On the Reproduction of Capitalism by Louis Althusser

Author:Louis Althusser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-02-03T16:00:00+00:00

VI THE POLITICAL CLASS STRUGGLE MUST BE DEEPLY ROOTED IN THE ECONOMIC CLASS STRUGGLE

We must, then, establish the facts again. And, because the trade union struggle is today under attack from certain ‘avant-garde theoreticians’ and is also, in effect, treated as secondary by certain communists, who, be it added, cultivate for that reason an equally false notion of their role in the political struggle, we must also emphatically rehabilitate the trade union struggle, which takes on the character of a direct economic class struggle when big workers’ union federations (such as the miners, metal workers, rail workers, construction workers, and so on) are involved. (In civil servants’ unions, for example, the relationship to economic class struggle is not direct.) We must establish the facts again, and understand why no communist political class struggle is possible unless it is deeply implanted in the masses’ economic class struggle, and unless the communists take up a correct position and carry out correct actions in the economic class struggle, that is, in the struggle for ‘bread-and-butter demands’.

We have brought out the principle that ultimately justifies this thesis: because the whole capitalist regime rests in the last instance on direct economic exploitation of the working class and other wage-earners who are not workers, both urban and rural, the anti-capitalist struggle inevitably takes the path of a direct struggle against direct exploitation. It also takes the path, secondarily, of a struggle against indirect forms of exploitation.43

Because this struggle can be led as a mass struggle, it is led by mass organizations, which are by nature distinct (by virtue of their statutes, operating rules – the broadest possible trade union democracy – and practices) from the communist parties. It is plainly a question of the masses, for exploitation affects all workers and labourers without exception; it is their daily lot, they experience it directly every day. Thus it is by way of the struggle for material demands that the masses can be rallied to objective actions against the capitalist system. The masses: not just the vanguard of the proletariat, not just the proletariat, but also the non-proletarian wage-workers in town and country, poor peasants, small peasants in the process of becoming proletarians, and all those, including many civil servants working in the Ideological State Apparatuses (teachers, for instance) or even certain Repressive State Apparatuses (for example, some categories of civil servants in the administration), who are objectively victims of capitalist exploitation.

It is the masses who make history. But if the masses can lead history to the victory of the socialist revolution only in the political class struggle and under the leadership of the political organization of the vanguard of the proletariat, it is clear and correct that the masses, when they go into motion, will not accept the party’s political leadership unless they have long since been unified and mobilized in the struggle against the economic exploitation of the capitalist regime by a long, hard, heroic, tenacious, unspectacular, trade-union struggle for bread-and-butter demands on the basis of a correct line.

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