History Calls On the Working Class for Duty

Many years have passed since the foundations of Marxism were laid. Through all these years capitalism has moved towards building a world system and inevitably has grown the working class into an enormous scale around the world. Under capitalism, history has still been a history of class struggles as had been the case with the history of previous class societies. Capitalist era has been marked by tensions, conflicts and wars of various intensity and size between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The world working class experienced many victories and defeats, from the Paris Commune of 1871 to the October Revolution of 1917, from the defeat of the Communards to the collapse of the workers’ power in the Soviet Union. In episodes of proletarian revolutionary success, confidence and faith in the working class were high. Whereas the periods of defeat were characterized by tendencies of escapism from the working class, denial and liquidation.

The test of hard times

Throughout the history of working class struggle we have seen numerous waves of escape from the class, denial of the revolutionary struggle, and liquidationism. One great wave followed the defeat of the Commune of Paris in 1871. Another emerged in Tsarist Russia during the years of reaction following the defeat of 1905 revolution. These liquidationist attacks against the working class in various forms and fields, from its revolutionary organization to its ideology, were studied by Lenin in their theoretical dimensions and turned into comprehensible lessons for future generations.

The struggle of the working class does not proceed purely on a proletarian basis. As it is open to the ideological influences of other classes, it may undergo various types of degeneration and distortion. Should socialist organizations not wage a successful struggle against the degenerating influence of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideologies, they would surrender to reformism and opportunism. Tendencies such as reformism and opportunism not only deform the ideological or political aspects of the struggle; but they also, especially during challenging periods in history, cause attacks threatening the very existence of revolutionary organizations and plunging into the swamp of legalism, resulting in great damage. Thus liquidationism is about such cases seen in the history of revolutionary struggle.

Liquidationism is the product of defeatism and tendency to escape from struggle that emerge within the ranks of the socialist organizations, especially during periods of reaction. Shortly speaking, liquidationism is so serious a denialism that amounts to denying the necessity of, and annihilating the revolutionary organization of the working class. As Lenin once expressed on the basis of the experience in Russia, liquidationism does not only mean liquidating (i.e. disbanding, dismantling) the revolutionary party of the working class. It is also destruction of class independence of the proletariat and twisting the class consciousness of the workers with bourgeois ideas.

In every case from history liquidators always tried to spread bourgeois influence within revolutionary organisations, which ended in reneging. The examples we witnessed in Turkey under the fascism of 1980 coup and in the world during the reaction following the collapse of the Soviet Union confirm these statements. Following the 1980 turn, liquidationism denied the need for revolutionary organization of the working class in the world and Turkey, and moreover, it ended up almost at the point of denying the existence of the working class itself.

The subjective factor (the level of revolutionary organization and consciousness of the working class) never follows the objective development of the working class spontaneously and linearly. The most striking example of this is the contradictory situation that emerged across the world by the 1980 turn: While capitalism proceeded with neoliberal attacks and the working class reached an overwhelming majority in quantity during this period, the subjective factor suffered a dreadful decline. However, contrary to what some writers wanted to show, this regression in the subjective factor was not an indication of an irreversible tendency that originated from a change in the structure of the working class. When the regression in question was evaluated from a historical point of view, it pointed to a temporary situation rather than a permanent one. There were a number of different factors that created this regression. One of them was the negative feelings of workers caused by Stalinism and the like which had foisted themselves to the world as socialists for many years. Another factor was the severe and systematic attacks of the world bourgeoisie trying to take measures against the working class which would sooner or later rise again due to the problems piled by the decaying capitalism.

As will be remembered, the bureaucratic regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries collapsed by the end of the 20th century. Starting from here, the world bourgeoisie embarked on an all-out smear campaign against the revolutionary struggle, organization and ideology of the working class. This offensive campaign launched by the bourgeoisie from its own class front against the struggle for socialism and the Marxist worldview, in a sense, precipitated a great wave of liquidationism rising from within the socialism and Marxism front. As a result, the revolutionary struggle of the working class experienced grave organizational degradation and disintegration on a world scale. The devastation caused by the bourgeois offensive and the tendency of liquidationism undoubtedly did not halt at this point, and also the theoretical and ideological positions of the proletariat were severely battered. Because of all these experiences, the revolutionary struggle of the working class was pushed far behind the positions it had reached during the 20th century. As we entered the 21st century, Marxism and socialism were being shown to be so outmoded that they could no longer be revived.

