The full realisation of the proletariat, its historical responsibility, is ‘beyond’ the economic procedure while being its essential motive force. Proletarians are both within and without the order they instantiate, a group of individuals having in common only their shared relationship to production, otherwise in competition with each other in the pursuit of self-interest. The formation of the ‘working class’ happens in the settling of individual competitions for the pursuit of a broader particular interest, which historically occurred in Britain and elsewhere through the institutions of the labour movement, the trade unions and the independent working-class party. The announcement of the proletarian standpoint came in the transition from the slogan ‘All Men are Brothers,’ to ‘Working Men of All Countries Unite’, from Marx's involvement in the League of the Just to the establishment of the Communist League. This rhetorical shift discloses a movement away from universality to practical historical particularity, from the enlightenment to Communism, isolating and recognising an essential, irreducible historical difference, being the actuality and possibility of social classes. Marx and Engels could articulate this standpoint without there being a sufficiently organised, conscious, or developed ‘working class’ according to what (for them) gives a class its ‘classness,’ being a group which has undergone generalisation, the suspension of individuality (interpersonal competition), towards their combined struggle against another (also generalised) class opponent. They saw the premises which would be cultivated, on the one side by the blind movements of capital, on the other by the concerted voluntary endeavours of labour, which would eventually result in revolution and Communism. In all this it's necessary to note that from the vantage of the movement’s founders the ‘working class’ and everything which proceeds from it did not exist, but was for them an inevitability which was announced by the circumstances of their day.
The Party in Marx & Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party also refers to something potential and non-existent: The Party materialised decades after the Manifestoin 1918 in Russia when the Bolsheviks dispensed with the ‘Social Democrat’ label, and in Germany the same year when the revolutionary element announced a final, irreversible split with the reformists. In the succeeding years, the Party emerged almost everywhere in Europe, and then the world. The Manifesto’s preamble refers to Communism as a power without form, something acknowledged and negatively produced through the pejorative term “communist,” an emergent property of the developing capitalist society haunting its own order; again, both within and without. Marx & Engels are very careful with their language; if there is such a thing as a Communist style, the rhetoric holds identity with what it speaks to, discursively the same as its material referent. Communism, both in the Manifesto and in Capital and everywhere else in Marx & Engels, is something which is in the first instance ‘organically’ emergent by contradictions within the economic order, and also ‘consciously/voluntarily’ apprehended, the reins of ‘organic’ contradictions grasped, then asserting therein a determinate particular interest. For Marx & Engels the explosive development of the productive forces and the annihilation of barriers to the free flow of capital permitted the formation of the proletariat as a global partial element. The ‘science’ of scientific socialism identified the determinate class and developed a means of epistemic identification with the ‘total perspective’ of this class, without a) that class ‘actually’ existing, and b) the proponent of the concept necessarily belonging to this class, or to the antecedent form of this class. All this is to say that it remains correct for Communists to take the ‘standpoint of the proletariat’ even when a local, immediate proletariat isn't there. If the first and last point of the struggle is always the cultivation of the ‘working class’ towards the annihilation of the ground which gave rise to them, then the existence of the ‘working class’ proper is secondary. The ‘working class’ is an instance in their own history, in the history of labour and capital, but the working class position predates and succeeds them, and is at root only the position which is against capital, and against the proletariat.
Communism is not then dependent on the reconstitution of the proletariat as a precondition for the re-emergence of the ‘working class’. Communist politics is, of course, historically dependent on the existence of the ‘working class’, at a certain period and in certain circumstances, and wouldn't make sense without it. But the period of the ‘working class,’ specifically the militant political class engaged in direct confrontation with the political and economic agents of capital, is over for us. The proletariat, on the other hand, threatens to re-emerge, being in its first instance a very large group of individuals bound together by a shared relation to production. If we read the history of the working class and capital as a basic repetitive historical drama which remains tethered inextricably to its original premises, then we arrive at the idea that the working class has some kind of magical transhistorical power, rather than it being a historically-determined instance in the disclosure of Communism. We can dismiss this by knowing and observing the development of the tendency of capital’s socialisation, our period's advanced stage of developed, institutionalised economic intercourse, the vast infrastructure of socialised-capitalist production and exchange afforded by the data economy, industrial robotics, the figure of the ‘universal owner’, bureaucratic-managerial planning, and so on. The primary contradiction today is the ballooning of socially unnecessary labour time against the concentration of productive capacity in smaller and smaller parcels of (increasingly dubious) socially necessary labour time. The dwindling political determinacy of the ‘working class’ is a consequence of the immense increase in their productive capacity, the advanced development of the labour movement itself in the last period and the concessions thus granted by capital. A transformation of quantity into quality, then: the quantitative reduction in socially necessary labour time without the reduction in labour itself has qualitatively changed the class into something which is actually, materially inhibited from achieving the capacity for revolution.
If the working class, not capital, is the prime mover of economic procedure (and therefore social reproduction), then relitigating primitive accumulation today would position Marxism as a mechanism of capital, implicating Communism in capital’s own forthcoming social and political revolution. Rather than tacitly accepting capital’s demand to resituate production ‘at home’, the Communist position would be to interrupt this leap, posit a distinct and opposite ‘resolution’ to the contradiction which capital intends to bypass through revolutionising the forces and relations of production for its own sake. The historical responsibility of a de-mobilised, dispossessed social element with the memory of once being ‘working class’ is then to affirm its dispossession and starve capital of labour (taking it a step further, the best way perhaps to show solidarity with the hyper-exploited proletarians of the third world is to join them in their refusal of sustained exploitation, to assert our own ‘sovereign interest’ in a manner commensurate with our own circumstances, but all the same on equivalent lines).
As Baron Glasman says, in the terminal phase of globalisation we (westerners) find our economic order at the point of death, and on the precipice of resurrection: the turbulent reappearance of democracy, strivings for faith, MAGA, Brexit, sovereigntism… Globalisation’s prior breakdown of the final vestiges of the commons, of the formal and informal networks of association amongst the working class, appear to precipitate their scandalous return, styled as a radical democratic conservatism. Is it progressive or reactionary to be “on the side” of the working class? I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about Blue Labour because I'm convinced that they’re the future of British social democracy, or at least the incubation of its future. Blue Labour reveals something which has always persisted in the labour movement in Britain, that being an essential industrial conservatism, striving to conserve the working class, and therefore to conserve capital. Communism is the opposite of social democracy: Marx & Engels weren’t solely concerned with a critique of capitalism, as in the mode of production they identified as contemporary to them in the mid to late 19th Century, but were also critics of socialism, most obliquely of the various ideologies using the name but more substantively what they understood as the thing which capitalism would become in and through the sustained socialisation of capital. This process of socialisation develops specifically according to the activity of the working class, conceived in refusal and consummated in capital’s concession to labour. Just as Marx & Engels’ ‘working class’, their subject, didn't actually exist, neither did their real object, the object of their critique, being the economic arrangement that capitalism was turning into. A totalising expansion of proletarian labouring across the whole world was, for them, the essential precondition for the end of labouring itself, the setting up of a zone of contestation wherein the circuit of exploitation is broken apart, history ended, and the whole drama put to rest.