A cooperative of American academics has launched a campaign to obtain the international theoretical driving licence of the so-called ‘third way of communism’, attempting a systematic elaboration of the ideas of this movement and disseminating them through a publication entitled Monthly Review, which appears simultaneously in several languages.

It is well known that many seemingly contradictory tendencies gather under the banner of the ‘third way of communism’: in fact, on the central theme of the more or less explicit proclamation of the transfer of the centre of the social movement from the area of the advanced countries to that of the backward countries, a whole range of variations can be developed. What matters is the necessary conclusion of the common underlying thesis, and it is precisely this outcome that Monthly Review, due to the presumption which animates it, is compelled to provide a fairly precise picture of.

As Trotsky says, the psychological characteristic of opportunism is, paradoxical as it may seem, the inability to wait. Monthly Review does not escape this definition. In fact, after having noted the current absence of a revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat, far from defending tooth and nail the doctrine that tomorrow will allow the inevitable resumption of the proletarian offensive wave to orient itself correctly and actively utilise the possibilities offered by objective conditions, it launches itself into ‘revising’ and ‘correcting’ Marxism and tries to pass off the apathy of the working masses as an irrevocable fact. And this irrevocability is declared, by a ‘strange’ coincidence, precisely at the moment when the world situation, from the United States to England, from Germany to France, to mention only the most striking cases, shows the first, albeit embryonic, symptoms of the awakening of the wage slaves and heralds the end, this one truly irrevocable, of the dark period of passive acceptance by the masses of the directives issued by the political and trade union apparatuses of traditional opportunism.

Under the guise of enormous ‘revolutionary’ zeal – the search for a ‘new’ protagonist of history – Monthly Review plays the typical role of all opportunism: to preemptively deprive the proletariat of that doctrinal weapon which is a necessary condition for its victory. This result is pursued thanks to a colossally impudent lie: the denial of the revolutionary role of the working class would be the direct product of Marxism, its essence finally discovered! Have entire generations of revolutionary militants learned that scientific socialism is the doctrine of the conditions for the liberation of the proletariat? The professors of the Monthly Review, in their kindness, deign to explain that they have understood nothing at all.

The argument presented by the magazine is, in summary, the following: The proletariat of the imperialist metropolises, thanks to the distribution of superprofits extorted from dependent countries, would have been transformed into a vast labour aristocracy and could no longer play, due to the solidarity of interests that binds it as a class to the bourgeoisie, the role of gravedigger of capitalism; but imperialism, by historically emasculating the working class of the advanced countries, would have also created a new subversive force, consisting of the ill-defined ‘oppressed masses’ of the Third World. Therefore, the keystone of the communist revolution would be represented by the victory of the so-called dependent and backward countries against the advanced imperialist countries, and the theory of class struggle would find its place in the museum of antiquities.

The purpose of this article is not so much to criticise the description of the so-called ‘third way of communism’, which, apart from a few nuances, is the same one served to us by all ‘fashionable revolutionaries’ – we refer the interested reader to other articles that have appeared in our press – but rather to unmask the ‘Marxist cover’ that Monthly Review tries to give to the thesis of dissociating the capitalism-communism antithesis from the capital-proletariat antithesis due to... the exhaustion of the latter.

This obscene embrace between Marxism and the denial of Marxism is brought about by none other than the magazine’s high priest, Paul M. Sweezy, in an article entitled ‘Marx and the Proletariat’ (Monthly Review, December 1967), in which we read:

