A-Infos (en) Spaine, Regeneracion - More Proletariat and Fewer Obituaries: From the End of the Working Class to Its Reconstruction (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Introduction ---- For decades, some critical thought has argued that the 
proletariat has ceased to occupy the historical position it held during 
the long cycle of the labor movement, roughly from the mid-19th century 
until the crisis of Fordist capitalism in the 1970s. The 
deindustrialization of Western economies, the fragmentation of labor, 
the expansion of the service sector, the precarization of employment, 
the individualization of labor relations, and the increasing integration 
of social life into the logic of consumption have led to questioning the 
validity of class politics as a strategic horizon for emancipation.

Within libertarian circles, the debate is particularly intense. Authors 
such as Tomás Ibáñez and Miquel Amorós argue that the profound 
transformations of capitalism have eroded the historical conditions that 
made the classical labor movement possible. The disappearance of 
working-class culture, the institutional integration of trade unions, 
the dissolution of the old work and neighborhood communities, and the 
increasing commercialization of existence have deprived the proletariat 
of the political centrality it held for over a century. The issue is no 
longer simply the defeat of certain organizations, but rather the 
exhaustion of a historical cycle in which the working class was able to 
constitute itself as a revolutionary subject.

The diagnosis contains elements that are difficult to dispute. It is 
evident that contemporary capitalism has profoundly transformed the 
conditions of production, the composition of wage labor, and the 
traditional forms of working-class organization. It also seems 
undeniable that the historical experiences of the labor movement-social 
democrats, communists, council workers, revolutionary syndicalists, and 
anarchists-belong to a historical context that cannot be mechanically 
reproduced. Anyone who attempts to reconstruct the organizational forms 
of the 20th century while ignoring the mutations of global capitalism 
will inevitably fall into anachronism.

However, these observations do not necessarily lead to the conclusion 
that the proletariat has ceased to be the potential subject of 
revolutionary transformation. There is a crucial difference between 
acknowledging a historical defeat and asserting a historical 
impossibility. The fact that the political forms through which the 
proletariat acted during a certain period have entered into crisis does 
not imply that the social relations that made their emergence possible 
have disappeared. Even less does it authorize the conclusion that the 
contradiction between capital and labor has lost its structuring 
character within contemporary capitalism.

The hypothesis guiding this article is precisely the opposite. The 
global reorganization of capitalism that began in the 1970s has not 
eliminated the material foundation of the proletariat, but rather 
transformed and expanded it on a scale previously unknown. The relative 
deindustrialization of Europe and North America has coincided with an 
extraordinary expansion of wage labor in Asia, Latin America, Africa, 
and Eastern Europe; the fragmentation of production processes has been 
accompanied by increasingly intense integration into the global market; 
and the diversification of employment forms has not reduced wage 
dependency, but rather extended it to new sectors of the population.

It is crucial to distinguish two levels: crisis of class consciousness, 
workers' organizations and historical forms of proletarian politics, on 
the one hand, and, on the other, the persistence of objective conditions 
that make possible the existence of a class defined by the need to sell 
its labor power in order to live.

The purpose of this work, therefore, is not to deny the depth of the 
defeat suffered by the workers' movement in recent decades, nor to 
idealize forms of organization whose crisis is evident. Nor does it seek 
to defend an essentialist conception of the proletariat as the 
predestined subject of history. Its objective is more limited, but also 
more precise: to examine whether the transformations experienced by 
capitalism truly justify the conclusion that the working class has 
definitively lost all revolutionary potential, or whether, on the 
contrary, the crisis primarily affects the historical forms of its 
organization and not the structural position it continues to occupy 
within the relations of production.

Answering this question requires shifting the analysis from the 
restricted space of Western societies to actually existing global 
capitalism. Only from this perspective is it possible to assess the 
extent to which the planetary expansion of wage labor, new international 
migrations, the reorganization of global production chains, and the 
emergence of new forms of exploitation modify-or confirm-the classical 
hypothesis that the contradiction between capital and labor continues to 
constitute the fundamental axis of capitalist societies.

Late capitalism, obsolete in its promise of general well-being, clings 
to survival through a drift toward a war economy. When the profitability 
of civilian production dwindles, cycles of military spending, security 
prioritization, and permanent exceptionalism are reactivated, 
disciplining society and reshaping public priorities. This regime, 
criminal in its effects, externalizes costs-environmental, human, and 
democratic-while transforming fear and conflict into new niches for 
accumulation. In this context, the precarization of labor and the 
dissolution of the proletariat's role as a political subject are not 
systemic failures, but rather conditions of possibility for a model that 
requires a readily available, disorganized, and surveilled population, 
at the service of a machine that produces value through destruction.

The proletariat as a social relation and not as a historical figure

The debate about the relevance of the proletariat usually begins with 
the changes in contemporary capitalism and then draws sociological 
conclusions. It is important, however, to first define the concept: the 
proletariat is not a particular historical figure-like the Fordist 
factory worker-but rather a position within the social relations of 
production.

From this perspective, it is significant that many theories on the 
crisis of the proletariat take as their point of reference a very 
specific historical figure: the industrial worker, concentrated in large 
factories, organized in unions, living in relatively homogeneous 
working-class neighborhoods, and possessing a collective culture built 
over more than a century of social struggles. This figure existed and 
played a decisive role in the history of the European labor movement. 
But identifying it with the proletariat as such means transforming a 
specific historical experience into a universal definition.

