The Decentering of the Working Class
In Postmodernist and Post-Marxist discourses, May ‘68 and the decline of labor movements in the West throughout the 70s and 80s represent the death of the industrial working class as the revolutionary subject. In the case of France, the students and workers’ inability to fuse into a larger force characterized the failure of May and the years after. The factory and industrial production was becoming less important to the mode of production, and the ‘80s saw an all out assault on unions and workers in the forms of Reaganism and Thatcherism, while production was beginning to be exported to the Global South. As Goran Therborn says in his survey of Post-Marxism, “class, formerly among the most important concepts in Left discourse, has been displaced in recent years in part, ironically, through the latter’s own defeat in the capitalist class struggle, but also because the developments of post-industrial demography have dislodged it from its previous theoretical or geographical centrality.”1 In other words, the displacement of the working class from leftist discourses is a product of deindustrialization altering the mode of production, and the failure of working class institutions and parties within the class struggles of the 20th century.
The history of Marxism has been dominated by the image of the working class as concentrated in the factory. Since all the workers were concentrated in the factory, collaborated in production, and lived in workers’ quarters together, they would collectively realize their exploitation and work together to fight back through the formation of unions. Marx and Engels say the “union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another.”2 Since production is socialized, the workers have more contact with each other, facilitating the development of class consciousness. Marx and Engels conclude that “of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.”3 This is due to the workers position as being antagonistic to the capitalist class. Thus, the workers are revolutionary because of their position within the mode of production.
Following World War II, workers were owning homes in the suburbs, working less in factories, and thus becoming more isolated from each other. As Althusser observes in the posthumously published What is to be Done?, the suburbs convert the worker into a petty-bourgeois unit, thereby concealing their exploitation.4 By owning their own property, along with a car to drive themselves to work, workers begin to develop petty-bourgeois class consciousness. As Stuart Hall observes in his lecture on the formation of Cultural Studies in Britain, “on both sides of the Atlantic, people are talking about the “postcapitalist” society, about the decline and disappearance of traditional class-oriented political ideologies.”5 It was widely believed that the development of consumer culture weakened working class politics, and in Britain, this theory was used to explain why the Labor Party lost their power to the Conservatives after a period of dominance in the 50s. Hall says that this period was defined by
“The diminishing sharpness of class relations; the drifting and incorporation of sectors of the working and lower-middle classes into the professional and nonprofessional commercial classes; the beginnings of mass cultures; the massive penetration of the mass media and the beginnings of a television age; the rapid expansion of a consciousness led by consumer advertising, et cetera.”6
To conclude, the decentering of factory labor, combined with the development of white collar labor and the further development of consumer society, has led to the weakening of the traditional working class in the West.
However, there is another element to de-centering the working class as revolutionary subject, which stems from the failure of the working class to become a revolutionary force. In many narratives of May ‘68, the students were the ones with the dreams of revolution, while the workers were less ambitious. In his research on May ‘68, Mitch Abidor directly interviewed individuals that were involved in the movement to investigate the narrative that the PCF betrayed a revolutionary movement, which assumes “that the workers supported the demands for a new society, and that they were aiming for a new world, the same new world as the students.”7 However, this was a false assumption, as many of the workers were distrustful of the students. Abidor says,
“The suspicion and distrust of the average worker for the students and their radical demands during May was expressed to me by Colette Danappe, who worked in a factory outside of Paris. After she told me that politics were never discussed at her occupied factory, I asked if students came there. She said they did, and that she and her co-workers rejected the students “because they came with red flags that they put up around the factory. The students were more interested in fighting, they were interested in politics, and that wasn’t for us.” As for seeing beyond bread-and-butter demands: “No, the workers in the factory didn’t, and I followed along.”8
Abidor adds another quote from Danappe, who said she and many workers were satisfied with the demands achieved in the crisis. While the PCF and CGT obstructed the students from connecting with the workers, it wasn’t as if the workers were desperate to connect with the students. Abidor concludes that “the Communists [PCF] may have been poor revolutionaries, but they were politically astute. They knew the workers, knew what they would fight for, and got them what they wanted.”9 Abidor fails to engage with the question of whether the PCF contributed to the workers’ conservatism. If the French working class is generally conservative, it’s up to communists to challenge them and a failure to do so is tailism.
