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Title: On The Working Class
Author: Bertram Ledbetter
Date: 2020
Language: en
Topics: marx, marxism, working class, industrialization, post-industrial

Bertram Ledbetter

On The Working Class

During Marx’s time, the urban proletariat certainly was a rising class.

Rapid industrialization made the powers of the day increasingly demand

factory wage-workers at an unforseen scale. In 1840, in Britain, only

8.8% of the working population worked in manufacturing. By 1870, one in

three Britons did. In 1840, in the USA, a meager 12% of families worked

in any kind of non-agricultural industry. By 1900, that had grown to a

full 27%. In Russia, the number of workers in factories and large mills

quadroupled between 1865 and 1900. The “old” working class, comprised of

the peasant farmers and their cottage industries, were surpassed and

rendered progressively irrelevant (In 1840, 68% of Americans worked on

farms; by 1900, this number decreased to 40%; Nowadays, its less than

2%). They were still, for a long time, a sizable and influential group,

but they were a dwindling minority, and a dwindling minority can’t very

well lead a populist revolution. And hence, for that reason, leftist

rhetoric always proclaimed that the factory workers, the proletariat,

would lead the revolution to victory, not the farmers.

But nowadays, things have changed. In 1870, 30% of Britons worked in

manufacturing; in 2010, manufacturing only accounted for 8.2% of the

workforce. Across the Atlantic, the trend is similar. In 1910, 32.4% of

non-agricultural workers in the USA worked in manufacturing. Today, only

8.7% do. In every advanced economy, the same thing has happened.

Automation, and massive increases in productivity due to technological

advancements, are the reasons behind this trend. The urban proletariat

is quickly going the way of the peasant-farmer. They’re a dwindling

minority (there are nearly six million less manufacturing jobs in the US

than there were twenty years ago) and a dwindling minority can’t very

well lead a populist revolution.

The modern rising class, the new working class, is the workers of the

service industry. In the USA, over 80% of the population lies in this

grouping, making them an overwhelming majority. The revolution won’t be

led by some mythical group of assembly-line workers, but instead by

Walmart greeters. Which brings up something rather interesting: most of

these “service” jobs would effectively be rendered nonexistent by a

communist revolution. You don’t need corporate financial advisors if

money’s been abolished. Salesmen and clerks alike are useless in a world

of free-stores. And many other occupations would be cut down in number

drastically due to the increased efficiency of communist cooperation

over capitalist competition. For instance, many locales have two or

three hotels when there’s only the actual need, in terms of capacity,

for one hotel, but the motive of profit causes multiple to open. This

leads to awkward situations of half-full hotels with empty rooms that

still must be maintained. It leads to twice the number of employees

being hired than socially necessary, who then must do twice as much work

then is actually needed. Twice as much furniture must be bought, twice

as many hallways have to be lit, twice as much electricity must be used.

You get the point.

Capitalism is tremendously wasteful, both of resources, and of the

people who are trapped in its jobs, doing unnecessary labor. Once the

inefficiencies of capitalism are removed- once we stop working for the

sake of work and overproducing for the sake of production- each

individual’s workload could drastically decrease. Communists in the past

were fighting for the ownership of their own work, fighting against the

theft of their surplus value. But communists today are essentially

fighting for the abolishion of their work- or, specifically, the

abolition of the useless, extraneous, and sometimes downright

destructive labor that we’re compelled to do in the holy name of profit.

The 4-hour workday is no utopian vision, but a very real possibility-

hell, the 2-hour workday isn’t far off either. And imagine all that

humanity could accomplish when liberated! Imagine all the paintings, the

books, the songs that could be created! Think of the philosophy and

science that could be advanced, the inventions that could be discovered!

There are a million Einsteins, Beethovens, Monets, and Tolstoys out

there, and probably half of them are stuck as bus drivers and waiters.

“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even

glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is

always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing

a better country, sets sail...”