Class Struggle: A Series, Part I

This is the first in a series of posts on class, class struggle, and the interactions of capitalism with various systems of oppression. The primary intended audience for this post is people coming from an anti-oppression background who wish to have a better understanding of the essential links between class struggle and struggle against systemic oppression. It is also hoped that this series of posts will not only be found useful by people engaged in anti-oppression activism, but also other anarchist communists, the broader scope of libertarian communism, anarchists in general (as in many anarchist scenes, poor understanding of capitalism and class struggle are the rule, and not the exception), and all people engaged in struggle for a more free and just world.

Topics to be covered include: how capitalism and class differ from forms of oppression; a quick overview of the sociological models of class; class analysis based on relationship to the means of production; the interaction of capitalism with systemic oppression; the role of the state in securing both capitalism and systemic oppression; the tendency to call for an end of “class elitism” rather than an end to capitalism; flaws in the idea of classism and how it is deployed; and the (generally) strawperson attack of “class reductionism”.

This series of posts will unapologetically come from an anarchist communist perspective. In other words, my central ideas are: that we can only end systemic oppression by abolishing capitalism and the state; that we can only succeed in struggle against capitalism and the state by confronting all systemic oppression; that only self-emancipatory, revolutionary struggle by the working class itself can dismantle these systems and create a stateless, communist world without hierarchy or systemic oppression. Furthermore, that this struggle can only occur through the self-organization of the working class, that self-organized, working class movements of oppressed groups should be supported in their struggles, and that there should be formal anarchist organizations who participate in the struggles around them, and do not seek to control those struggles, but provide a leadership of ideas. Hopefully this series of posts will support those assertions.

A couple of useful readings that will be helpful as background material:

Refusing to Wait: Anarchism and Intersectionality by Deric Shannon and J. Rogue. This is a wonderful piece that details the many ways that anarchism can learn from intersectionality theory and what anti-oppression activism can learn from anarchism.

Revolutionary Anarchism: class struggle and the fight against all forms of oppression by Wayne Price. The first part details the whys of class struggle anarchism, and the second talks about the relationship between the working class and forms of oppression. While some of the anti-oppression language is a little dated, it is still a very worthwhile read.

To begin to talk about the first topic of discussion, which will form a repeated theme throughout this series of posts, one of the major failures of anti-oppression activism in talking about class is to presume that it functions like systemic oppression, which often (but not always) leads to opposing class elitism rather than capitalism itself. One crucial difference is that ending a systemic oppression does not predicate on the group of people who are oppressed by it ceasing to exist; however, undoing the exploitation of the many by the few, which is the core purpose of capitalism, requires that the group of both the exploiters and the exploited ceasing to exist as a group. In other words, once capitalism is gone, the labeling of those groups will not change, it will cease to have meaning. As an example for how this differs from anti-oppression work, let us use as an example homophobia.

Homophobia (or more properly, heterosexism), is the oppression of people who have relationships, or an interest in pursuing such relationships, that do not match socially mandated heterosexuality. It clearly intersects with other forms of oppression, and is reinforced by the power of the state and a variety of social institutions. If we were to end homophobia, we would clearly not do so by eliminating homosexual relationships and desires; rather, all relationships, regardless of the gender of the people involved, would be equally respected in all spheres of life. While we might imagine that with the demise of homophobia, that people’s partner choices might change, and that people may feel less need to adopt an identity in resistance to heterosexism, it should be obvious that some people would still engage primarily or exclusively in relationships that we would label heterosexual, others in relationships we would label homosexual, and others would engage in a wide variety of relationships. This is unlike what we would experience with the demise of capitalism, and the creation of a society without property or the exploitation of labor, where there would no longer be a group of people engaged in exploiting the labor of another group.

Another difference is that the classes exist as a consequence of capitalism, and continually recreate it; oppressions are based on socially constructing a group out of real or perceived traits, and then systemically reducing that group to less than “human” in society. While we can look at some oppressed groups where membership is not constant throughout life, class is a social relation that is recreated every day; I am working class because I am exchanging my labor for wages, and someone is making a profit off that labor (thus taking some of the products of my labor), and if, tomorrow, I were to be handed ownership of a corporation, I would no longer be working class. While we do talk about how the unemployed, children, the retired, people with disabilities are still working class, members of the working class are such based on virtue of their relationship to the means of production, not real or perceived traits they have.

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