A-Infos (en) Greece, anarchism espiv: Working Class: The "classical"/Marxist approach and anarchist "interventions"[Part 1](ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The following text is the first part of an article by the editor of 
Alerta.gr, Yiannis Voliatis, for the anarchist newspaper  "Mavrokokini 
Simaia" . The first part of the article was published  in the December 
2023 issue  of the newspaper while the second part is expected to be 
included in the next issue.  ---- What is the Working Class and who does 
it consist of: The classic definition, anarchist "interventions" and the 
analogy to today ---- Part 1: Definitions of the working class ---- 
Anarchism is a revolutionary movement with clear roots and references to 
the working class, the oppressed and the exploited of the planet. His 
most important political vision, his final vision, is the social 
revolution that will overthrow this domineering and exploitative world 
and gradually give birth to a new one: that of equality, freedom, 
solidarity, without borders and states and classes, without gender and 
race discrimination. The members and activists of the anarchist movement 
have traditionally come from the wider working class - and those who 
historically came from an upper class, willingly gave up their political 
and material privileges or put their wealth in the service of the cause 
(a prime example of Prince" Pyotr Kropotkin). As it follows from the 
above, a key part in our broader political analysis as anarchists 
(should be) is the class analysis. And an important part of this 
analysis and a task for anarchists today is to clarify what the 
definition "Working Class" means in modern terms and who it consists of. 
This is extremely important, since social classes are not mere 
philology, but their members have competing material and political 
interests. So we should put some seals on the Anarchist Movement as 
revolutionary-class and not as simply a "rights", "identity" cross-class 
protest movement. That is, a movement that aims at the overthrow of 
capitalism and not at a parallel competitive course. In this way we will 
manage to determine his address, his enemies and his potential allies.

The working class is defined by Karl Marx, very tepidly and vaguely, in 
the Third Volume of "Capital". The main relationship that defines the 
social classes in general and more specifically the working class, is 
the relationship it has with the means of production, or rather the 
absence of a relationship of ownership over them. As a "means of 
production" we can define everything that can produce capital for its 
owner, while such a thing presupposes the exploitation, directly or 
indirectly, of a third person and his labor power, i.e. the extraction 
of surplus value. "Surplus value" is roughly defined as the difference 
between the value created by workers in the capitalist economy and the 
wages they are paid - and which are always lower than this value. This 
difference is the profit of the bosses, which is then mainly invested in 
new machines, new projects, etc., in order to increase production and 
profit for the company.

Thus, referring to the means of production, we can talk about a large 
factory with machines, where many workers are employed, fields where 
agricultural workers work, but even a small workshop with one or two 
employees. If we want to go deeper, we can separate inactive capital, 
i.e. that which does not return to the market in the form of investment, 
from active capital, pure "surplus value" from "super-labour", the 
former being that which the Marx called "productive labor" and the 
second "non-productive", that is, if a product with use value is created 
from the labor or not. But these definitions are a matter of controversy 
even for the most "hard" Marx scholars, so let's leave them aside in 
this particular paper.

Also, more "archaic" types of "means of production", which have survived 
through time and the transformation of social relations and in which the 
extraction of surplus value or surplus labor is more indirect, are 
property relations, such as the possession of real estate and, in 
general, premises for rent (real estate). There we are essentially 
talking about an "indirect" extraction of surplus value, as the tenant 
is probably subject to direct exploitation in his workplace, but he 
needs to allocate part of the earnings - and therefore the remuneration 
for the surplus value he has produced - to the owner of the property. 
And the owner has the possibility of imposing on the tenant, such as 
evicting him if he does not pay the rent on time, etc. Nevertheless, 
there is no direct extraction of surplus value, which we find in a 
typical employment relationship. In reality it is a commercial-consumer 
relationship, since the very means of raising capital, e.g. real estate 
does not need to be handled by workers in order to produce goods, while 
they are themselves the "consumer good" that brings profit to capital. 
It is an ancient form of property relationship that produces profit, 
similar to that of landowners. Except that here we are not talking about 
the taking away from the landowner of the greater part of the harvest 
produced by some serfs or landless peasants or the exploitation of the 
labor power of others in the production of this harvest, but the direct 
taking away of part of the remuneration that the worker receives from 
his work for some other employer, that is, part of his salary, from his 
tenant, with whom he has no other commercial relationship than that of 
providing him with the house in which he lives.

The members of the Working Class do not own means of production, i.e. 
means which produce capital and with which they can extract surplus 
value from other people, but, on the contrary, in order to survive they 
must sell their labor power themselves to a third party and collect a 
salary for this work.

