biscuitdough wrote: Thu Jan 20, 2022 10:12 amWell. You should care about the proletariat. You should care about building a proletariat. Proletarians have class solidarity.
I kind of
have to care about everything that forms part of my world in one way or another. I'm not saying I don't care.
I don't have much of a conception of what proletariat means in this present context, or if it can even be a meaningful term. There are so many possible missteps to be made and blind alleys to wander into, and the discourse is full of them. The idea of proletariat (and even more "working class") has a history and it undergoes alterations throughout that history, so until I have studied this more I wouldn't know what to do with it right now.
Here I will just give one simple example of some of the difficulties:
At the time of Marx, the proletariat or working class denotes a section of people completely outside the purview of the
public - they have no voting rights, no property, they are barely citizens in the real sense. They are simply the
underside, the "unconscious", on which "real society" is built.
Also notice that Marx is always speaking in some sense in ideal terms, in absolutes -
concretely there is of course nobody who is
really a proletarian (or a bourgeois), or a mass of identical people like this, and there are all kinds of nuances and gradations within either designation.
Through the process, in the western world, of rising labour power and the development of democracy, peaking in the post-war economic miracle period, this class
enters the public and the symbolic order - the individual of this class gains a
role, they become
somebody, they gain a
stake in their society.
The worker was able to negotiate a social contract which, in exchange for their labour, gave them access to a house, a wife, and a life of comfort.
A significant part of the protests of this "working class" right now (as it is expressed publicly) is based on a percieved
loss of this symbolic role,
in favour of other social groups who are interpreted as antagonistic, social groups who
themselves have been fighting for this symbolic recognition, and, crucially, did
not have this even at the time of the high point of this "working class".
It is here that all these fights over class vs. identity etc. are to be located.
This is borne out further by the fact that the practical programs put forth as pure class politics as distinct from identity politics, are always framed in nostalgic terms. They look back on the postwar reconstruction period as the thing to be preserved or replicated. The obvious problem with this is that an actual replication of the ideal living conditions of the "working class" of this period, can only mean a replication of the social conditions of this period in their entirety. It is therefore if not actively hostile to, at least dismissive of, contemporary feminism, LGBT etc., since the prominence of these are rooted in conditions which have replaced those in which this "working class" had their prominence - for example, the proliferation of media channels making possible for a wider array of voices to make themselves heard, and thus be identified with by other people.
The scare quotes around "working class" is to stress that this identification belongs, as expressed and typically imagined, to
one particular social group, one which even domestically does not encompass the entirety of the working class proper (what Marx called the "class in-itself" - the class which is concretely the class (people labouring), but does not recognize itself as such, i.e. has a concrete view of their mutual commonality and how their situation, individually and collectively, relates to the wider social environment.)
Then I haven't even touched upon the controversy of third world vs. first world, which I am not equipped to speak on anyway. For my part the idea of labour in itself, of economy, of capital, of markets, require reformulations which I don't possess at present, and which I find in the forms I encounter them to be mostly used in crude and unsatisfactory ways.
Not to mention the can of worms that is 20th century communism. The glorification of work which sits uncomfortably close to the gulag as its logical end point. The inherently ableist notion of grounding your claims to validity in being
someone who works. And so on and so on. So many things.
Bruh. I didn't even get to the subject of my original post, which is what I meant to comment on. I'll save that for later.