Wednesday, January 11, 2023

You want it all without the consequence.

"In the course of the complex and terrible evolution which has brought the era of class struggle under a new set of conditions, the proletariat of the industrial countries has lost its ability to assert its own independence. It has also, in the last reckoning, lost its illusions. But it has not lost its being. The proletariat has not been eliminated, and indeed it remains irreducibly present, under the intensified alienation of modern capitalism, in the shape of the vast mass of workers who have lost all power over the use of their own lives and who, once they realise this must necessarily redefine themselves as the proletariat - as negation at work in the bosom of today's society. This class is objectively reinforced by the peasantry's gradual disappearance, as also by the extension of the logic of the factory system to a broad sector of labour in the "services" and the intellectual professions. Subjectively, though, this is a proletariat still very far removed from any practical class consciousness, and this goes not only for white-collar workers but also for wage workers who as yet know nothing but the impotence and mystifications of the old politics. But when the proletariat discovers that its own externaslised power conspires in the continual reinforcement of capitalised society, no longer thanks merely to the alienation of its labour, but also thanks to the form taken on by unions, parties and institutions of State power that it had established in pursuit of its own self-emancipation, then it must also discover through concrete historical experience that it is indeed that class which is totally opposed to all reified externalisations and all specialisations of power. The proletariat is the bearer of a revolution that can leave no other sphere of society untransformed, that enforces the permanent domination of the past by the present and demands a universal critique of separation; the action of the proletariat must assume a form adequate to these tasks. No quantitative relief of its poverty, no illusory hierarchal incorporation, can supply a lasting cure for its dissatisfaction, for the proletariat cannot truly recognise itself in any particular wrong it has suffered: nor, therefore, in the righting of any particular wrong - nor even in the righting of many such wrongs; but only in the righting of the unqualified wrong that has been perpetrated upon it - the universal wrong of its exclusion from life."

You want it all without the consequence.

"In the course of the complex and terrible evolution which has brought the era of class struggle under a new set of conditions, the...