Since many of the articles appearing in Rally, Comrades! contain the phrase, “the new class,” the Editorial Board thought it would be helpful if we explain precisely what we mean by the term.

Often, when new phenomena arise there are no terms to adequately describe them and writers are forced to create a new term or give new meaning to an existing one.

The double-acting steam engine created industry. The working class created by industry was different from the old class that was created by hand labor or manufacturing. It was still a working class but the emphasis rapidly shifted from the manufacturing sector to the industrial sector. Thus, the industrial workers were a new class. In a somewhat like manner the application of electronics to production is creating a new class. What are these new means of production creating?  On the one hand, we have seen the emergence of part time, contingency, temporary workers. They work at or below minimum wage with few if any benefits. In fact, this sector already constitutes almost a third of the work force.

On the other hand, a growing number of jobs are simply disappearing forever, taken over by automation. The workers who held these jobs are often forced into a new category of unemployment –  the permanently unemployed. We see them every day, picking through the trash, begging on the street corners. This is not a “lumpen proletariat” – a group that was created in the wake of the industrial revolution out of the serfs who never entered either the manufacturing force or the bourgeoisie. These new strata of workers and this new permanently unemployed are the result of the introduction of electronics into the workplace.
They are a new class.

 

 

January.2006.Vol16.Ed1
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