‘Marx’s theory of capitalism (...) capitalism is a self-contradictory system which generates increasingly severe difficulties and crises as it develops. But this is only half the story: equally characteristic of capitalism is that it generates not only difficulties and crises but also its own gravediggers in the shape of the modern proletariat (...) In the eyes of many (...) this theory of the revolutionary agency of the proletariat is the weakest point of the whole system (...) I do not believe that the empirical observations which support this type of criticism of Marx’s theory can be seriously challenged. And yet it certainly will not do to jump from there to the conclusion that Marx's theory is “refuted” and must be abandoned (...) In Marx’s theory of capitalism, the proletariat is not always and necessarily revolutionary. It was not revolutionary in the period of manufacture, becoming so only as a consequence of the introduction of machinery in the industrial revolution. The long-run effects of machinery, however, are different from the immediate effects. If the revolutionary opportunities of the early period of modern industry are missed, the proletariat of an industrializing country tends to become less and less revolutionary. This does not mean, however, that Marx’s contention that capitalism produces its own gravediggers is wrong. If we consider capitalism as a global system, which is the only correct procedure, we see that it is divided into a handful of exploiting countries and a much more numerous and populous group of exploited countries. The masses in these exploited dependencies constitute a force in the global capitalist system which is revolutionary in the same sense and for the same reasons that Marx considered the proletariat of the early period of modern industry to be revolutionary’.

Sweezy begins his demolition of Marxism by posing, as we can see, as its champion against those critics who, according to him, are right in considering the thesis of the proletariat as a revolutionary agent to be outdated, but who, in their haste, have failed to understand that the centre of gravity of the doctrine lies elsewhere. In fact, according to our professor, there are two clearly distinct concepts in Marx: that of the insolubility of the contradictions of the capitalist system, from which recurring difficulties and crises derive, and that according to which capitalism produces its own gravediggers. What the critics have failed to grasp is that the second of these two basic concepts is not necessarily identified with the enunciation of the revolutionary role of the proletariat. Only contingently would the conflict between the working class and the bourgeoisie coincide with the contradiction between the development of the productive forces and the mode of production and have the possibility of escalating to the critical point, a possibility, however, not realised.

Apart from an easy irony on the theory according to which capitalism would produce the abstract necessity and, we would be tempted to say, ethics of its own burial, and history would then take care of executing this kind of sentence through successive... empirical approximations, to hold up the whole construction is only a miserable rhetorical trick.

Sweezy can separate these two concepts of Marxism and empty that of the production by the capitalist order of its own gravediggers of all definitive content only because he distorts, with calculated imprecision, the other concept: namely, the definition of the contradictory nature of the system.

In the ‘Preface’ to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx summarises the results of the materialist conception of history regarding the dialectic of every type of society with a class structure: ‘At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution’.

Why does Sweezy neither speak of productive forces nor of relations of production and limit himself to writing that ‘capitalism is a self-contradictory system which generates increasingly severe difficulties and crises as it develops’, a statement that, in its generality, means nothing? For the simple reason that, according to Marx, the pressure of the productive forces against the relations of production in capitalist society is expressed as the class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.

Sweezy relies on the vagueness of his words and on the possibility that his readers, if they happen to recall the aforementioned passage from Marx, fall victim to the common meaning of the expression ‘productive forces’, which is that of bourgeois political economy, as ‘factors of production’ – a production conceived by it as the process at the end of which the ‘goods’ that men need would be found.

Sweezy is also greatly aided by the widespread legend, of which he is one of the architects, according to which Engels would have been a poor populariser of Marx and that quotations from his works cannot be used as evidence against the claim to orthodoxy of the views expressed in the Monthly Review. In fact, it would suffice to open Anti-Dühring to consign our academic’s musings to their rightful place in the dustbin, but we will not do so, nor will we demonstrate that Engels wrote that text in collaboration with Marx, that is, with his full approval and participation. Nor will we make use of the Communist Manifesto, because we know the refrain with which such an initiative would be received: the immediate agitational aims of this pamphlet would have taken precedence over the ‘genuine’ thought of Marx, with the evidently non-negligible help of that bungler Engels.

Granted and absolutely not conceded, our intention is to demonstrate, citing works on which Sweezy has so far found nothing to criticise, that into the garbage this gentleman must go all the same, taking all his books, articles, and followers with him.

