"Class Against Class" or Real World Alignments for Revolution?

Posted on Feb 27, 2010 Posted by Eric Ribellarsi

The following originally appeared on the Kasama site. It is being reposted here for study

by Mike Ely

I wrote:

“Revolutionary rumblings [in the 1960s] didn’t take the form of “class against class” in the U.S. — and never will.

Bryan writes:

“Revolutionary rumblings will take the form of “class against class,” in this country and around the world….You don’t claim to be Marxists still, do you?”

There is a great transition happening in human society — breaking out of the sharp contradiction between social production and private appropriation. But to think that takes the form of workers gathering over here, and capitalists gathering over there — and then a rumble…. well that is non-materialist and non-Marxist (if you will).

There was in the 1960s a great element of rebellion rising from below (in more ways than often appreciated) and it has much to do with the radicalization of the most oppressed and working class layers of Black people in the U.S. And I don’t believe that great revolutions will arise in our epoch without a great ferment from below — without a driving force (a revolutionary people) arising from below and bringing with them into politics a spirit of “nothing to lose.”

But that doesn’t mean revolution has to take the form of “class against class.” (And I don’t think there is anything in Marxism that requires that it take that form.)

The polarizations that produce revolutions have never been that simple, and as the last century went on this became more and more obvious. The successful socialist revolutions happened in countries where workers were a minority, and where the alliances that led to socialism were far more complex and dynamic than this mechanical notion of “class against class.”

To be clear: there was a belief among some Maoists in the 1970s that revolution would become possible when “the fundamental contradiction became the principal contradiction” — i.e. that working people would shatter the alignments emerging in the sixties by (somehow) adopting a workerist orientation and self-identification — and then, as a unified and self-conscious class, entering the field of political battle — and that this leap would be the signal that revolution had become possible. (And this conception, obviously, saw revolution in workerist terms — precisely as “class against class” and there for saw socialism requiring a particularly sharp and defining workerist identification among the poor and working people.)

I think that is unlikely and also unnecessary for socialist revolution. We need a conscious movement for socialist revolution (and all the radical changes of ideas, relations and structures that that implies) — but that does not require working people to embrace some overweening self-identification of “workers as workers.”

That has to do with the history of the U.S. — This has never been a society of class-as-caste — imposing those kinds of class identities on people (the way 19th century Germany or England did).

In the U.S., caste identities were imposed on Indians and Black people — (ile. Black people as slaves and sharecroppers, confined by the “color line” — and Indians as hunted non-people.) Often, the structure and history of this place grouped and excluded people as nationalities — while social mobility among whites prevented the consolidation of a single “hereditary working class” that self-identified as such. And so there has never been (spontaneously in U.S. bourgeois society) that much self-identification as class — compared to the way even quite conservative workers self-identify as workers in England or Germany or France.

In the U.S., revolution will arise (if it arises) from the struggles against the historic oppression of minority nationalities, and from a sweeping new movement for socialist alternative society broadly among the (multiracial) poor and working people. It will arise from collisions that entwine with the liberation of women, revolt against brutal unending wars of empire and a disdain for the dominant culture of money and dog-eat-dog. And it will certainly be spurred by the growing consciousness broadly in society that uncontrolled capitalist development is creating an ecological disaster for humanity.

Socialist revolution does not require that conscious self-identification by sociological class be a defining feature.

“What force, if not the working class leading the oppressed, will change society then?

Well there are many issues bound up here, including what does it mean for one class to lead the rest of the oppressed.

There has never been the case where a class simply united to lead anyone. In major revolutions, there were deep divisions in the working class (certainly that is true in Russia). And what led the oppressed in some cases were radical political forces (the communists generally) who saw themselves as representatives of the working class (and its objective interests) — and who won the allegiance of important sections of that class (often minorities, but significant sections nonetheless).

But again, to say that revolutionary forces identifying with the working class lead broader alliances of the oppressed — is precisely to adopt a vision that is not simply “class against class.”

For example: It is not true that we need to somehow “unite the working class” (as a prerequisite for a socialist revolution). We should seek to unite working people (and other oppressed people) around a radical, socialist program. But there will be no simple class-wide unity in this process. Given the highly stratified nature of the U.S. working class, and the impacts of imperialism… it is quite possible that a revolutionary movement may serve to further polarize different sections of the working class from each other in the U.S.

And not only is this compatable with Marxism, but also Lenin’s experience. Lenin famously said that the revolution does not consist of workers lining up on one pole, and the capitalist lining up at the other, and pointed the historical fact that revolution commonly takes the form of a war between two sections of the people. And even if all this were not compatible with the texts or beliefs of Marx or Lenin, it would still be true.

In the 1960s, the actual alignments in the U.S. (the rise of Black liberation, the eruption of youth rebellion, the conservative expressions among some white “blue color” Democrats etc.) exploded the expectations of some rather crusty and conservative forms of Marxism who expected a repeat of their-romanticized-memory of the 1930s.