Regardless, there was allegedly a dissonance between class and ideology in May ‘68. The reality that many Marxist, or Marxist-adjacent, theorists were left to face was that the working class was not interested in revolution. The industrial working class was becoming decentered from capitalist production, and these same workers were unable to advance beyond a trade-union level of organization and political activity. Therborn says that while in Postmodern, Post-Marxist, and contemporary academic discourses “class remains a central descriptive category in several arenas: mainstream sociology; standard Anglo-Saxon inequality discourse… most of the links between this descriptive mainstream, on the one hand, and collective social action and radical theorizing of such action, on the other, have been snapped.”10 Or in other words, even if class remains present in many academic discourses, the concept does not take on the same meaning, nor does it carry any meaningful connection to radical politics.
Therborn posits that Marxism has three different poles: a historical social science emerging out of the German concept of wissenschaft focused on the historical development of capitalism, a philosophy of contradiction (dialectics), and a socialist, working class mode of politics. He says,
“Socialist politics… kept the Marxist triangle together, even if there was little in it of specifically Marxist intent. But socialist politics disintegrated in the course of the 1980’s: bogged down and driven to surrender in France; electorally crushed in Britain and pushed onto the defensive in Scandinavia; abruptly turning rightwards for geopolitical and other reasons in Southern Europe; abandoned or fatally undermined in Communist Eurasia; already crushed under the militarist boot in Latin America. This pulled the carpet from under Marxism as a social science, its analyses losing any discernible potential audience.”11
Thus the failure of socialist politics in the 60s and 70s led many intellectuals to abandon Marxism. The Maoist philosopher Josh Moufawad-Paul makes a similar argument in Continuity and Rupture, arguing that Postmodernism, Post-Marxist, and Post-Structuralist discourses emerged in the theoretical void left by Marxism-Leninism in the academy, and this void only existed because of the defeat of socialist politics.12
Lastly, if developments in theory are determined by economic, social, and political events, then it is no surprise that many French theorists and radicals would react strongly to the events of May ‘68 and the PCF’s role within the crisis. Many of the key thinkers of Postmodernism, like Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Baudrillard, and so on were French:
“Foucault’s notion of power as extending beyond the state throughout society, Derrida’s critique of a fixed centre from which objective knowledge could be obtained, and Lyotard’s suggestion that the ‘postmodern condition’ is characterized by the ‘suspicion of meta-narratives’ or philosophies of history, all could be seen (and were seen) as attacks on the Marxist-Leninist themes of ‘capturing’ state power, the working-class as the subject-object of history and the notion of ‘the class struggle as the motor of history.”13
The stifling nature of intellectual practice and discourse within the PCF meant that critics were forced outside of the party. Since the PCF was “labeled” as Marxist-Leninist, critics of the PCF would often criticize Marxism-Leninism instead of the concrete actions and practices of the PCF.
Following the decline of the traditional working class, many on the left began to challenge this notion of the classical ‘revolutionary subject’ in their political practice. Many in the black power movement of the ‘60s, including the Black Panther Party (BPP), centered their organizing around the lumpenproletariat. Even though she was never a member of the BPP, Angela Davis argues in, “Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Black Liberation,” that the lumpenproletariat takes on a different function within the United States due to the legacy of black oppression.14 The prison system is an extension of the systems of chattel slavery and Jim Crow, and many prisoners are imprisoned for “political” reasons, i.e. for having the temerity to fight back against racial oppression within the US. Therefore, the lumpenproletariat in the US does not entirely comprise petty thieves, even though abolitionists push back on this conceptualization as well, but also political prisoners. Davis notes that many Marxists have been historically dismissive of the lumpenproletariat by citing quotes from Marx to justify their position. She says that other quotes from Marx on the subject are usually not considered:
“Marx had stated that they [the lumpenproletariat] are as capable of “the most heroic deeds and the most exalted sacrifices, as of the basest banditry and the dirtiest corruption.” He emphasized the fact that the provisional government’s mobile guards under the Paris Commune — some 24,000 troops — were largely formed out of young lumpenproletarians from fifteen to twenty years of age. Too many Marxists have been inclined to overvalue the second part of Marx’s observation — that the lumpenproletariat is capable of the basest banditry and the dirtiest corruption — while minimizing or indeed totally disregarding his first remark, applauding the lumpen for their heroic deeds and exalted sacrifices.”15
Davis then proceeds to note that a bulk of the Black, Chicano, and Puerto Rican population at the time were unemployed due to rising unemployment within the capitalist system as a result of the shifting mode of production in the 60s. Davis concludes