Marx never proceeded in that way. Throughout Capital , the proletarian 
condition is not characterized by a trade, an industrial sector, or a 
specific form of work organization. What defines the proletarian is 
their position within the social relations of production. The worker is 
a proletarian because they lack the means to produce and reproduce their 
existence and, therefore, are forced to sell their labor power to the 
owner of capital. This definition possesses a sufficient degree of 
abstraction to encompass extraordinarily diverse forms of work and, 
precisely for this reason, explains capitalism's enormous capacity to 
adapt to changing historical contexts.

The distinction is not merely a matter of terminology. All subsequent 
interpretation depends on it. If the proletariat is identified with the 
large industrial working class that emerged during Fordist capitalism, 
it is relatively easy to conclude that we are now witnessing its 
decline. If, on the other hand, the proletariat is understood as a 
social relation defined by wage dependence and the expropriation of the 
means of production, then the question changes entirely. It is no longer 
a matter of asking whether the old figure of the industrial worker 
remains the majority, but rather of determining whether the development 
of capitalism has reduced or increased the number of people whose 
existence depends on selling their labor power.

The answer seems quite clear. Over the last five decades, capitalism has 
experienced an extraordinary expansion of wage labor. This is not 
because it has improved the living conditions of workers, but because it 
has incorporated entire regions of the planet, previously partially 
excluded from commodity production, into the system. The accelerated 
urbanization process that has accompanied economic globalization is 
probably the greatest proletarianization movement in all of history.

It is worth pausing for a moment to consider this aspect, because it is 
often obscured by an overly focused view of the European experience. 
Since the late 1970s, hundreds of millions of peasants have left rural 
economies to join capitalist production. China's industrialization is 
the best-known example, but not the only one. Similar processes, 
although less intense, can be observed in Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, 
Indonesia, Mexico, and Ethiopia. In all these cases, we witness the 
formation of enormous concentrations of wage laborers whose social 
existence corresponds precisely to the classic definition of the 
proletariat.

What disappears, therefore, is not the proletariat, but a specific 
industrial geography. Production relocation is often interpreted from a 
European perspective as a phenomenon of deindustrialization, when in 
reality it constitutes an international redistribution of production. 
Factories that closed in the north of the continent reappeared, often 
expanded, in the Pearl River Delta, in China's special economic zones, 
in the industrial corridors of Southeast Asia, or in Central American 
maquiladoras. Capital abandoned some territories to establish itself in 
others, but it continued to depend on wage labor as an indispensable 
condition for its valorization.

This geographical shift has significant consequences for social theory. 
If the analysis remains confined within European borders, the impression 
that the proletariat is fading away is understandable. Old working-class 
neighborhoods disappear, large factories reduce their workforce, unions 
lose members, and industrial employment gives way to service sector 
activities. However, this picture changes radically when the frame of 
observation shifts from national or continental to global. What then 
emerges is not a reduction of the working class, but its extraordinary 
expansion, accompanied by a profound reorganization of the international 
division of labor.

At this point, an important distinction is necessary. Recognizing that 
the proletariat has increased numerically does not mean denying that the 
conditions under which it can constitute itself as a political subject 
have changed. It would be absurd to ignore that productive 
fragmentation, job insecurity, the individualization of labor relations, 
and territorial dispersion greatly hinder the construction of stable 
organizations and collective identities comparable to those that 
characterized the classical labor movement. But precisely for this 
reason, it is necessary to carefully distinguish between the objective 
existence of a class and the historical forms that its political 
organization adopts.

The confusion between these two levels has frequently accompanied 
discussions in recent decades. Where the old workers' organizations 
disappear, the tendency is to conclude that the class that made them 
possible has also disappeared. However, the relationship can be 
formulated in exactly the opposite way. Perhaps what has entered into 
crisis is not the proletariat, but the organizational forms inherited 
from a particular phase of capitalist development. If this hypothesis 
were correct, the political problem would cease to be about finding a 
new revolutionary subject and would instead become about understanding 
how a class that continues to exist under profoundly altered conditions 
can reorganize itself.

This question leads us directly to the heart of the debate. Because, in 
reality, the discussion doesn't revolve solely around the sociology of 
contemporary work. What's at stake is the very interpretation of the 
historical defeat suffered by the labor movement in recent decades. And 
it is precisely here that Ibáñez and Amorós's theses, in my opinion, 
reveal their main limitations.

The defeat of the workers' movement and the illusion of its disappearance

The issue takes on a different dimension when we move beyond solely 
considering the evolution of wage labor and examine the historical 
trajectory of the labor movement. It is here, perhaps, that the origin 
of the pessimistic diagnosis that pervades much of contemporary critical 
thought likely lies. For it is difficult to deny that the organizations 
that for more than a century shaped the political experience of the 
working class are undergoing a profound crisis. The major unions have 
become institutionalized, workers' parties have long since abandoned any 
vision of social transformation, the proletarian culture that 
characterized vast industrial areas has practically disappeared, and the 
successive defeats suffered since the late 1970s have weakened 
confidence in the capacity of social conflict to alter the course of 
capitalism.

All of this constitutes a historical fact that no serious interpretation 
can ignore. However, acknowledging this defeat does not necessarily 
compel one to accept the conclusions that are frequently drawn from it. 
Between recognizing a political defeat and asserting that the 
proletariat has ceased to occupy a central place in capitalism, there is 
an argumentative leap that is rarely adequately justified.

