Preface
by Anon00
This is material from a workers' school class from around 2005. At the time that the book "The Future is up to Us" was being written by Nelson Peery, he didn't have a name for this new emergent class. I would suggest that the term "the precariat" coined by UK Professor Guy Standing captures these concepts fairly well. He came out with his paper on this around the time that the "indignados" (indignant ones) and the "Juventud Sin Futuro" (youth without a future) movement in Spain were in high gear). Compare his paper linked here with what follows below the dashed line.
http://workerspartypac.blogspot.com/2011/12/who-is-new-dangerous-class.html
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CLASS 4: THE NEW CLASS
Readings:
Revolutionary Change in America (How We are Changing, pages 12-19
The New Class: A Definition (Rally, ComradesVol. 16, #1, December 2005)
Why is the New Class Revolutionary? (Rally, ComradesVol. 16, #2, February 2006)
Discussion points:
1. New means of production changed the game. Expanding sections of the working class are permanently unneeded. The new mode of production no longer needed a reserve army of unemployed. Nor does it need healthy young men for an infantry war. As industry gave way to the new electronically controlled means of production, it downsized. The government necessarily had to follow suit.
2. What we are dealing with is not an underclass, but a new class. A new class outside the constraints imposed by the worker-capitalist relationship is a mortal danger to the system.
3 This modern proletariat will play an independent political role. It is, by it social position, communistic. Owning no property whatsoever, without employment or resources, it cannot move in the direction of securing individual property. It is the only class in modern society where “each for all and all for each” has any real political meaning, and where “from each according to ability, to each according to need” makes economic sense.
4. ...They are forming a new class that has few or no ties to capital. This class is revolutionary because it is increasingly outside of or hostile to the wages system. ... It is revolutionary because robotics makes it impossible for them to co-exist with private property. The only way for them to prevent these gigantic means of production from crushing them is to make the means of production public property.
Revolutionary Change in America
Excerpt
How we are changing
Great social problems do not happen out of the context of a certain time. To understand a problem, we must understand the period of time in which it occurred. I do not think it is possible to understand a period of time by simply describing a series of events. Events are a chain with a key link which drags the entire chain forward. We must identify and concentrate our thinking on that key link. Or to put it another way, it is necessary to understand the crucial content of a time in order to understand the time.
The content of our time is the historic shift from production by electromechanics, that is, production by human labor aided by electrically driven machinery, to production by robotics, or production by computer-controlled machinery with very little or no human labor involved. This ongoing economic revolution shapes and determines the social destruction we see around us. It is bringing to the forefront a political struggle unknown to our country.
With this in mind, let us dig beneath the form that this historic shift is taking — the millions of homeless, the tens of millions of jobless, the acres of burned-out neighborhoods, the slaughter of our youth, the “in your face” looting of the public treasury, the decline of health care and education and the elimination of social services. The important thing is to understand why this is happening and what the political results are bound to be.
When and why did government grow big with the alphabet programs and when and why did it suddenly need to shed itself of these programs?
The major task of government is to create the structural programs and policies that allow the economy to function. For example, when the government was the instrument of the farmers, that government did the things necessary to protect and expand the farm. The Indians were cleared from the fertile lands, slavery was protected and extended, shipping lanes for export were cleared and frontiers expanded. As the farm gave way to industry, the government transformed itself into a committee to take care of the new needs of industry.
At that point, government began to grow. Industry needed literate workers, so the school system expanded. The army needed healthy young men to fight the wars brought on by industrial expansion, so a school lunch program was started. As industry got big, a Department of Housing and Urban Development provided order to the chaotic, burgeoning cities it created. In other words, government became big government in order to serve the needs of industry as it became big industry. The workers were kept relatively healthy and the unemployed were warehoused in such a manner as to keep them available for work with every industrial expansion.