For Marx, capitalist production is a production of use values only in relation to the production and reproduction of the capitalist relation, that is, of surplus value and the division of society into classes. Therefore, productive force is not an abstract entity, a technological datum, a material characteristic of a given machine or the use that capitalists make of it. It is indeed ‘determined by various circumstances, amongst others, by the average amount of skill of the workmen, the state of science, and the degree of its practical application, the social organisation of production, the extent and capabilities of the means of production, and by physical conditions’ (Capital, Book One), but it is not identified with these circumstances: it is the ‘productive force of labour’; and since in bourgeois society the proletariat is the only class that produces and reproduces all value, including its own labour power, it is also the repository of the ‘material productive forces of society’.

As simple as it is obvious, even if, as Marx points out, since these productive forces only manifest their effects after the proletariat has ceded to capital its own labour power, they appear as a property emanating from capital, thus giving rise to the error into which all bourgeois economists fall and of which Sweezy offers a typical example in its opportunist version: separating the productive forces of society from the working class and attributing to the latter the role, in the history of the anti-capitalist revolution, of actor in a circumscribed ‘episode’ of its own.

Mr. Sweezy has the audacity to quote in his article the following passage from The Holy Family, in which Marx and Engels (it is clear that in this work it is not the villainous Engels who prevails over Marx) write:

‘When socialist writers ascribe this world-historic role to the proletariat, it is not at all (...) because they regard the proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary. Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need – the practical expression of necessity – is driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation. Not in vain does it go through the stern but steeling school of labour. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is visibly and irrevocably foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organization of bourgeois society today’ (The Holy Family, Marx-Engels).

What does Sweezy read in this passage? ‘(...) we must be quite clear that Marx’s theory of the revolutionary agency of the proletariat has nothing to do with an emotional attachment to, or blind faith in, the working class as such’. That’s all! And one might wonder whether we are dealing with a revisionist so foolish as to not realise that he has shot himself in the foot, because the passage from Marx and Engels merely reiterates what we have said above. The proletariat, by alienating to capital its own labour power, also alienates to it the entire productive force of the society of which it is the repository, and thus alienates the very humanity of the whole society. This class, which by selling its labour power also loses even the semblance of an individual humanity, has the task, by breaking the mercantile chains of capitalism, of recovering at one at the same time its own humanity and that of society as a whole.

But let us make Marx and Engels speak again, for greater clarity. And let us stress that these are lines that precede those quoted by Sweezy.

‘Proletariat and wealth are opposites; as such they form a single whole. They are both creations of the world of private property. The question is exactly what place each occupies in the antithesis. It is not sufficient to declare them two sides of a single whole. ‘Private property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to maintain itself, and thereby its opposite, the proletariat, in existence. That is the positive side of the antithesis, self-satisfied private property. ‘The proletariat, on the other hand, as proletariat, is compelled to abolish itself and with it the opposite that conditions it and makes it proletariat, private property. It is the negative side of the opposition, its restlessness in itself, private property dissolved and dissolving. ‘The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this self-estrangement, it recognizes estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of a human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its condition of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature. ‘Within this antithesis the private property-owner is therefore the conservative side, the proletarian the destructive side. From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter the action of annihilating it. ‘Indeed private property drives itself in its economic movement towards its own dissolution, but only through a development which does not depend on it, which is unconscious and which takes place against the will of private property by the very nature of things, only inasmuch as it produces the proletariat as proletariat, poverty which is conscious of its spiritual and physical poverty, dehumanization which is conscious of its dehumanization, and therefore self-abolishing. The proletariat executes the sentence that private property pronounces on itself by producing the proletariat, just as it executes the sentence that wage-labour pronounces on itself by producing wealth for others and poverty for itself. When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then the proletariat disappears as well as the opposite which determines it, private property’ (The Holy Family).