Of course, it is not every salaried part of the working class, since, 
according to Marx's tepid definition, there is a gradation in terms of 
the size of the wage and what it can buy - material or immaterial - that 
will separate the high wage earner from the worker. , in terms of 
quality of life, leisure, amenities, and the ease of accumulating 
capital that can be converted into means of production in a second year. 
Of course, the definition of "high wage" in Marx is rather vague, while 
in this part the first "interventions" of anarchist thought in relation 
to some additional criteria, which have to do with "management" as a 
concept in the economy, enter into this part: senior salaried managers, 
whether in the public or private sector, can be counted as part of the 
working class. That is, those who may not own the capital themselves, 
but own an important part of its management and reproduction, as well as 
play a decisive role in the management of human resources (workers) and 
can have a direct impact on the acquisition or loss of a job by another 
employee. In other words, they are at the same time 
supervisors-supervisors of the rest of the workers and responsible for 
the reproduction of capital.

The above objection is encountered very early in the revolutionary 
history of the socialist movement and has to do with Lenin's idea about 
the "Managers" of the factories, after the October Revolution. In short, 
Lenin, like most of his genuine descendants, did not believe in the 
self-management of factories and production by the working class as 
such, but looked to special "comrades-managers", who were often only one 
person in each factory, which would determine the policy of production, 
according to the state line. In a relatively recent article (June 2021) 
in the anarcho-syndicalist review  "Ideas and Action" , entitled 
"Against Leninism" , Tom Wetzel  explains how Lenin, speaking of 
"workers' control" in the position of the same name in 1917, it did not 
support anything other than the obligation of "Managers" to "open and 
present the books of the enterprise to the workers". Literally, that is, 
for the employees to "check" whether what the manager is doing is clear 
of irregularities - where an irregularity, of course, beyond the moral 
part, was the disregard of the central state policy for the economy. 
However, the workers themselves would not have a say on the production 
line and policy: This would come directly from the central planning of 
the economy, i.e. from the State, while the "Manager" would take care of 
its correct application in each factory.

Vladimir Lenin sets us very close to his thoughts on this layer of 
"managers" and their role within (?) the Working Class, in his work "The 
Direct Tasks of Soviet Power"  , in 1918:  "The indisputable experience 
of history has shown that ... the dictatorship of individuals has too 
often been the vehicle, the channel of the dictatorship of revolutionary 
classes ... Large-scale machine industry-which is the material 
productive source and the foundation of socialism-requires absolute and 
strict unity of will .... How can strict unity of will be ensured? When 
thousands submit their wills to the will of one... Unquestioning 
submission to a single will is absolutely essential  to the success of 
the labor processes based on large-scale machine industry... today the 
Revolution demands, in the interest of socialism, that  the masses obey 
indisputably in the single will of the leaders of the labor process .

Of course, this is a position that, as we said above, the anarchists - 
and other parts of the revolutionary movement - do not accept, and the 
modern class analysis of the libertarian movement considers all kinds of 
"Managers" as a middle class, outside of the working class. After all, 
the forms of organization of production work and the distribution of 
goods that flourished in the places where the working class, in the 
midst of revolutionary processes, came under the influence of anarchist 
ideas, prove the statement to be true: The collectives of the Spanish 
Revolution of 1936- 1939 they did not know of a "manager" and "obedience 
to the will" of a specific person, but they proposed self-management of 
production. Where there were separate managerial tasks, which required 
specialized knowledge (something natural, since we are talking about a 
new society that was just emerging from the shell of the old one), the 
people who provided them were not considered superior to the rest of the 
workers and did not have responsibilities of a decisive nature, but 
advisory. The decision-making processes within the collectivized 
factories - and even more so in the fields - were horizontal. The old 
"managers" of the capitalist era were allowed to stay as consultants, as 
equals among equals. Furthermore, in historical periods where anarchists 
played a large role in labor uprisings and attempts to self-manage the 
means of production, such as in the Biennio Rosso (Biennio Rosso, 
1919-1920) in Italy, a cyclical rotation of tasks was preferred within 
the workplace, to break specialization and because it was believed that 
the worker was more complete as a revolutionary subject if he had full 
insight and knowledge on the entire production process, which struck at 
the root of the phenomenon of alienation of the worker from the product 
of his work.

Valuable information about the life and work within these collectives is 
given to us firsthand, having experienced that time as a teenage 
anarchist in Barcelona, Abel  Paz , in his work  "Journey to the Past" 
(1995):  "The workshop where I worked as an apprentice it was on Calle 
Mallorca, at the corner with Calle Navas de Tolosa...When the workshop 
was collectivized, both bosses remained as simple workers...Peiro was a 
skilled craftsman and remained in the factory as a technician. His 
partner, Serra, was an elderly man who did clerical and accounting 
work...At first I learned to work with a sledgehammer...then they made 
me learn to glue tanks. At that time I had read nothing of Proudhon 
except "Property is Theft," and I am sure the rest did not even know 
that. Apparently they had understood by instinct alone that 
specialization limits the creative spirit of man. There was no 
specialization in that lab. All workers passed through all posts and 
could succeed in all jobs. Even the accountant, when he didn't have a 
job, would pick up the sledgehammer or tackle the lathe or welding."