During the period of the great ideological offensive against the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat, the most important aide of the bourgeoisie has been the so-called Marxists and petty-bourgeois elements, who carried bourgeois influence to the working class. As is frequently seen in history, the leftist intelligentsia, who took a position as if they were on the side of the proletariat during periods of revolutionary upsurge, quickly changed its stance when the revolutionary struggle began to decline under heavy bourgeois attacks. The transient petty-bourgeois companions, who turned “revolutionary” by the impact of the rising wave in the workers’ struggle, quickly ended their period of class praise when the hard times came, and shifted to class dispraise. The prominent writers and intellectuals of these social segments gave a lead to the tendency to escape from the class in ideological and theoretical realms.

As for the case of Turkey, the turn of the 80s marked the beginning of the dark period opened by the crushing of the workers’ movement and revolutionary struggle under the fascist boots of the bourgeoisie, ending a period of robust rise. The socialist and revolutionary movement of Turkey faced the heaviest blows in its history during the 1980 military-fascist dictatorship, a severe haemorrhage, and had to grapple with successive waves of liquidation. What happened those days is of prime importance that had a profound impact on all left and revolutionary organizations, circles and people of the time, and constituted the main milestone of their individual histories. To put it in general outlines, liquidationism that proceeded in political and organizational realms, enforced its dynamics, cutting through all organizations of the time from top to bottom. As a result, as experienced most strikingly in the example of the old TKP [Communist Party of Turkey], a divergence arose between those who liquidated and closed down the organizations and those who were determined to build a new future on the basis of revolutionary lessons and revolutionary struggle, toiling to hold on to even seemingly most hopeless small positions of resistance.

No doubt that those who experienced the revolutionary surge of the 1960s and 1970s, and then, could swim against the current in the difficult years of the 1980s and 1990s, and thus strived to carry the revolutionary values of the working class to the present day are not many in number. Such elements are, after all, a minority. But it was this minority that made it possible to carry the flag of revolutionary struggle from the past to the future. While organizational positions were being shattered, the accretion that adhered to the ideological positions and set to build the core of a newly organized struggle in those difficult years, thus created the Marksist Tutum (Marxist Attitude), came from within this minority. Among the painstaking efforts that marked the first years of the Marxist Attitude are the resolute defense of revolutionary Marxism against all kinds of attacks and a theoretical struggle arising from this point.

The growing working class

One of the first and outstanding examples of the tendency to escape from class during the period of decline in the world socialist and workers’ movement was Andre Gorz’s “Farewell to The Working Class”. Contrary to the claims of charlatans like Andre Gorz, who said “Farewell” to the working class, the book The Growing Working Class (Elif Çağlı, Büyüyen İşçi Sınıfı, Tarih Bilinci Pub., January 2002) set forth that the working class is growing on a world scale, and refuted the now-trendy anti-Marxist approaches about the internal structure and historical role of the working class.

However, the analyses put forth over the years by The Growing Working Class and other similar studies were generally shrugged off by other socialist circles, reflecting the spirit of the period characterized by disinterest. Many years passed in this manner, many things changed. By the year 2013, following the “Gezi” protests to which socialist circles generally attached a greater importance than it had, a murky debate was initiated on whether the working class or the middle class could play the leading role. These cacophonic debates still continue today, with the current cloudiness and ongoing petty-bourgeois praising of “Gezi”. However, the discussion in question has, favourably, been instrumental in exposing the right and wrong views on the working class and its structure.

