinate site for industrial action, with domestic energy infrastructure necessarily belonging to the cohort of socially indispensable labour today.

Ewan briefly gestures at Operaismo, specifically work undertaken by the writers at Classes Operaie to distinguish the technical and political composition of the working-class as it was in 1960s and 70s Italy; repeating this inquiry today, the immediate criticism of our contemporary sects would be that they spend too much time drawing out analysis of the political at the expense of the technical. Despite claims regarding what has been done to the class, that it’s presently determined by fragmentation, dispersed across a labour market restructured to prevent concentrations of collective power, that it is precarised, atomised, stripped of dense institutional life, and so on, an account of the class’ positive determinations, what it actually is, remains ambiguous, in this article in particular and across the rear of Ewan’s output. For the sake of clarification, Operaismo concerns itself crucially with the productive element, the fight that begins from the factory floor, to which foundational Operaista Mario Tronti offers the assertion that there is “nothing more limited and partial, nothing less universal” than workplace struggle, that from this direct confrontation – rather than the vantage of a presumed universal – the essential spark of Communist politics is located. With global supply chains having assumed determination at the aggregate level globally (intermediate inputs, the parts and half-wrought goods moving between stages of production rather than finished articles exchanged between self-contained economies, now account for over two-thirds of the goods traded worldwide) logistics is the actual point by which domestic labour qualitatively interfaces with the circuit of valorisation, therefore lays claim to the positional leverage Ewan speaks to; logistics workers are, despite only making up 8% of the workforce in Britain, the inheritors of economic determination through the effects wrought by the withdrawal of their labour; no other element can claim the same level of fundamental economic determinacy, therefore positioning logistical workers as the legitimate inheritors of the category which Marx establishes as the working-class. Here we arrive at perhaps the fundamental scandal for contemporary Marxism: the productive proletariat, the revolutionary subject, has transitioned from the category of the mass, from the absolute majority of the population of the developed world, to a miniscule social minority who, in Britain, constitute a mere 8% of the workforce taken as a whole.

If we follow this assertion further we can see that what Marxists continue to call the ‘working-class’ doesn’t necessarily refer to a ‘class’ in any determinate sense; what is called ‘the class’ more so refers to a kind of politically-constituted coalition of various different ‘labour-power sellers’ cohered by a formal relation to the wage rather than by a common relationship to production. The docker, the carer, the warehouse picker, and the call-centre worker are united at the level of juridical category, but where they relate in terms of the production and realisation of value, each diverges immeasurably. I doubt Ewan will agree with my radicalising his argument to this extent; I expect the charge against me is that I’ve proposed something which theoretically ‘divides the working-class’ – the problem with that rebuff is that this ‘division’ between determinate and indeterminate labour is a mere fact of the present technical composition. To insist upon the unity of this inherited form and to subordinate the leverage of the determinate minority to the coalitional logic of the indeterminate majority doesn’t follow from adequate application of method; if Marxists were to critically reappraise the given notion that this coalition constitutes ‘the class’ in a real sense, rather than as the form of a political inheritance, I would wager that the pursuit of solidarity could begin to proceed consciously. The distinction is not ours to invent, in any case. The same structure that concentrates the production of surplus in a shrinking minority also pools that surplus across the whole of the capitalist class, confirming the determinate minority as above the category of a sectional interest and as the actually existing working-class.

How a certain social force appears at the level of economic output or at the level of the wage actively eludes an account of their actual determinacy; an equivalent and parallel process occurs from the standpoint of capital itself, with these two processes reinforcing and compounding each other in kind; in Capital Vol. III Marx notes that while surplus value is produced by individual capitals in proportion to the living labour they employ, that surplus is appropriated across the capitalist class as a whole in proportion to total capital advanced. As a result, what an individual firm retains as profit bears no essential relation to the surplus value generated by the firm – a capitalist employing no variable capital at all (therefore exploiting no workers directly) still draws profit from unpaid surplus labour, each capital drawing from this same common pool of surplus, that surplus then being “divided among capitalists as dividends proportionate to the share of the social capital each holds,” that “in selling their commodities the capitalists of the various spheres of production recover the value of the capital consumed in their production,” and that ultimately “they do not secure the surplus-value, and consequently the profit, created in their own sphere by the production of these commodities” alone; “What they secure is only as much surplus-value, and hence profit, as falls, when uniformly distributed, to the share of every aliquot part of the total social capital from the total social surplus-value.”

