The «class problem»

§0    

 The 1990s are perhaps the very rusty nails driven into the coffin of the working class as a real social force after mass digitalization and the practical opening of the doors to passive income — which meant means of production for everyone. Although the process of the proletariat’s dying out had begun earlier, almost as early as the start of the 20th century. This might not have happened if Marxism had been able to take root anywhere beyond France, because if we regard the world spirit as a struggle of opposites, each side of the conflict must first secure its positions and only then advance. A potential “anchoring point” for the proletariat in the form of Bolshevik Russia, however, failed to justify itself, turning into party tyranny by the 1930s. The bourgeoisie managed to consolidate itself through its own ideology of liberalism; the workers did not. As a result, an entire class and class identity died out on a global scale — which, of course, undermines the potential for a world revolution.

 Naturally, if a person is wounded, people try to stitch the wound; likewise, if something almost central to an entire worldview disappears, that void needs to be filled with something else. This is what Marx’s critics (and at the same time his students) set about doing, producing ever-new constructions, malleable like wet clay. They shaped various things, from the abandonment of the proletariat to the renunciation of world revolution altogether — in short, they reshaped it until there was essentially nothing left of Marxism.

 And it’s clear how unsuccessful these new proposals to revise Marxist orthodoxy turned out to be, even if they contained ideas useful for development. Only 34 years after the death of Saint Marx the largest land power in the world descended into a bloody struggle over his ideas (and that’s not even counting the Paris Commune, in which communists participated during Marx’s lifetime); meanwhile, new fighters with a “cultural” turn were being debated by the Frankfurt School from the 1930s onward, but there was no real action. Moreover, as I argued in my previous work, capital not only did not feel the stirrings of the new “proletariat” (which in the end proved to be more of a new lumpen-proletariat), it also — mocking them — extracted large profits from them, putting even medical institutions on the production line. So perhaps this “new proletariat” is no proletariat at all? It seems so. But if that is true, it creates new problems for those of us who envision a classless world in the future.

 Yesterday, my belarusian friend told me:«if you criticize — then propose». Well, for now I will criticize, but it is quite possible that by the end of this letter I will try to suggest something as an alternative to fill the hole in the chest of that very specter that once struck terror into the bourgeois countries of Europe in the 19th–20th centuries.

                    §1

 Let's get straight to the point. Why was the proletariat’s practice of uprising and class emancipation orders of magnitude larger and more powerful than that of the modern neo-proletariat? It all comes down to the history of the neo-proletariat itself, because, like the proletariat, it clearly did not always exist and only appeared when conditions allowed it to.

 The history of the neo-proletariat begins — as I’m tired of repeating — with German neo-Marxism, also known as the Frankfurt School or Critical Theory, but the neo-proletariat only became firmly established much later, after World War II, with the marginalization of explicitly Marxist positions following the events in France in 1968. At that point the paleo-proletariat began to show its last signs of life, a convulsion before falling into a coma and, as one might expect, dying on the hospital bed of the early third millennium. And although the neo-proletariat succeeds the paleo-proletariat, there is nothing essentially in common between them, because the bases on which the two concepts are formed are different.

 The paleo-proletariat is a purely economic phenomenon, emerging after the Industrial Revolution in Europe as estate-based society dissolved and only the third, peasant-urban estate remained. Its distinctiveness is not just that, like a house, the economy serves as its foundation, but that its dependence on the economy is unimaginable in any other way — so much so that the proletariat was formed not merely as a social class but as an identity. For this reason, the paleo-proletariat, like the bourgeoisie, is a spirit of culture: it reflects the era of the paleo-bourgeoisie, albeit in a way highly specific to the cultural spirit. That identity is so strong that its specter still haunts people’s minds, which explains why most contemporary Marxists remain orthodox: they are obsessed with the ghost of the proletariat and cannot exorcise it from themselves.

 The neo-proletariat, however, is a completely different beast. If the paleo-proletariat follows the formula “identity from economy,” the neo-proletariat is organized the opposite way: “economy from identity.” Where the paleo-proletariat has a proletarian identity dependent on the economy, the neo-proletariat’s identity governs the economy — not as a ruler, but as an economic instrument in other hands. The neo-proletariat is much more diffuse and fragmented, with internal conflicts between subgroups that the paleo-proletariat did not have to the same degree. This, again, stems from the neo-proletariat’s reversed construction. Its identity lacks a foundational base as such, because identity itself is the foundation of the neo-proletariat — which is highly problematic, since identity is formed as the result of very powerful events, as the paleo-proletariat experience shows. By making identity the foundation instead of the outcome, we effectively force the whole mess to hang by itself. You know how long a person can hold on to themself. First, it looks ridiculous; second, your back won’t hold out for long.

 It is precisely this deep fragmentation and identity-based foundation that produces what I described in my previous article about minorities. The paleo-proletariat has a strong base in its position within commodity-money relations; its actions are built on that. The neo-proletariat, stripped of this, becomes extremely vulnerable to financial influence. That is why the neo-proletariat is not only monetized by the Leviathan but actively promoted by it to generate even more capital. In short, neo-Marxism and post-Marxism (whose idea it was to create a neo-proletariat led by the intelligentsia) failed spectacularly in this respect, creating yet another revenue source for bourgeois technocracy and its authoritarian stability.

