--- Yoshie Furuhashi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Some political theorists, like Theda Skocpol, > suggest that peasants, > not wage workers, have more of what it takes to make > social > revolution, contrary to Marx and Marxists' > suggestion that wage > workers are to be the main collective agent of it.
At a categorical level, the abolition of the commodity form entails the abolition of the proletariat. In history, social movements with real emancipatory potential have almost always been comprised of either peasantry refusing the process of proletarianisation, or recently proletarianised people with a common memory of a non-capitalist way of life. It seems to me a real emancipatory movement would do well to orient towards something like E.P. Thompson's ideas concerning a moral economy, rather than the stinking corpse of the classical workers movement which stands in direct lineage of a never-revolutionary German social democracy, anamolous, isolated figures like Rosa Luxemburg notwithstanding. And while the Bolsheviks were also certainly an ideological product of the German Social Democracy, the Russian Revolution is the exception that proves the rule, since the "workers" that made that revolution were often first generation workers fresh off the farms. None of this is to argue that peasants are automatically the revolutionary subject, just that the domesticated urban working-class needs to be knocked off its pedestal. Proletarians have emancipatory potential to the extent that they are capable of abolishing their social existence as proletarians. Unfortunately, the classical Marxist conception of revolution is one of proletarian power, rather than of proletarian self-abolition. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