New means of production changed the game. Expanding sections of the working class are permanently unneeded. The new mode of production no longer needed a reserve army of unemployed. Nor does it need healthy young men for an infantry war. As industry gave way to the new electronically controlled means of production, it downsized. The government necessarily had to follow suit. Robots do not need unemployment compensation or Social Security, decent food or environmental protection. These entitlements are part of the cost of production. Newt Gingrich aims to transform them into increased profitability. This is the demand of internationally competitive industry. This is the meaning of his revolution.
These fundamental changes in the economy opened the political door for reaction and social progress to fight out who was to benefit from the economic revolution. The initiative was seized by the reaction under the slogan of the Republican Contract With America. The first 100 days of the 1995-96 Congress was a whirlwind of reactionary legislation.
The historic result has not been the legislation, but the beginnings of a new mass political awakening. The recent quarter of a million-person march in Washington called by the National Organization for Women was the first mass reaction to the change. The million-plus march called by a coalition of major black organizations and churches was a watershed that defines the approaching mass struggle. It was the tip of a political iceberg of social discontent. The unreported struggles and growing restlessness in the streets of the nation’s poor are even more important. The conscious forces on both sides realize they must prepare to take political advantage of the social upheavals that are now absolutely inevitable.
Wanting to turn the spontaneous social struggles to one’s political advantage and being able to do so are different things. The game has changed. This is not 1932.
Apparently, Gingrich does not understand the social consequences of the economic changes he is pushing through Congress.
As the application of these new scientific marvels to production expanded, a new economic category, the structurally unemployed, was created. A hundred and fifty years ago, the philosophers and scientists Karl Marx and Frederick Engels coined the term “the reserve army of the unemployed.” This was the industrial reserve to be thrown into the battle for production as the need arose. The structurally unemployed are different. They are a new, growing, permanently unemployed sector created by the new emerging economic structure. Once a job is taken over by robotics, the worker who once performed that job becomes permanently unemployed. His category of work , his job, is eliminated because no human being can work as efficiently or as cheaply as a robot.
Worst than that, the government turns its back to the former worker. He or she is not considered unemployed, but jobless.
The government, which today is little more than an executive committee to manage the affairs of the ruling, capitalist class, is not going to care for something it cannot exploit.
Naturally, robotics entered industry at the lowest and simplest level. Its first victims were the unskilled and semiskilled workers. Part of the legacy of slavery was that a huge section of the African American work force remained tied to the land and especially employed in cotton culture after emancipation. Tractored off the land after the development of the cotton-picking machine, they were the last section of the rural population to join the industrial work force. Consequently, they were concentrated in that sector — the unskilled and semiskilled sector — that was first attacked by the robot.
The social oppression of the African American is the fulcrum for the political leverage of the economic elite of America. We are used to using this historic oppression as a context of understanding the economic and social motion of the country. Last hired and first fired has been the economic lot of the African American since Emancipation. Therefore, it was natural that the wholesale wiping out of African Americans from industry was understood as racism. It is one of the rare times when this analysis was wrong.
The effects of robotics on the white unskilled and semiskilled workers were not so easily seen. They are scattered throughout the general white population, especially in the suburbs. The African Americans were highly visible, being concentrated in a relatively small urban area. Also, the percentage of black laborers among the African American population was higher than white laborers among the white population. Racism provided the form, but the content is the beginnings of a social revolution. The first expression of that revolution was the wrecking of the economy of working-class black America. That revolution now is moving on to wreak its havoc against the formerly secure sections of the blue-collar, white-collar and lower management levels of the white workers.
The economists, their social vision distorted by racist ideology, were unable to understand the difference between the reserve army of unemployed created by industrial capitalism and the structural, permanent joblessness created by robotics. They only saw a growing mass of African Americans outside the labor market. They eagerly embraced the term “underclass.” What were the origins of that term?
European industry was born and began its development while feudal political and economic relations still existed. As industry developed, new economic classes came into being. The bourgeoisie and the modern working class were created from the serfs. Some of these ex-serfs did not make it into either of these new classes. This social flotsam existed as best it could on the periphery of emerging capitalist society until the system finally absorbed them.
