An abridged translation of “Más proletariado, menos obituarios” by Agustín Guillemón
translated by Coco N. Spirator and Washington Zermeño
Introduction
A number of critics over the last few decades have brought class politics into question as a strategic, emancipatory horizon. They point to deindustrializing western economies, a fragmenting workforce, the growth of the service sector, increasing employment precariousness, the individualization of labor relations, and not least of all, the total integration of social life into the logic of consumption. Authors such as Tomás Ibáñez and Miquel Amorós have argued that the historical conditions that made the classical workers’ movement possible have been eroded. They say the disappearance of workers’ culture, institutional capture of unions, growing market colonization, and the dissolution of the old workers’ neighborhoods and communities have deprived the proletariat of the political centrality which materialized more than a century ago.
The thesis of this article is precisely the opposite: the global reorganization of capitalism that began in the 1970s has not eliminated the proletariat in a material sense but has instead transformed and widened it to a scale that’s never been seen before.
The fragmentation of productive processes has been accompanied by an ever intensifying integration of the global market. The relative deindustrialization of Europe and North America has coincided with an extraordinary expansion of waged work in Asia, Latin America, Africa and eastern Europe. More diversity in the forms of employment has not lessened the dependence of wages, but it has extended wage work to new sectors of the population.
This is why it is necessary to distinguish between two different factors. On the one hand, there is the crisis of class consciousness, workers’ organizations, and historical forms of proletarian politics. On the other, there is the persistence of objective conditions which make possible a class defined by its need to sell its own labor power to survive.
International migration and the production of a new global proletariat
Something that should, on its own, throw doubt on the supposed disappearance of the proletariat is the international migration of workers that is characteristic of modern capitalism. If it were true that the proletariat ceased being the base of the economic system, why do hundreds of millions of people leave their own country to enter labor markets in the most developed economies and emerging centers of accumulation, even under the most precarious conditions?
Contemporary migrations are neither a marginal phenomenon nor a simple humanitarian consequence of wars and natural disasters. They form part of the functioning of global capitalism itself. The free circulation of goods, capital and investment lives alongside the strict control of labor mobility. This contradiction is not an accident. Capital requires mobile workers, but not necessarily workers with rights. The existence of a mass migrant population permanently crushed under a legal regime of insecurity is one of the mechanisms through which wages are suppressed and the negotiating power of the working class is weakened.
Since the end of the 20th century, western Europe, the United States and Canada have seen successive increases in immigration from Latin America, northern Africa, sub-saharan Africa, eastern Europe, the Middle-East and Asia. These workers find themselves concentrated primarily in those sectors characterized by a heightened intensity of work, low wages, and few worker protections; sectors like industrial farming, construction, hospitality, cleaning, healthcare, delivery driving, logistics, domestic labor, and particular branches of manufacturing and food production.
The figure of the undocumented immigrant, the seasonal farm worker, the foreign domestic worker, the gig-app delivery driver, the Asian construction worker, or the Palestinian worker under occupation all find themselves in circumstances not unlike the proletariat of the 19th century. They are not an exception to the normal functioning of capitalism, they are a pure manifestation of it. Their existence is undeniable proof that the proletariat actually hasn’t disappeared at all. In fact, it showcases global capitalism’s growing need to displace, mobilize, and exploit a mass of wage workers on a planetary scale.
The proletariat is a social relation, not a historical figure
It is worth bringing in an important, nuanced clarification. Recognizing that the proletariat has grown numerically does not mean denying that the conditions under which it can become a political subject have changed. It would be absurd to ignore that fragmentation of production, increasingly precarious employment, individualization of labor relations, and territorial dispersion massively complicate the task of constructing stable organizations and collective identities comparable to those of the classical workers movement. But it’s precisely for that reason that we have to carefully distinguish between the objective existence of a class and the historical forms that its political organizations take.
These two things have often been conflated in the debates of the last few decades. When we see the old workers’ organizations vanish, we tend to conclude that the class that made these organizations possible must have vanished also. But we can understand this relationship in exactly the reverse. Maybe what has come into crisis is not the proletariat itself, but the organizational forms inherited from a specific phase of capitalist development. If this hypothesis is correct, then the political problem would no longer be about finding a new revolutionary subject and, instead, would be about understanding how this class can reorganize itself under profoundly different conditions.
The defeat of the workers’ movement and the myth of its disappearance
Social classes do not just disappear when they are defeated. If that were the case, the bourgeoisie would have stopped existing every time it lost political power during a revolution and the aristocracy would have disappeared immediately after the liberal revolutions. A class is not defined by the success or failure of its organizations, but by its position within the social relations of production. Historical failures do change the balance of forces, destroy institutions, disrupt political traditions, and can even deeply alter collective consciousness, but they don’t change the fundamental structure of social relations in and of themselves.
This observation feels especially important when making sense of the evolution of capitalism since the 1970s. The neoliberal offensive was not simply a series of economic reforms. It was, above all, a massive political operation to break the accumulated power of the workers’ movement following World War II. The defeat of the British miners, the industrial restructuring of much of Europe, the increased flexibility of the labor market, the relocation of production, and the growing submission of the economy to finance were not independent processes. They formed part of a strategy for weakening the working class’s capacity for resistance and negotiation and for reorganizing capitalism.
