Inside vs. Outside: The Proletarian Composition Problem

Translations: Türkçe


One of the central problematics of modern communism is the proletarian composition problem: capitalism has an immanent tendency to shrink the ratio of productive1 to unproductive2 workers and even to expel people from wage labor altogether. The establishment of a communist society requires the revolutionary restructuring of the means of production by those who intimately know these means (i.e. the productive workers that work with these means for their job). Communism is not the restructuring of capitalism’s distribution of goods, but a complete overhaul of how and why they are produced in the first place. The fundamental transformation must happen at the level of production itself. This tendency of capital towards deindustrialized workforces reduces the proportion of workers that are positioned to enact this fundamental productive transformation in a revolutionary situation.

There are, at the moment, two “camps” from which serious communist revolutionary structure may arise. The first, and more traditional, is among workers that directly create and use the means of production and distribution. By virtue of having direct access to the physical infrastructure of capitalism, they have the ability to put a halt to production and circulation by various forms of work stoppage. The second camp is workers further removed from production and critical distribution, as well as proletarians ejected from wage labor altogether. Given the lack of power in the productive realm of society, struggle performed by these individuals currently takes the form of amorphous riots and insurrections against elements of present society itself. These two camps are negative images of each other. The defining feature of each tends to be the state of affairs the other is, in contemporary times, incapable of reaching.

Struggles by workers in the workplace generally have as their goal the improvement of wages and working conditions. Such demands constitute an entrenchment of wage labor and its role within capitalism rather than gesturing towards the dissolution of capitalism and its constituent social relations altogether. Such a limited scope does not allow for workplace struggles to generalize to the level of society as a whole, or even the working class as a whole. To expand workplace struggles to the point where they pose a threat to capital as a whole rather than an individual capital, a logical gulf must be bridged. This discontinuity exists between the struggle to secure the position of specific workers as workers and the communist objective of completely restructuring humanity’s relationship to labor, production, and ultimately itself. Such a discontinuity can only be bridged by some sort of organization materially structured around this communist objective in the first place. No, this does not include self-proclaimed “vanguard” parties staffed by self-important busy bodies whose only claim to leadership is that they really want it but otherwise have nothing at stake.

The inverse of the worker struggle takes the form of the surplus population riot and insurrection. Capitalism’s tendency towards automation (a buildup of fixed capital) in the production process shrinks the ratio of workers needed to actually physically produce goods and increases the ratio of workers needed to administer this fixed capital and the increasingly complicated circulation of commodities and capital. This creates more individual titles to capital that must each claim their share of the shrinking pool of surplus value extracted from the productive worker. As profit rates fall across the board and capitalist production becomes feasible with fewer workers, more individuals are pushed out of the realms of both productive and unproductive labor into the realm of surplus population. In geographic zones with high levels of historical wealth accumulation3 this takes the form of an underemployed or semi-employed body of laborers (or those unable to work), as well as laborers working in sectors, industries, or government agencies that are only viable because they are subsidized by the state. Individuals can sometimes float between these two groups, however the latter can be quite diverse and include even well-paid positions such as government bureaucrats and administrators at universities or hospitals. In poorer regions without excess money floating around for such subsidy, the surplus population largely resembles the former case with many people earning a living outside the formal economy.

The surplus population, by definition, has no potential power over the productive activity of society. Whereas unproductive workers that facilitate the circulation of money and goods (warehouse workers, material buyers, accountants, truck drivers, etc) can at least throw a wrench in the gears of circulation by withholding their work en masse, the withholding of labor by surplus population individuals (assuming they even have a job) is structurally incapable of effecting the same level of disruption, let alone reconfiguration, that would be necessary for a communist victory. The surplus population itself hardly constitutes a body politic that points towards the dissolution of capitalism4. It serves not as a pole of attraction but rather a beacon around which proletarian fears congeal. There is a palpable downward mobility for the proletarian body as a whole, and this downward mobility is most pronounced among the surplus population for whom it is not just a threat but a lived reality. While access to wage labor (or lack thereof) plays a central role in this downward mobility, this abjection (correctly) takes the appearance of a problem with society as a whole rather than a problem with a specific employer. The most tangible site of struggle for the surplus population is the only one directly available: the streets. The most accessible tactic, if you can call it that, is the riot. From the Arab Spring to the George Floyd rebellion, this is the eminent form of class struggle outside of the workplace. Its vanguard is just as much the marginalized (often racialized) youth excluded from access to wages or amenities as it is the college graduate whose degree does little to secure them work. As the demonstrations grow and turn into riots, it is this common sentiment of downward mobility and increasing vulnerability to the violence of capitalist society that brings not just the surplus population into the streets, but also the standard proletarian for whom this downward slide is constant threat.

The mass demonstration and subsequent confrontation with the police circumvents the limited horizon of the workplace struggle by (ostensibly) confronting the totality of society as a whole. In doing so, however, it leaves behind the industrial locus of proletarian power. Insofar as the mass demonstration can pose demands or generate a self-understanding, these very rarely go as far as to call into question the fundamental social relations that constitute capitalist society. Is this because to be rendered surplus to production is to lose sight of the creative potential of proletarian technical expertise? Given that even unionized industrial workers are generally not communists by default, I would say no, it is not that simple.

So what is the trajectory of this dynamic? Given that a serious communist movement has yet to form, the answer is unclear. The character of contemporary mass struggles is one with no communist horizon, but which simultaneously carries a totality-facing kernel that is not present among struggles for workers who fight for shoring up their positions as workers. Neither of these is preferable to the other, as each contains something important the other lacks. The power to reshape production can only come from the (proportionally shrinking) body of workers that fundamentally understand the technical nature of industrial production. In an era of mass struggle located outside the workplace, it is more critical than ever that communists build an organizational bridge between those who revolt from “inside” the productive system and those who revolt “outside” of it. This problematic is necessarily abstract and cannot be answered abstractly. As struggles both inside and outside the workplace proliferate, it is the concrete details of economic activity, proletarian subjectivity, organizational innovation, and communist self-understanding that will provide the components from which the answer can be assembled.


Footnotes

  1. Productive workers are those whose concrete labor qualitatively adds use value to a workpiece, which increases its abstract value. All surplus value is extracted from productive workers.
  2. Unproductive workers facilitate the administration and circulation of capital in the form of money, commodities, or constant capital. They do not produce new value but are important for the process of capital valorizing itself.
  3. This is sometimes called the “imperial core”, “global North”, or sometimes just “the West”. These terms obscure the stratifications of accumulation within these countries and the ways that capital can be highly concentrated outside of these zones in regions that are otherwise less developed.
  4. See An Identical Abject Subject? from Endnotes 4.

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