We apologise for the perhaps somewhat lengthy quotation, but we trust that readers will understand how necessary it was in order to reiterate that Marxism is either accepted as a whole or rejected as a whole. Remove the revolutionary role of the proletariat and you will have removed – this is the desired and pursued result of Sweezy’s professorial distinctions – revolution and communism.

However, Sweezy cannot simply assert apodictically that the proletariat is a force not already historically but contingently and, in a certain sense, fruitlessly revolutionary; he must demonstrate this or attempt to provide some semblance of proof. And so he outlines a summary picture of the ‘sad history’ of the working class, which he divides into three phases:

A) Manufacture. ‘The labor force of the manufacturing phase corresponded to the requirements of this particular mode of production. It consisted of a multitude of craftsmen possessing a great variety of specialized skills which were characteristically passed on from father to son. Craft consciousness rather than class consciousness was the hallmark of a proletariat so composed’.

B) Development of modern industry. ‘It is the capitalistic employment of machinery, and not merely capitalism in general (sic!), which generates the modern proletariat as Marx conceived it (...) The nature of work in the modern factory requires the organization and disciplining of the workers, thereby preparing them for organized and disciplined action in other fields. The extreme of exploitation to which they are subjected deprives them of any interest in the existing social order, forces them to live in conditions in which morality (sic!) is meaningless and family life impossible, and ends by totally alienating them from the work, their products, their society, and even themselves. Unlike the skilled craftsmen of the period of manufacture, these workers form a proletariat which is both capable of, and has every interest in, revolutionary action to overthrow the existing social order’.

C) ‘Long-term effects of machines’ in the absence of a proletarian uprising. ‘[T]he two chief consequences of modern industry’s revolutionary technology have been (a) a drastic (and continuing) reduction in the production-worker component, and (b) a vast proliferation of job categories in the distribution and service sectors of the economy. At the same time there has taken place a slow but cumulatively substantial increase in the real wages of both production and nonproduction workers (...) In short, the first effects of the introduction of machinery (...) have been largely reversed. Once again, as in the period of manufacture, the proletariat is highly differentiated; and once again occupational and status consciousness has tended to submerge class consciousness. It might be thought that despite these changes the blue-collar proletariat would remain a revolutionary element within the working class as a whole (...) blue-collar workers, being a diminishing minority of the whole working class, do not think of their families as permanently stuck in the stratum which they occupy. As long as this is so, their attitudes and ideology are not likely to be radically different from those of the nonrevolutionary majority of the working class which surrounds them’.

The materialist dialectic and the theory of class struggle are so foreign to Mr. Sweezy that he is forced to seek the reason why the proletariat becomes a revolutionary class and why it would cease to be so in the reflection of a given sociological and technological situation in the psychology of the individual worker, to the point of falling, with his diagnoses like a psychoanalyst for wealthy old spinsters, into science fiction. It is strange that he does not raise the issue of psychological changes in workers following a... Martian invasion!

But the funny thing is that this super-academic does not realise that he has once again shot himself in the foot. In fact, it was not us, but him, who quoted Marx and Engels, who say: ‘It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do’.

This truly is the height of academic imbecility!

Leaving aside the errors Sweezy makes due to... carelessness, let us now turn to the substance of the critique of the nonsense he says out of conviction or bad faith.

Marx writes:

‘The process (...) that clears the way for the capitalist system, can be none other than the process which takes away from the labourer the possession of his means of production; a process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into wage labourers. The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as primitive, because it forms the prehistoric stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding with it’ (Capital, Book One).

This process is not instantaneous but sprouts from the destruction of the feudal economic and social order:

‘The starting point of the development that gave rise to the wage labourer as well as to the capitalist, was the servitude of the labourer. The advance consisted in a change of form of this servitude, in the transformation of feudal exploitation into capitalist exploitation’ (Capital).

