The history of class struggle: from original accumulation to neoliberalism

Monthly Review, May, 1997 by Kees van der Pijl

On the workers' side, there is also a very differentiated picture. Depending on the varying degrees to which the commodity form is imposed on labor relations, workers may be semi-proletarianized people or hired hands, etc. Wage workers may be employed in a family setting, they may be recruited as vagrants into work-house labor forces, or they may be former artisans and their apprentices dislocated by new forms of factory organization of work, and so on. The different phases of original accumulation, and the deepening control of capital at every stage, have been expressed in various forms of struggle: the early formation of trade unions in response to the destruction of the autonomy of artisans, the Luddite revolt against early mechanization and the laws against combination to quell it, or the resistance to the introduction of Taylorism and Fordism in Europe under the Marshall Plan.

To the degree that original accumulation proceeds in a shock-like fashion, there occurs what sociologists call anomie. People subjected to the new discipline experience a loss of normative coherence which creates a susceptibility to new forms of collective consciousness. This normative vacuum, affecting large masses of people who find themselves driven into the unknown, creates the opportunity for intellectual vanguards to try and steer the mass movement towards some new pattern of organized existence.

We can still observe this process today: for example, the Islamist doctrine that triumphed in the 1979 Iranian revolution has a "proletarian" connotation because "Islamic ideology became a substitute for the lost communality of the oppressed masses."(5) Indeed the Iranian revolution has been compared to the Bolshevik revolution, at least in the sense that both found their mass base among "former peasants streaming into the city."(6) The great differences between these two cases arise not only from the obvious historical and material differences between pre-revolutionary Russia and Iran but also from the fact that, in cases like these, where an intellectual "vanguard" steps into a normative vacuum, the particular nature of that vanguard has a disproportionate effect on the movement's orientation.

Struggles in Production and the Historical Proletariat

The development of capital beyond its earlier forms into industrial capital goes hand-in-hand with the generalization of the commodity form and the wage relation. Having imposed this formal discipline (and continuing, as we saw, to deepen it), capital is now driven by the need to raise the rate of exploitation. The discipline of capital here means that the technical labor process is subordinated to the process of value expansion or valorization. Human labor power exists as part of the natural/social substratum on which the mode of production rests. Now, the human capacity to produce tools and food, to have ideas, etc. is turned into a commodity (labor power) which becomes part of the material inputs of capitalist production and accumulation. This drive to transform labor power into a commodity like any other requires a constant reimposition of capitalist discipline on human beings, who are, of course, resistant to commodification in a way that inanimate material objects are not.