in Esperanto
Chapter 8: NEW REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT
In order not to end communism as a blue bird, we need a new revolutionary movement with a new term and a new methodology that breaks the old revolutionary common sense, armed proletarian revolution. What could it be like?
1. The leading actors of revolution are the common people.
1.1. Political enterprise called "revolution"
Up until the previous chapter, the reality of communist society has been described quite concretely, but the big question of how communism is actually realized in the first place still remains. If this big problem cannot be solved, communism will be nothing more than an unreachable blue bird.
So, first, I would like to review what was discussed in Chapter 1. I argued there that capitalism is strong and incapable of self-destruction, but that this 'modern' economic system reveals serious limitations.
Therefore, if we do not simply object to capitalism, but rather give up on capitalism and truly desire the realization of a communist society - for those who do not wish to do so, this chapter and the next chapter are unnecessary -, we must artificially break away from capitalism through the political enterprise of "revolution." Who will lead the revolution? This section is about the answer to this question.
1.2. Marxist model answer
According to Marxist theory, which is considered "orthodox", the working class (proletariat) is the main subject of the communist revolution. This answer is still politically correct. This is because capitalism, no matter how much it changes its superficial form, cannot, at its fundamental level, subside the class antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
Today, the line of labor-management cooperation has taken root in developed capitalist countries. However, this is nothing more than a remnant of the honeymoon period, when total capital increased the share of labor in an era of soaring growth, and managed to achieve relatively high wages. Therefore, when faced with an economic crisis such as the Great Recession of the World, the harsh structure of wage slavery will immediately surface.
The fact that it is the wage workers who suffer the most from the logic of capitalism is a universal law of political economy almost all over the world. Indeed, it is the wage laborers, i.e. wage serfs, who have the strongest reason for the final end of capitalism, and the proletarian revolution aiming at the realization of a communist society is the uprising of wage serfs.
1.3. A difficult "proletarian revolution"
However, the above is just a revolutionary subject theory based on political economic theory, and from a social dynamics point of view, a "proletarian revolution" is no longer possible. why? First and foremost, today's working class is so deeply divided that it cannot be brought together by a single class interest.
First of all, this division has arisen in the form of a polarization within the incumbent workers between the general worker class (blue-collar workers) and the senior worker class (white-collar workers). The former are mostly non-career workers in the operational sector, while the latter are career workers who are candidates for future management positions.
Even though they are the same workers, they are placed in different positions. Senior workers are generally well-educated and highly paid, and although they are wage workers, they are candidates for future management positions and have the logic of capital. It is an elite who is fully educated and walks the path of management. They can be superior and sometimes even hostile to the common working class.
This division of "blue vs. white" has a long history with the development of the joint-stock company system, but in recent years, a dichotomy between relatively stable and unstable classes has become noticeable even within the general worker class. The stable class joins a labor union and manages to maintain solidarity, but the unstable class consists of many unorganized and fragmented non-regular workers, and their interests tend to conflict.
Furthermore, in modern times, public authorities such as the national and local governments also employ many wage workers. These public workers (so-called civil servants) are in a position to supervise the activities of private capital, have relatively high educational backgrounds and wage levels, and wage workers are also divided by these public and private sectors. However, even within the public sector, there is a clearer class difference between general workers and senior workers than in the private sector.
In addition to this division within incumbent workers, the generational divide between incumbent workers and retired workers is deepening with the development of the old-age pension system. If the pension income of retired workers is guaranteed by the pension insurance premiums paid by incumbent workers, whose future pension benefits may decrease, a clear intergenerational conflict will surface.
The intra-class divisions described above have also succeeded in relativizing the class differences between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat to a considerable extent. Many of the corporate executives who represent today's bourgeoisie are promoted and selected from among the upper working class (in some cases, the general working class). In this way, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie are connected by a staircase - by no means a smooth one. Furthermore, retired workers who invest part of their savings can be considered to be subsumed by the bourgeoisie as a class of petty investors.
In this way, the confrontational scheme of "bourgeoisie vs. proletariat" has, in fact, liquefied considerably without being subdued in essence.
Moreover, assimilation to capitalism is progressing remarkably even within the consciousness of the working class itself. Marx once wrote in the first volume of Capital, “As capitalist production progresses, the working class who accepts the demands of this mode of production as self-evident natural lawsthrough education, tradition, and custom will appear.” Now it seems that the working class has almost has almost made capitalism part of itself.
As such, it cannot be said that a "proletarian revolution" is completely impossible, but it must be said that it has become a project with little feasibility in its literal form.
