"The political left has a tendency to multiply through division. That’s nothing to mock or mourn. Anarchists have always made a distinction between so called affinity groups and class organizations. Affinity groups are small groups of friends or close anarchist comrades who hold roughly the same views. This is no basis for class organizing and that is not the intention either. Therefore, anarchists are in addition active in syndicalist unions or other popular movements (like tenants’ organizations, anti-war coalitions and environmental movements).
The myriad of leftist groups and publications today might serve as affinity groups – for education and analysis, for cultural events and a sense of community. But vehicles for class struggle they are not. If you want social change, then bond with your co-workers and neighbors; that’s where it begins. It is time that the entire left realizes what anarchists have always understood.
We need a united class, not a united left, to push the class struggle forward."
https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/we-need-a-united-class-not-a-united-left/
Completely, it’s not about ideologies or “the left” it’s about everyday people taking back autonomy, not just for themselves … but together as well!!
The opportunity is that even the professional classes are now more like working class in terms of pay, debt, job security, affordability. They’ve got social status but not a lot to show for it. There are lawyers, professors, therapists making no more than union workers when you factor in their student loan payments. The working class and poor are a growing class.
The key thing, is not how much you make, but how much you control your own destiny and most of us just DON'T. I can tell you that there are TONS of doctors getting the fuck out of medicine because they are totally dominated by MBAs and insurance execs etc and can't actually do their job they got their training to do.
What's really missing from the non-ownership class is ... autonomy and "ownership" of their destiny. The promise of leftist/anarchist politics isn't just "you'll make more money" but rather you can choose how your life will proceed.
Towards an anarchism without adjectives!
Isn't that synthetic anarchism? /s
More like synthesizing anarchism! (Sorry)
The basis for preferring a class analysis is that a particular class has some kind of "revolutionary potential" within it that can be unleashed against class society. If we don't believe that there is such a class at the present moment, class analysis loses its bite and becomes a moral stipulation as opposed to a social ontological one.
I would say the "levelling" of the category of proletarian to "salaried worker" has made this position a reality. There is no radical movement and the thing that presents itself as radical is incoherent in its analysis. It becomes a counter-populist movement (which is still worth pursuing) and, by definition, cannot be a class movement.
How much of your country is on this stable and level salary plain? My country is full of gig workers and hourly workers at the whim of a company.
I mean as in: when people say proletariat, they have reduced the term to "salaried worker" as opposed to the particular class-object that Marx was writing about.
I don’t know those people. The working class has pretty clear divisions. Salary doesn’t exclude someone from working class. People who need to work to pay their expenses to live are working class. People who make their money owning businesses and being landlords are not working class.
Like I say, this is a sharp break from the historical concept of the proletariat.
Literally quoting Marx: “What is the proletariat? The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor” Salary= labor 1099=labor W-2=labor Day laborer for cash=labor Union worker: labor People who work and don’t own anything could also include homeowners with a mortgage they may never pay off and certainly do not earn any income from paying a mortgage payment. Also Marx was distinct in his definition of personal property versus owning business interests and capital investments. You are not bourgeois for owning your toothbrush, car, and domicile.
Yes, bur what makes them proletarian as opposed to lumpen? What makes them proletarian as opposed to the various, incoherent strands of "petty bourgeois" affectation?
I assume you're not going to tell me that the CEO of a large company who doesn't directly own some productive capital is proletarian, surely. Or that the lumpen who has gambled a few stocks on the market is not petty bourgeois.
Stop trolling
I'm not. This is the same critique of Marxian abstraction we find in Ellul's Jesus & Marx—that not even the Marxists have managed to hang onto the unhelpfully abstract notion Marx theorised, creating a new one that is even less useful.
CIO proletarian?
Stop being ridiculous. Definition from the source given.
Well, in that case, that makes CEOs proletarian as they are salaried workers.
Good job. You invented CEOcialism. To each boss as determined by their need to profit, and from each worker as they need to live and work. Welcome to the Revolution. You new job is to start pedantic fights online with workers to try to break class solidarity. Good job so far.
I remember having a salary, it felt pretty bougie, like I knew how much I'd earn in a year before working... it's like having some magical foresight...
Beautiful
A united class and a united Left are the same things. I agree with everything else you've said.
You're missing the point. Working class unions exclude all leftists who are bosses, high public bureaucrats and politicians. And they welcome workers in general, including workers who vote on center and right parties. That's what unions do. A united working class sharply divides the left. A broad united left divides the class.
I think this narrowing of definitions is possibly counterproductive. If the idea is that the non-working class left can never unite and work with and for the benefit of the working class then how are you not making things harder than they need to be? Why would this be mutually exclusive?
How is this not more of a Venn diagram?
I didn't miss the point. But thanks for telling me you're a liberal who has no idea what the definition of leftism is. Nothing about what you have described is how things work in reality. Were you born yesterday?
U R ignorant
Ok liberal
I view the "left" as a prism rather than a single entity.