Thread by @ChicagoCityDSA

Our eighth semester of Socialist Night School starts tomorrow! To explore the question ‘why the working class?’ we're reading excerpts from the Communist Manifesto and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.

🧵A few key points from the readings:

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels write that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles".

The protagonists of class struggles have naturally varied, through the ages, from "freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman", to bourgeoisie and proletariat under capitalism.

Throughout, "oppressor and oppressed" have "stood in constant opposition to one another", carrying on an "uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society, or in com­mon ruin of the contending classes".

Marx and Engel write that "the epoch of the bourgeoisie" has "simplified class antagonisms".

"Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat."

Marx and Engels saw the primary conflict in capitalist society as that between capitalists and wage-earners, what Marx called "the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers".

It is this relationship, Marx claimed, which revealed "the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure".

But the bourgeoisie "is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells".

"Not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians."

The proletariat is "the modern working class, a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital."

Why the working class? The answer Marx and Engels give is that the working class is not only the vast majority of the population but that it is also the only class in history whose interests and well-being do not depend on the oppression and exploitation of other classes.

"The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority."

And that the proletariat, once having swept away the old conditions of production, "will, along with these condi­tions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class".

But while the proletariat exists as class in the capitalist mode of production, it is not inherently "a class in itself and a class for itself". And right now the working class is very much divided.

Paired with this reading from Marx and Engels is an excerpt from Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.

Taylor writes that "because of the gross inequality it produces, capitalism requires various political, social, and ideological tools to divide the majority— racism is one among many oppressions intended to serve this purpose."

"Capitalism used racism to justify plunder, conquest, and slavery, but as Karl Marx pointed out, it would also come to use racism to divide and rule—to pit one section of the working class against another and, in so doing, blunt the class consciousness of all."

"To claim, then, as Marxists do, that racism is a product of capitalism is not to deny or diminish its centrality to or impact on American society. It is simply to explain its origins and persistence."

"Nor is this reducing racism to just a function of capitalism; it is locating the dynamic relationship between class exploitation and racial oppression in the functioning of American capitalism."

"Marx grasped the modern dynamics of racism as the means by which workers who had common objective interests could also become mortal enemies because of subjective, but nevertheless real, racist and nationalist ideas."

"Solidarity is not just an option; it is crucial to workers’ ability to resist the constant degradation of their living standards. Solidarity is only possible through relentless struggle to win white workers to antiracism..."

"To expose the lie that Black workers are worse off because they somehow choose to be, and to win the white working class to the understanding that, unless they struggle, they too will continue to live lives of poverty and frustration."

"Success or failure are contingent on whether or not working people see themselves as brothers and sisters whose liberation is inextricably bound together."

"No serious socialist current in the last hundred years has ever demanded that Black or Latino/a workers put their struggles on the back burner while some other class struggle is waged first."

"This assumption rests on the mistaken idea that the working class is white and male, and therefore incapable of taking up issues of race, class, and gender".

"Immigrant issues, gender issues, and antiracism are working-class issues."

But these are only a few excerpts from the readings, and this is far from a complete summary of both texts.

You find the full readings here:

Readings: bit.ly/sns8-1

Register for Zoom: bit.ly/sns8-1zoom