[…]
The lesson to be learned is that class systems change, often
very rapidly; sometimes in violent revolution, sometimes as a symptom of
changing economic conditions.
Ostensibly, our modern class system has progressed has not
progressed much beyond what it was following the overthrow of the Ancien
Régime. Our society is still ordered around property ownership, market exchange
and obedience to law. According to Marx this is “the dictatorship of the
bourgeoisie,” invented for the growth of capital and freely expressed
productivity. And like all systems it follows the same pattern of ascent and
decline. Marx predicted that the bourgeois order would be toppled by the
proletariat and that the working classes would rise up to supplant the owning
classes, in the same way that the owning classes wrested control away from the
noble class. It would seem history has not played out that way, not exactly. In
fact, one could argue it is the working classes which have been marginalized
over the course of modern history and have gradually been rendered irrelevant.
The cause of this unexpected turn of events is 1: automation of work processes
and 2: globalization of capital. Productivity within the world’s
post-industrial economies is derived from mechanized labor; this has been the
primary reason productivity has continued increasing in the industrialized
world even though population growth has more or less stalled out. Outside of
the post-industrial economies, traditional industry and human labor remain
relevant and continue to escalate, but the effect this has on core capitalist
economies is such that industrial labor vanishes. Slavoj Zizek explains our
current economic milieu quite nicely in this article from The New Left Review:
How else should we conceive the
connexion between the two mega-powers, the United States and China, for
example? They relate to each other more and more as Capital and Labour. The US
is turning into a country of managerial planning, banking, servicing etc.,
while its ‘disappearing working class’ (except for migrant Chicanos and others
who mainly toil in the service economy) is reappearing in China, where a large
proportion of American goods, from toys to electronic hardware, are
manufactured in ideal conditions for capitalist exploitation: no strikes,
little safety, tied labour, miserable wages. Far from being merely
antagonistic, the relationship of China and US is actually also symbiotic. The
irony of history is that China is coming to deserve the title of a ‘working
class state’: it is turning into the state of the working class for American
capital. (“Why We
All Love to Hate Heider“)
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