Three Divisions of the Proletariat

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 147-148:

It is as if the three components of the production process--intellectual planning and marketing, material production, the provision of material resources--are increasingly autonomized, emerging as separate spheres. In its social consequences, this separation appears in the guise of the "three main classes" in today's developed societies, which are precisely not classes but three fractions of the working class: intellectual laborers, the old manual working class, and the outcasts (the unemployed, those living in slums and other interstices of public space). The working class is thus split into three, each fraction with its own "way of life" and ideology: the enlightened hedonism and liberal multiculturalism of the intellectual class; the populist fundamentalism of the old working class; more extreme and singular forms of the outcast fraction. In Hegelese, this triad is clearly the triad of the universal (intellectual workers), the particular (manual workers), and the singular (outcasts). The outcome of this process is the gradual disintegration of social life proper, of a public space in which all three fractions could meet, and "identity" politics in all its forms is a supplement for this loss. Identity politics acquires a specific form within each fraction: multicultural identity politics among the intellectual class; regressive populist fundamentalism among the working class; semi-illegal groupings (criminal gangs, religious sects, etc.) among the outcasts. What they all share is recourse to a particular identity as a substitute for the missing universal public space.

The proletariat is thus divided into three, each part being played off against the others: intellectual workers full of cultural prejudices against "redneck" workers; workers who display a populist hatred of intellectuals and outcasts; outcasts who are antagonistic to society as such. The old cry "Proletarians, unite!" is thus more pertinent than ever: in the new conditions of "postindustrial" capitalism, the unity of the three fractions of the working class is already their victory. This unity, however, will not be guaranteed by any figure of the "big Other" prescribing it as the "objective tendency" of the historical process itself--the situation is thoroughly open, divided between the two versions of Hegelianism.