An example to this is the book titled “Marxism and Classes” (Marksizm ve Sınıflar) by Sungur Savran, Kurtar Tanyılmaz, and E. Ahmet Tonak, published in 2014. As Korkut Boratav drew attention in his article, published on sendika.org on December 5, 2014; the book touched upon the wrongness of deriving a category of middle-class from inside the working class, the issue of productive/unproductive labour, the white/blue collar distinction within the working class, the segments that should not be considered a section of the working class even if they appear in the wage-labour category, the fact that the working class is growing quantitatively, and that it forms a whole, both with the employed and unemployed segments. These assessments are undoubtedly important to the extent that they adhere to Marxist foundations, and in many respects, they are in accord with the theses in The Growing Working Class. Besides, it is not enough to express some general truths in the context of theoretical struggle today. What is of critical importance today is to take a healthy and correct political-organizational path to advance the revolutionary workers’ struggle.

In another example of different nature, Ergin Yıldızoğlu’s article titled “A note on the political organization/party of the working class”, the importance of this issue is more clearly seen in some of its aspects that we do not agree with. In his article, Yıldızoğlu touches upon some noteworthy points that need to be reflected on, however, the main concern of the author on the whole, is to declare the correct approaches to the revolutionary party of the working class outdated. Yıldızoğlu attributes the decline in the socialist movement to the lack of organizational forms to keep pace with the change in the structure of the working class. From this point of view, he draws attention to the dynamics of the newly developing educated, high-income segments of the working class with high consumption levels.

Yıldızoğlu approaches the educated segments of the working class as: “they are individuals who are most apt to the latest production techniques, can establish relationships most rapidly with their international counterparts, and can trouble the rulers by using the latest communication technologies”. In our opinion, drawing attention to the dynamics of these segments is not problematic; but the main problematic point here is defending the invention of “new types of organizations” by exaggerating these dynamics. Today, it is being spread around the world by unorganized socialists to praise the ways and methods that will lead the revolutionary struggle of the working class to defeat. It is irresponsible only to praise today’s youth, including the new and young sections of the working class, by ignoring the fundamental deficiencies in their action types; to attribute too much importance to their showing up in the squares by using sinking and floating communication networks based on new technologies; and to present all this unorganisedness as “new type organization that we need today”. It is imperative not to surrender to, on the contrary, to wage a struggle against this tendency, which obscures the need for a revolutionary organization of the working class and thus prevents organizing a sound revolutionary struggle against the capitalist order.

Yıldızoğlu’s article is distinguished by overvaluing the young elements that are, in reality, far from the revolutionary spirit of the working class, that feed on by the bourgeois ideology and that attach great importance to their individualism. Yıldızoğlu says: “While a consumption model is developing based on pleasure, fueled by financialization, this class both could be able to reach a higher level of welfare compared to the rest of the working class; and developed a lifestyle within consumption, focused on his own body, accustomed to their «freedom» which is tuned up for maximizing his individual pleasures, and developed a series of fantasies of «being original», «being different», «being yourself» in order to support this lifestyle.”

Yıldızoğlu states that, with the deepening crisis of capitalism, these class members began to lose their confidence in both society and the future, and it was time to use the concept of the proletariat for this new class fraction and says “This proletariat first manifested itself in Turkey with «RedHack», but mainly with the «Gezi Park» protests, and appeared on the stage of history as the «subject» of «Gezi Protests»”. If this “proletariat” that Yıldızoğlu was trying to portray were indeed equipped with features that strengthened the revolutionary organization and struggle of the class, then our hearts would not be saddened and we would comfortably join this caravan of Gezi praises. However, even the lines of Yıldızoğlu themselves reveal that the “spontaneousness” of these young people is far from reassuring. Yıldızoğlu says: “The outstanding features of this fraction (apart from their relationship with technology) are their opposition to all forms of authority, their commitment to individual freedoms, and in spite of these, their openness to discuss new ideas. This segment first approaches every thought with suspicion, ridicules and despises them, and then begins to adopt the identities and ideas that pass this test. Once convinced, this fraction takes its place in politics with tenacity and dedication, just as we have seen on the streets since «Gezi».”

