Richard Seymour on proletarian hegemony

Richard Seymour on proletarian hegemony:

Peter Thomas, in his Marxism talk about Gramsci and the 99%, made a defence of the concept of proletarian hegemony against certain misconceptions that might put people off it. Pointing out that the working class is numerically and proportionately larger than ever, he suggested that the 99% was potentially the name for hegemony as a principle of unity, rather than as simply a form of domination: what we all have in common, despite our immense differences in identity, social category, occupational culture and habitus, etc., is that we are all exploited. This is what working class hegemony means in practice today. Not, generally speaking, the unity of a national popular bloc of classes under working class leadership: this becomes less the case as capitalist mode of production has entrenched itself, and thus simplified the class system in one sense. Rather, it means the dominance of the working class as the axis of our common exploitation and thus as the strategically privileged basis for organisation. The arrival of the Asturian miners in Puerta del Sol, site of the Indignado rebellion, could be the the sign and sanction of this hegemony in motion. The question, then, is whether Spain's heteroclite social and industrial struggles can be stitched together under the banner of the 99%.

What is a ‘left’ or ‘workers’ government?

What is a ‘left’ or ‘workers’ government?

A government of the traditional workers’ parties does not gain power, merely because the majority of workers have voted for it. It also depends upon being allowed take office by the bourgeoisie, in other words they feel they are forced to give up their governmental positions to the leaders of the parties with a base in the workers’ movement. They do this either because they feel it would be counter-productive to destroy the myths of parliamentary democracy merely to prevent the temporary loss of power or because they feel compelled to retreat before a mass upsurge of the workers movement (as in Germany in 1918 and the SPD-USPD government, or in Spain with the Caballero government of September 1936).

However, it is only governmental positions that the bourgeoisie give up. They maintain their control over the major sectors of the state machine, over the key areas of the economy and over most of the means of communication. In other words, they retreat from the ‘front-line’ of the state, which in any case have less and less importance as the concentration of capital proceeds, but instead consolidate their power in the hierarchies of the state machine and in the economy.

Thus the ‘left government’ is not a revolutionary government formed by the smashing of the bourgeois state. Rather it exists with capitalism and its state still intact.

At a time of major social crisis the bourgeoisie is prepared to concede even major material reforms on condition that their main agency of control – the state machine – is left intact. Short-term concessions can be made as long as the bourgeoisie retain the means to perpetuate their long-term control. Reforms can always be repealed and fresh attacks launched when the workers movement has declined. …

While it was written 1977, with the impressions of Chile and Italy, is still (and especially) interesting today in the context of Venezuela – were we are seeing the realization – and Greece – were this option is currently not really on the table, but things might have to change.

That is Socialism!

Whether it was a question of the right of petition or the tax on wine, freedom of the press or free trade, the clubs or the municipal charter, protection of personal liberty or regulation of the state budget, the watchword constantly recurs, the theme remains always the same, the verdict is ever ready and invariably reads: "Socialism!" Even bourgeois liberalism is declared socialistic, bourgeois enlightenment socialistic, bourgeois financial reform socialistic. It was socialistic to build a railway where a canal already existed, and it was socialistic to defend oneself with a cane when one was attacked with a rapier.

This was not merely a figure of speech, fashion, or party tactics. The bourgeoisie had a true insight into the fact that all the weapons it had forged against feudalism turned their points against itself, that all the means of education it had produced rebelled against its own civilization, that all the gods it had created had fallen away from it. It understood that all the so-called bourgeois liberties and organs of progress attacked and menaced its class rule at its social foundation and its political summit simultaneously, and had therefore become "socialistic."
– Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

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