By JOSÉ MANUEL DE SACADURA ROCHA*
Max Horkheimer's notes, from the beginning of the 20th century, on the working class, are still full of consequences for workers today. in their political struggles
1.
We talk here about observing the conditions of the working class and the speeches we make to them. Between 1926 and 1931 Max Horkheimer wrote a series of aphorisms that were collected and published now in Brazil under the name of Twilight: German Notes (1926-1931).[I]. Among these aphorisms, on page 109 is the aphorism “The importance of the German working class”, which, despite having been written ninety years ago, maintains absolute vigor and relevance, something that can only be explained by the method of historical materialism that was able to give account of the situation of the working class in the past, as of absolute relevance and importance for the class struggle, both theoretical and practical today.
We will try to demonstrate this unique relevance and importance of Max Horkheimer's ideas contained in these notes for the contexts that modernly involve salaried workers in the face of the quite dystopian dynamism of their existence under the capital regime. We are mainly moved by the dissociation of the different fractions of the working class – employees, reserve army, lumpenproletariat – and how from them we see the capitalist movement striving for the dispensation of labor power, based on the radical transformation of the “organic composition of the work”, with severe consequences not only for the situation of the working class but also for the desperate outcome of overcoming capitalism.
Such dynamism in market societies instigates a more refined and critical reading of the necessary discourses of the progressive vanguard to deal with the new reality of work, automatism and flexibility, and of the duly detailed approaches to communication of Marxian theory in the daily lives of workers under capitalism. of today.
We think that, although there may be some truth in the loss of the revolutionary categories of Marxism in left-wing discourses, we must pay attention to the fact that in the real world class struggles, for the mass of workers, more or less organized, take place in the midst of domination apparatuses of the hegemonic class; more precisely, attention must be paid to the adequacy of these categories,[ii] however precious and fundamental they may be, to the conditioning situation of capitalism regarding the situation of the working class and salaried fractions in the global space of production and circulation of goods (contemporary commodity form).
We treat the working class as those who are able to produce capital, and therefore those who, through their productive work, directly or indirectly, transform materials and money into capital. The working class is part of the real assets as a labor force that, in the process of economic work, simultaneously achieves the elementary objective of social survival while producing wealth for the capitalist through surplus labor or unpaid surplus value.
The working class, in this sense, is not only one that opposes capital for its own interests, but one that in this process fights for the emancipation of all humanity in relation to capitalism and work itself. The foundation of these theses is the work process as it develops in capitalism, not to replace it with another type of social relationship for work, but to overcome it. Initially, it must be thought that subsistence work is currently limited to the dismissal of workers, increasing the available social work time, based on constant investments in fixed capital, machines and equipment.
This was the movement that Max Horkheimer captured at the beginning of the 20th century, with strong repercussions on the consciousness of fractions of the working class in their political struggles. In this case, clearly, an adequate interpretation of the theories of historical materialist dialectics, its elementary and abstract categories, is required, the more the support and organizational guidance of workers today are necessary.
2.
Max Horkheimer begins by stating that in the dynamics of capitalism the number of workers employed decreases “in proportion to the use of machines”, as a result, the percentage of employees is increasingly smaller. This modifies “the relations among themselves” of the layers of the proletarian class, as well as with the bosses. Even “momentary employment”, like “permanent employment”, becomes an exception; with this “the life and consciousness” of employed workers are more clearly differentiated from those who are unemployed: “With this, the solidarity of interests of the proletarians experiences more and more losses”.
Max Horkheimer makes it clear that the working class is, in fact, many working classes, or that it is separated into fractions with very different situations of selling labor power to the capitalist, which results in a broad spectrum of consciousness and interests in opposing bosses and capital management.
At the beginning of industrialization it was possible to distinguish between those who were employed and the “reserve army”, and “as a rule there was a constant transition between employed and unemployed” (a way for capital to regulate labor prices (wages) and maintain workers subdued by fear of unemployment). If, on the one hand, the workers' ability to work was not questioned, they also did not distance themselves, at least in terms of relevant aspects of their destiny as a class: “not only was their interest in overcoming the domination of capital essentially the same, but also so was engagement in this fight.”
