No sooner did capitalism begin to find itself threatened by the emergence of the Marxist proletariat than it began to divide what so threatened it, and thereby to conquer what posed the threat. Thus did the proletariat become antiquated.*
By the middle of the 20th century, there no longer was a proletariat any longer—at least in the full classic sense. That is, it was no longer the case that the “workers of the world” constituted a segment of society defined by a realistic possibility of seeing through all the subterfuge that attempted to divide the subjective interests of those who constituted that segment, and discerning the underlying unity of objective interest that they all shared—so that they could hear and heed the call to unite in order at last to free not only themselves but also every single other member of the entire human community from their chains.
Thus, the question that the antiquation of the proletariat raises is the one I have used as the title for today’s post. That is the question of whether there is today any substitute for the proletariat. That is: Is there today, when there is no longer any genuine proletariat, some segment of society that has the realistic possibility of uniting, and in uniting, throwing off the chains that have for so many centuries bound us all?
Unfortunately, ever since that question first posed itself to me, which was in the 1960s, I have myself been bound to answer that there is not.**
* * *
The most plausible suggestions of possible substitutes for the now long-antiquated proletariat have been three: (1) minorities, (2) the economically disadvantaged in general, and (3) women. None of those three suggestions will work, however.
That is because the same strategies that so effectively splintered the proletariat during the last half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th are also fully at play, and at least equally effective, with regard to all three of those suggested substitutes. I will briefly address each in turn, beginning with minorities, where I will use as paradigmatic the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
The very success of the Civil Rights Movement in opening economic opportunities for some blacks not only led to tokenism, which already splinters black unity by holding out the carrot of success to individual blacks, especially the most accomplished, intelligent, and creative, while keeping the great mass of the black population in poverty—if not in prison. It also, and far more importantly, led to a shift of focus away from any genuinely revolutionary change in the capitalist system that engenders racism to serve its own interests. That truly revolutionary focus can indeed be found in such figures as Martin Luther King, Stockley Carmichael, and the leaders of the Black Power movement—which called down persecution of such figures, up to and including murder, on the part of the ruling powers. However, precisely by winning such limited achievements as forcing President Lyndon Baines Johnson successfully to push Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Civil Rights Movement ended up paradoxically ending, as it were, the very endeavor on which that Movement was first founded: the endeavor radically to address, challenge, and change the underlying racist nature of the society. The supposed success of the movement as represented by such supposed accomplishments as the 1964 Civil Rights Act just diluted the power of the Movement as such, and provided fodder to feed the forces of reaction.
Similarly, by atomizing the disadvantaged of society—that is, by defining the problem of widespread economic degradation of large numbers of the population as a problem that could and should be addressed on an individual, case by case basis—the dominant power closed the door on any call for the radical restructuring of the social whole to address the underlying issues of unfairness and neglect involved. Thus, any real possibility of the disadvantaged realizing their unity with one another, and uniting with one another or with others not so disadvantaged to throw off their chains and those of everyone else, was erased.
Finally, the feminist movement that gained new steam in the ‘sixties and ‘seventies has sometimes been held out as having the potential to constitute itself as a truly revolutionary movement, making women a possible replacement for the antiquated proletariat. However, the divisions between women were already so great even before “second-wave feminism” began that there was never, even during the heyday of feminism—which today is a thing of the past, with relatively few women willing to self-identify as feminists—any real chance of that ever occurring. The subjectively perceived interests of the wife of a corporation executive were and are vastly different from those of an unemployed single woman, for instance. Such differences of subjectively perceived interest always thoroughly mask the real, objective interest of all women as such in being liberated from bondage to a sexist, patriarchal power-system. Accordingly, no more than minorities or the disadvantaged—or even workers—did women as a whole ever offer any real hope of general revolutionary change.
Nor does any other segment of society today, unfortunately.
There simply is no substitute for the antiquated proletariat.
*As I discuss in my earlier post, “The Antiquation of the Proletariat,”
**In this post I will confine myself to explaining briefly why I have never seen any possible substitute for the now antiquated proletariat. In a future post, I will address what the absence of any substitute for the antiquated proletariat leaves for us all to do, if we are ever to break our chains and set ourselves free.