The question of the proletariat as a revolutionary subject cannot be resolved either by nostalgia for the forms the workers' movement once took, or by asserting that, since those forms have disappeared, the class whose existence they expressed has also disappeared. Both positions stem from the same confusion: they identify the existence of a class with the historical forms through which, under certain conditions, that class came to recognize itself, organize itself, and act politically. But a historical form can be destroyed without the social relation that made it possible disappearing, just as a class can exist objectively without yet having attained the political capacity to act as a class. Between these two things lies a crucial difference, for it is precisely here that we find the problem of our time: understanding why the proletariat continues to exist and, at the same time, why it has largely ceased to exist as a force capable of recognizing itself and consciously confronting the social relations that determine its existence.
To understand this, one must begin with the material relationship that constitutes classes, not with individuals' awareness of them. The proletariat does not exist because millions of people receive a wage, nor because they share a particular cultural background, nor because they recognize themselves under a common name. It exists because a segment of society is separated from the objective conditions that would allow it to autonomously produce and reproduce its life , and, in order to live, it must sell its labor power to those who control those conditions. The wage relationship is not simply an exchange between legally free individuals, but rather the means by which a fundamental separation is reproduced: on one side, those who possess the means of production and can purchase labor power; on the other, those who, deprived of those means, need to sell their capacity to work to obtain the means necessary for their existence. Class, therefore, does not appear after individuals have become aware of belonging to it; it exists prior to that awareness, as a social relationship imposed on individuals regardless of their thoughts about it.
This is what it means to affirm that the proletariat objectively exists. It is not a matter of attributing to it an eternal essence, nor of maintaining that everyone who receives a wage occupies exactly the same position within society, but rather of recognizing that, under capitalism, the reproduction of life for a fundamental part of the population depends on the sale of their labor power, and that this power is bought and used within a process whose purpose is not simply to satisfy the needs of those who work, but to produce and reproduce capital. The worker enters this process as the owner of their labor power, but not of the conditions under which they can use it; the capitalist possesses these conditions, buys that power, and incorporates it into a production process from which they obtain a value greater than what they advance in the form of wages. The relationship between the two does not depend on either of them being conscious of belonging to a class: it is reproduced every day through production, wages, and the need to sell labor power again in order to continue living.
Therefore, class is not an identity that can be adopted or abandoned at will. A worker may not consider themselves a proletarian, may politically identify with interests contrary to their own, may individually aspire to become a property owner, may reject all notions of class struggle, and may even consciously defend the order that oppresses them; none of this, in itself, alters the material relations in which they find themselves. Similarly, someone who owns the means of production may not recognize themselves as a member of a ruling class and may consider themselves simply an entrepreneur, an investor, or an individual who has succeeded through their own efforts; but their consciousness also does not alter the position they occupy within social relations. Classes do not first exist in consciousness in order to subsequently produce their material relations; it is these material relations that provide the foundation upon which a class consciousness may, or may not, develop.
But this is precisely where the difficulty begins. The fact that a class exists objectively does not mean that it exists as a political subject. The very relationship that materially unites workers can keep them separate in the immediate experience of their existence. Capital brings them together within an increasingly interdependent social production and, at the same time, pits them against each other in the competition for employment, for wages, and for the conditions necessary to reproduce their lives. Workers depend on one another in the general process of production, but each one individually depends on finding a buyer for their labor power. What appears from capital's point of view as an organized whole appears from the worker's point of view as a succession of particular relationships: a company, a contract, a lease, a debt, a workday, a threat of dismissal, a bill to pay. The whole exists materially, but it does not necessarily appear as a whole in the experience of those who bear it.
Herein lies one of the great forces of capitalism: it makes those objectively united by a social relationship appear subjectively separated by the concrete ways in which that relationship is reproduced. The worker who loses their job may interpret their situation as a personal failure; the person who cannot pay the rent may consider it a private problem; the person who accepts increasingly longer working hours may believe they are simply facing a particular demand from their company. Competition transforms a shared relationship into a multitude of separate experiences, and the immediate need to survive hinders precisely the kind of overall understanding that would allow us to recognize the common cause of these experiences.
