We are publishing below two letters from ICC sympathisers aimed at continuing the reflection that arose in a meeting in France on 15 May 2020 on the subject of the nature and composition of the working class. During this discussion some participants questioned what affect “uberisation” of work had on the composition of the working class. In other words, do the “uberised” employees belong to the working class? We welcome the comrades’ efforts of reflection and their willingness to express their concerns. The letters from the comrades make two contributions to this debate which will be continued at other ICC meetings. The ICC is committed to developing its position on this subject and we will publish further material in our press dealing with it.

Contribution to the reflection on: “what is the working class? who is part of the working class?” (L.)

Generally speaking, the conditions of production of wealth have not changed since the 19th century, when capitalism appeared in the Western countries (for Great Britain, in the 18th century). The working class is still the class that produces all the wealth and will continue to exist as long as surplus value is produced. Marx's definition specifies that the working class does not own the means of production, it only has its labour power to produce surplus value, in an associated manner, in exchange for a wage. However, in the 19th century, the proletariat was mainly concentrated in the primary (extraction and exploitation of natural resources) and secondary (transformation of basic materials into goods) sectors. Workers worked alongside each other and they could easily interact and organise themselves.

Following the ascendance of capitalism, the composition of the proletariat has changed linked to the development of other sectors. The tertiary sector, which included public servants (in French “fonctionnaires”) in charge of administering and organising the life of society, now includes many more workers, who participate in the valorisation of commodities, are paid a minimum wage and no longer have any hope of easily climbing the social ladder; this is the case in the Post Office sector (which includes fewer and fewer workers with public servant status), in Education, in Health Care, in Public Transport (where the status of public servant is also disappearing).

The bourgeoisie is always looking for “undercover” ways to further squeeze the working class: Britain has introduced a policy of “fire and re-hire”, which allows employers to terminate existing contracts of employment and replace them with much less “beneficial” contracts for the workers. An article on the situation in the UK [1] mentions this new devious practice, used by Tesco, British Telecom, British Gas and bus companies. It was also in Britain that the status of the self-employed “worker” was first introduced, in working for Uber, Deliveroo and other mail delivery companies, parcel delivery companies, etc.

At the last meeting, it was quite right to defend the working class affiliation of these “independent” workers. Even if they don't work in an associated way, they participate in the valorisation of the commodity labour power, by delivering meals to workers, transporting parcels, cleaning offices, etc.

Struggles have also taken place in Britain, in different sectors, involving temporary agency workers: “In March 2021, 150 porters, cleaners, switchboard operators and catering staff employed at Cumberland County Hospital by the equipment company Mitie, led a first day of action through the union, Unison, over a failure to pay them overtime...”

Today, there are fewer and fewer industrial workers, machinery having replaced them, but the technicians who operate and maintain the machines are workers, since they also participate in the production of value.

As capitalism has spread throughout the world, there are fewer and fewer small farms and now they are amalgamated into large agricultural companies managed on an industrial basis; these (farm) workers are part of the working class.

The working class has always been heterogeneous but the workers in peripheral countries do not have the historical experience of workers in central countries and are more likely to be influenced by the democratic sirens that divert their struggle into the trade union or into participation in elections.

So, the struggles of the workers in the central countries will be decisive in giving a lead to the workers from around the world in the development of a pre-revolutionary situation.

People from other classes can join the working class struggle by supporting revolutionary groups and by being convinced that only communist revolution can bring a viable future for humanity.

Experience has shown that occupying factories is no longer an effective means of struggle and that there is no power in being confined to the factory. On the contrary, the extension of the struggle and communications with other sectors is what empowers the struggle. The last movement against pension reform in France, for example, saw a wide range of sectors converge in the streets, including the public and private sectors, temporary workers, those on fixed-term contracts, lawyers and the unemployed. Even if some workers do not work in an associated manner inside the big companies, the attack on the pension system was (and can be in future) a powerful unifying factor.