It is worth focusing for a moment specifically on this concept of capitalist reorganization and its implications. Capitalism doesn’t keep modifying its own forms of production just because it would like more technological innovation. Every significant transformation has been a response, at least in part, to the capitalist need to overcome the obstacles brought about by the preceding cycle of accumulation. Mechanization was a response to the need to increase productivity. Fordism made the organization of mass production possible. Relocating production helped cut labor costs. Globalized logistics allowed geographically dispersed production. None of these transformations eliminated wage labor, but they did attempt to reorganize it in a more favorable way for capital accumulation.
Here, it’s worth making one final point: no social class possesses a guaranteed, predetermined historical mission. The existence of the proletariat, in and of itself, does not guarantee the revolution, just as the existence of the bourgeoisie did not automatically guarantee the triumph of the liberal revolutions. There are no divine subjects of history. But recognizing this fact does not mean denying that certain classes occupy structural positions from which the existing order can be questioned. Revolutionary capacity is not born out of some metaphysical essence of the proletariat, but by the objective contradiction putting capital in tension with those who produce social wealth but who remain separated from the means managing this process.
So the central problem of our time does not consist in finding a new subject to replace the proletariat, but to understand the concrete forms under which the 21st century proletariat can rebuild its capacity for collective action. The strategic question has not changed as much as it is sometimes argued. What has changed are the current historical conditions in which that strategy could develop.
A program for action: twelve points for restructuring the proletariat
If the proletariat hasn’t actually disappeared but has just been dispersed, internationalized, and made more precarious, then the strategic question is how to rebuild its capacity for autonomous organization. This means letting go of our nostalgia for the old ways of doing things, including the defeatist conclusions that class politics has become impossible. One single model doesn’t exist, but we can point things in a general direction.
1. Rebuilding proletarian social life…
because without permanent social relations, collective consciousness cannot exist, and no organization will be able to maintain itself in the face of capitalism. The first task consists of recuperating spaces for gathering, debate, and solidarity, whether in neighborhoods, workers centers, places of study or recreation.
2. Organizing where the majority work…
because organization should follow the actual movement of capital. The new worker’s movement should place itself primarily in the industries of logistics, transportation, digital platforms, healthcare, education, hospitality, retail, intensive agriculture, subcontracting, and distribution.
3. Overcoming the fragmentation of the workforce…
because working class organization will have to rebuild itself around shared material realities, not around those administrative categories imposed by the market of the State. The divisions between permanent and temporary workers, citizen and immigrant workers, waged and “contract” workers, and between public and private employees, represent one of the primary instruments of corporate control.
4. Fully incorporating the migrant proletariat…
because capital uses legal inequality to permanently lower wages and discipline labor. Fighting for the same social, political, workplace and union rights for immigrant workers as workers who have citizenship is an essential condition for halting capital.
5. Recovering direct action unionism…
because the assembling of workers, federalism, the ability to recall delegates, direct action, and autonomy from the State must remain our central principles. Unionism will have to become a tool for day-to-day confrontation again, not just a machine for institutional management.
6. Building appropriate mutual aid institutions…
because material infrastructure for sustaining prolonged conflicts and strengthening working class autonomy is indispensable. This includes strike funds, consumer cooperatives, worker councils, cultural clubs, libraries, care networks, cultural centers, popular educational practices, and community spaces.
7. Coordinating struggle at an international level…
because capital is already organized at the global level. This means that exclusively national responses are insufficient and that effective solidarity, international campaigns, and cooperation between workers within the same logistical or production chain must all become standard practice.
8. Linking together social struggles without losing sight of class…
because the defense of housing, public health, education, feminism, ecology, anti-racism, and anti-militarism are part of the same historical conflict when they are articulated around a critique of capitalism, not as isolated struggles within themselves.
9. Recovering political lessons and historical memories…
because forgetfulness is one of the great victories of neoliberalism. It is essential to rebuild a critical culture with constant political development, through the intergenerational transmission of organizational knowledge and by studying the historical experiences in both the workers’ and libertarian movements.
10. Combating authoritarianism and the war economy
because opposition to militarism and the war economy are an inseparable part of the struggle against capital. Growing militarization, the expansion of defense spending, the spread of surveillance technology and the normalization of the “state of exception” are also tools for disciplining labor. The class war is the only real opposition to the wars of capital.
11. Democratizing production and social reproduction…
because the libertarian perspective cannot limit itself to only improving the conditions related to the sale of labor power. It should be oriented toward direct worker control of production, collective management of common goods, socialization of care work, and development of cooperative and federal forms of economic organization.
12. Building popular power from below…
because self-organization, cooperativism, federalism, direct democracy, and mutual aid are not simply ethical principles, they also represent the material conditions for the revolutionary transformation of society. Our strategic objective cannot be to take State power and give capitalism a new set of managers. Instead, it should be based in the development of a growing web of autonomous organizations capable of challenging the economic, social, cultural and political functions of capital.
These twelve points aren’t a closed program or a complete strategy. They are an attempt to point in a strategic direction. 21st century capitalism deeply altered the composition of the proletariat, but it has not eliminated the fundamental contradiction between those who own the means of production and those who only own their own ability to work. As long as this contradiction continues structuring society, the work of the libertarian movement is not seeking out an alternative political subject, but in contributing to the conscious, autonomous, federal and internationalist restructuring of the working class. We need fewer obituaries and more organization!
The deep transformations that capitalism has undergone since the 1970s do not, on their own, mean that the proletariat has stopped being the potential subject of revolutionary transformation. What these transformations actually reveal, above all else, is a crisis of the historically effective forms of the workers’ movement, the forms that sustained working class organization in the past.
Más proletariado y menos obituarios: del fin de la clase obrera a su reconstrucción
CES 