Our Moment: Proletarian Disorganization as the Problem of Our Time

Introduction

Usually, the political problems facing the left are interconnected but heterogeneous. No single problem sits above all others. One can ask “how to articulate a socialist politics around climate change” without thinking that “how to run a successful union negotiation campaign” or “how to manage internal debate within an organization” are related questions. Each of these problems tends to take on a distinctive shape that is not congruent with the others. But in some historical moments, we can identify a prevailing problem that underlies practically all other political issues. All political problems tend to orbit this central problem in these historical situations. We live in just such a moment.

The historical problem of our time is proletarian disorganization. We have lost the class institutions and political habits of organized struggle.

What is proletarian disorganization? Although proletarians are always somewhat disorganized, in our historical situation disorganization has been generalized to systemic levels and has had morbid effects. Before the 1970s, proletarian self-organization in the US¹This essay is focused on the US context; it may be that other geographic areas have situations that follow this analysis, though we are not trying to make this claim here.—composed of formations like labor unions, labor auxiliary organizations, left civic organizations, various informal working-class social formations²Even informal networks of social organization have been in decline. Though we disagree with Putnam’s liberal and anti-communist politics, the information presented in his essay (link) is helpful. , etc.—shaped everyday working-class life. These organizations were not reflections of an existing social structure so much as political interventions against them: they were hard-won vehicles for solidaristic collective action of the working class against conditions of competition and segregation. But these institutions, which provide the ability and power to challenge status-quo politics, have been broken up and hollowed out. More conceptually, this proletarian disorganization is characterized by individualization and segmentation. Individualization: the dissolution of vibrant and dynamic self-organized proletarian collectivities across the field of struggle. Segmentation: the naturalization of divisions between groups of proletarians, often collaborating with a neoliberal ideology of classless pluralism. 

The very long arc of the workers’ movement gave life to numerous political situations, with organized workers intervening and sometimes determining the outcome of historical events.³See above link to Balibar’s work, which touches on the fact that the workers’ movement was a product of political articulation from intentional proletarian organization, rather than an automatically-generated social fact arising from the capitalist class structure. For more on the workers’ movement, see: Eley’s Forging Democracy (link); and Endnote’s “Betrayal and the Will” (link) The workers’ movement of the past benefited from organizational density that, while never genuinely centralized, produced a dynamic of ever-changing political possibilities conducive to strategic innovations for the left. Even when these situations ended in defeat, the defeat itself implied a real contest with capitalist power, which means that the movement had capacity that the entire left⁴By ‘left’ we mean socialist and communist tendencies (excluding, for example, non-profit organizations or the progressive wing of the Democratic Party), or other political tendencies that aim to fundamentally transform society towards liberatory and egalitarian ends. currently lacks. The success of the neoliberal counter-revolution demolished a large share of the traditional organized sites of working-class power that delivered might to socialist and communist movements. Disorganization of the proletariat, broadly conceived, has brought about disaster for the left and made it weak. 

Proletarian disorganization has also led to innumerable political morbidities in the recent past and the present. It’s no accident that today’s reactionary politics arose amid proletarian disorganization. Psychic distress and nihilistic angst are nourished by generalized political-organizational homelessness. Unmoored from organizations that could proudly and confidently sustain class consciousness through ongoing collective struggles, some within the working class have become susceptible to racist, nationalist and other types of right-wing propaganda, while many more have dropped out of all political activity. While it is important to emphasize this point, exclusive focus on the reactionary right can lead to a politics of liberal tailing and thus reinforce the very conditions that enable today’s reactionary politics. The rise of today’s national conservatism, its political rhetoric around “workers empowerment,” and its intentional conflation of neoliberal centrism with the historic left to sideline both are symptoms of acute disorganization. 

No left alternative can be realistically offered without militant and active mass working-class organizations across the entire spectrum of capitalist contradictions. No left tendency—not socialism, not communism, nor serious strands of anarchism—can survive without its integration into an organized working-class movement; for a left formation without an organized proletariat is a fish out of water—a politics defined by its atrophy and destined for a slow death. 

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