In conclusion, today, in the epoch of the decomposition of capitalism, all the workers traditionally associated producers of surplus value, in the factories but also the temporary workers, workers in primary and secondary education, basic administrative staff, those in precarious jobs: self-employed workers who work in isolation but can be drawn into large (class) movements, all those who participate in the valorisation of the commodity to one degree or another, are part of the working class. The bourgeoisie does everything it can to prevent the workers from being "together" and tries to divide them, but the common interest of the workers, the struggle to defend wages, pensions, sick pay, working hours, holidays, resisting lay-offs, in short opposing the increase in exploitation, inexorably unites them.

L, 19/05/2021

Reader's letter from comrade Patche

At the last ICC meeting (Saturday 15 May), some comrades raised the question of the nature of the working class in a society where a phenomenon described as “uberisation” (named after the company Uber, a pioneer of this sector) in what is called “the gig economy” has taken root over the last decade or so. It is important to ask whether these new workers belong to the proletariat or whether they come from classes outside the proletariat that belong to the petty bourgeoisie, because the answer to this question has important consequences, particularly political ones. It determines whether or not we should defend these workers based on whether they are on a working class terrain or on a terrain outside the working class.

According to the ICC, in its Resolution on the Balance of Forces between the Classes (2019), “The increase in unemployment and precariousness has also highlighted the phenomenon of the "Uberisation" of work. By using an internet platform to find a job, Uberisation disguises the sale of labour power to a boss as a form of ‘individual enterprise’, while reinforcing the impoverishment and precariousness of these ‘entrepreneurs’. The ‘Uberisation’ of individual work is a key factor in enforcing atomisation, and increasing the difficulty of going on strike, because the self-exploitation of these workers considerably hinders their ability to fight collectively and develop solidarity against capitalist exploitation.”

Several points are important in this resolution. First of all, it states that Uberisation “disguises the sale of labour power to a boss”. According to the ICC, this form of self-employment is just a legal artifice. Moreover, in Great Britain, the Supreme Court has decided to reclassify Uber drivers as employees, thus showing that even the legal organs of the bourgeois state are not fooled by such a charade. If Uber workers are not considered as self-employed and, on the other hand, they sell their labour power to a boss, can't they be considered as belonging to the working class? The rest of the resolution is less clear on this question.

It argues that “the ‘Uberisation’ of individual work is a key factor in enforcing atomisation and increasing the difficulty of going on strike” and it “considerably hinders their ability to fight collectively” against capitalist exploitation. It is undeniable that the nature of the task carried out, which differs according to the service provided, though the main ones are delivering meals or working as a driver- as well as the mystified belief that Uber workers are their own bosses and answerable to no one but themselves - play a role in atomising the class and breaking the necessary solidarity between workers. Let's remember that for Marx capitalism, through the concentration and centralisation of capital, results in associated labour which, in the end, reinforces the class consciousness of workers who are collectively confronted with the same reality of savage exploitation. This is fundamentally what distinguishes the proletariat from the small peasantry, which is also exploited, but dispersed across the land, preventing it from forming bonds of solidarity.

But if Uber workers are atomised and dispersed and if it is extremely difficult for them to form solidarity links and lead collective struggles or strikes, are they not still a part of the working class, the proletariat? The fact that they are in the rearguard of the working class because of their precarious working conditions, does not mean that we should then deny these workers their status as exploited proletarians, separated from the means of production and condemned to sell their labour power to subsist, which is the definition of the proletarian according to Marx. The modalities of their exploitation could moreover be compared to that of piecework wages analysed by Marx in Book 1 of Capital (in chapter 21), the profitability of their task being calculated not in hours of work but in the number of tasks carried out, further increasing the competition between workers, each one seeking to accomplish as many tasks as possible in the course of the day.

