Marx, The Present Crisis and the Future of Labour

Abstract

For several years, the political thesis that human emancipation can no longer rely on the 'proletariat', the class of wage labour, has been increasingly buttressed by economic arguments. Some posit that wage labour is receding rapidly from its position as the main sector of the active population, as the result of automation, robotisation, mass unemployment, growth of small independent business firms, etc. (Gorz, Dahrendorf, Daniel Bell, Hobsbawm). Others state that there is no future for mankind (and therefore for human emancipation) as long as 'classical' industrial technology and thence 'classical' wage labour are maintained at their present level because such a situation would lead to a complete destruction of the ecological balance (Ilitch, Bahro, Gorz. The present crisis is therefore seen not as a typical crisis of overproduction and overaccumulation. It is seen as a fundamental change of structure of the international capitalist economy, with a long-term fundamental shift in the weight, cohesion and dynamic of wage labour, at the expense of that class, as a 'crisis of the industrial system'.