Contenu de l'article

Titre La lutte de classes et les dépossédés
Auteur Bryan D. Palmer, Jean-Michel Buée
Mir@bel Revue Actuel Marx
Numéro no 58, octobre 2015 Histoire et luttes de classes
Rubrique / Thématique
Dossier : Histoire et luttes de classes
Page 28-45
Résumé anglais
Class struggle and the dispossessed
How do we conceive of class and class struggle ? Orthodox Marxism has often been represented as understanding class as a relationship to production, a conceptualization reinforcing a sense of class struggle where the accent is placed on the conflictual relations within the workplace. Overt capitallabour conflict at the point of production does indeed constitute class struggle, but neither class nor class struggle can be reduced in Marxist terms to strikes, lockouts, and the like. Rather, as Marx's writings suggest, the origins of class formation lie in dispossession, and it is as the dispossessed that workers, waged and wageless, have routinely resisted both the exploitation and the oppression that is fundamental to capitalism's project. This project, in which accumulation through dispossession is driven by periodic crises, necessarily involves destruction and creates not only vast wealth but vast destitution. The working class is made as a productive force, divorced from ownership of the means of production, but it is also made amidst persistent crises, which lead to unemployment, the precariousness of labour, and the existence of reserve armies of labour. A comprehension of the origins of class in dispossession thus widens our understanding of class struggles, which take place at the point of production but which also develop in all manner of other ways, including struggles around space, against the state, and in the reproductive realm.
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