Just before concluding, it is important to look at the real combativeness or otherwise of the Uberised workers. As we have said, their atomisation, the competition in this modern form of piecework, is constantly undermining solidarity between these workers. Yet in several places around the world we have seen spontaneous forms of struggle emerge without the creation or participation of any unions, the instruments of collaboration with the bourgeois state and defence of the capitalist mode of production. In Los Angeles, Uber workers spontaneously went on strike to fight against their working conditions. This is also the case in other countries and with other (gig economy) companies, in Italy, the UK, etc. It is true that these workers sometimes form unions or seek support from existing unions. Communist must reject these dead ends, arguing instead for the specific instruments of the class struggle, notably the wildcat strike, that rejects any union involvement. But such mistakes do not warrant placing the “uberised workers” outside the proletariat, and locating them with the petty-bourgeoisie.

In recent years, the quantity of precarious jobs has increased and the working class is the victim of this process, and the “Uberisation” of the workers is one of the expressions. To say that the Uberised workers do not belong to the proletariat because of their atomisation, their difficulties in placing themselves on the terrain of the working class, necessitates a deep and serious discussion based on a Marxist analysis. It is only through pursuing a polemical but fraternal debate that the working class is able to avoid the traps set by the bourgeoisie and its ideologues and to advance the struggle for the overthrow of capitalism and the emancipation of the proletariat.

Fraternal greetings, Patche

We are publishing below an article by the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, celebrating the 65th anniversary of the Paris Commune. The interest of this article, written in the midst of the counter-revolution and the march towards the Second World War, is that it highlights the historical continuity between the Commune of 1871 and the October Revolution of 1917. The article illustrates both the proletarian character of these two revolutionary experiences, their international scope and the tragedy of their defeat. Above all, it highlights, in the face of false friends and the chauvinist politics of the "popular fronts", that the proletariat must learn from its experiences, knowing, as Rosa Luxemburg underlined, that it is from "defeat to defeat" that the struggle of the proletariat progresses in order to assert and develop its revolutionary consciousness.

Between the Paris of the glorious Commune of 1871 and the Paris of the Popular Front there is an abyss that no phraseology can hide. The one embraced the workers of the whole world, the other saw the French proletariat dragged through the mud of treason. We want, to use the profound words of Karl Marx, "the Paris of the workers in 1871, the Paris of the Commune" to be "celebrated as the harbinger of a new society" and not as a simple 'national' episode, a moment in the defence of the fatherland, of the struggle against the 'Prussian' as the lackeys of the Popular Front will inevitably want to present it.

Certainly, the historical circumstances in which it arose could make such ideas possible. After all Marx did write: "Any attempt at upsetting the new government in the present crisis, when the enemy is almost knocking at the doors of Paris, would be a desperate folly. The French workers must perform their duties as citizens". But when, in March 1871, the Commune appeared, it was Marx who first brought out its profound internationalist character by writing: "If the Commune was thus the true representative of all the healthy elements of French society, and therefore the truly national government, it was, at the same time, as a workers' government, as the bold champion of the emancipation of labour, emphatically international.” 

The importance of the Commune lies in the fact that it was able to overcome the prejudices of the time, inevitable in the phase of the formation of capitalist states, in order to assert itself, not as the representative of the "Nation" or that of the democratic republic ("in reality," wrote Engels in his 1891 preface to Marx’s The Civil War in France, "the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, … in a democratic republic no less than in a monarchy"), but that of the world proletariat. Marx rightly wrote: " Its true secret was this: It was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing class against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour”.

It is this historical significance of the Parisian workers' insurrection, brilliantly drawn out by Marx in the heat of the events themselves, which has remained, and which gave it the colossal importance it had for the development of the workers' movement. It was the appearance of "the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labour". It's not surprising that, until 1914, the international movement lived on the heroic memory of the Commune, fed on it, but also came to blur its real meaning with the triumph of opportunism.

The French bourgeoisie, aided by Bismarck, was to crush the Commune with iron and fire. In the conditions of economic and social development of the time the Commune could have had no prospects. It was only after many years that the bourgeoisie, aided by opportunism, succeeded in blurring the immense significance of this event for the working class. In 1917, it appeared that only the Russian Bolsheviks had learned from the school of the Commune, that only they had understood its significance and through its critique had enabled them to deal with the problems of insurrection. Without the Commune, the October 1917 revolution would not have been possible. Here, it was one of those historical moments when "a desperate struggle of the masses, even for a hopeless cause, is essential for the further schooling of these masses and their training for future struggles" (Lenin), a first fruit of a bloody experience, a concrete step towards the world revolution.