Also, an important clarification, which follows indirectly, both from 
the analysis of Marx and Engels regarding the constitution of the 
Working Class, but is also an important part of the anarchist position 
on the theory of classes, has to do with a relationship of a 
non-economic nature, at least not direct, but rather "ideological". So 
according to the writings of the two German theorists on the role of the 
state as guardian of the interests of the respective upper class and of 
the anarchists regarding the positions that carry the privileges of 
coercion: As a matter of fact, those who belong to the security forces 
are excluded from the working class. and in mechanisms of repression, 
that is, the military and all kinds of police, as guardians of the 
system and therefore as inextricably linked to the interests of the 
bourgeoisie. In fact,  Engels  had mentioned the following verbatim, in 
relation to the role of the security forces: " The police will keep 
vigil so that (the worker) starves to death in a quiet way, not 
offensive to the bourgeoisie"  (" The Condition of the Working Class in 
England" 1845).

In addition to the above, it is now clear that the management of the 
state (regardless of its form, bourgeois or "labor") and its mechanisms, 
historically gives rise to new elites with their own separate economic 
interests, but linked to those of the economic ruling class , since many 
of the members of these two sets are common. The anarchist  Errico 
Malatesta  had even mentioned in his work  "Anarchy" (1891)  that "Today 
the Government consists of owners or people of their class, so strongly 
under their influence that the richest do not even find it necessary to 
participate actively themselves " . Whether we analyze political power 
as a servant, or as cooperating and complementing economic power, it is 
a part hostile and foreign to the Working Class. He has the power of 
imposition on the oppressed, he is essentially the "chief" of the 
security forces.

The enemy camp still includes a large portion of "workers" who hold high 
positions  in institutions that reproduce the ideology of the Bourgeois 
Class and its hegemony . Such can be certain great journalists and 
university professors. But not the teachers in the schools, who, as 
civil servants, although they do not reproduce "capital" for a boss, are 
an inferior part of the system, in the specific historical period that 
it is going through, they perform strictly administrative duties, in 
which they are not required to receive substantial structural decisions 
and are paid with salaries commensurate with the Working Class. Another 
analysis on the question of civil servants is the one that presents the 
structure - State not simply as the current (alienated) form of social 
organization, but as the "collective capitalist" - and civil servants as 
the workers in it, of whose work it exploits, in order to continue its 
operation.

In relation to the media again, we would say that not even the ordinary 
workers, who do not have a share in the production of the pro-Urban 
Class political speech from the Middle, but simply work in equally 
processing tasks (reporter, camera, editor, etc.), they can be seen as 
enemies of the working class, on the contrary, parts of them have often 
been the protagonists in the past in struggles of economic and political 
content, either for their sector or in general.

Finally, in the working class, Marx also classifies the unemployed, who 
are the surplus labor force. It is characterized as the "reserve army" 
of the working class, since, by maintaining it in increased numbers, the 
bosses can blackmail the workers with the bogeyman of the expendability 
of their workplace. On the one hand, the unemployed person is more 
vulnerable to accepting a job of another worker, with reduced wages and 
rights, in order to get out of his poverty, on the other hand, the 
worker himself is easier to discipline when there is blackmail 
dismissal, with the prospect of his position being immediately filled by 
someone unemployed  (A large part of this sub-stratum today consists of 
immigrant workers, to whom we will refer later in the second part of 
this text) .

In summary, if we want to give a modern, more expanded definition of the 
Working Class, based on both the "classic" Marxist analysis and the 
anarchist perspectives on it, we would say that it consists of all those 
who, in order to survive, have not some other means, despite their labor 
power (whether they are working or not at the given time period), they 
do not manage large funds for the benefit of their boss for a pittance, 
they do not belong to some oppressive or repressive apparatus of the 
state and they do not perform work of oppression, control and management 
over other employees (administrative tasks). Also, they do not reproduce 
the ideology of the Urban Class for hire, through some institution, 
having a dominant position. Finally, it is not part of the political 
elite and the management of state institutions.

(Goes on)

https://anarchism.espivblogs.net/2024/01/13/ergatiki-taxi-i-klassiki-marxistiki-proseggisi-kai-oi-anarchikes-paremvaseis/
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