The Decline of the Class Struggle

Post-Marxism is important today. Post-Marxism implies that elements of Marxism are taken up and utilized for the struggle for freedom while other elements are rejected. We will now examine the issue of 'class' and why class is no longer relevant as a category to initiate a struggle for freedom. In moving from Marxism to post-Marxism in this way, we will have to marginalize certain identities, while bringing other identities closer to the struggle for freedom. We will also have to change the fundamental ways in which a Marxist views society and reality. But, we must also show how the Marxist way of doing analysis is still a positive way of articulating a struggle for freedom.

Class is no longer very relevant. This is because the class-based way of struggle (“class struggle”) only goes to divide the population along certain lines which do not 'naturally' pertain to how society is constructed in reality; the class struggle assumes the creation of a class consciousness, which is a slow and complicated process. Indeed, it is because of the inadequacy of the class struggle that there is so much violent conflict as a result of the struggle. Frustration is an important consequence in class struggle; frustration determines the violence of the class struggle; frustration signifies that the divisions of class are inadequate. Many a politician diverts the attention of the crowd towards the other from the upper class, as if the other is the problematic site of the class struggle. In fact, it is never another subject, but the Other of analysis and knowledge (“Other as language” in the Lacanian sense) which is problematic. But the Other is much more difficult to approach and counter for the masses than the other is; and countering the big Other may not be the way forward for struggles anyway. That is why the division of society based on class is still an easy way out for those who want to vent or apply frustration.

Society today is much more blended in than the divisions based on class makes apparent. The upper class person may be a kin or a friend of a lower class person and so on. Society is organically more whole rather than fractured along class lines. Different class elements interact in the everyday, that is, constantly, so it is highly impossible to formulate an antagonistic relationship between two classes. All classes are vital to society. For a class struggle, there is the need of an 'incubation' period, a preparing period...and it is this period where the nefarious elements of class struggle, such as propaganda, are produced. 

But, what is most important is that the lower classes of today have themselves been made into important objects rather than serving as an excess to capitalism. There is no human excess to capitalism today, in that, all peoples are relevant. This is the transition highlighted by Foucault in his text on the birth of 'population' as a category: it is the whole population which is at stake, which is equally important for power, than one class being privileged over another. The days of privilege are gone. With the extinction of privilege along class lines, any critiques of the culture of the upper classes are also no longer important (the cultural sphere is the location where privilege is made apparent.) 

Having rejected the division of class, we must still believe that Marxism is a positive way forward. We must propose another type of division. The solution here too is borrowed from Foucault and Lacan: the division based on 'self' and 'other' is more important. This is because of the possibility that the knowledge of Marxism is available to all and has, in a sense, become part of the norm. There is no need for the group or the collective. The group or collective had as its birth the classroom, where the total population was gathered. To put forward a dialectic not between the powerful teacher and the student, but between the students is an important step to achieve in post-Marxist times. The fundamental critique must be leveled on the collective itself during the process of its learning, the collective as population and the self as an rebellious outlier to it. This means that learning should be individualized, each individual must creatively offer itself to the knowledge material at hand.