CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Who Can Overcome?
The decisive question
We live in a system which is unstable, which breeds economic crises and wars, and which is eating up the very environmental basis it stands on. This is going to lead its component national sectors into repeated social and political crises in the course of the 21st century. Just as the 20th century was a century of wars, civil wars and revolutions, so too is the 21st century. But this leaves open a decisive-the decisive-question. What forces exist that are capable of taking on the system and transforming the world?
For classical Marxism, the answer was simple. The growth of capitalism was necessarily accompanied by the growth of the class it exploited, the working class, and this would be at the centre of the revolt against the system. It was not the first exploited and oppressed class in history. But it differed from the 200 or so generations of peasants and slaves that preceded it in very important respects. Capitalist exploitation was concentrated in huge workplaces in giant industrial conurbations, giving the working class power at decisive points in the society in which it found itself. Such exploitation tended to produce homogeneity in the conditions of its members as capital repeatedly reduced diferent forms of concrete labour to abstract labour. And capital required an exploited class that has a level of culture-of literacy, numeracy and knowledge of the world at large-greater not merely than preceding exploited classes, but also than most preceding ruling classes. These factors combined to create the potentiality for it to take control of society as a whole into its own hands in a way that was not true of its predecessors.
But potentiality was not actuality. The development of capitalism was not a simple smooth upward process that had its impact on the exploited class it created. There was unevenness over time, with the concentration of workers into centres of exploitation during booms and the expulsion of some from those centres during slump. There was geographic unevenness, with some centres arising in connection with national states before others, and then sometimes declining as new centres supplanted them. These forms of capitalist unevenness led to unevenness within the working class, with different levels of skill and payment arising, with competition for jobs and security of employment between different groups of workers, with sections of workers identifying with the particular state that controlled them because it seemed like a locus for achieving reforms of the system. Nevertheless, for classical Marxism, this was a class which would be driven to unite periodically by the very pressures of the system upon it. Skill differentials which had arisen at one point would be eroded at another. Competition between workers would fade as they fought together to achieve overriding common goals. National ideologies would lose their hold in the face of the horrors of imperialist wars.
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