The Commune was great and will remain so because the Parisian workers allowed themselves to be buried under its rubble rather than capitulate. No threat from Thiers, no violence could overcome their heroism. It took the massacres of May 1871 of Père-Lachaise to restore order and the triumph of the bourgeoisie. And even the opportunists of the Second International, who deliberately rejected the lessons of the Commune, had to bow to its heroism. Before the war, the Socialist parties had to glorify the Commune in order to better dismiss its historical lessons. But this attitude entailed a fundamental contradiction in that it made the Paris insurgents a permanent focus of international revolutionary struggle where genuine Marxists came to learn.

The Russian Commune of 1917 did not have this glorious fate. Its transformation into a centre of counter-revolution, its disintegration under the weight of world capitalism, has made it an element of repulsion whose lessons are very difficult to draw out. The Soviets for the worker no longer mean a step forward in relation to the Commune, but a step backwards. Instead of perishing under its own rubble, facing the bourgeoisie, the Soviets crushed the proletariat. Today its flag is that of imperialist war. But in the same way as there would have been no October 1917 without the Commune of 1871, there is no possibility of a triumphant revolution without the tragic end of the Russian revolution.

What does it matter, after all, if the Commune serves the chauvinistic hype of the Popular Front, if Russia has become a powerful instrument for the preparation of imperialist war? It is the destiny of the great events of history to be used in the interests of the perpetuation of capitalism, as soon as they have ceased to be a threat to its domination. The only thing that nobody in the world can erase from the Commune is its character as a forerunner in the liberation of the working class. The only thing that remains of the Russian Soviets is the gigantic experience of running a proletarian state[1] in the name and on behalf of the world proletariat.

The revival of revolutionary struggles must recall the political bases of these events. The historical forms do not matter: Commune or Soviet (rather Commune than Soviet[2]), the world proletariat will not be able to repeat the historical errors of either one, because, as Marx put it so well, it has "no ideals to realise, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant". We do not have to oppose a utopian and abstract ideal to these two historical experiences, to get lost in an empty enthusiasm or a sentimental repulsion, but to draw "the elements of the new society" from the historical phase in which the Russian revolution fell, as Lenin did with the Commune. As the Hungarian Commune of 1919 clearly shows, among other things, you inevitably see the repetition of errors, of failures, which, because of the existence of a previous experience, undermine the struggle of the proletariat for many years.

The workers cannot "repeat" in the course of their emancipatory struggle, but must innovate, precisely because they are the revolutionary class in present-day society. The inevitable defeats that occur along the way are then only stimulants, valuable experiences that determine, later on, the victorious development of the struggle. On the other hand, if we were to repeat tomorrow even one of the errors of the Russian revolution, we would jeopardise, for a long time, the destiny of the proletariat, which would become convinced that it has nothing more to try.

Let us therefore, while the proletariat is being beaten in all countries, allow the traitors to falsify the scope of the Commune. Let Russia follow its course. But let us take care to preserve the lessons of these two experiences, to prepare the new weapons for tomorrow's revolution, to solve what the Russian revolution failed to do, because if "The great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence" (Marx, The Civil War in France), the merit of the Russian revolution was to have tackled the problems of the management of a proletarian economy in conjunction with the workers' movement of all countries and on the front of the world revolution. The "great act" of the Commune ended in massacres, the management of the Russian state ended with "socialism in one country". We know today that it is better that the next revolutions end like the Paris Commune than in the shame of betrayal. But we are working, not with the prospect of defeat, but with the will to prepare the conditions for victory.

There have been two Communes. Long live the Communes of the world proletariat.

Bilan no 29 (March-April 1936)