The new Working Class

7/1/2020

"Record 47.2 percent of working-age Americans without jobs"

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/01/jobs-j01.html

These so-called Marxists explain this crisis in terms of the fiction of the not really so deadly Pandemic. Instead of using what is the actual cause of the crisis and well established Marxian analysis of the declining rate of profit contradiction of a fully matured capitalist economy. It does not reveal how the advanced state of automation has reduced the value of variable capital or wage labor to dangerously low levels. It does not correspondingly talk about the parallel growth of the capitalist class resulting from this intense exploitation of the working class.

There are two dominating trends in the working class today in modern and mature capitalist economies, in the US, Europe, Japan, etc... The first of which are the majority who are being reduced in power and income to dangerous levels. Dangerous to themselves and correspondingly dangerous to the capitalist class. They are dangerous not because by going on strike they could bring the economy to an halt. To the contrary the majority of the working class in the modern economies are entirely irrelevant to both overall production of commodities and profits of the economy. The Pseudo Pandemic makes this fact very clear. However their respective numbers make them a very dangerous foe. They have been neutralized upto this period solely on the basis of a vast dangerous expansion of credit and the race privileges given to them to lord over minorities and women. However the rise of China has forced the US to revamp its economy and dramatically increase the levels of exploitation of its workers to match China, in a race to the bottom, which is classical capitalism.

The necessity to fully exploit and raise the rate of labor value to be extracted from minorities and women in turn has denied the dominant sector of the working class, i.e. white male workers of its historical privileges. This is the essence of the identity politics campaign. So white workers are being given nothing. While at the same time their status and state in the economy has been reduced from the artificially high middle class levels of the past 50 years. This middle class itself is a product of the Cold war with the Soviet Union. Which was an unstable middle class dictatorship. A state which could only be defeated with a corresponding and more powerful middle class which the US was more than rich enough to create, not just in the US, but in Europe and Japan as well.

However the rise of a classical capitalist economy in China has completely changed the class composition of the working class all over the World. China's small middle class with respect to its massive working class is enjoying an outsized temporary powerful influence and serves as a basis for propaganda for erstwhile Maoist nationalist fellow travelers around the World. Solely on the basis of its novelty of the springing forth of a middle class in a massive society which has never seen a middle class of any significant size in its entire history. Thus the existence of Maoists around the World who peddle the fiction that China is still a middle class dominated society and provides a socialist path towards Communism. I might add that many of these ideologists are on the payroll of the rising Chinese capitalist class. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Communist Chinese party allows even its billionaires into the party. The only path towards Communism being offered by the Chinese capitalists are traditional revolutionary paths. Where their violent overthrow brings to power the proletariat in China.

The second trend in modern and mature capitalist economies is a correspondingly and much more powerful sector of the working class, which is super productive. It is a sector which typically has occupied the professional middle class sectors of the economies, from professors in the universities, engineers, highly skilled technicians, medical doctors, etc... What value that generates profits for the capitalists is coming almost solely from this sector of the working class. This sector is small with respect to the rest of the working class, but much larger than these professionals have traditionally occupied. They have in the past been given privileges and status of sharing in the exploitation of the working class, because there was surplus to be derived from that working class. This is no longer the case today. That traditional working class no longer produces enough profit to sustain the capitalists much less support the professional classes.

Today the professional class itself must generate the precious profits which the parasitical capitalist class desperately needs. This makes this class a very dangerous class to the capitalists. Whereas before a massacre of even millions of workers by way of a contrived war could discipline the working class without seriously impacting their precious profits, the same is not true of the new class of former professional working class. A General strike of a much smaller class of highly skilled and educated working class is much easier to organize and much more difficult to repress. All that is needed is the development among these workers is an understanding of their status as an exploited working class.

Clearly the immediate problem for the capitalist class today is to first deal with the unproductive majority in the working class. But how to kill millions of them without upsetting their fellow productive workers is the dilemma of modern capitalism. Nuclear war is too dangerous to all classes. Perhaps a real pandemic, that is truly deadly. But biologically is difficult to guarantee that even having the vaccine surreptitiously is enough of a protection. Then there is the problem of getting this final solution past the skilled workers.

I believe that Musk and Gates are pushing neural links and mind control solutions in the long run. But this technology is not there yet. There exists a window in which the class struggle can still be a winning strategy. The working class today remains class unconscious, but the economic necessity of a rapidly automating capitalist economy is pushing class contradictions to the point in which class consciousness is rising everywhere. We live in very interesting times, today comrades!!

Richard