Future of working class struggle
From a revolutionary perspective, the British working class was thrown back many decades by the gutting of whole segments of the class and its organizations under Thatcher. The Blair years continued a kind of taming exercise, as unions fused and turned into workers’ benevolent societies.
We still lack a sizable militant core of well organized workers, and as we move inexorably towards robotized productive forces and AI, the working class as experienced by Marx, his twentieth century followers, and even ourselves pre 1990s, is no more. This raises the question whether in such highly automated economies workers could still play the revolutionary role envisaged by Marx.
Add to that the social atomization that has occurred virtually overnight due to lockdown measures, which the overwhelming majority of working people — including the militant left — have accepted passively — or even demanded in stricter form.
This all calls into question the feasibility of revolution by seizing of state power in the ‘classic’ Marxist sense.
Usually termed “revisionism”, forecasts of the end of working class struggle have been proven wrong many times. But it’s hard to see how workers in a country like 2020s UK could — or would — overturn capitalism without a massive impetus from without, from workers who still work and live as we did a few decades ago.
There are other ways in which the capitalist system may be undermined from within, and ultimately replaced by a new economic system.
For example, the rapid development of decentralized peer to peer interaction via blockchain-based systems and currencies like Bitcoin could potentially wipe out the existing financial system, which forms the heart of modern capitalism.
Replacing it with what? Probably you’d need a new Marx to predict an answer to that. One thing is certain: the catastrophic effects of a year’s economic lockdown have thrown everything up in the air, and it’s doubtful anyone can say what Britain or the world will look like ten years hence.