Those who coined the term “underclass” perhaps thought here again was a group unable to keep up, and once falling behind and supported by welfare, consciously accepted an existence outside the capitalist relations of worker and employer. It must have seemed that a subclass of blacks, reliant on welfare, had lost the work ethic. Worse, that they were creating a subculture of immorality and criminality in the midst of a great national expansion of wealth and productivity.
A more concrete look will show something different. First, the new productive equipment has polarized wealth and poverty as never before. Absolute wealth in the form of 145 billionaires and absolute poverty in the form of some eight million homeless and absolutely destitute are new to our country. Secondly, the increase in production was accompanied by an increase in unemployment and joblessness.
The black poor were hit first and hardest by both these aspects of the new economy. The black bourgeoisie fled their traditional sections of the city as soon as the ink was dry on the laws allowing them to do so. A section of the African American workers also benefited from integration. Holding stable jobs, they too, moved from the inner city into much more stable neighborhoods. With the factories shutting down, the land around these factories quickly lost their value. Those who could flee did so. Taxes fell, maintenance dwindled and the combination of the American form of apartheid, plus the liquidation of jobs, created a new type of slum: the black, permanently destitute, rotting inner core of the formerly central working-class area of the city. This was also accepted as simply the result of racist economic policies of capitalist industry, rather than the social expression of an economic revolution that was couched in the historic American form of racial discrimination.
Since that phrase “underclass” was coined, the process of social destruction has continued. We can see now that this new group of permanently unemployed is not the result of the welfare system, but of the new means of production, of what they call downsizing.
The results are broader than the social problems caused by racism. It is acknowledged now that, in fact, the white so-called underclass is larger and growing faster than the black. What we are dealing with is not an underclass, but a new class. Gingrich and Company understand the implications of this. A new class outside the constraints imposed by the worker-capitalist relationship is a mortal danger to the system.
Electronics as a new means of production is producing more than an irresolvable depression. It is creating a social revolution. By social revolution we mean the process of qualitatively new means of production disrupting the economic order. In turn, new classes are created that disrupt and disorganize the existing society. The new class (or classes) finally overthrow the ruling class and create a society in their own image. We are in the first, elementary stage of a social revolution. It is important that we take this abstract idea and see what happens in a concrete way.
Let us look at the social revolution from agriculture to industry. In Europe, its political expression was from feudalism to capitalism.
Over a considerable period of time, manufacturing developed from simple, manual manufacture to a system of power-driven machines. As the principal means of production, machinery was qualitatively different from plots of land. As the use of machinery increased, so did the new class of workers who manipulated them. The two classes that developed with machinery — the bourgeoisie and the proletariat — grew with the spreading use of machinery. Wage labor, the new system of exploitation, ruined the peasants and the handicraftsmen. This was the process of social revolution: the new classes forcing their way into and disrupting the established class relationships, forcing the reorganization of society. The new classes were totally outside of the relationship between the existing classes. Therefore, there was no social contract between the serfs and the nobility. A new social relationship could be finally settled only by force.
Once again, social revolution is beginning before our very eyes. This process could not begin without the creation of new instruments of production, and a new class or classes to interrupt, disorganize and finally overthrow the existing order. This has been the historical evolution of society thus far.
This new class of propertyless people, structurally forced away from production, is a true proletariat. One big difference is that while the Roman proletariat was politically passive, or troops for another class, this modern proletariat will play an independent political role. It is, by its social position, communistic. Owning no property whatsoever, without employment or resources, it cannot move in the direction of securing individual property. It is the only class in modern society where “each for all and all for each” has any real political meaning, and where “from each according to ability, to each according to need” makes economic sense.
The new class of the new poor includes the throw-away workers — temporary laborers with no benefits, the part-time workers, the newly unemployed as well as the permanently unemployed. This class is rapidly gaining an elementary consciousness of itself and the world. This consciousness is couched in the concepts of rich and poor. It is elementary and shallow, but it is a different conception than white and black.
It is already clear to the more advanced thinkers that as this society is destroyed, a new one must be built. The class struggle is the fight between the old and new classes over how, and in whose interest, the new society will be organized.