During primitive accumulation, ‘[i]t is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated in a mass, in the shape of capital, at the one pole of society, while at the other are grouped masses of men, who have nothing to sell but their labour-power (...) The bourgeoisie, at its rise, wants and uses the power of the State (...) to keep the labourer (...) in the normal degree of dependence’ (Capital). This means that the wage worker, the seller of labour power without means of production, has already appeared, but not yet the one who not only has to sell his labour power but is at the same time condemned to perpetually recreate the conditions of his own slavery. In other words, the proletarian is not yet present as a member of a class that is ‘private property dissolved and dissolving’.

The wage worker of the ‘prehistoric stage of capital’ is subject to the same laws of exploitation as the proletarian of the ‘historic stage of capital’, but the process of proletarianisation that has just begun appears to his individual consciousness as reversible, not only because, in a certain sense, the legal reconquest of the means of production is still within his reach, but above all because the material process of production in the young capitalist society retains all its previous characteristics: the worker performs the same operations for the capitalist as he did before his dispossession, and the social productive forces are the simple arithmetic sum of the individual productive forces of the workers.

The conflict between workers and capital in this period is already underway (and, despite Sweezy’s claims, this is demonstrated by countless episodes) because the interests of the former are already in opposition to those of the capitalists. Indeed, if you like, compared to proletarians in the strict sense, they have a more immediate awareness of the violence inherent in the relations of production – they are living the drama of violent expropriation by capital – but such awareness, although common to a mass of workers, remains nevertheless an individual fact. The worker is not yet a member of a revolutionary class – the only one in modern society – because the material foundations of the new communist society are lacking and because the conditions in which he can assert his own interests as class interests are lacking. Capitalist relations, to use an expression of Marx, are still the ‘form of development of the productive forces’.

But let us be guided in this analysis by that Marx, whom Mr. Sweezy expects no one to read since he is there to ‘scientifically popularise’ his doctrine:

‘Capitalist production only then really begins (...) when each individual capital employs simultaneously a comparatively large number of labourers (...) A greater number of labourers working together, at the same time, in one place (or, if you will, in the same field of labour), in order to produce the same sort of commodity under the mastership of one capitalist, constitutes, both historically and logically, the starting-point of capitalist production’ (Capital, Book One).

‘The form of labour performed by many people working side by side and together according to a plan, in the same production process or in different but related production processes, is called cooperation. ‘Just as the offensive power of a squadron of cavalry, or the defensive power of a regiment of infantry is essentially different from the sum of the offensive or defensive powers of the individual cavalry or infantry soldiers taken separately, so the sum total of the mechanical forces exerted by isolated workmen differs from the social force that is developed, when many hands take part simultaneously in one and the same undivided operation, such as raising a heavy weight, turning a winch, or removing an obstacle. In such cases the effect of the combined labour could either not be produced at all by isolated individual labour, or it could only be produced by a great expenditure of time, or on a very dwarfed scale. Not only have we here an increase in the productive power of the individual, by means of co-operation, but the creation of a new power, namely, the collective power of masses’ (Capital).

And again:

‘(...) the special productive power of the combined working-day is, under all circumstances, the social productive power of labour, or the productive power of social labour. This power is due to co-operation itself. When the labourer co-operates systematically with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species’ (Capital).

Cooperation, which is the period in which the premises are laid for the proletariat to objectively position itself against capital as a revolutionary historical class, is followed by manufacture, and it seems to us that Sweezy, on this point, presents us a real mess with his little schema.

Marx also writes:

‘(...) manufacture arises, its growth out of handicrafts, is therefore two-fold. On the one hand, it arises from the union of various independent handicrafts, which become stripped of their independence and specialised to such an extent as to be reduced to mere supplementary partial processes in the production of one particular commodity. On the other hand, it arises from the co-operation of artificers of one handicraft; it splits up that particular handicraft into its various detail operations, isolating, and making these operations independent of one another up to the point where each becomes the exclusive function of a particular labourer. On the one hand, therefore, manufacture either introduces division of labour into a process of production, or further develops that division; on the other hand, it unites together handicrafts that were formerly separate. But whatever may have been its particular starting-point, its final form is invariably the same – a productive mechanism whose parts are human beings’ (Capital).