Hence, class consciousness cannot be mechanically deduced from the existence of a class. The proletarian position contains the possibility of a common consciousness, but it does not automatically produce it. The worker does not become a revolutionary simply by being exploited, just as a multitude of individuals subjected to the same relationship do not, by that fact alone, constitute a collective force. For this possibility to be realized, something must occur that is not immediately contained in the economic position: individuals must enter into relationships with one another through struggle, they must discover that what they suffer separately can be confronted collectively, and they must experience in practice a force they could not know while remaining isolated.
Therefore, the class struggle should not be understood solely as a confrontation between two pre-existing subjects. It is also the process by which a class can become politically constituted. When workers collectively stop work to prevent a wage reduction, when they refuse to accept a dismissal, when they occupy a space to prevent an eviction, or when those experiencing the same situation begin to organize to confront it, they are not simply expressing a consciousness they already possessed. They are producing a new experience. They discover that the relationship each individual maintained with the capitalist can be transformed when collective action intervenes; they discover that the power that seemed to belong exclusively to the employer also depends on the workers continuing to produce; they discover that a private need can become a common demand and that solidarity is not only a moral disposition, but a material capacity to modify the balance of power.
The struggle thus produces a transformation in the very relationship between those who struggle. Where once workers were separated by competition, a shared experience begins to emerge; where there was individual fear, a collective capacity for resistance appears; where each person saw only their own situation, a social relationship affecting many begins to become visible. Consciousness does not arrive from the outside to illuminate a reality that remains unchanged: the very experience of reality is transformed when individuals begin to act upon it collectively. This is why a class can exist objectively before recognizing itself as such, and yet can only constitute itself as a political subject through a historical process of struggles in which that objective existence begins to transform into consciousness, organization, and power.
This also helps us understand why the defeat of the old labor movement has such profound significance and why, at the same time, it cannot be confused with the disappearance of the proletariat. Capitalism did not destroy a class that had ceased to exist, but rather many of the historical conditions that had allowed that class to recognize itself and organize itself in a particular way. Large-scale industrial concentration, workers' communities, certain forms of job security, mass trade union and political organizations, shared cultural traditions, and forms of sociability built around work were the result of specific historical conditions. When these conditions were transformed by capitalist restructuring, offshoring, productive fragmentation, precarious employment, and technological transformation, these forms began to lose the material basis that had allowed for their reproduction.
We cannot recover that world through willpower alone.
Nostalgia for vanished forms cannot restore the conditions that made them possible. But neither can we accept that their destruction proves the proletariat has ceased to exist. What has been destroyed is a particular form of the class's political constitution, not the social relation that continues to produce workers separated from the means of production and dependent on the sale of their labor power. The problem before us, therefore, is not to reconstruct the old workers' movement under new names, but to understand what forms of organization and struggle can emerge from current conditions and how they can transform a fragmented objective existence back into a collective force.
This is the point at which the question of autonomy becomes inseparable from the question of class.
If a class can only constitute itself politically through its own experiences of struggle, then the activity through which it constitutes itself cannot be indefinitely replaced by an organization acting on its behalf. An organization may be necessary to preserve experiences, coordinate forces, transmit knowledge, and make possible actions that isolated individuals could not undertake; but this necessity does not make the organization the subject of emancipation. When those participating in a struggle permanently delegate the capacity to decide on it to others, those who receive this delegation begin to occupy a different position from those who delegated it to them. They accumulate information, relationships, resources, and knowledge; they acquire a decision-making capacity that others cease to exercise directly; and what was initially a functional difference can progressively become a difference in power.
