WORLD WORLDWIDE GREECE News Journal Update - (en) Greece, Blak and Red: THE CLASSICAL AND THE ANARCHAL APPROACH OF CLASS ANALYSIS (PART 1) - BY YIANNI VOLIATIS/ORTUS (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Anarchism is a revolutionary movement with clear roots and references to
the working class, the oppressed and the exploited of the planet. His
most important political vision, his final vision, is the social
revolution that will overthrow this domineering and exploitative world
and gradually give birth to a new one: that of equality, freedom,
solidarity, without borders and states and classes, without gender and
race discrimination. The members and activists of the anarchist movement
have traditionally come from the wider working class - and those who
historically came from an upper class, willingly gave up their political
and material privileges or put their wealth in the service of the cause
(a prime example of Prince" Pyotr Kropotkin). As it follows from the
above, a key part in our broader political analysis as anarchists
(should be) is the class analysis. And an important part of this
analysis and a task for anarchists today is to clarify what the
definition "Working Class" means in modern terms and who it consists of.
This is extremely important, since social classes are not mere
philology, but their members have competing material and political
interests. So we should put some seals on the Anarchist Movement as
revolutionary-class and not as simply a "rights", "identity" cross-class
protest movement. That is, a movement that aims at the overthrow of
capitalism and not at a parallel competitive course. In this way we will
manage to determine his address, his enemies and his potential allies.

The working class is defined by Karl Marx, very tepidly and vaguely, in
the Third Volume of "Capital". The main relationship that defines the
social classes in general and more specifically the working class, is
the relationship it has with the means of production, or rather the
absence of a relationship of ownership over them. As a "means of
production" we can define everything that can produce capital for its
owner, while such a thing presupposes the exploitation, directly or
indirectly, of a third person and his labor power, i.e. the extraction
of surplus value. "Surplus value" is roughly defined as the difference
between the value created by workers in the capitalist economy and the
wages they are paid - and which are always lower than this value. This
difference is the profit of the bosses, which is then mainly invested in
new machines, new projects, etc., in order to increase production and
profit for the company.

Thus, referring to the means of production, we can talk about a large
factory with machines, where many workers are employed, fields where
farm workers work, but even a small workshop with one or two employees.
If we want to go deeper, we can separate inactive capital, i.e. that
which does not return to the market in the form of investment, from
active capital, pure "surplus value" from "super-labour", the former
being that which the Marx called "productive labor" and the second
"non-productive", that is, if a product with use value is created from
the labor or not. But these definitions are a matter of controversy even
for the most "hard" Marx scholars, so let's leave them aside in this
particular paper.

Also, more "archaic" types of "means of production", which have survived
through time and the transformation of social relations and in which the
extraction of surplus value or surplus labor is more indirect, are
property relations, such as the possession of real estate and, in
general, premises for rent (real estate). There we are essentially
talking about an "indirect" extraction of surplus value, as the tenant
is probably subject to direct exploitation in his workplace, but he
needs to allocate part of the earnings - and therefore the remuneration
for the surplus value he has produced - to the owner of the property.
And the owner has the possibility of imposing on the tenant, such as
evicting him if he does not pay the rent on time, etc. Nevertheless,
there is no direct extraction of surplus value, which we find in a
typical employment relationship. In reality it is a commercial-consumer
relationship, since the very means of raising capital, e.g. real estate
does not need to be handled by workers in order to produce goods, while
they are themselves the "consumer good" that brings profit to capital.
It is an ancient form of property relationship that produces profit,
similar to that of landowners. Except that here we are not talking about
the taking away from the landowner of the greater part of the harvest
produced by some serfs or landless peasants or the exploitation of the
labor power of others in the production of this harvest, but the direct
taking away of part of the remuneration that the worker receives from
his work for some other employer, that is, part of his salary, from his
tenant, with whom he has no other commercial relationship than that of
providing him with the house in which he lives.

The members of the Working Class do not own means of production, i.e.
means which produce capital and with which they can extract surplus
value from other people, but, on the contrary, in order to survive they
must themselves sell their labor power to a third party and collect a
salary for this work.