From these considerations it follows that:

‘If, at first, the workman sells his labour-power to capital, because the material means of producing a commodity fail him, now his very labour-power refuses its services unless it has been sold to capital. Its functions can be exercised only in an environment that exists in the workshop of the capitalist after the sale. By nature unfitted to make anything independently, the manufacturing labourer develops productive activity as a mere appendage of the capitalist’s workshop. As the chosen people bore in their features the sign manual of Jehovah, so division of labour brands the manufacturing workman as the property of capital. ‘The knowledge, the judgement, and the will, which, though in ever so small a degree, are practised by the independent peasant or handicraftsman, in the same way as the savage makes the whole art of war consist in the exercise of his personal cunning these faculties are now required only for the workshop as a whole. Intelligence in production expands in one direction, because it vanishes in many others. What is lost by the detail labourers, is concentrated in the capital that employs them. It is a result of the division of labour in manufactures, that the labourer is brought face to face with the intellectual potencies of the material process of production, as the property of another, and as a ruling power. This separation begins in simple co-operation, where the capitalist represents to the single workman, the oneness and the will of the associated labour. It is developed in manufacture which cuts down the labourer into a detail labourer. It is completed in modern industry, which makes science a productive force distinct from labour and presses it into the service of capital’ (Capital).

At this point, it is superfluous to fully report the entire analysis carried out by Marx on the emergence and affirmation of modern industry, the results of which, for the purposes of resolving the question of the revolutionary character of the proletarian class, are clearly stated in the passage just quoted.

Let us instead try to summarise: the wage worker, the producer expropriated of the means of production, that is, the static antithesis of capital, arose historically with primitive accumulation. He is transformed into a proletarian in the strict modern sense, into the soldier of that ‘destructive side’ of which Marx speaks in The Holy Family, when not only is the sale of labour power a condition of his very existence, but it also recreates the terms for a new alienation, when the act of surrendering labour power is not simply the alienation of individual productive forces but rather the alienation of the whole social productive force and, at the same time, this social productive force, immensely enhanced compared to those individual productive forces or even their arithmetic sum, can only be expressed through an act of alienation to capital. In other words, the dynamic antithesis of capital appears when workers are no longer purely forced to sell their labour power because they lack, taken individually or in more or less numerous groups, the means of production, but the estrangement of the instruments of production, science, and products from the totality of producers is a necessary condition for labour power to operate, such that no alternative exists to this monstrous slavery other than the abolition of the system of wage labour.

Mr. Sweezy can therefore keep to himself his whining about the long-term effects that the introduction of machinery would have on the proletariat, eliminating it from the historical scene. We, with Marx, affirm once again that with the development of the proletariat, there is the ‘(...) formulation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only human, title; which does not stand in any one-sided antithesis to the consequences but in all-round antithesis to the premises of [the State]; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man’ (Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – Introduction).

The proletariat is already a revolutionary class, not contingently, due to the immediate effects of the introduction of machinery, as Sweezy claims, but by its very nature: because it is the living embodiment of the irreconcilable contradiction between the social expansion of the productive forces and their imprisonment in the private form of the appropriation of the product. And this revolutionary class does not present itself as a statistical sum of individuals, because in the proletariat, which has become an appendage of the industrial apparatus, a function of the social productive force, all individuality is killed by definition. The revolutionary proletarian class is the organic subversive movement of the current mode of production and precursor of the new communist society, in which the social productive forces will truly be such, in the sense that they will be redeemed both from the dependence on the individual contribution of the single producer, as in the pre-capitalist era, and from the subordination to a social form, the capitalist one, which opposes the producers.

We have thus sufficiently established that the reasons why Marx considers the proletariat revolutionary as a class are one hundred percent different from those stated by Sweezy, and therefore our professor’s theory on the accessoriness of the role of the proletariat and class struggle in Marxism falls apart.