Perhaps it's worth recalling a basic truth: social classes don't 
disappear simply because they are defeated. If that were the case, we 
would have to conclude that the bourgeoisie ceased to exist every time 
it lost political power in a revolutionary process, or that the 
aristocracy vanished immediately after liberal revolutions. Classes are 
not defined by the success or failure of their organizations, but by the 
position they occupy within the social relations of production. Defeats 
modify the balance of power, destroy institutions, disrupt political 
traditions, and even profoundly alter the collective consciousness, but 
they do not, in themselves, transform the fundamental structure of 
social relations.

This observation is particularly relevant when analyzing the evolution 
of capitalism since the 1970s. The neoliberal offensive did not consist 
solely of a series of economic reforms. It was, above all, a massive 
political operation aimed at breaking the power accumulated by the labor 
movement during the post-World War II era. The defeats of the British 
miners, the industrial restructuring across much of Europe, the 
deregulation of the labor market, the offshoring of production, and the 
growing subservience of the economy to finance were not independent 
processes. They formed part of a strategy to reorganize capitalism whose 
objective was precisely to weaken the bargaining power and resistance of 
the working class.

It is paradoxical that the success of this offensive has sometimes been 
interpreted as proof that the proletariat has ceased to exist or has 
lost all historical relevance. In reality, the exact opposite argument 
could be made. If capital deployed such an effort to transform the 
organization of labor, shift production to other regions of the world, 
fragment workforces, and make employment more precarious, it was 
precisely because it continued to consider worker concentration as one 
of the main limitations to its accumulation process. The reorganization 
of capitalism does not demonstrate the disappearance of the conflict 
between capital and labor; it constitutes a response to that conflict.

At this point, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider the 
implications of the very concept of capitalist reorganization. 
Capitalism does not continually modify its modes of production simply 
out of a desire for technological innovation. Every major transformation 
responds, at least in part, to the need to overcome obstacles that arose 
during the previous cycle of accumulation. Mechanization responded to 
the need to increase productivity; Fordism made it possible to organize 
mass production; offshoring facilitated the reduction of labor costs; 
global logistics made it possible to coordinate geographically dispersed 
production processes. None of these transformations eliminates wage 
labor. They all seek to reorganize it in a way that is more favorable to 
capital accumulation.

Perhaps for this reason, it is more appropriate to speak of a crisis in 
the historical forms of the labor movement than a crisis of the 
proletariat as a class. The organizations that arose around large-scale 
Fordist industry responded to very specific conditions: relative job 
stability, the concentration of thousands of workers in the same 
production space, continuity of labor relations, and the existence of 
relatively cohesive working-class communities. When these conditions 
disappear or are profoundly altered, the inherited organizational forms 
cease to function with the same effectiveness. But it does not follow 
from this that the class whose existence gave rise to these 
organizations disappears.

History offers numerous examples of this difference. Revolutionary trade 
unionism at the beginning of the 20th century was not identical to 
English Chartism, nor did Chartism coincide with the forms of artisanal 
organization that existed before the Industrial Revolution. Each 
transformation of capitalism produced new forms of conflict and demanded 
new organizational responses. No one would have concluded, therefore, 
that the working class ceased to exist each time one of these historical 
forms entered a crisis. It is strange that such a conclusion is accepted 
so readily today.

All of this compels us to reconsider the initial question. Perhaps the 
pertinent question is not whether the proletariat remains identical to 
the one that led the great workers' struggles of the 20th century. 
Clearly, it is not. Nor does contemporary capitalism resemble the 
capitalism analyzed by Marx in Victorian England. The real question is 
whether the transformations experienced during the last few decades have 
altered the fundamental relationship between capital and labor or 
whether, on the contrary, they have merely modified the forms under 
which that relationship continues to reproduce itself.

Answering this question requires abandoning a Eurocentric perspective 
and examining the development of capitalism as a global system. Only 
then is it possible to assess the extent to which the apparent 
disappearance of the proletariat constitutes a real phenomenon or, 
rather, a perspective effect derived from observing only one part of the 
process. The class does not die: capital rebuilds it.

However, recognizing the depth of this transformation does not compel us 
to conclude that the very possibility of class politics has disappeared. 
Rather, it means that the conditions under which such politics must be 
remade are radically different from those that existed for much of the 
20th century. This difference is important because it shifts the focus 
of the problem. It is no longer a question of whether the proletariat 
exists or not, but of understanding why an objectively larger class 
finds it so difficult to recognize itself as such and to establish 
stable forms of organization.

In reality, this issue should come as no surprise. The history of 
capitalism can largely be read as a history of capital's efforts to 
prevent the imposed association within the production process from 
transforming into political collaboration against capital itself. Every 
significant advance of the labor movement has been followed by attempts 
to reorganize production in such a way as to hinder new forms of 
solidarity. The introduction of machinery, the scientific division of 
labor, production decentralization, automation, outsourcing, and the 
platform economy do not respond solely to technical demands. They also 
constitute forms of work organization that modify workers' capacity for 
collective action.

From this perspective, the contemporary fragmentation of labor takes on 
a different meaning. It does not signify the end of the contradiction 
between capital and labor, but rather a specific way of managing it. 
Capital does not fragment labor because it has ceased to be conflictive; 
it fragments it precisely because it remains so. The dispersion of 
workforces, the proliferation of subcontracting companies, temporary 
contracts, and the individualization of labor relations reduce the 
bargaining power of workers and hinder the construction of collective 
identities. Fragmentation is not proof that the proletariat has 
disappeared, but rather a strategy of domination over a proletariat 
whose potential capacity for resistance continues to be perceived as a 
problem by capital itself.

