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+3 votes
Are worker struggles as irrelevant to insurrection as post-leftist make it sound?
by

2 Answers

+3 votes
no to both parts of this question.
social war is not just broadened class war. class war as a concept riffs off of marxist thought about the workers being the revolutionary subject - the group of people who are the engine for fundamental political change (note: "political" not "social").
and i don't think that post-leftists are saying that worker's struggles are irrelevant. they are (i believe) saying that a) the idea that workers are any more revolutionary than any other group of people is demonstrably false, and b) unions (as a force of the workers -- which they aren't really anymore, if they ever were) are not revolutionary, and c) the premise that "class war" is based on (see my second paragraph) is outdated and wrong headed.
but maybe you mean something different by class war, and by workers struggles, in which case being more specific might be helpful here?
by (53.1k points)
+2 votes
Not irrelevant, but not the central activity of insurrection. Recall that the class struggle types are convinced (even now) that the proletariat, the working class is the subject of history. That they are the sole carriers of utopia, and that without them everything else is just false consciousness. It's like a marxist mantra and in 2013 it means nothing, or maybe everything. I would argue that with the globalization of the wage relation, that to speak of classes means nothing. What happens when everyone, save a handful of the wealthy, falls under the same lash? I think it means that class, as a concept, loses its relevance, it fails the dialectical test by virtue of its universality. We are now required to speak of humanity as the insurrectionary subject, and that the real enemy has become not a person, not a class, but society as concept, or even more to the point--civilization. Will the armies and cops and the collaborationists oppose the insurrection? Only if the pay is good, most are in it for the money and when that ceases to lose meaning, fealty evaporates. That will be our moment, the Social War will be won or lost in the days following that eventuality.
by (560 points)
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