In our opinion, it is never possible to regard these kinds of evaluations as benevolent and agree with them. Because this approach is a blessing of the point to where the bourgeoisie pushes the young people in order to keep them away from revolutionary politics and revolutionary discipline. Bourgeois ideology keeps the youth away from the revolutionary struggle by sneakily hiding behind notions such as “their fondness for their own individual freedom and their opposition to all kinds of authority” and, to the extent that it is successful in this road, it binds them to the bourgeois order with thousands of invisible threads. As would be expected, a politics derived from this mentality does not go beyond the limits of the bourgeois order, and the adoption of such a policy and conveyance of it to the squares devotedly by the youth, does not change its bourgeois left character. One who draws a revolutionary political positivity from this picture must either have no knowledge of Marxism or have forgotten it completely!

Brought to the agenda on the occasion of the Gezi process, the discussion topics, we tried to exemplify above, regarding the structure of the working class, the “middle class” or the role of new dynamics, make us obliged to remind, albeit briefly, of our analyses that we put forward years ago in the book The Growing Working Class.

Years have passed since the book was written but the evaluations in the book still shed light on the current debates. In the first place, let us remind an important fact highlighted in the Preface of the book, dated 1999: “Capitalist development created a single capitalist world system by dissolving the countryside, proletarianizing the labourer, antiquating the former modes and relations of production. In such a world, approaches that try to ignore or minimize the power of the working class are now a complete self-deception. Because in reality, the most weighted class in the entire world population, today, is the proletariat. … The alarm bells of the globalizing capitalist system of exploitation are being rung by the globalized proletariat, not the «people’s alliances» dominated by the petty bourgeoisie. For all that, the working class is growing, regardless of those who want to say farewell to it or try to display it as lesser.”

Let’s proceed with some reminders from the book The Growing Working Class, first published in January 2002. The basic factor that determines the position of people in a given mode of production and thus their status in the division of the social product, is their relationship with the means of production. This basic factor finds its reflection in property relations, which is the legal expression of relations of production. In this respect, opposite to the capitalist class, which has the private ownership of the means of production in capitalist society, there stands the working class who does not own this property. All wage labourers who do not own means of production and therefore have no choice but to sell their labour force to the capitalist to be able to survive, are generally within the scope of the working class, regardless of their profession, income level, or whether they are employed in surveillance/control positions or not.

The capitalist development is a process in which the structure of the working class changes. What is important here is to make a correct interpretation of this change. Linked with the technological developments, there is a constant change in the technical composition (that is, proportion of mental and manual labour) of the working class, in the internal structure of the class, in its distribution across production sectors and in the level and diversity of qualifications. But on the other hand, the fundamental position of the working class in capitalist society, that is, the place it holds in the social division of labour and capitalist relations of production remains unchanged. This is where the revolutionary potential and the revolutionary mission of the working class in the historical sense stems from. And this is the point that interests us most.

Understanding the evolution of the internal structure of the working class throughout the process of capitalist development on Marxist grounds is also extremely important in order to refute the wrong approaches to the issue of productive and unproductive labour. Marx states that the concept of productive worker in capitalism does not only describe a relationship between work and the usefulness of work, and between labour and the product of labour. It describes a specific social production relation that marks the worker as a means of creating surplus-value. Therefore, in order to distinguish the part of the working class that falls under the category of productive labour, it will be necessary to look at the areas where surplus-value is produced and at the collective labour forces working in these areas; and not at the division of mental and manual work. As capitalism develops, an increasing number of types of work are included in the category of productive labour every day, and the workers who do these jobs are productive workers, no matter whether manual or mental labour dominates. The production of surplus-value is not limited to the production of traditional material commodities. While the service sector that has gained great importance today, workers of the service sector who produce intangible commodities, are also within the scope of productive workers as long as they produce surplus-value, regardless of the white-collar and blue-collar distinction.

Today, mental labour gains weight in the capitalist production processes, but this does not mean that the working class has disappeared, as some claim. However, arbitrarily distorting reality, some authors argue that white-collar workers do not produce material [commodities] and therefore do not belong to the working class. By cramming all white-collar workers into the concept of the “new petty bourgeoisie”, writers of this kind ignore both that most of them are workers and that some of them fall within the scope of productive labourers. The approaches of writers (for example, of Poulantzas and the like) who exclude mental workers from the working class and cram them into a “middle class” category, for example, on the grounds that they are more susceptible to be influenced by bourgeois ideology than manual workers, are totally wrong. Even a rough questioning will reveal that merely by being a worker, no one (not even manual workers!) can escape the influences and hegemony of bourgeois ideology.