At this point, a clear difference in approach emerges that runs 
throughout the debate. Where some analyses view the fragmentation of 
labor as the death knell of the proletariat, it could be interpreted, on 
the contrary, as a historical response of capitalism to the persistence 
of class conflict. In the first case, the conclusion is inevitably 
pessimistic: with the subject gone, only scattered resistance and 
partial struggles remain. In the second, the problem takes on a very 
different character. The issue ceases to be the non-existence of the 
class and becomes the search for new forms of organization capable of 
responding to the conditions created by capitalist restructuring.

This difference is not merely theoretical. It directly affects political 
practice. The categories used to interpret reality also condition the 
possibilities considered open. If one starts from the premise that the 
proletariat definitively belongs to the past, it is logical to turn 
attention to other social actors and abandon the perspective of class 
politics. If, on the contrary, one understands that the working class 
continues to constitute the material foundation of contemporary 
capitalism, albeit profoundly transformed, the strategic question 
changes completely. The challenge is no longer to replace the 
proletariat with new historical actors, but to understand how a 
collective consciousness can be rebuilt where capital has done 
everything possible to prevent it.

This observation allows us to return, finally, to the article's starting 
point. The crucial issue is not denying the profound transformations 
undergone by capitalism since the 1970s. These transformations are real 
and have radically altered the social landscape upon which the classical 
labor movement operated. What is debatable is turning these changes into 
proof that the fundamental relations of capitalism have ceased to exist. 
Because, precisely when wage labor has reached an unprecedented global 
extent, declaring the category of the proletariat exhausted seems to 
describe less the objective reality of capitalism than the historical 
experience of a political defeat whose importance no one should 
underestimate, but whose explanation cannot be found in the supposed 
disappearance of the class that suffered it.

This hypothesis is not merely abstract. The experiences of workers' 
autonomy in Italy between the late sixties and seventies-from the 'hot 
autumn' to diffuse self-organization in factories and territories-and 
the assembly and anarcho-syndicalist cycles in Spain during the 
Transition showed that the association imposed in production can become 
political participation without party mediation, through grassroots 
organization in workshops, neighborhoods, and supply chains.

The political consequences of a diagnosis

Up to this point, it has been argued that the transformations 
experienced by capitalism since the 1970s do not justify speaking of the 
disappearance of the proletariat as a social class. The global expansion 
of wage labor, the geographical reorganization of production, and the 
persistence of the capital-labor relationship seem to point, rather, in 
the opposite direction. However, the importance of this discussion lies 
not only in a matter of conceptual accuracy. What is truly relevant are 
the political consequences that arise from one diagnosis or the other.

Theoretical categories are never neutral. They are not merely 
descriptive tools, but rather ways of ordering historical experience 
and, therefore, of defining the horizon of what is politically possible. 
When the way we understand a social reality changes, so do the 
strategies considered reasonable for intervening in it. In this sense, 
the discussion about the proletariat extends far beyond the field of 
sociology and falls squarely within the realm of political theory.

If it is accepted that the proletariat has ceased to play a structural 
role in contemporary capitalism, the logical consequence is to abandon 
any strategy based on class organization. Emancipation then ceases to be 
conceived as the result of a conflict arising from the relations of 
production themselves and becomes dependent on a plurality of 
resistances whose articulation always appears as an open problem. 
Revolutionary politics thus loses the foothold that had historically 
guided the workers' movement and tends to shift toward a multiplicity of 
partial struggles, undoubtedly valuable in themselves, but whose 
convergence no longer finds an evident material basis.

This is not about questioning the legitimacy or importance of these 
struggles. Feminism, environmentalism, anti-racist movements, housing 
conflicts, and the defense of public services express real 
contradictions of contemporary capitalism and have significantly 
enriched the horizon of social critique. The problem arises when these 
struggles are conceived as substitutes for the conflict between capital 
and labor, and not as specific dimensions of a society whose structure 
continues to be organized around the process of capital accumulation.

In reality, capitalism is not simply a sum of independent forms of 
domination. The exploitation of labor remains the mechanism through 
which the entire system reproduces itself. This does not mean that all 
forms of oppression can be mechanically reduced to economic 
exploitation, but it does imply recognizing that the accumulation of 
capital continues to organize the space within which these forms acquire 
their concrete historical expressions. Ignoring this relationship risks 
analyzing the various manifestations of domination as if they existed 
independently of the mode of production that shapes them.

Perhaps this is one of the main differences between a critique of 
capitalism and a critique of certain consequences of capitalism. The 
former attempts to understand the logic that organizes the whole of 
social relations; the latter risks limiting itself to combating some of 
its most visible effects without reaching the underlying principle that 
produces them. The problem, therefore, does not lie in broadening the 
scope of emancipatory struggles, but in preventing that broadening from 
dissolving the analysis of class relations into a plurality of 
disconnected conflicts.

From this perspective, the theoretical shift observed in some 
libertarian thought over the last few decades takes on particular 
significance. The crisis of the traditional labor movement has fostered 
an understandable distrust of the organizational forms inherited from 
the 20th century. This distrust has stimulated a constant search for new 
subjects, new practices, and new modes of political intervention. 
However, this search sometimes seems to have been accompanied by a 
progressive distancing from the analysis of production relations. The 
critique of labor has ended up replacing the critique of capital, and 
reflection on the cultural transformations of capitalism has taken the 
place previously held by the study of its economic structure.