At the beginning of the 2011th century, employees and the “reserve army” began to constitute layers of the proletariat under very different conditions: with the increase in machines, the “reserve army” grew, which in turn was also divided between those who could actually be in a position to reuse the workforce and those who were not able to work, either due to disqualification or due to a situation of extreme poverty and social exclusion, the “lumpemproletariat” (MARX, XNUMX).[iii] Max Horkheimer considers the “lumpemproletariat” as “a relatively insignificant layer, in which criminals are recruited”, which worsened the split between employees and other fractions of the working class, mainly because the fear of being temporarily unemployed as a “reserve army ”, for the fear of becoming part of the “lumpemproletariat”.
When this was written, it was still possible, therefore, to distinguish “reserve army” from “lumpemproletariat”, but the decrease in employed workers and the increase in workers no longer effectively able to return to occupy a place among the employed due to the high increase was clear. of fixed capital, which Marx called dead labor, to the detriment of variable capital, which Marx called living labor. Horkheimer says that at this moment, the “class experiences in its own existence the negative side of the current order, misery”.
Under these conditions, the mass of workers and other salaried employees, “whose salaries and whose years of membership in unions and associations provide certain security”, face fear in the face of the “danger of enormous losses”, and begin to constitute themselves as employees in opposition to unemployed, those who have less to lose, or “those who even today have nothing to lose but their chains”.
So, between those who work and those “who work exceptionally or not at all”, that is, the underemployed and unemployed of our time, there is a distance as great as the “reserve army” and the “lumpenproletariat” at the beginning of industrialization; This means, therefore, that Horkheimer visualized that not only are workers always destined for unemployment, but this unemployment turns more and more into a “lumpemproletariat”, to the extent that the unemployed and underemployed find it difficult to return to their jobs in their countries. specialties, but they soon mix with former workers in conditions of extreme poverty, that is, apart from those who are still in their jobs, all other layers of the working class are outside the world of work, underemployed, precarious or in “employment jobs”. shit” (GRAEBER, 2022).[iv]
In contemporary times, there is something like a “fusion” of different layers of salaried workers,[v] who, due to their precariousness of work or the gradual misery and despair of their existence, separate themselves in consciousness and engagement in struggles from the employed class fractions; Max Horkheimer would then say that “work and misery become distant and are distributed to different carriers”. Even though the exploitation and misery of workers continue to be the basis of capitalism, the type of worker in activity, says the author, “no longer designates the one who most urgently needs transformation”; in turn, what unifies the lowest layers of the proletariat, the unemployed, underemployed and precarious is “the evil and restlessness of the existing itself”.
Therefore, those who are now interested in the revolution are the most helpless and desperate fractions of the working class, precisely those who have the least preparation and capacity for training and organization, class consciousness and credibility, far from those who, because they are still employed, are integrated into the functioning of capitalism. This spectrum appears increasingly bipolar and divided: it ranges from the extreme poverty that constitutes the masses of former employees or those who have never been integrated into work, to those who, being integrated and co-opted, do not risk joining the deformed and disorganized masses. of that group of unemployed, precarious and impoverished.
Younger people have always constituted themselves as a layer of society in which many hopes were placed that they would be organic intellectuals; however, Max Horkheimer states that they lack, “even with all their faith, an understanding of the theory”.
3.
Therefore, we are facing realities in which interest in socialism and human characteristics fluctuate in such a way that there is no way to safely interfere with the consciousness of the working class and other subaltern layers of workers, which greatly conditions the revolutionary activities of the vanguard. and, fundamentally, the discourses and approaches regarding communication processes in the left field.
If we do not understand this, and if we do not overcome our deficiencies in language and theoretical narratives to socialism, taking into account that the capitalist process brings about this separation between the group of excluded and marginalized workers and those who are still integrated into capitalist production, they will be inefficient. or even empty and discouraging our theoretical and practical efforts, whatever the qualities of discourse and theory in practice.