“In the context of class exploitation and national oppression it should be clear that numerous individuals are compelled to resort to criminal acts, not as a result of conscious choice — implying other alternatives — but because society has objectively reduced their possibilities of subsistence and survival to this level. This recognition should signal the urgent need to organize the unemployed and lumpenproletariat, as indeed the Black Panther Party as well as activists in prison have already begun to do.”16
Another example of organizing different subjects is the Combahee River Collective, which sought to explicitly organize Black women.17 The premise of their argument was that since Black women face dual oppression as Black individuals and women, then by organizing for their own liberation, they will simultaneously be organizing for the liberation of everyone. Or in other words, if working class Black women are to successfully liberate themselves, this logically entails the liberation of everyone. They say, “if black women are free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”18
Returning to France, Badiou and Lazarus both sought to organize migrant workers in France following May ‘68 through their work in the organizations the Union des communistes de France marxiste-léniniste (UCFml), and later the L’Organisation Politique.19 Badiou and Lazarus were both responding to the failure of the PCF to build connections with movements outside of the typical industrial working class. Even Althusser in the PCF was internally advocating for the party to organize migrant workers and students.20 While there are plenty more examples of organizing that move away from classical labor organizing, the general point is that May ‘68, and the rest of the “long 60s”, signaled a shift to new forms of organizing that were no longer dependent upon the industrial working class.
The dominant narrative of Postmodern and Post-Marxist discourses is that the working class is outdated as a revolutionary subject due to the effects of deindustrialization and the failure of socialist politics. Instead of organizing the industrial working class, socialists and communists ought to organize the more oppressed strata of the masses in general, like black and migrant workers, the lumpenproletariat, and women.
Defense of the Working Class
I want to push back on features of the Postmodern/Post-Marxist narrative, although I am not going to insist that communists still primarily ought to organize the industrial working class as others have.21 Furthermore, I strongly agree with Davis and the Combahee River Collective’s arguments on the necessity of organizing other political subjects outside the sphere of production. However, the notion that the workers in May ‘68 were not revolutionary on the whole is inaccurate. After all, if the dominant narrative of May ‘68 centers the student revolts, which necessarily undermines the significance of the general strike, then Postmodern and Post-Marxist discourses share the same assumptions. While there were certainly conservative elements in the French working class, how can we explain the deployment of novel forms of class struggle if we reduce all workers to this? As Badiou notes, many workers, especially younger ones, would defy CGT orders and perform wildcat strikes. The problem for Badiou was that the CGT and PCF prevented the radical workers and students from experimenting and pursuing new forms of action.
Extending beyond France, there was also the Italian Hot Autumn the following year. In her memoir, Italian communist and theoretician Rossana Rossanda describes the period:
“The Hot Autumn was the largest, most sophisticated industrial struggle since the War—not just a strike, but a matter of the workers taking the entire production process into their own hands, elbowing the management hierarchy aside. And these were not an experienced cohort, tested by decades of repression, but young workers, often without qualifications, whose education had come from the chaotic development of the society they had grown up in; who had taken something from the resounding student protests of the year before and made it their own.”22
Just as in France in May ‘68, it was the young workers taking control of the strike and pushing for revolutionary action. Rossanda continues
“The stakes were very high; for capital there could hardly be a greater challenge. The media knew it. At first they were pleased to see the PCI [Italian Communist Party] and the unions bypassed, then they were frightened… They were shocked that Fiat could be run by its subordinates, that factory workers could discuss production issues on the different assembly lines and come to an agreement, without the management having any say… Autumn 1969 was, I think, the only time in the post-war era that the potential of a struggle at the heart of the system of production seemed— for a moment, was—unlimited. Europe was still shaken by 1968, the United States by the movement against the Vietnam War; echoes of the Chinese Cultural Revolution still reverberated. Latin America was in turmoil, torn between guerrilla warfare and military juntas. It was an acute crisis, in a common climate both universal and unorganized; a shudder that ran from one social sector to another.”23
Within two years in Europe, there were two significant revolutionary episodes, both involving general strikes and radical new forms of politics carried out by workers. While the movements certainly failed, this does not mean that the working class is done for as a revolutionary agent.