It is paradoxical that this shift is occurring precisely when capital 
has reached an unprecedented level of concentration and centralization. 
Never before have large corporations accumulated so much economic power, 
never before have production chains acquired such a global dimension, 
and never before has wage dependency affected such a broad segment of 
the world's population. Under these conditions, abandoning class 
analysis amounts, in a way, to accepting as definitive one of 
neoliberalism's major ideological victories: the idea that capitalism 
has ceased to organize society around the conflict between those who own 
the means of production and those who possess only their labor.

It seems no coincidence that this interpretation spread precisely after 
the historic defeat suffered by the Western labor movement. Every major 
defeat inevitably produces a crisis in the categories with which the 
vanquished had interpreted the world. The history of revolutionary 
thought offers numerous examples of this phenomenon. After every great 
failure, the temptation arises to attribute the defeat not to the 
historical correlation of forces, but to the inadequacy of the very 
subject that brought it about. However, such an explanation transforms a 
historical event into a supposed structural necessity and turns a 
contingent defeat into a permanent theoretical conclusion.

Perhaps this is the point where a final reflection is warranted. No 
social class is guaranteed a historical mission beforehand. The 
existence of the proletariat does not in itself ensure revolution, just 
as the existence of the bourgeoisie did not automatically guarantee the 
triumph of liberal revolutions. History knows no providential agents. 
But acknowledging this fact does not compel us to deny that certain 
classes occupy structural positions from which they can challenge the 
existing order. Revolutionary capacity does not arise from a 
metaphysical essence attributed to the proletariat, but from the 
objective contradiction that pits capital against those who produce 
social wealth and yet remain separated from the means that make it possible.

Therefore, the central problem of our time is not finding a subject to 
replace the proletariat, but understanding the concrete ways in which 
the 21st-century proletariat can rebuild its capacity for collective 
action. The strategic question has not changed as much as is sometimes 
claimed. What has changed are the historical conditions in which that 
strategy must be developed.

International migrations and the production of a new global proletariat

There is one phenomenon that, in itself, is enough to call into question 
the theories about the supposed disappearance of the proletariat: the 
large-scale international migrations of workers that characterize 
contemporary capitalism. If the proletariat had ceased to be the 
foundation of the economic system, it would be difficult to explain why 
hundreds of millions of people leave their countries to join, almost 
always under the most precarious conditions, the labor markets of the 
most developed economies or the new centers of accumulation.

Current migrations are not a marginal phenomenon nor simply a 
humanitarian consequence of wars or natural disasters. They are an 
integral part of the functioning of global capitalism. The free movement 
of goods, capital, and investment coexists with strict control over the 
mobility of the workforce. This contradiction is not accidental. Capital 
needs mobile workers, but not necessarily workers with rights. The 
existence of a large mass of migrant population subjected to permanent 
legal insecurity is one of the fundamental mechanisms by which wages are 
driven down and the bargaining power of the working class as a whole is 
weakened.

Since the late 20th century, Western Europe, the United States, and 
Canada have received successive waves of migration from Latin America, 
the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and 
Asia. These workers are predominantly concentrated in sectors 
characterized by high labor intensity, low wages, and limited labor 
protections: intensive agriculture, construction, hospitality, cleaning, 
care work, home delivery, logistics, domestic work, and certain branches 
of the food and manufacturing industries.

The choice of these sectors is not due to cultural preference or a 
supposed lack of qualifications. It stems from the structural position 
that capitalism assigns to a workforce whose legal vulnerability 
facilitates far more intense forms of exploitation than those endured by 
other workers. Administrative irregularity, the dependence of residence 
permits on employment contracts, the constant fear of deportation, and 
the ever-present threat of unemployment make migrant workers a 
particularly disciplined workforce.

In this sense, the figure of the undocumented worker represents one of 
the most complete expressions of the contemporary proletariat. In many 
cases, they lack not only ownership of the means of production, but even 
the most basic civil rights that would allow them to negotiate the sale 
of their labor power on minimally equal terms. Their situation reveals 
with particular clarity the inherent asymmetry of the wage relationship 
under capitalism.

The United States offers a particularly significant example. Millions of 
workers from Mexico, Central America, and other Latin American countries 
sustain entire sectors of agriculture, construction, restaurants, and 
the meatpacking industry. However, these same workers live under the 
constant threat of deportation. Periodic campaigns against irregular 
immigration, the militarization of the border with Mexico, police raids, 
and the tightening of immigration laws do not eliminate this workforce. 
On the contrary, they contribute to maintaining it in a vulnerable 
position that directly benefits numerous business sectors. The 
criminalization of immigrants thus serves an economic as well as a 
political function: producing easily exploitable workers through the 
constant fear of losing their very right to remain in the country.

A similar pattern can be observed across much of Europe. The European 
Union's external borders have become increasingly militarized, while 
numerous economic sectors are structurally dependent on migrant labor. 
Intensive agriculture in southern Spain and Italy, greenhouses, fruit 
picking, construction, domestic work, and care for dependent individuals 
could hardly be sustained without a workforce from Africa, Latin 
America, Eastern Europe, or Asia.