Of course, it is not every salaried part of the working class, since,
according to Marx's lukewarm definition, there is a gradation in terms
of the size of the wage and what it can buy - material or immaterial -
that will separate the high wage earner from the worker. , in terms of
quality of life, leisure, amenities, and the ease of accumulating
capital that can be converted into means of production in a second year.
Of course, the definition of "high wage" in Marx is rather vague, while
in this part the first "interventions" of anarchist thought in relation
to some additional criteria, which have to do with "management" as a
concept in the economy, enter into this part: senior salaried managers,
whether in the public or private sector, can be counted as part of the
working class. That is, those who may not own the capital themselves,
but own an important part of its management and reproduction, as well as
play a decisive role in the management of human resources (workers) and
can have a direct impact on the acquisition or loss of a job by another
employee. In other words, they are at the same time
supervisors-supervisors of the rest of the workers and responsible for
the reproduction of capital.

The above objection is encountered very early in the revolutionary
history of the socialist movement and has to do with Lenin's idea about
the "Managers" of the factories, after the October Revolution. In short,
Lenin, like most of his genuine descendants, did not believe in the
self-management of factories and production by the working class as
such, but looked to special "comrades-managers", who were often only one
person in each factory, which would determine the policy of production,
according to the state line. In a relatively recent article (June 2021)
in the anarcho-syndicalist review "Ideas and Action", entitled "Against
Leninism", Tom Wetzel explains to us that Lenin, speaking of "workers'
control" in the position of the same name in 1917, it did not support
anything other than the obligation of "Managers" to "open and present
the books of the enterprise to the workers". Literally, that is, for the
employees to "check" whether what the manager is doing is clear of
irregularities - where an irregularity, of course, beyond the moral
part, was the disregard of the central state policy for the economy.
However, the workers themselves would not have a say on the production
line and policy: This would come directly from the central planning of
the economy, i.e. from the State, while the "Manager" would take care of
its correct application in each factory.

Vladimir Lenin puts his thoughts about this layer of "managers" and
their role within (?) the Working Class very clear in his work "The
Direct Tasks of Soviet Power" in 1918: "The indisputable experience of
history has shown that ... the dictatorship of individuals has too often
been the vehicle, the channel of the dictatorship of revolutionary
classes ... Large-scale machine industry-which is the material
productive source and the foundation of socialism-requires absolute and
strict unity of will .... How can strict unity of will be ensured? When
thousands submit their will to the will of one... Unquestioning
submission to a single will is absolutely essential to the success of
labor processes based on large-scale machine industry... today the
Revolution demands, in the interest of socialism, that the masses to
obey unequivocally the single will of the leaders of the labor process".

Of course, this is a position that, as we said above, the anarchists -
and other parts of the revolutionary movement - do not accept, and the
modern class analysis of the libertarian movement considers all kinds of
"Managers" as a middle class, outside of the working class. After all,
the forms of organization of production work and the distribution of
goods that flourished in the places where the working class, in the
midst of revolutionary processes, came under the influence of anarchist
ideas, prove the statement to be true: The collectives of the Spanish
Revolution of 1936- 1939 they did not know of a "manager" and "obedience
to the will" of a specific person, but they proposed self-management of
production. Where there were separate managerial tasks, which required
specialized knowledge (something natural, since we are talking about a
new society that was just emerging from the shell of the old one), the
people who provided them were not considered superior to the rest of the
workers and did not have responsibilities of a decisive nature, but
advisory. The decision-making processes within the collectivized
factories - and even more so in the fields - were horizontal. The old
"managers" of the capitalist era were allowed to stay as consultants, as
equals among equals. Furthermore, in historical periods where anarchists
played a large role in labor uprisings and attempts to self-manage the
means of production, such as in the Biennio Rosso (Biennio Rosso,
1919-1920) in Italy, a cyclical rotation of tasks was preferred within
the workplace, to break specialization and because it was believed that
the worker was more complete as a revolutionary subject if he had full
insight and knowledge on the entire production process, which struck at
the root of the phenomenon of alienation of the worker from the product
of his work.

Valuable information about the life and work within these collectives is
given to us first hand, having experienced that time as a teenage
anarchist in Barcelona, Abel Paz, in his work "Journey to the Past"
(1995): "The workshop where I worked as an apprentice it was in Calle
Mallorca, at the corner with Calle Navas de Tolosa...When the workshop
was collectivized, both bosses remained as simple workers...Peiro was a
skilled craftsman and remained in the factory as a technician. His
partner, Serra, was an elderly man who did clerical and accounting
work...At first I learned to work with a sledgehammer...then they made
me learn to glue tanks. At that time I had read nothing of Proudhon
except "Property is Theft," and I am sure the rest did not even know
that. Apparently they had understood by instinct alone that
specialization limits the creative spirit of man. There was no
specialization in that lab. All workers passed through all posts and
could succeed in all jobs. Even the accountant, when he didn't have a
job, would pick up the sledgehammer or tackle the lathe or welding."

