In the Marxian Workshops by Sandro Mezzadra

Author:Sandro Mezzadra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

Chapter 8

Class (Struggle)

It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness.

—W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 (1935)1

For Marx, these antagonisms are class antagonisms. Yet what is a ‘class’? The sources of Marx’s use of this concept – the works of the historians and bourgeois economists mentioned in one of his letters to Joseph Weydemeyer in 1852 (MECW, 39: 60ff) – have been amply studied.2 Ultimately, on the basis of what we claimed in reference to labour power and money in the previous chapter, it would seem straightforward to define ‘class’. If we were to assume the split of the field of subjectivity around these two poles, the individuals constructing their lives on the ownership of labour power would form the class pitted against the class of individuals for whom the ownership of money is decisive. However, this definition of the ‘two great classes directly facing each other’, to recall the definition from the Manifesto, has at most a ‘logical’ value. It says nothing on the production of a collective subject that is capable of action as such – and we saw earlier the extent of the complexity of, on the one hand, the relation between individual capitalists and the ‘total capital’ and, on the other hand, between individual workers and the collective and social power of ‘a body of men working together’.

The two fields we have ‘logically’ singled out are internally stratified due to a multiplicity of conditions that intervene to mediate and differentiate the relation each individual entertains with money and labour power. Here, what is under scrutiny is not only the multiplication of classes tackled by sociological analysis – as in the debates on the ‘middle class’, already beginning in the early 1900s within and outside Marxism. Factors such as gender and race originally divide the field of class, and they do so by introducing crucial differentials of power and devices of hierarchization. What I mean by ‘originally’ is that these factors structure what has just been described as the relation individuals entertain with money and labour power. The contradictions so determined around gender and race thus cannot be defined as being secondary in relation to a class contradiction qualified as ‘fundamental’.3

The body should not be merely considered as a neutral tabernacle of labour power, since it is powerfully invested by these contradictions, shaped and constructed within a field of forces and resistances which we need to investigate in their specific cases. One could say that, by now, we should have already learned about this aspect from a century of struggles and theoretical developments on these themes.

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