The contradiction is obvious. The same states that build walls, 
outsource border control, and develop policies of persecution against 
irregular immigration simultaneously need to incorporate hundreds of 
thousands of workers to sustain entire sectors of their economy. 
Immigration is officially presented as a security issue, while in 
reality it functions as an essential component of the labor market.

The situation is even more extreme in the Persian Gulf countries. Saudi 
Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Bahrain have built 
a significant portion of their economic growth on the labor of millions 
of migrants from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, the Philippines, 
and Sri Lanka. For decades, the sponsorship system known as kafala 
legally subordinated workers to their employers to the point of 
preventing them from freely changing jobs or leaving the country without 
authorization. Although some states have introduced partial reforms in 
recent years, numerous international organizations and trade unions 
continue to document grueling working hours, non-payment of wages, 
confiscation of passports, substandard housing, and severe restrictions 
on rights that place many workers in conditions akin to debt bondage or 
contemporary forms of forced labor.

The preparations for the Qatar World Cup brought this reality into the 
international spotlight. Thousands of migrant workers participated in 
the construction of stadiums, roads, subway lines, and major 
infrastructure projects under extremely harsh conditions. What is 
relevant to the argument developed here is not only the severity of 
these abuses, but what they reveal about the workings of global 
capitalism: the great projects of the 21st century continue to rest on 
the backs of enormous masses of workers deprived of the effective power 
to negotiate the terms of the sale of their labor.

Asian migrations offer another example of the same dynamic. Millions of 
workers move each year from rural areas of China to the major industrial 
centers on the coast; from Indonesia, the Philippines, or Vietnam to the 
more developed economies of East Asia; or from Bangladesh and Nepal to 
the oil monarchies of the Gulf. In all these cases, labor mobility is a 
central element of contemporary capitalist accumulation.

Nor can we forget the situation of the Palestinian people. Occupation, 
territorial fragmentation, and the systematic destruction of a large 
part of the Palestinian economy have, for decades, produced a mass of 
workers deeply dependent on the Israeli labor market or on precarious 
employment in the occupied territories. The deprivation of national 
rights is combined here with intense economic subordination, 
demonstrating once again how political domination and labor exploitation 
can reinforce each other.

Taken together, these processes reveal that contemporary capitalism not 
only continually reproduces new forms of the proletariat, but also 
internationalizes them. The mass mobility of workers constitutes a 
structural condition of the accumulation process. Wherever capital needs 
to reduce labor costs, it finds in the migrant population a particularly 
vulnerable workforce whose legal precarity facilitates intensified forms 
of exploitation.

Therefore, international migrations do not disprove the theory of social 
division into antagonistic classes; they confirm it with particular 
force. Capitalism is not replacing wage labor with another form of 
social organization. It is expanding the global labor market, 
continually incorporating new contingents of workers and deliberately 
producing situations of legal inequality that allow for an increased 
rate of exploitation.

The figure of the undocumented migrant, the seasonal farm worker, the 
foreign domestic worker, the digital platform delivery driver, the Asian 
construction worker, or the Palestinian worker subjected to occupation 
expresses perhaps better than any other the proletarian condition of the 
21st century. They do not represent an exception to the normal 
functioning of capitalism; they represent one of its most characteristic 
manifestations. Their existence constitutes, precisely for this reason, 
one of the most solid empirical refutations of the thesis that the 
proletariat has disappeared. If global capitalism demonstrates anything, 
it is exactly the opposite: it has never before needed to mobilize, 
displace, and exploit such an immense mass of wage laborers on a 
planetary scale.

Program of action: twelve lines for the recomposition of the proletariat.

If the proletariat has not disappeared, but rather been dispersed, made 
precarious, and internationalized, the strategic question is how to 
rebuild its capacity for autonomous organization. This requires 
abandoning both nostalgia for past forms and the defeatist resignation 
that declares all class politics impossible. There is no single model, 
but some fundamental guidelines can be identified.

1. Rebuild proletarian sociability.

The first task is to reclaim spaces for encounter, debate, and 
solidarity in neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, and communities. 
Without lasting social relationships, there is no collective 
consciousness, and without this, no organization can withstand the 
pressures of capital.

2. Organize where most people work today.

The new workers' movement must prioritize its establishment in 
logistics, transportation, digital platforms, healthcare, education, 
hospitality, retail, care work, intensive agriculture, industrial 
subcontracting, and large distribution centers. This organization must 
keep pace with the actual shifts in capital.

3. Overcoming labor fragmentation.

The division between permanent and temporary workers, nationals and 
migrants, salaried employees and bogus self-employed workers, public and 
private sector employees, constitutes one of the main instruments of 
corporate domination. Class organization must be rebuilt on shared 
material reality and not on administrative categories imposed by the 
market or the State.

4. Fully integrate the migrant proletariat.

Equality of labor, social, trade union and political rights between 
native and migrant workers is an essential condition to prevent capital 
from using legal inequality as a permanent mechanism for wage reduction 
and the imposition of collective discipline.

5. Reclaim direct action trade unionism.

Trade unionism must once again become a tool for everyday struggle, not 
an apparatus of institutional management. The assembly, the recall of 
delegates, federalism, autonomy from the state, and direct action remain 
fully valid principles.

6. Build our own mutual support institutions .

Resistance funds, consumer cooperatives, labor advisory services, 
cultural centers, social libraries, care networks, cultural centers, 
popular schools and community spaces constitute the indispensable 
material infrastructure to sustain prolonged conflicts and strengthen 
class autonomy.

