Proletarians, unite!

From The Idea of Communism, edited by Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, (London and New York: Verso, 2010), pp. 225-226:

[....]

And the same goes for natural resources, the exploitation of which is one of the great sources of rent today, accompanied by the permanent struggle over who is to receive that rent -- the people of the Third World or Western corporations. The supreme irony is that in order to explain the difference between labour power (which, when put to work, produces surplus value over and above its own value) and other commodities (the value of which is consumed in their use and which thus involves no exploitation), Marx mentions as an example of an 'ordinary' commodity oil, the very commodity which is today a source of extraordinary 'profits'. Here also, it is meaningless to link the rise and fall of oil prices to rising or falling production costs or the price of exploited labour -- the production costs are negligible, the price we pay for oil is a rent we pay to the owners of this resource because of its scarcity and limited supply.

It is as if the three components of the production process -- intellectual planning and marketing, material production, the providing of material resources -- are more and more autonomized, emerging as three separate spheres. In its social consequences, this separation appears in the guise of the 'three main classes' of today's developed societies, which are precisely not classes but three fractions of the working class: intellectual labourers, the old manual working class, and the outcasts (unemployed, or living in slums and other interstices of the public space). The working class is thus split into three, each part with its own 'way of life' and ideology: the enlightened hedonism and liberal multiculturalism of the intellectual class, the populist fundamentalism of the working class, and the more extreme, singular forms of the outcast fraction. In Hegelese, this triad is clearly the triad of the universal (intellectual workers), particular (manual workers), and 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 in each of the three fractions: postmodern multicultural identity politics in the intellectual class, regressive populist fundamentalism in the working class, half-illegal initiatic groups (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 played off against the others: intellectual labourers full of cultural prejudices against the 'redneck' workers; workers who display a populist hatred of intellectuals and outcasts; outcasts who are antagonistic to society as such. The old call 'Proletarians, unite!' is thus more pertinent than ever: in the new conditions of 'post-industrial' capitalism, the unity of the three fractions of the working class is already their victory.