The New Class: A definition
Rally, Comrades, Vol. 16, No. 1, December 2005
Since many of the articles appearing in Rally, Comrades! contain the phrase, “the new class,” the Editorial Board thought it would be helpful if we explain precisely what we mean by the term.
Often, when new phenomena arise there are no terms to adequately describe them and writers are forced to create a new term or give new meaning to an existing one.
The double-acting steam engine created industry. The working class created by industry was different from the old class that was created by hand labor or manufacturing. It was still a working class but the emphasis rapidly shifted from the manufacturing sector to the industrial sector. Thus, the industrial workers were a new class. In a somewhat like manner the application of electronics to production is creating a new class. What are these new means of production creating? On the one hand, we have seen the emergence of part time, contingency, temporary workers. They work at or below minimum wage with few if any benefits. In fact, this sector already constitutes almost a third of the work force.
On the other hand, a growing number of jobs are simply disappearing forever, taken over by automation. The workers who held these jobs are often forced into a new category of unemployment – the permanently unemployed. We see them every day, picking through the trash, begging on the street corners. This is not a “lumpen proletariat” – a group that was created in the wake of the industrial revolution out of the serfs who never entered either the manufacturing force or the bourgeoisie. These new strata of workers and this new permanently unemployed are the result of the introduction of electronics into the workplace.
They are a new class.
Why is the New Class Revolutionary?
Rally, Comrades, Vol. 16, No. 2, February 2006
We have entered a revolutionary era. New electronic means of production are destroying the society based on industry. It is only a matter of time until there will be a political decision as to what kind of society will replace this one. Herein lies the importance of revolutionaries strategically understanding which social force is capable of overthrowing the existing order and reconstructing society on the basis of social ownership of socially necessary means of production. Only after answering this question can we set about the task of educating and politicizing this social force.
Revolution is a change in quality. Therefore we begin our inquiry by answering the question, how does quality change? Scientists for centuries have agreed that simply re-arranging quantitative aspects or relations will not change quality. To change a quality, something must be extracted from or added into the process. While this is obvious in the material world, it is not so easily seen in the process of social change. Social scientists such as Frederick Engels touched upon this concept a hundred and forty years ago. However, he believed that the introduction of large-scale industrial production would be the introduction of the “something new” that would create the conditions for the workers to overthrow capitalism.
Industrialization brought about a great social revolution in Europe and America; however it did not go far enough and deep enough to bring about the kind of political revolution that could lead to the elimination of private property. Why? We think that since all the social elements that overthrew the political shell of feudalism (or in America, chattel slavery) were within capitalist society, they were restricted to reforming that system – no matter how militant the struggle. The industrial workers were in antagonism with feudalism and slavery because they were external to that system. They were in contradiction to the capitalists because they were inside that system. Industry got bigger, manufacturing and agriculture got smaller. The existing elements were re-arranged, but nothing was extracted or added. Therefore, the quality could not change. The industrial revolution changed the productive forces – i.e., the means of production and the resultant skills of the working class — but could not change the mode of production, which remained capitalist.
A social force capable of such a change must be outside capitalist society and antagonistic to it. True to the dialectic, electronics itself is creating this force. As more and more production is taken over by electronics, the displaced workers are forced into lower and lower paying jobs and many of them end up in the growing mass of permanently unemployed. Today over a third of the work force is unemployed, contingency, parttime or temporary workers. A huge section works at or below minimum wage. They are forming a new class that has few or no ties to capital. This class is revolutionary because it is increasingly outside of and hostile to the wages system. It is revolutionary because it cannot fight the individual employer – it must fight the state. It is revolutionary because robotics makes it impossible for them to co-exist with private property. The only way for them to prevent these gigantic means of production from crushing them is to make them public property.
We hope our ongoing statements on the new class will become the basis of discussion and inquiry. It is sorely lacking in the American Left. As in all social transitions, we revolutionaries will have a small and very temporary window of opportunity. If we do not understand the historical line of march and have not worked out a strategy of transition, that window will close.
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