At the time these notes were written, in Weimar Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, the divisions between workers, especially between the “integrated” and the “unemployed/unassisted”, meant that, based on their theoretical awareness and interests, immediate, spread among the labor parties (Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)), “and, furthermore, through the fluctuation of large layers of unemployed people between the Communist Party and the National Socialist Party”.
It is relevant that the German philosopher and sociologist draws attention to this “fluctuation” of the unemployed and possibly to the lower layers of workers, who are included in what Hannah Arendt called the “rabble”,[vi] towards Nazism, because this seems to be exactly what reveals the penetration of the current extreme right among these same populations, which further aggravates revolutionary praxis in our days, not so much because of the lack of Marxist elements and categories, but because this The reality of insecurity, fear and pauperization leads the most threatened and unprotected fractions of the working class to take an interest in right-wing radicalization movements and their false promises.
Max Horkheimer states that the distribution arising from the capitalist economic process “condemns workers to factual impotence”, but precarious, underemployed, unemployed workers – given the circumstances of fear and vulnerability –, and significant layers of employed/integrated workers, who move in direction to the extreme right (fascism; Nazism), does not allow us to affirm that workers are led to “impotence” – this “detail” can be significant when we define the public to which we direct theory and speeches in practice: workers choose, including participating in the existence plans of the bourgeoisie and the extreme right.
Our author is didactic and very current when he states: “With the volume of material prepared by the theory, the principles do not take on a form appropriate to current times, but are retained in a non-dialectical way. Political praxis also fails, therefore, to take advantage of all the possibilities for strengthening political positions and exhausts itself in various ways in vain commands and in the moral reprimand of the disobedient and disloyal”. One may ask: is this the case, then, of a lack of categories in theoretical and discursive forms?
Regarding “reformism” it must be said that it is also part of the economic process of capitalism; When we think through materialist dialectics, we see that its technological development alters the composition of capital in production and circulation to the detriment of the employment of labor force, and thus, not only the employability of the working class is “lowered”, but also the discourses and practices of their leaders in the search for job guarantees and some rights. This type of “defensive struggle” is concretely given by the organicity of the world of work: the “phlegmatic” speeches, the slogans “demoted” to insignificance in the face of the fact of imminent unemployment and misery, “attend” to the desperate reality of working class against which the vanguards and leaders can do little or nothing.
What is called “real reformism” in revolutionary theory is, in most cases, fueled by the dynamism of capitalism against wage workers and is not always due to the loss of content or categories, but, as Max Horkheimer says, “the aversion the pure repetition of principles can also have, in the most distant spiritual domains – sociology and philosophy – an importance justified by the situation: it turns against what is vain there”.
When factual reality changes so radically and desperately for the working class, it is necessary to verify theory, discourse and practice in a “zero return” path.[vii] Does this mean that the labor movement is doomed to reformism? No! Only it is circumscribed in a reality of the moment of intense growth of fixed capital in production and other necessary activities related to the reproduction of capital. However, many times, because the dynamics of capital are not considered in advance, the only option left to “professional reformism” is to negotiate under the worst possible conditions with capital.
Most of the time, in good or bad faith, the materialist dialectic is misunderstood, without paying attention to the underlying and inevitable phenomena of financial market systems. And then, “many seek with all means, including giving up simple loyalty, to remain in their posts; the fear of losing their position increasingly becomes the only reason that explains their actions.”
The “recognition of facts”, however, for the masses of unemployed, underemployed, precarious workers, and those below, seems to go down well, and as a result they end up falling into the trap of the prophets. , of philosophies that seem impartial to them, and a balm, when they preach conformism and “vague faith in a completely indeterminate transcendental or religious principle”.
When intellectuals today talk about theories that have lost “their faith” in concrete analysis – they denounce the poor results of the progressive wings that have left aside the contents and categories that once made so much sense and were so successful in the global labor movement, thus making it unfeasible , the confrontation of these vain philosophies –, speak exactly what Max Horkheimer denounced as the worst reformism: “In the place of causal explanation, it puts the search for analogies; when it does not completely reject Marxist concepts, it formalizes them and brings them to the academy”.