Let us now examine what value a refutation of Marx might have in relation to alleged ‘new facts’ produced in the technological organisation of society and which, according to Sweezy, have brought about a radical change in the character of the proletarian class.

Sweezy points to the long-term effects of mechanisation in the process of reducing the number of workers employed in material production and in the parallel proliferation of job categories in the service and distribution sectors, which, according to him, would have a hybrid character between the bourgeois and proletarian and would constitute a social trait d’union that cancels out, in the general osmotic exchange and solidarity of interests arising from this condition, class conflict. The proletariat tout court would therefore have become a tiny and disappearing part of the population of industrially advanced countries.

We are facing another rhetorical trick: Mr. Sweezy identifies the true proletariat with that section of workers employed in the production of material goods and, once again basing himself on a mere technical distinction, lumps all the other categories together, cancelling out every class and revolutionary characteristic in them. The point is that he uses the concepts of productive and unproductive labour in a sense absolutely foreign to Marxism.

Marx writes:

‘The direct purpose of capitalist production is not the production of commodities, but of surplus-value or profit (in its developed form), the aim is not the product, but the surplus-product. Labour itself, from this standpoint, is only productive in so far as it creates profit or surplus-product for capital. If the worker does not create profit, his labour is unproductive. The mass of productive labour employed is only of interest to capital in so far as through it – or in proportion to it – the mass of surplus-labour grows’ (Theories of Surplus Value – XVIII – Ricardo’s Miscellanea. John Barton).

Since, therefore, ‘...this distinction between productive and unproductive labour has nothing to do either with the particular speciality of the labour or with the particular use-value in which this special labour is incorporated’ (Theories of Surplus Value – IV – Theories of Productive and Unproductive Labour), it can also take the form of a service, and nothing detracts from its productive character – in Marx’s sense – from the fact that the service rendered is exchanged by the capitalist for income, i.e. used by the purchaser for unproductive purposes. For example, a bus driver performs productive labour insofar as he provides surplus value to the company even if his labour utility is transferred to passengers, who use it to satisfy their need to travel from one place to another. We quote, for greater clarity, another passage from Marx: ‘Productive labourers may themselves in relation to me be unproductive labourers. For example, if I have my house re-papered and the paper-hangers are wage-workers of a master who sells me the job, it is just the same for me as if I had bought a house already papered; as if I had expended money for a commodity for my consumption, But for the master who gets these labourers to hang the paper, they are productive labourers, for they produce surplus-value for him’ (Theories...).

The fact is that the proletariat does not alienate to capital the productive force of society in the form of labour, the specific result of labour activity, but in the form of labour power, i.e. potential labour activity, which, when employed, no longer belongs to it. Therefore, the proletariat retains its character as an organically revolutionary class regardless of the distribution of its members between the goods production and service sectors.

As regards the distribution sector, however, two categories of workers must be distinguished: 1) Workers involved in the transport of commodities and their physical sorting. Marx writes: ‘(...) in this case there certainly takes place, in the labour-process, a change in the object of labour, the commodity. Its spatial existence is altered, and along with this goes a change in its use-value, since the location of this use-value is changed. Its exchange-value increases in the same measure as this change in use-value requires labour (...)’ (Theories...). This category of wage-earners, by creating value, therefore fully belongs to the ranks of the proletarian class. 2) Workers whose activity does not affect the value of products but simply performs a social function of capital (accountants, public relations officers, sales representatives, etc.). These constitute the faux frais of capitalist production, and their income is not variable capital but a distribution of surplus value. Although they may have reasons to clash with capital, which at certain times tends to limit the share of profit distributed to them, they are one and the same with the ranks of merchants, speculators, etc., who live off the backs of the proletariat. They have nothing in common with the working class, even though they are continually thrown into its ranks by the process of capitalist concentration.

