One hundred years of???

Abstract

Marxian socialism has bequeathed contradictory ideas about the course of capitalist development. There is "the proletariat," the anticipation that workers were being simplified into a uniform mass, living at the bottom of society, and "having no country of their own." On the other hand, there is an historical tendency for the relations and even the forces of production to become more deeply social in character, ultimately to burst the confining integument of private property and capitalism itself. Modem socialism continues to be influenced by echoes of that proletariat, but has tended to ignore opportunities provided by the increasingly social character of our mode of production, assuming that those are tasks to be taken up on some distant tomorrow. If the decline of socialism is to be radically reversed, the proletarian echo will have to be muted even further, and the increasing socialization of the mode of production taken up as an existing threat and a striking opportunity. The expectation of a revolutionary proletariat neither can nor does function as the underpinning for socialist strategies of change. Of course, that is not the same thing as socialist sensitivity to the very poor and to inequality generally, but the two are often confused. If there were such a thing as proletarianization, then a realistic and ultimately dominant political movement could be based upon it, but contemporary socialist sympathy for the poor and the denied has much more morality than strategy to it, and to that extent does not supply a sufficiently acute political perspective. I am not saying, "Devil take the poor," nor denying their permanence while capitalism still exists. But an anticapitalist transformation of society now requires a different socialist fulcrum.