The decentering of the factory system does not mean that there is no more working class. Wage labor still exists, and thus the exploitation of wage labor still exists. The only thing that has changed is the forms of labor carried out under capitalist production in the imperialist countries. While workers no longer work primarily in factories, they now work in schools, universities, hospitals, retail stores, cafes, and so on, and workers within each field are still exploited and endure terrible working conditions. The recent strike waves of teachers, museum workers, cafe workers, and graduate student workers are all reactions to capitalist exploitation.24 Additionally, the image of the white male factory worker is reductive in itself, as the capitalist system has always been built and maintained on the labor of immigrant workers (American railroads), black workers and slaves, and the unpaid labor of women. The image of the worker as the blue collar white man was already a false image, even prior to deindustrialization.
One may object and say that including insurance reps, for example, as part of the working class since they technically sell their labor power in exchange for a wage negates the meaning of ‘working class’. After all, if one works for completely meaningless industries like insurance companies, which are parasites on working class people, while also facing a low degree of exploitation, then are they really someone to be organized against the capitalist system? This is why it is important to study class composition, and to understand the differences between various sections of the working class. Some workers are highly educated with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, and some even have PHDs, while others have only received a highschool education. Workers vary according to race, sex, and gender expression, and thus face varying levels of oppression. While I would argue that certain individuals are more predisposed to be interpellated into radical politics based on their backgrounds, the goal of a communist politics is to build solidarity throughout the fractured, diverse working class. This will be a very difficult task, which is why understanding the diversity of the working class is essential for contemporary communist politics.
May ‘68 proves that without the support and activity of the working class, which is directly antagonistic to capitalist production, no revolutionary movement is possible. The defining character of May was the general strike, which threw the state into crisis. It was the end of the general strike that led to the end of the May movement, as the students were unable to sustain it by themselves. The revolutionary activity of the working class, defined by taking action that is antagonistic to the capitalist system and its reproduction, is necessary for a revolution to occur in capitalist societies. There could be no Bolshevik Revolution without the Soviets, and there could be no potential revolution in France without the CGT in 1968. In China, where the class antagonistic to the dominant mode of production was the peasantry, the Revolution could not have unfolded without them.
The conditions of capitalism alone will not create a revolution. The contradictions of capitalism present the opportunity for a rupture, but as May shows, this is not guaranteed. Thus, I think we need to reject the notion that there is an intrinsic revolutionary subject since no social group or class is necessarily revolutionary. In his talk on the concept of a revolutionary subject, Michael Heinrich says,
“Unfortunately, the absence of revolutionary tendencies is the normality in capitalism. The existence of revolutionary tendencies depends on special historical factors. I think there is no revolutionary subject waiting to be discovered or sleeping. A revolution can happen, and then in this revolution a revolutionary subject constitutes.”25
There is a common assumption within some areas of socialist organizing that the working class is like a sleeping giant. If we discover the working class and infuse the workers with communist ideology, then we’ll have a revolutionary movement on our hands. In my experiences in communist organizing, I have come to realize that this is not the case. The working class is isolated, fragmented, and incredibly diverse, and organizing is very difficult. After all, individuals in capitalist societies are indoctrinated from birth with capitalist ideology and values, and deconstructing our habits and instincts is an incredibly difficult task. These instincts come to the fore in organizing when people become scared to take action, fear retaliation from a boss or landlord, and ultimately become discouraged. These instincts and assumptions drilled into individuals plague organizers and workers alike. Heinrich continues that
“The search for this revolutionary subject without revolution is a kind of political alchemy – like in medieval ages when the alchemists searched for a magical stone that could transfer chemical elements etc. This stone does not exist and neither does a revolutionary subject without revolution. It constitutes during a revolution or a revolutionary event, and after this event, whether the revolution is successful or not, the revolutionary subject will disappear. The revolutionary subject without revolution cannot exist… The consequence of this analysis is not to say that we should have no hope for revolution and therefore no hope of fundamentally changing capitalism. Of course, I want this fundamental change and I hope one day it will come and perhaps I will be a part of it. But to see this revolutionary tendency as an objective tendency which is always there is, I think, a very bad illusion.”26
For Heinrich, revolutionary ruptures are rare, and it is only through these events that we can speak of a revolutionary subject. But to posit a revolutionary subject prior to any revolutionary activity is wishful thinking.
