The revolutionary class
“The working class is either revolutionary or it is
nothing,” Marx wrote to German politician J.B. von Schweitzer and copied “word
for word” in a letter to Engels. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party,
Marx and Engels wrote “the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.”
Marx cited that statement in a footnote at the very end of the penultimate
chapter of volume 1 of Capital. Without denying the plausibility of
other, canonical, interpretation of the revolutionary working class, there is
one clear definition given by Marx in the Grundrisse that has escaped
notice as a definition of the revolutionary working class:
The more this contradiction develops, the more does it become
evident that the growth of the forces of production can no longer be bound up
with the appropriation of alien labour, but that the mass of workers must
themselves appropriate their own surplus labour. Once they have done so – and disposable time thereby ceases to have
an antithetical existence – then, on
one side, necessary labour time will be measured by the needs of the social
individual, and, on the other, the development of the power of social
production will grow so rapidly that, even though production is now calculated
for the wealth of all, disposable time
will grow for all. (emphasis in original)
The first sentence is a compact version of Marx’s famous
statement about fetters on the forces of production and reprises what he had
said two pages earlier about the contradiction between the forces and relations
of production. In Capital and in his work with the International, Marx
repeatedly referred to the limitation of the working day as a preliminary
condition or basic prerequisite for the emancipation of the working class.
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