The process is well-known. An organization created to serve the struggle develops its own interests in preserving itself; those who perform temporary functions become permanent specialists; representation ceases to be a revocable function and begins to transform into a position; the need to coordinate demands the concentration of information and decisions; concentration facilitates immediate effectiveness, but can produce a growing separation between those who lead and those who execute. At a certain point, the organization may find itself defending its very existence as an institution even when that existence begins to contradict the autonomous capacity of those who originally created it.
This is not an accident that can be attributed to the personal corruption of certain leaders. It is a trend that arises from the very separation between function and power once that separation becomes entrenched. Precisely for this reason, the emancipation of workers cannot simply consist of replacing one leadership with another, nor in finding more honest leaders than the previous ones. If the fundamental relationship remains intact, the power to decide will continue to be concentrated outside those who are meant to be emancipated. Autonomy, then, is not a matter of organizational purity, but a requirement that stems from the very content of emancipation: if workers are to cease being subject to powers that decide over their lives, they cannot achieve this emancipation by building a separate power that permanently decides for them.
But autonomy contains a difficulty that cannot be resolved simply by affirming it. A struggle can be autonomous and yet remain confined within the particular conditions that gave rise to it. An assembly can decide collectively and yet have no capacity to modify the economic relations that exist outside of it. A community can build different forms of cooperation and still depend on the market to obtain what it cannot produce itself. A collective can achieve a real improvement and, at the same time, remain subject to the general relations that allow capital to continue reproducing itself.
This occurs because capital is not organized as a sum of individual spaces, but as a social relation that permeates and connects those spaces. A worker in one company depends on processes that unfold in other companies and in other territories; production depends on networks of transportation, energy, credit, and distribution; the reproduction of labor power depends on housing, care work, public services, and a multitude of activities that do not appear directly as industrial production, but without which capitalist production could not be sustained. A particular struggle can disrupt a part of that network, but as long as it remains isolated, it cannot modify the general relations upon which it depends.
That is why autonomy needs to be generalized.
This does not mean that all struggles must take the same form, nor that a central organization must absorb them into a single structure. It means something more concrete: that struggles must be able to establish relationships with one another that allow them to increase their capacity for action without losing control over themselves. One strike can find another; a struggle for housing can connect with workers who produce or maintain the spaces on which that housing depends; those fighting against precarious work can discover that the same relationship they experience appears in different forms in other sectors; those who carry out tasks of social reproduction can recognize the dependence that exists between their activity and the production as a whole.
Generalization does not consist of erasing the differences between these experiences, but rather in discovering the material relationship that allows one to become a source of strength for the others. Solidarity then ceases to be a declaration of principles and transforms into a concrete capacity. A struggle ceases to depend exclusively on its own strength when it can draw upon others; a victory ceases to be a particular outcome when it can open up possibilities elsewhere; a defeat ceases to be an absolute loss when the experience gained can be transmitted to those who continue fighting.
Here again, the question of the proletariat arises. Not because every struggle should be reduced to a wage demand, nor because there is a moral hierarchy among different forms of resistance, but because the possibility of generalizing struggles ultimately depends on the material relations that underlie them. Capitalism requires a multitude of different activities to function together, and precisely for this reason, it produces a mutual dependence that can become a foothold for collective action. Where production and social reproduction depend on the labor of millions of people, there is a potential for power that no single struggle possesses on its own.
The centrality of the proletariat does not mean, therefore, that the factory is the only site of struggle, nor that all conflicts must be subordinated to the wage struggle. It means that the transformation of society must confront the material relations through which capital reproduces its power, and that these relations permeate all of social life. The proletariat is central not because it possesses moral superiority, nor because history has assigned it a mission, but because its position within capitalist reproduction contains an objective capacity for disruption and transformation that no political action can ignore if it truly aims to overcome capitalism.
