Fuck your working class

 Peasantry1 - Working Class 0

Beyond the classic Marxist distinction between class in itself and class for itself, it is obvious that only an improper process of reification allows us to assert the existence of something like the working class (or any other class). Class is a sociological concept, a category, an abstraction, lacking a material referent. When this conceptual entity is hypostatised, not only is an inferential error committed, but the foundations are laid for constructing narratives that attempt to disguise their fantastical nature behind technical language. This ultimately distorts our representation of reality and steers our political analyses, as well as the activities derived from them, toward misguided paths and erroneous conclusions.

The decline in the importance of the so-called working class is not an ideological bias induced by neoliberalism, but a fact that is trivial because it is so obvious. Questioning the tendency to hypostatise it does not diminish the undeniable fact of capitalist exploitation, nor the very real existence of multitudes of people who, in order to survive, are forced to sell their time, their health, their skills, and their energy in exchange for economic compensation that is always less than the surplus value generated, as demanded by the iron law of capitalism.

To claim that the working class is “the revolutionary subject” is a double fallacy. First, because if a working class does not exist, it is impossible for it to be the subject of anything. Second, because if we insist on calling the entities that produce revolutions the revolutionary subject, it turns out that these subjects are multiple. There is not one revolutionary subject, but many. And these are not usually defined mechanically by a specific insertion into the productive fabric, but rather correspond to the reactions and resistances against the various mechanisms of domination that make up the social fabric and that permeate it with discriminatory practices. Beyond the eventual revolutionary potential of the exploited and/or discriminated groups to which individuals belong, those who are truly revolutionary are driven by a conscious and radical rejection of submission and by an intense desire for revolution that leads them to develop revolutionary activities aimed at resisting the various forms of domination inherent in the current system.