{"id":5355,"date":"2022-01-26T00:55:48","date_gmt":"2022-01-26T05:55:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=5355"},"modified":"2022-01-30T01:39:02","modified_gmt":"2022-01-30T06:39:02","slug":"social-movements-are-how-classes-struggle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2022\/01\/social-movements-are-how-classes-struggle\/","title":{"rendered":"Social movements are how classes struggle"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following article consists of excerpts from Colin Barker\u2019s<\/strong> 2007 draft article, “Class Struggle, Movement, Party”, the full text of which can be found here<\/a>. In the excerpts that follow, Barker offers crucial insights into the relationship between classes, movements, and organization. Most provocatively, while affirming the centrality of class struggle, he argues that \u201cit is movements rather than classes that prove to be the direct collective actors that possess the capacity to change the world.\u201d Although this argument may sound novel, Barker shows how it was a basic assumption informing the thinking of such revolutionaries as Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin, and Antonio Gramsci. The dynamics of social movements were a central theme in Barker\u2019s writing throughout his life, always approached with an unparalleled curiosity and creativity.<\/em><\/p>\n

All of Barker\u2019s writings are animated by a fundamental faith in ordinary people to think and act for themselves, not to serve as pawns or props in the grand strategies of parliamentarians or states. As Barker points out, \u201cthe process of mobilization into movements is one of self-activation, of active engagement.\u201d That self-activity or self-emancipation of working people has been the core of the politics of socialism from below since Marx\u2019s time. To recognize the central importance of social movements to class struggle is not, however, to fetishize spontaneity. Movements are \u201calways and everywhere riven by inner contradictions and arguments,\u201d Barker argues, and the working class \u201cwill never unify itself spontaneously.\u201d Organization is required precisely to influence the direction of these movements toward greater self-reliance and expansion in moments of upheaval when it counts.<\/em><\/p>\n

The argument presented in these excerpts is expanded upon in many of Barker\u2019s other writings, but especially in his chapter of the recently published Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age<\/a> (2021).<\/em><\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on Colin Barker\u2019s<\/strong> website<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n

– Sean Larson, for Tempest<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Class Struggle as a Concept<\/h4>\n

I<\/span>n Marx’s usage, the term \u201cabstract\u201d most decidedly does not mean \u201cunreal\u201d: value and surplus-value define the most fundamental relationships of the whole of capitalist society, permeating every aspect of life. They determine the boundaries of what is possible within the society, determining its other shapes and forms.<\/p>\n

I want to suggest that Marx’s concept of \u201cclass struggle\u201d is that kind of abstract concept. Class struggle, in Marx’s meaning, also permeates every aspect of life and determines\u2014in the sense of \u201csetting limits to\u201d\u2014the whole of political and social life. It is, however, at the same time an \u201cabstract\u201d or general concept, and if [we] want to study its actual forms of appearance we need to deploy a whole range of other, more concrete, concepts, at the same time never forgetting how these are shaped in their actual functioning by the underlying processes of class struggle.<\/p>\n

What I suggest is that \u201cclass struggle\u201d is an \u201cabstract concept\u201d in the above sense. We cannot understand the way capitalist societies work without constant awareness of class struggle as a general process that underlies and shapes everything. Nor is it imaginable that, without class struggle, there can be any possibility of future social transformation. However, class struggle always appears in \u201cmediated\u201d forms. Classes, as social wholes, do not directly appear as political entities with formed wills and purposes, acting as homogeneous subjects. Nor should we assume that they ever will. Rather, actual class struggles never involve all workers equally, even at the very peak of mass revolutionary battles, and it is exactly for this reason that such struggles always pose vital questions about strategy and tactics. Nor, indeed, do actual movements ever involve simply members of \u201cone class.\u201d Further, the issues that arise in social struggles are not, mostly, capable of being simply \u201creduced\u201d to \u201cclass issues\u201d without taking account of a whole series of additional mediations.<\/p>\n