But this objective capacity alone does not become a revolutionary force. Capital can have millions of workers at its disposal and, at the same time, keep them divided. It can replace some with others, relocate production processes, pit companies and regions against each other, exploit wage differences, create precarious employment, and make mutual dependence appear as competition. Therefore, the issue is not about discovering an existing force and waiting for it to manifest itself, but about creating, through struggle, the conditions in which that force can recognize itself and act.
This is where the positions of Amorós and Ibáñez become most interesting.
Amorós has emphasized the profound destruction of the old working-class world and the impossibility of recovering, through mere ideological continuity, the conditions that made the old proletarian movement possible. This critique is essential because it prevents us from confusing fidelity to a tradition with the reproduction of the material conditions that made it possible. We cannot artificially reconstruct the old communities nor restore to current organizations the function they had when a different social structure existed.
But acknowledging the depth of the defeat does not allow us to transform it into the definitive horizon of history. If the disappearance of the old working-class world is interpreted as the disappearance of any possibility of proletarian recomposition, then the defeat ceases to be an object of analysis and becomes a premature conclusion about the future. Capitalism would then have succeeded not only in destroying a historical form of organization, but also in imposing on those who have suffered this destruction the conviction that no other form can emerge from their own contradictions. Critiquing the vanished conditions is necessary; making their disappearance a theory of impossibility is quite another matter.
Ibáñez starts from a different, yet equally necessary, difficulty: the impossibility of reducing contemporary struggles to a homogeneous figure of the proletariat, as if all forms of domination could simply be subsumed under the experience of a single historical subject. Paying attention to the plurality of resistances allows for a better understanding of a much more complex social reality and prevents the transformation of a historical category into an abstract identity.
But the plurality of resistances does not solve the problem of power either. Capitalism can withstand and even integrate a multiplicity of conflicts as long as they remain sufficiently separate, because it can negotiate with them, institutionalize their demands, absorb their forms of expression, and transform their outcomes into new conditions for reproduction. The existence of many resistances demonstrates that the social order produces contradictions; it does not demonstrate that these contradictions have yet found the political form capable of confronting them as a common force.
Therefore, we cannot choose between the proletariat, conceived as an already constituted subject, and a multiplicity of struggles condemned to remain dispersed. The first path transforms a historical possibility into a pre-established identity; the second fails to explain how resistance movements can acquire the strength to transform the general relations that produce them. The real problem lies between these two: a class exists objectively, but it must constitute itself politically; struggles are multiple, but they can find relationships that allow them to generalize; autonomy is indispensable, but it cannot be confused with isolation; organization is necessary, but it cannot become a power separate from those who need it.
In this way, we can understand more precisely what it means to say that a class is constituted in struggle. Struggle does not create class relations from scratch, because those relations exist before workers recognize themselves within them. What struggle can create is the possibility for those who objectively occupy a common position to begin acting as a force conscious of that position. Struggle transforms an objective relationship into a shared experience; that experience can produce consciousness; consciousness can produce organization; organization can preserve and expand strength; and the expansion of that strength can make a new experience of unity possible. This is not a linear or inevitable process, but an open one, marked by defeats, recoveries, internal conflicts, setbacks, and new possibilities.
That is why a revolutionary policy cannot wait for this process to end before intervening. There is no moment when the class appears fully formed and only then does the political task begin. The constitution of the class is precisely the terrain on which this task must unfold. Wherever a conflict arises, there is the possibility that it will remain confined within its immediate limits, but there is also the possibility that it will produce new relationships among those involved and between them and other sectors. What matters is fostering the conditions that allow this second possibility to develop.
This requires a militant practice that does not replace the initiative of those who struggle, but rather contributes to making it more conscious, more organized, and more capable of relating to others. Militancy does not consist of imposing a consciousness from the outside that others do not possess, but of participating in the collective development of an experience; it does not consist of providing permanent leadership, but of helping the struggles themselves find ways to coordinate; it does not consist of building an organization intended to represent the class, but of developing capacities that allow those who struggle to maintain and expand their own strength.