Max Horkheimer tells us about this “unfortunate affection for the 'concrete'”, in the sense that it is the fact of the dispensation of labor from work, therefore, the permanent threat of losing one's job that forges this reformism among intellectuals, the trade unionism and the “schematisms” of working class leaders. The problem would not be to demand jobs and better wages, etc., but to stop at just that, that is, “not something that is organized by consciously taking a position in the historical struggle, above which they (reformists) believe they rather hover”.
Here, it seems clear that, rather than taking into account the “concrete” of work relations and employability, we must act “by consciously taking a position in the historical struggle” of workers. However, what would this “conscious taking of a position in the historical struggle” mean at a time when the phenomenal reality of capital is compelled to replace the hiring of the workforce with investment in productive technology and services?
Since praxis ultimately speaks of consciousness in modes of social survival, the way in which capital's salaried workers need theory for the practice of engaging and confronting capital passes, whether we like it or not, through this reality, that is, by the immanent practices of the development of capitalism in which workers are inserted. Doesn't this fact oblige the labor movement and other employees to move taking into account this reality of intensification of technosciences in production and services?
4.
According to Max Horkheimer, left-wing intellectuals stick to “the literality of the text” and make materialist theory “a cult of people”. And those who are integrated into the capitalist work process, therefore knowledgeable about the “effective world”, have become unfaithful to “Marxism”. Hence, without the theory of materialism, facts become “blind signs” or “fall within the scope of the ideological powers that dominate spiritual life”. On the part of intellectuals, there is a lack of practice and analysis of the “real” to prepare for the revolution; and the layers of employed workers lack the theoretical knowledge and even the interest to do so.
Symptomatically, our author identifies, in his time, the divergences between social democracy and communists: those of social democracy, as a consequence of incontinently adhering to circumstances and contexts, reverence objectivity or political pragmatism and commit the error of arrogance : “humiliate their ignorant opponents.” In turn, says Horkheimer, communists “have too few reasons”, and “often resort not to reasons, but only to authority”, based on their “moral strength” and “also physical strength”: they claim the truth and disregard individual points of view.[viii]. Max Horkheimer lucidly says: “Overcoming this theoretical situation depends as little on mere good will as the suppression of the practical situation that conditions it, the dissociation of the working class.”
For the materialist dialectic, the different situations in the economic process must be relevant in the analysis of the moments or contexts in which the realization of social life is found in its historical development: “The categories themselves are born from a real historical experience” (HARVEY, 2013. P. 566). This is absolutely clear in Max Horkheimer. The phenomenal moment-context in which Horkheimer writes about “the impotence of the German working class”, at the beginning of the last century, is revealing of the “same” need of capital “that has kept a large part of the population away from jobs since its birth and condemns her to an existence without prospects.”
Only from this reality can the theory unfold to monitor the situation and uncomfortable position of workers. No theory can be viable outside the understanding of its time; it is always more of a “direction” possibility than a consolidated “trail”.
It is understandably despairing that those who “observe the situation” want to escape the well-intentioned diagnoses of theories. It may even happen that many of the contents and categories no longer adequately absorb the reality that represents the interests of class fractions, as in the case of salaried workers of capital.
It is not clear, however, that the time has come to prepare society for the available working time and not just stick to “employment unionism”, because as Marx states: “(…) capital here – entirely involuntarily – reduces human work, energy expenditure, to a minimum. This will benefit emancipated labor and is the condition of its emancipation.” (2011, p. 585).[ix] Would this also be reformism?
Possibly neither concepts nor categories can exist completely for the “zero return” of the reality of work in our time, and it happens that, in the disputes for the adherence of workers, the best practices, “on which the future of humanity depends”, they may, possibly, be written long ago for our accurate interpretation in the inexorable flow of human emancipation.
*José Manuel de Sacadura Rocha He has a PhD in Education, Art and Cultural History from Mackenzie University. Author, among other books, of Legal sociology: foundations and borders (GEN/Forensics) [https://amzn.to/491S8Fh]
References
ARENDT, Hannah. The totalitarian system. Lisbon: Publicações Dom Quixote, 1978.
GRAEBER, David. Shitty Jobs: A Theory. São Paulo: Editions 70, 2022.