Marx continues:

‘(...) the terms productive and unproductive labourers in the narrow sense [are concerned with] labour which enters into the production of commodities (production here embraces all operations which the commodity has to undergo from the first producer to the consumer) no matter what kind of labour is applied, whether it is manual labour or not ([including] scientific labour), and labour which does not enter into, and whose aim and purpose is not, the production of commodities. This difference must be kept in mind and the fact that all other sorts of activity influence material production and vice versa in no way affects the necessity for making this distinction’ (Theories of Surplus Value – XXIV – ‘Richard Jones’).

Once again, the childishness of the cobbled-together empiricism with which Sweezy tries to smuggle in his counter-revolutionary theses is demonstrated.

The proletarian class, whose statistical composition may, indeed, vary, but certainly not in the terms indicated by Sweezy, remains today, as it did yesterday, a socially defined historical force, that is, a force whose roots and aims are clearly and irrevocably carved into the situation of its own life.

The phenomenon that Sweezy would like to use, after having thoroughly muddled the concepts, as a way to justify the exhaustion of the revolutionary role of the proletariat, proves nothing to Marx other than the approach of the moment when that role will be fulfilled in practice:

‘(...) it is but a requirement of the capitalist mode of production that the number of wage-workers should increase absolutely, in spite of its relative decrease. Labour-power becomes redundant for it as soon as it is no longer necessary to employ it for 12 to 15 hours daily. A development of productive forces which would diminish the absolute number of labourers, i.e., enable the entire nation to accomplish its total production in a shorter time span, would cause a revolution, because it would put the bulk of the population out of the running. This is another manifestation of the specific barrier of capitalist production, showing also that capitalist production is by no means an absolute form for the development of the productive forces and for the creation of wealth, but rather that at a certain point it comes into collision with this development. This collision appears partly in periodical crises, which arise from the circumstance that now this and now that portion of the labouring population becomes redundant under its old mode of employment. The limit of capitalist production is the excess time of the labourers. The absolute spare time gained by society does not concern it. The development of productivity concerns it only in so far as it increases the surplus labour-time of the working-class, not because it decreases the labour-time for material production in general. It moves thus in a contradiction’ (Capital, Book Three).

As for the ‘substantial wage increases’ resulting from the distribution of imperialist superprofits and applicable to the vast majority of workers in advanced countries, besides inviting the distinguished professor to step down from his chair and come and tell this fairy tale to the vast majority of employed workers and to the nearly fifteen million unemployed concentrated in the imperialist metropolises (the latter and their continual increase are not even mentioned once in Sweezy’s article), we remind him that imperialist power is directly proportional to the degree of exploitation of this metropolitan proletariat: backward countries can only be crushed under an iron heel to the extent that the workers of the various ‘mother countries’ are increasingly enslaved.

The key to the communist revolution is always the contradiction between the development of the productive forces and relations of production, which is expressed in the class struggle of the proletariat against capital and, therefore, the heart of the contemporary social movement beats at the point of greatest intensity of this struggle, within the imperialist citadels.

Let us repeat Marx’s concept one last time:

‘The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself. It is that capital and its self-expansion appear as the starting and the closing point, the motive and the purpose of production; that production is only production for capital and not vice versa, the means of production are not mere means for a constant expansion of the living process of the society of producers. The limits within which the preservation and self-expansion of the value of capital resting on the expropriation and pauperisation of the great mass of producers can alone move – these limits come continually into conflict with the methods of production employed by capital for its purposes, which drive towards unlimited extension of production, towards production as an end in itself, towards unconditional development of the social productivity of labour. The means – unconditional development of the productive forces of society – comes continually into conflict with the limited purpose, the self-expansion of the existing capital. The capitalist mode of production is, for this reason, a historical means of developing the material forces of production and creating an appropriate world-market and is, at the same time, a continual conflict between this its historical task and its own corresponding relations of social production’ (Capital, Book Three).

A conclusion? Let Sweezy tremble, and with him all the self-styled ‘third way communists’, at the thought of the proletarian revolution!