Starting here, we can read into Marx’s schema in Poverty of Philosophy regarding the formation of the working-class proper, that the mass of workers “is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself. In the struggle… this mass becomes united, and constitutes itself as a class for itself. The interests it defends become class interests.” The determinacy of the workplace and the elevation of immediate interest to class interest is itself a process of generalisation which is mirrored in capital, of the aggregation of surplus value into the “common pool” and the aggregation of individual workers into a working-class. What distinguishes these analogous processes is that the working-class represent the active principle while capital is necessarily passive, as succinctly elaborated by Tronti that “capitalist development becomes subordinated to working class struggles; it follows behind them, and they set the pace to which the political mechanisms of capital’s own reproduction must be tuned.” In other words, despite the fact that surplus-value can only be properly registered at the aggregate level, its generation is still essentially tied to actual physical production, and that actual physical production develops according to the tempo of the labour movement itself. Historically, a share of the surplus from this common pool served as the basis for the distribution of profits to the capitalist class in aggregate, and as the source of the existing revenues by which the wage-packets of the indeterminate working majority are derived.

The active pulverisation of working-class power under Thatcher through the dismantling of our national industrial and energy base demonstrates – paradoxically – how the working-class sets the tempo for capital, and how the capitalist class seeks to escape the class relation, the “political history of capital” being “a sequence of attempts by capital to withdraw from the class relationship; at a higher level… the history of the successive attempts of the capitalist class to emancipate itself from the working class.” The capitalist class will invariably attempt to suspend the antagonism by any means necessary, even to their own fundamental detriment, cutting off its nose to spite its face and laying the foundation for the supersession of their own hegemony. Meanwhile, the levels of genuine productivity of the contemporary productive worker have risen to astronomic heights compared with that of the late 19th or early-to-mid 20th Century; outside productive work, the immense ballooning of superfluous labour time and the mass expansion of the public sector demonstrate what actually happens when capitalists attempt to escape the class relation by force. It does indeed seem paradoxical to say that the currently atrophied state of the working-class movement is a direct result of the class’ political success; perhaps it’s easier to demonstrate by looking at capital’s dismal failure to innovate domestically as a direct consequence to Thatcher's attempt at a ‘final solution’ to the class antagonism. Ultimately the only tangible result of this maneuver on capital’s part has been an explosion in economically indeterminate forms of labour and the concentration of more and more insurgent determinacy in fewer hands at key physical points of economic leverage. The old style of mass politics evidently belongs to a prior epoch, but what replaces it is still an open question. If we follow this line of inquiry to its conclusion, then we might say that Communism has atrophied politically less so by failure of agitation, propaganda, or even by wrong-footed analysis, but that the decline in potency of Communist politics in our period actually reflects a real process going on at the economic level, which has then been exacerbated by Communists failing to interrogate this objective reconstitution of the working-class as a minority. The actual ‘masses’ today technically ‘work’ in conditions of virtual unemployment, serving as a vector for the redistribution of pre-existing revenues, while an ever-slimmer productive minority actually works at the points by which the country, our immediate political terrain, interfaces with the global economy. I would wager Communism is still the politics of the working-class, but that it can’t any longer call itself the politics of the masses, and that our movement ought to proceed from this understanding, however difficult it might be to cast off the inheritances of the prior period.

The concern for Communists, now attempting to reconstitute themselves in various ways, is then in reckoning with the meteoric ballooning of labour time performed in contradiction to the immense diminution of any intelligible share of value produced (and therefore the potential for collective bargaining) across the population. Rather than maintaining a faltering subject by reifying a political coalition as a class, the task ought to be carrying on with what Communists have always done in embedding the movement within the productive part of the working-class and from there fighting for a political programme from a position of strength, to engender the conversion of the virtual unemployment of the toiling majority into genuine free time.