HARVEY, David. The limits of capital. Sao Paulo: Boitempo, 2013.
HORKHEIMER, Max. Twilight: German Notes (1926-1931). São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2022.
LUKÁCS, Georg. From Bourgeois Antinomies to the Problem of Class Consciousness. Sandrine Aumercier. Magazine GRUNDRISSE. Available in: https://grundrissedotblog.wordpress.com/2024/06/02/georg-lukacs-des-antinomies-bourgeoises-au-probleme-de-la-conscience-de-classe.
MARX, Carl. Grundrisse: economic manuscripts of 1857-1858: sketches of the critique of political economy. Sao Paulo: Boitempo, 2011.
MARX, Carl. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Sao Paulo: Boitempo, 2011.
Notes
[I] HORKHEIMER, Max. Twilight: German notes (1926-1931). São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2022). All quotes referring to Horkheimer have been collected in this edition.
[ii] According to Harvey: “The emergence of new questions to be answered, new paths to be followed by investigation, simultaneously provokes the reevaluation of basic concepts – such as value –, the eternal reformulation of the conceptual apparatus used to describe the world.” (HARVEY, David. The limits of capital. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2013, p. 529).
[iii] In "The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, [1852], chap. V, Marx referred to this layer or fraction of the population as: “Under the pretext of the institution of a charitable society, the Parisian lumpenproletariat was organized into secret sections, each of which was led by a Bonapartist agent and had at its head a general Bonapartist. Decadent roués [ruffians] with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, ruined and adventurous offspring of the bourgeoisie were flanked by vagabonds, exonerated soldiers, ex-convicts, escaped galley slaves, thieves, cheats, lazzaroni [lazarones], pickpockets , conjurers, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel owners, porters, literati, organ grinders, rag pickers, scissor sharpeners, tinsmiths, beggars, in short, all this undefined mass, unstructured and thrown from one side to another, which the French call it la bohème [bohemia]; With these elements, which were similar to him, Bonaparte formed the basis of the 10th of December Society.” In this sense, it is permissible to place in this layer of society the fraction of the working class that has already been completely excluded from productive work, or that has never been part of it. (MARX, Karl. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2011).
[iv] GRAEBER, David. Shitty Jobs: A Theory. São Paulo: Editions 70, 2022.
[v] We can consider that the welfare state post 2nd. The Great War was a turning point in the process of increasing available working time and dispensing with productive labor: in the period of Fordism, which, due to the wars of the first half of the 1970th century, extended until the end of the 1980s, the industrial reserve army was still a fraction of the workers used in production, exchanged with the employed workers – they were all functionally unemployed of capital (insofar as the threat of unemployment is the permanent guillotine over their heads); From the XNUMXs onwards, in post-Fordism, structural unemployment began to increasingly and continuously push the unemployed (from the army of reserve workers) into the group of the discouraged, disqualified, impoverished who no longer constitute a function in the reproduction of value and capital – the “lumpemproletariat” today are all the unemployed, underemployed and precarious, dysfunctional workers of capitalism, who we often insist on pushing them into the insane and mediocre jobs of current technocapitalism.
[vi] The expression “rabble” appears emphatically in Arendt: The totalitarian system: chaps. on pages. 163, 209 and 417; Dom Quixote Publications, Lisbon, 1978. [In Brazil: Origins of totalitarianism (Cia. De Bolso, 2013)].
[vii] “It is not a mere addendum to what we already know, but it constitutes a completely different starting point from that on which the theory of Capital is based.” (HARVEY, 2013, p. 562).
[viii] In Western Marxist theory, Lukács distinguished the “point of view of the totality”, which the proletarian class can access in its consciousness, from the “point of view of the individual”, which is typical of the consciousness of the bourgeois class. By the way, see: Sandrine Aumercier. Georg Lukács: From Bourgeois Antinomies to the Problem of Class Consciousness, GRUNDRISSE (wordpress.com), 02/06/2024.
[ix] MARX, Carl. Grundrisse: economic manuscripts of 1857-1858: sketches of the critique of political economy. Sao Paulo: Boitempo, 2011.
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