The criterion for judging an organization should therefore be simple, even if its consequences are demanding: if it increases the autonomous capacity of those participating in the struggle, it serves emancipation; if it progressively replaces that capacity with its own, it begins to reproduce the relationship it sought to overcome. An organization should not be measured by its size, its permanence, or its capacity to speak on behalf of many, but by what it leaves in the hands of those who struggle once the organization has fulfilled its function.
This also alters our relationship with defeat. If a struggle ends and those who participated remain exactly where they were, without having gained any experience, relationships, knowledge, or organizational capacity that can be used in the future, then the defeat is complete. But if the experience can be passed on, if those who participated maintain connections with other conflicts, if they have learned to recognize the forms of division through which the adversary was able to defeat them, and if the next struggle begins with greater strength than the previous one, then even a defeat can become part of a process of formation.
The same applies to victory. An immediate conquest can improve living conditions and yet not substantially alter the relationships that produce those conditions. A victory takes on a different dimension when it expands the capacity of those who struggle, establishes new relationships, and opens up conflicts that previously seemed impossible. The crucial point, therefore, is not to measure each struggle by its distance from a revolution conceived as a final event, but to ask what capacities it produces and whether those capacities increase or decrease the possibility of a broader transformation.
Capital reproduces itself by accumulating power, knowledge, resources, and the capacity for reorganization. Struggles, too, need to accumulate experience. But this accumulation cannot take the same form as capitalist accumulation. It cannot consist of the permanent concentration of power in a separate organization. It must consist of expanding the capacities of those who struggle, transmitting experiences, and creating relationships that prevent a struggle from having to start from scratch.
This is perhaps the most difficult task we face: building a common force without building separate power .
If we abandon generalization, each struggle becomes isolated, and capital can defeat them one by one. If we abandon autonomy, generalization can become bureaucratic centralization, and collective power can end up being managed by an entity no longer dependent on those who produce it. The difficulty cannot be resolved by eliminating one of the terms. We must maintain the tension between the two and build organizational forms capable of harnessing it as a force.
There is no formula that guarantees that result.
No structure is immune to bureaucratization, nor can any organization promise that it will never become detached from those who sustain it. Autonomy cannot be guaranteed by any particular institutional form, because any form can become a power relationship if those involved cease to control its decisions. The only possible guarantee is a continuous practice of oversight, participation, the circulation of roles, the ability to be recalled, and the capacity to transform the structures themselves when they no longer serve the struggle.
This is insufficient given the magnitude of the task.
But therein lies the seriousness of the problem. We don't have a historical machine that automatically leads to revolution, nor an organization that can replace the activity of millions of people, nor an autonomous way of life capable of escaping on its own from the general relations of capital. We have an objectively existing but politically fragmented class, struggles that appear scattered, and a possibility of recomposition that can only be realized through practice.
We don't know what form this recomposition will take. We don't know what conflicts will be able to bring it about. We don't know which organizations will survive the test of struggle without breaking away from it. We don't know what defeats will be necessary, nor what victories will pave the way for a broader path. But the absence of these certainties doesn't alter the structure of the problem. As long as there is a society in which those who produce do not control the conditions of their own existence, as long as life depends on the sale of labor power, and as long as social production is subordinated to the valorization of capital, the material conditions of a contradiction will exist that no historical defeat can definitively abolish. What is not guaranteed is that those who occupy this position will be able to recognize it, organize themselves, and act upon it.
That is where our responsibility lies.
Not in announcing that the revolution will come, because we have no such knowledge; nor in declaring that it can no longer come, because no historical defeat grants us that right, nor was it granted to Amorós or Ibáñez. Our responsibility lies in working on the present conditions of its possibility, wherever social relations produce conflict, wherever individuals discover that their problems are not solely their own, wherever a struggle begins to transform the relationships between those who participate in it, and wherever one experience can find another similar one.
The issue is not waiting. The issue is intervening in that process.