From a Marxist point of view it is not right to include the segments of the working class that earn relatively higher wages and consume more than the other segments of the working class that live on much lower wages, into the “middle class” category. Such misconceptions that reflect the influence of bourgeois ideology served to conceal the massive proletarianization on the one hand, and caused some workers who believe these lies to perceive themselves as a member of the “middle class” on the other hand. Thus, some of the white-collar workers (e.g. engineers, teachers, medical doctors, nurses, public workers employed as civil servants, office workers, etc.) have isolated themselves from the general struggle of the working class, to which they actually belong. Avoiding organizing in labour unions has been valued by the workers with such distortions as an indicator of having a higher status in social life.

Although it is politically meaningful to describe those workers who are mistaken about their position in the capitalist order and who aim for higher ranks in society as petty-bourgeois, such a characterization does not change the fact that in terms of society and class they are part of the working class. And it should not be forgotten that the truth is merciless. As capitalism discloses its real face through crises, falling living standards, and diminishing social rights, many more workers who will swallow the bitter pill will get sober. Therefore, the main point to focus on is to rectify the distorted consciousness and mobilize all segments of the working class for a common mass struggle against capitalism. One of the important issues for class revolutionaries today is to rescue the young and new sections of the class and the educated proletariat of modern urban society, from the ideological influence of the bourgeois order and win them over to the ranks of the revolutionary struggle.

The self-employed professions (such as medical doctors, lawyers, accountants, engineers) that had great privileges in the past, are rendered ordinary by the capitalist development, and significant part of those who belong to these professions are pushed to the ranks of the proletariat. Therefore, even if they appear misleadingly in the category of self-employed when taken into consideration in terms of occupational sorting, people such as medical doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc. who live on their income they earn by selling their labour power to various companies and businesses are in fact within the working class. A small fraction of these professionals are bourgeois, as they own large-scale offices and similar organizations that provide them the opportunity to accumulate capital, employ large numbers of workers and participate in the exploitation of surplus-value. On the other hand, some of these professionals who possess their own offices do not have enough capital to engage in the exploitation of surplus-value like the capitalists, and they maintain their existence primarily with their own labour. The person in this situation is the owner of both his own labour serving in one way or another, and the objective conditions (office, various equipment, etc.) of this labour. Therefore, those in this position do not go beyond the traditional definition of the petty-bourgeoisie.

However, in the context of professional occupations diversified and expanded by the capitalist development, it is necessary to exclude those so-called wage earners who are generally in administrative positions and earn much more than the cost of their labour power. They can be found in many capitalist institutions and companies working on the basis of independent contracts. These managers and technocrats, who are given a certain degree of authority in the decision-making mechanisms, should not be confused with the engineers and junior chiefs assigned to ordinary surveillance and control tasks in capitalist enterprises. It should be noted from the very beginning that, with various extra payments they get, such as shares, premiums, etc., apart from their regular and lavish salary, senior managers have no place in the working class. As a result of the separation of capital ownership and professional management, it is clear that the top managers who perform the functions that industrial capitalists once performed in the production process are also different from the managers at the intermediate level. High-level managers are mostly busy with making and overseeing strategic decisions on the provision and distribution of financial resources. Although they seem to be receiving monthly wages from the corporate budgets, they are genuine bourgeois with their share of the profits, their stocks and other securities.

Mid-level managers, on the other hand, do not have as much authority and advantages as senior managers in the process of decision mechanisms and the distribution of financial resources. However, they are in a different position from the other skilled supervision and surveillance workers with their high wages, additional premiums, etc., which far exceed the cost of reproduction of their labour power. Since we cannot include such a layer in the bourgeoisie or the proletariat in reference to their characteristics, which is in an intermediate position just like the traditional petty bourgeoisie, it would not be wrong to classify it in the “middle class”. In fact, there is no “middle class” other than the petty bourgeoisie in modern capitalist society. Therefore, the concept of “middle class” (or “intermediate class”, “middle strata”, etc.) can only correspond to the petty bourgeoisie analyzed by Marxism.