7. Coordinate the struggles on an international scale.

Faced with globally organized capital, purely national responses are 
insufficient. Cooperation among workers within the same supply or 
production chain, international campaigns, and effective solidarity must 
become permanent practices.

8. Linking social struggles without diluting the class issue.

The defense of housing, public health, education, feminism, social 
ecology, anti-racism or opposition to militarism are part of the same 
historical conflict when they are articulated around the critique of 
capitalism and not as isolated demands among themselves.

9. Recover political education and historical memory.

Forgetting history is one of neoliberalism's greatest victories. It is 
essential to rebuild a critical culture through lifelong learning, the 
study of the historical experiences of the labor and libertarian 
movements, and the intergenerational transmission of organizational 
knowledge.

10. Combat the war economy and authoritarianism.

Increasing militarization, rising defense spending, expanding 
surveillance, and the normalization of states of emergency are also 
instruments used to discipline labor. Opposition to militarism and the 
war economy is an inseparable part of the struggle against capital. Only 
class warfare can counter the wars of capital.

11. Democratize production and social reproduction.

The libertarian perspective cannot be limited to improving the 
conditions for selling labor power. It must be oriented towards direct 
control of production by those who work, the collective management of 
common goods, the socialization of care, and the development of 
cooperative and federal forms of economic organization.

12. Building popular power from below.

The strategic objective is not to conquer the state in order to manage 
capitalism with other administrators, but to develop a growing network 
of autonomous organizations capable of challenging capital for economic, 
social, cultural, and political functions. Self-organization, 
cooperativism, federalism, direct democracy, and mutual aid are not 
merely ethical principles; they also represent the material conditions 
for a revolutionary transformation of society.

These twelve guidelines do not constitute a closed program or an 
exhaustive catalog of demands. They aim to point to a strategic 
direction. Twenty-first-century capitalism has profoundly altered the 
composition of the proletariat, but it has not eliminated the 
fundamental contradiction between those who own the means of production 
and those who possess only their capacity to work. If this contradiction 
continues to structure society, the task of the libertarian movement is 
not to seek an alternative subject, but to contribute to the conscious, 
autonomous, federal, and internationalist recomposition of the working 
class. Less obituary and more organizing.

Conclusions: the defeat of the labor movement and the limits of defeatism

The analysis presented in these pages leads to a conclusion that, while 
simple in its formulation, has significant theoretical and political 
implications. The profound transformations undergone by capitalism since 
the 1970s do not, in themselves, justify concluding that the proletariat 
has ceased to be the potential agent of revolutionary transformation. 
What these transformations reveal is, above all, the crisis of the 
historical forms through which the working class managed to organize 
itself during the long cycle of the labor movement.

This is a distinction that should be carefully preserved. The defeat of 
the European labor movement, the disintegration of traditional 
working-class culture, the institutional integration of much of the 
trade union movement, the fragmentation of production processes, and the 
increasing individualization of social relations are all well-documented 
historical facts. To deny them would be to ignore half a century of 
capitalist evolution. However, this observation does not necessarily 
imply that the social relations that made the emergence of the 
proletariat as a class possible have disappeared, nor, much less, that 
all possibility of a politics based on the conflict between capital and 
labor has been extinguished.

This is precisely where the disagreement between this article and a 
segment of contemporary libertarian thought lies. Authors such as Tomás 
Ibáñez and Miquel Amorós have described with remarkable clarity the 
depth of the defeat suffered by the labor movement and capitalism's 
capacity to dismantle the forms of sociability that nurtured class 
consciousness. Their analyses contain valuable observations on the 
commodification of daily life, the crisis of traditional organizations, 
the disappearance of old working-class neighborhoods, and the 
integration of social conflict into the system's management mechanisms. 
All of this constitutes an essential contribution to understanding the 
present.

The discrepancy arises when this historical diagnosis becomes a 
strategic conclusion. It is one thing to assert that the proletariat 
has, to date, lost the political centrality it once held during a 
particular stage of capitalist development, and quite another to 
maintain that this loss constitutes an irreversible transformation or 
that capitalism has ceased to produce the material conditions upon which 
a class-based politics could be rebuilt. Between these two assertions 
lies a theoretical leap that the facts examined in this work do not 
appear to justify.

The global reorganization of capitalism, on the contrary, reveals a more 
complex reality. Never before has there been such a large, 
internationalized, and integrated working class within a single global 
market. The expansion of industrial production in Asia, the growth of 
global logistics, the proletarianization of broad sectors of the service 
industry, the spread of precarious work and digital platforms, as well 
as the large-scale labor migrations that crisscross the globe, indicate 
that capitalism continues to massively reproduce the proletarian 
condition. What has changed is not the existence of this class, but 
rather its composition, its areas of concentration, its shared 
experiences, and the conditions under which it can develop a collective 
consciousness.

International migration is precisely one of the clearest expressions of 
this process. Millions of workers cross borders each year to enter labor 
markets where they occupy the most precarious and lowest-paid jobs. From 
agricultural laborers in Southern Europe to Latin American workers 
persecuted and criminalized in the United States; from migrant domestic 
workers to Asian laborers subjected for years to the patronage system of 
the Gulf monarchies; from Palestinian workers subjected to the 
occupation to those who sustain the vast global logistics and 
distribution networks, contemporary capitalism continues to produce new 
forms of proletariat whose legal vulnerability becomes, precisely, an 
additional source of exploitation. Far from heralding the end of the 
proletarian condition, these realities demonstrate its expansion and 
diversification on a planetary scale.