To intervene means to contribute to a struggle's understanding of the relationships that determine it without imposing a prefabricated consciousness from the outside; it means helping those who participate to maintain control of their own decisions; it means establishing links between conflicts that capital keeps separate; it means circulating experiences and knowledge; it means preventing coordination from becoming permanent representation and representation from becoming power; it means, ultimately, working so that each struggle can leave behind something more than the immediate result of its conflict.
Because if the proletariat objectively exists as a class produced by capitalist relations, it can only become a revolutionary subject through a practice in which that common existence is transformed into consciousness, organization, and strength; and if that strength is to be truly emancipatory, it will have to retain in the hands of those who produce it the capacity to decide about it and, at the same time, find the means to overcome the isolation in which capital keeps its experiences divided.
This is the relationship we must establish between class and autonomy: not two principles that can be added together from the outside, but two dimensions of the same process. Class needs autonomy because it can only emancipate itself if it develops its own capacity for action and decision-making; autonomy needs generalization because no particular experience can, by itself, abolish the social relations that surround it; generalization needs organization because dispersed forces do not spontaneously become a common force; and organization needs to remain under the control of those who struggle because, when it acquires a separate existence, it risks becoming the very power that replaces the force it was meant to organize.
The revolution does not begin when an already established class presents itself to history as a finished subject. It begins much earlier, the moment those who live separated by the forms of capitalist society begin to discover, through struggle, that their separation is not their destiny; the moment a particular demand reveals a general relationship; the moment a defeat leaves behind an experience that can be used elsewhere; the moment an organization ceases to be merely an instrument and becomes a collective capacity that remains in the hands of those who created it.
We cannot know how far this process will go. But we can decide whether we contribute to closing it or opening it.
The defeat of the old workers' movement does not oblige us to rebuild it, nor does it authorize us to bury it with it. It obliges us to understand what conditions made its existence possible, what forces destroyed it, what contradictions remain, and what new forms can emerge from them. The class has not disappeared because it has lost the historical forms through which it was recognized; nor has it automatically become a subject simply by continuing to exist objectively.
Between these two things lies the entire terrain of the struggle. And it is on that terrain that we must position ourselves.
We do not know what form the force capable of transforming the social relations that today seem to be imposed as second nature will take. We do know, however, that it cannot be built from outside the working class, that it cannot arise from the separation between those who decide and those who obey, and that it cannot be born from the endless sum of struggles incapable of converging. It will have to emerge from the concrete experience through which workers, in their different conditions of existence, discover the relationships that unite them, build forms of organization that remain under their control, and find the means to extend each conflict beyond the limits that initially contain it.
It is not, therefore, a matter of waiting for the revolutionary subject to appear or of inventing it through a theory that claims to speak on its behalf; it is a matter of participating in the struggles through which a class that objectively exists can begin to recognize itself in its own strength, transform that strength into organization without surrendering it to a separate power, and extend it to the point where what today appears as a multitude of subjugated, dispersed lives forced to fight separately can become a force conscious that the relations that produce it as a class are also the relations that it can abolish.
The proletariat exists; but only by fighting, organizing, and expanding its struggle can it cease to be a subjugated class and become the force capable of abolishing all classes. Its victory is not to perpetuate itself as a class, but to destroy itself at the very moment of conquering freedom for all humanity.
Capital pits us against each other, fragments us, and forces us to fight separately. Our task is to transform this separation into a problem, each conflict into an experience, and each experience into a shared strength. We don't know beforehand what form this strength will take. But we know it won't appear on its own. It will be built through struggle, autonomous organization, and the capacity to extend each fight beyond its immediate limits.
White flag or black flag? That is the question: to accept defeat as final or to make the class struggle the path to the abolition of classes.
Agustín Guillamón. Barcelona, September 2026.
https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2026/10/16/clase-autonomia-y-constitucion-del-sujeto-revolucionario/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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