A-Infos (en) Spaine, Regeneracion: What is the proletariat? (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Mr. Amorós ---- Mr. Amorós's erudite article, published on September 2, 
2024, on the Alasbarricadas website and on October 28 on the OACA 
Libertarian Portal, qualifies him to occupy the position of anarchist 
membership card seller. ---- Enjoy it and be pleased. ---- The 
pronouncement that anarchism is what anarchists think and do also places 
him on the honor roll of the most foolishly confused theorists and 
political scientists, because that tautology explains nothing. ---- Let 
them give him a diploma for verbosity and a medal for ignorance. On the 
other hand, and this is the most serious, the sacrosanct and Eurocentric 
dogma of the disappearance of the proletariat places him on the other 
side of the barricade. ---- The Proletariat1 ---- The proletariat is not 
a thing, nor an identity, nor a culture, nor a statistical collective 
with its own class interests to defend. The proletariat constitutes 
itself as a class through a process of development and formation that 
only occurs in the class struggle.

The proletariat, reduced in advanced capitalism to the status of 
producer and consumer, becomes a passive social category, without its 
own consciousness; it is a class for capital, subject to capitalist 
ideology. It is nothing, nor does it aspire to anything, nor can it do 
anything.

Only through the intensification and sharpening of the class struggle 
does it emerge as a class and become aware of the exploitation and 
domination it suffers under capitalism. In the very process of this 
class war, it manifests itself as an autonomous class and constitutes 
itself as a proletariat antagonistic to and opposed to capitalism, as a 
community of struggle. A total, deadly confrontation, with no 
possibilities or aspirations for reform or management of a system that 
is now obsolete, criminal, and outdated.

This notion of class as "something that happens," that sprouts and 
flourishes from the soil of the exploited and oppressed, is key. Class 
does not refer to something people are, but to something they do. And 
once we understand that class is the fruit of action, then we can 
understand that any attempt to construct an existentialist, cultural, or 
ideological notion of class is false and doomed to failure.

Class is not a static, solid, or permanent concept; rather, it is 
dynamic, fluid, and dialectical. Class only manifests and recognizes 
itself in the brief periods when the class struggle reaches its climax.

The proletariat is defined as the social class that lacks all property 
and must sell its labor power for wages to survive. The proletariat is 
comprised of wage earners, the unemployed, the precarious, migrants, 
those without papers, retirees, and their dependent families, whether 
they are aware of it or not. In the French state, the proletariat 
includes the nearly three million unemployed and the twenty-six million 
wage earners or self-employed workers who fear joining the ranks of the 
unemployed, as well as an indefinite number of marginalized people who 
do not appear in the statistics because they have been excluded from the 
system.

Since the beginning of the depression (2007), European parliamentary 
democracy has rapidly transformed into a "nationally useless," 
authoritarian, and mafia-like party system dominated by that stateless 
capitalist ruling class, which serves international finance and 
multinationals: the corporate class. There is a profound and widespread 
proletarianization of the middle classes, a massification of the 
proletariat, and the violent and intermittent eruption of irrecoverable 
collectives, marginalized suburbs, and communities, anti-system-not so 
much out of conviction as out of exclusion. Nation-states become 
obsolete-but still necessary, as guarantors of public order and armed 
defense against exploitation-instruments of this ruling capitalist 
class, with global reach and interests. Its form of government is 
democratic totalitarianism: a democracy reduced to the bare minimum of 
voting every so many years, to elect between bad or worse 
representatives of capital, without any capacity for intervention or 
decision-making in social or political life.

The suburbs become ghettos of those excluded from the system, whom the 
state attempts to isolate from one another, handing over their control 
to gangs, drug traffickers, mafias, schools, social workers, NGOs, 
ETÉTÉs, prisons, the army, and the police, so that they can jointly 
impose control and/or economic, political, social, moral, volitional, 
and, if necessary, physical sacrifice on "all those who are left over," 
with the precise and concrete objective of deactivating their 
revolutionary potential, attempting to turn these peripheral 
neighborhoods into hives of the living dead, against whom state 
institutions have declared a total war of extermination and annihilation.

The class struggle

Class struggle is not only the only possibility of resistance and 
survival in the face of the ferocious and sadistic attacks of capital, 
but also the unavoidable path to finding a definitive revolutionary 
solution to the terminal phase of the capitalist system, now obsolete 
and criminal, which also believes itself to be unpunished and eternal. 
Class struggle or unlimited exploitation; power over one's own life or 
wage slavery and marginalization.

It's not just the anarchists, Mr. Amorós; it's the class war of the 
proletariat, Mr. Scholar. It's the old mole, appearing and disappearing 
from the scene, ceaselessly digging its tunnel beneath an outdated, 
criminal, and obsolete world. It's no longer a matter of understanding 
the world from this or that doctrine or ideology; it's a matter of 
changing it.

Only the anarchists who intervene in this struggle matter. Philosophers 
who, anarchist or not, are dazzled by navel-gazing or deny the existence 
of the proletariat, are on the other side of the barricade.

Agustín Guillamón

https://www.regeneracionlibertaria.org/2025/04/03/que-es-el-proletariado/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en