This has parallels with Badiou and Lazarus, where May ‘68 proved that there is no necessary revolutionary subject. In an essay on the thought of Lenin, Lazarus says,
“The lapsing of classism, that is, an approach to politics in terms of class, took place when it appeared very precisely that “class” and “class party” carried no particular proposition on the state and did not aim at any event, either in exteriority or in interiority: this was the figure of the PCF and CGT in 1968. At this point something essential came to an end, an end that was signaled here by the obsolescence of the party-state-revolution triptych.”27
In other words, the classical Marxist framework, where the communist union and party are the agents of class struggle, was ineffective, and May ‘68 is the proof of this. After all, the seizure of state power was never put on the agenda by the PCF or CGT. Thus, there is no guarantee that a revolution will happen, or that the workers will necessarily come to adopt communist ideology.
The Marxist Conception of Revolutionary Politics
While the capitalist mode of production has changed and evolved over time, creating new forms of labor and work while displacing the old, Marx was correct that workers possess revolutionary potential due to their position within the mode of production. Etienne Balibar says that “class consciousness is contained in potentia in the conditions which first objectively unify the working class.”28 Since workers experience the class struggle everyday, the potential for politicization is always present. Althusser says that the workers’ antagonistic position relative to the capitalist class is the source of their power and threat against capitalism.29 The workers have the capacity through collective action, specifically the general strike, to halt the running of the capitalist system. Capitalists and business owners are always desperate to prevent any attempts at worker resistance. To use a current example, Starbucks is desperately trying to prevent unionization at their stores by hiring anti-union lawyers and scaring the workers out of unionizing through isolation, intimidation, and even dismissal of union leaders.30 In May ‘68, it was the general strike that transformed the scale of the crisis. While the government wasn’t pleased with the actions of the students, they were not really scared of them. The largest general strike in the country’s history is what motivated them to take the crisis more seriously.
Of course, potential does not always translate into actuality. Just because the workers have the capacity or potential to overthrow the capitalist system, this does not mean that they will always try to, as the history of capitalism proves. After all, how many serious revolutionary movements have there been in the history of the United States (or other capitalist countries for that matter)? The failure for workers to become revolutionary depends on the particularity of the situation – the conjuncture they were born into, the organizations that exist at the time, and so on and so forth. Fundamentally, there is no necessary correspondence between identity and ideology. Just because one is a worker, this does not mean they will become revolutionary. Just because one is a woman, this does not mean they will necessarily become a feminist. Just because one is black, this does not mean they will believe in black liberation. One might argue that workers ought to be revolutionary, or that women ought to be feminists, or that black individuals ought to believe in black liberation, but that is an entirely different argument. There is an assumption that identity and ideology possess a necessary correspondence, which is why people are usually surprised when workers worship capitalists like Elon Musk, when women don’t believe in feminism, or when a black individual is a Republican. The assumption is that every identity possesses certain interests, and that individuals who represent that identity should share those interests. However, individuals are not entirely reducible to their identities, and while one’s identity may shape aspects of their experience and beliefs, it will not automatically guide them onto the path of their “predetermined” ideology.
If “social being determines consciousness,” as Marx and Engels argue all the way back in the German Ideology, then why are we surprised when workers are not revolutionary?31 Or as Lenin says in What is to be Done?, communist ideology does not organically develop amongst workers – it has to be consciously introduced to them.32 If workers are not introduced to communist ideology, they will remain trapped at the level of trade unionist politics. The PCF and CGT were not revolutionary organizations, and functioned as social democratic organizations. So if the ‘communist’ organizations of class struggle were not advancing communist ideology, then it should be no surprise that some workers did not want to pursue revolutionary action. Furthermore, the absence of revolutionary organizations in many countries throughout the West, combined with omnipotence of ideological state apparatuses like the media and press, it should be assumed that most people are not revolutionary. This is part of the reason for the necessity of party formation: the party serves as the vanguard of the movement by developing cadres through organizing, political education, and workers’ inquiry. Communists have to introduce and spread revolutionary ideas throughout a movement.
