FROM PROLETARIAN TO INDIVIDUAL:
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�� The social relationships of class and exploitation are not
simple. Workerist conceptions, which are based on the idea of an objectively
revolutionary class that is defined in terms of its relationship to the means
of production, ignore the mass of those world-wide whose lives are stolen from
them by the current social order but who can find no place within its productive
apparatus. Thus these conceptions end up presenting a narrow and simplistic
understanding of exploitation and revolutionary transformation. In order to
carry out a revolutionary struggle against exploitation, we need to develop an
understanding of class as it actually exists in the world without seeking any
guarantees.
�� At its most basic, class society is one in
which there are those who rule and those who are ruled, those who exploit and
those who are exploited. Such a social order can only arise when people lose
their capacity to determine the conditions of their own existence. Thus, the
essential quality shared by the exploited is their dispossession, their loss of
the capacity to make and carry out the basic decisions about how they live.
�� The ruling class is defined in terms of its
own project of accumulating power and wealth. While there are certainly
significant conflicts within the ruling class in terms of specific interests
and real competition for control of resources and territory, this overarching
project aimed at the control of social wealth and power, and thus of the lives
and relationships of every living being, provides this class with a unified
positive project.
�� The exploited class has no such positive
project to define it. Rather it is defined in terms of what is done to it, what
is taken away from it. Being uprooted from the ways of life that they had known
and created with their peers, the only community that is left to the people who
make up this heterogeneous class is that provided by capital and the state�the
community of work and commodity exchange decorated with whatever nationalist,
religious, ethnic, racial or subcultural ideological constructions through
which the ruling order creates identities into which to channel individuality
and revolt. The concept of a positive proletarian identity, of a single,
unified, positive proletarian project, has no basis in reality since what
defines one as proletarian is precisely that her life has been stolen from her,
that he has been transformed into a pawn in the projects of the rulers.
�� The workerist conception of the proletarian
project has its origins in the revolutionary theories of Europe and the United
States (particularly certain marxist and syndicalist theories). By the late 19th
century, both western Europe and the eastern United States were well on their
way to being thoroughly industrialized, and the dominant ideology of progress
equated technological development with social liberation. This ideology
manifested in revolutionary theory as the idea that the industrial
working class was objectively revolutionary because it was in the position to
take over the means of production developed under capitalism (which, as
products of progress, were assumed to be inherently liberating) and turn them
to the service of the human community. By ignoring most of the world (along
with a significant portion of the exploited in the industrialized areas),
revolutionary theorists were thus able to invent a positive project for the
proletariat, an objective historical mission. That it was founded on the
bourgeois ideology of progress was ignored. In my opinion, the luddites had a
much clearer perspective, recognizing that industrialism was another one of the
masters� tools for dispossessing them. With good reason, they attacked the
machines of mass production.
�� The process of dispossession has long since
been accomplished in the West (though of course it is a process that is going
on at all times even here), but it is in much of the South of the world it is
still in its early stages. Since the process started in the West though, there
have been some significant changes in the functioning of the productive
apparatus. Skilled factory positions have largely disappeared, and what is
needed in a worker is flexibility, the capacity to adapt�in other words, the
capacity to be an interchangeable cog in the machine of capital. In addition,
factories tend to require far fewer workers to carry on the productive process,
both because of developments in technology and management techniques that have
allowed a more decentralized productive process and because increasingly the
type of work necessary in factories is largely just monitoring and maintaining
machines.
�� On a practical level this means that we are
all, as individuals, expendable to the production process, because we are all
replaceable�that lovely capitalist egalitarianism in which we are all equal to
zero. In the first world, this has had the effect of pushing increasing numbers
of the exploited into increasingly precarious positions: day labor, temporary
work, service sector jobs, chronic unemployment, the black market and other
forms of illegality, homelessness and prison. The steady job with its guarantee
of a somewhat stable life�even if one�s life is not one�s own�is giving way to
a lack of guarantees where the illusions provided by a moderately comfortable
consumerism can no longer hide that life under capitalism is always lived on
the edge of catastrophe.
�� In the third world, people who have been able
to create their own existence, if sometimes a difficult one, are finding their
land and their other means for doing so being pulled out from under them as the
machines of capital quite literal invade their homes and eat away any
possibility to continue living directly off their own activity. Torn from their
lives and lands, they are forced to move to the cities where there is little
employment for them. Shantytowns develop around the cities, often with
populations higher than the city proper. Without any possibility of steady
employment, the inhabitants of these shantytowns are compelled to form a black
market economy to survive, but this also still serves the interests of capital.
Others, in desperation, choose immigration, risking imprisonment in refugee
camps and centers for undocumented foreigners in the hope of improving their
condition.
�� So, along with dispossession,
precariousness and expendability are increasingly the shared traits of those
who make up the exploited class worldwide. If, on the one hand, this means that
this commodity civilization is creating in its midst a class of barbarians who
truly have nothing to lose in bringing it down (and not in the ways imagined by
the old workerist ideologues), on the other hand, these traits do not in
themselves provide any basis for a positive project of the transformation of
life. The rage provoked by the miserable conditions of life that this society
imposes can easily be channeled into projects that serve the ruling order or at
least the specific interest of one or another of the rulers. The examples of
situations in the past few decades in which the rage of the exploited has been
harnessed to fuel nationalist, racialist or religious projects that serve only
to reinforce domination are too many to count. The possibility of the end of
the current social order is as great as it ever was, but the faith in its
inevitability can no longer pretend to have an objective basis.
�� But in order to truly understand the
revolutionary project and begin the project of figuring out how to carry it out
(and to developing an analysis of how the ruling class manages to deflect the
rage of those it exploits into its own projects), it is necessary to realize
that exploitation does not merely occur in terms of the production of wealth,
but also in terms of the reproduction of social relationships. Regardless of
the position of any particular proletarian in the productive apparatus, it is
in the interests of the ruling class that everyone would have a role, a social
identity, that serves in the reproduction of social relationships. Race,
gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual preference, subculture�all of these things
may, indeed, reflect very real and significant differences, but all are social
constructions for channeling these differences into roles useful for the
maintenance of the current social order. In the most advanced areas of the
current society where the market defines most relationships, identities largely
come to be defined in terms of the commodities that symbolize them, and
interchangeability becomes the order of the day in social reproduction, just as
it is in economic production. And it is precisely because identity is a social
construction and increasingly a saleable commodity that it must be dealt with
seriously by revolutionaries, analyzed carefully in its complexity with the
precise aim of moving beyond these categories to the point that our differences
(including those that this society would define in terms of race, gender,
ethnicity, etc.) are the reflection of each of us as singular individuals.
�� Because there is no common positive
project to be found in our condition as proletarians�as the exploited and
dispossessed�our project must be the struggle to destroy our proletarian
condition, to put an end to our dispossession. The essence of what we have lost
is not control over the means of production or of material wealth; it is our
lives themselves, our capacity to create our existence in terms of our own
needs and desires. Thus, our struggle finds its terrain everywhere, at all
times. Our aim is to destroy everything that keeps our lives from us: capital,
the state, the industrial and post-industrial technological apparatus, work,
sacrifice, ideology, every organization that tries to usurp our struggle, in short,
all systems of control.
�� In the very process of carrying out this struggle in the only
way that we can carry it out�outside of and against all formality and
institutionalization�we begin to develop new ways of relating based on
self-organization, a commonality based on the unique differences that define
each of us as individuals whose freedom expands with the freedom of the other.
It is here in revolt against our proletarian condition that we find that shared
positive project that is different for each one of us: the collective struggle
for individual realization.
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