Also, an important clarification, which follows indirectly, both from
the analysis of Marx and Engels regarding the constitution of the
Working Class, but is also an important part of the anarchist position
on the theory of classes, has to do with a relationship of a
non-economic nature, at least not direct, but rather "ideological". So
according to the writings of the two German theorists on the role of the
state as guardian of the interests of the respective upper class and of
the anarchists regarding the positions that carry the privileges of
coercion: As a matter of fact, those who belong to the security forces
are excluded from the working class. and in mechanisms of repression,
that is, the military and all kinds of police, as guardians of the
system and therefore as inextricably linked to the interests of the
bourgeoisie. In fact, Engels had mentioned the following verbatim, in
relation to the role of the security forces: "The police will keep vigil
so that (the worker) starves to death in a quiet way, in no way
offensive to the bourgeoisie" (" The Condition of the Working Class in
England" 1845).

In addition to the above, it is now clear that the management of the
state (regardless of its form, bourgeois or "labor") and its mechanisms,
historically gives rise to new elites with their own separate economic
interests, but linked to those of the economic ruling class , since many
of the members of these two sets are common. The anarchist Errico
Malatesta had even mentioned in his work "Anarchy" (1891) that "Today
the Government consists of owners or people of their class, so strongly
under their influence that the richest do not even find it necessary to
participate actively themselves ". Whether we analyze political power as
a servant, or as cooperating and complementing economic power, it is a
part hostile and foreign to the Working Class. He has the power of
imposition on the oppressed, he is essentially the "chief" of the
security forces.

The enemy camp still includes a large portion of "workers" who hold high
positions in institutions that reproduce the ideology of the Bourgeois
Class and its hegemony. Such can be certain great journalists and
university professors. But not the teachers in the schools, who, as
civil servants, although they do not reproduce "capital" for a boss, are
an inferior part of the system, in the specific historical period that
it is going through, they perform strictly administrative duties, in
which they are not called upon to receive substantial structural
decisions and are paid with salaries commensurate with the Working
Class. Another analysis on the issue of civil servants is the one that
presents the structure - State not simply as the current (alienated)
form of social organization, but as the "collective capitalist" - and
civil servants as the workers in it, of whose work it exploits, in order
to continue its operation.

In relation to the media again, we would say that not even the ordinary
workers, who do not have a share in the production of the pro-Urban
Class political discourse from the Middle, but simply work in equally
processing tasks (reporter, camera, editor, etc.), they can be seen as
enemies of the working class, on the contrary, parts of them have often
been the protagonists in the past in struggles of economic and political
content, either for their sector or in general.

Finally, in the working class, Marx also classifies the unemployed, who
are the surplus labor force. It is characterized as the "reserve army"
of the working class, since, by maintaining it in increased numbers, the
bosses can blackmail the workers with the bogeyman of the expendability
of their workplace. On the one hand, the unemployed person is more
vulnerable to accepting a job of another worker, with reduced wages and
rights, in order to get out of his poverty, on the other hand, the
worker himself is easier to discipline when there is blackmail
dismissal, with the prospect of his position being immediately filled by
someone unemployed. (A large part of this sub-stratum today consists of
migrant workers, to whom we will refer later in the second part of this
text).

In summary, if we want to give a modern, more expanded definition of the
Working Class, based on both the "classic" Marxist analysis and the
anarchist perspectives on it, we would say that it consists of all those
who, in order to survive, have not some other means, despite their labor
power (whether they are working or not at the given time period), they
do not manage large funds for the benefit of their boss for a pittance,
they do not belong to some oppressive or repressive apparatus of the
state and they do not perform work of oppression, control and management
over other employees (administrative tasks). Also, they do not reproduce
the ideology of the Urban Class for hire, through some institution,
having a dominant position. Finally, it is not part of the political
elite and the management of state institutions.

Saints Anargyro - Kamaterou:
https://anarchism.espivblogs.net/
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