While there is no intrinsic revolutionary subject waiting to be discovered, communists need to identify the class antagonistic to the mode of production, and facilitate their organization. Since the working class is antagonistic to the capitalist mode of production, this means communists should be organizing the working class. Of course, the working class is very diverse and fragmented, and it should be assumed that not every worker will be interested in the movement. It is impossible for every worker to be revolutionary, and most revolutions are carried out only by a handful of the population. Rebuilding the communist movement will not be easy, as the past decade or so has proven. The only reality is the gradual process of building a movement through the construction of organizations and the development of cadre. The goal of communists today has to be the construction of an organizational apparatus through which a revolutionary situation can be taken advantage of. Lenin says revolutionary conditions are:
“1. When it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the “upper classes”, a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for “the lower classes not to want” to live in the old way; it is also necessary that “the upper classes should be unable” to live in the old way;
2. When the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual;
3. When, as a consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses, who uncomplainingly allow themselves to be robbed in “peace time”, but, in turbulent times, are drawn both by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the “upper classes” themselves into independent historical action.”33
I believe May ‘68 satisfies all of these conditions, but as Lenin says, there is no guarantee that a revolutionary situation will result in a revolution. Revolutionary situations will organically arise throughout history, and the goal for contemporary communists is to put in the work everyday to ensure that more opportunities do not pass us by.
Notes
1. Goran Therborn, From Marxism to Post-Marxism?, (London: Verso, 2008), 140. ←
2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, (London: Verso, 2012), 46. ←
3. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 47. ←
4. Louis Althusser, What is to be Done?, (Medford: Polity Press, 2020), 7-10. ←
5. Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 6. ←
6. Hall, Cultural Studies, 6. ←
7. Mitchell Abidor, “1968: When the Communist Party Stopped a French Revolution,” The New York Review, April 19, 2018. ←
8. Abidor, “1968: When the Communist Party Stopped a French Revolution.” ←
9. Abidor. ←
10. Therborn, 140-141. ←
11. Ibid, 118-119. ←
12. Josh Moufawad-Paul, Continuity and Rupture, (Zero Books, 2016), 142. ←
13. Kian Tajbakhsh, “Postmodernism, Post-Marxism, and the Question of Class,” Social Scientist, Vol. 19, no. 3/4 (March-April 1991), 80. ←
14. Angela Davis, “Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation,” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), 42-45. ←
15. Davis, “Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation,” 45-46. ←
16. Davis, 46. ←
17. Combahee River Collective Statement, in How We Get Free, (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017), 17. ←
18. Combahee River Collective, 23. ←
19. Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, (London: Verso, 2010), 33. ←
20. Louis Althusser, “Something New,” in Essays in Self-Criticism, (1974), 215. ←
21. Carlos L. Garrido, “Why Midwestern Marx?”, July 28, 2020, accessed from https://www.midwesternmarx.com/articles/why-midwestern-marx-by-carlos-l-garrido. ←
22. Rossana Rossanda, “The Comrade from Milan,” New Left Review 49 (January and February 2008), 98. ←
23. Rossanda, “The Comrade from Milan,” 98-99. ←
24. I expand on the significance of this movement in, “Some Notes on the Strike Wave,” Negation Magazine Newsletter (November 2021). ←
25. Michael Heinrich, “The Political Impact of Marx’s Form Analysis,” (Video Lecture, Red May TV), transcribed by https://www.moishepostone.com/post/michael-heinrich-on-the-revolutionary-subject-red-may. ←
26. Heinrich, “The Political Impact of Marx’s Form Analysis.” ←
27. Sylvain Lazarus, “Lenin and the Party,” in Lenin Reloaded (Durham: Duke University, 2007), 266. ←
28. Etienne Balibar, “From Class Struggle to Struggle Without Classes?” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Volume 14 (No.1), 13. ←
29. Louis Althusser, “Reply to John Lewis”, 1972, accessed from https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1663&context=alr. ←
30. See the Starbucks United Twitter account for updates on their struggles to unionize. ←
31. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1974), 51. ←
32. Vladimir Lenin, What is to be Done?, 1902, accessed from https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/download/what-itd.pdf, 17. ←
33. Vladimir Lenin, “The Collapse of the Second International,” May-June 1915, accessed from https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/csi/ii.htm#v21pp74h-212. ←
Philosophy of Construction 