Date: Wed, 1 May 96 08:05:12 GMT
Subject: Re: the working class -Reply



> 
> Jorn wrote:
> > One of the political implications of this is very important:
> > That the emancipation of the working class is the task of
> > workers themselves. Not as an oppressed minority trying to
> > get the oppressed majority to accept working class
> > leadership - but as the oppressed and exploited majority
> > drawing the rest of oppressed layers with them.
> 
> Jerry replied:
> The political implications, suggested above, don't flow directly from
> the  size of the working class. To demonstrate that, consider the law
> of uneven  (and combined) development. If you accept that law, then
> does the  beginning of the second sentence hold for most "developing"
> capitalist  nations where the working class is still a numerical
> minority?
> 
> Lisa:  To extract another tangent out of this exchange, I wonder why
> you say that the working class is a minority in Lesser Developed
> Countries [LDC, I think that is one common label].

Jerry is right to talk about combined and uneven development in relation
to countries where the working class is in a minority.

In other words, the social weight of a small number of proletarians is
greater than a large number of peasants.

However, in contrast to Marx's time, when workers were a timy minority
of the world's population, the working class is now a majority. So in
most LDC's, the working class is in the majority. I think this particularly
applies to those countries where most of the world's population lives :
China, India, Brazil, Russia. And so Marx's arguments are stronger today,
not weaker ( perhaps not India, yet ? ).

I think also, certainly in China, but probably elsewehere as well, we
can see similar changes in the coutryside as there were between 1905 and
1917 in Russia. The army, ie the peasants in uniform, crushed the 1905
workers revolution, but not the 1917 one. This was in part due to the
impoverishing effects of the reforms in the countryside, which had
been introduced to make Russian agriculture more competitive.

In China today there are millions of dispossed peasants sleeping rough 
in the industrial cities. Also, I believe there has been a lowish tech
industrialisation process in the countryside itself, so poor peasants
who can no longer live off their own land are becoming more proletarian
whether or not they stay in the countryside.

The next Tiannamen may have a different outcome.

Adam.

Adam Rose
SWP
Manchester
UK


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