Precarious legal status, a state tool for labor discipline, confirms 
that the class struggle is inseparable from the struggle against 
borders, institutional racism, and labor policing.

Therefore, the central problem is no longer whether the proletariat 
exists. That question largely belongs to the realm of empirical 
evidence. The real question is different: why does a class that is 
objectively larger than ever appear politically fragmented, and what 
historical conditions might make possible a new recomposition of its 
capacity for collective action?

Answering this question requires abandoning two opposing 
simplifications. The first is to imagine that it would suffice to 
reconstruct the organizational forms of the classic workers' movement. 
History does not go backward, and 21st-century capitalism does not 
reproduce the social conditions under which the revolutionary 
organizations of the past grew. The second is to conclude that, since 
those historical forms have been defeated, the possibility of a 
proletarian politics has also been definitively defeated. This second 
simplification transforms a historical defeat into a structural 
impossibility and turns a conjuncture, however profound, into a law of 
history.

However, the history of capitalism teaches precisely the opposite. The 
forms of organization of the working class have never remained 
unchanged. Resistance unionism, workers' councils, revolutionary 
collectives, affinity groups, anarcho-syndicalist organizations, 
recallable workers' commissions, workers' athenaeums, cooperatives, 
revolutionary or defense or supply committees, rationalist schools, 
mutual aid societies, and workers' coordinating bodies have always 
emerged as specific responses to particular historical conditions. None 
of them were derived from a pre-existing theory nor did they conform to 
a universal model. All were born from the encounter between an objective 
structure of exploitation and the capacity of the workers themselves to 
build institutions adapted to their time.

There is no reason to think that this historical process has 
definitively concluded. What the defeat of the labor movement forces us 
to recognize is not the exhaustion of the contradiction between capital 
and labor, but the need to rethink the ways in which this contradiction 
can once again be translated into organization, solidarity, and an 
emancipatory project. Capitalism has profoundly transformed labor; it 
would be strange if the forms of resistance did not also have to be 
transformed.

In this sense, philosophical defeatism is an understandable temptation, 
but politically sterile. Every major defeat leads one to think that the 
enemy has definitively resolved the contradictions that previously 
fueled resistance. However, capitalism continues to depend, today as 
yesterday, on living labor; it continues to organize production through 
wage relations; it continues to concentrate wealth at one pole and 
economic dependence at the other; it continues to displace millions of 
workers wherever accumulation requires; and it continues to resort to 
precarity, fragmentation, and legal inequality as instruments to 
discipline the workforce. None of these tendencies points to the 
disappearance of the social question. Rather, they indicate that it is 
taking on new, more complex, and more international forms than those 
known to the classical labor movement.

From a libertarian perspective, this dispersion demands flexible forms 
of organization: neighborhood-workplace mutual support networks, 
non-bureaucratized union sections, workers' autonomy groups that are not 
substitutes for the class, and federal coordination between logistics 
nodes, riders, subcontractors, and care workers.

The task of critical theory, therefore, is not to certify the end of the 
proletariat as a historical subject, but to understand the metamorphoses 
that capitalism itself imposes on the composition of the working class 
and its possibilities for organization. The decisive question is no 
longer whether the proletariat of the 21st century resembles that of a 
hundred years ago. Clearly, it does not. The question is to ascertain 
what forms of consciousness, solidarity, and organization can emerge 
from the specific conditions created by global capitalism.

Far from closing off the prospect of class politics, contemporary 
capitalism compels us to rethink it on new foundations. The defeat of 
the workers' movement belongs to history. The contradiction between 
capital and labor still belongs to the present. To confuse the two is to 
transform a historical experience, however dramatic, into a theoretical 
conclusion that the facts do not support. And perhaps this very 
confusion is one of the main obstacles to considering the emancipatory 
possibilities of our time.

Recent historical examples support this approach. The Italian workers' 
autonomy movement (1969-1977) and the assembly-based and 
anarcho-syndicalist experiences in Spain during the Transition 
demonstrated that the working class can rebuild itself outside the 
tutelage of parties and states: self-organization at the points of 
production and reproduction, territorial and federal coordination, and 
the politicization of workers without vanguards.

The task is not to replace the proletariat with a new providential 
subject, nor to subordinate it to parties or states, but to rebuild its 
autonomous, horizontal, and federal power to overwhelm capital in all 
spheres of life. If capital is global and total, our organization must 
be so as well.

Nothing in the above confers upon the proletariat a guaranteed 
"historical mission." The existence of the class does not ensure its 
victory; it merely indicates the terrain on which the struggle can be 
waged. The alternative to defeatism is not to promise insurrection, but 
to rebuild the conditions of possibility: social networks, 
infrastructures of conflict, revocable coordination, effective 
internationalism, communities of struggle. This is what sustaining a 
libertarian perspective of the class consists of today: not in 
proclaiming it, but in preparing for it. And that seems to be the role 
of Liza, Embat, Batzac, and so many others, demanding a more prominent 
role for the proletariat and fewer defeatist obituaries.

"Revolution or barbarism" is no longer a slogan: it is a real 
alternative and, in the medium term, between two antagonistic futures.

Agustín Guillamón

https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2026/08/11/mas-proletariado-y-menos-obituarios-del-fin-de-la-clase-obrera-a-su-reconstruccion/
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