Middle-class Socialism and Working-class Politics

Abstract

The ‘crisis of the working-class movement’ is as much the crisis of intellectual failure to grasp its true nature as the crisis of ‘the movement’ itself. To impute to ‘the working class’ and its alleged defects of ‘consciousness’, responsibility for the failure of the socialist project (and its projectors) is to deepen every illusion. Indeed, to use fundamentally middle-class concepts of the working class and the ‘proletariat’ as the organizing principles of socialist theory and practice is to have been at odds from the beginning with the self-identification of ‘working’ people themselves, whether as citizens, appropriators, consumers or as individuals. For these are concepts, the only ones we have, which are not only narrow, authoritarian and reductionist, but based on an ideological perception de haut en bas. In its light, the usually middle-class socialist intellectual who theorizes about (and for) ‘the working class’ almost always sees himself as a distinctive, free and independent individual in relation to the mass-object — the ‘masses’ even — of his observation and analysis. Against the appeal of the politics of individuation.