 Think about it: what can a modern person choose today? Either indulge the bourgeoisie and the Leviathan, or join the champions of social justice, who, like tame puppies, rejoice at any concession from the state, look their master in the eye, and show no sign of revolution. The main task is to keep supplying the fuel — various SJW content and goods that serve as walking advertisements for new financial inflows — and so the endless and equally vicious cycle continues.

                    §2

 What does this mean for us? Since experience has shown that an ideology based on an extremely cohesive, non‑monetized group is very strong and capable of outlasting even that same group, instead of inventing something new we need to look at the remaining options. You, being mature people, wouldn't throw away all your products just because one of them has gone bad, would you? It's simply a matter of finding something to replace the dead class.

 For that we should turn to archaic socialists of the pre‑Marxist era. I should say in advance that by socialists I will mean any person or movement that advocates the reduction or dismantling of society's elite structures, preferring simpler forms of social organization over vertical hierarchies.

 Take, for example, the Hussites—more precisely the Taborites as their most radical wing—who called for public access to land, the abolition of feudal privileges, greater power for the working strata, and other demands that strongly resemble those later made by the Jacobins during the French Revolution. But their main motive was a proto‑Reformation that predated Martin Luther; that is, the motive of their program was essentially religious/Christian in nature. As for the Jacobins I mentioned above, their egalitarian motives were based on essentially nationalist ideas. It’s worth noting that the French Revolution itself gave birth to nationalism and the very concept of the “nation.”

 The “fashion” for nationalist socialism was widespread. For example, Germany in the Weimar period became literally a breeding ground for socialist nationalism: Ernst Niekisch, Pettel, Drexler, Hitler, Puhl, Otto and the Strasser brothers—these were all socialists in the full sense of the term, but their socialism was fueled not only by class but also by ethnicity. And Marxist revolutions likewise carried nationalist character, especially in Asia—consider China, Kampuchea, Cambodia, and so on. In short, however hard an orthodox Marxist revolution tried, it always first became a national revolution, an unorthodox revolution, a heretical revolution.

 Closer to the point: since the proletariat is dead and new proposals are either laughable (for example, the intelligentsia) or failed, we should look for a new approach in the old. And it’s not surprising: haven’t we already had experience reinventing concrete? So we have only two candidates: religion and nation. Although someone might disagree with me, I see the nation as a much stronger element for revolutionary purposes than religion. But both suffer from a very large problem, roughly comparable to the ailment of the neo‑proletariat: weakness in the face of global capital.

 Capitalist relations have greatly blurred national and racial boundaries, just as they have blurred people’s population‑based perceptions. Where once someone might see a Russian Ivan, an Englishman Theodore, and an Arab Islam, today they perceive them either as clients or as business colleagues. The same goes for religions. Of course, in the absence of bad relations there's nothing wrong with this, but capital shapes all these good ideas precisely in such a way that, in the end, no one can rise up if they wake. Good deeds pave the way to hell.

 So we have the following picture: to the dead paleo‑proletariat and the harmful neo‑(lumpen)proletariat is added a dying national and religious identity (which, however, could play a very important role if we find something that will help us lift them up) that does not extend beyond personal perception. For Anton he is, on a personal level, a Spanish Catholic, even though for international corporations there is no “white,” “Spaniard,” or “papist”—there are only workers and consumers. But the nation is built first on personal association with such identities, and then those individuals, by uniting, transfer their national identity to a higher universal level, turning the nation into something that exists beyond the individual. The same goes for Christianity. I have emphasized personal identity for a reason.

                    §3 

 Now to business. If neither classes nor identities work anymore — then what should be done? Essentially, every social structure has been locked inside capital or has been diluted to an unusable state. So we need to overcome both classes and mass identity in the form they exist at the moment. We should, broadly speaking, reject the current “massiveness” as such if it has outlived itself; modesty has no place here.

 This is a revolution that is neither class-based, nor national, nor even religious. It is a personal revolution. It is about individuals uniting for their own personalities, about reviving religion and nation on personal, not collective, grounds. The resurrected Frankenstein of nation and religion should serve the person in the revolution, not the person serve Frankenstein. For Marx, the emancipation of oppressed groups was extremely important — but what if every person is now a group?

 It is important that each person, personally, like Stirner’s egoist, exalt their own uniqueness, detaching themselves from the rest of the bourgeois web not because they follow someone, but because they are Spanish and/or Christian. They are unique as a Spaniard from birth, since “Spaniard” is dead, and their self-perception as a Spaniard will become the weapon of their own personal revival. What was previously perceived as “empty words,” as naming oneself with dead titles, will now be the best salvation before the coming revolution. What used to be mere sound or a simple attribute will become what provokes, prior to the real revolution, a cultural revolution — a traditionalist revolution — where, instead of adorning life with new commodities and pseudo-identities, a person will color their life with the beauty of the personal, practicing liberatory necromancy. If Ivan is Greek, he will adorn his life with Greek things: Greek traditions, Greek culture, in effect depriving capital of the ability to promote neo-proletariat as the only possibility of freedom — and unlike the neo-proletariat, this will be real freedom. After all, a total return to the national should imply not only an aesthetic return but a quotidian one, up to a return to traditional national forms of conduct (although I will leave that, of course, for later).

 This traditionalist revolution will be a new base, a necessary stage before a larger-scale revolution. Such a cultural revolution should lead to the start of an economic revolution, because, as neo-Marxists say, culture is prior to economy — with which I completely agree. Pretty surprising that I actually agree with them about something.