Bourgeois laws in Turkey have placed some of the workers of the state factories and enterprises, under the status of “public servant” to narrow the extent of the working class and restrict the right to unionize. However, in capitalism, the state as the collective capitalist intervenes in economic life by its economic enterprises and workers of these enterprises are also within the scope of working class. The fact that the capitalist state stands as the boss in the face of these workers does not render them different from the workers of various enterprises owned by private capital owners. Because under capitalism, whether the owner of capital is private or a state makes no difference in terms of the position of the worker.

State officials, whose salaries are paid from state revenues and who are generally called public servants, also have their own distinctions. When we examine public servants in terms of their class division, the largest part of them is, undoubtedly, the part that we can call workers. Within the capitalist state, high-ranking ideological servants that still maintain their privileged positions as in the old times, occupy a small percentage among public servants. On the basis of the division of work within the ruling class, the high-level bureaucracy corresponds to the mental executives section and is directly part of the bourgeois class. This also applies to parliamentarians, ministers, senior administrators, undersecretaries etc., who are in the status of state official. Although they may look like salary earners, in reality, they are bureaucrats who do not live solely on labour-power income, and are distinguished by hidden allowances and additional incomes they pinch off from government institutions, with their hands in the cookie jar.

Marxism does not approach the working class as consisting only of its working (active) part, but also takes into account, with particular emphasis, the unemployed section of the proletariat, namely the industrial reserve army. In effect, capitalism is unthinkable without creating a reserve army of workers alongside an active army of workers. So, whether they are directly under the unemployed or in retiree status, those who cannot find a job and are no longer able to work are also included in the working class. In addition, workers have to produce not only their own existence, but also their offspring, that is, masses of new generations of wage labour. Therefore, the position of surviving by selling the workforce is not only a concern of the “head of the family”, but also poses a reality for the whole family members of working class: So working class is a reality together with the workers’ families. All these points we have tried to remind briefly, reveal clearly that today the working class is an overwhelming majority on a world scale.

History calls for duty

Contrary to those who want to ignore the working class, expel it from the stage of history or dissolve it in an ambiguous “middle class” definition without identity; the changing structure of the class on the basis of capitalist development and new technologies has neither stopped the growth of the proletariat, nor eliminated its potential for revolutionary struggle. The class that has the potential to change the world in a revolutionary way is the working class, as has been the case in the past. The revolutionary struggle potential of the proletariat has an objective basis, and this originates from its position in the capitalist production process. As long as capitalism exists, it will not be able to escape from producing its own gravedigger and creating the class that will put an end to the capitalist system of exploitation.

In the days when it came into fashion to say farewell to the working class, we turned to the future with our historical optimism based on these Marxist scientific analyses. We did not surrender to the temporary ebbs in the class movement; we proceeded forward with a patient, planned, and long-term understanding of struggle; and we expressed, with great faith, that only those who did so would prepare for the days when the working class struggle would rise again. Although the bourgeoisie seeks to ignore the working class in the good days of the capitalist economy, the days when it restores trust in its own system, the book The Growing Working Class proclaimed that, the working class, with its movement preparing for a new rise in various countries at the beginning of 21st century, was exclaiming to the world “he who laughs last, laughs best!”.

We are now passing through a new period in which in which the anger of the working class grows and this righteous anger turns into explosive revolts in various parts of the world. This is caused by the devastating consequences of the deepening historical crisis of capitalism. In this respect, the period of decline in the workers’ movement is now over. Sure, in terms of raising the level of revolutionary consciousness and organization of the class, we are still at the beginning of the road on a world scale. However, the change in the objective situation is of great importance since it provides a ground for class revolutionaries to step up their efforts to strengthen the subjective factor. It is obvious that today, the revolutionary mission of the working class has increased in importance and gained a burning character that will determine the fate of humankind. History calls on the working class for a huge task of ending the capitalist system of exploitation, which is driving humanity to destruction with its ruthless exploitation, unbearable relations of inequality, and bloody imperialist wars!